King's College London



Song and the Soundscape of Old French RomanceThe topic of this essay is song’s presence in romance and, in particular, its status and meaning as sound. The tradition under consideration is that of Old French romance, from its early incarnation in the 1170s, in the works of Chrétien de Troyes, to the early decades of the thirteenth century. Romance’s emergence coincided with a period of extraordinary creativity in the realm of vernacular song, most notably with the emergence of a Northern lyric tradition of the trouvères, with the continued cultivation of their Occitan inspiration in the lyrics of the troubadours, and with the earliest efforts at codification of both, in songbooks or chansonniers, the earliest examples of which date from the 1230s. That there was a natural sympathy between romance and song culture is self-evident. Both speak out to, and about, aristocratic habitats of the court, espousing values of chivalry and fin’ amors; while scenes of festivities, replete with musical performances, were a familiar feature of the courts represented in romance. There is evidence, too, of a more practical, creative entanglement of the two, best witnessed in a category of texts dating from the early thirteenth century in which songs from the lyric tradition are interpolated into narrative, a genre sometimes referred to as the romans à chansons. Jean Renart’s Roman de la Rose, also known as Guillaume de Dole (c. 1218), claimed to inaugurate the practice, and drew liberally from the stock of vernacular song (both Northern and Occitanian), using them to animate characters, and to enliven scenes of courtly celebration.Despite the seeming proximity of these two creative media, there remains from a scholarly perspective a significant distance between them; a gap attributable in part to the ambiguous status of song as a sounding phenomenon. Thus, for example, song’s interpolation in romance has frequently led to a sub-categorisation within the romance genre, and characterisation of such texts as a “hybrid” mix of two traditions. Music’s quoted presence is a mark of difference, even from the many romances sans chansons which contain lavish descriptions of music-making. Yet if music is a signal of their not-quite-literary status, the romans à chansons have had only modest purchase in the musicological mainstream. This may be attributed, paradoxically, to the fact that as only partial citations, many without musical notation, the songs in romance do not quite constitute musical works, or fully singable songs, in a historiography of song that more usually begins with the fully notated chansonniers of the mid thirteenth century. Meanwhile, literary approaches to romance (with and without song) suggest that what scenes of music-making connote is not itself a musical act at all, but rather a representation of an act: the simulacrum, then, of an active performance or voice, but not the performance itself. Finally, in work that most clearly forges bridges between literary and musical traditions, Sylvia Huot’s and Ardis Butterfield’s exploration of the interaction of performative traditions with written media of manuscripts in the thirteenth century points to the ways in which earlier oral traditions underwent a conceptual transformation in their inscribed, repeatable form. Huot’s proposition of a “poetics” of manuscripts is specifically concerned with what she perceives to be a shift in lyric from a “performative toward a more writerly poetics” in the thirteenth century. Thus, within the discourse of the manuscript, romances (with and without song), and songs themselves, are represented according to a “writerly concept of the song.” Butterfield’s work on the same repertories likewise detects a certain slipperiness in the relationship between writing and performance. Accordingly, works such as Guillaume de Dole “go[es] hand in hand with new self-consciousness about the significance of writing songs.” Thus Butterfield is cautious about the notion that such texts can contain a “real presence” of performance, and argues that they are rather “always functioning in a borderline area in which constant negotiations take place between public and private, vocal and aural, physical and abstract concepts of communication.” This brief overview of disciplinary perspectives of song and romance points to the multiplicity of functions song could have, in and outside romance, and also to the ways in which early romance and song repertories continued to “live,” in their transformations into written media. It points, too, to an ontology of song that is more varied and variable, and often quite different from later, more familiar, concepts of music rooted in the idea of a work. Yet in all these accounts, song’s most vital qualities, emanating from its sonic presence, remain muted. Here, I think there is a case to be made for an integrated approach, more grounded in the possibility that song in romance draws upon effects derived from oral and aural encounter – in song’s most songish dimensions, as a thing produced of a voice, and encountered by an ear: a thing drastic, performative, emotive, alive to human encounter. Approached as an integrated history, the story of romance and song offers a rare opportunity to attune to that most elusive aspect of music history: a history of sound’s effects. It is a story that may inform an understanding of vernacular song, but also invite new modes for listening