Program Notes

The rich fabric of court life in 15th-century France and Burgundy has been an irresistible subject for scholars for centuries. The gorgeous paintings and illustrations, the cultivated literature of love, the courts’ splendid musical establishments, and the period’s fondness for nostalgic fantasy and courtly ceremony captivate us today. While the 15th century is a time of new developments in musical style in Italy, spurred by humanist scholars and the patronage of the northern Italian courts, Flanders and France remained very much in their own world, so beautifully described in the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga’s classic book The Autumn of the Middle Ages.  

The French chanson, especially, is a genre dominated by the traditions, forms, and conventions of an earlier age. This is not to say there is nothing original or appealing in 15th-century chanson; nothing could be further from the truth. The exquisite gem-like songs and instrumental pieces inspired by them are a perfect aural counterpart to the beautiful miniature illuminations found in the manuscripts of the time.  

For Love Songs of the 15th Century, we have elected to focus on the rich body of secular music from this time and place. The Loire Valley (where many of the songbooks which contain the central repertory of courtly song were prepared) and the courts of France and Burgundy will be the source of most of our music and poetry this evening. For Valentine’s Day, we feature one manuscript in particular, the Chansonnier Cordiforme, now in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. As its name suggests, this lovely songbook is in the shape of a heart. All the chansonniers were prepared for wealthy patrons, and this one is no exception. It dates from the 1470s and was commissioned by canon Jean de Montchenu. The Chansonnier Cordiforme, along with the other songbooks, gives us a picture of the 15th-century hit parade: the songs that appear in most of the collections. These include songs by Guillaume Du Fay, Gilles Binchois, Johannes Ockeghem, Antoine Busnoys, and others heard in this program.  

It is interesting to consider more particularly the elements that are carried over from the medieval lyric tradition, as well as what is fresh in the 15th-century chansons. Generally, the songs are all in the fixed forms of medieval lyric poetry. Rondeaux predominate, and there are a few even older-style ballades and virelais. The language used in these songs is a stylized, formal, nostalgic representation of the universe of medieval courtly love, the universe invented by the troubadours and trouvères over 200 years before. While 15th-century songwriters contributed their share of cheerful songs for May Day or the New Year—and some genuinely funny little songs as well—there’s a striking preponderance of melancholy sentiments about unattainable or unresponsive ladies, oaths of romantic fealty, desperate pleas for love, and all the trappings of a “retro” fashion for courtly love in all its permutations. There is much here of the delight taken by people at the 15th-century courts in a kind of fantastical play-acting, a conscious imitation of the grand old days of tournaments, jousting, and chivalry. Within their strictly delimited and very artificial poetic world, however, the poets of the chansonniers are capable of great ingenuity and subtlety in the manipulation of their treasured themes and “buzz” words. It is easy to understand the appeal of the genre for the sophisticated audience of connoisseurs who heard these songs at court, in settings that ranged from intimate gatherings to grand ceremonial banquets.  

While the poetry of the chansons is bound by the conventions of courtly love, the music is something else entirely. The theorist Johannes Tinctoris, writing in 1477, stated that “There is no music written over 40 years ago that is regarded by the learned as worth hearing.” This confirms our modern assessment that a new central European tradition, which borrowed heavily from English music, was forged in the Low Countries during this period, around 1400 or a little later. The English had introduced a style of sweet, full, consonant counterpoint and harmonic structure which, together with the French mastery of musical architecture and an Italianate sense of flowing melody, became the basis for the first international musical language of Europe. It is this style, with subsequent modifications, which becomes the basis for all polyphonic art music in Europe for over 100 years—the first real musical style of the Renaissance. One commentator singles out the Englishman John Dunstable as the originator of this style, and, for purposes of our program, the Franco-Flemish Gilles de Bins (or Binchois, as we are used to calling him) (c.1400-1460) and Guillaume Du Fay (c.1398-1474) as its early proponents. As one might expect, there are substantial stylistic differences between these earlier chansons and those of slightly younger composers, including Johannes Ockeghem (c.1410-1497). But in spite of the differences, there is a great degree of continuity in all this music, as borne out by the songbooks themselves, since pieces by the various generations are found side by side.  

In this program, we have grouped songs and instrumental pieces in roughly chronological order, so Du Fay and Binchois will be heard before intermission, and for the most part the next generation is featured after. Also, a few special songs achieved such fame and popularity that they spawned whole families of related pieces, including added parts or different versions of the original chanson, magnificent mass settings, and involved instrumental pieces. We present several of these generative pieces. 

Guillaume Du Fay was regarded by his patron Lorenzo di Medici as the crowning glory of their age. Born around 1398, possibly near Cambrai, France, where he worked for much of his life, Du Fay took the lead in establishing the mainstream musical language of the European Renaissance. As his contemporaries recognized, Du Fay followed the example of English musicians in using full harmonies and sweet sounds. The new sonority he (and, of course, others) developed during his long career in Italy and France is based on a fresh sense of harmonic considerations, flowing melody, and sophisticated treatment of dissonance. His style became a model and a taking-off point for future generations. He has left us over 70 chansons, from which we have chosen six this evening to demonstrate his range as a chanson composer. Donnes l’assault amusingly uses an imitation of military trumpet calls to make clear the imagery of the poem. This is a text/music relationship familiar to us from later music, but this sort of “text painting” is extremely rare in these songs. Also rare for 15th-century chanson is the setting of three complete poems simultaneously in Je vous pris, although this had been a practice in earlier centuries. The highest voice is the complaint of a lady and the other two respond from a man’s point of view. The wrenchingly beautiful La belle se siet is a ballade, a fairly old-fashioned kind of poem by this time, reserved for serious or ceremonial subjects for the most part. Ce moy de Mai and J’atendray tant are more typical rondeaux, and lively light-hearted ones at that.  

