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Unfolding the Rondeau: Form and Meaning in Early 15Th-Century Chansons Elizabeth Randell Upton

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Unfolding the Rondeau: Form and Meaning in Early 15Th-Century Chansons Elizabeth Randell Upton Unfolding the Rondeau: Form and Meaning in Early 15th-century Chansons Elizabeth Randell Upton 1. Musicological Values and What Musicology Values It’s no longer news: much that 20th century musicologists considered to be objective and scientific, especially with regards to musical analysis, was rife with unexamined subjectivity. Since the early 1990s, scholars such as Rose Subotnik, Gary Tomlinson, Richard Taruskin, Lawrence Kramer and Susan McClary have uncovered and discussed what Janet M. Levy termed “Covert and casual values” in musicological writing. But much work still remains to be done. 2. The Formes Fixes Problem Discussions of the formes fixes chansons—ballades, rondeaux, and virelais—of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries clearly demonstrate how non-paradigmatic musical works can suffer when examined with 20th century analytical techniques developed to discuss 18th and 19th century German orchestral and instrumental music. Analysts of formes fixes chansons have tried to explain the appeal of these songs in “acceptable” terms: they found seed-like motives (especially in Machaut’s works) that grow throughout a piece, and they discussed the various ways a composer could unify a song into an organic whole. But nothing could be done to salvage the biggest problem with these songs: their formal structures, the defining element for us, are fixed. By definition, a formes fixes chanson can not develop, it “merely” repeats sections of music already heard, in some predetermined pattern. And, if the situation weren’t bad enough already, the poetry for these songs concerns itself mostly with what is generally seen as trite, stereotypical courtly love themes. Discussions of the formes fixes chansons in music history textbooks are largely taxonomies, concerned with describing the musical and poetic structures and documenting any variations. The descriptive method invariably used is an alphabet soup of A’s and B’s, seasoned with ouvert and clos endings, rhyme schemes, and syllable counts. These discussions of the formes fixes are predicated on earlier discussions of troubadour and trouvère song, seeing the later works essentially as polyphonic elaborations of the earlier monophonic genres. Here, for example, from Hoppin’s Medieval Music, is the discussion of “Poetic and musical form in [Machaut’s] Ballades”: In their poetic and musical forms, Machaut’s ballades offer little that is new. For the most part, his texts are conventional love songs that differ from the older trouvère chansons only in having a refrain and in being reduced to three stanzas. The envoy has also been eliminated, although it continues to appear in literary ballades throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Because the ballade is strophic, its three stanzas are identical in form, have the same refrain, of course, and usually use the same rhymes. The stanzaic structures may vary considerably from one ballade to another, but in Machaut’s hands they did become standardized to a degree. most of his ballades have stanzas of seven or eight lines with rhyme schemes such as ababbcC or ababccdD. Also evident is a tendency to use longer lines of eight or ten syllables and to make all the lines of equal length. This tendency becomes almost a rule for later composers, most of whom use only a few stereotyped patterns of stanzaic construction in their ballades. Whatever poetic form Machaut chose for a ballade, it always fit one of two musical forms. The one usually called ballade form—aoacbC—is by far the more common and occurs in 37 of Machaut’s 42 ballades…” And so on. It is easy to justify such a taxonomic approach in a textbook, focusing on formal structure, with schemes that can be memorized. The student learns to recognize repetition through exposure to straightforward cases, a skill that will be necessary for understanding later music, with more complicated uses of repetition to structure pieces whose forms are not pre-dictated. But, by suggesting that the only elements worth mentioning about the formes fixes chansons are their patterns of formal repetition, a student’s further thinking or analysis of these chansons is limited. It is a vicious circle: the experience with the music of students who have been taught to notice only the formal elements of a formes fixes chanson will only serve to emphasize the centrality of formal structure to these genres. Did you all notice the diction of the example I just read? Machaut’s ballades offer “little that is new,” the poetry is “conventional,” and differs little from earlier Trouvère examples, the stanzaic structure becomes standardized, it is stereotypical— this is highly contentious language, and this sort of language points directly at the second burden under which formes fixes chansons have suffered in musicological scholarship. In the