European day of early music - Capella Carniola

Performance-wise, poetry, music and dance were always closely connected in the Middle Ages. Unlike today when poetry reaches us mostly in paper form, written poetry and music were limited to a small, privileged class of people in the time of troubadours and trouvères, the purpose of which was to prevent them from sinking into oblivion. The journey of poetry from the author to the audience was made only via live performance, always accompanied by music and often also by dance. This sort of performance was mostly called carol and was performed in a circular form of dance, where the dance leader sang the lines, and everyone else, dancing and singing, joined him for the chorus. The way the music was written was closely connected to the lyrics. Music notation contained marks for the pitch of a tone, but not for its duration. The rhythmic pattern of tones can be determined solely on the basis of the lyric metre.

foto: Ars Ramovš, Katja Smolar