Sorbonne Université Anglais musicologique

UFR de Musique & Musicologie M1

Catherine A. Bradley
Understanding the medieval refrain
Jennifer Saltzstein, The refrain and the rise of the vernacular in medieval French
music and poetry, Gallica 30 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013), £60

Refrains—short phrases of music and French poetry circulating across various literary and
musical genres—are notoriously multifaceted and difficult to define. Jennifer Saltzstein’s new
book offers a much-needed full-length study of the refrain as a phenomenon in song and poetry,
demonstrating that practices of refrain quotation played a crucial role in the increasing
5 importance and authority of the vernacular in 13th- and 14th-century France. She focuses closely
on the music of refrains in addition to their texts and contexts. This is significant, since all existing
refrain catalogues record only texts, ignoring completely the corresponding musical material, and
scholars have previously investigated primarily literary aspects and interpretative possibilities of
refrains, principally within the genre of Romance. Saltzstein’s fundamentally interdisciplinary
10 study effortlessly traverses established historiographical boundaries—between vernacular poetry,
proverbs, Classical texts, plainchant, chansons and motets—tracing the paths of individual
refrains across a wide range of manuscript sources.
The book opens with a challenge to current understandings of the origins of refrains,
questioning the long-standing assumption that they ultimately stem from a lost oral tradition of
15 dance songs, principally rondets and rondets de carole. Saltzstein demonstrates that the general
distribution of refrains exhibits considerable independence from rondets, additionally arguing that
their musical stability points towards a place in an essentially written (rather than performative)
environment. This reinforces the status of the refrain as an agent of auctoritas, adopting a literate
Latinate practice of quotation in order to legitimize vernacular culture. Chapter 2 illuminates
20 further the learned clerical and monastic contexts in which refrains circulated, highlighting
connections between the 13th-century French translation of Ovid’s Ars amatoria and the motet.
Saltzstein also draws attention to the presence of seven refrain quotations within a collection of
French proverbs in a manuscript at Hereford Cathedral, each proverb accompanied by
allegorical Latin references to scripture. This encapsulates the kind of cultural exchange between
25 Latin and vernacular that is at the centre of her thesis: the glossing of vernacular proverbs and
refrains with scripture serves not only to ‘recuperate’ them—reappropriating ‘worldly material
into the sacred realm’—but it may also ‘elevate’ them ‘to the status of auctoritates worthy of sacred
meditation’ (p.73).
Chapters 3 and 4 describe a more specific geographical context for refrains, suggesting that
30 certain quotations constituted part of a musical tradition recognized as distinctive of Arras in
northern France. Saltzstein explores ways in which several generations of Arrageois trouvères
might have reused and reinterpreted local refrains, culminating with the most famous poet-
composer of the region, Adam de la Halle. Adam, exceptional as a trouvère to whom polyphony
is attributed, presents a fascinating case-study in authorial identity: his Jeu de la feuillée (c.1277)
35 seems to be akin to an autobiography, and he also frequently quotes and reinterprets his own
refrains. This interest in self-quotation is shared with another famous author figure, Guillaume
 de Machaut, to whom the book’s final chapter is devoted. Saltzstein draws parallels between
Machaut’s refrain usage and its 13th-century heritage, emphasizing a fundamental continuity of
practice that undermines previous chronological and scholarly separations of these repertories.
40 This book is as accessible to the non-specialist as it is valuable to the expert, carefully explaining
any technical vocabulary and precisely clarifying terminological distinctions—contrasting
quotation and citation, and differentiating between song, lyric and poetry (see p.4). Saltzstein
navigates with ease the range of bibliographic resources and catalogues required to understand
this complex corpus, outlining the transmission patterns of particular refrain networks with
45 admirable lucidity. Only occasionally would the reader benefit from even clearer exposition. The
concept of an intertextual refrain—one whose status as a true quotation is confirmed by the
survival of at least two surviving concordances in independent contexts—is a very useful one, but
the different possible types of intertextuality could be more strictly delineated. For Saltzstein, an
intertextual refrain can be, variously: a combined textual and musical quotation (refrain 1859 on
50 p.20); a textual quotation for which we lack evidence pertaining to possible additional musical
concordances (a number of the Ovid refrains in chapter 2); or a textual quotation with several
musical incarnations (as in chapter 5). This leads to momentary confusions, such as when the
reader is informed that there are ‘approximately 350 intertextual refrains from Boogaard’s
catalogue for which at least two known contexts survive’ (p.4), learning only later (on p.18) that
55 ‘136 refrains … have extant melodies in two different works’. One realizes retrospectively, then,
that the corpus of intertextual refrains consists predominantly of exclusively textual quotations,
but it remains unclear how many of the 136 refrains with multiple musical witnesses constitute
established musical quotations.
A focus on intertextual refrains is one of the most innovative aspects of Saltzstein’s approach,
60 and it leads to revealing new conclusions as well as avoiding older problems concerning the
legitimate classification of refrains. But the definition of such a category brings its own com-
plications. Insisting on the demonstrable dissemination of refrains may allow the vagaries of
manuscript survival to assume too great a significance. There might also be a considerable
quantity of ‘unique’ refrains that have extant concordances yet to be located. Saltzstein draws
65 attention to a refrain previously thought to circulate exclusively within the motet repertory, but
for which she has uncovered an additional text concordance among the Hereford proverbs (see
p.72, n.116). The effective exclusion of ‘unique’ refrains from discussion surely discourages the
detection of any additional concordances that would result in their reclassification as intertextual.
The author scrupulously and repeatedly acknowledges the possibility of missing sources—that
70 refrains may originally stem from works now lost (p.88), or draw on certain versions that no
longer survive (p.137)—and she is additionally cautious in presuming that extant concordances
must refer directly to one another, allowing for the existence of hypothetical intermediaries
(pp.156–7). There remain, nevertheless, moments when she might engage more directly with the
inescapable uncertainties on which her arguments are founded. Should, for instance, stability in
75 the written transmission of refrains (demonstrated on pp.16–27) necessarily deny a previous or
additional oral circulation? Consistency in a written tradition could equally be a later and/or
independent phenomenon. The pairings of stability and writing, flexibility and orality, are
problematic in any case, as is the automatic transferral to polyphony of criteria developed for
tracing oral circulation in monophony. In chapter 3, the identification of an Arrageois refrain
80 corpus relies heavily on the supposition that a manuscript source linked to a particular region, in
this case T, must contain local music or at least be representative of local knowledge. Several of
the refrains and motets under discussion in T have unacknowledged external concordances in

