ABSTRACT
The relationship between the trouvde poetic structures and musiccal structuresshassbeen a favoured method of analytical approach, from the prosody-based inspiration of Jean Beck and Pierre Aubry which ensured for some seventy years that our approach to trouvere melodic style was coloured by the rhythmic modes, to Theodore Karp's analysis of 1977 in which the rhyme scheme, or poetic phrase, becomes the basic criterion for musical structure, and ' "mplexity "is a quality assigned to those few songs in his sample where the musical phrase is manifestly disjunct from the poetic structure. Literary critics have happily considered the words without musk, but musicologists have more or less never considered the music without the words.s.
A trouvie song is obviously a hybrid form, but is analogy witth literary structures actually the most helpful way of coming closer to its melodic style and musical structure?
This paper aims to present an analytical theory of trouvde melodic style that takes as its starting point the purely musical criteria of final and pivot note and explores the relationships between these two notes in the way that all the other notes are deployed. Graphic analyses not only reveal an astonishing consistency in the treatment of structural notes across all the variants of a particular song, but also an astonishing consistency of procedure within the field. Despite the fact that many trouv&r songs seem to lack a strong tonal centre and indeed different variants show different finals, the final is always carefully prepared by being singled out by unfinished movements earlier in the song, and variants are shown to be the result of slightly different emphases given to the same essential prolongation. Thus the selection and deployment of notes will be seen to be far frorom 146random and it will be argued, in the second instance, that such an analysis actually makes a greater contribution than interdependent analyses to the understanding of the songs as poetry, since the differing emphases of the musical structures of different variants can entail subtle semantic shifts from one variant even in cases where the words are identical.
