Joseph Mason (Assistant Professor, University of Cambridge), ‘Irregular contrafacts in trouvère song: making words fit melodies in medieval France’

Abstract: How closely were words bound to melody in medieval song, and how did medieval composers and performers decide how to align words and melodies? This paper approaches these questions by looking at instances of irregular contrafacture in trouvère song, that is, monophonic song in French composed between 1160 and 1310. It is usually assumed that, when making a contrafact (a song that sets a new text to an old melody), poet-composers would create a text that has the same structural features as the text that it supplants. Yet a surprising number of contrafacts in the trouvère corpus do not mimic the textual structure of their model exactly. In these 'irregular' contrafacts, poet-composers deployed a range of strategies for adapting a pre-existent melody to fit a different textual structure. Theorising these strategies through praxeological theory, this paper explores these practices of irregular contrafacture, arguing that they reveal historical ways of conceiving of the relationship between text and music not only in contrafacts, but in trouvère song more broadly. Adaptations to melodies and music-text alignment were pragmatic, guided by practical rules of thumb, and suggest that musicians conceived of melodies in units of different sizes simultaneously. These observations offer oblique evidence for unnotated practices in the trouvère corpus as a whole, such as the possibilities for changing text-music alignment in a strophic song as it unfolds, and—a particularly vexed question in trouvère studies—the rhythm of these songs.

Biography: Joseph Mason is an Assistant Professor in Early Music at the University of Cambridge. After completing a DPhil at the University of Oxford, Joseph held postdoctoral fellowships at University College Dublin and New College, University of Oxford. Joseph has published on Old French song and fourteenth-century polyphony and was the recipient of the Roland Jackson award for music analysis at the AMS in 2024. His research interests include the history of medieval song, music analysis, manuscript studies, digital humanities, and music and politics.