ABSTRACT
In a series of important studies of the arias of Johann Sebastian Bach, Paul Brainard has demonstrated convincingly that the composer’s melodic invention was generated by a keen sensitivity to the prosody, syntax, and affect of the text as well as by more abstract musical concerns. 1 Indeed, in Bach’s time, mastery of the poet’s craft was considered an integral part of the craft of composition, 2 reflecting a continuing predominance in the Baroque era of vocal over instrumental music. Turning to composers of earlier centuries, we find that they too looked on the text as a prime source of musical invention. Like Bach, song composers of the late Middle Ages were thoroughly grounded in prosody and versification; in fact, most of them probably composed their own poetic texts. These poet-composers were also well versed in the thematic commonplaces of the rhetorical tradition that flourished in troubadour and trouvère poetry and reached a high point in the thirteenth-century Romance of the Rose. Although—judging at least from the text underlay in the manuscript copies that have come down to us—they may not always have been sensitive to details of correct accentuation, they were clearly aware of the nuances of poetic theme and genre, an area of investigation that has received too little scholarly attention. This study will explore the thematic and structural rather than prosodic, metrical, or affective relationships between text and music in a small group of late fourteenth-century polytextual chansons. Even though surface clarity is obscured in these songs by the polyphony of multiple texts, the polyphonic texture itself can be understood as a symbolic representation of a textual theme.
