Such a powerful idea was destined to go viral, as we would describe it in contemporary terms. Even today we embrace the musical attitudes the troubadours brought to their performances, starting in southern France during the late eleventh century. Nowadays we simply assume that songs express personal emotions, especially feelings about love, and that they are intertwined with the biography and worldview of the singer. But before the rise of the troubadours, such notions only existed on the fringes and in the shadows of musical life in Europe, facing censorship and backlash whenever they became too prominent. This now would change, first for a small number of performers, many of them nobles, but eventually for almost everyone else. We should count ourselves among these beneficiaries.
The rapid spread of this new approach to song can perhaps be gauged by the name of one of the earliest troubadours, Cercamon, whose pseudonym literally translates as “circle-the-world.” We can connect him to the oldest troubadour, William IX, Duke of Aquitaine—one of Cercamon’s surviving works is a planh, or funeral lament, for the duke’s son, William X—but his travels may have brought him to many other locales, perhaps even on the Second Crusade as a follower of Louis VII. Marcabru, another prominent early troubadour, was probably a student of Cercamon’s, and he, too, took his craft on the road, perhaps at first as a joglar, a performer of songs created by others, and later as composer of his own works. We hear of him at the court of King Alfonso VII of León and Castile, and the spread of his work is testified by frequent references to him by later writers.
If the surviving accounts of these singers indicate the geographical reach of the troubadour art, they also make clear its even more impressive leap across barriers of class and privilege. Marcabru is said to have been a foundling of illegitimate birth, yet this didn’t prevent him from unloading scathing attacks on the nobility. The lowborn now had a platform for denouncing their rulers, if only via song. Bernart de Ventadorn, the most distinguished of the next generation of troubadours, was the son of a servant—not even a baker, we are told, but merely the person who gathered the wood and heated the oven where the bread was baked. Yet he was bold enough to sing love songs to the wife of the Viscount of Ventadorn, and perhaps even share her bed. The viscount himself allegedly thought so: he eventually put his wife under the watchful eye of a guard and forced the amorous troubadour to leave his court.
But Bernart, described as a handsome man in a surviving text, found the favor of an even more exalted lady, Eleanor of Aquitaine, who possessed the rare distinction of serving as queen of both England and France. Our lowborn troubadour may even have been on hand in Westminster Abbey at the coronation of Eleanor and her husband Henry II in 1154. That a career of this magnitude could be built on love songs—and no troubadour sang about love with more devotion and passion than Bernart de Ventadorn—tells us not only how much these songs were valued during this period, but also how profoundly the world had changed since the time of Charlemagne, who had Gregorian chant taught in his palace, and when he was seeking musicians, had them supplied by the pope.
The nobles set the tone, and everyone followed their example. “Now these days everyone—Christian, Jew, or Saracen, emperor, prince, king, duke, count, viscount, vavasseur, cleric, bourgeois, peasant—simply everyone great or small, is putting his whole heart into singing and composing,” complained Raimon Vidal, a Catalan troubadour of the early thirteenth century. “You could hardly find yourself in so private or solitary a place, with so few or so many persons, that you would not hear someone or other, or all together, singing; for even the most rustic shepherds of the mountains find their greatest solace in song.” And these songs, more than ever before, were about the singers themselves—for high and low, music now served as a channel for emotion-driven autobiography.1
The new rules of music not only fostered self-expression, but also created an unprecedented degree of fame for those who excelled at it. This marks a major change in the musical culture of Europe. A significant portion of the art, writing, and music of the medieval period was produced anonymously, and though the silence surrounding the people who created these works was by no means absolute—composers such as Hildegard von Bingen, Léonin, and Pérotin are known to us by name—nothing prepares us for the hero worship directed at the troubadours. Some five hundred of them are identified in the surviving literature. We can hardly avoid the conclusion that some aspect or essence of this music struck its listeners as inseparable from the personalities of those who created it. When music served God—as was the case with almost every song preserved from the early medieval period—the humans who created it were obscured by the higher purpose of their craft. Now that music celebrated love and glory, the singer emerged as the focal point of the lyrics, the real subject of every song. At this juncture, the cult of personality entered the DNA of Western music, where it remains to this day, the dominant gene passed on to each new generation of singers, surviving all other changes of style and genre.
How did the church respond to this? A few priests continued to rail against the erotic tone of these popular songs, but their prohibitions no longer had much impact on the musical tastes of the day. On the other extreme, some Christians adopted the troubadour’s craft for their own purposes. The most prominent example is St. Francis of Assisi, whose Canticle of the Sun, the oldest surviving lyric in vernacular Italian, clearly imitates the troubadour lyrics he heard during his youth. Francis even referred to his friars as “jongleurs of the Lord”—adopting the same word, jongleur (or minstrel), used to describe performers of secular songs. But most responses fell between these two extremes, and an uneasy truce emerged between Christianity and the new music.
