Welcome back to Between the Barlines! Today we are going to explore different types of songs prior to the renaissance era in western classical music! If you haven’t listened to any of the previous episodes from this season, please give those a listen because many of the aforementioned topics help us understand how the music we are going to start talking about today developed.

	I wanted to go on a short tangent before jumping into types of music in Europe between the 12 and 14th centuries to talk about societal climates during this time. The boundaries of countries in Europe were bending frequently with the different empires, most notably the Roman and Byzantine empires. In addition to empires, kings, nobles, and lords ruled under the feudal system, and courts became important centers of musical patronage. The feudal system created a class of aristocrats who could afford to patronize musicians and composers. Courts became centers of musical development, and we will talk about some of the musicians that flourished with that support now. 

	Many songs that deviated from the church were still in Latin; some of these songs were referred to as goliard songs. These were popular from the 10th to 13th centuries, and Burkholder states that they were mostly “associated with wandering students…known as goliards.” There were also many songs that were composed in languages other than latin like medieval French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, and more. One significant type of song like this was a French song using courtly love as its main topic. In the 12th century, troubadours from the south and trouvères from the north went around and sang these songs. Sometimes the subject of these songs is referred to as fin’ amors, but we mostly use courtly love to describe it today. The melodies of these medieval french songs are syllabic and rarely exceed over an octave of range. These songs are also typically strophic, meaning that each verse of text has the same music. Another aspect of these songs that is interesting is their form; according to Burkholder, most medieval songs are in bar form, or AAB. 

	In addition to music occurring in France with the troubadours and trouvères, music by similar musicians was being created in other areas of Europe as well. In Germany, musicians called Minnesingers between the 12th and 14th centuries wrote love songs that they called Minnelieder that are comparable to the songs in France. These songs also utilized bar form! In Italy, a song called a laude was their contribution to devotional song, despite them being sacred monophonic songs. Another prominent song contribution was the cantiga; cantigas is a medieval song written in either Spanish or Portuguese. There is a huge collection of over 400 cantigas called Cantigas de Santa Maria; these songs are in Galician-Portuguese and were written in honor of the Virgin Mary. 

	You might be wondering what types of instruments other than the voice that these musicians were using, so I am going to tell you! There were fiddles, hurdy gurdys, pipes, transverse flutes, a thing called the shawm (which was basically an oboe), and portative/positive organs. Obviously the smaller instruments were easier to carry around and serenade with comparatively to the organ, but even then, those are smaller instruments! In our next episode, we are going to start talking about polyphony, which seems like our next logical step!!! We will talk about the beginnings of this in the 13th century and explore some prominent composers and figures who made this change happen!  Join me next time on Between the Barlines.