MUSIC AS DESCRIPTION
A new sort of “literary music”—or rather a possibly unwitting revival of an old sort—came into being when Attaingnant, still in his first year of publishing activity, brought out a slim volume devoted to the works of a single composer. The title page read Chansons de maistre Clement Janequin, and it contained only five items. Those five, however, took up as much space as fifteen had occupied in Attaingnant’s first collection. Four of them became famous and vastly influential all over Europe, and (most amazingly of all) remained in print for almost a century.
ex. 17-8b Clemens non Papa, beginning of motet Musica dei donum
The composer, Clément Janequin (ca. 1485–1558), was a provincial priest from Bordeaux in the south of France, who never held a major appointment either at a large cathedral or at court. Despite his clerical calling, he was almost exclusively a chanson specialist: he wrote two Masses (both of them based parody-fashion on chansons of his that had become popular) and a single book of motets, but more than 250 chansons, many of them broadly humorous or racy or downright lewd. When thinking of Janequin it is hard not to recall his near-exact contemporary, François Rabelais, the novel-writing monk whose name became synonymous with gross drollery. It was Janequin who gave the “Rabelaisian” mood its musical embodiment.
The four big chansons of 1528 define the Rabelaisian genre. Broad they certainly are, in more ways than one. Where the average length of a “Parisian,” semi-courtly chanson like Tant que vivray is thirty to forty measures (counting the breve or “tempus” as a measure), the longest item in the 1528 book, divided into two “partes” as if it were a motet, totals a whopping 234 measures, six times the normal length. What could be the text of such a monster chanson? Here is where things get even curiouser, because if “text” is taken to mean something meaningful written in French words, then these colossal pieces have hardly any text at all.
In the original publication of 1528 the contents are listed the normal way, by incipits (first lines). Nine years later, the volume was reissued in a deluxe “quarto” edition with double-sized pages, and with each item most unusually given a title, so popular had they become. The first (excerpted in Ex. 17-9), called La guerre (“The war”) is the 234-measure monster. It commemorates the battle of Marignano, the Milanese conquest of 1515, and its text, once past the opening salute (“Hear ye, gentlemen of France, of our noble King François”) consists almost entirely of battle sounds: guns and cannon-fire, bugles, war whoops, laments for the fallen. (It must have been written a good deal earlier than its publication date, since by 1528 Francis had been defeated, captured, ransomed, and forced to give up all his Italian territorial claims.)
The second item, La chasse, is a hunting piece full of horn calls and barking dogs. We know (as Janequin possibly did not) that such pieces, written in the form of canons both in France (where they were called chace) and Italy (where they were called caccia) were a popular genre close to two centuries before. The fourth item in the Janequin chanson book, called L’alouette (“The lark”), begins with the line “Or sus, vous dormez trop” (“Get up, you sleepyhead”), which we encountered in another fourteenth-century genre, the “birdsong virelai.” But there is nothing in the fourteenth century to compare for sheer ornithological frenzy with Janequin’s third item, Le chant des oyseux (“The song of the birds”), a huge composition in which another refrain about lovers awakening alternates with five different birdsong collages.
These orgies of onomatopoeia, sheer imaginative play on a par with Rabelais’s hilarious lists, amount at times to long stretches of what might best be described as pure texture. The beginning of the second part of La guerre (quaintly listed in 1528 by its incipit, “Fan Frere le le lan fan”), which depicts the height of battle, holds a single chord for a veritable eternity (Ex. 17-9). The singers have nothing resembling a tune to sing, and nothing resembling words to say, just a concatenation of lingual sound effects—a virtuoso turn for performer and composer alike. As befits such a stunning tour de force, it inspired emulation on a grand scale, beginning with Philippe Verdelot, a Flemish composer active in Italy, who at the request of the publisher Susato skillfully added a fifth voice to the piece to augment its already loaded textures and, no doubt, promote sales. Janequin liked Verdelot’s added voice well enough to include it in his own revised edition of the work, and that is how it is presented in Ex. 17-9.
ex. 17-9 Clément Janequin, La guerre, a 5, with Verdelot’s extra voice (secunda pars, mm. 1-6)
To call a piece like Janequin’s La guerre “literary” is to interpret the word a little loosely. It would make no sense to say that such a work “expresses” its text. (How do you express “fan frere le le lan fan”?) Rather, the text and the music work together to evoke the sounds (and not only the sounds) of the world at large, and in so doing point outside the work in a way that the music of Tant que vivray had no business or interest in doing. But construing the word more strictly, in terms of the relationship between the music and the text, Janequin’s onomatopoetic chansons are not literary. The music is still basically a medium for the recitation of the text; the two components still touch mainly on the phonological (or declamational) level, not the semantic one. Onomatopoeia is presentation, not representation. It has no semantics.
- Citation (MLA):
- Richard Taruskin. "Chapter 17 Commercial and Literary Music." The Oxford History of Western Music. Oxford University Press. New York, USA. n.d. Web. 27 Apr. 2025. <https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume1/actrade-9780195384819-div1-017005.xml>.
- Citation (APA):
- Taruskin, R. (n.d.). Chapter 17 Commercial and Literary Music. In Oxford University Press, Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century. New York, USA. Retrieved 27 Apr. 2025, from https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume1/actrade-9780195384819-div1-017005.xml
- Citation (Chicago):
- Richard Taruskin. "Chapter 17 Commercial and Literary Music." In Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century, Oxford University Press. (New York, USA, n.d.). Retrieved 27 Apr. 2025, from https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume1/actrade-9780195384819-div1-017005.xml
