Music of the Troubadours and Trouvères
Authors: Bleisch Nicholas 
Published: April 2023

The troubadours and trouvères were singers as well as poets. Both the volume of their musical output and descriptions of their art attest to this. The word ‘troubadour’ may be familiar in its broader modern usage as referring to singers and songwriters. In its narrow sense, it refers to the many individuals in the 12th and 13th centuries who invented songs in various dialects of Occitan, the language then spoken across the southern part of the French hexagon. The word ‘trouvère’ distinguishes their northern, Old-French-singing counterparts. The early contribution of the troubadours to textual and melodic idioms of vernacular song in the 12th century is widely acknowledged. However, while only a few hundred troubadour songs are preserved with musical notation in just four manuscripts, more than twenty French trouvère ‘chansonniers’ (vernacular song-books) contain notation for a total of more than two thousand songs. A sizeable gap in time exists between the earliest troubadours and trouvères and the copying of the earliest extant chansonniers leaving open the question of how the songs were passed down before writing, and how much they might have changed between their invention and their notation. To know what the singing of troubadours and trouvères was like, we must rely on literary description and scholarly inference as much as on notation. Recently, researchers have accepted that manuscripts containing only texts are still music manuscripts, so long as those texts were intended to be sung However, the availability of melodic evidence has resulted in relatively more musicological weight being given to the trouvères. Melodies for Old French and Old Occitan texts maintain a distinct character from liturgical and Latinate forms of music and from polyphonic music, despite the extensive borrowing and quotation between these forms and vernacular song for single voices. Comparisons have been drawn to tropes and polyphony practiced at St Martial in the south of France, to the late medieval sequence and the new song style, to motet voices, and, by way of contrast, to the ‘propers’ and antiphons of Gregorian chant. Troubadour and trouvère music has resisted numerous attempts to classify it according to the church modes or the 13th-century rhythmic modes of Ars antiqua polyphony. Texturally, the melodies remain generally syllabic with melismas rarely longer than four notes. Both entirely syllabic and relatively melismatic songs exist, yet the longest troubadour and trouvère melismas remain much more restrained than the long melismas found in some Latin chant genres. All of the troubadour and trouvère manuscripts but one employ square notation on staves. The sole exception is one of the earliest chansonniers, which uses neumes on staves in place of discrete notes for each pitch. The notation, with very few exceptions, gives no indication of rhythm. The underlay of words can also be ambiguous, despite the fact that square-note ligatures work to clarify syllable-breaks as a rule. Just as medieval vernacular texts are notoriously difficult to pin down due to the interplay of performance, copying, and reinvention inherent in a partially oral tradition, troubadour and trouvère melodies exhibit enormous variance between sources. Both editions and analysis thus require considerable interpretative intervention. Literary descriptions of performance, iconography, manuscript comparison, and scholarly inference have all served as evidentiary support for this purpose.