Secular Music for a Single Line, ca. 1150-ca.1300
From the point of view of notation, secular music of the Middle Ages existed on the fringes of churchly life, for most of the music scribes of the era were church musicians. Nevertheless, they have left us a vibrant glimpse of life at court and in the town. Some of the earliest surviving secular music, music by the goliards, wandering scholar/poets, was gathered in an early thirteenth century collection titled Carmina burana. Unfortunately, the unheighted notation does not allow us to reconstruct the actual sound of the melodies for these early secular works (except for a few pieces with concordances in sacred sources). The largest collection of secular music, then, is that of the troubadours from the south of France and the trouvères in the northern regions. More than a dozen chansonniers collect the songs that these poet-musicians created. In addition to musical evidence, vidas (fictionalized biographies of troubadours) and razos (short introductory remarks to individual pieces) purport to explain how the poets' songs came to be written.
The poems for the troubadour-trouvère repertory adopted the vernacular language of the region of their creation. Thus, troubadour lyrics are written in the langue d'oc, or old Provençal, and trouvère lyrics are in the langue d'oïl, or old French. The poems themselves feature ingenious poetic structures such as clever rhyme-schemes, varied use of refrain-lines or words, and different metric patterns, and the music reflects these structures in various ways. Indeed, novelty rather than predictability of form seems to have been the desired goal - a goal which changed radically in the fourteenth century.
The troubadour-trouvère repertory is largely strophic, with the music of one stanza repeated for successive stanzas. The internal musical structure of each stanza is bound up with the poetic organization, but musical forms which allow for flexibility from setting to setting are the most common. Each stanza of a canso, for instance, consists of a repeated section at the beginning (called a pes, or in plural, pedes: foot or feet) and a free section at the end (called a cauda or tail); many incorporate musical rhyme, with a line repeated from the pes to round out the cauda. Each pes contrasts lines that sound somewhat incomplete (with an ouvert or 'open' cadence) with lines that sound conclusive (with a clos or 'closed' cadence). At the very end of the poem, after three to ten stanzas, the poet might include an envoy, a few lines of text to be sung to the end of the cauda that provide a verbal 'send-off,' perhaps instructing the singer to deliver the song to the poet's lady or directing the listener to think of the poet after hearing the piece. The most frequent topic is courtly love, in which the poet's love is unobtainable; the sentiment itself is more important than the characters involved. Spinning songs, dawn songs (in which the lovers are cautioned that dawn is at hand), crusader songs, pastorelles, and even quasi-religious poetry also form a part of the troubadour-trouvère corpus.
The troubadour-trouvère repertory flourished in a courtly milieu. In the south, particularly, courtly women contributed to the repertory alongside their male colleagues. The patronage system for troubadours, however, broke up following the Albigensian crusade. As the troubadours fled, they brought the styles and topics of the secular genres with them to regions such as Spain, where the cantigas flourished, Germany, where Minnesang also focused on courtly love, and Italy, where most of the surviving repertory consists of lauda, sacred songs. In the north of France, however, there was more continuity, and patrons such as Eleanor of Aquitaine continued to encourage poetic and musical production.
If troubadours and trouvères participated in courtly culture and so achieved at least some measure of social distinction, minstrels, also known as jongleurs, were typically considered mere entertainers. They might perform courtly songs, but they might also juggle, play instruments, dance, recite poems, and the like. They frequently had to tour in order to produce a steady income, though in some instances a court patron would invite them to reside for a period ranging from weeks to years. During the period of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, minstrels formed guilds to protect their status as artisans. From guild records, we known that in at least some instances, women were allowed to join the minstrel's guild as members, and not merely as spouses.
In addition to secular vocal music, we have some evidence for a lively instrumental repertory. Numerous iconographic depictions of medieval instruments survive--as miniatures in manuscripts, in frescos, and in paintings--and a few instrumental dances survive, along with a handful of instrumental intabulations of vocal songs. Because instruments were evidently taught through oral tradition (and in a master-apprentice system), however, little documentation survives on important aspects such as selecting appropriate repertory, forming an accompaniment, ornamenting melody lines, and the like. Modern players of medieval instruments have to use informed imagination to recreate plausible performances.
 

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