Preface (2001)

PREFACE In accordance with the tradition ofthe troubadour tenso, this preface should have opened with the singing of the words "Senher Guilhem", for indeed, this issue of Tenso was first conceived of as both a reply and a complement to Tenso 13/2, guest-edited by William Paden. However the objective here will not be to emulate the style ofthe troubadours or oftheir direct imitators, either in song or in literary creation. And in fact, it will not be to fundamentally question orcontradictthevaluable and inspiring articlescontained in Tenso 13/2, but rather to make strides in slightly different directions. Tenso 13/2 was devoted to various types ofborrowings in the courtly lyric (Occitan, French, Italian, Gallego-Portuguese), which the authors ofthe articles, Samuel Rosenberg, Christopher Kleinhenz and William Paden, studied from a mainly literary and cultural point ofview. Also in 1998, an important set of conference proceedings (Touber) came out, containing several textual analyses of medieval lyric works involving borrowings.1 This issue is therefore a reaction to both. In an attempt to take into account the structural and musical aspects of troubadour song and of its imitations, the present issue concentrates on contrafactum. Medieval lyric contrafactum (also called contrafacture or contrafact, and not to be confused with the polyphonic contrafactum masses ofthe Renaissance) is aterm that refers bothto imitative compositional and literary techniques used by poet-composers ofthe 12th and ^-century monophonie repertoire such as the troubadours, and to the end-product of these techniques, that is, the imitative song itself. The musicologist Friedrich Gennrich defined contrafactum as "regular", when it borrows the metrics and rhyme scheme ofan existing song, and as "irregular" or even "fundamentally different", when a modified melody is used with a new text structure.2 Looking at the phenomenonfromastrictlytextual point ofview, JohnMarshall sought CHANTALPHAN to determine rules to follow in order to be sure one is dealing with a contrafactum—-the imitation of a given model—and not with a song which just happens to use a frequent rhyme scheme (289-292). In a more recent attempt at a redefinition of Gennrich's regular contrafactum, Ramine Adi and Chantal Phan incorporated some of Marshall's limits and mises en garde. "For the purposes ofour work we have defined the term contrafactum (plural contrqfacta) as an imitative poetico-musicaltechnique involvingthe re-useofthemetrics and rhyme scheme ofan existing poem, thus allowing also a borrowing ofthe melody ofthe model. (...) As this general definition cannot determine the validity ofall proposed contrafacta, we analyse philological , musicological and performance aspects ofthe song and look for aesthetic evidence that might allow us to consider that there was indeed a link between the model and its proposed contrafactum."3 The articles contained in this issue continue totacklethe problem ofdefining, describing, and situating contrafactawithinthe courtly tradition ofintertextual and musical borrowing. Each ofthe contributors suggests different ways to look at contrafactum, and hopefully these diverging, ifcomplementary, definitions and attitudes will constitute a step toward a better, fuller understanding of the complex world of this mode of imitation.4 The aim is to describe structural relations as well as practical and philosophical conceptions of structure as it is found in medieval imitative texts and melodies in general and contrafacta in particular. It is hoped that thiswill inspire the reader to see and hear these subtle works in a renewed way. Musical examples are provided for the first two articles (Unlandt, Phan), and an effort has been made to avoid technical vocabulary and to make the commentary on text-music relations clear and useful to musicians and non-musicians alike. The transcriptions ofthe music use no rhythmic notation, as has become standard in the past twenty years.5 The computerized presentation of the musical examples was prepared by Leslie Taylor (Vancouver). PREFACE In the first article, Nico Unlandt analyzes several songs by the Minnesänger Ulrich von Liechtenstein. This wide-ranging study offers both an intertextual look at the metrics ofthese works, and detailed stylistic observations which lead to proposed identifications of model-to-imitation links involving trouvères and Minnesänger. The traditional method of finding possible contrafacta according to textual metric structure and rhyme scheme is combined with a more interdisciplinary commentary on various aspects...