9/13/12 Music History Dr.

Campbell

The Earliest Secular Music which was written

o Most of the secular music came from people at court
o First stuff came from Knights
o South & south-central France
o Knights were very high on the social hierarchy
o The court poets were called troubadours and they wrote the songs in court
o The subject of the troubadours poetry was the life they led
Life was ritualized, idealized, and romanticized
Canso = song about lovecourtly love, specifically
Fin Amours = courtly love (e.g. 1st hymnal pg 26)
o Woman is lofty, poised, upper crust of society. Poised, aloof,
unobtainable (often somebodys wife)
o Strophic structure = type of text setting in which we write music
for one stanza of poetry and then we sing all the rest of the
stanzas to the same music
o Melodic form did not necessarily follow the rhyme scheme of
the poem
o Notation really doesnt tell us about rhythm at all still
o A lot of Canso poems do not have written music with it, despite
the fact that we know they were sung
Pastourelle = outdoor setting, based on folk music (e.g. 1st hymnal pg 28)
A knight seducing a peasant girl (which apparently happened a lot)
PG-13ish content
Often actually talking directly to the peasant girl
Instruments sometimes accompanied these troubadour songs. We know this
because of paintings, etc.
o The art of the Troubadours was an aristocratic one, and troubadours are aristocratic
o Minstrel/Jongleur would sometimes perform a troubadours music.
It would be slightly disgraceful for a troubadour to get down and play a lute and
sing.
o Anthologies of troubadour poems were collected in what is called Chansonniers.
Chansonniers are bookshelf items and are very decorative.
They contain vidas, which are short biographies of the poet-composers
o These tell us that there are female composers
La Comtessa de Dias composition A chanter mer de so
quieu non volria is the only surviving
o Troubadours tradition lasted for about 200 years
These people in southern France fled south during
o In the north, as the southern troubadour tradition declined, the northern French
Trouvres started to rise
o Trouvre forms of music
9/13/12 Music History Dr. Campbell

Geste = deeds. These songs were about honor, etc.

Musical form = AAB (bar)
Text scheme = ABC

We know that we had migration from the Arab world to Southern France. These people were lower
caste and often served as minstrels.