Chapter nine

Self-Citation and Compositional Process in Guillaume de Machaut’s Lyrics with and without Music: The Case of “Dame, se vous n’avez aperceü” (Rondeau 13)

Yolanda Plumley

Literary scholars and musicologists specialising in the Middle Ages have long been aware of the propensity for medieval authors and composers to draw on existing material within their new compositions.1 Deliberate citation or reworking of known material was sometimes motivated by a respect for the past or the desire to pay homage to an illustrious con- temporary or predecessor, but, equally, it could be prompted by mere expediency. In the songwriting tradition, the troubadours and trouvères sometimes wove into their songs references to their predecessors and contemporaries, often to tip their hat to colleagues from past and pres- ent while inscribing themselves within an illustrious genealogy of lyric authors. Composers of sacred songs, on the other hand, often simply bor- rowed verbatim the entire melody of a familiar love song to accompany their newly composed religious lyrics so as to reach out to lay and reli- gious audiences alike. Modern literary theories of intertextuality, a term first coined by Julia Kristeva in the late 1960s, teach us, however, that interrelationships between works are not necessarily limited to deliberate strategies on the part of the author. Authors might unconsciously invoke material that had somehow influenced them; for their part, readers or listeners contribute to the construction of a work’s meaning through their identification of reso- nances of absent texts within it, echoes recalled from their internalised memory store that might or might not overlap with that of the author.2

1 Some of the material explored here appeared in an earlier form in an article published in French in Analyse musicale 50 (2004); its use here is with kind permission of Analyse musicale, 83 boulevard Sébastopol, 75002 Paris. The present essay forms part of a research project entitled Citation and Allusion in the Ars nova French Chanson and Motet: Memory, Tradition, Innovation led by the author at the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Exeter, UK, and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK. 2 See, for example, Julia Kristeva, Semiotiké: Recherches pour une sémanalyse (Paris, 160 yolanda plumley

In recent years, literary scholars and musicologists have looked afresh at questions of borrowing, citation, allusion and more nebulous types of interrelationships linking medieval lyrics with and without music.3 Tex- tual citations from within the tradition have been shown to have played a significant role in troubadour lyric,4 while the thirteenth-century French motet has been especially noted for its remarkable integration of myriad textual and/or musical citations from both secular and sacred traditions. The study of citational practice in these contexts has cast light on the cir- culation of the repertory as well as the interface between oral and written, and high (aristocratic) and low (popular) registers.5 Recent explorations of the intertextualities traceable in Machaut’s motets have shed light on the materials that influenced the poet-compos- er’s composition of both text and music, and on the sophisticated manner in which his newly-composed works engage with existing ones.6 The new lyric refrain-forms that became so popular in the fourteenth century, not least with Machaut himself, had an inbuilt susceptibility to incorporate borrowings, for the dance songs that were their prototypes were usually built around existing refrains. The tendency for authors of fourteenth- century fixed-form lyrics to indulge in recycling existing material has cer- tainly been noted by literary scholars; indeed, Leonard Johnson suggests that for lyric authors like Machaut the “game” of poetic composition was about showcasing their skills by creating new twists on existing ideas.7

1969); Gérard Genette, Palimpsestes: La littérature au second degré (Paris, 1982); Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (London, Oxford and New York, 1973); and, on the role of the reader, Roland Barthes, “Death of the Author,” Image-Music-Text (London, 1977). A recent useful guide to intertextuality is Graham Allen, Intertextuality (London and New York, 2000). 3 I am using the term “citation” broadly to encompass various forms of reference, including quotations or allusions (i.e. verbatim or looser borrowings from another author), and even the naming or evocation of an author or source. 4 See, for instance, Jörn Gruber, Die Dialektik des Trobar (Tübingen, 1983), and Sarah Kay, “How long is a quotation? Quotations from the troubadours in the text and manu- scripts of the Breviari d’amor,” Romania 127 (2009), 140–68. 5 See, for instance, Sylvia Huot, Allegorical Play in the Old French Motet: The Sacred and the Profane in Thirteenth-Century Polyphony (Stanford, 1997); Ardis Butterfield, Poetry and Music. From Jean Renart to Guillaume de Machaut (Cambridge, 2002); and Mark Everist, French Motets in the Thirteenth Century: Music, Poetry, and Genre (Cambridge, 1993). 6 See for instance, Jacques Boogaart, “Encompassing Past and Present: Quotations and their Function in Machaut’s Motets,” Early Music History 20 (2001), 1–86, and Kevin Brownlee, “Machaut’s motet 15 and the Roman de la rose: The Literary Context of Amours qui a le pouoir/Faus Samblant m’a deceü/Vidi Dominum,” Early Music History 10 (1991), 1–14. 7 Leonard W. Johnson, Poets as Players. Theme and Variation in Late Medieval French Poetry (Stanford, 1990). See also Jane Taylor’s The Making of Poetry (Turnhout, 2007), which shows how interrelated poems reflect the social role of lyric in the late