The life replaces the tune

Claim (verbatim)

Troubadour songbooks preserve two kinds of context for a song: musical notation, and the short prose biographies (vidas) and anecdotes (razos) that tell you who the poet loved and why he sang. This conjecture holds that the two were substitute goods, not complements: chansonniers systematically preserve either melodies or biographies, rarely both, because a song still alive in performance needed no backstory, while a song that had become a reading text needed prose scaffolding precisely because the performance context — and the tune — had died. The vida is a tombstone erected where the melody used to stand. If true, the strange distribution of the surviving troubadour melodies (barely a tenth of the corpus, concentrated in a few manuscripts) is not accident of loss but a map of where the songs were last actually sung.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Across the troubadour tradition, manuscripts rich in vidas and razos (the Italian chansonniers A, B, I, K) will show melody transmission at or near zero, while the notated chansonniers (G, R, W, X) will carry significantly fewer biographical prose items per song; and at the poet level, among troubadours with at least ten surviving songs, those equipped with vidas will have a lower melody-survival rate than those without, controlling for total witness count. Primary clause: the poet-level negative association between vida presence and melody survival.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: BEdT (Bibliografia Elettronica dei Trovatori) per-song witness and vida/razo records, joined to the Troubadour Melodies Database inventory of notated songs.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

Searched vidas/razos versus melody transmission. The exact connection is published: the Italian chansonniers that transmit troubadour song without melodies are the same manuscripts whose compilers supply vidas and razos for audiences cut off from the original performance context — the standard account since Meneghetti. Only the poet-level quantification is new.

• M.L. Meneghetti, Il pubblico dei trovatori (Einaudi, 1992)
• 'Scribes and Singers: Latin Models of Authority and the Compilation of Troubadour Songbooks' (Univ. of Michigan diss.)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.