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Phrasing in medieval song: perspectives from traditional music

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2008

Warwick Edwards
Warwick Edwards
Affiliation:
University of Glasgow
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Extract

During the course of a series of articles relating medieval Italian songs to oral and unwritten traditions, Nino Pirrotta comments on a peculiar anonymous two-voice setting from the fourteenth century whose verses seem to have been broken and shattered by the music. Word repetition ‘does not result in a more effective or more understandable rendition of the text; on the contrary, it so fragments and stutters it that any meaning is lost, except as a pretext for the melody which submerges it’. The song in question, Dolce lo mio drudo, is part of a group of unica with Calabrian associations found in the oldest layer of the Reina manuscript. Pirrotta transcribes the song in full and analyses the text and its cognates in detail. It is a ballata with irregularities. I quote in Example 1 just the refrain, together with an indication of the syllable count, in order to facilitate comparison with what follows.

Type
Articles
Information
Plainsong & Medieval Music , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , April 1996 , pp. 1 - 22
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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References

1 Pirrotta, N., ‘;Polyphonic Music for a Text Attributed to Frederick II’, Music and Culture in Italy from the Middle Ages to the Baroque (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), 39–50, on p. 44;CrossRefGoogle Scholaroriginally published as ‘Musica polifonica per un testo attribuito a Federico II’, in L'Ars nova italiana del Trecento, 2 (Certaldo, 1968), 97–112.Google Scholar

2 Paris, Bibliotheque nationale, MS n. a. fr. 6771, f. 29v. The piece is also published in Italian Secular Music, ed. Marrocco, W. T., Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century 11 (Monaco, 1978), no. 27.Google Scholar

3 Magrini, T., ‘Dolce lo mio drudo: La prospettiva etnomusicologica’, Rivista italiana di musicologia, 22 (1986), 215–35.Google Scholar For further details see Baud-Bovy, Samuel, Chansons populates de Crite occidental (Geneva, 1972)Google Scholar and Magrini, , Forme della musica vocale e strumentale a Creta, 2nd edn (Milan, 1985).Google Scholar

4 Transcription by Warwick Edwards, after Grèce: Musique populaire de tradition orale: Chants des Akrites, LP (Ocora 558 600). I am grateful to Athanassios Papazaris for assistance in transcribing the words. The translation is reprinted here by kind permission of Harmonia Mundi France. A series of variant versions of the melody are transcribed and discussed in Baud-Bovy, Chansons populaires, 219ff, and one of them is recorded on the accompanying disc. In this, and in the further traditional song transcriptions following, I have only notated the performance features pertinent to this article. In particular I have refrained from indicating durational values for the examples from Greece and Herzegovina. The notes certainly have values - and in many cases they are not particularly difficult to express in standard modern notation; yet it is far from certain whether such notation, based on the regular temporal recurrence of a hierarchy of accentual patterns, reflects the song rhythms as singers perceive them, or whether it falsifies them and misleads. The use here of a common notational system for modern traditional renderings and for nonmensural medieval songs does not necessarily compel us to infer similarity of thought processes, though I have to admit it is suggestive. There is of course a need to study the rhythms of traditional song in their own right, and to ask whether these too can lend insight to those of medieval song.

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11 This is, I think, the only instance of the phenomenon in Bartók and Lord's collection, notwithstanding that it comes from a location, Gacko, which provided a large number of their recordings.

12 Bartók and Lord, Serbo-Croatian Folk Songs, 74ff.

13 Ibid., no. 23a.

14 Transcribed from an unpublished field recording made by Athanassios Papazaris. I am most grateful to him for allowing me to quote it here. For numerous further examples of line-, word- and syllable-interruptions see Baud-Bovy, Chansons populaires.

15 Bartók and Lord, Serbo-Croatian Folk Songs, 76.

16 Transcribed by Warwick Edwards from Les Traditions populaires en France, I: Auvergne, LP (Ocora: 558 520).

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18 Though readers who can turn to the recording and become listeners will be left in no doubt as to Mme Reichert's relish for her cheeky text.

19 See also the example quoted and discussed in my ‘Parallel Performance Traits’.

20 Ibid., opening paragraph.

21 Stevens, J., Words and Music in the Middle Ages: Song, Narrative, Dance and Drama, 1050–1350 (Cambridge, 1986), 33.Google ScholarOn armonia, see also pp. 20–1 and Chapters 11 and 12.

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37 Zumthor, , Toward a Medieval Poetics, 196.Google Scholar

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40 Arlt, ‘Secular Monophony’, 66.

41 Arlt, ‘Nova cantica’.

42 Discarding Images, 99–100.

43 Music for the Lion-Hearted King, Gothic Voices, dir. C. Page, CD (Hyperion CDA 66336).

44 Edwards, ‘Text Underlay in Marguerite of Austria's Chanson Album’, 44–5.

45 Discarding Images, 110–11.

46 Treitler, L., ‘Oral, Written and Literate Process in the Transmission of Medieval Music’, Speculum, 56 (1981), 471–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also his ‘Reading and Singing’; ‘ “Unwritten” and “Written Transmission” of Medieval Chant and the Start-up of Musical Notation’, Journal of Musicology, 10 (1992), 131–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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52 Ibid., 87–8.

53 Ibid., 63–4.

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55 Arlt, ‘Secular Monophony’, 61. As a contributor to,The Byrd Edition, I can scarcely refrain from referring here to my earlier footnote on that edition's text punctuation policy.

56 Randel, D. M., ‘,Dufay the Reader’, in Music and Language, Studies in the History of Music 1 (New York, 1983), 38–78.Google Scholar

57 Stevens, , ‘Samson dux fortissime’, 14–15.Google Scholar

58 Treitler, L., ‘The Troubadours Singing their Poems’, The Union of Words and Music in Medieval Poetry, ed. Baltzer, R. A., Cable, T. and Wimsatt, J. I. (Austin, Tex., 1991), 15–48, on p. 16.Google Scholar

59 Village Music from Romania: Oltenia - Moldavia - Transylvania (Collection Constantin Brᾰiloiu), AIMP, 9–11 (3 CDs, AIMP 9–11, 1988), sleeve-note.

60 This article is a revised version of materials presented at the European Seminar in Ethnomusicology, Geneva, 23–8 September 1991; at the Annual Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Music, Newcastle upon Tyne, 10–13 July 1992; as well as at the London Colloquium on 20 July 1995 in memory of Michael Morrow.