to romance.In this essay I pursue one line of enquiry, with the hope of inviting further investigation of these dual histories, similarly flexible with regards to disciplinary category and expectations. What follows offers some ways to “turn up the volume” on romance. While the romance soundscape is made up of a diverse sonic spectrum ranging from song to terrifying noises of combat, I will attend primarily to sounds that are most obviously musical (knights and ladies who sing, or jongleurs who provide instrumental entertainment). Bound into the impetus to listen is a curiosity about the significance of musical sound as an event linked to a phenomenological reality, and to its socialising and emotional potential. My examples are characterised by Northern French production and reception, and by their largely “courtly” content. They include three romans à chansons: two closely-related romances, Jean Renart’s Guillaume de Dole, Gerbert de Montreuil’s Roman de la Violette, and a later thirteenth-century romance attributed to Jakemés, his Roman du Ch?stelain de Couci et de Dame de Fayel, a work modelled on those earlier examples. These texts cite liberally from Northern and Occitanian song traditions, and in the case of Jakemés roman, base an entire narrative around the life of a trouvère, the Ch?telain de Couci. My evidence is not limited to romans à chansons alone. It includes examples from the early romance tradition of the last quarter of the twelfth century. These include Chrétien’s Erec et Enide, Gautier d’Arras’s Eracle and Renaut de Beaujeu’s Bel Inconnu. All of these were written without musical interpolations, but contain lengthy episodes representing music-making. According to John Baldwin, it is texts such as these that provide the “‘horizon’” for the romans à chansons of Renart and Montreuil. Placing literary and musicological accounts of these texts into dialogue, and drawing, too, on recent work in musicology and studies on the soundscape, I shall demonstrate that the soundworlds of romance were not merely decorative, and nor were they incidental to the narrative. Rather, sound – and in particular musical sound – emerges as a crucial means of generating a sense of place and community. Equally, it was the means by which social, emotional and affective values were forged. These values may not have been limited to the interior world of romance, and the later part of the essay will consider the extent to which the musical values depicted in romance connected to the external environments in which romance and songs were performed and enjoyed. A brief word finally about the linguistic scope of this study. My essay limits its review to texts and music from the medieval French tradition. However, the issues pertaining to sound are by no means unique to this tradition. Early Arthurian romances from the French tradition of course exerted considerable influence on other linguistic traditions of romance, and this extended, too, to the presence of sound and representations of music. In the English tradition, for example, many of the scenarios of musicking we shall explore here were imported as a site of emulation, and indeed, the soundscape was itself a topic of invention and expansion in some instances. Meanwhile, writers in traditions from Old Norse saga, to Dante’s Vita Nuova display a preoccupation with the frictions and compatibilities between narrative and lyric composition. The concern with sound, then, is a universal concern of romance culture. By retaining a close focus on a network of texts from romance’s inauguration in France, I hope to offer a model that may be adapted and applied to the broader romance tradition, with a view to encouraging readers to listen in on their texts, and to be attentive to the sonic qualities of the materials of romance. The Festal SoundscapeSounds of many kinds abound in French romance. Some recall an older epic tradition: sounds of warring knights and the clash of hooves and armor, bellowing oliphants, the list goes on. Indeed, the endurance of such sounds may offer an interesting intervention in disputes about the generic categories of romance and, in particular, distinctions between romance and chansons de geste. Christopher Page, in his exploration of literary sources for music-making in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, notes that the earliest examples of romance bring with them a subtle change in the range of sounds evoked. Musical performance is not an explicit part of epic. The Chanson de Roland has implied musicality – as its name suggests, it was represented as a song, and its hero foresees his deeds will be remembered in songs, and worries that a false move may result in a “male chan?un.” But Roland himself never utters a note, nor are there any other scenes of song-making in the story. This is in contrast to the hero of an early romance, the Roman de Horn, which fashions a warrior of a different stripe: one who can “converse with ladies and deport himself in a way that inspires emulation;” he can also sing and play the harp. As courtly values take hold in the twelfth century – in court life as in literature – they also, crucially, become audible. They manifest as eloquent, elegant behavior: behavior that was often musical in munal, courtly music-making is perhaps the most stable of a number of recurring – and highly conventionalized – sonic tropes in romance. Christopher Page and Peter Noble offer a useful “selective