A Musico-Literary Commentary on Bernart de Ventadorn’s “Qan vei la laudeta mover”

What are the mechanisms facilitating the memorization and minimizing variation in the transmission of troubadour poetry? A close analysis shows that even in the best documented case, as modern readers look at a transcription of the manuscript page, they should not expect to see reflected back at them the image of an original song, free from the influence of oral and written transmission. This reading takes into account the modalities of these two strata of transmission as they are deployed, complicating each other in each particular case. Key lexemes are bound to melodic leaps, pitch goals and melismas. Manuscript evidence suggests that these accentuated lexemes were more stable in the transmission tradition than others; just as in the textual stratum there is more variation in the beginnings of the verses than in the ends, stabilized by rhymes.