I believe that the rules of this truce explain otherwise paradoxical attitudes toward sexuality embedded in these lyrics. Again and again in these songs, we find the most heated expressions of sexual desire placed side by side with calls to chastity. Troubadours sing about their libidinous passions, and then deny they want to act on them. What’s going on here? Most readers nowadays will view this as little more than hypocrisy. The seductive songs we know about inevitably aim at seduction, so it’s hard for us to comprehend any other end in mind. We assume the troubadours were celebrating actual sexual union with the beloved—otherwise, what’s the point? But this attitude reflects a basic misunderstanding of the rules of the game—not just the dictates of courtly love, but also the implicit compromise between secular and religious forces that allowed this music to come out into the open.
The troubadour revolution was built on the view that, in the words of troubadour Guilhem de Montanhagol, “from love chastity comes forth, for if a man aspires entirely to love he cannot then act badly.” Not every singer lived up to this ideal, and a few troubadours were perhaps chronic offenders. But such lapses could be viewed as a result of human weakness, and thus did not topple the prevailing theology. Indeed, the troubadour’s art could not have flourished if it hadn’t accepted a measure of restraint and rule-based ordering of sexual desire. It’s worth noting that some of the lustiest of the surviving lyrics were dedicated to noble ladies or the wives of powerful men. We deceive ourselves if we view these songs as calls to adultery. On the contrary, the very unattainability of these women made them the perfect subjects for such songs.2
But let’s be honest. Over the long run, this attempt to turn lusty lyrics into a vehicle for moralizing was doomed to failure. Sexy songs are poor platforms for imposing ethical guidelines—although authoritarian regimes, even in our own day, haven’t stopped trying. Even as I write, the Communist Youth League in China continues to release videos by the attractive boy band TFBoys, whose songs celebrate the joys of romance while encouraging deference to the party line. North Korea strives to create K-Pop equivalents—for example, relying on the attractive Hyon Song-wol to sing uplifting songs, such as “I Love Pyongyang,” “She Is a Discharged Soldier,” or “We Are Troops of the Party.” Nonetheless, hardline regimes still haven’t figured out how to balance demand for erotic music with the strictures of prevailing dogma. In 2015, Ugandan singer Jemimah Kansiime found herself in jail for rubbing soapsuds over her body in a music video, and in 2017, an Egyptian vocalist, Shyma, was arrested after eating a banana while performing her song “I Have Issues.” In most instances, authoritarian regimes have learned, it’s best to bend in the face of musical trends, and find ways to coexist with a little give and take on both sides. At least that was the compromise that allowed secular songs of personal expression to come out of hiding in the Western world during the late medieval period. Even if the truce couldn’t survive, the impact on music was irreversible. From this point onward, musicians would continue to sing about their love lives, no matter what the dictators dictated.
What role did women play in this cultural shift? At a minimum, they laid the groundwork for the new way of singing. The prohibitions on secular songs in earlier periods had repeatedly targeted women, perpetuating the ancient mythology of the female ‘siren’ song as the epitome of risky music. And even when these songs were given scope for expression in the Islamic world, women were acknowledged as preeminent in the music of longing and desire. The rise of so-called courtly love, from this perspective, ought to be seen as the long overdue legitimization of a feminine approach to song. Certainly the songs themselves are built on an idealization of the feminine, as well as an implicit acceptance that women are the judges and arbiters in all matters relating to emotions and intimate relationships—an extraordinary claim in a culture that gave so little real power to females. The very words these lyrics used to describe a man’s intercession to a woman—a “suit” offered by a “suitor”—are the ones we still apply when making a legal appeal to a judge. Yet the woman’s authority apparently ended when she wanted credit for her own songs. Women account for just 5 percent of the singers we know by name from this era, and only around two dozen songs by female troubadours, known as trobairitz, have survived—in comparison with around 2,600 by men.
Most trobairitz are known for only a single song, while just two, Castelloza and the Comtessa de Diá, have left us several lyrics. Very little biographical information survives, and in most instances the details emphasize the women’s noble families or the powerful men they knew and loved. Many male troubadours came from humble origins, but a trobairitz needed influential connections for her songs to be preserved for posterity.
Yet we must pay close attention to this small body of work if we hope to understand the true dimensions of the troubadour revolution. Lyrics by women from this era reveal a different approach to singing about love. They devote less energy to wordplay, and offer more realistic depictions of romantic affairs. The situations described are less stylized but more plausible. Note, for example, the direct, conversational tone Castelloza adopts in this heartfelt lyric:
Handsome friend, as a lover true
I loved you, for you pleased me,
but now I see I was a fool,
for I’ve barely seen you since.