typology” of public categories of music in early romances without interpolation, which includes music associated with feasts (including those associated with weddings and tournaments); caroles sung and danced at court, and sometimes within feasting contexts; singing parties, where court members entertain themselves. There are also categories associated with singing on horseback, examples of the “lai/harp” complex, where a courtier will sing and accompany himself on the harp; solo performances by minstrels or courtiers; and catalogues of musical prowess in accounts detailing the courtly accomplishments of characters. Romans à chansons, such as Guillaume de Dole and the Roman de la Violette, seem to supply songs implied in the earlier romances. I suggest that the absence of interpolations in those earlier texts should not inhibit an effort to listen to romance’s musical representations. So repetitive and stylized can such representations be that it may be tempting to tune them out as signs of literal sonic effects, and understand them instead as literary devices: decorative, verbal, or visual effects. Indeed, their conventional nature might be understood as a facet of genre: that is, as a set component or episode to be deployed in part of what Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner terms the “art of shaping” in romance. In the sense of offering a predictable interlude within a form given to episodic organization, the scenes of large-scale performance might be understood to operate rather like the ekphrastic episodes found in romance: the ekphrastic description, a “hyper-conscious creation of art within art,” also briefly suspends action, representing a kind of “time out” in the flow of then narrative. While there is more to pursue in considering sound’s place in debates about generic categories of romance, I here wish to consider the sonic implications of such scenes. Is it possible to understand them as ripples or wrinkles in the experience of the narrative, borne of a recognition of sound’s effective and affective power? Scholars of troubadour and trouvère repertories have pointed to close relationships between the worlds depicted in song lyrics and romance texts, and the courtly environments in which they circulated, and speculate that scenes of musicking in romance may have a partially documentary quality. Building on that work, I would propose a somewhat different approach, one that derives inspiration from recent work in the field of sound studies, specifically that associated with soundscapes. Here, it will be useful to follow the lead offered by the foundational text of soundscape studies: R. Murray Schafer’s 1977 The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning the World. Schafer sets out a curriculum for an aural engagement with the world – that of the past as well as present – that has been taken up in a number of scholarly constituencies. Among the most fruitful aspects of Schafer’s project is the invitation to attend to the keynote of the soundscape – a sonority specific to a particular place, at a given time, and which participates in shaping the meaning of that environment, and the way its inhabitants define their community. How, then, might the sounds depicted in romance – ranging from the non-musical clash of swords to the highly stylized compositions of the wedding scenes – establish a soundscape? Here it will be helpful to examine two aspects of this complex area: the way in which sound creates an acoustic space; and how such space might facilitate and manipulate social and emotional interactions among those within, and involved in making, this acoustic space. It will helpful to illustrate one aspect of the soundscape in some closer detail: those sounds associated with courtly festivities – including weddings, feastings, tournaments, knightings, and vows. As Noble, Page and Boulton all note, the festal setting quickly acquired a standardized sonority in early romances; these scenes were subsequently enlivened with interpolated music in the romans à chansons. The festal soundscape was also evoked in texts as late as Machaut’s Remede de Fortune, where courtly festivities were now a source of nostalgia for the chivalrous past. Chrétien’s Erec and Enide offers a template for the “classic” festal soundscape, one frequently emulated and alluded to in later generations of romance authors. The wedding of Erec and Enide at Pentecost is marked by a suite of activities: the inviting and assembling of knights for two weeks of festivities, which included tournaments, knighting ceremonies, as well as extensive feasting to celebrate the nuptials. The feast that accompanies that union is marked by a specific acoustic:Quant la corz fu tote assemblee,N’ot menestrel en la contreeQue rien seüst de nul deduit,Que a la cort ne fussent tuit.En la sale mout grant joie ot;Chascuns servi de ce qu’il sot:Cil saut, cil tume, cil enchante;Li uns conte, lis autres chante;Li uns sible, li autres note;Cil sert de harpe, cil de rote,Cil de gigue, cil de v?ele,Cil fleüte, cil chalemele;Puceles querolent et dancent;Trestuit de joie faire tencent.N’est riens qui joie i puisse faireNe cuer d’ome a leesce traire,Qui ne soit as noces le jor.Sonent timbre, sonent tabor,Muses, estives et fretelEt buisines et chalemel.When the court was completely assembled, all the minstrels in the land who knew any entertainment were present. And the court was not silent. In the main hall