(Fr.: ‘hash’).
A kind of Quodlibet popular in 16th-century France. The term was first used in Attaingnant’s Second livre contenant XXV chansons (Paris, 1536) and refers to a small number of pieces associated with the repertory of the Parisian chanson in which melodies and melodic fragments from French chansons were mixed and juxtaposed in a new polyphonic framework, often to witty, hilarious or obscene effect. (Like its Spanish counterpart, the ensalada, this ‘stew’ takes a gastronomic concoction as a figurative model for a musical procedure.) The musical processes at work in early fricassées may derive from some used in theoretical and practical sources of the late 15th century, in which a complete voice part from some well-known work was combined with another line crafted from many different sources – polyphonic art songs and monophonic popular songs alike. Three of the four extant fricassées of the early 16th century (an anonymous piece, as well as one each by Henry Fresneau and Jean Crespel) similarly juxtapose a complete voice from a well-known chanson by Sermisy, Janequin or Crecquillon with catchphrases from many other pieces. The eclecticism of these pieces is prodigious: Lesure identified quotations from well over 100 sources in Fresneau’s fricassée alone. Pierre Certon’s Vivre ne puis content sans ma maistresse (RISM 153814) stands somewhat outside the radical ‘polymusicality’ of these pieces, and instead reworks only a few melodies from chansons by his friend and colleague Sermisy. The established collage technique nevertheless survived well into the second half of the 16th century: Petit Jean de Latre’s Fricassée sur les dessus de mon pouvre coeur, issued uniquely in the 1564 edition of Phalèse’s famous Septieme livre, similarly draws on chansons by Sermisy, Janequin and Northern masters such as Gombert and Crecquillon. Late examples include a Fricassée des cris de Paris in Jean Servin’s Meslanges de chansons nouvelles of 1578 (like an earlier one by Janequin, it consists exclusively of Parisian Street cries or vendors’ calls) and Denis Caignet’s five-voice fricassée N’avons point veu la peronelle from his Airs de court of 1597.
For further bibliography see Quodlibet.
I. Cazeaux: French Music in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (New York and Oxford, 1975), 230–33
E. Kovarick: ‘Apropos of the Fricassée’, SMA, xii (1978), 1–24
H. Vanhulst: ‘La fricassée de Jean de Latre (1564)’, RBM, xlvii (1993), 81–90
MARIA RIKA MANIATES/RICHARD FREEDMAN