Troubadours

Name for any of a large number of 12th- and 13th-century poet-musicians of southern France (Provence), who were the first in Western history to establish a tradition of songs in the vernacular.  Their numbers included members of the French nobility as well as commoners, all devoted to poetry and music in the service of chivalrous love.  In the mid-12th century it spread to northern France (trouveres) and Germany (minnesingers).  Scholars do not agree about the origins of this movement.

About 300 troubadour poems are preserved with melodies. The main sources are listed under Chansonnier.  The texts of most of the songs are love lyrics.  Practically all of them are strophic poems, normally with five or six stanzas and a concluding half-stanza.  Most often the stanza is through-composed, but the form with initial repeat, a a b, also occurs.

The melodies of the troubadours and trouveres are all monphonic and were never accompanied in the modern sense of the word.  Instrumental participation in the performance, suggested by some pictures showing a singer holding a fiddle or being assisted by an instrumentatlist, was restricted to a strict or slightly varied unison duplication of the melody, or perhaps, to some short extemporization in the way of a prelude, interlude, or postlude.