The early troubadours exercise a certain fascination for moderns. Beginnings tend to be shrouded in mystery, especially the origins of cultural movements we would like to know more about. It is the reverse situation that makes the early troubadours so fascinating. They seem to spring up, brilliant from the first vers or songs of Guilhem de Peitieu, and continuing through two more generations until about 1170, when the movement, initially concentrated in just a few courts, grows wider and the poets more numerous.

At least three reasons may explain why these poets hold the sway they do in modern times. First, the coherence of their corpus, and its homogeneity: it is useful to be able to quote troubadours who evidently knew each other's work, who quote each other, and for whom the evolution of their poetry seems so closely entwined. A second reason for the prominence of the early troubadours is their genius in creating what has come to be called, since Roger Dragonetti and Paul Zumthor, the grand chant courtois. Christopher Page illustrates the seductiveness of this concept in his book Voices and Instruments of the Middle Ages where he asserts that the poetic force of the grand chant or ‘high style song’, as he calls it, lies in the coherence of the formal elements internal to the lyric. The genius of the genre, by this account, stems from its ability to reveal only gradually the complex architectonics of its art. Performance, the lyric component of the song, orchestrates our apprehension of the work.