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‘La Grande Chanson Courtoise’: The Chansons of Adam de la Halle

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 1974

John Stevens
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Extract

Far more attention has been given over the last century to the polyphonic compositions of Adam de la Halle and his plays than to his courtly chansons. Yet, if the number of surviving manuscripts is a guide, it was as a trouvère in the high courtly style, a courtly ‘maker’ in the tradition of la grande chanson courtoise, that his contemporaries chiefly valued him. His courtly chansons survive in eight main manuscripts and several lesser ones. In the manuscript (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, fir 25566) containing his Collected Works, as it were, the chansons have pride of place and are notated in a different style from the polyphonic rondeaux and motets and from the monophonic refrains of the same manuscript. Their notation is the square, non-mensural notation analogous to that of contemporary Gregorian chant and traditional for vernacular monophonic song.

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 101 , 1974 , pp. 11 - 30
Copyright
Copyright © 1977 The Royal Musical Association and the Authors

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References

1 They are conveniently listed in J. H. Marshall's literary edition (The Chansons of Adam de la Halle, Manchester, 1971)) using the familiar sigla of G. Raynaud, Bibliographie des altfranzösischen Liedes, rev. Hans Spanke, Leiden, 1955. I use Marshall's numbering of the chansons and Raynaud's sigla. The only modern musical editor of Adam's chansons, Nigel Wilkins (The Lyric Works of Adam de la Hale (Corpus mensurabilis musicae, xliv), American Institute of Musicology, 1967), uses an individual set of sigla and the numbering of Oeuvres completes du trouvère Adam de la Halle, ed. E. de Coussemalter, Paris, 1872 (reprinted Farnborough, 1966). The texts quoted in this paper follow Marshall's edition, by kind permission.Google Scholar

2 I discuss the diverse manifestations of this notation in a forthcoming article, ‘The Manuscript Presentation and Notation of Adam de la Halle's Courtly Chansons’, Source Materials and the Interpretation of Music: a Memorial Volume to Thurston Dart, ed. Ian Bent and Michael Tilmouth (in the press).Google Scholar

3 W. Apel (Gregorian Chant, Bloomington, Indiana, 1958) adopts a similar policy without invalidating his analyses.Google Scholar

4 The isosyllabic or ‘isochronous’ style of transcription is advocated for example in R. Monterosso, Musica e ritmica dex trovatori. Milan, 1956.Google Scholar

5 Dante's Lyric Poetry, Oxford, 1966, i, p. xvii.Google Scholar

6 Huizinga, J., The Waning of the Middle Ages, London, 1924 (reprinted 1950), ch. 8: ‘Love Formalized’.Google Scholar

7 For the numbering system here adopted, see footnote 1Google Scholar

8 See Marshall, The Chansons of Adam de la Halle, p. 118n., and Raynaud-Spankc, Bibliographie, Nos. 514, 537. Italics indicate a conjectural stress-scheme. For a more detailed stress analysis see below, p 17.Google Scholar

9 Op. cit., p. 3.Google Scholar

10 ‘Ut rude thema novae formae sibi sumat amictum’ (Geoffroi de Vinsaul).Google Scholar

11 La Technique poétique des trauvères dans la chanson courtoise, Bruges, 1960.Google Scholar

12 Langues et techniques poétiques à l'époque romane (Bibliothèque française et romane, C4), Paris, 1963. Among Zumthor's other studies, see especially ‘Entre deux esthériques: Adam de la Halle’, Melanges Frappier, Geneva, 1970, ii. 155–71.Google Scholar

13 Op. cit., p. 580.Google Scholar

14 Langues et techniques, p. 221.Google Scholar

15 Leys d'Amors, ed. A. F. Gatien-Arnoult (Monuments de la littérature romane, i–iii), Toulouse, 1841–3, i. 8–9.Google Scholar

16 Le Chansonnier Cangé, ed. Jean Beck (Corpus cantilenarum medii aevi, i/1), Paris, 1927, ii. [43]-[44].Google Scholar

17 I am grateful to Dr. Leslie Topsfield for allowing me to consult him about this problem.Google Scholar

18 Beck (Die Melodien des Troubadors, Strasbourg, 1908, p. 104) quotes an anonymous theorist who describes the iambic decasyllabic, authentic, ‘est ab antiquo tempore’ (i.e. used by Statius), which rather suggests its absence as an ‘authentic’ metre from the contemporary scene.Google Scholar

19 La Technique, pp. 543–4.Google Scholar

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21 The Chansons of the Troubadours and Trouvères, Utrecht, 1972, pp. 63–64.Google Scholar

22 See Marshall, Chansons, p. 126, for the sense and structure of this piece, ‘misunderstood by earlier editors’; see Stevens, ‘Manuscript Presentation’, for comments on the notation.Google Scholar

23 The three manuscripts differ at this point (line 8, notes 1–4): MS R reads b-a-c'-a; MS T reads a-c'-a-c'; MS W as given above (for an explanation of the sigla, see footnote 1).Google Scholar

24 (a) No. 20 (MS a), 6.1; (b) No. 1 (MS W), 7–4; (c) No. 23 (MS W), 8.3; (d) No. 20 (MS a), 8.2.Google Scholar

25 No. 23 (MS W), 1.1.Google Scholar

26 No. 8 (MS P), 5.1.Google Scholar

27 No. 1 (MS W), 5.1; No. 13 (MS P), 7.1.Google Scholar

28 No. 36 (MS W), 9. 1.Google Scholar

29 No. 3 (MS W), 1.2.Google Scholar

30 R Guiette, ‘D'une poésie formelle en France au moyen age’, Revue des sciences humaines, liv (1949), 67; quoted in Dragonetti, La Technique, p 541.Google Scholar

31 The Lyric Works, ed. Wilkins, No. 28, gives the melody of W onlyGoogle Scholar

32 See, for example, Gustave Reese, Music in the Middle Ages, New York, 1940, p 217.Google Scholar

33 De vulgari eloquentia, II. ix. 4.Google Scholar

34 See above, p. 17, and footnote 20.Google Scholar

35 The Songs of Bernart de Ventadorn, ed. S. G. Nichols and J. A. Galm, Chapel Hill, 1962, Nos. 27, lines 4–6 (the reading ‘apedit’ is doubtful)Google Scholar

36 E.g. by F. Gennrich in ‘Internationale mittelalterliche Melodien’, Zeitschnft fur Musikunssenschaft, ii (1928–9), 259, and many others.Google Scholar

37 ‘Dante and Music’, Italian Studies, xxiii (1968), 16.Google Scholar

38 For further information on Adam de la Halle's use of the plica, see Stevens, ‘Manuscript Presentation’.Google Scholar

39 Gregorian Chant, p. 126.Google Scholar

40 Éd. Gatien-Arnoult, i.59.Google Scholar