chapter 7, too.) Polyphonic writing was a very “learned” style for a trouvère, so what is especially
interesting—even curious—about Adam’s polyphonically set verses is that they are cast in the folksiest
(or rather, the most mock-naive) of all quasi-pastoral genres, the dance-song called rondel.
Mock-naive, because for all its rustic pretension the rondel (or rondeau, as it is more commonly
called by musicians) is actually a quite sophisticated kind of poem. The name (“round” or “circular”) may
originally have stemmed from the nature of the dance it accompanied; but it also well describes the
“rounded” form of the poem, in which a “contained refrain” both frames the verse and appears, truncated,
within it. A contained refrain is one that uses the same melody as the verse itself; thus the form of a
rondeau can be represented with letters as follows: AB a A ab AB, where the capital letters stand for the
refrain text, and the lower case letters for new text, all sung to the same tune. The trick was to contrive a
poem in which the refrains both rounded the verse and also made linear sense when the whole verse was
sung or recited in sequence. The clever effect that can be achieved in this way, even without music, has
kept the “rondel” (as it is still called by poets) popular with makers of “light verse” into recent times.
Here is an example by Austin Dobson (1840–1921):
A KISS
[A] Rose kissed me today
[B] Will she kiss me tomorrow?
[a] Let it be as it may,
[A] Rose kissed me today,
[a] But the pleasure gives way
[b] To a savour of sorrow;—
[A] Rose kissed me today,—
[B]Will she kiss me tomorrow?And here is an example by Adam de la Halle, perfect for memorization even in this hopelessly literate
day and age because the “A” and the “B” have each been whimsically held down to a single measure (Ex.
4-6).
EX. 4-6 Adam de la Halle, Bone amoureteThe first written rondeaux (texts only) are “found objects,” popular songs interpolated into old