Title
Autant qu’on voit au cieux de flammes
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 here – a lute setting by Adrian Le Roy)
I was dismissive of La Grotte’s ‘instrumental’ style in a previous post; so I thought it only fair to illustrate his approach, and allow you to make up your own mind. La Grotte was an organist, initially for the King of Navarre but then for the Duke of Anjou who became Henri III – which made La Grotte an influential figure, as ‘vallet de chambre et organiste ordinaire’ to the French King – see the title page below.
His approach is in some ways an anticipation of the ‘modern’ song style – that of melody + accompaniment, the latter being essentially chordal. It was a style which in France was typified by the air de cour, developing in the late sixteenth century; and in some ways is similar to the seconda prattica introduced by Monteverdi in Italy to replace the polyphonic style (the prima prattica) which had dominated Western art music for the previous few centuries.
So being dismissive of it is – let’s be clear – risking being dismissive of the way that music has developed from 1600 till now…!
But you can see my point in, for instance, the first 3/2 section on the opening page: chords which remain constant, each voice repeating the same note – easy to play on instruments as the fingers don’t need to move to maintain the chordal accompaniment, but hardly as interesting to sing as the polyphonic style this was replacing. At the same time, though, La Grotte achieves a rich, full sound overall which is compensation for the loss of internal movement in the parts. As I said, a trade-off.
A word on notation: La Grotte drifts between ‘black note’ (=3/4) and ‘white note’ (=4/4) notation; black breves are easily identified, but black minims look like ‘white’ crotchets & can generally be recognised by appearing in 3s not 2s! Interpreting what La Grotte means is tricky. It could be any of three things:
- note values stay the same, so the 3/4 bits go slower (more notes per bar) – unlikely, but see 3 below;
- note values adjust so that the length of the breve (the ‘mensural’ unit of notation, in the transcription = 1 bar) stays the same, in which case the bits with 3 minims to a bar go at 150% of the speed of the bits with 2 breves in the bar. This is what the notation ‘should’ mean, but then the song progresses with awkward shifts of the basic note length – in effect, jumping between 2 and 3 beats in equal-length bars means the pulse keeps shifting and the overall effect is unstable and unconvincing;
- what I’ve transcribed as the ‘black’ minims could be read as ‘white’ crotchets, so the basic pulse of the music stays the same, but La Grotte is effectively allowing bars to be of unequal lengths. I’ve assumed this is what La Grotte intended, and this means that the ‘black note’ 3/4 sections go twice as fast as the ‘white note’ sections, i.e. at 200%. This seems to be the view of the performers in the lute setting I’ve linked to, and so what you can hear matches the transcription – except at the beginning where Le Roy has adjusted La Grotte’s complicated rhythm. That seems like a smart move by Le Roy: though La Grotte starts with this complex rhythm, he seems to forget about it after the opening line and settles into something much more regular; which seems rather weak structurally. So Le Roy gets rid of the anomalous beginning rather than leaving it there, and thus strengthens the overall shape of the song.
(I should mention a 4th possibility, which is that La Grotte is trying out something like musique mesurée, a style used by Claude le Jeune later in the century where note values are adapted to reflect the weight of syllables in spoken French. It was proposed by Baif, based on Latin and Greek models of poetry, and meant basically that short syllables were set as crotchets, long syllables as minims, and the ‘metre’ of the music was irregular except at the unit of the poetic line, since the number and weight of syllables per line was consistent. The irregularity is certainly there, as I’ve pointed out in 3 above. However, La Grotte’s setting clearly doesn’t attempt to ‘weight’ syllables consistently like this, so I think we can reject the idea that this is his plan.)
The transcription below keeps original note values, follows option 3 above, and therefore has lots of speed adjustments noted to keep the tempo constant:
This version takes the simpler approach – hard though it is to abandon original note values! – of adjusting the ‘3-time’ sections to 3/4 so that the crotchet values stay constant – this means that note values of the ‘black notes’ are halved:
This is the approach I intend to use for these transcriptions going forward.
As he does consistently throughout the book, La Grotte prints extra verses of the poem to be sung: these really are strophic songs just like a ‘modern’ song is.
Oeuvres de Ronsard 