Jehan Bretel was the great master of the jeu-parti (“mock-debate”), the trouvère equivalent of the
troubadour tenso. These jousts-in-song were performed and judged before the so-called Arras Puy, a
branch of the Confrérie that held regular competitions at which songs were “crowned.” At least one
manuscript from the period actually indicates with little cartoon crowns the chansons couronées that
were so honored by the Puy. Jehan Bretel, not a nobleman but a wealthy burgher of the town, won these
contests so often with his jeux-partis that he was elected “Prince” or presiding judge of the Puy, thus
putting him out of contention. His elevation was a formal assertion of artistic “meritocracy”—aristocracy
achieved by merit, not birth.
ADAM DE LA HALLE AND THE FORMES FIXES
Jehan’s musical debating partner at the Arras Puy was often Adam de la Halle, called “Adam le
Bossu”—Adam the Hunchback—by his contemporaries (“although I am not one,” he complained in one of
his poems). At the time of their jointly composed jeux-partis, Adam was a young man, just back from his
studies in Paris. His advanced studies had acquainted Adam with the various forms of “university music”
that we will take up in later chapters. They equipped him to compose polyphonic music, and he became
the only trouvère to do so. His skills made him famous, and he had an international career that ranged
from Italy, which he visited in the retinue of Charles d’Anjou, to England, where he is reputed to have
performed, as an old man, at the coronation of Edward II in 1307. An entire chansonnier, evidently
compiled late in the thirteenth century, is given over almost wholly to a retrospective collection of his
works, grouped by genres: first traditional chansons courtoises, then the jeux-partis, and finally the
polyphonic works.
Of these last there are two groups. The first consists of French verses, harmonized the way Latin
versus (or, up north, conductus) were often harmonized at the time, in a fairly strict homorhythmic (note-
against-note or “chordal”) texture, and notated in score. (The second group consists of more complicated
polyphonic compositions called motets; we will deal with them in chapter 7.) Like all polyphonic music
of the period, Adam’s used a new type of notation that fixed the rhythms exactly. (We will deal with that in