Wandering voices: Refrain citation in thirteenth-century French music and poetry

Description

Cited refrains wandered through nearly every thirteenth-century French musical and poetic genre, connecting and disrupting works. These refrains have long been viewed as central to poetic practice, creating productive tensions between lyric and narrative poetry, evidencing the orality behind many medieval texts, and articulating social difference by mixing poetic registers. This dissertation resituates refrain citation within a rich context of medieval reading and writing practices, as well as crucial notions of auctoritas, or the use of citation to create authority in medieval literature. It offers a new view of the refrain as a vital part of these strategies of authorization: a tradition typified by the Roman de la Rose. Refrain citation is not only a technique but a repertory as well. Assembling the families of musical and poetic works that are connected through refrain citation is a necessary starting point. In taking on the long-established idea that refrains are representations of an oral song culture, I offer the first comprehensive account of their musical transmission and establish that the practice of refrain citation is in fact writerly. Understanding the refrain as writing suggests different interpretive strategies than those that have been employed to date. Music-compositional analysis shows that composers treated refrains as borrowed musical material. The medieval traditions of rhetoric and hermeneutics suggest a reception history for the refrain, showing a variety of ways in which medieval listeners and readers might have interpreted refrain citations in their musical and literary contexts. Finally, thirteenth-century composer Adam de la Halle provides an important case study, demonstrating the connection between refrain citation and authority. Instead of citing earlier, authoritative writers, Adam de la Halle begins to cite refrains from his own musical compositions, a gesture through which he positions himself as a vernacular auctor. By bringing music into dialogue with writing traditions, this dissertation suggests the rich interdependence of the sung and the written in medieval culture and the slippage between these categories. My findings move toward an alternative history of authorship in thirteenth-century France, one forged through cited song.