DEFINICIÓN DE LA SECUENCIA DE IMPLEMENTACIÓN

In the 20th century, when stemmatic analyses of the chansonniers began to incorporate melodic comparisons, V came under suspicion. Spanke, Gennrich, Bittinger, and Theodore Karp drew attention to the numerous musical divergences in V.279 Most editors working from V have challenged the source’s reliability based on errors and real problems of reconciling melodic and textual readings. Scholars establishing stemmata have associated V with R, a source whose sparse decoration and informal appearance aggravated its musical eccentricity in the eyes of some. The problem of ‘isolated’ or ‘unique’ melodies became a serious question for anyone editing or describing these two sources and complicating the issue in many musicological studies. A question that needed to be asked was what constitutes an extreme level of musical variation between two melodic versions, and what constitutes two different

279

melodies? And what would the second scenario mean for the relative worth of the sources that contain them?

When broaching the issue of using melodic comparison as a means of establishing filiation for melodies, Aubry was pessimistic. It would be intriguing to know more about the relationship between both Aubry’s and Beck’s thought regarding musical variance and the developing theories of their co-collaborator, Bédier.280 Some of Aubry’s statements published in 1909 already resonate with radical stance taken by Bernard Cerquiglini: ‘nous avons affaire moins à des fautes qu’à des variantes légitimes’ [emphasis original].281 Yet he still believes in an authorial version, even if choosing between scribal permutations is impossible for music (and even if an edition must consequently print representatives from each melodic family, acknowledging that any one of them could be ‘correct’).282 In textual criticism, ‘la faute est réelle’ and manifests in violations of sense and norms, whereas for music, ‘une seule forme est la bonne, la forme originale, l’émanation de la pensée musicale de l’auteur, mais laquelle ?’ The various manuscripts, including V, do not represent errors, but ‘des variations d’un thème’ for each of the songs.283

In his essay on KNPX, Spanke had little call to discuss the more extreme variation found between sources such as V or R.284 By contrast, when considering the topic of contrafaction and the reuse and adaptation of strophe forms, Spanke began the work of developing a ‘Methodik der Melodienvergleichung’ by and large divorced

280

There is no musical introduction in Joseph Bédier, ed., Les chansons de Colin Muset, with musical transcriptions by Jean Beck, Les classiques français du Moyen Âge (Paris: Champion, 1912). John Haines has made note of the friendship between Beck and Bédier and the latter’s support for the former’s application for positions in the United States, Haines, ‘The First Editions’, at p. 363. Haines proposes a profound shift in Beck’s policy as a result, ibid., at p. 368.

281

Joseph Bédier and Pierre Aubry, eds., Les chansons de croisade, avec leurs mélodies (Paris: Champion, 1909; repr. Genève: Slatkine, 1974), p. XXIV.

282_{Ibid. p. XXXIII.} 283_{Ibid. p. XXV.} 284

from any stemmatic considerations.285 Without theorizing in particular depth the line between different melodies and different versions of the same melody, Spanke goes about cataloguing previously identified contrafacta for which the melodies disagree. Both here and in his consideration of V’s unica specifically the musicologist confronts the issue of highly individual melodies (Spanke identifies RS 333, RS 590, RS 700 and 1887, RS 1495, and RS 1559). 286 He describes these as melodic

Sondererscheinungen and suspects them to be the invention of the V notators, supplied in the place of songs for which the notator had lost the notation.287 Spanke’s writings were nearly the last on this topic still to accept Gröber’s model of transmission and thus to attribute to scribes the full responsibility of both melodic variation and the invention of new melodies for pre-existing texts.288 Yet the idea that these peculiar melodies could have been invented wholesale by a scribe persisted in German scholarship.

A new name was given to these Sondererscheinungen in the 1950’s, a period that, thanks largely to Gennrich, witnessed the first real steps towards characterising chansonniers based on the musical variants they contain. While Gennrich’s critical editions are surprisingly sparse on commentary, Werner Bittinger’s work clarifies a number of theoretical points by way of applying Gennrich’s theories to problems of

285

Hans Spanke, ‘Das öftere Auftreten von Strophenformen und Melodien in dem altfranzösischen Lyrik’, Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur 51 (1928), pp. 73–117 at pp. 88–108.

286

Ibid, pp. 94, 96, 106.