I never tried to trick you,
yet you returned me bad for good;
I love you so, without regret,
but love has stung me with such force
I think no good can possibly
be mine unless you say you love me.3
Compare this with the over-the-top protestations of Bernart de Ventadorn, who jumps from metaphor to metaphor as he seeks out the most extravagant ways to describe his frustrations as a lover:
Like some great trout that dashes to the bait
Until he feels love’s hook, all hot and blindly,
I rushed toward too much love, too rash to wait,
Careless, till ringed in by love’s flames I find me
Seared as by furnace fires upon a grate
Yet not one hand’s breadth can I move, so strait
And narrow does this love enchain and bind me.4
We must give Bernart credit for anticipating the most fashionable tone in European love lyrics during the centuries ahead, when countless chansons, Petrarchan sonnets, frottolas, and madrigals would enumerate the sufferings of lovers with a quasi-sadistic relish, but dressed up with the most ostentatious poetic conceits. Even so, Castelloza is more attuned to the raw confessional tone of our own day. But even beyond that, her approach is far more credible.
The surviving texts of the women troubadours are important for another reason. I believe they give us a reasonable approximation of the forbidden vernacular songs during those long centuries when church authorities tried to prevent women from singing about their lives (and failed), while working to eliminate all written record of this music (and, alas, succeeded). If we hope to penetrate behind the veil imposed by censorship, and grasp what the songs of day-to-day life might have expressed, the trobairitz offer our best entry point. For the first time in a thousand years, a group of women in the Christian world were given the opportunity to express their inner life in nonreligious music, and their lyrics—at least, a few of them—were preserved for posterity. We do well to take such songs seriously.
Men certainly participated in this prohibited music-making before the rise of the troubadours, but if we can judge by church proclamations and denunciations, they were far less likely to sing these kinds of passionate songs than women—at least until the nobles of southern France made clear that a man’s masculinity wasn’t in doubt if he sang about a broken heart. When men finally embraced this style of performance, they gained renown as the innovators, so much so that women who sang about emotions during the era remained mostly in the shadows. But men changed the idiom even while serving as powerful advocates for it. They developed a far more stylized manner of singing about their feelings, still infused with passion, but consciously aspiring to a more embellished, and often poetically indirect, mode of expression. I can’t help but be reminded of the lyric poets of the ancient world, who also took a tradition of singing closely linked with a female innovator—namely, Sappho—and turned it into a literary genre. In the case of the male troubadours, fervent singing became a highly self-conscious art marked by textual niceties and subtleties. The fact that we typically treat troubadour lyrics nowadays as written poetry is, of course, largely due to the absence of surviving musical notation, but the lyrics themselves facilitated this transition to the printed page.
By now we have gathered enough evidence to highlight the many incongruities and paradoxes in the history of women’s music. There’s something deeply disturbing in the fact that the two groups of women most closely associated with singing during the medieval period were nuns and prostitutes. There were, of course, many other women singing songs, including the trobairitz, but they hardly captured the medieval imagination the way these two groups did. Yet this stereotyping testifies to the fear and anxieties stirred up by female voices raised in song. Such music was sanctioned only in the safety of the nunnery, while in other settings it tended to licentiousness and sin—with very little room for anything in between. Despite these apprehensions, women managed to provide the creative impulse behind several categories of secular song, especially the three L’s: the lament, the lullaby, and the love song. By this same token, these were three genres that rarely got preserved for posterity.
We have already seen how the love song and the lament were condemned for channeling dangerous emotions, but why was the humble lullaby marginalized? Thousands of lullabies must have been sung daily by medieval women, yet as scholar John Haines points out, “no titles, no composers and no dated or notated specimens survive.” Even stranger is the continuation of that marginalization in our own time. We have hardly progressed beyond the closed worldview of the medieval authorities, for whom this whole category of music remained, in Haines’s words, “anonymous, common, childish, and lacking written codification.” We have seen how love songs got accepted as legitimate and artistic only after the nobility started singing them. May I hazard a guess that the lullaby would have gained similar prestige if dukes and lords had specialized in them? That never happened, so the whole genre still awaits its acceptance as art music.5
I have proposed elsewhere that a special group of songs exists that I call performatives, drawing on the terminology of philosopher J. L. Austin. Back in the 1950s, Austin pointed out in lectures at Oxford and Harvard that certain words have the power, when spoken, to change the world. They are only uttered on special occasions, and after they are said, human events are noticeably altered. One example took place on my wedding day, when I said: “I take you, Tara, to be my wife.” Not only my spouse, but legal and tax authorities, treated me differently after I made that statement. The same thing happens when I tell a friend: “I promise to pay you back the money on Friday.” Breaking that vow may have fewer consequences than violating a marriage vow—unless my friend is a loan shark with a penchant for vengeance—but saying these words still changes my external environment in a meaningful way. Other examples of performatives include “I’m naming our new dog Aristotle”; “I dub thee Sir Galahad”; “I say to thee, thou art Peter”; and “I’ll give you a six-point spread on the Lakers-Celtics game.” When J. L. Austin wrote a book about performative statements, he titled it How to Do Things with Words—a fitting name for a work that celebrated the efficacy of language in altering the world when spoken in certain contexts and settings.6
I raise this matter because I believe we need to undertake a similar expansion in our notions about music. Some songs are also performatives—they actually change human affairs rather than simply express emotions and moods. No scholar, to my knowledge, has noticed that women always seem to play a central role in these specifically performative genres of music. We have already seen how the magical music of the shamans is associated with femininity, even to the point that male shamans sometimes dress in women’s attire. The same is true of the music of witches, sirens, courtesans, even mothers and lovers. In each of those cases, the woman’s song is a performative, by Austin’s rigorous standards. The lullaby, by definition, is a song that aims to put the child to sleep, and its success is judged not by artistic standards, but by its power to change behavior. Recall that both the love song and the lament, those two maligned specialties of medieval women, originated in the fertility rites of antiquity, where they aimed to resurrect a dying god. That’s a powerful song! Indeed, women’s music would not have been feared so much if it hadn’t been associated with this performative ability to alter the external environment.
