Thematic Catalogue of Troubadour and Trouvère Melodies (review)

Scholars of troubadour and trouvère song are indebted to and deeply reliant upon catalogs. Most research on these repertories begins by consulting either the catalog of Alfred Pillet and Henry Carstens (Bibliographie des Troubadours [Halle: Niemeyer, 1933]) or that of Gaston Raynaud and Hans Spanke (Hans Spanke, G. Raynauds Bibliographie des altfranzösischen Liedes [Leiden: Brill, 1980]). These foundational resources organized the sprawling corpus of troubadour and trouvère song into a tidy series of entries indicating the text incipits of thousands of songs and their manuscript concordances. Donna Mayer-Martin and Dorothy Keyser have combined the information in these volumes for the first time, producing a single catalog of both troubadour and trouvère songs. They have also added a new thematic index of melodic incipits. The result is a welcome resource that is sure not only to facilitate future research, but also to help inspire comparative work on the troubadours and trouvères.

The catalog begins with a short introduction explaining its unusual genesis. The project began when Mayer-Martin signed the contract with Pendragon Press in 1984; Keyser joined her in 1992 and completed the catalog after Mayer-Martin's death in 2009 (pp. vii-ix). Mayer-Martin was unable to complete a planned study of the manuscript history, a lacuna that has already been partially filled by Mary O'Neill's recent monograph on trouvère song, which is curiously absent from the bibliography (Courtly Love Songs of Medieval France [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006]). Keyser's introduction offers a brief summary of the troubadour and trouvère traditions, a discussion of issues in transcription, and a bibliography.

The summary of troubadour and trou-vère traditions could have benefited from having been brought up to date with recent research. For example, Keyser's statement that the origin of the music of troubadour song is enigmatic is certainly arguable, but should be read against Margaret Switten's convincing study of the influence of the Aquitanian versus on the melodies of troubadour song ("Versus and Troubadours Around 1100: A Comparative Study of Refrain Technique in the 'New Song,' " Plainsong and Medieval Music 16 [2007]: 91-143). Similarly, the assertion that the northern French city of Arras hosted a puy or guild is inaccurate. The Old French term puy refers not to a guild, but to an elusive song contest purportedly held by the bourgeois members of the Carité de Notre Dame des Ardents, the first confraternity of musicians. (Carol Symes, A Common Stage: Theater and Public Life in Medieval Arras [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007]). Keyser also addresses the thorny issue of rhythm in trouvère song. She adopts a non-mensural approach, including neumatic incipits for melodies with "mensural significance" (pp. xii-xiv). She argues that the scholarly consensus supports a non-mensural interpretation for all sources except trouvère manuscript O. There are, however, many scholars who also adopt rhythmic interpretations of trouvère manuscripts M and T, a factor that is not discussed. Finally, Keyser provides a scholarly bibliography, helpfully cued to individual manuscripts. Unfortunately, the bibliography also lacks references to many relevant studies published in the past decade. In addition to O'Neill's book (cited above), readers should take note of studies by Judith A. Peraino and John D. Haines (Peraino, "Re-Placing Medieval Music" Journal of the American Musicological Society 51 [2001]: 209-64 and Haines, "The Transformations of the Manuscrit du Roi," Musica Disciplina 52 [1998]: 5-43).

The most valuable aspect of this volume is the catalog itself, which is divided into two large sections devoted to the troubadours and trouvères respectively. Each song is given an entry with its melody, its position in the base manuscript (the choice of the base manuscript is not discussed), its concordances in other manuscripts, and any known contrafacta. Each section ends with a bibliographic list of the songs organized alphabetically...