(fl 1162–73; d Cortezon). French troubadour. He was a lord of the town of Omelas, west of Montpellier. Through his father he was a vassal of the seigneurs of Montpellier; he also had connections, through his mother, with the lords of Baux. Raimbaut maintained a fairly lavish court at his castle at Cortezon (between Orange and Avignon in the marquisate of Provence), where he may have received Marcabru, Guiraut de Bornelh, and Peire d'Alvernhe, and a joglar named Levet who is mentioned in his poems and in his testament. His 40 surviving poems contain allusions to French literature, Ovid and rhetoric, with recondite versification schemes, a style known as trobar ric. Only one canso melody is extant, in the northern French source F-Pn fr.20050: Pos tals sabers mi sors e·m creis (PC 389.36; ed. in van der Werf and in Aubrey). It is essentially through-composed, but several phrases are repeated with variations, a common technique among the troubadours. It makes use of a three-note rising figure at the beginning of almost every phrase, similar to motivic treatments in music by his contemporaries.
W.T. Pattison: The Life and Works of the Troubadour Raimbaut d'Orange (Minneapolis, 1952) [incl. complete edn of texts]
M. de Riquer: Los trovadores: historia, literari y textos (Barcelona, 1975), i, 418–58
H. van der Werf: The Extant Troubadour Melodies (Rochester, NY, 1984), 288* [incl. music edn]
E. Aubrey: The Music of the Troubadours (Bloomington, IN, 1996)
For further bibliography see Troubadours, trouvères.
ELIZABETH AUBREY