there was great joy; everyone showed what he could do, one jumped, another tumbled, a third did magic tricks, one told stories, another sang; one whistled, another played an instrument, this one the harp, that the rote, this the gigue, that the Vielle, this one the flute, another the shawm. The young ladies made caroled and danced; everyone outdid themselves to show joy. Nothing that could bring joy nor plunge the heart of man to happiness was missing from the wedding day. The sounded tambourines and tabors, musettes, flutes and pipes, and trumpets and reed pipes.There are several aspects to note. These include the wide variety of performances, which range from singing, playing a comprehensive orchestra of instruments, to story-telling. There are also specific physical activities associated with them, such as youthful caroling and dancing. Equally important to register is the almost pedantic typology of instruments and performances, and the formulaic nature of the writing (for example, the recourse to listing “li uns… li autres,” and “cil… cil…”). Both the music and activities, and the writerly devices by which they are inventoried, form part of the convention that moves across the tradition. Thus while this kind of sonority, in particular its detailed description, is quite rare in Chrétien, the example is among the earliest cases of a musical representation that persists across the tradition, as far as Guillaume de Machaut’s Remede de Fortune. Such duplication of the syntax and “paratactic formulae” also carries over into a number of other festal accounts; these were as conventional as the sounds depicted. The early romans à chansons enliven festal episodes with the interpolation of actual music. Guillaume de Dole and the Roman de la Violette have both interpolated and uninterpolated festal scenes. Both texts begin with extended descriptions of the festal court, in which the copious refrains and dance songs (several with concordances), performed by the members of the court, establish singing and dancing as integral to the identity of the group. At the end of Guillaume de Dole, the revelation of the seneschal’s treachery and the ultimate union of Conrad and Liénor unfold against the playbook of festal conventions, from public performances by minstrels and courtiers from every corner of the land to dancing and storytelling. According to Boulton, Renart’s addition of songs in scenes of courtly festivities, “did no more than amplify the references to musical performances that were already conventional in the representations of those scenes punctuating most romances.” However, while agreeing with this, I would argue that reading interpolated and uninterpolated festal scenes together helps to broaden the evidential horizon for a consideration of these scenes as soundscapes. Together they provide a substantial body of evidence not only for the sorts of sounds and music associated with the festive courtly environment (which has been the primary concern with these scenes to date). They also offer multiple opportunities to explore the work that sound performs within the courtly communities and spaces represented. Understood on those terms, they afford important insight into what sound does in such scenes. The soundscape, in other words, restores sound, as an effect, to these scenes. Accepted and understood as soundscapes, the noises implied by the numerous instrumentalists and singers in festal settings contribute to the romance keynote by establishing what Shafer terms a “soundmark”: that is, “a community sound which is unique or possesses qualities which make it specially regarded or noticed by people in that community. Once a soundmark has been identified, it deserves to be protected, for soundmarks make the acoustic life of the community unique.” The repetition of the festal sonority across centuries of romance may then be understood as just such an act of preservation. In addition, the presence of that identifiable soundmark brings with it the implication of an acoustic environment: “the acoustic space of a sounding object is that volume of space in which the sound can be heard.” The sense that sound defines space is apparent in the example of Erec and Enide. The location of the wedding festivities is familiar enough: it is the hall at the court of King Arthur. However, the festal soundscape is implicated in an expansion of the court’s boundaries on this occasion. The description of music-making is followed by the narrator’s comment that “N’i ot guichet ne porte close:/ Les issües et les entrees/ Furent totes abandonees,/ N’en fu tornez povres ne riches” (“Neither gate nor door was closed: the entrances and exits were all abandoned that day, and neither rich nor poor were turned away”). Sound and space interact here, and the sheer volume of music-making, among the loudest scenes of the whole romance, is marked by a dilation of the festal space. The court is both limitless and excessive but, at the same time, also benevolently communal. Another highly dramatic example of music’s role as spatial marker occurs in Renaut de Beaujeu’s Bel Inconnu. One of the most memorable adventures facing the hero of this early thirteenth-century romance is a trial by music. The scene of his challenge is a grande sale. Unlike that depicted in Erec et Enide, this ceremonial chamber is void of feasting nobles. It is located in the derelict and empty Cité de Ruine, which is an inversion of the more regular