Sirventes cut from vanished cloth

Claim (verbatim)

The sirventes was, by the tradition's own account, a parasite form: the Catalan Doctrina de compondre dictats instructs that it should take its tune from an existing song, and sirventes routinely borrowed a canso's full metrical scheme and rhyme sounds so that polemic could ride a melody the audience already knew. That habit turns Frank's Repertoire metrique into a loss-detector. A sirventes whose exact scheme survives in no canso is, with high probability, wearing the clothes of a model we no longer have; count the model-less sirventes and you have bounded from below a body of vanished love-song. The mechanism that split the pairs is differential channel survival: the canso was anthologized for its art and travelled the international canon-books, while the sirventes was kept for its history - its names, feuds and crusades - often in different, later, more local collections. Pairs that entered the written record through different doors could easily lose one member, and the lost member should preferentially be the model, since by the time of compilation the polemic's referential value outlived the love song's fashion. The formal shadow the borrowed scheme casts is, for each missing model, the only surviving trace that the canso ever existed.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: joining BEdT genre labels to Frank's metrical formulas, and excluding by rule the twenty most frequent schemes in the whole repertory (commodity forms on which model-matching is meaningless), at least one-third of sirventes will share their exact scheme - stanza structure plus rhyme-sound sequence - with no surviving canso (primary clause: the one-third model-less rate; the verdict follows it). Schemes shared only with other sirventes or with nothing count as model-less; a documented Old French model noted in Frank's own concordances counts as modeled. The test voids if fewer than 150 sirventes carry usable Frank formulas.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: Frank's Repertoire metrique scheme identities crossed with BEdT genre labels - the census of sirventes whose exact scheme appears in no surviving canso.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

The sirventes as formal parasite is textbook - the Doctrina de compondre dictats prescribes the borrowed tune (edited in Marshall's Razos de trobar volume), and the contrafacta identifiable on Frank's schemes are catalogued in Marshall's classic Romania study - but the published work counts the surviving matches, not the residue: the share of sirventes whose exact scheme appears in no extant canso, under a commodity-scheme exclusion, has never been computed, so the one-third model-less rate is un-run.

• J.H. Marshall, 'Pour l'etude des contrafacta dans la poesie des troubadours', Romania 101 (1980)
• J.H. Marshall (ed.), The Razos de trobar of Raimon Vidal and Associated Texts (London, 1972)
• I. Frank, Repertoire metrique de la poesie des troubadours, 2 vols. (Paris, 1953-57)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.