2024 Theses Doctoral

Degrees of Separation: Intermusicality and Intertextuality in Medieval Monophonic Song

Wilkening, Anya Brittany

This dissertation examines the procedure of musical borrowing, in which melodies are recycled or reworked, in the sung, vernacular poetry of the troubadours. Their usage of the practice (specifically, that of contrafacture, wherein pre-existing melodies are retexted) is attested to in poetic treatises, confirmed by a small number of examples transmitted with musical notation, and further supported by a large body of poems that share a versification structure. The paucity of extant melodies, however, has prevented scholars from fully exploring the musical implications of the technique.

Through close and multidisciplinary analysis of music, text, image, and material object, this study uses intermusicality as an entry point to address larger questions about the musical practice of the Occitan poet-composers: how were songs crafted, and what is the relationship between music and text? How was this repertoire spread, and what roles did oral and notated transmission play? How would audiences have interpreted the songs of the troubadours?

To that end, I examine a series of case studies drawn from Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, f. fr. 22543. Throughout, I characterize musical borrowing as a generative procedure used commonly by the troubadours, and foreground the connections (aural and otherwise) that arise as a consequence. As such, the dissertation offers a new way of understanding the musico-poetic practice of the troubadours, with respect to both mechanics and meaning, through the lens of a well-attested but largely-silenced compositional practice.