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Li tans nouveaus The present recording proposes a repertoire of songs whose poetry and music are the work of troubadours and trouvres active in 12th- and 13th-century France. These pieces constitute in fact the first surviving medieval examples of song written in the vernacular. The troubadour (trobador), the trouvre (troveor) is one that finds, invents, composes music and words. The troubadour is the first to appear; he is, like the trouvre, at once poet, musician, singer, and composer. He writes in the langue doc (or old language from Occitanie). He can be found as early as the late 11th century in the courts of southern France. He may come from any social class: the nobility, the clergy, the great merchant families; he could as well be a knight as be of humble origins. Some are great travellers, accompanying the crusaders to free the Holy Land, or visiting various European courts, especially those of Spain, Italy, and Hungary. Nearly forty manuscripts contain the poems of the troubadours, but there are principally two that have handed down the music. Half of all these documents come from Italy, a land both of exchange and of exile for the troubadours. Unfortunately, these manuscripts represent only a fraction of the works of these great poetmusicians. We lose trace of them at the outset of the 14th century. The art of the troubadours is at its peak when in the north of France, toward the end of the 12th century, there resonates for the first time the words and music of the trouvres. To a certain extent, they imitate the poetry and music of the troubadours, but they also boast their own, distinct forms. The manuscripts of the trouvres have come down to us in much greater number than those of their southern cousins. In these documents, not only does the music almost always accompany texts written in langue doïl (Old French), but also the same music is often found associated with different poems and vice versa. The trouvres disappeared during the course of the 14th century. These two musical civilizations came into contact by various means. It is not easy to pinpoint the precise reasons that favoured their meeting. lonore of Aquitaine was surrounded by artists and troubadours at her court of Poitiers. Éléonores two daughters, Marie and Aelis one of whom was married to Henri 1st of Champagne and the other to Thibaut de Bloismust certainly have inspired the love of courtly poetry in their entourage, and they took under their wing several trouvres in addition to welcoming travelling troubadours. The estampie is one of the earliest recorded examples of dance music performed on instruments during the Middle Ages. The etymology of the term is uncertain. Several hypotheses have been proposed: it may stem from the Latin stampare, which refers to the movement of the foot when it marks the downbeat of a dance; or from the verb estampir (Old Provenal), which means to resound; or again from the Germanic stamph or stampon, which describes the striking sound of a pestle in a mortar. What imagination! According to an early 14th-century theorist, the estampie is made up of several sections (punctum). A section is a melodic phrase of varying length consisting of ascending and descending lines that combine harmoniously. Each section is repeated, ending the first time on the open (overt, apertum), the second time on the close (clausum, chiuso). The open and the close each have different melodic endings. Sixteen estampies have come down to us: eight from a late 13th-century French manuscript and eight from a late 14th-century Italian manuscript.
In the present recording, the royal estampies are associated with the repertoire of the trouvres, on account of their designation, their style, and the manuscript from which they come. Several of the written elements in the source point to a possible origin in the north of France. And although the dances and estampies that come from Italian manuscripts date from after the time of the troubadours, their character and melodic beauty harmonize beautifully with their repertoire.
Marot, par cortoisie je te prie, © Guy Ross
Kiya Tabassian, setar |
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©2010 Constantinople info@constantinople.ca 428, Rachel Est Montréal (Québec) H2J 2G7 Canada |
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