Manuscripts, Music, Machaut: Essays in Honor of Lawrence Earp (Epitome Musical) 9782503602998, 2503602991
This multidisciplinary volume celebrates the scholarship and career of Lawrence Earp, whose work has profoundly shaped t
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Table of contents :
Front Matter
Jared C. Hartt, Tamsyn Mahoney-Steel, and Benjamin L. Albritton. Introduction
Helen J. Swift. A Guide to Research: ‘je vous tiens pour ma guide’
Tamsyn Mahoney-Steel. Machaut: The Greatest Fourteenth-Century Poet and Composer of the Twenty-First Century
Jennifer Bain. The Impact of Hildegard of Bingen’s Bibliographers and Catalogers
Julie Singer. Child Performers on the Medieval French Stage: A Review of the Published Evidence
Andrew Wahey. Guillaume de Machaut and Yolande of Flanders
Benjamin L. Albritton. Ex historia Guillermi de Mascandio: Machaut in the Annales Hannoniae of Jacques de Guise
Kevin N. Moll. The Fourteenth-Century Polyphonic Mass Ordinary: A Nascent Meta-Genre
Anna Zayaruznaya. Classical Vitry/Romantic Machaut
R. Barton Palmer. Machaut’s Dit dou vergier and Prologue: Some Thoughts
Kevin Brownlee. Machaut as Poet Figure in the Prise D’alexandre
Anne-Hélène Miller. The Poetics of Destour and Ordenance in Machaut’s Lyrico-Narrative dits
Deborah McGrady. Silencing the Sirens and Rethinking Masculinity in Machaut’s Voir dit
Kathleen Wilson Ruffo. Fine Feathered Friends, or, Machaut and the Magicians
Domenic Leo. Notes on Reconstructing the Pictorial Program in a Mutilated Machaut Manuscript
Eliza. Seeing Sens: A Picture of Two Guillaumes and Two Brothers?
Uri Smilansky. Singing from the Source: Performance Markings in Machaut Manuscript G
Yolanda Plumley and Anne Stone. Machaut on the Loose in Italy: Two Case Studies
David Maw. Making Song Speak: Machaut’s ars nova Word Setting
Jacques Boogaart. To See or Not to See: Machaut’s Motet 11, Dame, je sui/ Fins cuers dous/ Fins cuers dous
Catherine A. Bradley. Polyphony from and for Refrains in Dance-Song Motets
Richard Dudas. Another Look at Vos/Gratissima
Alice V. Clark. Dolor meus: Competing Visions of Suffering in a Pair of Motets
Michael Scott Asato Cuthbert. Two ‘Textless’ Elaborations of Chant from the Ivrea Codex
Karen Desmond. Tempus, Tempo, and Insular Semibreves
Margaret Bent. Washington, Library of Congress, M2.1 .C6 1400 Case: A Neglected English Fragment
Jared C. Hartt. A Missing Middle-Voice Melody: Reconstructing the Tenor of A solis ortus/Salvator mundi Domine
Back Matter
Citation preview
Manuscripts, Music, Machaut Essays in Honor of Lawrence Earp
Centre d’études supérieures de la Renaissance de Tours Université de Tours, UMR 7323 du CNRS Collection « Épitome musical » dirigée par Philippe Vendrix & Philippe Canguilhem Editorial Committee: Hyacinthe Belliot, Vincent Besson, Camilla Cavicchi, David Fiala, Daniel Saulnier, Solveig Serre, Vasco Zara Advisory board: Vincenzo Borghetti (Università di Verona), Marie-Alexis Colin (Université Libre de Bruxelles), Richard Freedman (Haverford College), Giuseppe Gerbino (Columbia University), Inga Mai Groote (Universität Zürich), Andrew Kirkman (University of Birmingham), Laurenz Lütteken (Universität Zürich), Pedro Memelsdorff (Centre d' d'études études supérieures de la Renaissance de Tours), Kate van Orden (Harvard University), Yolanda Plumley (University of Exeter), Massimo Privitera (Università di Palermo), Jesse Rodin (Stanford University), Emilio Ros-Fabregas (CSIC-Barcelona), Katelijne Schiltz (Universität Regensburg), Thomas Schmidt (University of Manchester). Graphic design and layout: Vincent Besson (CNRS-CESR)
Cover illustration: Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. , 22545, fol. 40r (detail)
© , 2022, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. ISBN: ---- 978-2-503-60299-8 E-ISBN: ---- 978-2-503-60300-1 DOI: ./M.EM-EB.. 10.1484/M.EM-EB.5.131855 ISSN: - 2565-8166 E-ISSN: - 2565-9510 Printed in the EU on acid-free paper. D/// D/2022/0095/268
Manuscripts, Music, Machaut Essays in Honor of Lawrence Earp edıted by
Jared C. Hartt, Tamsyn Mahoney-Steel & Benjamin L. Albritton
Centre d’études supérieures de la Renaissance Collection « Épitome musical »
ForFor Lawrence Lawrence Earp Earp on on hishis 70th birthday. birthday.
