Conference Agenda

Histories of French medieval repertory have long noted the political and historicist character of many conductus and motets. Yet a musicological historiography oriented toward stylistic innovation, and especially toward the ars nova, gives less attention to the durable social functions of politically charged notated music: how it carried counsel, how it staged and distributed voices, and under what conditions its political meanings became available. In the context of politically charged medieval musical media, parenetic literature (often called "mirrors") is often invoked, but more by way of contextualizing reference than as an operative framework for design, distribution, and performance.

This paper argues that medieval political music should be understood more fully as an expression of the same parenetic and advisory culture that produced princely mirrors, and that it furthermore offered a medium with distinctive means of voicing and regulating counsel. In this view, stylistic change pertains less to a transformation in musical or political function than to new formats and modes of distribution. Such continuity positions political music as crucial evidence for a longue durée, multimedia history of premodern counsel, one centered on the mobile clerical-musical functionaries who produced, transmitted, and performed it. In rereading an alleged planctus, In occasu sideris, and the motet Servant regem/O Philippe/Rex regum against parenetic literature, notated music emerges as having particular affordances for navigating medieval networks and negotiating social-political discourse. That wider aperture also pertains to performance evidence, as our scarce traces, rather than constituting an evidentiary deficit, conform to patterns well attested in parenetic literature scholarship, in which repeated oral-literary encounter in intimate social environments is given.

Across two brief stanzas, Bien m’ont amors entrepris expresses the anguish of a lover who knows the impossibility of his desire. At night he tosses and turns, consumed by thoughts of his beloved, and at day he beseeches her to grant him mercy. In the context of a trouvere chansonnier, these histrionics are par for the course. The presence of a tenor, however, renders Bien m’ont amors unusual, making it a unique example of a strophic polyphonic song recorded in a 13th-century source. While F-Pnm fr. 846 (TrouvO) is known for its unusual use of mensural notation, Bien m’ont amors is the only piece of polyphony notated therein. Much like the songbook in which it is recorded, this piece straddles the generic conventions of song and motet, fully conforming to neither.

This paper asks how one can understand Bien m’ont amors without reverting to outworn teleological narratives. While the piece appears to presage the emergence of the formes fixes, situating the song as a reflection of its own current moment allows it to shed light on compositional techniques and aesthetic tastes that endured across periodisation boundaries. Here, I frame the song within the context of the O-scribe’s interest in musical grafting. While this horticultural metaphor initially seems to serve an organicist narrative of stylistic development, grafting - which is to say, the process of joining two plants to create a new hybrid - is not a natural process, but a technological one. Seen in this view, Bien m’ont amors appears less a link in an evolutionary chain than a symptom of a sustained interest in musical hybridity that was mediated by changes in notational technologies.

This paper builds on extant scholarship on song-motet interactions (Everist 2007; Saint-Cricq 2013; Thomson 2016) and the motet enté (Butterfield 2003; Peraino 2011). By situating the question of genre in the context of notational practices and manuscript production I emphasise the extent to which compositional and notational techniques were co-constitutive. Bien m’ont amors emerges as a piece that, rather than serving as a pivot between two periods, instead points to the overarching practices bridging them.

The monophonic balada, A l'entrade del temps clar (BEdT 461.12), is a rustic celebration of spring: joyful vocalic interjections recur throughout (“Eya!"), and the refrain repeatedly begs, “leave us to dance/among ourselves.” Its melody, transmitted in the chansonnier Saint-Germain-des-Prés (F-Pnm: Français 20050), reappears as the tenor of a three-voice conductus, Veris ad imperia. This transposed and elaborated version is found within the Medici Antiphoner (I-Fl: Ms Plut 29.1), the largest source of Notre Dame polyphony. On the surface, this transformation fits neatly into familiar historiographies of the long thirteenth century: a vernacular, monophonic song emerging from courtly culture is absorbed into Latin-texted polyphony, reflecting its new clerical environment.

Yet both of these works are anomalous in their own ways. The origins of the balada have been contested due to its text, which exhibits both French and Occitan linguistic traits (Taylor 1993); Zingesser (2020) has argued that it is indicative of the appropriation and imitation of the southern troubadour tradition by their northern French counterparts. Veris ad imperia, meanwhile, stands out for its melodic reuse; as a genre, conductus are typically newly composed. Veris also adopts the theme of the balada and maintains key words, including the “eya” exclamations and the closing conceit of the refrain. The refrain itself—formerly signifying dance music—reappears, but is ambiguous in both function and notation. The pair is thus at the nexus of a dense network of cultural, scribal, and generic interactions, and obscures the linguistic and registral boundaries that historically divide these repertories.

Prompted by these idiosyncrasies, I situate this case study within scholarship on both Latin and vernacular song; I consider how it augments and challenges existing understandings of borrowing practices and generic norms (e.g., Murray 2019; Everist 2018; Milonia 2016), and contributes to our understanding of song culture in the long thirteenth century (Caldwell 2022; Zingesser 2020). I offer an intertextual and musical analysis of the pair; their relationship reveals a more flexible compositional approach to melodic reuse that contrasts with the tight textual links—a juxtaposition mediated by scribal interventions, and made meaningful by their cultural and generic hybridity.