festal setting and, accordingly, deploys music-making here to perverse effect. The room has a thousand windows, and in each window space there sits a jongleur, sumptuously attired, and armed with an instrument and a candle. These form part of an enchantment and perform what is, in effect, an excessive version of the festal soundscape trope, with instruments and pieces listed according to convention. Not to be outwitted by their enchantment, the hero resists the jongleurs’ sonic temptation, and failure is marked by their extinguishing their candles and noisy departure. Sound and space converge here, and as the jongleurs leave, taking their music with them, the scene is plunged into darkness – the space becomes literally indecipherable.While sound can establish environment, it can also establish those within it as an “acoustic community.” Acoustics contribute to order and interaction within the community; sounds which enter the acoustic community from outside are able similarly to determine actions and reveal the community. In romance, the festal soundscape is most explicitly bound into communal values, since it is also part of the economy of the court. Demonstrations of largesse, hospitality and almsgiving were integral to aristocratic life, and were no less a feature of the courts of the romances. Such occasions were often tied to demonstrations of benevolence and gift-giving, and the acoustic component is integral to that economy. Thus, the festal scene from Erec et Enide cited above concludes with payment of the minstrels, while Conrad’s jongleur, Jouglet, in Guillaume de Dole, is rewarded with a fur cloak for entertaining his lord with his quasi-lyric description of Liénor. The festal soundscape also articulates – and sometimes suspends – categories of class and gender. Musicologists have observed that implied or cited festal music is markedly different from the introspective, emotional songs performed by individuals or couples. Where festal scenes are interpolated they are often filled with rondets de carole and refrains or rondeaux. The topics are light, with little hint of the lovelorn, inward-looking style of the chanson courtoise traditions which comprise personal outbursts. This distinction registers differently in the romance venue, where the acoustic space is also one where hierarchies of gender and social class are established. In Gautier d’Arras’s Eracle, a so-called historical romance, in which classical characters are translated into contemporary chivalric context, aristocratic order is exaggerated around festal performance. Singing, dancing and instrumental playing dominate communal gatherings and are explicitly linked to rank. With the arrival of the empress Athana?s, the soundscape is transformed; it becomes overwhelming (“Grans est li noise environ li,” “the commotion around her was deafening”) as she is thronged by instrumentalists, all with noble backgrounds (“… frans et de halt lin,” “…noble and aristocratic family”). The more noble they are, the closer they get to the empress, as they dance and leap to the music (“Et selonc se que cascuns valt/ S’en trait plus prés et tresque et salt,” “the higher the status the closer they approached the empress, dancing and leaping as they went.”) The festal soundscape also permits a shift in gender relations. Women and men of the court are represented as equal in entertainment, and in Guillaume de Dole, women instigate singing and dancing as often as men. In the opening scene, undesignated knights (“chevaliers”) and ladies (“dames”) interrupt one another to sing, while later Renart calls out individuals by rank: the noble sister of the Duke of Mainz, followed by the Count of Savoy, followed by the Count of Luxembourg, and so on.The soundscape also permits certain modes of emotional interaction. Thus, it is not simply that characters in romance marry, or that courtiers gather to celebrate: the soundscape itself is a factor in determining public actions and private interactions. While tournaments and jousts might coordinate knights in bodily combat and oppose heroes against villains, music-making coordinates characters in more intimate, emotionally-driven interactions. For example, the festal soundscape is a soundtrack to dancing, and often involves a “call out” of members of the community to sing a song while others listen or dance. The communal scenes of Guillaume de Dole witness members of Conrad’s court taking turns to sing refrain songs, or “chansonnettes.” In Jakemés’s Roman du Ch?telain de Coucy et de la Dame de Fayel (c.1280?), based on the life of the eponymous trouvère, the socializing effects of the festal soundscape evolve as the mechanism for intimacy, intrigue, and ultimately deadly revelation. Thus, shortly after the long-awaited consummation of the relationship between the Ch?telain and Dame de Fayel, courtiers assemble for festivities in the Vermandois “en un lieu qui fu biaus et gens.” While Jakemés takes pains to locate the event in a specific place, he also articulates it by means of its acoustic – not only in terms of what was heard, but also, interestingly, in terms of what was not:Trois jours dura entirementLa fieste ensi en teil deduitC’on n’i demena autre bruitDe tournoiyer ne de jouster,Fors de treskier, de carolerEt de bien donner a mangier.The festivities lasted three full days in this way, in such delight that the only noise was of dancing, of caroles, and of copious feasting, without that of