Acknowledgments | List of Figures | List of Tables | List of Music Examples | Contributors | Abbreviations |
Introduction
Jared C. Hartt, Tamsyn Mahoney-Steel, Benjamin L. Albritton
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Guiding Research . A Guide to Research: ‘je vous tiens pour ma guide’ | Helen J. Swift
. Machaut: The Greatest Fourteenth-Century Poet and Composer of the Twenty-First Century Tamsyn Mahoney-Steel . The Impact of Hildegard of Bingen’s Bibliographers and Catalogers Jennifer Bain
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. Child Performers on the Medieval French Stage: A Review of the Published Evidence Julie Singer
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(Re)examining and (Re)assessing the Fourteenth Century . Guillaume de Machaut and Yolande of Flanders Andrew Wathey
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. Ex historia Guillermi de Mascandio: Machaut in the Annales Hannoniae of Jacques de Guise | Benjamin L. Albritton . The Fourteenth-Century Polyphonic Mass Ordinary: A Nascent Meta-Genre Kevin N. Moll . Classical Vitry/Romantic Machaut Anna Zayaruznaya
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Reading Machaut . Machaut’s Dit dou vergier and Prologue: Some Thoughts R. Barton Palmer . Machaut as Poet Figure in the Prise d’Alexandre Kevin Brownlee
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. The Poetics of destour and ordenance in Machaut’s Lyrico-Narrative dits Anne-Hélène Miller . Silencing the Sirens and Rethinking Masculinity in Machaut’s Voir dit Deborah McGrady
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Manuscripts, Music, Machaut
Image and Illumination . Fine Feathered Friends, or, Machaut and the Magicians Kathleen Wilson Ruffo
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. Notes on Reconstructing the Pictorial Program in a Mutilated Machaut Manuscript Domenic Leo . Seeing Sens: A Picture of Two Guillaumes and Two Brothers? Elizabeth Eva Leach
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Machaut Musicology . Singing from the Source: Performance Markings in Machaut Manuscript G Uri Smilansky . Machaut on the Loose in Italy: Two Case Studies Yolanda Plumley and Anne Stone
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. Making Song Speak: Machaut’s ars nova Word Setting | David Maw
. To See or Not to See: Machaut’s Motet , Dame, je sui/ Fins cuers dous/ Fins cuers dous Jacques Boogaart
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Motets and Chant . Polyphony from and for Refrains in Dance-Song Motets Catherine A. Bradley . Another Look at Vos/Gratissima Richard Dudas
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. Dolor meus: Competing Visions of Suffering in a Pair of Motets Alice V. Clark . Two ‘Textless’ Elaborations of Chant from the Ivrea Codex Michael Scott Asato Cuthbert
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Music in Medieval England .
