The Song of Roland : Prologue - French Medieval Music

Music & vocals by Farya Faraji. This is an original composition which aims to be an historically informed rendition of how French music of the 1000’s onto the 1200’s would have sounded. The text is the Song of Roland, the oldest work of French literature and the central main epic of French culture in the Middle-Ages. It is set centuries prior to when it was first written around the 1000’s, being set during the time of the Carolingian Empire and Charlemagne’s reign. The instrumentation consists of a hurdy-gurdy, a psaltery, a citole and a bowed psaltery. The arrangement follows the conventions of Western European medieval music of the time: the arrangement employs the practice of Organum, that of harmonising melodies by transposing them to a fourth or a fifth—in this case, a fifth. I explain more on the subject of Organum in this video: Take the pronunciation with a grain of salt; resources on Old French phonology are difficult