ALTHOUGH MEDIEVAL MUSIC IS NOW OVER EIGHT CENTURIES OLD, IT REMAINS A modern obsession. In one form or another, music of the Middle Ages is invoked in present-day culture, from Gothic pop songs to Hollywood films.

John Haines of the Faculty of Music and the Centre for Medieval Studies is trying to understand the link by studying how people have interpreted troubadour songs since they were first written down in the late 13th century.

“I’ve focused on how the music of the troubadours and the trouvères, the lyric poets of 12th- and 13th-century France, was interpreted.” Haines admits he has his work cut out for him. “We don’t know what instruments were used, at what point they would play, the rhythm, the pitches or how long the songs lasted. What people have had to do is fill in the blanks with the 250 surviving troubadour melodies.”

Haines believes that over the centuries different influences have played an important role in how these songs have been interpreted. One tendency has been to imagine these melodies in an Arabic style or to sing them with a waltz-like rhythm to a keyboard accompaniment. The results of all this detective work will be in his forthcoming book, Eight Centuries of the Troubadours and Trouvères: The Changing Identity of Medieval Music, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institut Français de Washington and a Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst grant.

Haines draws his interest in the troubadours from his childhood. Born in Tangiers, Morocco, he grew up in Marseilles, in the south of France – the troubadours’ stomping grounds in the Middle Ages. After earning undergraduate degrees in French literature and music education in the U.S., he enrolled in musicology at U of T for his master’s and PhD. He taught at Shorter College in Georgia, then returned to U of T in 2002 when he was awarded a Canada Research Chair.

This position will allow for an extensive study of the primary system of musical notation in the Middle Ages and the direct ancestor to our own system, so-called square notation.

Haines refuses to view medieval music as esoteric or old-fashioned. “There is a great public fascination with the Middle Ages. Look at movies like The Lord of the Rings, which is based on ideas from the Middle Ages. Young people are creating associations with this time in human history by watching these films,” he says.

In fact, Haines sees definite links between then and now. “There are more musical connections between troubadour songs and the Rolling Stones or rap music than with Mozart or Schubert. The main difference is that rap comes out of an oral culture, not from one where music was written down. That says something about what was important to people 800 years ago.”

(Reprinted from the U of T Bulletin, with additional reporting by Paul Fraumeni/Edge)