La Grotte – Las! je n’eusse

Title

Las je n’eusse jamais pensé

Composer

Nicolas de la Grotte  (1530-c.1600)

Source

Chansons de P. de Ronsard, Ph. Desportes et autres, Le Roy & Ballard 1569 (I’ve used the 1580 re-print)

(text on Lieder.net here)
(blog entry here)
(recording unavailable)

Continuing with La Grotte’s settings, this one offers a small frisson of excitement as the print writes out the repeat (as usual) but, in the Superius, marks a B-natural the second time round instead of the B-flat of the first time. Just for fun I have transcribed it exactly, replicating this difference in the repeat, although it’s more likely the repeat is intended to be exact and the B-flat in bar 3 ‘naturalled’ too. Flattening it, however, widens the 4th by a semitone – a spicier sound!

As the setting is short, just two lines of music, La Grotte underlays 6 verses, and adds the text for 6 more on the following page – 12 times through in all. You might just like the variety of the flat/natural choice to spice it up a little!

 

 

 

Le Blanc – Amour dy moy

Title

Amour dy moy de grace

Composer

Didier Le Blanc  (fl. 1575-85)

Source

Airs de plusieurs musiciens sur les Poësies de Ph. Desportes & autres des plus excellants Poëtes de nostre tems. Reduiz à 4 parties par M. D. Le Blanc, Le Roy & Ballard, 1579 (reprinted 1582)

(text on Lieder.net here)
(blog entry here)
(no recording available)

Another obscure composer makes his debut: so obscure, we know almost nothing about him. He produced 2 books for Le Roy & Ballard of airs ‘reduced to 4 parts’ – though it’s not clear where many of them came from and in how many parts they were before, so maybe he composed (some of) them in 4 parts.

You’ll notice that by now – it’s only 1579 – the airs are ‘by Philippe Desportes and others’, with Ronsard definitely demoted from first place. In fact, most of the texts are by Amadis Jamin, along with several more Pleiade poets, so Desportes hasn’t quite taken over. But the Ronsard boom is beginning to be over, before we’ve even left the 1570s.

This is another of the pieces which has switches of metre, as discussed in the context of La Grotte. Here there is more than a hint that Le Blanc is at times trying out musique mesurée, with the metrical changes reflecting only the shifting of long and short syllables. The piece is not consistent, however; my transcription simply assumes that black-note crotchets are equal to white-note crotchets, so that all black-note sections are in 3/4 against the 4/4 of the white-not sections.  [There’s one exception: in the 2nd bar, the Superius has black notes while all others have white: I’ve treated this as minor color, a dotted minim+crotchet in 4/4 instead of a triplet (effectively in 3/4 against the prevailing 4/4).]

Like La Grotte, Le Blanc offers a few more verses:

 

La Grotte – Quand ce beau printemps

Title

Quand ce beau printemps je voy

Composer

Nicolas de la Grotte  (1530-c.1600)

Source

Chansons de P. de Ronsard, Ph. Desportes et autres, Le Roy & Ballard 1569 (I’ve used the 1580 re-print)

(text on Lieder.net here)
(blog entry here)
(recordings here and here)

Another of those ‘hymn style’ settings by La Grotte, and at last one that you can hear, so that you can judge the effect. The two recordings are at very different tempi: the former, by the Ensemble Vocal du Pays de Thann, at a more hymn-like pace, and in full costume too; the latter by the La Croche Choeur, Arles, at a spanking pace which tries hard to disguise any similarity to a hymn! The acoustic doesn’t favour the speed they sing at, but well worth a listen.

It’s also quite a short setting. So, as well as setting 6 stanzas under the music, La Grotte provides 3 further pages of text, another 18 stanzas, for a total of 24 repeats of the tune!

 

 

 

 

 

La Grotte – Mais voyez

Title

Mais voyez mon cher esmoy

Composer

Nicolas de la Grotte  (1530-c.1600)

Source

Chansons de P. de Ronsard, Ph. Desportes et autres, Le Roy & Ballard 1569 (I’ve used the 1580 re-print)

(text on Lieder.net here)
(blog entry here)
(no recording available)

Here is a settng by La Grotte which approaches very close to that Victorian hymn style I have talked about: the minim and semibreve are the only notes used, so everything is smooth and relatively slow, with the focus on the tune, which moves mostly stepwise, and the gently-shifting chords. And it’s quite short. It’s all very different from George de la Hèle’s setting from nearly 30 years later in full-on polyphonic, madrigalist style!

