The anthology Poets and Singers: On Latin and Vernacular Monophonic Song is one of the seven volumes of the new series Music in Medieval Europe. While the other volumes in the series deal with chant and tropes, instrumental music, Ars Antiqua, and Ars Nova, this book contains a selection of articles dealing with the repertories of troubadour and trouvre song, Italian laude, German minnesang, Galician cantigas, and Latin song. The book's editor, Elizabeth Aubrey, has been one of the leading scholars in the field of troubadour music, in particular since the publication of The Music of the Troubadours (Indiana UP, 1996). Although it has become customary to study each repertory individually, Aubrey explains, the present volume is "not intended to be an introduction to the repertories" (xi), but is structured around five principal themes and issues that cross the repertories' boundaries. The twenty-four articles of the anthology are thus organized into five parts: "History and Society," "Women," "Poetry and Music," "Transmission," and "Performance," preceded by the editor's introduction ("Poets, Singers, Scribes and Historians") and bibliography.
The interest and coherence of anthologies obviously hinges on the selection they provide. It is in this respect that anthologies are at their most vulnerable, and often they can easily be criticized for what they have not included. The editor of the anthology under review accomplished a fine result in offering a poised selection of articles. In contrast to Thomas Forrest Kelly's "Series Preface" which states that the series' aim is to "sketch a picture of the shape of the field and of the nature of current enquiry" (ix), however, the papers published in the book date from between 1964 and 2004, taken evenly from the four decades of scholarship covered by the book. In some cases, such as Ursula Aarburg's article "Probleme um die Melodien des Minnesang" (1967), one wonders whether there really is no more current scholarship available, especially when it is the only contribution that deals with minnesang.
On the other hand, selecting older articles has its advantages, e.g. the possibility to trace the evolution of musicological thinking. A case in point is the interpretation of rhythm in medieval monody, discussed in the five articles that form the second half of Part V. Three of these provide the discussion between Hendrik Van der Werf and J.E. Maddrell in Current Musicology of 1970-1971. Van der Werf- -whose name is consistently misspelled by Maddrell--defends a free rhythm and refrains from assigning rhythmical values in his editions of the melodies ("Concerning the Measurability of Medieval Music," 1970; "The 'Not-so-precisely Measured' Music of the Middle Ages," 1988), although he concedes that the notation of double notes over one syllable most likely indicates a longer tone than the one represented by a single note (496). Maddrell ("Mensura and the Rhythm of Medieval Monodic Song," 1970; "Grocheo and the Measurability of Medieval Music: A Reply to Hendrik Vanderwerf [sic]," 1971) denies that Grocheio justifies the use of free rhythm, and joins Hans Tischler ("Rhythm, Meter, and Melodic Organization in Medieval Songs," 1974) in his opinion that the editor holds the responsibility for providing the performer with an indication of rhythm.
Aarburg's article mentioned above stands out positively in other respects: it was published in a journal (Der Deutschunterricht) that is not easily accessible and rarely consulted by musicologists, and it is the only article in German, while the twenty-three others are in English. The almost exclusive focus on English articles may have been chosen from a commercial point of view, and pervades the entire series-the volume on Ars Nova, for example, similarly includes only one non-English article (in Italian). Such a choice, however, hinders the editor of the volume under review to represent the state of research adequately, given the extensive French literature on troubadour and trouvre song.
A more important criticism can be made of the repertories to which attention is given: the majority of the articles deal with trouvre and troubadour song, making the absence of French literature stand out clearly. Much less space and paper are spent on laude, minnesinger, or Latin secular song. As the editor admits in her Introduction, the imbalance in the articles reflects that of the numbers of extant musical sources of medieval monody (xi). Both the linguistic and the repertorial choices are partly compensated for in the extensive bibliography consisting of the field's most important (245) titles, which includes 37 articles and chapters published after 2000. The volume is complemented with a good index, although a number of useful additional entries, such as "chanson de femme," or a more elaborate "manuscripts" entry would have been welcome.
