« A l’aube du XIIe s., en Occitanie, naît la littérature moderne de l’Europe. Les troubadours chantent l’amour, joie et jeunesse, dans une savante alchimie des mots et des sons. Grands seigneurs ou simples roturiers, ces poètes-musiciens, vont animer plus de deux cents ans de vie intellectuelle avec savoir et connaissance (saber e coneissensa). Génie, humour, amour, chants et courtoisie embellissent leur art. Avec leurs noms et leurs biographies, dont le contenu repose sur de multiples légendes (vidas et razos), ce sont avant tout les chansons qu’il faut retenir et qui s’imposent à nous dans un style sûr et inaltérable. Dans la poésie des troubadours la parole est d’or.
Celle des cansos est ouvrée et forgée de mots de valeur. Pendant deux siècles, ces artistes de la parole libre s’inventent une esthétique nouvelle, l’ art de trobar. »

G.Zuchetto – J.Gruber Le Livre d’or des troubadours, Paris, 1998

Performing trobar

“[…]It remains a challenge for teachers of medieval lyric to make the musical and performative nature of the troubadours—the originators of the love song—accessible for students in a historically responsible and creative manner. Opportunitiesto listen to or watch performances of modern love songs seem ubiquitous today through radio, live concert, iPod or YouTube.
Yet despite the ease with which the digital age allows for personal engagement with all sorts of recordings, the sensual experience of a live concert has not yet lost the impact of shared reception, live presence, and the communal, visceral reaction to the gestures of a performer and the auditory movements of a song. As in other forms of premodern art, the teacher must provide a immediate access to texts and be wary of anachronistic or facile reimaginings of medieval culture. This is not an easy task. Relatively little has come down to us out of a primarily memorial culture in which many vernacular and secular texts, including troubadour poetry, were transmitted orally. Further, particular fictions of what constitute “the medieval” permeates contemporary culture—one only has to think of the Harry Potter series, Monty Python, and Renaissance Fairs—making it all the more important for the teacher to provide a kind of accessibility that distances itself from popular familiarity. The task of historical reconstruction aside, there is also the task of translation.
The songs of the troubadours are in Old Occitan, a medieval My experience with students who hear troubadour music for the first time, with only a vague idea of medieval culture, uch less Occitania, has proven useful in thinking through how we can engage with the live performance of troubadour song. In this vein, we are fortunate to have an ensemble like Troubadours Art Ensemble: they have performed before diverse audiences, and have bridged the academic study of the troubadour corpus with outreach to a broader, uninitiated public.[…]
The visit of the Troubadours Art Ensemble and curriculum development project is co-sponsored by the Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts; Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages; Department of French and Italian; Department of Music; Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies; France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies; and The Stanford Humanities Center.”

Marisa Galvez, Department of French and Italian Stanford University

Aujourd’hui, l’association Trob’art Productions, installée en Languedoc-Roussillon, favorise la connaissance et la diffusion des troubadours dans le monde à travers concerts, enregistrements, conférences, animations pédagogiques, expositions, Master Classes, la valorisation du patrimoine en divers sites de la région… et collabore activement au programme Performing Trobar qu’elle a initié à la Stanford University California. http://www.stanford.edu/group/troubadours/cgi-bin/lyric/