Conference Agenda

This paper addresses two narratives that are remarkably similar despite differences in language, culture, time, and place. Both stories concern a pair of courtly musicians who seek to entertain their patron through song; one of the poet-composers overhears his rival practicing a newly created composition, rehearsing it over and over again until it is perfect. The repetition allows the eavesdropper not only to learn the song, but ultimately to perform it, sowing doubt about the authorship of the work. These anecdotes appear respectively in the Kitāb al-Aghānī (The Book of Songs), a tenth-century Arabic anthology of poetry and stories about musical life, and Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, f. fr. 22543, a thirteenth-century troubadour chansonnier from southern France. In both, the vignette precedes a specific song, providing a glimpse of its compositional circumstances; in the Kitāb al-Aghānī, the report (khabar) introduces a work by Ibrāhīm al-Mawṣilī, while in the chansonnier, it appears as an explanation (razo, lit. “reason”) for a song attributed to Arnaut Daniel. I read the tales in juxtaposition as evidence for a set of common concerns and practices.

A comparative approach enables me to explore the compositional process of vernacular monophony and to propose a new framework for interpreting instances of melodic borrowing. Close analysis reveals numerous shared elements between these stories; they show how melodies of this kind were initially crafted and transmitted, reveal the social dynamics that supported the production of song economically, personally, and culturally, and clarify composers’ anxieties concerning the proper attribution of their songs. The wholesale theft of a song, it seems, concretizes questions of authorship, originality, and compositional intent that are inherent to examples of musical borrowing more broadly.

Many surviving trouvère chansonniers provide authorial names above songs. These attributions apply to the texts of songs, but not necessarily to their melodies, which could shift and were not always included. With contrafaction, the process of inventing a new text for a pre-existing melody, a single melody could accompany multiple texts attributed to multiple authors. Examples where different texts share both a melody and an author attribution raise questions for this model. Did some trouvères engage in self-contrafaction, habitually re-using their own melodies? Or did shared melody confuse the scribes into mis-attributing these songs? This paper addresses this question through three cases of apparent self-contrafaction which show how melodic ownership exerted a claim on song.

Individual trouvères rarely re-used the same melody for multiple songs. Most modern analysis of contrafaction has characterized contrafacta as later re-workings of their models, often marked by intentional illusions. The few cases of self-contrafaction have provoked speculation over the accuracy of their attributions. Marie-Genevieve Grossel has proposed that some of these named trouvères were singers rather than poet-composers. Melodic form, perhaps even specific melodies, could act as a calling card for a performer. This paper proposes a radical extension of Grossel’s proposal, toward a theory of melody as a tool of possessing song. To test it, this paper compares the use of names to indicate melodies within songbooks to cases of supposed mis-attribution in the works of Moniot d’Arras and Gontier de Soignies. I ask what role contrafaction played in creating confusion in manuscripts, to what extent attribution means ownership in these contexts, and what role melody played in the possession of a song. I frame these case studies within a survey of broader patterns of divergences in melodic versions and manuscript attributions.

The lai lyrique, sometimes called the lai-descort, is one of the most intricate of poetic-musico genres in the trouvère repertory. Most work on the form comes in the efforts to define and describe the genre (both textually and musically), trace its origins, and establish a repertory. However, study of other issues such as loci of production, reception, and preservation are starting to come to light. That said, the question of contrafacture in the lai is woefully understudied. The most well-known article might be J. H. Marshall’s 1979 article, “The descort of Albertet and its Old French imitations” in Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie. To my knowledge, no one has undertaken a comprehensive look at contrafacture in the lai lyrique and the resulting textual networks. In this paper, I intend to analyze examples to tease out cultural exchanges that run along melody but that transgress several boundaries. First, linguistic: the melodies that accompany French texts are also set to poems in Latin and English. Second, generic: these songs are sometimes secular and sometimes religious. Third, registral: while most are aristocratic in tone, some sound more “popular” in performance. Examination of the extant witnesses will also be essential, especially in those cases where the same source preserves more than one example, which is particularly interesting in TrouvKNX. Obviously, time will not permit an exhaustive analysis, but I hope to lay the groundwork for future work.