Adam de la Halle

Adam de la Halle worked in northern France during the final generation of the trouvère tradition, sometime between 1245 and the late 1280s or early 1300s. He belonged to the Confrérie des jongleurs et bourgeois d'Arras, a guild of performers and townsmen. His output moved between conservative chansons and poetic debates in the established manner, and newer experiments: polyphonic rondel, motets drawn from liturgical technique, and around 1282–83, the Jeu de Robin et Marion, a musical play that survives as the earliest known secular French drama with music. The range left him with a contradicto…