A prominent historian of medieval music has termed the polyphonic rondeaux of Adam de la Halle "a turning point in the history of secular song." Though simple in form and short in duration, his rondeaux strike out in a bold new direction. For at least a couple of centuries, the divine liturgy as sung in French centers such as Paris and St. Martial had been experimenting with simple but effective chordal polyphony, adorning the melodies of holy plainchant with accompanying voices. French secular music, instead, was dominated on the one hand by solo songs, and on the other by the multi-layered (and polytextual) complexity of the motet. The famous trouvère of Arras, de la Halle, wrote in both of these forms. But he also left 16 polyphonic pieces composed in a more direct style, known collectively as Li Rondel. These pieces, 14 of which are in what would later be the fixed rondeau form, showed the path that secular French song would take for centuries after; the style and the forms would be codified by Machaut, and both would extend all the way to the time of Guillaume Dufay and Josquin Desprez.

Tant con je vivrai simply but eloquently exemplifies de la Halle's new style. The piece appears in a simple chordal three-voiced texture throughout, similar to the sacred Conductus: a somewhat more ornamented upper voice and a middle melody travel at the same speed as the pedantic lowest voice. Tant con je vivrai was copied into its manuscript sources in score format, also like the Conductus. Once, in the second phrase, a quick shift to B natural colors the harmony. The lilting triple-meter rhyhms, the simple modal melody in the middle voice, and the regular phrases (three and five tacti long) clearly indicate de la Halle's inspiration in a "Rondel," or round-dance. Tant con je vivrai could even have been written for performance during a dance. The brief French text speaks in highly conventional platitudes about the lover's loyalty to the beloved "as long as [he] lives." That very first line is used as a refrain three times in the poem's eight lines: AbaAabAB (capital A and B are the refrain, while lower-case letters represent new lines of text to the refrain music). Each musical and textual feature seems perfectly simple, yet proved pathbreaking for later musical generations. The troubador's grand chant would diminish, while rondeaux like Tant con je vivrai would reign for 200 years.

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