The charming Las, j’ay perdu mon espincel is by Jacques Vide, who in 1428 was made a secretary to Phillip the Good, Duke of Burgundy. The song is a visual pun in the manuscript. Although most chansons have three parts, this one has only two, and the contratenor staves are left empty to symbolize the missing brooch of the title. We continue with the only surviving musical setting of Christine de Pisan’s poetry. Pisan had turned to writing poetry after her husband, an official at the French court, died suddenly, leaving her widowed with two young children to support. In a very real sense, she was the first European woman to make a career out of writing. In addition to excellent but conventional lyrics like Dueil engoisseux, Pisan brilliantly displayed her erudition in her feminist utopia, The Book of the City of Ladies, and, fittingly, in her Tale of Joan of Arc, the only contemporary literary account of the Maid of Orleans outside her trial records. But the 15th-century chanson repertoire is full of songs in which a woman is speaking, so in addition to the setting of Pisan’s poetry we have included here many songs sung from a woman’s perspective.  

Of the composers identified by historians as the originators of the new “Burgundian” style of the 15th century, Gilles Binchois was the only one actually employed at the Burgundian court, as a member of Phillip the Good’s chapel. The anguished ballade Dueil engoisseux (Pisan may have written it on the death of her husband), paradoxically, sounds sweet and not at all unhappy to modern ears because of its major mode. Even adjusting for anachronistic listening habits, it’s clear that the words and music in this repertoire have a different relationship than we might expect…  

Before the next song we hear the earliest instrumental setting of the T’andernacken melody, very much in the style of dance band improvisations. T’andernacken is a Flemish folksong that became for some reason the basis for some of the earliest, purely instrumental pieces in the 15th-century repertoire. We perform it here first as a reconstructed folk song, and then later in the program in a couple of instrumental versions. Composers vied with each other in fashioning more and more virtuosic settings of the tune, and it was popular well into the 16th century.  

Binchois’s Filles a marier seems to fit well in a set that includes a Pisan lyric. It is unusual in its construction as well as its subject matter, being built on a pre-existent tune in the tenor, probably a folksong. We conclude the first portion of our program with Du Fay’s rollicking drinking song, Hé, compagnons (Du Fay, in addition to his musical and diplomatic skills, was trained as a sommelier).  

After intermission we return to the Chansonnier Cordiforme and two songs that certainly deserve a place in the hit parade of the next generation chansonniers. In his own lifetime, Johannes Ockeghem’s stature as a singer, composer, and human being was unquestioned. Writing in the 1470’s, the Italian humanist Francesco Florio wrote in an unqualified rave: “I am sure you could not dislike this man, so pleasing is the beauty of his person, so noteworthy the sobriety of his speech and of his morals, and his grace. He alone of all singers is free from all vice and abounds in all virtues.” Ockeghem served the French court during the reigns of three kings: Charles VII, Louis XI, and Louis XII. In 1459 he was given the extremely lucrative position of Treasurer of the king’s own abbey, St. Martin of Tours. This made it possible for Erasmus to pun in his elegy for the composer about the ‘aurea vox Okegi’, his” golden voice.” Ockeghem’s works are distinguished by an extraordinary technical skill and ingenuity in the service of powerful and expressive music; only a relatively small number of these exquisite pieces survive. His death was lamented in verse by Guillaume Cretin and Jean Molinet as well as Erasmus, and in musical settings by Johannes Lupi, Josquin des Prez, and others. We continue with two instrumental settings of another very popular chanson, J’ay pris amours. The second is from the first printed collection of part music, Ottaviano Petrucci’s Harmonices Musices Odhecaton A. Although printed in Venice in 1501, the Odhecaton contains mostly French/Burgundian chansons along with instrumental pieces.  

We continue with another piece from the Odhecaton, the rollicking Dit le bourgignon. The rest of this group features music of the next generation of composers, some, like Heinrich Isaac, who lived and worked in Florence and Vienna but traveled extensively. The poet and composer Jean Molinet, as well as Antoine Busnoys, the most prolific chanson composer of his generation, never left the French and Burgundian realms, where almost all the singer/composers featured on our program received their training in cathedral schools.  

Our final group is composed of a complex of pieces built on the Ockeghem chanson D’ung aultre amer and a popular tune, L’homme armé. The setting by Phillipe Basiron juxtaposes the two melodies in one piece—a compositional feat that became popular toward the end of the 15th century. In 1453, the city of Constantinople fell to the Turks, finally ending the history of the Roman Empire in the East. Duke Philip the Good and his court lamented the fact, and Du Fay even wrote pieces commemorating the sad event. The Duke encouraged his knights to swear to go on a holy Crusade to free Constantinople from the infidel, and threw a famous party in 1454, the Banquet of the Oath of the Pheasant, to celebrate this solemn vow. The hall was lavishly decorated with tapestries, and wine flowed in fountains. Musicians appeared in giant pastries, and an actor dressed as Mother Church entered the hall on an elephant, to sing a lament for the fall of her city. Of course, none of the Burgundians had the slightest intention of marching off to war in the faraway East, and the vows were never undertaken. Robert Morton’s humorous rondeau combines the L’homme armé tune with a text that certainly sounds like it could have been part of these fanciful festivities.