Talk:Rondeau (forme fixe)

What is this article talking about?
I don't know the source of this article, but to my knowledge the rondeau is a french medieval seculiar court song going AB aA ab AB. It is one of the three formes fixes flourishing in the 14th century, uses two rhymes and results in at least 8 verses. The sections represented by caps are the refrain, means those verses are repeated identically. Refrains appear in the contemporary artworks also outside of rondeaus and may have a status of proverbs or sayings. Rondeaus are mostly set to music. Here is an example by Solage i'm just working on:

A - fumeux fume par fumee B - fumeuse speculacion a - qu'antre fummet sa pensee A - fumeux fume par fumee

a - quar fumer molt li agree b - tant qu'il ait son entencion A - fumeux fume par fumee B - fumeuse speculation

So, what this article talks about is definitely not the Rondeau (poetry) i know. My sources are "New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians", "Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart" and manuscripts filled with french rondeaus from the 14th century by Machaut, Solage, Cordier, etc. -- LeV Jul. 07

Pages merged
I had the same "WTF?" moment reading this page as User:LeVampyre had back in 2007 in his post above. The article as it stood did a very poor job at defining what it was about. From what I could gather reading up on the topic, there may be a difference of perspectives here. The 15-line form that this article was talking about is a later (mostly 16th-century) development of the form, with the refrain shortened to a single line rentrement. Musicologists will invariably use the term "rondeau" to refer to the older, full-refrain form of the 14th and early 15th century, when it was a combined literary and musical genre. Literary scholars may distinguish the forms, treating the later 15-line form as the primary type of rondeau, or reserving the term to it, and calling the older full-refrain forms "rondel". General reference works tend to treat both together under the same term, "rondeau". The article as it stood was inconsistent, as it first implied the "rondeau" was set to music in the 14th century, but then went on to define its structure solely in terms of the later form (which wasn't.) Somebody, somewhere, needed to explain how the two are historically related, which the article failed to do.

(I think there is a general problem here with the way many of our poetry form articles are written, treating poetic forms mostly in an ahistoric, taxonomical fashion, and often exemplifying them only with modern English texts, even in cases where the forms are inextricably linked with quite different historical contexts and languages.)

In any case, I've tried to solve this by merging this page with Rondeau (music) and expanding it to treat both forms together as an historical development. Fut.Perf. ☼ 07:47, 28 February 2013 (UTC)