287

Ibid. p. 112 and idem, ‘Studien zur Geschichte des altfranzösischen Liedes. I.’, Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 156 (1929),pp. 66–79 at p. 70:‘In dem Nachdichter, der in der V-Fassung von Str. II ff. sein Wesen getrieben hat, dürfen wir wohl den Schreiber von V vermuten.’

288_{Idem, ‘Strophenformen und Melodien’, p. 95:‘Und doch scheuten sich einige Sammler nicht, ihre}

author attribution instead of editing.289 In the process of doing so, Bittinger developed a vocabulary for a phenomenon cursorily identified in chansonnier R by Rudolf Zitzmann several years earlier.290 Zitzmann, in the course of preparing critical editions of the melodies attributed to Jacques de Cysoing, concluded that R’s versions were later reinventions and could be excluded.291

Bittinger sought to generalize the proposition, and compared the practice to contrafaction, thus coining the term Kontraposition, denoting the invention of a new melody for an old text.292 In the article, he examines one text (RS 1575, Je ai esté lonc tenz hors du païz, number 68 in V) with no fewer than four melodies, unique both in R and in V as well as in M.293 Bittinger first explains the last of these unique melodies as the product of a later owner of the manuscript who supplied a new melody as a stand-in for the forgotten original.294 In Bittinger’s chosen example, R1575 (number 68 in V), the versions in M, V and R fundamentally differ in contour, structure, and detail from all other musical settings of the same text, such that their filiation, however distant, seems implausible.295 Melodic comparison gives way to Bittinger’s main concern, attribution, and he thus leaves the unattributed melody in V

to one side. Bittinger returned to the topic of Kontraposita within the broad sweep of his book on vernacular song, where he examines other examples in R, though not in

289

Bittinger, ‘Musikwissenschaft als Hilfswissenschaft’, at pp. 162–5.

290 _{Rudolf Zitzmann, ‘Die Lieder des Jacques de Cysoing’, Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 65}

(1949), pp. 1–27.

291

‘Die Fassungen der Hs. R weichen meistens so stark von den übrigen Lesarten ab, daß sie zur Herstellung einer kritischen Fassung kaum in Frage kommen, R ist als jüngere Handschrift offensichtlich viel weiter vom Original enfernt als die Übrigen Handschriften.’ Ibid., p. 5.

292

Bittinger, ‘Fünfzig Jahre’, p. 178.

293 Ibid.

294

‘in Unkenntnis der ursprünglichen, die Eintragung einer neuen Liedmelodie veranlaßte oder sogar eigenhändig vornahm’,ibid., p. 179.

295

V.296 There, he concurred with Zitzmann’s assessment, calling R’s version of RS513 ‘eine gänzlich abweichende Melodie späterer Herkunft ebenfalls mit Stollendifferenzierung’.297 For such a totally divergent melody to have repeating

pedes at all would have been a surprise to Spanke, who had described his

Sondererscheinungen as generally through-composed.298

Some four years later, in discussing the problems of editing trouvère music, Ursula Aarburg defended the integrity of an original idea of the melody against the challenges posed by musical variance.299 In doing so, she chose a melody (R238) for which three separate manuscript families basically agree. Her conflation method of editing, she insists, is therefore completely practical in this case; Aubry’s warnings, concerned with the more extreme variation, could not nullify the validity of careful critical editing. However, prefiguring Grier, Aarburg stressed the necessity of a thorough familiarity with the stylistic idiom of the music. Only this knowledge and an understanding of typical scribal errors, not the stemmatic grouping of manuscripts, could make musical correction possible. By the middle of the 20th century, the early synoptic attempts and manuscript transcriptions of Aubry and Beck had been replaced by a critical approach split into two separate activities: the various different melodies for a single text were to be assessed and their viability weighed. On the other hand, variants within a single melodic family were to be compared and corrected, either by

296 _{Bittinger, Zur musikalischen Textkritik, pp. 23–5.}

297_{Ibid. p. 25. By Stollendifferenzieurung, Bittinger refers to the aba’b’X structure of R’s melody,}

compared to the exact ababX of K’s version (R: fol. 157v K: p. 217).

