chapter 6 Dance Music, Dance Songs and Airs de Cour

The music that is recorded in the dance master’s notebook is an intriguing mixture of formats, genres, modes of notation and attribution. The musical pieces occur throughout the manuscript, but they occur in rough sections de- pending on the genre and method of notation. The largest category of music recorded is pieces associated in some way with dancing. There are dance pieces such as courantes, voltes, allemandes, which are all representative of the dances that were fashionable in the early seventeenth century. There are entrées for ballets, both titled and unnamed, as well as airs de cour from the ballets de cour performed at the French court in 1613 and 1615, and composed by Pierre Guédron, one of the leading composers of the day who worked at the French court. The second largest category of music recorded in the note- book is airs de cour by composers associated with the French court, as well as anonymous airs that were published in Paris by Pierre Ballard but without any attribution. The musical pieces are recorded in mensural notation, tabla- ture, mandore tablature and two pages of tablature. Sometimes only one part was recorded, for other pieces two, three or four parts were copied into the notebook. The purpose of this chapter is first to identify the musical material where possible and to discuss the relationship between pieces recorded in the notebook. The second aim of the chapter is to examine what the music can tell us about the compilation of the manuscript and the choreographic and teach- ing activities of its anonymous owner. The dance music recorded in the notebook is typical of collections pub- lished during the same period, in that it contains examples of the current, fashionable dances: courantes, voltes, allemandes, ballets, a passamezzo and a sarabande. The majority of these dances are courantes, twenty-one in all; there are only three allemandes, five voltes and four ballets. Courantes, and to a lesser extent voltes, also feature strongly in contemporary collections of dance music, such as those by Robert Ballard whose two books were published in 1611 and 1614, Nicolas Vallet’s two volume collection Le Secret des Muses pub- lished in 1615 and 1616, and ’s Terpsichore, published in 1612.1 What is also found in these collections, but is missing from the dance master’s

1 Robert Ballard, Premier livre de luth (Paris: P. Ballard, 1611) and Diverses pièces mises sur le luth (Paris: P. Ballard, 1614); Nicolas Vallet, Le Secret des Muses, 2 vols. (Amsterdam, 1615 and 1616); Michael Praetorius, Terpsichore (Wolfenbüttel, 1612).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/9789004377738_008 Dance Music, Dance Songs and airs de cour 141 notebook, are examples of galliards and branles, the latter of which are espe- cially prominent in Terpsichore. In other collections branles form the over- whelming majority of recorded pieces, as is illustrated by the 1615 publication for solo voice Le Recueil des plus belles chansons de danse de ce temps, where forty-two of the fifty-seven pieces are branles.2 Looking at the dance master’s notebook from another perspective, the collection of dance music is atypical in that some pieces are recorded in mensural notation, while others are in lute tablature. Contemporary collections did not usually mix different formats in the same publication, preferring to direct their effort towards either lutenists, or small instrumental ensembles, or to a solo voice and lute.3 In fact the pub- lications printed by Pierre Ballard in the first two decades of the seventeenth century are a good example of this separation of formats. Pieces were often published twice, once for a solo voice with lute accompaniment, and again in a separate publication arranged for four or five parts.4 Airs from the ballets performed at the French court, along with airs de cour is another substantial section of the music in the notebook. The final category of music found in the notebook is ballet entrées. It is not surprising that music in lute tablature was recorded in the dance master’s notebook, as some skill on the lute was considered part of a gentle- man’s or noble’s education at this time. In the academies that taught such stu- dents the music teachers were most likely to be professional lutenists.5 Lute playing was then seen as an ideal vehicle for display by gentlemen, and the fact that the instrument was also very popular with ladies did not detract from this ideal.6 Thus dances in lute tablature would have been ideal material for a

2 Le Recueil des plus belles chansons de danse de ce temps (Caen: Jacques Mangeant, 1615). 3 Multi-format volumes were published, as illustrated by the three books published between 1582 and 1600 by the celebrated lutenist and teacher Emanuel Adriaenssen who ran a music school for lutenists in Antwerp. Adriaenssen’s collections include arrangements of dances and vocal music for the lute and his own fantasias, as well as two or more vocal parts in men- sural notation for each chanson or in lute tablature so that the vocal music could be performed as an instrumental piece, as a vocal piece or as a combination of voices and lute. See Kristine K. Forney, ‘The Netherlands, 1520–1640’, in European Music 1520–1640, ed. James Haar (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2006), p. 270, and Godelieve Spiessens, ‘Adriaenssen, Emanuel’, in Grove Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com (accessed 1/10/2016). 4 See Table 7 for examples of such pieces and the publications in which they appeared. 5 Kate van Orden, Music, Discipline, and Arms in Early Modern France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 45. 6 Van Orden, Music, Discipline, and Arms, p. 46. As Van Orden points out the lute was an easier instrument for beginners to learn than many others, and lute tablature, a graphic represen- tation of where a player had to place his or her fingers on the neck of the instrument, also facilitated the process of learning to read the music. ‘[B]eginners could produce an accept- able tone on it in just a few weeks without a developed touch, and if the frets were correctly