Notwithstanding the volume's somewhat stronger emphasis on troubadour and trouvre song, the choice of organizing the volume along thematic lines is fortunate, and strengthens the editorial option for offering an alternative to the obvious introduction to the various monodic repertories. It enlightens central issues of the monodic repertories, such as the position and image of music and musicians, both men and women, in medieval society, as seen through both musical and narrative and literary sources; the esthetics and analysis of poetry, music, and their interrelations; the status of manuscript and oral forms of transmission; and the significance and interpretation of melodic variants and rhythm. Scholars of other (medieval) repertories, such as chant, polyphony, or instrumental music, will certainly discover parallels to approaches and problems they are familiar with in their own fields.
Part I, "History and Society," opens with an article by Christopher Page, "Music and Chivalric Fiction in France, 1150-1300" (1984), in which Page distinguishes between the images of music given in epic and romance, and between the "reviewing" and the "focusing" registers. The schemes and "complexes" given in the appendix still invite comparisons with and extrapolations to other literatures and repertories for which such analyses have not yet been made, e.g. Middle Dutch literature. Ruth Harvey's article "Joglars and the professional status of the early troubadours" (1993) clarifies the specific usage of both terms. Bryan Gillingham's "Turtles, Helmets, Parasites and Goliards" (1994) provides a critical revision of the so-called "goliards" as wandering clerical poet-composers by offering a new view on the etymology of the term, and on the--probably rather limited--contribution of goliards to the monodic repertory of the Middle Ages. But while providing an important etymological-terminological discussion, nothing is said about actual music to Latin texts. Similarly, Cyrilla Barr's paper ("Introduction" to her 1988 book on the lauda and confraternities in Tuscany and Umbria) on the origins of the flagellati or disciplinati is a fascinating contextual study of the movement that originated in the context of the Joachite movement started by Rainiero Fasani in Perugia, spread over Italy around 1260, influenced existing confraternities, and took over the habit of singing laude. Even though it certainly is important to the study of the genre, the article is not concerned directly with the music of the laude. Given that this is the only article to deal with the laude repertory, the reader is left to wonder how the music of the laude has been studied by musicologists to date.
Part II, "Women," zeroes in on a specific but varied group of performers and composers of secular monodic song. Although the importance of the notion "woman composer" is not explicitly discussed in the editor's introduction (p. xiv has a brief discussion on "authorship"), its inclusion in this anthology testifies to the importance of the genderapproach in recent medieval studies. Joan Tasker Grimbert's article "Diminishing the Trobairitz, Excluding the Women Trouvres" (1999) provides a sharp criticism of the views of Pierre Bec as expressed in a 1979 article, in which, in Tasker Grimbert's view, Bec attempts to deny the contributions of women composers and their importance. It deconstructs Bec's distinction between fminit gntique and fminit textuelle and his assumption of an apparent contradiction between the existence of trobairitz in the south of France and the absence of chansons de femme there (or between the absence of female troubadours in the North and practice of male authors composing chansons de femme). One wonders if it might have been useful to include Bec's paper ("Trobairitz et chansons de femme: Contribution la connaissance du lyrisme fminin au moyen ge," Cahiers de civilisation mdivale 22, 235-62) in order to obtain a fuller sense of the discussion, even though it does not deal with music directly. In the following article, "Women's Performance of the Lyric Before 1500" (2002), Susan Boynton comments on the position of female musicians in the Arab world and in troubadour, trouvre and fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italian culture. She specifies how the flexibility of performance practices and the irrelevance of the performer-composer distinction illuminates the extant literary references to women composers-performers. Such a view is supported by literary and narrative sources, such as Boccaccio's Decamerone, in which singers are identified as authors-composers. Boynton's article is the only in the volume to contain a discography (128-129).
