narrative romances to “illustrate” dance scenes. (The first such usage is in a manuscript dated 1228.)
Rondeaux were the source of many of the popular refrains in the store from which thirteenth-century
composers of chansons avec des refrains would draw. In fact, the word “rondeau” may have originally
meant a song framed (sur-rounded) by a quoted refrain. No rondeau with surviving music seems to be any
older than Adam’s polyphonic ones, however. There are ten monophonic rondeaux by Adam’s
contemporary Guillaume d’Amiens, who was a famous manuscript illuminator besides being a trouvère,
and another dozen by a Parisian cleric named Jehannot de l’Escurel (hanged for debauchery in 1304).
There is no reason to think these pieces any earlier than Adam’s, though, just because they are written in a
simpler texture.
The rondeau was one of three types of dance-song (carole) with refrain that came into widespread use
as models for composed music beginning with Adam in the late thirteenth century. They differed from one
another chiefly in the deployment of the refrains. What they had in common was more significant. Take
away the refrains from a rondeau—that is, simply take away the capital letters from the alphabet scheme
up above—and we are left with the long-familiar canso, the basic stanza in ode or bar form, thus:
EX. 4-7 Adam de la Halle, Dieus soit en cheste maison (ballade)