‘Irregular’ contrafacts in the trouvère repertory

Abstract

In his 1965 study of contrafacture in medieval song, Friedrich Gennrich distinguished between ‘regular’ and ‘irregular’ contrafacts, the latter consisting of songs that share their melody with another song but not the same poetic structure. This article examines the forty-one contrafact networks for trouvère song that exhibit this kind of ‘irregularity’ through the lens of practice theory. The modifications that are made to melodies in order to accommodate texts with different numbers of lines or syllables show that trouvères used text to parse melodic strings into units of different lengths. A poetic line could correspond to a single unit of the melody, but so too could a group of multiple poetic lines, or a portion of text shorter than the poetic line, such as the syllables before a caesura. While these contrafacts may appear irregular in formal terms, the practices used to modify melodies were common to other kinds of composition and transmission of trouvère melody. Viewed in this light, irregular contrafacts begin to look much more regular.