Conference Agenda

Twelve of the twenty-two surviving songs attributed to Andrieu Contredit are copied, or appear to have been intended for copying, in the closely related yet instructively divergent manuscripts M (BnF fr.844) and T (BnF fr.12615). For the philologist Schwan, whose work prioritized textual variants and ordering, M and T belong to the same stemmatic family; however, Schwan’s assessment did not sufficiently consider the musical evidence. Hendrik van der Werf, by contrast, argued that musical divergences between the two manuscripts suggest that the copyists “did not, or did not always, share exemplars for the music.”

This paper argues that a systematic examination of musical variants between M and T reveals the nature of the exemplary materials used by scribes. By distinguishing copying error from legitimate variation through the modelling of plausible scribal mechanisms, it becomes possible to infer structural features of now-lost exemplars. Central to this analysis is the diagnostically significant difference in layout between the two manuscripts: M is copied in two columns on four-line staves, while T uses single-column layouts with five-line staves. The more frequent system-line changes necessitated by M’s four-line staves create increased opportunities for clef changes, often required because of the limited ambitus of a four-line staff. The recurrent presence of pitch discrepancies—most commonly by the interval of a third—supports the hypothesis that such errors arise from clef changes occurring slightly earlier or later than in the exemplar. These observations permit informed speculation about the length and organization of system lines in that exemplar. Moreover, clef changes that occur within system lines rather than at their boundaries frequently coincide with the beginnings of new poetic lines, suggesting that the exemplar material was lineated according to poetic rather than purely musical structure. Taken together, these findings point towards the existence of ephemeral, pedagogically oriented exemplars that underpinned the transmission of Contredit’s songs.

Recovering aspects of lost exemplary materials offers a clearer view of the practical musical culture in which repertory was learned and internalized. It also helps to explain why the layout conventions of luxury library manuscripts diverge from the implicit norms governing everyday musical transmission.

Existing theories of musical structure often describe musical sections using multiple criteria. Whether and how a section of music is repeated is often a deciding factor—for example, exposition and recapitulation in sonata theory, or statement and restatement in pop choruses (Everett 1999). Tonal function and gesture have likewise played a role in defining the status of a musical section, such as primary and secondary themes in sonata expositions, or verse, pre-chorus and chorus in rock songs (Covach 2005). By contrast, existing studies of medieval vernacular monophony have rarely discussed musical structure in any terms other than repetition. The songs of the troubadours and trouvères, poet-composers in southern and northern France from 1100 to 1300, are frequently described as having one of two structures: pedes-cum-cauda (ABABX), where the opening quatrain repeats material in the form ABAB and the second section of the melody is more loosely structured; and oda continua, where the melody is through-composed.

This paper seeks to move beyond current repetition-based definitions of melodic structure in troubadour and trouvère song by examining how tonal and gestural aspects of a melody could articulate structure. The analysis focuses on two important moments in trouvère songs that are in pedes-cum-cauda (ABABX) form: the part of the melody immediately after the pedes (usually line 5) and the final part of the melody. As Switten (1985) notes, the start of the cauda may recall material from the pedes or may be a departure; the end of the cauda may function as a “kind of coda.” The paper will determine the musical features that contribute to a sense of “beginning” or “ending” in these melodic sections, focusing on the seventeen songs of Andrieu Contredit that are in pedes-cum-cauda form. Close readings of individual songs will show how Contredit played with listener expectations by manipulating such gestures of “beginning” or “ending” elsewhere in his songs.

Recent approaches to tonal focus in trouvère songs have moved away from older models, like those espoused by Hendrik van der Werf or Michelle F. Stewart, which posited overarching systems of “scales” or loosely constituted “modes.” Rather, work by Leach, Mason, and others has understood songs as articulating what Mason calls a “principal pitch”, which is central either to the whole song or to a section thereof. Importantly, these scholars concentrate on defined corpuses, from which norms for the articulation of such tonal centres can be extracted. Each melody can then be seen as articulating important pitches in ways that follow, transform, or challenge repertorial norms, while the textual construction of each stanza set to a melody can be understood as confirming, avoiding, or recalibrating the moments of tonal articulation afforded by the melody.

The two stages of this paper adopt and further this methodology through an examination of the articulation of tonal centres within the songs attributed to Andrieu Contredit in pedes-cum-cauda (ABABX) form. Concentrating on the opening pedes-section (ABAB), the first step compares the melodies given for Andrieu’s songs to the norms I have identified in a previous study of a wider corpus of pedes-sections. Having established a baseline for this mini-corpus, a second step furthers Leach and Mason’s methodology by using varying manuscript readings to reconstruct both the processes by which singers, listeners, and scribes might have identified central pitches and the differing readings that might have resulted. Through close readings both of songs in which manuscripts present different versions of what is essentially the same melody and those in which they provide melodies that are more fundamentally divergent, I explore medieval musicians’ possible identifications both of the principal pitch of the pedes-section and of structural pitches that constituted a lower level of tonal focus, as well as the implications that both kinds of pitches had for the tonal focus of the cauda.