Aubrey Page 5

1. Who were they?
2. When were they?
3. What was their training?
4. Were the scribes who wrote Old French monophony originally trained in writing plainchant, or did they specialize from the beginning in vernacular song?
5. Did they also write polyphony like organum, conductus, discant, and motets; were they trained in modal notation, or in mensural notation?
6. What did they know about music theory, particularly about rhythmic modes and the notational signs used to express them, about modal or mensural?
7. Did scribes copy from other written sources? If so, were these mensural or not?
8. Did they write down music from memory? from dictation?
9. What did scribes know about trouvère song: about compositional norms such as genres, forms, and style; about the original conception of the composers?
10. What did scribes know about specific songs and what they sounded like?
11. What did they know about singers, about their practices, and about their needs?
12. What were the intentions of the scribes?
13. Were they attempting to be faithful to a particular composition (the "piece"), or to perceived compositional norms, or to abstract "theory"?
14. Were they attempting to capture sounds they heard, a moment in performance, a conflation of many performances, an idealization of the "best" performance?
15. Were scribes being descriptive, translating sounds into visual symbols?
16. Were they trying to be prescriptive, regularizing or nuancing, reducing or enlarging, correcting or recomposing? If the latter, was this conscious or unconscious?
17. Were scribes preserving songs for others, for immediate patrons, or unknown future admirers of French song?
18. How reliable were scribes — as listeners, as translators from sounds to signs, as describers, as prescribers?
19. Should we trust them? For what?

The Singers

1. Who were they?
2. Did they sing plainchant as well as vernacular songs?
3. Did they sing polyphony?
4. Were the singers trained to read music?
5. Were they trained to read modal or mensural notation?
6. Did they know music theory?
7. How did singers learn a song — from another singer or from the composer? Were they themselves the composer?
8. Did they learn or sing from manuscripts?
9. How much did they rely on memory, or on formulas?
10. How much and what kind of freedom of interpretation did they have?

The Signs

1. For whom was a manuscript intended — the composers? singers? a patron? posterity?
2. What was the purpose of the signs in a particular book?
3. Were the songs a transcription from performance, a "description" of heard sounds?
4. If so, how adequate were the signs to represent the sounds: what were they sufficient to capture about sound, and what were they incapable of capturing?
5. Were the signs mnemonic, intended to remind singers of tunes that they already knew?
6. Is the notation descriptive or prescriptive? Do the signs suggest possibilities, or do they prescribe necessities?
7. Were the signs intended to represent an idealization of sounds, icons as it were of a typical, a traditional, a desired performance, or of the idea of a performance?