If, as the text suggests, this song is meant to accompany a carole, an actual public dance, then its rhythm
has got to be metrical. No such information is conveyed by the actual notation, which like that of the other
troubadour melodies is indistinguishable from the “quadratic notation” (notation with square note-heads)
used in contemporary chant manuscripts. (“Contemporary” here means thirteenth-century, the period of the
retrospective chansonniers.) Meter has to be supplied conjecturally, on the basis of the words. In the case
of a dance, no one is likely to object to such a conjecture; but the question of the proper rhythmic style for
troubadour songs—indeed, for verse-music in general before the thirteenth century—is one of the most
hotly contested issues in musical scholarship.
The poetry is of course metered; indeed, metrical design (along with rhyme scheme) was a field in
which the troubadours vied to excel one another in virtuosity. The question is whether the metric
patterning was reflected in the music in patterns of note lengths or by means of stress patterns. Or, as some
maintain, were the troubadour songs performed in a supple rhythm modeled, perhaps, on that of the sacred
chant? Such an attribute of “high” style would free the troubadour art from any taint of the “popular”—if
indeed that was thought desirable.
This is certainly not the place to adjudicate such a question; but it should be emphasized that we are
just as much in the dark about the intended rhythmic performance of versus (or even Frankish hymns and
sequences) as we are about vers. And it should be noted that the scholarly consensus has lately been
swinging, in the case of all of these repertories, away from the a position (now regarded as anachronistic)
that favored applying quantitative meters wherever possible. This theory, which dominated editions and
performances of troubadour melodies and late chants alike in the earlier part of the twentieth century, was
based on a misreading of treatises on the rhythmic performance of late medieval polyphonic music (to be
described in chapter 6).
The approach most favored now is the so-called “isosyllabic” approach, whereby all syllables,
whether sung to a single note or to a group or two or three notes, are given roughly equal length. Another
possibility, which also has its adherents, is the “equalist” approach that makes precisely the opposite
assumption. It gives all notes the same length, regardless of how many of them are given to a syllable.
This fairly radical “solution” to the problem of rhythmic interpretation is the one recommended by the
editors of modern chant books (officially adopted by the Catholic church in 1904 and in general Catholic
use until 1963), and is therefore the one most widely practiced today wherever the Gregorian chant is still
sung as service music.
TROBAR CLUS
There is one more important genre of troubadour poetry with music: the tenso (or joc-partit), an often
jesting debate-song that involves two or more interlocutors, and that was sometimes, but not necessarily,
actually a joint composition by two or more poets. The subject matter could be some fine point of love or
feudal service (like, “if you love a lady, would it be better to be married to her or to have her love you
back?”), or it could be—and most often was—about poetry itself. Here the troubadour addressed his craft
directly and with marvelous self-consciousness. The tenso was thus a sort of school for poets and can be
extremely instructive for us.
One of the favorite themes for debate was the eternal conflict between trobar clus and trobar clar,
between “closed” or difficult poetry for connoisseurs and “clear” poetry designed for immediate pleasure
and easy communication. The virtues claimed for the first were its technical prowess, its density of
meaning, and the exclusive nature of its appeal, which lent it an ability to create an elite occasion and
foster solidarity among a coterie of insiders. It promoted social division and hierarchy, and was therefore