5 | 2022 - Circulation and Exchanges of Techniques and Musical and Literary Knowledge in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance

‘To His Beloved Friends…’: The Epistolary Art of Song in Medieval France
By Mary Channen Caldwell 
The search for written traces of medieval Latin song has long consumed musicologists and literary scholars, leading to numerous catalogues and editions carefully tallying and comparing wide-spread concordances. As is readily acknowledged, however, song’s written transmission is complicated and inflected by its intangible transmission through oral processes, including as a form of knowledge and didactic tool whose lessons are remembered long after the melody has faded from sound. Shifts in language and register also influence the mouvance of Latin song, with melodies and poems slipping in and out of other genres and contexts through written and oral processes of citation, quotation, borrowing, and contrafacture. Song was on the move in the medieval Europe, carving out circuitous byways among places, people, and manuscripts. One less explored path for Latin song follows that laid by a literary medium well-known for its mobility: the medieval letter. Reflecting in practice the intersection of the pedagogically linked ars dictaminis and poetriae, letter writers since antiquity have included poetry and song in personal correspondence. While this relationship has been studied in vernacular contexts, contemporary Latin practices have been largely overlooked. This oversight is understandable; unless collected post factum into collections of model materials (formularies), letters – and accompanying poetic or musical content – were uniquely penned and intended for a specific audience to read and digest. Undertaken chiefly for personal correspondence and teaching, manuscript survival for letter collections containing poetry generally reflects planned compilations for posterity and teaching, or simple happenstance. Despite this challenging archival situation, extant manuscripts shed light on aspects of Latin song’s circulation within and alongside epistolary writing, revealing how the arts of letter writing and poetry intersected and how epistolary modes of communication influenced the circulation of Latin song. As a comparative case study, I examine two such manuscripts copied in northern France in the late twelfth and late thirteenth centuries, respectively. The first is the Liber epistolarum of Gui of Bazoches, a collection of the twelfth-century French cleric and chronicler’s personal letters in a single manuscript (Luxembourg, Bibliothèque nationale du Luxembourg, 27). A notable feature of the Liber epistolarum is that nearly all of Gui’s letters are accompanied by poetic verses of varying lengths and forms. The second manuscript is a textual miscellany, often labelled the St-Victor Miscellany (Paris, BnF, lat. 15131), whose final gathering intermixes model letters, sermons, and Latin and multilingual poems. The two poetic-epistolary collections differ in terms of how each conveys ideas of authorship, modes of production, and the function of poetry in, and in relation to, letters. Both manuscripts, however, complicate the definition and identity of Latin song and its modes of circulation. Dozens of unique, unnotated Latin poems are copied into the two sources: Lux. 27 includes metrical as well as rhythmical poems (metra and rithmi), while in lat. 15131 the poems are exclusively rithmi. Examining the identity of Latin rithmi in these manuscripts as songs – as opposed to poems unintended for musical realization – situates these sources within the broader culture and history of medieval Latin song and its circulation. Exploring how and why songs were copied with and alongside letters fosters an opportunity to explore how Latin song participated within lesser-studied networks that developed out of the teaching and practice of letter writing.

Attribution in Trouvère Musical Manuscripts: the Circulation of an Idea
By Pascale Duhamel
This article contributes to the study of the emergence of composership starting in the Middle Ages, by examining the presence of repeated attributions in four notated manuscripts of trouvères. Independently of musico-poetic creation processes and using Foucault’s notion of author-function, the analyses show that the names of trouvères in the form of attributions, their repetition, their placement in the page layout, and their link with the notated music, reveals the emergence on the page of a musico-textual author-function. The presence of attributions in other manuscripts suggests that this emergence took place and circulated more widely.

Female Voices, Memory and Circulation of Trouvère Lyrics in 13th-Century French Romances
By Emmanuelle Dantan
This article aims to shed light on the possible role, in terms of memory and circulation of the Old French Lyric, of the female figure in romances with lyric insertions of the 13th century. Using a quantitative methodology (distant reading), it compares the lyric insertions of a corpus of nine narrative texts with the corpus of the Old French Lyric that has come down to us via the manuscripts. The lyrical genres represented, the role played by female figures in introducing the lyric insertions and the types of pieces they perform are analysed in this study.

