W. Edwards

Phrasing in medieval song: perspectives from traditional music

During the course of a series of articles relating medieval Italian songs to oral and unwritten traditions, Nino Pirrotta comments on a peculiar anonymous two-voice setting from the fourteenth century whose verses seem to have been broken and shattered by the music. Word repetition ‘does not result in a more effective or more understandable rendition of the text; on the contrary, it so fragments and stutters it that any meaning is lost, except as a pretext for the melody which submerges it’. The song in question, Dolce lo mio drudo, is part of a group of unica with Calabrian associations found in the oldest layer of the Reina manuscript. Pirrotta transcribes the song in full and analyses the text and its cognates in detail. It is a ballata with irregularities. I quote in Example 1 just the refrain, together with an indication of the syllable count, in order to facilitate comparison with what follows.

Parallel performance traits in medieval and modern traditional Mediterranean song

Three quotations spark off the present paper. The first is by the philologist Paul Zumthor: ?Medieval literature can be more aptly compared with folklore... than with modern literatures?1. The second quotation is by the literary and musical scholar John Stevens with reference to song writing in the Middle Ages: ?In plain language, the musician did not set the words of the poem to music; he set its pattern?2. The implications of that observation were developed subsequently by its author3 and have sparked off some discussion, none of which was accessible in Ceau?escus information-starved Romania to folklorist Speranza R?dulescu who mirrored Stevenss words in uncanny fashion, and unwittingly provided my third quotation, when in private conversation with me in 1987 on her countrys traditional song she remarked how ?The words have their pattern projected on the music?. With that chance remark it finally dawned on me how much more there is yet to be played for in the admittedly difficult and dangerous game of drawing parallels between medieval and modern traditional performance practice. Published research has centred on the search for models?some more appropriate than others?for the use of instruments, improvisation and ornamentation techniques, and types of voice timbre in the performance of

Understanding Fifteenth-Century Chansonniers

JANE Alden’s topic is a group of five exquisitely penned and illuminated chansonniers compiled chiefly, as she argues, in the later 1460s and during the 1470s. With names alluding to their present locations Copenhagen (hereafter Cop), Dijon (Dij), Wolfenbüttel (Wolf ) or to their sometime owners the comte Léon de Laborde (Lab), Nivelle de la Chaussée (Niv) they are well known to musical scholarship. However, it is only with the recognition in the 1980s of their origin in French royal court circles that they have gradually come to be known under the collective title ‘Loire Valley chansonniers’. In this, the first booklength study of them, Alden accounts for their discovery or recognition by philologists and music historians (for the most part in the 1850s), their characteristics as ‘material objects’, their chronology and dating, their ‘makers’, and finally their owners, readers and the ‘bookish culture’ that gave rise to them. In the form of a companion website, she also provides supporting materials, including contents lists and gathering structures for each of the chansonniers, along with high-resolution reproductions (in colour, where applicable) of the book’s illustrations. There is much that is new and valuable here. So much so that the book succeeds less in drawing a line under its subject matter than in opening up the pursuit of numerous avenues for further enquiry. With that in mind I shall attempt here not only to summarize and evaluate but also to probe the implications of Alden’s view of the five chansonniers as ‘the earliest surviving examples of a new kind of deluxe musical collection’ (p. 65). What exactly is new? And to what extent does such novelty extend to other chansonniers of the time, be they luxurious or otherwise, from France or elsewhere?