Metric-musical imitation in troubadour lyric: the partial counterfaction

Abstract

The contrafactum constitutes an interdisciplinary process that concerns both text and music. However, when addressing this creative phenomenon of oral tradition, an essential aspect is often overlooked: reception. The audience of sung poetry does not usually analyze the work from a philological perspective—whether metrical or literary—nor from a musicological one. Rather, they are likely listeners with a cultivated sensibility, capable of grasping nuances without the need for technical analysis. They are an audience of connoisseurs. Therefore, the responsibility falls to us to question the author's purpose in "constructing" a new work from the contrafactum of a pre-existing composition. It is equally pertinent to ask what kind of reaction it might have elicited from the audience, or what the author's intention was toward that audience with the new creation, which in many of its imitations is laden with intertextual and intermelodic messages. From our perspective, it is essential to investigate both the “closed” or complete contrafacta —those that fully reproduce the metric structure, the arrangement of the rhymes and the music— and the partial or “open” contrafacta, which only take up part of the metric of the imitated model and, consequently, also of its music.