Troubadour

What it means

Troubadours were poet-composers in the Occitan-speaking region of southern France, active roughly from the late eleventh to the thirteenth century. They composed both text and melody of their songs themselves and performed them or had them performed. In the northern French-speaking region, the trouvère movement corresponds to them; in the German-speaking region, Minnesang. Some 2,600 poems or fragments of poems survive from around 450 identifiable troubadours, but fewer than 300 melodies out of an estimated 2,500 songs, and their notation does not fix rhythms unambiguously.

Musical use

The songs are monophonic and strophic. There are fixed genres with their own rules — love song, debate poem, lament, dance song, and others — which differ in theme, stanza structure, and tone. Widespread is the canso form with two identically built opening sections and a differing close, a principle that shapes the European song form for a long time. Whether and with what the songs were accompanied is not documented; depictions show instruments, but the musical sources contain no accompanying parts. Performances must make decisions here and should mark them as such.

Performance practice

Start from the text: metre and stress give the musical structure and the most probable rhythm. Sing monophonically, plainly, and with a calm tone without much vibrato. Choose a comfortable register, since the notation gives no absolute pitch. Shape the stanzas differently, because long sequences otherwise become monotonous; the course of the text gives the cues for this. Keep accompaniments sparing and avoid harmonic interpretations that stem from later music.

The genres of this poetry have their own rules: a debate poem calls for a different delivery than a lament, and the stanza structure follows fixed patterns in each case. Check which genre is involved before you shape it, and whether a melody survives for a text at all, since editions occasionally supply foreign melodies. Well-known troubadours are William IX of Aquitaine, the earliest troubadour whose work survives, and Bernart de Ventadorn, regarded as the master of the love song.