tournaments and jousting.There follows a check-list of jongleurs, who are once again paid for their services, and then dancing and singing ensue. In the course of that, one of the ladies present, a “dame de Vermendois,” who carries a torch for the Ch?telain, takes the opportunity of the feast to try to get close to him. Against the backdrop of music and dance, she observes him, growing increasingly suspicious that his downcast air and sighs belie a secret – that he is in love with someone else. This gradual unfolding of suspicion to jealous intent is punctuated by both her own performance, and that by the Dame de Fayel, as well as of other ladies of the court, all of whose lyrics reflect their unuttered thoughts of suspicion and joy. The secrets revealed in this musical hiatus set in motion a chain of events that will prove fatal for the Ch?telain. There is of course much more to say about the effects of song in Jakemés roman, but this example offers insight into how the acoustic environment can facilitate and stage highly nuanced intimacies. The festal acoustic is thus also an emotional environment. Soundscape as “Reality Effect”Understood as a soundscape, festal sound in romance is infused with significance. Sound is present in these scenes as a marker of spaces, and makes those spaces briefly extraordinary, permitting behaviors and interactions among members of the acoustic community that are equally unusual. What, though, of the status of the festal soundscape of romance as “earwitness” to court performance, and thus as a witness to contemporary musical traditions? As noted earlier, the documentary status of romance has been much debated among literary scholars. Meanwhile, Schafer himself, and historians who have followed, have remained sensitive to the difficulties of speaking of the historical soundscape, particularly with regards the veracity of historical records as earwitness. In the specific context of medieval romance, indeed any literary product of this period, one needs to be cautious of assigning evidently rhetorically charged scenes with too much documentary purpose. These texts were not mirror-images of an aristocratic venue, but highly intricate, highly crafted products, just as was song-culture. However, while there needs to be some caution about taking them at face value, there are also good reasons to understand them dialogically – as speaking back to certain social milieu in very specific ways. Indeed, the chivalric behaviors and values espoused in chansons de geste and romance by their very nature were not bounded to literary artefact, but were lived, social values too. In the case of romance, there is robust evidence to encourage a dialogic reading. Early generation romances conversed from within and to an aristocratic audience. Romances of Chrétien, Renart and Montreuil addressed specific noble patrons, and thus spoke out to particular court culture. And there was a long tradition of the court speaking – at times singing – back to romance. Archives and documentary histories of court life testify to audiences who were not only attentive listeners to romance, but who also, on occasion, sought to emulate it in court ritual and festivities. Broadening the horizon of romance beyond the literary and musical sources reveals an active, participatory audience among the aristocrats of a number of European courts. Understood in the broader context of chivalric values, and their shift in the thirteenth century, as aristocratic courts were increasingly brought into tension with an emergent bourgeois culture, it is hardly surprising that these exchanges between fiction and reality prevailed. Work by historians of court culture reveals the considerable interplay between fiction and reality, as life imitated art imitating life. Thus, albeit in rather perfunctory terms, contemporary Latin chronicles of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries note numerous festal scenarios, from coronations, to royal entries, to knighting ceremonies. In the later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, a manuscript such as Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce 308, which records the Tournoi de Chauvency (based on events of a week-long tournament in Chauvency in 1285), demonstrates the complex ways in which the fictional worlds of romance were woven into construction of the realities of aristocratic constituencies across Europe. By the early fourteenth century, the festal scene had acquired a historical status, evocative of a bygone age. In his study of court culture in North-West Europe, Malcolm Vale illustrates the many ways in which certain public rituals were modeled on activities of romance. Returning to the earlier examples of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, song might be understood to serve as an important mediator between the habitat of literary representation in romance, and the environment of consumption, which was often itself one of performance. Indeed, it is worth rehearsing some well-known facts about the early generation trouvères. The most obvious of these is that a significant cohort of early generation song-writers emerged from aristocratic backgrounds. Bondel de Nesle (ca. 1150-1200), Conon de Béthune (fl. ca. 1180-1219-20), Gace Brulé (fl. ca. 1185-1210), the Ch?telain de Couci (fl. 1186-1203), and Thibaut de Champagne (1201-1253) were all linked to aristocratic families and were themselves of noble birth. Like