298

recourse to a base manuscript (in practice, chosen by a textual editor) or through the identification of mechanical errors.300

In the anglophone world, Theodore Karp published a sweeping article on trouvère transmission that situated each chansonnier on a continuum from ‘central’ to ‘peripheral’ based on the comparison of melodic variants alone (though Karp was keenly aware of the philology preceding him).301 Karp’s most salient contribution to the perception of V was its proposed relationship to trouvère chansonnier R. Karp recommended a comprehensive comparison of R and V, and even claimed that ‘philological evidence links V with the third section of MS R’, though he leaves the details of that evidence to be reconstructed by future scholars (as well as a more exact definition of the ‘third section’).302 This loose thread would later be picked up both by Johann Schubert and Mary O’Neill.303 In fact, Karp was similarly interested in chansonnier O as an object of comparison for V, though this relationship has yet to be extensively explored in detail.304 Ultimately, it was not philological considerations (textual or melodic) that prompted comparison between R and V, but the fact that both contain their own unique melodic versions and that both are known for their ‘unreliability’. Yet Karp’s discussion of the musical issues found in R and V prompted a condemnation of conflationist practices in editing.305 Karp here noted that scholars will need to begin to accept multiple musical readings as valid, at least where short

300

See Aarburg’s system of symbolic notation for denoting the typical errors of Verschiebung

(rhythmic displacement of one or more pitches), Verlagerung (transposition by a second, third, or fifth), Umkehrung, Ausfall, Zusammenfassung and Spaltung (binding multiple notes as one ligature or spliting ligatures), and Tonrepetition, ibid. p. 214.

301_{Karp, ‘MS Tradition’.} 302

Ibid., p. 44.

303

Schubert, Die Handschrift Paris, pp. 56–7, 123–4, 127, 140–43, 178. O’Neill, Love Song, pp. 44–5.

304

Karp, ‘MS Tradition’, at p. 44. See also Matthew Thomson’s comparison of V’s notation to that in

O in the context of modal rhythm, in his ‘Interaction between Polyphonic Motets and Monophonic Songs in the Thirteenth Century’, Doctoral Thesis, University of Oxford (2013), pp. 149–51.

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phrases are concerned.306 At the same time, he followed Zitzmann and Bittinger in denigrating the validity of ‘contraposita’ in R and V, even asserting a rule for editors:

In the event that a melody in either V or R is unrelated to a melody setting the same poem in a more reliable source, one may be quite certain that it is the

latter which is the earlier of the two.307

This is a turn away from Spanke’s more cautious stance, which accepted the possibility, however unlikely, that some contrafacted melodies in the ‘reliable’ sources might have been supplied to replace a lost divergent melody, still witnessed in sources like V.308 Scholarship had progressed toward a more active editorial stance.

Karp was writing at a time when Gennrich’s ‘Repertoire-theorie’ was still new and references to it were sparse in anglophone scholarship. A year after Karp’s article, van der Werf acted as a bridge between the two cultures by discussing oral transmission in English.309 _{Taking up the cross for Gennrich’s theory of transmission,}

van der Werf considered the relevant dichotomy no longer to be between intentional and unintentional written alteration, but between written and oral transmission. The changes were now fully conscious, if un-premeditated: they were born from the genius of the performer in the heat of the moment. In van der Werf’s proposed model, melodies could change drastically through the process of sung transmission, contemporaneously with the creation of the extant chansonniers.310 Each collection then becomes a snapshot of a melody’s shape at a given point in time, even during a given performance. Over the years, van der Werf accumulated an impressive amount

306 Ibid., p. 49. 307 Ibid., p. 27. 308

Spanke, ‘Strophenformen und Melodien’, p. 98.

309

of research and a monumental number of transcriptions.311 With the growth of this corpus, van der Werf’s confidence in his methods of melodic comparison grew as well. At the beginning, in weighing the stability of the melodies in the KNPX group against the flexibility between M and T, van der Werf believed he could contrast the symptoms of written transmission to those of oral transmission.312 By the 1970s, he felt in a position to identify clear musical errors and to attributed them unequivocally to scribal deficiency.313

In practice, only two circumstances would lead van der Werf to dismiss melodic readings: firstly, if a manuscript (such as V) contained different melodies for pieces known to belong to the same contrafaction network; given the same melody in other manuscripts, V’s melodies were presumed to be at fault.314 Secondly, van der Werf saw the provision of too many or two few notes for the number of syllables in a verse as clear evidence of scribal corruption, as opposed to performed variance.315 Thus, in his editorial practice in the 1970s, van der Werf’s tolerance for scribal error was considerably lower than what he professed in his theory of 1965:

…the scribes did not copy at sight symbol for symbol. Instead, certain manuscripts show clearly that a scribe must have sung to himself a section from the manuscript in

front of him … and then copied from memory what he had heard rather than what he

had seen. Consequently he put himself in the position of a jongleur notating his own

performance.316 [Emphasis original]

311_{van der Werf, ed., Trouvères-Melodien, Monumenta monodica medii aevi XI–XII, 2 vols. (Kassel,}

Basel, Tours, and London: Bärenreiter, 1977).

