(Fr.: ‘song’).
Any lyric composition set to French words; more specifically, a French polyphonic song of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. In a general sense the word ‘chanson’ refers to a wide variety of compositions: the monophonic songs of the Middle Ages (see Troubadours, trouvères); court songs of the late 16th and 17th centuries ( see Air de cour); popular songs of the streets, cafés and music halls in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries (see Chanson pour boire; Vaudeville; Pastourelle; Bergerette (ii); Brunette); art songs of the 19th and 20th centuries (Mélodie); as well as to folksongs (‘chanson populaire’ or ‘chant folklorique’). The term is sometimes used in its more specific sense to refer only to those 15th- and 16th-century polyphonic songs that do not set poems in one of the formes fixes (see Rondeau (i); Virelai; Ballade (i)), but in this article it is taken in a somewhat broader context to mean any polyphonic song with French text written from about the time of Machaut to the end of the 16th century.
3. 1525 to the mid-16th century.
4. The second half of the 16th century.
HOWARD MAYER BROWN/DAVID FALLOWS (1–2), HOWARD MAYER BROWN/RICHARD FREEDMAN (3–4), NIGEL WILKINS/DAVID FALLOWS (bibliography to 1450), HOWARD MAYER BROWN/DAVID FALLOWS, RICHARD FREEDMAN (bibliography after 1450)
Extensive collections of monophonic songs by trouvères and troubadours survive from the 13th century, and secular songs sometimes appear in one of the upper parts of a 13th-century motet, combined with other texts in French or Latin and set over a tenor derived from plainchant (or, rarely, from a song or dance). But polyphonic compositions in which all the voices sing the same lyrical poem (or where the top line, intended to be sung, is accompanied by one or two newly invented subordinate lines) are extremely rare before the middle of the 14th century. Guillaume de Machaut is the earliest musician to have written an extensive collection of polyphonic songs; he can legitimately be called the first important composer of polyphonic chansons.
But a few polyphonic songs survive from the late 13th and early 14th centuries: a number of three-voice rondeaux, including 16 composed by Adam de la Halle, one by Jehannot de L’Escurel and two in the so-called Picard roll (F-Pn Pic.67), dating from the early 14th century. In addition, the late 13th-century manuscript F-Pn fr.12786 contains on ff.77–82 a group of 35 poems (mostly rondeaux) with spaces that can only have been intended to contain polyphonic music of the kind found in Adam de la Halle’s chansons. Apel also proposed that three songs in the Leiden fragments (NL-Lu BPL 2720, ed. in Apel, 1972, iii, nos.285–7, and Van Biezen and Gumbert, 1985, nos.L9–11) could be from the first quarter of the century, though their context in a Flemish manuscript of around 1400 could be otherwise construed. Most of these songs were written in a style closely resembling that of the conductus. The music moves in lightly decorated note-against-note counterpoint; most of the pieces were notated in score with the text beneath the lowest voice. In some or all of these chansons, the lowest or middle voice seems to be the most important melodically; for example, the middle voice of Jehannot’s A vous, douce debonaire, appears elsewhere in the manuscript of his works as an independent melody supplied with the complete poetic text (the polyphonic version has only the refrain). This could suggest that these earliest chanson composers may well have set about making polyphonic versions of originally monophonic melodies.
Besides the two polyphonic rondeaux, the Picard roll also contains two chaces, that is, three-part canons, complete with onomatopoeic effects, that set hunting poems in the manner of an Italian caccia (although most cacce consist of a two-part canon over a third non-canonic supporting line). Only an incomplete fragment of one chace appears in the Picard roll, and the second (Se je chant mains que ne suel) was originally thought to be a two-part canon.
Among Machaut’s settings of long sequence-like poems called lais, most of them monophonic, are several that are canonic, and one of his polyphonic ballades consists of a three-part canon with each voice singing different words. But most of Machaut’s polyphonic songs resemble neither chaces nor the conductus-like compositions of Adam and Jehannot. Instead, they are basically treble-dominated, with one or more florid melodic lines supplied with text, one or more slower-moving accompanying lines (tenors and contratenors) and an occasional faster-moving upper part called ‘triplum’. Judging from their musical style, Machaut’s chansons seem best adapted for performance as solo songs with instrumental accompaniment, although 14th-century performing practices allowed a cappella performance of them.
In his long narrative poem, Remede de Fortune, probably written before 1342, Machaut interpolated compositions for one, two, three and four voices to illustrate various verse forms: Lai, complainte, chanson roial, baladelle, ballade, virelai and rondelet (or rondeau). But the major portion of his secular polyphonic works consists of settings for two, three and four voices of ballades, virelais (or ‘chansons baladées’, as he called them) and rondeaux. They have survived as a group, included in the several manuscripts that contain Machaut’s complete poetic and musical works, though several also appear scattered throughout various manuscript anthologies of the time. Since there are so few connecting stylistic links between the conductus-like chansons of the earlier generation and the treble-dominated style of Machaut, with its emphasis on rhythmically unstable, intricately decorated melodic lines, it may be that Machaut himself invented the new chanson style that was to dominate secular polyphony for almost 200 years. Possibly Philippe de Vitry, none of whose secular works survive, first composed polyphonic chansons in the new style; an anonymous 14th-century poetic treatise credits him with having ‘found the manner of the lais and simple rondeaux’, a statement that may acknowledge his innovations in the realm of secular polyphony, but may merely suggest that he established those poetic forms in the manner in which musicians would continue to use them, or that he set those poetic forms to monophonic music. Possibly, too, Machaut derived his new chanson style from the earlier motet, for the two kinds of composition are not completely dissimilar. The 13th-century motet is normally polytextual, but the tenor is in longer notes; thus a two-voice motet, with French text in the upper voice, differs from a chanson chiefly in having a tenor that is derived from plainchant and written in modal rhythms or isorhythmic patterns, rather than being newly composed and rhythmically free.
The repertory of polyphonic chansons of the first half or even three-quarters of the 14th century is quite small (Machaut’s 70 or so compositions make up by far the largest single group), but composers after about 1360 regularly set French lyric poems polyphonically. Well over 400 compositions survive from the last three or four decades of the century, all of them available for study in modern editions (see Apel, 1950 and 1970–72; Greene, 1981–9; Wilkins, 1966), and Reaney (1955–83) has published over 100 more dating from the first decades of the 15th century. These chansons were the work of two overlapping generations of composers active during the period between Machaut and Du Fay (c1360–1420): a group of ‘mannerists’, most of whose complex works were composed before the turn of the century; and a somewhat younger group (the precursors of Du Fay and Binchois) who wrote less complicated chansons during the first two or three decades of the 15th century, but who began their work before 1400. The works of some of the best composers of this period, such as Johannes Ciconia, Matteo da Perugia and Baude Cordier, show the characteristics of both generations; during their careers, however, these composers appear to have simplified their earlier mannerist tendencies and helped to establish a new style.
The majority of mannerist chansons, which consist of mostly three-part settings of ballades, virelais and rondeaux, appear in four large manuscript anthologies from libraries in Chantilly (F-CH 564), Modena (I-MOe α.M.5.24, olim lat.568), Paris (F-Pn n.a.fr.6771, the so-called Reina Codex) and Turin (I-Tn J.II.9), the last of which contains a repertory of music from Cyprus. Some of the mannerist composers worked at the papal court in Avignon (J.S. Hasprois, Johannes Haucourt) and at the courts of Foix or Aragon (Gacian Reyneau, Jaquemin de Senleches, Pierre Tailhandier and Trebor). Others, such as Anthonello de Caserta, Philippus de Caserta and Matteo da Perugia, were Italian, and their works show the influence of the Trecento ballata, madrigal and caccia.
The mannerist composers took special delight in rhythmic complexity, written down in a sophisticated notation capable of expressing intricate syncopations and polyrhythms (ex.1; the sets of notes above and below the staves were added by the editor, Apel, to clarify the rhythmic groupings of the original notation). Most of their chansons have the treble-dominated texture first found in Machaut’s polyphonic songs, a florid melody with text accompanied by two slower-moving supporting voices (tenor and contratenor). This basic scheme is capable of great variety, however: the contratenor sometimes approaches the cantus in speed and complexity; some chansons have two florid melodies, each supplied with text; in some a fourth voice, called ‘triplum’, is added above the others. The longest and most ambitious and serious chansons of the mannerists set ballades, some of which extend to 90 bars or more. Among the most immediately appealing compositions in this repertory are the virelais that imitate natural sounds such as birdcalls (e.g. Vaillant’s Par maintes foys).
Chansons by the later of the two generations between Machaut and Du Fay are found in a number of early 15th-century manuscript anthologies, particularly that in Oxford (GB-Ob Can.misc.213). This collection includes music by Nicolas Grenon, Richard Loqueville, Estienne Grossin, Franchois Lebertoul, Guillaume Legrant, Johannes Reson, Hugo and Arnold de Lantins, as well as by Johannes Cesaris, Johannes Carmen and Johannes Tapissier, the three composers singled out by Martin le Franc in his poem Champion des dames as having astonished Paris with their music before the advent of Du Fay and Binchois. With their simpler style, in which the complex artifices of the mannerists are largely absent, they established the conventions that the later 15th-century composers followed. In their music the principal melodic line is less florid than in works by Machaut and his successors. Melismas are usually reserved for initial or final parts of a phrase (and may well occasionally have been performed by instruments). The contratenor generally moves with the tenor in slower note values often disjunctly, filling in the harmonies. The more ambitious ballades and multi-stanza virelais all but disappeared in favour of the shorter and more epigrammatic rondeaux.
Many of the most important 15th-century composers were born and educated in the areas controlled by the dukes of Burgundy, especially in the part that is now northern France and Belgium. From there many of them pursued careers in various parts of western Europe, particularly Italy, and became the ambassadors of an international musical style. Hence scholars speak of a Burgundian school of 15th-century composers, or a Franco-Flemish school, and of Burgundian or Franco-Flemish chansons. The terms have proved their usefulness, and it is doubtless correct to stress the importance of the 15th-century Burgundian court as a cultural centre so long as it is clear that the most important surviving French chansonniers of the years 1450–75 are from central France (perhaps Paris, Tours or Bourges) and that other French centres were often just as important.
The work of Guillaume Du Fay dominates our view of the French chanson in the second quarter of the 15th century, largely because his are the works that most vividly characterize their texts. He seems to have chosen a wider range of poetic theme than most of his contemporaries. The variety of moods in his song poetry is enormous: from the celebratory – Resvelliés vous – to the lamenting – Mon chier amy – to the hearty and companionable – Hé compaignons – to the obscene – Je ne suy plus – to the seasonal – Ce jour de l’an – to the suicidal – Helas mon dueil – to the farewell song – Adieu ces bons vins – to the incomprehensible jargon of the drinking-song Puisque vous estes campieur, and so on. He cultivated a wide range of sharply focussed ideas, while many other composers operated within a less consciously varied palette (the variety is still there, just with rather subtler gradations).
But even within his love poetry, Du Fay shows the most astonishing variety. Par le regard de vos beaux yeux is one of the few songs of blissfully happy and fully reciprocated love. Pouray je avoir is in the genre of persuasive seductive songs, uncertain of their reception. J’ay mis mon cuer is a song of unrestrained praise expecting no response. In Malheureux cuer the poet addresses his heart and complains that it has brought him unfathomable sadness.
Du Fay could set the tone with absolute precision in only a few notes. The long held note that opens Par le regard de vos beaux yeux shows an almost tentative introduction to a melody that becomes more and more luscious as it progresses. The striking chromatics at the start of Helas mon dueil are among the saddest notes he wrote, strikingly different from the joyful chromatics at the opening of the wedding song Resvelliés vous. The languid octave rise and fall that begins Malheureux cuer gives a wonderful introduction to the poet’s dialogue with his wayward heart. At the start of Vostre bruit the sturdy imitative pattern marvellously reflects the poet’s courage in aspiring to love a lady so much loved by others. The bracingly imitative opening of Entre vous, gentils amoureux instantly sets the tone of communal merrymaking on Mayday.
Du Fay, like his predecessors, set mostly chansons cast in one of the formes fixes (La belle se siet is a rare exception, being based on a popular ballad melody), but he had a decided preference for rondeaux over ballades or virelais; almost 60 of his 80 chansons are rondeaux, a proportion characteristic of the chanson production of most later 15th-century composers.
Du Fay inherited the treble-dominated three-part texture from earlier generations, but in his chansons this traditional model underwent considerable revision and refinement. The principal melodic line (and, indeed, all three lines) in his early chansons, such as Adieu ces bons vins de Lannoy ( ex.2), is apt to be quite simple metrically. Except for frequent hemiola patterns they can be transcribed into modern notation in 3/4 or 6/8 with few or no syncopations over the bar-lines. In later works Du Fay conceived his melodies in irregular groupings of two or three beats independent of metrical units, a feature that gives his melodies a floating, almost detached quality, and that established a stylistic convention followed by most composers for the next 150 years. Also in his later chansons Du Fay refined his control of tonality, and he took ever greater care to integrate the various strands of texture into a homogeneous whole (while never abandoning the layered structure of treble-dominated texture), by moving all three voices at approximately the same speed, for example, or by increasing the amount of imitation among the voices.
Binchois is usually portrayed as a lesser contemporary of Du Fay. Spending most of his mature career at the court of Burgundy, Binchois cultivated a much more consistent style, where Du Fay seems to have gathered new ideas from others almost with each new piece. The music of Binchois is more private and reflective, so it has found less favour in recent years. But in the 1420s and 30s his music was more widely distributed than that of Du Fay; and in many ways his restrained and refined style can be considered to represent the central tradition of the chanson in those years.
Much of Binchois' music is very simple: extremely regular phrases; almost syllabic declamation of the text until the slight melismas in the last line to bring it to a close; but most important of all, very much music of melodic line and grace, with the lower voices often playing no role except to support the melody. Everything is calculated to framing the very simple melody that projects the words. In his music every slightest gesture seems designed for a clear musical purpose; the text must come through with absolute clarity, an aim achieved by using an almost minimalist melody, sometimes with phrases that keep within only three or four notes.
When Binchois becomes more elaborate it is still clear that his aim is clarity and graceful line. His music shows very little interest in harmonic colour for its own sake. Binchois was a composer of lines, not harmonies or textures. In some of his chansons there are astonishing and fascinating dissonances, but even these are calculated merely to drive the melodic line.
Du Fay and Binchois were the most distinguished figures of their generation, but there were many fine chanson composers among their contemporaries, most of them employed in cathedrals and princely chapels as church musicians. Like Du Fay, many of them had been educated by the great choir schools in the Low Countries. Graduates of those institutions who were active during the first half of the century include Nicolas Grenon, Richard Loqueville, Johannes Brassart, Hugo and Arnold de Lantins and Johannes Franchois de Gemblaco.
Around 1450, various changes in the chanson style took place, of which three should be mentioned here. The first is syntactical: the contratenor moved into a range below the tenor, becoming a true bass line for the first time in musical history; that affected all kinds of polyphony (including, for example, the emergence of a consistent style of four-voice sacred polyphony at the same time) and therefore needs no further comment in this context. The second concerns text-setting: just as the composers of the early 15th century had reacted against the music of the Ars Subtilior by writing songs that were almost syllabic and put their emphasis on clear declamation, so the generation of the 1450s allowed a new luxury of lines to create their own kind of novelty. A rondeau with a four-line refrain in the 1420s or 30s would characteristically take about two minutes to perform, whereas those of the 1450s could be twice as long and those of the Compère-Agricola generation perhaps six or seven minutes – a development that surely contributed to the ultimate abandonment of the formes fixes. Third, and perhaps related to the second change, was the revival of the old virelai form that had been neglected for some 40 years but was to become one of the favoured forms for composers such as Ockeghem and Busnoys.
Busnoys was a sophisticated melodist particularly adept at writing long and elaborately shaped vocal lines. Often they are made up of melodic clichés, cadence formulae and turns of phrase common to all Franco-Flemish composers of his time, but Busnoys filled his melodies with finely wrought details and organized them in carefully balanced segments. His technique of beginning each phrase syllabically with a clearcut motif and continuing with faster motion and a long melisma on the penultimate or antepenultimate syllable derives from earlier masters; but he normally took great pains to contrast the differing formal and melodic functions of phrase beginnings and endings. Moreover, in his music, individual phrases tend to be longer and more complex (they are often subdivided, for example, into several smaller units) than those of earlier composers.
Like Ockeghem, Busnoys made an effort to weld the three voices together into a homogeneous texture, partly by understating the conventional hierarchy of principal melody (cantus), supporting melody (tenor) and filler voice (contratenor). Not infrequently two of the three voices move in parallel 3rds or 10ths, a mannerism associated with Busnoys as well as his younger contemporaries, Jacob Obrecht and Alexander Agricola. The amount of imitation Busnoys wrote in any one chanson varies greatly; some have very little, whereas others include fully developed points of imitation between two or even all three voices at the beginnings of most or all of the phrases. In addition to his settings of rondeaux and virelais, Busnoys also composed a few polyphonic arrangements of popular tunes, and some chansons in which one or two popular tunes serve as cantus firmi providing the scaffolding over which the cantus (and sometimes other voices as well) sing a more conventional lyric, usually a rondeau. Normally three voices sufficed to set these stereotyped love-poems to music, but in about a third of his chansons Busnoys wrote for four voices, the texture that was to become standard for secular as well as sacred music by about 1500.
It looks very much as though most of the surviving chansons by Ockeghem and Busnoys were composed by about 1470. At about the same time a new and startling generation arose. Perhaps the most successful of these was the young Hayne van Ghizeghem, whose De tous biens plaine and Allez regrets, both composed around 1470, were to become the most widely copied chansons of their time and were to stay in the repertory for some 70 years, to judge from their surviving sources. The true innovator of that generation, however, seems to have been Loyset Compère, whose chansons show the most radically new uses of imitation and of melismatic lines that are plainly used purely for their decorative effect. In that same generation Alexander Agricola produced some of the most elaborately florid text settings of the entire 15th century. A favoured form of chanson at this time was the Motet-chanson, normally in three voices, in which a lower voice carried a Latin text and was usually based on chant.
Also in those years, perhaps initially in the hands of Johannes Martini, the tradition of the ‘instrumental’ chanson arose. In texture and melodic structure these works differed little from the chansons of Compère and Agricola. The main difference is in their formal design: while they generally adhere to the formal pattern of the rondeau settings, they do not have the clear separation of poetic lines that had characterized all songs of the 15th century. None of these works has any identifiable text beyond the opening words, and it must be assumed that these were simply titles of pieces that stand firmly in the chanson tradition but were evidently intended for instrumental ensemble performance.
Some time about 1480 this led to yet another tradition, perhaps pioneered by Alexander Agricola, that of apparently instrumental pieces that were elaborations based on just one voice of an existing chanson: Hayne’s De tous biens plaine was initially a favourite for this kind of treatment, as were Ockeghem’s D’ung aultre amer and the anonymous J’ay pris amours.
In secular and sacred works, musical style changed radically towards the end of the 15th century. The generation of Franco-Flemish musicians whose careers span the several decades before and after 1500 – in the first place, Josquin Desprez, but also Jacob Obrecht, Henricus Isaac, Pierre de La Rue, Jean Mouton, Antoine de Févin and many others – forged new techniques that became central to 16th-century musical language. Although they continued chiefly to use cantus firmi, composers around 1500 made a decisive step forward in liberating themselves from the scaffolding techniques of the later Middle Ages, which forced predetermined elements of design on their compositions. They began to work with motifs as the smallest units of musical construction, creating in the process pieces consisting of chains of interlocked phrases, each of them devoted to the manipulation of a single motif. In its 16th-century classical formulation, this technique produced a series of points of imitation, interrupted for variety and contrast by occasional chordal passages. The composer planned his piece without recourse to any predetermined scheme; he varied the texture and changed the character of the music at will, shifting from full sounds to thin, from strict imitative counterpoint to dialogue among parts of the choir to thickly scored chords as his mood and the musical requirements dictated.
These new techniques radically changed the relationships of individual voices and hence the way music actually sounded. Although both Du Fay (especially in his later years) and Ockeghem tended not to emphasize the differences among various voices, each strand in the contrapuntal fabric did not become fully equal until the end of the century, in the music of Josquin and his contemporaries. Perhaps the most obvious result of the innovations of the new generation of composers working around 1500 was the change from a hierarchical texture, in which each voice has a special function, to a texture in which all the voices, while independent, are equal in importance and in melodic style. This new sonority is sometimes described as a combination of melodic lines that are all vocal in conception, but this does not mean that pieces in the new style were performed exclusively by voices. Specifically in the chanson, the new technique of imitative counterpoint applied to equal but independent melodic lines enabled composers more easily to abandon the predetermined repetition schemes of the formes fixes. The gradual disappearance of rondeaux, ballades and virelais, however, did not prevent Josquin and his contemporaries from using repetition schemes. Josquin often repeated phrases in ways that are easily comprehensible if untraditional, and he was especially apt to associate musical repetition with poetic lines that rhyme. Josquin mirrored the structure of the poem, for example, in his setting of Plusieurs regretz, composed round a canon, the structural device that he used more than any other in his settings of serious courtly lyrics. But in Je ne me puis tenir d’aimer (ex.3), a through-composed chanson without any scaffolding device, he took full advantage of the possibilities of imitative writing and choral dialogue to vary the texture of the music and to extend each phrase by working with one or more motifs very much in the manner of a motet.
Popular poems, intended to be sung, circulated throughout France during the 16th century in cheaply printed books of verse; the melodies for some of them survive in several manuscripts prepared for the aristocratic circles round Louis XII, who evidently cultivated for a time this attractive genre, intended in the first place for the amusement and education of the urban lower and middle classes. Josquin’s generation was the first to use this material extensively, and he himself wrote a substantial number of popular arrangements. It is not always possible to be certain that a particular chanson incorporates a popular tune if its monophonic model has not survived, but the tenor of Josquin’s Si j’eusse Marion is so simple and straightforward that there can be little doubt that the composer took into his polyphonic texture one of the melodies sung in the streets of Paris. Josquin treated his borrowed material in the manner he reserved for three-part popular arrangements; that is, the outer voices imitate the cantus firmus, but the tenor enters last and presents the melody in its simplest and most complete form while the outer voices either continue their imitation or move in parallel motion. Similar three- and four-part popular arrangements were composed by Févin, Mouton, Ninot le Petit and various other composers working in the late 15th century or early 16th. In four-part popular arrangements the borrowed material is often paraphrased rather than presented as a cantus firmus, and Josquin sometimes put the popular melodies into canons with themselves to form a solid structural framework round which the other voices weave their complex and varied web; he did so, for example, in Faulte d’argent, and in Adieu mes amours, in which the cantus sings a rondeau while the lowest voices move in free canon.
Not all late 15th- and early 16th-century composers were as progressive as Josquin in abandoning the formes fixes. The chansons of Pierre de La Rue, Johannes Prioris, Antoine de Longueval, Antonius Divitis and others include settings of rondeaux and virelais as well as some songs in the newer forms and styles, whereas Obrecht, Isaac, Mouton, Févin, Ninot le Petit, Braconnier, Antoine Brumel and others abandoned the older forms almost entirely. The music of these men appears in the later manuscript chansonniers as well as in the magnificent three-volume anthology of songs published by Ottaviano Petrucci of Venice in the years after 1501: the Odhecaton, Canti B and Canti C.
See also Borrowing, §7.
Much discussion of the chanson repertory of the second quarter of the 16th century has taken place against a background of presumed differences in national or regional approaches to musical style. This view has stressed the apparent contrast between the predominantly imitative and contrapuntal style favoured by Franco-Flemish composers such as Gombert (who worked at the Netherlands Habsburg court and whose chansons were issued principally by Flemish printers such as Susato) and the patent lyricism and homorhythmic textures preferred by French composers, above all the royal musician Sermisy (whose output figures largely in the offerings of the official French printer Attaingnant). Indeed, a considerable stylistic gulf separates the two approaches.
Many of Sermisy’s chansons are graceful but quite straightforward lyrical miniatures with easy charming melodies that follow closely the rhythms of the words they set. Sermisy harmonized his polished soprano lines with simple chords, or placed them in a polyphonically animated homophony, or else he elaborated the important melodic material by means of relaxed bits of imitation that make the texture varied and interesting. But it is the very simplicity of a song like Sermisy’s Tant que vivray (ex.4), which sets a poem by Clément Marot, that makes its greatness so elusive and so difficult to explain. Such a chanson certainly reaches no great expressive heights, although its charm and ability to delight listeners are immediately evident. Like so many of Sermisy’s chansons the words seem to control the flow of the music. They are set for the most part syllabically, with short melismas only towards the ends of phrases serving a purely decorative function. Moreover, the structure of each musical phrase exactly matches the formal details of the poetry. The pause on the fourth note of each of the first three phrases, for example, marks the caesura in the middle of the poetic line, and the characteristic opening rhythm, repeated at the beginning of each phrase, mirrors the dactyls of the poem. Some chanson melodies are virtually isorhythmic, so closely do they fit the patterned repetitive rhythms of the poetry. In spite of its imitative second half, Tant que vivray is unusually homorhythmic; in most Parisian chansons the texture is enlivened by rather more actively moving and independent inner parts. Moreover, most chansons in this repertory reveal more clearly than Tant que vivray that their counterpoint is based on a self-sufficient duet between superius and tenor, to which a harmonic bass and a complementary (and sometimes extraneous) altus have been added.
How different these French chansons of the 1530s are from settings produced in the Netherlands can immediately be seen by comparing Tant que vivray with the songs by Clemens non Papa, Gombert, Willaert, Richafort or Crecquillon that were published by Susato in Antwerp and by other Flemish printers of the mid-16th century. Without their words, many of these Flemish chansons could well be mistaken for motets, so pervasive is their imitation and so dense their texture once all the voices have entered (there are many works for five voices here, as well as three- and four-voice ones such as are found in French prints). In purely musical terms the secular nature of such compositions can be discerned only in matters of details and emphasis; they are shorter, less serious and somewhat more tuneful than most motets, their phrases are more concise and clearly defined, and their rhythms shortwinded and inclined to regular emphasis (even though the implied metre often conflicts with the bar-lines of modern editions).
Scholars have now refined their view of the chanson repertory of the second quarter of the century, recognizing that each of the two principal types embraces a wide range of styles. Much the same concern for coordinated polyphonic motion and clear text declamation in Sermisy’s Tant que vivray, for instance, can also be heard in the music of his close associate Certon, who was employed in Paris as master of the choirboys at the Ste Chapelle. But the so-called Parisian manner of chanson composition was not shared by all composers whose careers can be linked to Paris, nor were French provincial composers equally disposed to emulate directly Sermisy’s approach to melodic style, texture and form. Thus, although Sermisy’s style was clearly favoured at the royal court (and at the allied court of Lorraine, to judge from the speed with which the local court composer there, Mathieu Lasson, adopted Sermisy’s model of melodic design), there now seems no convincing reason to view the French repertory as a monolithic one. The long and often melismatic melodic lines favoured by Janequin, who with Sermisy dominated the French publications of the second quarter of the century, reveal that the restrained lyricism and largely homorhythmic textures typical of Sermisy’s works were not the only means available to French chanson composers.
Efforts have also been made to understand the patent variety of stylistic types as reflecting the poetic texts. Chanson composers in the second quarter of the 16th century no longer chose to set poems that followed the rigid formal and thematic conventions of the 15th-century rhétoriqueurs. Rondeaux, ballades and virelais, for example, appear only rarely in Attaingnant’s anthologies. Instead, the poems on which Parisian chansons are based follow no fixed rhyme scheme, although they are often strophic, and their patterned repetitions are usually immediately intelligible. Their long metrical patterns and elegantly balanced quatrains and huitains lend themselves well to the refined melodic manner that is the epitome of the mid-century chanson, with its clear alignment of rhyme, prosody and musical line. Often, as in Tant que vivray, the first few phrases of music are repeated to new text, and the last phrase or two of both words and music are also repeated, in order to round off the composition convincingly. Many Parisian chansons are organized according to the scheme AABBC, but that is only one of several similar groundplans commonly adopted. Like the formal schemes, the subject matter and diction of the poems chosen by Parisian composers also reflect a new freedom and a release from the strictness of late medieval traditions. The subject matter was more varied than in chansons of around 1500; it encompassed fulfilled as well as unrequited love, and comic as well as serious aspects of the amorous predicament. Many poems mix popular with courtly elements. Clément Marot, the leading chanson poet of the time, even edited anthologies of the song texts that were presumably those most frequently heard in the streets of Paris. And the poetic diction, less strained and artificial than in 15th-century chansons, took on a more relaxed, natural and individual tone.
French composers also set narrative texts, many of them humorous and some as wittily indecent as Marot’s tale of an amorous priest, Frère Thibault, whose plans are foiled when his young lady friend gets stuck halfway through the latticework attempting to enter his bedchamber. Like most narrative chansons, Certon’s setting of this anti-clerical story alternates points of imitation, based on short and precise motifs, with simple chordal passages that occasionally break into triple metre – changes of texture and technique designed both to embody the dynamism of the story and to imitate the profile and rhythms of speech itself. Compositions of this sort seem to have enjoyed great popularity in 16th-century France, at least to judge by the prominence afforded them by music printers. The second volume of the Lyonnais printer Jacques Moderne’s Difficile des chansons (1544) was devoted exclusively to works of this sort.
Both prolific, Sermisy and Janequin between them wrote more than 400 chansons of various sorts, lyrical or narrative, relentlessly imitative, simply chordal, or in some in-between style of polyphonically animated homophony. Sermisy excelled at composing delicate and sophisticated love-songs, while Janequin’s most characteristic works express the vivacious or irreverent side of the esprit gaulois. Quite extraordinary and in a class by themselves, though, are Janequin’s long descriptive chansons, for which he is now best known. In a series of compositions (La guerre, La chasse, Le chant des oiseaux, Les cris de Paris, Le caquet des femmes and so on) he took up themes – the battle, the hunt, birdsongs, street cries and ladies’ gossip – that allowed him to make a virtuoso display of their onomatopoeic possibilities. The harmonically static La guerre, for example, probably written to commemorate François I’s victory at the Battle of Marignano in 1515, imitates trumpet fanfares, calls to arms, battle cries, cannon fire and other warlike sounds. It became one of the best-known pieces of the entire century, copied by many other composers and arranged for keyboard or lute solo and for all varieties of instrumental ensemble. Le chant des oiseaux, on the other hand, includes a veritable ornithological collection of natural sounds. When the birdsongs start, the harmonic rhythm slows down and the ‘counterpoint’ becomes simpler. The series of slowly moving chords merely furnishes an unobtrusive frame for the rich jangle of fancifully elaborated animal noises that constitute the main point of this brilliantly amusing work (fig.2).
The precise origins of the chanson repertory issued by Attaingnant beginning in the 1520s have been the subject of much discussion. There is, of course, a superficial resemblance between these new works and the frottola that had been composed and performed at north Italian courts. But scholars have come to discount any direct relationship between the two genres: the frottolists specialized in the declamation of poetry within conventional formal structures and with formulaic instrumental accompaniment, whereas chanson composers worked in a tradition of arranging borrowed timbres and stylized imitations of those tunes in three- and four-voice polyphonic settings. The source tradition for the chanson in the decades immediately before Attaingnant’s first publications, moreover, is particularly complex. Relatively few chansonniers survive from the years between Petrucci’s Odhecaton (1501), Canti B (1502) and Canti C (1504) on the one hand, and Attaingnant’s first printed collections. Among these, one or two manuscripts from the French court of Louis XII contain three-voice chansons, by Antoine de Févin, Jean Mouton and other court composers, that anticipate the style of some of Sermisy’s efforts. But there is also ample evidence to suggest that the new style of chanson composition embodied in the Attaingnant repertory and in other prints of the 1530s emerged in Rome, Florence and other Italian centres where French musicians, among them Ninot le Petit, Antoine Bruhier and Jean Mouton, sang and composed. These findings are, of course, consistent with the new recognition of the manifest pluralism of the Attaingnant chanson repertory itself.
Finally, scholars have re-examined the role of printers and editors in the history of the chanson and the formation of public taste, accepting that compositional choice was mediated by printers’ own interests and musical judgments. That the music of Sermisy, Certon and others closely associated with royal patrons and their allies should dominate Attaingnant’s early output might in part bear witness to the printer’s own dependence on the royal patronage of François I for the protection of his patent to issue music. But if the French music press of the 16th century had important links with the state (a principal patron and protector) and the Catholic Church (a traditional training-ground for composers and singers), it also enjoyed a growing readership among a musical public that stretched well beyond the confines of courts and cathedrals. Indeed, Attaingnant’s royal privilege of 1531 explicitly acknowledges this broad appeal, which it identifies as a worthy aim, authorizing Attaingnant alone to print ‘many books and quires of Masses, motets, hymns, chansons, as well as for the said playing of lutes, flutes, and organs, in large volumes and small, in order to serve the churches, their ministers, and generally all people, and for the very great good, utility, and recreation of the general public’. Attaingnant did not long remain the only music printer active in the realm, however. Jacques Moderne began issuing music books in Lyons even while Attaingnant’s patent was still in effect. And when Henri II became king following the death of François I in 1547, Attaingnant and Moderne’s rather exclusive hold on French music printing was briefly loosened. In Paris Attaingnant was joined in the musical market-place first by Nicolas du Chemin (in 1548) and later by Adrian Le Roy and Robert Ballard (in 1551). Moderne, too, was joined by local competitors starting in the late 1540s, when the Beringen brothers, Robert Granjon and others began issuing music aimed at the cosmopolitan world of mid-century Lyons. Together these printers published chansons by a host of minor masters from Paris and from the provinces, composers such as Pierre Cadéac, Pierre Cléreau, Pierre Colin, Jean Conseil, Jean Courtois, Garnier, Nicolle des Celliers de Hesdin, Jacotin, Guillaume Le Heurteur, the Florentine Francesco de Layolle, Jean Lhéritier, Jean Maillard, Mittantier, Pierre Passereau, Rogier Pathie, Dominique Phinot, Jean Rousée, Pierre Sandrin (Regnault), Mathieu Sohier, Pierre Vermont and Pierre de Villiers. And beginning in 1543, Susato published chansons in Antwerp, by both French and Netherlandish composers. Nor was circulation of the French chanson limited to France and the Low Countries. Philip van Wilder, a Flemish émigré who was the leading musical figure at the English court of Henry VIII, brought knowledge of continental musical practice of the second quarter of the 16th century to his adoptive country. In Augsburg, members of the Herwart family were keen collectors of the chanson repertory as it appeared in the Attaingnant prints.
Even before Attaingnant’s death in 1551 or 1552 the pattern of dissemination of chansons in France began to change. Attaingnant and Moderne’s virtual monopoly was broken, as more French publishers were granted printing privileges, and publishers in the Netherlands set up presses that issued chansons among other things. In Paris, Michel Fezandat started to print music after 1552; and about 1549 Du Chemin issued a series of volumes of ‘chansons antiques’ (that is, songs borrowed for the most part from Attaingnant’s earlier publications), as well as a series of ‘chansons nouvelles’ by a younger generation of composers. But it was the firm run by Le Roy and Ballard which, more than any other, took Attaingnant’s place as the most important music publisher in Paris, a position it kept from the time it began issuing music in 1551 to the end of the century. In Lyons, Moderne’s monopoly was broken in the second half of the century by Granjon, the Beringen brothers, Simon Gorlier and others. Beginning in the 1540s and 50s Netherlands chansons as well as those composed by Frenchmen appeared in the several series of anthologies published by Pierre Phalèse in Louvain, and by two firms in Antwerp, one owned by Susato and the other by the partners Hubert Waelrant and Jean de Laet. Although their repertories overlapped to an extent, each of these publishers had his own group of composers. The history of the late 16th-century chanson could best be written as a report on these several, overlapping repertories; the published catalogues of the output of Phalèse and the Lyonnais printers (Vanhulst, 1990, and Guillo, 1991) have now set the stage for this sort of work.
In the 1550s the older composers who had been associated with Attaingnant – Janequin, Certon and their contemporaries – still made their appearance in anthologies published by Du Chemin and by Le Roy & Ballard, along with such younger composers as Nicolas de Bussy, Entraigues, Didier Leschenet, Jean Maillard, Thomas Champion (Mithou) and Pagnier. But it is Jacques Arcadelt, the Netherlands composer of madrigals, who returned north in the early 1550s in the company of Cardinal Charles de Lorraine (at the time a close ally of the royal court), who is the most important new name in Le Roy & Ballard’s anthologies of secular music of the 1550s. In the next decade other composers closely linked with the French aristocracy, such as Guillaume Costeley and Nicolas de la Grotte, also figure prominently in the offerings of that firm. But the official printer also turned to composers who had no direct ties to the court, such as Goudimel and especially Lassus. Even though Lassus never left his position as Kapellmeister to the dukes of Bavaria in Munich, his reputation as a chanson composer continued unabated in France; his collections of songs were reprinted again and again until the end of the century. Perhaps the greatest of all the native French composers of chansons during the second half of the 16th century, Claude le Jeune, began to have his chansons published in the 1570s, along with a number of his contemporaries, including Guillaume Boni, Antoine de Bertrand, Fabrice Marin Caietain, Denis Caignet, Eustache Du Caurroy, Jean de Castro, Jehan de Maletty, Jacques Mauduit and Jean Planson.
Shortly after the middle of the century the group of poets known as the Pléiade, led by Pierre de Ronsard and including Joachim du Bellay, Jean-Antoine de Baïf, Jean Dorat, Pontus de Tyard, Etienne Jodelle and Rémy Belleau, came to prominence, and their views on poetry and music had an important influence in determining the character of French chansons of their time. They urged the imitation of classical forms and metres, and extolled the moral effects of these means. In illustration of his intentions, Ronsard published in a Supplément to his Amours of 1552 a small number of musical settings for four voices (by Certon, Janequin, Goudimel and the humanist Marc-Antoine de Muret) to which all the sonnets in his collection could be sung. The Pléiade strongly encouraged a close union between poetry and music, but without prescribing precisely how it should be brought about, except with rather vague exhortations to follow ancient models. The ideology embodied in the Supplément to the Amours encouraged the continued development of short, predominantly syllabic settings of courtly poems in strophic form, using textures that are almost completely homorhythmic. The melody in the top line (and hence all the lower voices too, since they had the same rhythm) matched the metre and the declamation of the poetry exactly; on a purely formal level, Ronsard’s ideal of a union of poetry and music was fulfilled in these simple songs, and they were well suited for singing as solos with lute accompaniment. Compositions of this sort (at times called ‘voix de villes’ or ‘vaudevilles’) are found in anthologies as early as the 1540s. Arcadelt and Cléreau, themselves closely associated with the same courtly circles that embraced the literary ideals of the Pléiade, adapted techniques from the Italian villanella for their three-voice French (and Latin) songs that were published by Le Roy & Ballard during the 1550s. By 1571 the importance of this new ideal was such that Le Roy was quick to assimilate this patent variety to a single genre, airs de cour, which he described in a preface as ‘chansons de la cour … legières que jadis on appelloit voix de ville, aujourd’huy Airs de Cour’, as though the term ‘voix de ville’ were no longer used, even though it (or ‘vaudeville’) continued to denote the simplest sorts of airs de cour.
The styles of the airs or vaudevilles suited Baïf’s experiments with neo-classical poetry and music perfectly. In the 1560s he devised a way of translating the quantitative metrical patterns of Greek and Latin verse into accentual French verse (see Vers mesurés, vers mesurés à l’antique), and he encouraged musicians (among them, the brilliant Claude le Jeune) to set his neo-classical poems in the simple style of airs, in order that his audience could follow the poetry while it was being sung. In this musique mesurée à l’antique, composers set a long syllable to a note twice as long as that for a short syllable, so the music moved exclusively in, say, quavers and crotchets with, perhaps, an occasional pair of semiquavers to break the monotony. Since the accent patterns of the poetry were rather varied, the music tended to proceed in irregular groupings of two and three beats, a feature that compensated to some extent for the lack of variety in the homorhythmic textures. Thus songs written as musique mesurée can best be transcribed without bar-lines. The Académie de Poésie et de Musique that Baïf formed under royal patronage in 1570 lasted only a short time, but its influence on secular music extended throughout the rest of the century, and even into the 17th. Le Jeune’s Fiere cruelle (ex.5), for instance, displays many features of musique mesurée.
Still other chansons from the second half of the 16th century reveal the strong influence of the Italian madrigal on French musical culture. In some respects the first serious influence of this repertory was manifest in the chansons of Arcadelt and Lassus, who on account of their work in Italy had come to set Italian texts as well as French. But French composers such as Le Jeune, Costeley and others used the wealth of polyphonic, rhythmic and harmonic means favoured by madrigal composers to express the meaning as well as the form of poetry in their music. They emphasized rhetorically important or strongly emotional words; they evoked the mood of their texts by manipulating texture, inventing appropriate melodic lines and so on; and they seldom repeated the same music with different words (most of their chansons are through-composed). In order to cope with the increased expressive demands and for greater technical flexibility, they often increased the number of voices from four to five or six. Not least, they set sonnets, sestinas and other Italian verse forms, and even some of Petrarch’s poetry in French translation; on occasion they parodied Italian madrigals, just as some of the airs had reworked villanellas. In short, chansons gained in range of expression and variety of technique while they lost, perhaps, in that sense of clarity that had been so strong a characteristic of the earlier Attaingnant chanson. However, French composers never pushed their expressionistic intentions to the extremes found in the late 16th-century Italian madrigal.
This time of religious conflict in France also saw the rise of the chanson spirituelle or ‘chanson morale’, a secular composition with moralistic or even sacred words. Chansons spirituelles were written chiefly by Protestant sympathizers, but they occasionally appear as well among the works of the Catholics. Some anthologies of polyphonic chansons, and many collections of chanson texts, merely substitute a new set of ‘purified’ and doctrinally acceptable words (or even sectarian polemics) for the original love-poems; they keep the pre-existing music. Other volumes contain newly invented music as well. The Chansons spirituelles published in Lyons in 1548 with texts by Guillaume Guéroult and music by Didier Lupi Second were among the best-known Protestant chansons in the second half of the 16th century. The whole volume was reprinted a number of times, and one composition in the collection, Suzanne ung jour, was reworked and parodied by many composers, regardless of their religious convictions. Hubert Waelrant and Jean Caulery were among the other musicians of the middle of the century who wrote or arranged sacred songs, and in the 1570s and 80s Jean Pasquier and Simon Goulart did so too; they also published editions of Lassus’s songs with new texts replacing the originals. At the very end of the century Le Jeune produced one of the masterpieces of the genre: his collection of three- and four-voice settings (published posthumously in 1606) of the Octonaires de la vanité et inconstance du monde, made up of moralistic texts by the Calvinist preacher, Antoine Chandieu.
french secular music to about 1525
StrohmR
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G. Raynaud: Rondeaux et autres poésies du XVe siècle (Paris, 1889)
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E. Hoepffner: ‘Virelais et ballades dans le chansonnier d’Oxford’, Archivum romanicum, iv (1920), 20–40
T. Gérold, ed.: Le manuscrit de Bayeux (Strasbourg, 1921/R)
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K. Jeppesen, ed.: Der Kopenhagener Chansonnier (Copenhagen, 1927, 2/1965 as The Copenhagen Chansonnier)
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M. Bukofzer: ‘An Unknown Chansonnier of the 15th Century (the Mellon Chansonnier)’, MQ, xxviii (1942), 14–49
H. Hewitt, ed.: O. Petrucci: Harmonice musices odhecaton A (Cambridge, MA, 1942/R, 2/1946)
W. Apel, ed.: French Secular Music of the Late Fourteenth Century (Cambridge, MA, 1950)
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G. Lote: Histoire du vers français, ii (Paris, 1951), 231ff, 259ff
G. Reaney: ‘Concerning the Origins of the Rondeau, Virelai and Ballade Forms’, MD, vi (1952), 155–66
G. Reese and T. Karp: ‘Monophony in a Group of Renaissance Chansonniers’, JAMS, v (1952), 4–15
P. Le Gentil: Le virelai et le villancico: le problème des origines arabes (Paris,1954)
M. Françon: ‘On the Nature of the Virelai’, Symposium, xi (1955), 348–52
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G. Reaney, ed.: Early Fifteenth-Century Music, CMM, xi (1955–83)
L. Schrade, ed.: The Works of Guillaume de Machaut, PMFC, ii–iii (1956)
W. Rehm, ed.: Die Chansons von Gilles Binchois (Mainz, 1957)
H.M. Brown: ‘The chanson rustique: Popular Elements in the 15th- and 16th-Century Chanson’, JAMS, xii (1959), 16–26
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H.M. Brown: Music in the French Secular Theater, 1400–1550 (Cambridge, MA, 1963)
M. Picker: The Chanson Albums of Marguerite of Austria (Berkeley, 1965)
D. Poirion: Le poète et le prince: l’évolution du lyrisme courtois de Guillaume de Machaut à Charles d’Orléans (Paris, 1965)
W. Marggraf: ‘Tonalität und Harmonik in der französischen Chanson zwischen Machaut und Dufay’, AMw, xxiii (1966), 11–31
H.M. Brown: ‘The Transformation of the Chanson at the End of the Fifteenth Century’, IMSCR X: Ljubljana 1967, 78–94
H. Hewitt, ed.: O. Petrucci: Canti B numero cinquanta, MRM, ii (1967)
N. Wilkins: ‘The Post-Machaut Generation of Poet-Musicians’, Nottingham Mediaeval Studies, xii (1968), 40–84
N. Wilkins: One Hundred Ballades, Rondeaux and Virelais from the Late Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1969)
N.H.J. van den Boogaard: Rondeaux et refrains du XIIe siècle au début du XIVe (Paris, 1969)
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W. Dömling: Die mehrstimmigen Balladen, Rondeaux und Virelais von Guillaume de Machaut (Tutzing, 1970)
U. Günther: ‘Das Manuskript Modena, Biblioteca Estense, α.M.5, 24 (olim lat.568 Mod)’, MD, xxiv (1970), 17–67
M.R. Maniates: ‘Combinative Chansons in the Dijon Chansonnier’, JAMS, xxiii (1970), 228–81
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N. Wilkins: Guillaume de Machaut: La louange des dames (Edinburgh, 1972)
M.R. Maniates: ‘Combinative Chansons in the Escorial Chansonnier’, MD, xxix (1975), 61–125
A. Atlas: The Cappella Giulia Chansonnier: Rome, biblioteca apostolica Vaticana, C.G. XIII.27 (Brooklyn, NY, 1975–6) [vol.ii incl. edn]
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L.L. Perkins and H. Garey, eds.: The Mellon Chansonnier (New Haven, CT, 1979)
W. Arlt: ‘Musik und Text im Liedsatz franko-flämischer Italienfahrer der ersten Hälfte des 15. Jahrhunderts’, Schweizer Jb für Musikwissenschaft, new ser., i (1981), 23–69
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W. Arlt: ‘Aspekte der Chronologie und des Stilwandels im französischen Lied des 14. Jahrhunderts’, Forum musicologicum, iii (1982), 193–280
L.F. Bernstein: ‘Notes on the Origin of the Parisian Chanson’, JM, i (1982), 275–326
H.M. Brown: ‘Emulation, Competition, and Homage: Imitation and Theories of Imitation in the Renaissance’, JAMS, xxxv (1982), 1–48
H.M. Brown, ed.: A Florentine Chansonnier from the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent: Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale MS Banco Rari 229, MRM, vii (1983)
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U. Günther: ‘Unusual Phenomena in the Transmission of Late 14th Century Polyphonic Music’, MD, xxxviii (1984), 87–118
P. Higgins: Chansonnier Nivelle de la Chaussée (Geneva, 1984) [facs.]
H.M. Brown: ‘Josquin and the Fifteenth-Century Chanson’, Proceedings of the British Academy, lxxi (1985), 119–58
J. van Biezen and J.P. Gumbert, eds.: Two Chansonniers from the Low Countries: French and Dutch Polyphonic Songs from the Leiden and Utrecht Fragments [Early 15th Century], MMN, xv (1985)
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D. Fallows: ‘Two Equal Voices’, EMH, vii (1987), 227–41
P.M. Higgins: Antoine Busnois and Musical Culture in Late Fifteenth-Century France and Burgundy (diss., Princeton U., 1987)
G. Montagna: ‘Caron, Hayne, Compère: a Transmission Reassessment’, EMH, vii (1987), 107–57
G. Montagna: ‘Johannes Pullois in the Context of his Era’, RBM, xlii (1988), 83–117
D. Slavin: Binchois’ Songs, the Binchois Fragment, and the Two Layers of Escorial A (diss., Princeton U., 1988)
M.R. Maniates, ed.: The Combinative Chanson: an Anthology, RRMR, lxxvii (1989)
W.H. Kemp: Burgundian Court Song in the Time of Binchois: the Anonymous Chansons of El Escorial, MS V.III.24 (Oxford, 1990)
P. Higgins: ‘Parisian Nobles, a Scottish Princess, and the Woman's Voice in Late Medieval Song’, EMH, x (1991), 145–200
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H. Meconi: ‘Art-Song Reworkings: an Overview’, JRMA, cxix (1994), 1–42
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G. Boone: ‘Tonal Color in Dufay’, ibid., 57–99
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J. Tiersot: ‘Ronsard et la musique de son temps’, SIMG, iv (1902–3), 70–142
P.-M. Masson: ‘L’humanisme musical en France au XVIe siècle: essai sur la musique’, BSIM, iii (1907), 333–66, 677–718
H. Expert, ed.: La fleur des musiciens de Pierre de Ronsard (Paris, 1923/R)
K.P. Bernet Kempers: ‘Die wallonische und die französische Chanson in der ersten Hälfte des 16. Jahrhunderts’, IMSCR I: Liège 1930, 76–80
R. Lenaerts: ‘La chanson polyphonique néerlandaise aux 15e et 16e siècles’, IMSCR I: Liège 1930, 168–73
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