contemporary of William of Aquitaine, wrote six planctus on biblical themes, two of which exist in staff
notation. A large collection of versus in an early thirteenth-century French manuscript best known for
polyphonic music includes planctus commemorating a whole honor roll of recently deceased aristocrats
and churchmen, and what may be described as Latin sirventes (one of them concerning Pope Innocent III’s
excommunication of Otto IV, the Holy Roman Emperor, in 1210 and the ensuing war of succession). Many
planctus settings (including the planctus cigni) are in a form resembling the older (pre-“Victorine”)
liturgical sequence, with its melodically paired verses of differing lengths. This form, too, had its
Provençal counterpart, called the descort. The name, translated literally, means “discordant,” the idea
being that its component stanzas are in varying (disagreeing) rhyme and meter schemes, requiring new
melodies for each. Such a structure particularly suited narrative poems.
FIG. 4-3 The Languedoc region in the twelfth century. Note the close proximity of Limoges, the monastic center, where Latin
liturgical poetry to music was composed in profusion; and Poitiers, the center of troubadour activity.
Other troubadour genres or individual melodies affected a mock-popular style that may have drawn
stylistically not on chant but on otherwise unrecorded folk idioms. A chantar m’er de so gu’en no volria
(“I must sing of that which I would rather not”), the one poem with surviving tune attributed to the late
twelfth-century trobairitz Beatriz, Countess of Dia, departs markedly from the chant idiom. Its overall
structure is that of the regularized or “rounded” canso with its repeated couplet and final refrain (AB AB
CD B), but the tune alternates cadences on E and D in a fashion never encountered in first-mode chants
but common in the dances and dance songs of a slightly later period. (Such endings would be designated