Wer sang für wen in Salzburg?
The question of exactly who composed the songs often only labelled as münchs in many of the manuscript sources has elicited many different answers (on this question see further Stefan Engels » Kap. Widersprüchliche Forschungsmeinungen zum Mönch and » Kap. Schriftliche Zeugnisse über den Mönch). As noted (» Kap. A Panopticum of Song) it is highly unlikely that all 106 songs attributed to the Monk were indeed composed by a single individual. Christoph März, in his edition of the secular songs, attempted to attribute each of the secular songs to one of three ‘layers’(Schichten). Layer II, that furthest from the core—and thus furthest from the individual “Monk”—is particularly rich in refrain forms. This invites the suggestion that the refrain songs offered a flexible basis for less gifted poets among the courtiers at Salzburg to join in the common interest in vernacular song. For example, the songs W48, W49 and W53 (all in März’s Layer II, and all unique to the Mondsee-Wiener Liederhandschrift, A-Wn Cod. 2856) are marked by a certain derivative quality. W48, ‘Ich het czu hannt gelocket mir’, as Ingrid Bennewitz-Behr proposed, imitates a song by Heinrich von Mügeln.[22] The fact that it might be doing this in the female voice makes it unique in the Monk corpus, where female voices only appear in the context of dialogue songs such as the polyphonic pieces W3, 4 and 5, and the tenor-type song W57* (W4: » Hörbsp. ♫ Untarnslaf – Das kchúhorn).
The presence of female voices supports the idea that the Monk songs were responding to a highly varied audience.[23] Salzburg was thus, it seems, a court where participation in the making and appreciation of song was constitutive to the establishment and delineation of a courtly community. We can perhaps also draw comparisons with narrative sources from the time.[24]
[23] Knapp 2004, 468-469.
[24] Compare Willaert 1994 on the uses of song in the narrative texts of Guillaume de Machaut. An earlier Germanic example for the embedding of song in narrative is the Frauendienst of Ulrich von Liechtenstein (†1276).