(Fr.).
French verses, written in the last third of the 16th century by Jean-Antoine de Baïf, a member of the group of poets known as the Pléiade, and by his followers. Baïf attempted to apply the quantitative principles of Greek and Latin poetry to the French language, by its nature accentual, and worked out an accentual version of classical metres – hexameters, Sapphic strophes, and so on – by equating long with accented syllables and short with unaccented syllables.
As a member of the Pléiade, Baïf was committed to the proposition that music and poetry should be united as they had been (according to their theories) in ancient times. Eventually, Baïf and his musical associates – Thibault de Courville, Jacques Mauduit, Guillaume Costeley and the brilliant Claude Le Jeune – devised a technique for setting vers mesurés to music. In musique mesurée à l’antique (or, more simply, musique mesurée), the composer followed the metre of the verse exactly; each long (accented) syllable was set to a minim and each short (unaccented) syllable to a crotchet. To ensure that the words would not be obscured the verses were set syllabically in an almost strictly homophonic texture broken occasionally by very brief melismas often no more than two notes long. Because of the complex patterns of classical verse musique mesurée moves in irregular rhythmic groupings, alternating between two and three beats. Since no regular musical metre is maintained such compositions are best transcribed without bar-lines, or, at most, with bar-lines marking ends of phrases. The beginning of Le Jeune’s Si le lien se voit deffait (ex.1), from his Airs of 1594, shows the austere character of the new style.
D.P. Walker, whose studies of vers and musique mesurées are the best and most thorough to date, reported that Baïf and his principal musical adviser, Thibault de Courville, began working out their theories and experimenting with practical solutions in 1567. By 1570 they had amassed enough material and gained enough support from musicians and men of letters to found an Académie de Poésie et de Musique for which Charles IX granted Letters of Patent. Baïf set ambitious goals for the Académie; it was not to be merely a literary salon where the union of music and poetry could be celebrated properly for the first time since the golden age of Greece and Rome. He intended that, through vers and musique mesurées, it would be able to revive the ethical effects of ancient music. Its aims were political and, indeed, revolutionary. An art new in its style and in its effect on listeners was to be cultivated at the concerts sponsored by the Académie in Baïf’s house. Consistent with his plans, Baïf would not tolerate anything but musique mesurée at these concerts. The statutes of the Académie reveal that there were to be two classes of members, professional musicians and auditeurs, the gentlemen who attended the concerts who were to pay annual subscriptions to subsidize the group’s work. The professional musicians were to meet every day to rehearse, and were forbidden from copying or carrying away any of the books containing vers or musique mesurées. The Académie was also to be an educational institution, training young poets and musicians, not so that they could popularize musique mesurée or introduce it to ever larger audiences, but so that the new art could be kept within a small circle of intellectuals and politically powerful men until its style was fixed and its superiority clearly recognized. Then the élite could impose their art on the general public; the musical life of the country was to become well regulated and mankind be improved.
Baïf’s grandiose plans came to very little. After initial opposition, the Académie was in fact organized and met, but it probably did not survive after Charles IX’s death in 1574. Certainly, Baïf and his circle continued to be active throughout the 1570s and 80s, but the first Académie was replaced by another – the so-called ‘Académie du Palais’ (because it met in the Louvre) – under the reign of Henri III. The new Académie had a completely different and more narrowly aesthetic character, even though many of the same members participated and it, too, enjoyed royal patronage.
Baïf’s Académie might be considered but a curious footnote to history were it not for the confined but significant influence his work had on the most important French musicians of the late 16th and early 17th centuries. No musique mesurée was published during the few years the original Académie was meeting; but collections of neo-classic verse set to musique mesurée appeared in great quantities in the 1570s and 1580s. In 1578, for instance, F.M. Caietain indicated in a preface to his Chansons that the rhythmic profile of his settings of some of Baïf’s chansonettes mesurées had been shaped under the guidance of Thibault de Courville. From thereafter a number of other composers, such as Didier Le Blanc (1579), Guillaume Tessier (1582), Nicolas de la Grotte (1583) and Claude Le Jeune (1583 and 1585) included examples of musique mesurée in their chanson publications. Jacques Mauduit issued his complete settings of Baïf’s chansonettes mesurées in 1586. The bulk of Le Jeune’s mesurées settings did not appear in print until shortly after his death, in Le printemps of 1603, a book issued under the editorial supervision of his sister Cecile. Despite the specialized social and aesthetic origins of the genre, vers and musique mesurées continued to be written; the posthumous Meslanges (1610) by Eustache Du Caurroy, for example, includes a good many settings of neo-classical poetry by Nicolas Rapin.
The formation of Baïf’s Académie and the subsequent history of the specialized musical settings that derived from it have long held the attention of those interested in the French Renaissance, thanks to the pioneering researches and early modern editions of Walker, Expert and Yates. Musique mesurée has also been viewed in somewhat broader and less isolated musical and cultural contexts. It has long been acknowledged, for instance, that the lyrical impulse of the nascent musique mesurée recall that of the homophonic airs (earlier called vaudevilles) in mid-15th-century French music prints, even if the latter were based on rhymed poetry rather than on texts written in emulation of Greek or Latin metrical schemes. Perhaps more surprisingly, some of Baïf’s poems (and Le Jeune’s settings in particular) are closely modelled on villanesche and villotte published in Venice during the 1550s and later. One of the most famous examples of the repertory and among the very first of Le Jeune’s airs mesurés to appear in print, Une puce j’ay dedans l’oreille, seems to be a reworking of the poem No pulice m’entrato nell’orecchia from Donato’s Le napollitane et alcuni madrigali of 1550. Of new interest, too, are the parallels that exist between the classicizing tendencies of the Académie and other attempts to align current French musical practice with the expressive ideals and ethical effects of ancient poetry and music, from the retrospective anthologies of chansons issued during the late 16th century to the musical poetics of Ronsard’s Amours and the philosophical dialogues of Pontus de Tyard.
M. Augé-Chiquet: La vie, les idées et l’oeuvre de Jean-Antoine de Baïf (Paris, 1909/R)
H. Prunières: Le ballet de cour en France avant Benserade et Lully (Paris, 1914/R)
P.M. Masson: ‘Le mouvement humaniste’, EMDC, I/iii (1921), 1298–342
D.P. Walker: ‘The Aims of Baïf’s Académie de poésie et de musique’, JRBM, i (1946–7), 91–100
F.A. Yates: The French Academies of the Sixteenth Century (London,1947/R)
K.J. Levy: ‘Vaudeville, vers mesurés et airs de cour’, Musique et poésie au XVIe siècle [Paris 1953], ed. J. Jacquot (Paris, 1954, 2/1974), 185–99
M.M. McGowan: L’art du ballet de cour en France, 1581–1643 (Paris,1963)
E. Weber: La musique mesurée à l’antique en Allemagne (Paris, 1974)
R. Hyatte: ‘Meter and Rhythm in Jean Antoine de Baïf, “Etrenes de poezie fransoeze” and the Vers-mesures-à-l’antique of Other Poets in the Late 16th-Century’, Bibliothèque d’humanisme et renaissance, xliii (1981), 487–508
M. McGowan: Ideal Forms in the Age of Ronsard (Berkeley, 1985)
D.P. Walker: Music, Spirit and Language in the Renaissance, ed. P. Gouk (London, 1985) [incl. reprs. of seminal articles by Walker]
P. Bonniffet: Un ballet démasqué: l’union de la musique au verbe dans ‘Le printans’ de Jean-Antoine de Baïf et Claude Le Jeune (Paris, 1988)
G. Dottin: ‘Ronsard et les voix de ville’, RdM, lxxiv (1988), 165–72
G. Durosoir: L’air de cour en France, 1571–1655 (Liège, 1991)
I. His: ‘Les modèles italiens de Claude Le Jeune’, RdM, lxxvii (1991), 25–58
I. His: ‘Claude Le Jeune et le rhythme prosodique: la mutation des années 1570’, RdM, lxxix (1993), 201–26
H.M. Brown: ‘Ut musica poesis: Music and Poetry in France in the Late Sixteenth Century’, EMH, xiii (1994), 1–63
R. Freedman: ‘Claude Le Jeune, Adrian Willaert and the Art of Musical Translation’, EMH, xiii (1994), 123–48
I. His: ‘Italianism and Claude Le Jeune’, EMH, xiii (1994), 149–70
HOWARD MAYER BROWN/RICHARD FREEDMAN