As usual La Grotte prints five extra verses, in addition to the three set under the music:

 

 

Verdonck – Nous ne tenons

Title

Nous ne tenons en nostre main

Composer

Cornelius Verdonck  (1563-1625)

Source

Chansons Françoyses … mises en musique par Sévérin Cornet, Christophe Plantin, 1581

(text on Lieder.net here)
(blog entry here)
(no recording available)

First, a claim. I believe this is the first time that this song has been attributed to Verdonck, rather than Cornet. It appears in the standard bibliographies as a song by Cornet, as it is printed in his Chansons Françoyses, where it is the last song in the book. Thibault & Perceau’s classic bibliography, the online Catalogue de la Chanson Française à la Renaissance (CESR-University of Tours), and Jeanice Brooks’ thesis on Ronsard song all give it to Cornet.

Some of the books print Cornet’s name at the top – like the one above. But most attribute it instead to “Cornelius Verdonck, disciple de l’Aucteur” (below). Here, ‘the Author’ must mean the author of the book, as Verdonck is clearly claiming the song. While the Cornet attriobution could be a careless slip (the same heading as all the other songs in the book), the ascription to verdonck must have been intentional – it can hardly have got there by accident – so that I feel confident in changing the accepted attribution and publishing this as a work by Verdonck.

It’s ambitious for a young man: Verdonck had only moved back to Antwerp to become Cornet’s pupil the year before, shortly after his voice broke, so it is obviously one of his early compositions. In 8 voices, Verdonck mostly uses them as two antiphonal choirs of 4 voices each, as you can see just by glancing at the page layout.  Sometimes he joins a 5th voice to whichever quartet is singing at the moment. But all 8 voices join together in quite riotous polyphony quite regularly, and this is a joy to listen to (or would be – no recording is available).

The song itself is an attractive piece in the polyphonic style – full of imitation, even syncopation. Not particularly madrigalian in style, and with a limited palette of accidentals, it is really quite conservative for its time – which is consistent with what we know of Verdonck, who ignored the new ‘baroque’ style of Monteverdi even though he lives well into the 1600s.

Note too how attractive the books are; Plantin in Antwerp ues a clearer font than most of the French printers, and has (most obviously) chosen a ‘portrai’ rather than ‘landscape’ page orientation.

Although most of the part-books survive in the Bibliothèque nationale de France and are available on the Gallica website, the Quinta partbook (also containing the 2nd Superius of this song) exists in only a single copy in the Biblioteca Universitaria, Salamanca. I am extremely grateful to Oscar Lilao Franca at the library for providing me very efficiently and very cordially with a copy of the relevant pages of their unique copy.

 

 

 

 

 

Clereau – D’un gosier machelaurier

Title

D’un gosier mache-laurier

Composer

Pierre Clereau (or Cler’eau)  (c.1520-c.1567)

Source

Premier Livre de Chansons, Le Roy & Ballard 1559

(text on Lieder.net here)
(blog entry here)
(no recording available)

We round off the set of chansons in Clereau’s 1st book with this setting of what Ronsard himself called a chanson. To me, it’s a bizarre text to set: very complex references and words – after all, how many readers/singers of Clereau’s book knew what a ‘laurel-chewing throat’ was? Or who Lycophron was, how he related to Cassandra – or yet how he related to Ronsard’s reading in the Alexandrian Pleiad? [See blog entry for more discussion!] 

Bizarre text or not, it was also set by Costeley – so was clearly well-known. And Clereau’s setting is rather neat, like the one of De peu de bien, a mix of the homophonic and the gently polyphonic, finding a nice balance between the old and the new, the French (Parisian) and the international styles.

When the songs from the 1st book were later collected into Clereau’s Odes of Ronsard, they ended up in a group in the middle of the book. Mostly the sequence was unchanged: but for some reason this song was transferred from the end of the group to the beginning. Why might that have been? I suspect it is precisely that factor: the bridge between styles. In this structure, with D’un gosier first and De peu de bien last, the repeated  songs are neatly book-ended by songs which bridge the styles, ensuring that singers know both styles are represented.