the troubadours in the later vidas and razos, their lives were often subject to amplification and restyling in their later codification. But in some cases there is independent corroboration, as well as internal referencing and self-referencing in song texts, which offer clues to their social origins. Their social context is all important, since it demonstrates that they were part of the culture that shared and defined the chivalric values depicted in romance narratives. The social compatibility of song-makers and the inhabitants crafted into the fantasy worlds of romance is evident, for instance, in Guillaume de Dole. In his appropriation of songs into romance, Jean Renart makes the unusual gesture of naming certain authors, notwithstanding his opening declaration that no one will know the songs are not his own, because of his careful grafting of them into the story. Among those named are Gace Brulé, Vidame de Chartres, and Renaut de Beaujeu, who were only recently deceased at the time Renart was writing. The naming of authors indicates not just that their songs were in circulation in his milieu, but also that the idea of them as authors mattered. While it is easy to see this as precursor to the author-bias of the chansonniers, it also offers insight into older contexts, in which the social rank of the songmaker was significant to their audience, and significant, also, for their correlation to the social orders depicted in romance narratives. A closer look at Renart’s cues of trouvères evokes them along with cast of many nobles named in the text. Guillaume de Dole is almost pedantic in the way it names and ranks members of the entourage, many of them known historical figures, and moreover uses the festal scenes as opportunities for call outs. It is in this context that composers are named, sometimes with the afterthought that their song was the ideal song for the situation. A case in point is that of Renaut de Beaujeu, whose song Conrad sings, overjoyed at the arrival of Guillaume at his court. In this instance it is likely that the song is misattributed (it appears in later sources with alternate attribution, and is, in any case, the only song attributed to Renaut in the repertory). But the attribution itself is fascinating for bringing the romance author, Renaut, into the cast of characters:La chan?on Renaut de Baujieu,De Rencien le bon chevalier,por son cors plus esleechierde joie dou bon bachelercommen?a lués droit a chanter:Loial amor qui en fin cuer s’est mise…Out of joy at the good young man, and to delight his heart, he at once began to sing the song of Renaut de Beaujeu, the good knight of Reims:Faithful love which enters a noble heart…The trouvère, hailing from Reims, and “bon chevalier,” enters the story like any number of the other characters. Indeed, on finishing the song, Conrad hails Guillaume’s entry with similar shorthand of name, place and rank: “Dole! Chevalier! A Guillaume!” (v. 1477). Singing the songs performs a kind of resuscitation, as their makers join the community, briefly, as phantom nobility. These brief examples point to a degree of reciprocity between the vernacular song repertories and romance. Indeed, perhaps of all the musical scenarios of romance, the festal interludes invite consideration for their “reality effect”: informed by, and informing, the musical lives of their audience. Beyond the specific case of festal music, this essay has sought to demonstrate how much more remains to be learned from an approach to song and romance which collapses traditional generic boundaries. For musicology, romance offers fresh challenges to the early history of song. The evidence of the part of romance in illuminating a darker period of song history prior to its written transmission should not be underestimated. The fundamental fact that texts such as Guillaume de Dole or the Roman de la violette predate the earliest examples of musical theoretical texts and notated chansonniers, the more familiar staple of the discipline, is an important one. Perhaps the most pragmatic offering of romance studies to musicology, then, is the reminder that the material life of song should not be constructed as one bounded by the emergence of notated chansonniers. These are points that have been underlined by scholars working in the middle ground between musicology and literary studies, but the fact of song’s history before its material, notated, singable records begin has yet to claim full purchase in the modern conception of medieval song. The reconnection of the story of song with the music recorded in the romans à chansons, and implied in the older romans sans chansons is one example of how broadening song’s horizons might facilitate an ontological shift in the status of song, placing greater emphasis on sound’s effects, and their connection to social and emotional values. What emerges from the preceding discussion is the sense that as modern disciplines work through the confusion that arises from too reified an approach to song, a new way becomes apparent, one which invites reconsideration of the essential parameters of what song is, how it works on those who make it, reiterate it, experience it in book, voice or ear. Romance offers fresh insights into song history; conversely, attending to song as a sonic presence in romance has the potential to enrich the understanding of that august literary tradition. ................
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