Tempus, Tempo, and Insular Semibreves Karen Desmond
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. Washington, Library of Congress, M. .C Case: A Neglected English Fragment Margaret Bent . A Missing Middle-Voice Melody: Reconstructing the Tenor of A solis ortus/Salvator mundi Domine | Jared C. Hartt
Bibliography | General Index | Index of Manuscripts |
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Throughout most of and the first months of , I co-edited with Lawrence Earp a volume of collected essays (Earp and Hartt ) for this same series, Épitome musical. As we worked together, I witnessed first-hand Larry’s infinite wisdom, unfailing kindness, and utter brilliance day after day—and it occurred to me that it was rather unbelievable that a Festschrift had yet to be put together to celebrate his achievements. I decided it was time to rectify that problem. Apparently, I was not the only one to have that thought: on May I received a joint email from Tamsyn Mahoney-Steel and Benjamin Albritton suggesting a collection of essays (let’s call it ‘Earp de Mélodie’, they joked), and they rightfully pointed out that would mark a milestone birthday for Larry, his seventieth. We decided we would work together on the project, but we would need to act quickly: we immediately sent out a call for chapters with the ambitious goal of having the volume published before the end of to commemorate Larry’s seventieth. Within just one week we had the full roster of scholars in place; everyone indicated their enthusiasm to contribute and willingness to accept the challenge of a publication date. We were thrilled that Johan Van der Beke and Philippe Vendrix at Brepols soon thereafter enthusiastically agreed to publish this book. I thank my co-editors, Tamsyn and Ben, for their camaraderie, insight, and assistance throughout the past year. Our frequent brainstorming sessions on Zoom were not only thought-provoking, but also full of great (British, American, and Canadian) humo(u)r. It has been an honor for the three of us to have had the opportunity to engage with everyone’s stellar contributions; it has been a truly joyous experience working together to celebrate Larry. Finally, we thank Johan Van der Beke, publishing manager at Brepols, and Philippe Vendrix and Philippe Canguilhem, the directors of the Épitome musical series, for taking on this project, and Vincent Besson for typesetting and laying out this volume so beautifully. – JCH, May
Introduction, Jared C. Hartt, Tamsyn Mahoney-Steel, Benjamin L. Albritton Figure : MS Vg, fol. , detail (Private Collection of James E. and Elizabeth J. Ferrell) | Figure : MS Vg, fol. r, detail (Private Collection of James E. and Elizabeth J. Ferrell) |
Chapter , Helen J. Swift Figure .: MS C, fol. r, detail (BnF) | Figure .: Olivier de La Marche, Le Chevalier délibéré. Gouda: Collaciebroeders, c. (Geneva, Bibliothèque Jean Bonna) |
Chapter , Tamsyn Mahoney-Steel Figure .: Sample small network diagram with nodes sized by degree | Figure .: Sample small network diagram with nodes sized by in-degree | Figure .: Section of the full network diagram showing publications predominantly on motets | Figure .: Section of the full network diagram showing publications predominantly on art history and manuscripts | Figure .: Full network using a Yifan Hu layout, with areas of research specialization labeled | Figure .: Full network using a Fruchterman Reingold layout, with areas of research specialization labeled | Figure .: Full network using a ForceAtlas layout, with individual nodes (publications) labeled | Figure .: English language publications on Machaut in five-year increments | Figure .: Google Books Ngram Viewer graph of mentions of Machaut in publications since |
Chapter , Andrew Wathey Figure .: Quittance by Guillaume de Machaut, Bruges, August . Lille, ADN, B , no. (Archives Départementales du Nord) | Figure .: Personal signet seal of Guillaume de Machaut. Lille, ADN, B , no. , detail (Archives Départementales du Nord) | Figure .: Protarchos, Cupid playing a lyre riding a lion. Collection: Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Florence (Creative Commons Attribution . Unported License ) | Figure .: Personal signet seal of Yolande of Flanders, used during her regency of Bar, –. Nancy, Archives Départementales de Meurthe-et-Moselle, B , no. (Arch. Dép. de Meurthe-et-Moselle) |
Chapter , Benjamin L. Albritton Figure .: Excerpt from Book , Chapter , BnF lat. , vol. , fol. vb (BnF) | Figure .: Excerpt from Book , Chapter , BnF lat. , vol. , fol. ra (BnF) | Figure .: Excerpt from Book , Chapter , KBR , fol. v (Bibliothèque royale de Belgique) | Figure .: Excerpt from Book , Chapter , KBR , fol. v (Bibliothèque royale de Belgique) | Figure .: Interlinear annotation in Book , Chapter , KBR –, fol. r (Bibliothèque royale de Belgique) | Figure .: Excerpt from Book , Chapter , BnF RES-M-, fol. r (BnF) | Figure .: Excerpt from Book , Chapter , BnF RES-M-, fol. v (BnF) | Figure .: The Dampierre dynasty of the county of Rethel | Figure .: MS G, fol. v, detail (BnF) |
