Trouvère

The trouveres were poet-musicians active in northern France between roughly 1150 and 1300, composing and performing in langue d'oil (the medieval ancestor of modern French), as opposed to the troubadours who used Occitan in the south. Musically the traditions are similar — monophonic vocal lines accompanied by vielle, lute, or unaccompanied — but Old French's consonant-heavy phonology gives the lines a slightly harder edge than Occitan, and trouvere melodies tend toward more direct intervallic motion than the southern equivalents. The trouvere repertoire also includes pieces with multiple characters singing alternately, suggesting early staged musical performance.

The trouvere tradition began around the mid-12th century as the troubadour influence reached the northern French courts; Eleanor of Aquitaine's marriage to Louis VII of France in 1137 brought southern courtly culture north. Chretien de Troyes and other writers of chivalric romance worked in the same milieu. Adam de la Halle (c. 1240-1288) of Arras left the most extensive surviving body of trouvere material, including the music-theater piece 'Le Jeu de Robin et Marion' (c. 1283), one of the earliest known European musical plays. By the 14th century the monophonic trouvere tradition was being absorbed into the new polyphonic art of ars nova (Guillaume de Machaut and successors).

On Adam de la Halle's 'Robins m'aime' (a short song from 'Le Jeu de Robin et Marion'), follow how the short repeating melodic phrase fits the simple shepherdess narrative. The line is sung in middle vocal range without strain; the metrical regularity reflects the dance-like nature of the source genre (the pastourelle). Listen for the moments where a vielle player inserts brief instrumental ornaments between vocal phrases.

Adam de la Halle's 'Robins m'aime' and other excerpts from 'Le Jeu de Robin et Marion' (c. 1283) are the easiest entry — short pieces, dramatic context, attractive melodies. Various early-music ensembles have recorded the full play.

Guillaume de Machaut (c. 1300-1377), conventionally a transitional figure between the trouvere tradition and the new polyphony of the ars nova, took the unusual step of compiling his own complete works in supervised manuscripts during his lifetime — a sign of deliberate self-canonization rare in medieval music.