As another short setting (Ronsard’s stanza-from is also short), this is another song for which additionl verses are printed:

At least the text of these is slightly less specialised: the Trojan was being – hopefully! – sufficiently known to supply adequate context for its early singers.

 

 

 

Clereau – De peu de bien

Title

De peu de bien on vit honnestement

Composer

Pierre Clereau (or Cler’eau)  (c.1520-c.1567)

Source

Premier Livre de Chansons, Le Roy & Ballard 1559

(text on Lieder.net here)
(no blog entry yet)
(no recording available)

This one jogs along at a fairly consistent pace, all minims and semibreves: but although the opening is very homophopnic, and despite the even paving, the piece gradually introduces a more imitative style of real polyphony, with overlapping entries and little running figures. A neat balance between the two forms.

 

 

 

 

Voix de ville: part 2

Titles

Mais voyez mon cher esmoy;  Mais que me vaut d’entretenir;  Le cruel Amour vainqueur;  Comme l’aigle fond d’en haut [also from Le cruel Amour vainqueur (8th stanza)];  O Pucelle plus tendre

(texts on this blog as linked above)

Composer

Jehan Chardavoine & others

Source

Recueil des plus belles et excellentes chansons en forme de Voix-de-ville, tirées de divers autheurs tant anciens que modernes, auxquelles a été nouvellement adaptée la musique de leurs chants communs, afin que chacun les puisse chanter en quelque lieu qu’il se trouvera tant de voix que sur les instruments by Jehan Chardavoine, 1576

A long while back, I offered several of Chardavoine’s ‘tunes’ from the voix de ville. There are several more I haven’t uploaded, so here they are, all from the original 1576 publication.

The previous post explains a lot of the background.

As before I’ve just set out the tune, as Chardavoine does.

La Grotte – Quand j’estois libre

Title

Quand j’estois libre

Composer

Nicolas de la Grotte  (1530-c.1600)

Source

Chansons de P. de Ronsard, Ph. Desportes et autres, Le Roy & Ballard 1569 (I’ve used the 1580 re-print)

(text on Lieder.net here)
(blog entry here)
(no recording available)

I’ve been rude about La Grotte before, so why stop now?! The tenor here is astonishingly immobile: just 3 notes (D-Eb-F) for most of the song, 2 more (C-Bb) for a brief excursion in the middle, and a B-natural at the end. But then, as I’ve said before, La Grotte’s pieces are about the tune in the Superius, and the accompaniment is essentially chordal: the tenor just happens to be the static note in the middle of those chords! There is a nice little run in the Contra to spice things up in bar 17; and overall the sound is quite pleasant. It’s just not the kind of music which inspires me…

The motion of the piece – a mix of white and black notes – is again at issue: I’ve transcribed this one on the basis that the minims in the 3/2 section are equivalent to the minims in the final 2/2 section, since (i) the 2/2 section is just the coda, the time signatures don’t alternate; and (ii) there is no crotchet-based movement in the piece to make crotchet-equivalence meaningful. So I’ve transcribed this using option 1 as set out earlier though I dismissed that option there.

 

 As usual La Grotte prints some extra verses: this time, a very generous additional 10(!).

 

 

 

 

Clereau – O Dieux que j’ay de plaisir

Title

O Dieux, que j’ay de plaisir

Composer

Pierre Clereau (or Cler’eau)  (c.1520-c.1567)

Source

Premier Livre de Chansons, Le Roy & Ballard 1559

(text apparently not on Lieder.net)
(blog entry here – setting of alternate verses)
(no recording available)

A pleasant variation from the tune+accompaniment homophony characteristic of these 3-voice settings by Clereau: here the chordal setting is broken up with attractive runs in various voices. Clereau prints a couple of extra verses at the end, no doubt partly because the setting is quite short and there is space left to fill!

But in that small space Clereau takes several risks, sounding adjacent notes against each other ‘on the beat’ at the beginning of a bar: C-D in bar 7, B-C in bar 13, F-G in bar 29. Such emphatic discordant seconds are unusual…

 

Here are the extra verses printed: