Unwriting Medieval Song
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4873430 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Emma Dillon (0000-0001-5268-4246, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2015 |
| Volume | 46 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 595-622 |
| Publication date | 2015-09-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | New Literary History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0028-6087 • E-ISSN: 1080-661X |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1353/nlh.2015.0038 |
| OpenAlex | W2295982911 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 12 |
Unwriting Medieval Song Emma Dillon (bio) Bel m'es quan la fueill'altana el aut ra[m] branquillae.l rossinholet s'afana desotz la ramilla,que.l blacx frim e la luguana del chant que grazilla. Quecx auzels ques a votz sana del cantar s'atilla,es esforsa s'en la rana lonc la fontainilla,e.l chavans ab sa chavana, s'als non pot, grondilla. (I like it when the lofty foliage shoots on the high branch and the little nightingale under the bough exerts itself, for in the early dawn the oak copse reechoes with the trilling song. Each bird that has a good, true voice applies itself to singing; the frog beside the little spring tries to do so and the owl, with its female mate, if it can do no more, hoots.) -Marcabru (c. 1127-1150), Bel m'es quan la fueill' altana (PC 293: 21)1 Linguists may rightly tell us of sovereign mysteries of language structure and process; but only lift a voice in song, and all humans are struck-enthralled, seduced, threatened, made, or unmade-by these powers. -Gary Tomlinson2 "Critics say I can't sing. I croak. Sound like a frog. ... What have I done to deserve this special attention?" [Bob Dylan]. ... Dylan has something better than a "good voice." He has a true voice. He has a voice that brings out what truth there is in a song-particularly his own. He wrote those songs, as he's often said, so that he would have something to sing. -David Remnick3 [End Page 595] Medieval europe holds a special place in the history of song. With the emergence of the troubadours in twelfth-century Occitania, there began a tradition of vernacular song that still resonates today. Yet those early repertories are permeated with ambiguity and self-consciousness about the very medium of creation and communication: chan. Chan and chantar lie at the heart of vernacular lyric inspiration, as pretext for creative production, as the consequence and prompt of love, and as the invisible agent of communication between the protagonist and dedicatee of a song. What, though, did these categories signify? The objects that were identified, and that self-identified, as song represented a broad, frequently contradictory set of creative scenarios. As the troubadour's influence took root in other linguistic and geographical contexts, so did the category chan/ canso / chanson/ cantiga / minnesang become a commonplace. Across traditions, songmakers described verbal creations that were void of a melodic line as chant, while within the textures of notated trouvère songs moments of reported communication were often cast as dit (speech). German repertories of voiced poetry placed unambiguous priority on song's expressive function, conjoining the singing act with courtly aspiration in the term minnesang. Later in Italy, Dante, author of one of the first formal histories of song, unfolded his Divina Commedia song by song (canto by canto), but without evidence of a pitched line. Meanwhile, as song took to the page in manuscript anthologies, song's material life, as a thing to be written or notated (notée), added to this already diverse lexicon. Song's taxonomy is no less contested in the disciplinary venues most frequently charged to make sense of its history-musicology and literary studies. They share a common ground of terminology: song and its associated vocabulary (voice, poetry, music, lyric, to name but a few) are engrained in the scholarly apparatus of each. They also share common objects of study: troubadour song is the originary vernacular repertory for scholars of French literary history as well as for musicologists. Yet to be a song student in one or the other setting does not amount to the same thing. The connotations that song holds for different disciplines are frequently, startlingly at odds. My contribution concerns a separation of interests around perhaps the most fundamental and self-evident dimension of the shared object of study: song's status as something to be sung. Musicology's orientation to song has typically identified the category's sonorous implication as the melodic rendering of words. Its specialized analytical apparatus is set up to engage with song as a medium that
Art · Humanities · Literature · Singing · French Literature and Poetry · Medieval European Literature and History · Medieval Literature and History · History
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2025 (1) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |