Literatura i música a l'Edat Mitjana: la cançó èpica

Contents

The research that gave rise to this book had its origins in an academic experience and an artistic experience, in that order. After many years teaching the Romance Epic at university and asserting that those epics were sung, I determined to undertake research that might lead to a musical staging.
My objective, I have to admit, was to sing the romance epic: the Chanson de Roland, the Chanson de Guillaume, the Cantar de Mio Çid' Yet this aim was soon overshadowed by the enthusiasm of musicians and colleagues regarding the comparison with contemporary epic repertoires and the results stemming from the research.
Orality as a medieval composition system (text-music) is evident not only in the studies on contemporary epic repertoires that we have printed out, but also in the medieval ones. In this book, and in the book appearing together with it devoted to text-music relations in troubadour works, the starting point is an oral conception that governs the entire discourse. Orality viewed not so much as mnemonic structures that can be demarcated to some extent and that are to some extent structurally poetic, but more as a mnemonic device. A device that the author uses deliberately so that his work will spread rapidly among the people and be understood and adopted by them. This manifests itself in the form of an architectural composition affecting the lexis, the syntax, the melody and the literary poetic.
Summary of the author's presentation.