Colour within the darkness

When I thought of the Middle, or Dark Ages I generally thought of a more backwards time when the peasants spent their lives working hard in the fields and living a very basic existence while the nobility ruled over them and reaped the benefits. I believed it to be fairly dark time with little in the way of entertainment or enjoyment; where life was governed by the rising and setting of the sun, and the changing seasons. When it came to music my thoughts always turned to church music and Gregorian chant but they never really ventured towards the social music of the time even though I have seen many theatre and television adaptations set in that period featuring dancing and singing. Music was an intrinsic part of people’s lives outside the Church and it was a colourful and vibrant time; a far remove from the imagined darkness. Dancing, especially, was a very popular pastime in both peasant and noble circles.

Often people played music just for their own enjoyment but there were also professional musicians such as bards, jongleurs and minstrels. Bards were poet-singers who would sing at banquets, accompanying themselves on the harp or fiddle whereas jongleurs were lower-class travelling musicians. Minstrels were a more specialised group of musicians and were often employed by the nobility.

The musicians that particularly interest me are the troubadours of the twelfth century, also known as trouvère, depending on which region of France they were from. The troubadours of southern France spoke the Occitan language or “langue d’oc” while the northern trouvère spoke Medieval French or “langue d’oȉl”. They were poet composers and were generally under noble patronage. Among their ranks were many women, known as trobairitz and they were mostly of noble birth. Trobairitz were the first known female composers of secular music; the only known female composers prior to them were writers of sacred music.

Unfortunately, out of the 2,600 troubadour poems that have been preserved, only around ten per cent have notated melodies, however, many more of the surviving 2,100 trouvère poems have retained their melodies. These songs were contained in anthologies called chansonniers although it is often unclear whether the melody and poem have been written by the same person. Often new words were written to fit existing melodies and this was known as contrafactum. 

One of the best known trobairitz is the Comtessa de Dia (fl. c. 1175) who wrote the only known remaining notated work by a female trobairitz.

(Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatritz_de_Dia.)

Here is a short YouTube clip of how it is thought to have sounded. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5P71gzdJTs 

It is written in Occitan and you can hear the Eastern influences that were prevalent at the time. The YouTube clip has a scrolling commentary on the piece which describes the lyrics as being realistic as opposed to the idealistic style often used by male troubadours. It also comments on the way the lyrics show a frankness and confidence of her own worth which are equally as relevant to women in modern times. As a modern woman I find it quite heartening to realise that we haven’t changed that significantly in several hundred years.

Overall, my view now of life and music during the middle ages is very different to the one I started out with. Listening to the music and viewing related works of art has given me a real thirst for more knowledge of this period.

What would life have been like living alongside the Comtessa de Dia? I can imagine sitting down with her for a good conversation about music but more importantly, a good gossip about the goings on in court.