Only on the rarest of occasions did the mainstream culture encourage the intervention of these efficacious songs. In those instances, the powers of feminine songs were channeled in an acceptable or desirable direction—for example, in healing, in courtship, or in the sanctioned activities of a nunnery. Even as love songs were viewed with misgivings and sometimes prohibited outright, many communities refused to recognize the legality of a marriage ceremony that lacked music—a stricture that persisted in parts of Europe until the late Renaissance. Because songs possessed genuine power, they simply couldn’t be discarded; yet relying on them always was a dangerous proposition.
Once we understand this dynamic, we can see that the rise of the troubadours wasn’t merely a case of men discovering and legitimizing the love song. These celebrated singers also imposed different aesthetic standards on the genre that subtly altered its performative qualities. Seduction songs were no longer intended to seduce, at least not as their primary function. Love songs often had no function in a real courtship; they merely extolled and praised the powerful, just as Pindar and his imitators had done centuries before. Rather than aiming for efficacy, these songs, in their new masculine guise, now aimed for artistry, often in an intentionally stylized and exaggerated manner.
This is perhaps the most significant aspect of this whole interlude in Western music, but it is a mixed blessing. The secular song in the vernacular was turned into art, but the performative capabilities of the music, so closely connected to the women who had laid the groundwork for this shift, were weakened in the process. From this moment on in Western music, songs were rarely expected to do much beyond signifying meanings, expressing feelings, and—in ideal cases—giving the musician a way to earn a living.
Of course, the magic of music couldn’t be dismissed so easily. Performative songs still exist, even in the current day. Our fashionable theories of musical aesthetics don’t have much place for songs that try to do things, but that hasn’t stopped people from keeping these traditions alive. Shamanism and other forms of healing music still have their practitioners in a modern age, and can even draw upon a growing body of scientific evidence to support their use. When this evidence shows up in a sufficient number of peer-reviewed academic journals, these practices get relabeled as music therapy, a term that can now be applied in therapeutic situations by certified professionals in white coats. Courtesans are no longer expected to sing their alluring siren songs (although this was still a valuable job skill for them until only a few decades ago); but lovers and seducers continue to rely on music at every stage of a relationship, whether long-term courtship or short-term fling. In fact, there’s not a single hour of the day or night when performative music isn’t on the agenda. Recent surveys indicate that 70 percent of people believe music makes them more productive, and 62 percent rely on it to help them sleep. On the other extreme, music is used by organizations and institutions for a range of manipulative or unsavory performative tasks: assisting in enhanced interrogations (perhaps we should call it “musical torture”), dispersing loiterers and the homeless, encouraging shoppers to purchase specific items in retail environments, and so on. We may live in a culture that views music as mere diversion and entertainment, but it’s surprising how often the music of our day-to-day lives resists this pigeonholing and aims instead to alter the world around us.7
We rarely use the word “magic” in such settings. The troubadours legitimized secular songs as art, and not as incantation; and the whole official pedagogy of music, even a thousand years later, hasn’t deviated a whit from that ingrained approach. Both as performers and audience, we are taught to view music as an aesthetic experience, not a source of enchantment. I find people get anxious when I talk about music as a magical force, so I have learned to use different words: I call music a change agent in human life, or a catalyst. But it’s still magic, even under a fancier name. Not all wizards carry wands and wear pointed hats. Some show up at work with a saxophone or guitar in hand. And we still crave their life-changing interventions, even if that aspect of their craft remains mostly unacknowledged.