standard narrative of the development of Western music, music only becomes good, really, in the Renaissance, defined for music as the late fifteenth century onwards. Medieval music serves two purposes in such a narrative: it can be used to demonstrate the history of the development of mensural notation, a development that is more or less complete by the early fifteenth century, and it is the backward, limited stuff against which the heroic Renaissance composer struggles to break free, in order to write good music at last. In an article published in 1983 (“Dufay the Reader”), Don Randel complained about such ideologically contaminated language that denigrates earlier works in favor of later ones. While suggesting how to read Dufay’s poetic texts in ways that would have been available to the composer himself, Randel writes that the vocabulary commonly used to describe those texts—words such as “stilted,” “artificial,” “courtly,” “conventional,” and “formal” or “formalistic” —this vocabulary “attempts to situate the work in relation to current beliefs about some social milieu [he means, the royal courts of western Europe, chiefly France] or some (often much later) group of works.” Randel continues, “Each of these words is most often used in tacit relation to some antipode (“sincere,” “natural,” “popular,” “expressive”) that can be located only at some considerable distance in time and/or space from the works under study.” In the footnotes he quotes a number of examples from the writings of such scholars as Knud Jeppesen in the 1920s, Edward Lowinsky in the ‘50s, Howard Mayer Brown in the ‘60s, and Leeman Perkins in the ‘70s, with the common gist that the formes fixes represented “shackles” that the heroic Renaissance composer had to “throw off” in order to realize his individual destiny, that, presumably, of writing through-composed works with Italian texts. The situation is not much different in literary scholarship, where the conceptual biases for medieval works have long been in favor of narrative and against lyric forms. Implicit in the general narrative of literary history is the assumption that lyrics become interesting only with Charles d’Orleans and François Villon, later fifteenth-century poets who infused their lyrics with the sorts of personal expression that earlier, medieval poets reserved for narratives, and in which most later poets continued to traffic. This situation is positioned in opposition to the so-called stereotyped conventions and sterile complications of the Grandes Rhétoriqueurs, earlier fourteenth-century and turn-of-the- century 15th century poets such as Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart, Eustache Deschamps and so on. What is missing in most older discussions of formes fixes chansons is any sense of the ludic virtuosity in which the poets and composers so clearly delighted, any sense of the challenges posed by introducing novelty and originality into a work with so many proscribed, required elements, or any sense of the delight for the audience in hearing not just “another” formes fixes chanson but rather a new one. In other words, what is missing is a sense of formes fixes chansons as entertainment rather than Tonkunst. And furthermore, the view of formes fixes chansons as works that merely repeat, unchanged, the musical material presented in the first strophe completely misses what for me is one of the most exciting elements of these songs: that there is indeed drama in the schemes of repetition by which the chansons play out in performance. My own observations of a great many of these songs—as a performer, a listener, and an analyst in a more standard sense—has convinced me that medieval composers were very much aware of the drama inherent in the repetitions of the formes fixes schemata, and that they could and did reinforce that drama through the use of compositional details of the sort that analysts today can find on the printed page. To demonstrate this assertion, I want to examine a sample formes fixes chanson: a rondeau. Similar demonstrations could be made using a ballade or virelai; rondeaux in the 14th and earlier 15th centuries tend to be shorter than chansons in the other formes, a virtue for discussions in scholarly papers. The facsimile on the handout reproduces the bottom three lines of folio 17 of the famous Oxford manuscript, a paper manuscript completed about 1436 in Northern Italy that was someone’s personal collection of music he liked, collected and copied out over a period of years. Most of the folio is taken up with “Ce jour de l’an,” a flashy rondeau in honor of the New Year by Guillaume Dufay. At the bottom of the page, the Oxford scribe entered one of the shortest works in the manuscript (or, indeed, in the entire chanson repertory of this period): the rondeau “Je demande ma bienvenue”. In this, its unique source, the chanson is attributed to one Acourt, who may or may not have been the papal singer Johannes de Alta Curia. On the back page of the handout (that is, folio 2 verso) you’ll find the text of the rondeau, given with my translation.
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