Reflections of the Contrafactum in Ibero-Romance Poetic and Rhetorical Discourse: Circulation and Reception of a Practice
By Florence Mouchet
The contrafactum, which consists in developing a new poetic-musical ensemble starting from a pre-existing melodic source, is a common process in the Middle Ages, particularly in the context of “European” monodic lyrics. In this sung corpus, it is not uncommon to find an allusion to a «desviat» sound, suggesting a melodic reuse. Some mentions are explicit, such in the manuscript R (Paris, BnF, Fr. 22543), where the relationship between the melody of an enueg by the monk of Montaudon and a sirventes by Bertran de Born is specified by the reference to «el so de la rassa». But it is mainly in poetic treatises that this possibility to take up an ‘old sound’, instead of a new melodic composition, is best and most frequently expressed. Thus, in some Occitan theoretical texts from the 13th and 14th centuries (in particular the Doctrina de compondre dictats and the Leys d'Amors), this process is mentioned, applicable to specific genres, such as sirventes, tenso or vers. This process is of course not specific to the Occitan sphere. We find traces of it in the trouvère corpus, for similar genres (serventois, debat and jeu-parti), but also in the Galician-Portuguese or German corpus. The question arises of the theoretical framework in which musicians evolved. Does the rhetorical and poetic discourse, in these spaces often considered as having undergone the “influence” of Occitan lyricism, integrate this notion of contrafactum? Or is the description of this process mostly passed over in silence? This seems to be the case in poetic arts, outside Occitan sphere, where references to the contrafactum are rare, even though the preserved corpus testifies to its permanence. How then should we understand this disjunction between theory and practice? Between rhetorical absence and reality of the preserved corpus? Has the contrafactum become a standard practice? The comparative study of Ibero-Romance poetic treatises will help to better understand the evolution of this practice and its perception by contemporary theorists.

Sitot me soi a tart aperceubuz by Folquet de Marselha: a “sonic” model for Giacomo da Lentini
By Giovanna Santini and Giorgio Monari
The close connections between the two first strophes of the song Sitot me soi a tart aperceubuz (BdT 155.21) by Folquet de Marselha and the sonnet Sì como ‘l parpaglion c'à tal natura (PdSS 1.33) by Giacomo da Lentini as acknowledged through the comparison of the thematic, lexical, metric, phonic-rhythmic analysis of the two texts (also considering the melody of the song), allow us to bring the Sicilian composition very close to those translations and adaptations designed to be sung according to their model. Such a result prompts us to assume that the Notary had well in mind a vivid sound image of the Provençal song and that this image definitely had a strong influence upon the composition of his sonnet. The success enjoyed by the joint between Folquet de Marselha’s song and Giacomo da Lentini’s sonnet ‒ as witnessed by the subsequent broad tradition of the parpaglione theme ‒ marks a highly significant moment for the invention of the new genre.

A Latin Work from another era by Nicolas Grenon: the Lætabundus sequence and the isorhythmic motet Ave virtus virtutum
By Kévin Roger
This article focuses on a case of reuse of the famous sequence Lætabundus within an isorhythmic motet by Nicolas Grenon. This unusual choice, at least for cantus firmus, invites to explore the modalities of integrating rhythmic Latin poetry into the tenor, a voice essentially marked by melodic and rhythmic periodicity (color and talea). The liturgical passage generates some consequences on the organization of the lower voice: while the isorhythmic form follows the poetic-musical structure of the sequence, the figures clearly respect the rhythm of the verses. The analysis of the tenor also reveals that the version proposed by Grenon is the result of an evolution of the sequence (in contact with the vernacular language) and responds to specific issues of composer-poets at the end of the Middle Ages, halfway between the artes of versification and the codes of the Seconde rhétorique.

Séverin Cornet and Quant je pense au martire: Circulation and Reception of a Canzonetta by Pietro Bembo
By Cristina Cassia
Séverin Cornet’s chanson Quant je pense au martire, included in an anthology published by Phalèse and Bellère in 1575, is particularly interesting for both its text and music. In fact, its text is a singular French translation of Pietro Bembo’s canzonetta Quand’io penso al martire, while the music recalls the homonymous madrigal by Jacques Arcadelt. This study aims at highlighting on the one side the relationship between Bembo’s text and this particular French version, on the other the novelty of Cornet’s musical choices, which suggest that the composer himself might have been involved in the translation.