LOS MOTZ EL SO - Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Library ...

ecently, there is no consensus of what kinds of interactions to examine; different scholars
approach the problem from vastly different perspectives, gathering such disparate kinds of data
that generalizations about music-text interactions in troubadour song become difficult. A few
observations, however, may be made. Most studies, especially those that examine the entire
repertory, locate the points of contact or coordination between the music and the words, an
approach that Margaret Switten labels “structural.” 9 The structural approach may be divided into
two branches: the first, chronologically and methodologically, seeks to solve the problem of the
musical rhythms; 10 the second examines the ways in which the music and poetry interact to form
an expressive unit.
The rhythmic problem arises because the manuscripts that transmit troubadour melodies
use musical notation that indicates pitch but not duration and medieval music theorists provide
only ambiguous hints at how to identify durations; the proposed solutions fall into the area of
music-text relationships because the musical rhythm is most often derived from the metrical
patterns in the words in some way. Most editors choose one of two solutions: the first applies
modal rhythms to produce patterns of long and short notes derived from the location of the last
accented syllable in the line of poetry, 11 and the second assumes that each syllable has the same
9 Switten, “Music and Words,” 15-16.
10 I do not attempt to cover this topic exhaustively because virtually every scholar who
discusses medieval monophony produces a literature review of previous, usually incorrect
understandings of the rhythms. Several do describe various rhythmic theories in detail, most
recently, Aubrey, Music of the Troubadours, 240-54.
11 This solution was proposed by Beck in the early twentieth century and championed
currently by Tischler; most of Beck’s Die Melodien der Troubadours is devoted to deriving
modal theory.
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