312

Idem, ‘Notationless Culture’, p. 66.

313

Idem, The Chansons of the Troubadours and Trouvères: A Study of the Melodies and their Relation to the Poems (Epe, The Netherlands: Hooiberg, 1972), p. 32.

314

‘Es muß an dieser Stelle erwähnt werden, daß die Handschriften R und V von vielen Chansons Melodien überliefern, die nicht untereinander und mit den Melodien verwandt sind, die für die gleichen Chansons in anderen Manuskripten erhalten sind. Eine gründliche Untersuchung dieser Melodien zeigt, daß diese R- und V-Fassungen warscheinlich nicht von dem Trouvère selbst stammen und daß sie stattdessen wahrscheinlich von einem Jongleur oder einem Schreiber erfunden wurden. Das gleiche gilt bisweilen für Fassungen in anderen Handschriften.’ Hendrik van der Werf, ‘Deklamatorischer

Rhythmus in den Chansons der Trouvères’, Die Musikforschung 20 (1967), pp. 122–144 at p. 128. The author would restate the same sentiment in English five years later, see note below.

315_{Idem, Study of the Melodies,p. 32. See also idem, ed., Trouvères-Melodien, vol. II, p. 730.} 316

These ‘certain manuscripts’ clearly excluded R and V.

In such a changing climate, several younger researchers introduced dissenting opinions on the melodies of manuscript V. The first product of this generation, Johann Schubert’s monograph on R, presents the evidence not in defence of the notator or the melodies, so much as further support for Gennrich’s Repertoiretheorie.317 The work is overtly descriptive in character and consists primarily of detailed comparisons of chansons between the versions in R and other sources, many of which (due to the conservative nature of Schubert’s transcriptions) remain useful for reference. Schubert’s divisions of the manuscript based on melodic comparisons did reveal very solid patterns of filiation: some sections of R can be easily linked to T, others more easily to the KNPX group and a significant portion of songs relate most closely to V.

The fourth fascicle, (identified by Schubert as Gatherings 15 through 20, fols. 106r–153v), contains the greatest concentration of songs whose close relation to V is unambiguous.318 Although the musical relationships are convincing, Schubert’s conclusion from it relies on a dubious application of Gennrich’s theory: ordered sequences of melodies shared in two manuscripts, Schubert believes, derive from a common manuscript, whereas similar melodies found for songs scattered in two manuscripts implicate a shared ‘repertoire’ delivered by a performer. This logic appears in Schubert’s introduction and foregrounds the descriptive work. The entire exercise thus relies on the assumption ‘…daß die Lieder eines Spielmanns mehrmals niedergeschrieben wurden’.319 In such a case, the ordering of the songs would be

317

Schubert, Die Handschrift Paris, passim, especially pp. 179, 184–6.

318

variable, even in manuscripts copied from the same human source. The contents of different chansonniers would change as well, as the performer bolstered his or her repertoire. Melodic similarities between sources that do not share ordering would then be proof of oral transmission.

Schubert thus ignores the possibility that the ordering of songs had first been predetermined by the text scribes who followed the ordering of unnotated exemplars and that music copyists subsequently found melodies in whatever sources they could. Elizabeth Aubrey suggests that in Troubadour R’scase, the music copyist wrote the songs into the manuscript in the order in which he found them, jumping from section to section as he went.320 It might be revealing then to re-examine trouvère R in greater detail having first established the separate compilational sections of V; the following chapter will re-examine the case for drawing a parallel between V and R and engage with scholars who have connected the two through other means than melodic comparison. Comparisons of ordering do offer some justification: a number of songs from Fascicle 4 of R appear in brief sequences in V’s Gatherings 12 and 14–15. However, even adjacent songs’ melodies relate to R’s versions by massively different degrees of variation (some not at all). For example, V’s melody for 287 agrees with

R’s and differs drastically from that in all other sources; on the other hand, V’s