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

Materials
Scope of the Dissertation
Folquet’s poems are transmitted by most of the major troubadour chansonniers. Three
(G, R, and W) also transmit the musical settings; these manuscripts thus supply the versions of
the songs discussed in the dissertation. Manuscripts G and R contain primarily works in Old
Occitan; manuscript W primarily transmits trouvère songs but contains two gatherings of
troubadour songs.
Medieval chansonniers are usually arranged by genre (loosely defined) with the cansos
(songs about love) appearing first, followed by sirventes (songs on topics other than love), tensos
(debate songs), coblas esparsas (individual stanzas), and non-lyric works. Within each section,
especially those devoted to cansos, the works are grouped by author so that each major author
has at least one section containing his works. The author collections are then arranged in order
of importance. 73
Manuscript G, copied in northern Italy in the early fourteenth century, transmits the
largest collection of Folquet’s songs with melodies. It includes 237 Old Occitan songs, for
which 196 have been provided with staves and 61 with melodies. 74 The melodies are
concentrated in the first part of the manuscript; Aubrey speculates that the scribe started to work
on the manuscript with good musical and poetic exemplars for the main poets, starting with
Folquet de Marseille and Bernart de Ventadorn, and had less to work with as work on the
73 Burgwinkle, “Chansonniers as Books,” 247-49.
74 The manuscript is described by Bertoni, Biblioteca Ambrosiana R71sup. with a
diplomatic edition of the poems. The music is described by Sesini, Melodie trobadoriche with
transcriptions of the melodies according to Sesini’s theoretical reconstruction of the rhythms.
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