Introduction

Summary

When I first set out to find out more about the death of musicologist Pierre Aubry, I never imagined it would lead to this book. At best, my immoderate curiosity about a footnote-sized anecdote might grow into a single publication of interest to a handful of medieval musicologists old enough to remember some vague story about two scholars who nearly duelled in 1910. It did. My article relating these findings was published in 1997, and I assumed then that I would promptly leave behind this dust on academic dust for more important research directly related to medieval music.

But after making a string of apparently unrelated discoveries, most deriving from personal correspondence and work notes, I was drawn to the broader context surrounding Aubry's fencing death and realized that there was more to this story than faulty rumours about an academic duel. The various details shaped a longer narrative which began to answer another question that had occurred to me before my interest in the Beck–Aubry affair: why was rhythm considered so important in medieval song? In reading the secondary literature on the troubadours and trouvères, I found that the issue of rhythm frequently came up; the topic was either lengthily discussed (mostly earlier writers) or cautiously avoided (mostly recent writers). Either way, the ‘rhythm question’ loomed over the subject of French medieval song, and few stopped to ask why, although many wrote to explain how.