Part III, "Poetry and Music", presents some of the more analytical approaches of the repertory, with studies on the construction of music and poetry and the interrelationships between both aspects of the monodic repertory. Recurring topics are the focus on rhythm, taxonomies by Dante and Grocheio, and tools and models for analysis, such as genres and (high vs low) styles. Most authors seem to agree that "poetic and musical style and structure were devised according to the tools particular to each art" (Elizabeth Aubrey, "Poetics and Music," 1996, p. 150). Aubrey's article "Genre as a Determinant of Melody in the Songs of the Troubadours and the Trouvres" (2000) specifies that both text and music are essential elements of the medieval art of rhetoric, and demonstrates that Grocheio stressed the Aristotelian unity of matter (text) and form (music) (186-187). Furthermore, she describes how the anonymous Doctrina de compondre dictats, attributed to the theorist Jofre de Foix (144), and this theorist's Regles de trobar give remarkable instructions for the composition of specific genres. John Stevens's 1974 article on "La Grande Chanson Courtoise: The Chansons of Adam de la Halle" views this last trouvre's production as a play with conventions and topoi, striving towards unity in diversity. Stevens defines the "noble style" of courtly song (a term from Roger Dragonetti) by four "unchanging" features (215-218). Similarly, Theodore Karp's "Interrelationships between Poetic and Musical Form in Trouvre Song" (1977) offers a clear introduction to the text-music relationship of the genre, and focuses on the structure of text and music and possible divergences between both. Part III concludes with two recent articles by Manuel Pedro Ferreira on the context and music of the Cantigas de Santa Maria ("Andalusian Music and the Cantigas de Santa Maria," 2000, and "Rondeau and Virelai: The Music of Andalus and the Cantigas de Santa Maria." They offer striking observations on form (such as the "Andalusian rondeau" and various virelai types, p. 278-279), and rhythm (including five-beat patterns, p. 260-261). Even though this part's title is "Poetry and Music" and most of the contributions indeed focus on text-music relationships, what is missing in this most analytical section of the book is a discussion of modality in any of the repertoires it deals with. Ian Parker's "Troubadour and Trouvre Song: Problems in Modal Analysis" (Revue belge de musicologie 31, 1977, 20-37) might have been a valuable selection.
Part IV, "Transmission," clearly represents the principal positions towards the transmission of medieval monody. The titles of Karp's "The Trouvre MS Tradition" (1964) and Hendrik Van der Werf's "The Trouvre Chansons as Creations of a Notationless Musical Culture" (1965) speak for themselves. Karp also comments on transcription problems, and explicitly distances himself from Ursula Aarburg's procedure of "conflation" (307). The inclusion of Aarburg's article allows the reader to understand how Karp can accuse her of "conflating" sources. At the time of publication, Aarburg could still argue that given the "imperfect" nature of the sources, the music contained in them neither represents the "final" version of the songs as they were performed nor the original "Urtext." While such a position seems outdated today, the article reminds us of those repertories and sources where a significant input of the editor is unavoidable, such as the Carmina Burana, the Winchester Troper, or, among the vernacular repertories not covered by the present anthology, the Middle Dutch Gruuthuse Manuscript (The Hague, Royal Library, Ms. 79 K 10).
Part V, "Performance," consists of two groups of articles. The first collects three studies on the presence and representation of music in literature. Page's "The Twelfth Century in the South" (1986) asserts a distinction between "High Style" and "Lower Styles" with their own poetic and musical characteristics (347), and reads the evidence to suggests that the twelfth-century troubadour canso was not accompanied, whereas certain genres belonging to the lower styles were, such as the dansa and the descorts. Sylvia Huot, in "Voices and Instruments in Medieval French Secular Music: On the Use of Literary Texts as Evidence for Performance Practice" (1989) analyses 47 Old and Middle French literary texts (romances and epics) and offers methodological reflections. She establishes "guidelines for the analysis of literary texts as evidence for performance practice" (364). Both Huot and Aubrey ("References to Music in Old Occitan Literature," 1989) investigate the extent to which literary sources provide a view on performers, performances, pieces, the narrative function of music and musicians as characters within the frame text, and the influence of literary conventions. Their analyses of terminology provide a firm basis for any study of the subject. Both Page and Huot identify the "discontinuity problem" (the term is Page's) when working with literary sources. When two activities, such as singing and dancing, or singing and playing, are mentioned, this does often not allow the reader to see whether these activities take place simultaneously or successively, or even whether they are related at all (350, 370, 404). The second half of Part V brings together the articles on rhythm in monodic song referred to at the beginning of this review.
Even though the series in which the present anthology is published can be criticized for its (quasi-)monolingualism and its quite "broad" conception of "current" scholarship, Poets and Singers will be of great interest to readers wishing to broaden and deepen their insights in medieval monody. It enlightens them on all central issues of the field, even when the representation of the various repertories is slightly uneven. In this respect, the emphasis on troubadour and trouvre song is less troubling than the absence of discussion of modality or of the actual music of Latin and Italian song. Its inclusion of older material permits one to see clear distinctions between scholarly positions and makes the book both very stimulating material for study and research and an excellent teaching resource.