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Trobar in the language of the Troubadours or Old Occitan means to find or to invent.
They used it in the sense that they would say "I am composing a song" or "I'm trying
to fit words to music." And I wanted my students to do their own kind of trobar in their creative
projects. That is to say to re-invent or re-interpret the lyrics for themselves. One of the challenges
of teaching medieval literature is how to make literature that is so distant from us
accessible to students in an innovative yet historically responsible way. This is especially
true for medieval lyric because we know so little about how it was transmitted, or received
or performed. But one of the things I wanted to emphasize in my course on Troubadours,
who are lyric poets of the 12th and 13th centuries was how this lyric was performed before a
live audience. And I wanted them to think about this through doing creative projects
in which they could translate or re-interpret these lyrics in a way that was meaningful
for them. I wanted them to study the literary and historical aspects of it but also use
new, collaborative and technological resources available to them through the Division of
Literatures, Cultures, and Languages. With a grant from the Stanford Institute for Creativity
and the Arts as well as other departments in the Humanities, I brought an ensemble from
France, the Troubadours Art Ensemble to perform for the Stanford community as well as engage
with students in all different kinds of departments and my seminar in various colloquia. This
gave the students an opportunity to talk to the performers themselves, how do they interpret
this music and what does it mean that this lyric is literature that is valuable to us
today and historical but it is also an active tradition still being performed in southern
France and all over the world by this ensemble. It's being re-interpreted as well. In their
creative project, I wanted them to reflect on this experience and engagement with these
contemporary performers. In addition to collaborating with SiCA as well as other Humanities departments,
I also collaborated with Zach Chandler, the Academic Technology Specialist in the DLCL
and Experimedia in the Division to try to think about this performative aspect and also
the students' interaction with the Ensemble by having them make creative projects in which
they could trobar in which they could invent and re-interpret this lyric for themselves
using multimedia resources. We built a site with the help of Expermedia, Performing Trobar.
The website was designed as a workspace for the students so that they could think about
and analyze this lyric in different ways using video clips or other kind of footage. Basically
in a way that was different from just writing papers or reading books and they could also
get feedback from each other and from me in a very interactive, active way. So in the
lab that was part of the course, the students made different final projects that were translations,
interpretations of the lyric that took into account all this performance aspects and interaction
with the ensemble. Jasmine Hu made a creative project that reflected upon the linguistic
aspects of the lyric. She was interested in the way that troubadours would call out to
their audience by saying "Listen up" or "Hear this, you out there" and she wanted to think
about how one could translate that into a video experience or some kind of multimedia
experience. And in her video, she foregrounded the way that even though we read these lyrics
in books, there's a way that a video or sound could call out to us, a contemporary audience
in a way that re-enacted what the troubadours were doing. In another project, Anne Levitsky,
who has a background in music wanted to translate the lyric for modern ears. She sang a song
by the troubadours but then also made her own harmonic line to it. And during the time
of the troubadours there was no harmony and so this was a way of adapting the lyric to
our modern ears. She was able to reflect upon the way words and music fit together, or work
together in the lyrics in a very interesting way. What's great about Anne's project is
that she's been able to extend her research through the project beyond the parameters
of the course. This summer she received a grant to study and look at manuscripts at
the Bibliothèque Nastionale in Paris but she's also going to be performing with the
Troubadours Art Ensemble and recording with them as well on their upcoming CD. So this
is very exciting because she's been able to continue the collaboration with the Ensemble
as well as continue her interest in the archival and literary aspects of the lyric. When she
comes back, we're going to continue developing the website for a future course and she's
going to sing songs of the lyrics, working with me so that we can have our own in-house
archive of the troubadour songs as a student resource. I see the Performing Trobar project
as continuing in this way in the sense that we have this website that can serve as an
archive for future students who can look at the creative projects archived on the site.
And also it can continue the collaboration with not only a community at Stanford but
also a community in France and other scholars and students. So it's very exciting to be
able to have this cumulative development and cumulative collaboration through the website.
It has a great effect of extending and perpetuating this kind of research. And what I hope it
does is that, it helps us think about new ways we can teach and study medieval literature
and culture by using collaborative and technological resources.