GERMANY: THE TENORLIED
The German counterpart to the frottola, as purveyed in the printed songbooks that appeared in Germany
from 1507 (making that country chronologically the second to take up the music trade), is now known as
the Tenorlied. That is the modern scholarly term for what contemporary musicians called a Kernweise
(roughly, “core tune”): a polyphonic setting of a Liedweise, a familiar song-melody, placed usually in the
tenor—or else a song that resembled a Liedweise setting in texture. In other words, it was a cantus-firmus
setting of a lyrical melody, either traditional or newly composed, in what by the early sixteenth century
would have been considered in other countries a fairly dated style.
That is no surprise. We know that Germany took up the monophonic courtly song a bit later than its
western and southern neighbors. The earliest German composer of polyphonic courtly songs, the latter-
day Minnesinger Oswald von Wolkenstein (see chapter 4), had been dead for little more than half a
century when the print revolution transformed German music; the earliest German printed songs merely
continued the process he had fairly recently initiated of adopting courtly love lyrics to the polyphonic
literate tradition. Again we may observe that there is no uniform march of styles, and that styles arise and
decline in particular historical and social contexts.
The Tenorlied makes its earliest appearance in the form of folksong settings in manuscripts from the
second half of the fifteenth century, beginning around 1460. The earliest such manuscript, the source of the
three earliest identifiable Tenorlieder, was called the Lochamer Liederbuch and came from Nuremberg in
the south of Germany. The biggest source of early Liedweisen settings is the vast miscellany called the
Glogauer Liederbuch from around 1480, familiar to us as the earliest surviving set of part books, which