2
 later Parisian manuscripts and in early 13th-century ‘Notre Dame’ sources. The text of Ma loiaus
pense/In seculum (discussed on pp.105–9), for instance, is also found in Mo, while the melody of
85 refrain 314 (discussed on p.91) is transmitted within a clausula in F. Saltzstein proposes that ‘one
might view the motet C’ele m’a (m433)/Alleluia as a kind of compendium of intertextual refrains
specific to the manuscript [T] and the regional musical tradition it preserves’ (p.89), but the
additional presence of this same motet in a contemporary Parisian source, W2, surely weakens
the close connection of these refrains specifically to Arras.
90 Given that questions of transmission and provenance must often remain hypothetical,
Saltzstein is to be congratulated on carefully chosen examples, in which musical and textual
evidence is sufficiently compelling to support conclusions that move beyond the realm of
speculation. Occasionally, however, her interpretation of this evidence seems unnecessarily
cautious. In the case of the motet quadruplum C’est quadruble, the coincidence of unusual
95 harmonic, rhythmic and melodic features at the moment of the refrain is so striking that the status
of this musical phrase as pre-existent material which is being quoted seems much more certain
than Saltzstein’s equivocal conclusions (on p.68) would imply. She responsibly employs a number
of independent criteria in order to establish musical quotations, but these could have benefited
from greater theorization and more systematic application. Uncharacteristic dissonance, for
100 instance, is usually regarded as an indication of musical quotation, yet it is not noted in the case
of the refrain at the end of La pire roe du char/[Immo]latus (pp.50–1), although it supports her
reading of this piece. There is also an implication that the grafted or enté presentation of a refrain
might increase the likelihood that it represents a genuine quotation (p.57 and 110), a tantalizing
possibility that requires further probing. Similarly, the discussion of ‘intratextual polyphonic
105 quotation’ (p.127) in the work of Adam de la Halle raises several additional questions. How
common is it for refrains to appear in multiple different motets on the same chant tenor, and at
exactly the same moment in the quoted chant melisma? Must this constitute a sophisticated and
meaning-laden reference (as Saltzstein suggests), or could it reflect a basically practical aspect of
compositional culture, where certain refrains were known to be musically compatible with certain
110 chants and, as a result, were repeatedly used in conjunction with them?
Saltzstein’s detailed engagement with musical examples is particularly welcome, but their
presentation can be frustrating. It would have been helpful to include the motet tenor in example
3.2 (p.107) in order to understand the harmonic context (discussed on p.106), and ligatures could
preferably have been indicated by square brackets above the staves throughout, rather than by
115 beaming where possible but by slurs when not. For the two chansonniers that also transmit motets,
it is confusing to refer to the ‘Chansonnier du Roi’ by its motet siglum, R (rather than as Trouvère
M), while giving the ‘Noailles Chansonnier’ its trouvère designation as T, instead of the motet
siglum N. Yet quibbles such as these do not ultimately compromise the value of this book. It offers
important new contexts in which to understand practices of refrain quotation, establishing
120 analytical and interpretative frameworks for their melodies and texts that will prove invaluable to
musicologists as well as scholars of medieval French literature and culture.

Early Music, May 2014, 42:291-93