Music and Verbal Meaning: Machaut's Polytextual Songs

Abstract

Our modern experience of songs and singing, whether expert, amateur, or entirely uninformed and passive, is almost completely misleading when it comes to appreciating the singing of late-medieval lyric. My focus in this article is on polyphonic songs that align several texts for simultaneous delivery—a somewhat special category of work. However, the fact of music's indispensability for these pieces reflects the broader cultural use of music as a meaningful—and not just a pleasant—component of lyric performance. My exposition aims to bring out the potential significance of the dimension of performance—specifically sung musical performance—to scholars who normally consider only written forms of such works, whether poetic or musical. It thus addresses both those literary scholars who might want to know what kinds of meanings a musical setting might add to a written poem that they usually consider just as verbal text (written or spoken) and those musicologists who might want to consider the performed moment of a piece in conjunction with their more usual “reading” of it as a notated modern score.

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