Adjustment of tune to varying line length in 12th and 13th century french music

Abstract

This study aims at describing and analyzing mechanisms that allow a tune to be sung with lines of diff erent length. Our corpus comprises French songs from the 12th and 13th centuries, which are among the earliest French vernacular songs that have been preserved along with their musical notation. Our study examines the way these songs adjust the tune to the line length variation, without breaking the equivalence relation between the diff erent versions of the tune.