Authenticity and ‘auteur’: the songs of Hugues de Berzé

Extract

The concept of individual authorship, let alone authorial style, is not one that medievalists are accustomed to dealing with, particularly in the realm of monophonic music. Within this field, however, troubadour and trouvère songs provide a peculiar and almost unique challenge because many of the songs are by identified and identifiable composers. However, between the lives of those composers and the written records of their composition there is a gap which can be almost as long as 200 years. We do not know who compiled the manuscripts, nor do we know why they were produced; but what is plain is that the lines of transmission from composer to written record were neither clear nor simple, given the number and scope of the variants from one manuscript to the next. The relationship between the manuscripts is complex, and stemmatics has not proved particularly useful in determining the variant closest to the composer’s ‘original’. In these circumstances it is hardly surprising that the authentic voice of the composer is not a common subject for discussion. Like other monophonic repertories, the songs of the troubadours and trouvères tend to be analysed as a corpus, and rightly so. If analysis is to encompass the entire legacy of songs, it needs systematic tools of the kind and quality available to other repertories. However, effective tools for the melodic analysis of troubadour and trouvère song are few, for reasons which I have discussed elsewhere.