Manuscripts, Music, Machaut
Chapter , Anna Zayaruznaya Figure .: Formal features of Machaut, Martyrum/Diligenter (M) and Vitry, Impudenter/Virtutibus | Figure .: Aspects of tenor taleae in Martyrum/Diligenter (M) and Impudenter/Virtutibus |
Chapter , Anne-Hélène Miller Figure .: MS C, fol. r (BnF) | Figure .: MS Vg, fol. v, detail (Private Collection of James E. and Elizabeth J. Ferrell) Figure .: MS A, fol. Er, detail (BnF) | Figure .: MS A, fol. v, detail (BnF) |
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Chapter , Deborah McGrady Figure .: Image of Lady Fortune from the Voir dit, MS A, fol. r, detail (BnF)
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Chapter , Kathleen Wilson Ruffo Figure .a: Lady and courtiers dancing, Remede de Fortune, MS C, fol. r (BnF) | Figure .b: Feathered turban-wearer, with two others, MS C, fol. r, detail (BnF) | Figure .a: Lady before her castle, Remede de Fortune, MS C, fol. r (BnF) | Figure .b: Protagonist and companion wearing feathered cap, MS C, fol. r, detail (BnF) | Figure .: Princes of the East, Cité des dames Master, from Le Chevalier errant by Tomaso di Saluzzo, Paris c. . BnF fr. , fol. r (BnF) | Figure .: Islamic turban example (third figure from left), The Reign of Bahram Bahramiyan, from the Book of Kings (Shahnama) by Firdausi, Tabriz c. –. Dublin, Chester Beatty Library, Pers ..v (© The Trustees of the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin) | Figure .: Banquet at the lady’s court, Remede de Fortune, MS C, fol. r (BnF) | Figure .: Drawing of a peacock hand-washing device, from the Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices by Ismā’īl ibn al’Razzāz al-Jazarī, Damascus . The Cleveland Museum of Art, Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund ..a (Open Access, Courtesy of The Cleveland Museum of Art) |
Chapter , Domenic Leo Figure .: Hypothetical iconographic program of W | Figure .: W, detail of offset from fol. v on fol. r, a lady(?) stands watching a man(?) on horseback(?) (By permission of Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru/The National Library of Wales) | Figure .: New York, Morgan Library, M., Roman de la Rose, fol. v, Paris, early s, ‘Frankness and Pity speaking to Danger’ (The Morgan Library & Museum. MS M., fol. v. Purchased by J. Pierpont Morgan (-) in ; Photographic credit: The Morgan Library & Museum, New York) | Figure .: Genealogical tree with the interrelated families of Bonne of Luxembourg and Yolande of Flanders and their descendants |
Chapter , Elizabeth Eva Leach Figure .a: Machaut, Nature and her children, MS A, fol. Er (BnF) | Figure .b: Sens, detail from MS A, fol. Er (BnF) | Figure .a: Machaut, Love and his children, MS A, fol. Dr (BnF) | Figure .b: Sweet Thought, detail from MS A, fol. Dr (BnF) |
Chapter , Uri Smilansky Figure .: MS G, fol. v, detail of B (BnF) | Figure .: MS G, fol. r, detail of contratenor of R (BnF) | Figure .: MS G, fol. r, detail of B (BnF) | Figure .: MS G, fols v–r, B and B (BnF) | Figure .: Timeline of Machaut reception activity c. –c. |
Essays in Honor of Lawrence Earp
Chapter , Yolanda Plumley and Anne Stone Figure .: Layout of the couplets in section A of B, MS A, fol. r, detail (BnF) | Figure .: Comparison of text alignment in a portion of B in MSS A, E, and B (BnF) | Figure .: Cantus voice of R in MS G, fol. r, detail (BnF) | Figure .: R in MS B, fol. r (BnF) |
Chapter , David Maw Figure .: MS G, fol. v, detail (BnF) | Figure .: MS G, fol. v, detail (BnF) | Figure .: Development of basic declamation in R, B, R, and B
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Chapter , Jacques Boogaart Figure .: M in MS A, fol. r, detail of the tenor (BnF)
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Chapter , Richard Dudas Figure .: A comparison of the structure and proportions of the motet texts | Figure .: Musical and text-setting structure of Vos/Gratissima | Figure .: The reversed roles of the ‘head’ and ‘tail’ components of the taleae in the second color, as compared with those of the first | Figure .: The entirety of Vos/Gratissima in score with a layout that gives preference to text structure and periodic musical material in the upper voices | Figure .: Vos/Gratissima, breves –, with instances of the prominent SSB rhythmic cell highlighted | Figure .: Vos/Gratissima, breves – (top system) compared to breves – (bottom system) | Figure .: Vos/Gratissima, breves –, showing the regular placement of the SSB cell with respect to the modus beat |
Chapter , Michael Scott Asato Cuthbert Figure .: Detail from Iv, fol. r, including textless works (Archivio Diocesano, Ivrea) | Figure .: Gradual ‘Universi qui te exspectant’ from Graduale Romanum (), p. |
Chapter , Margaret Bent Figure .: Wa, fol. r, Alleluia ∕V Virga Jesse (Library of Congress Music Division) | Figure .: Wa, fol. v, Credo, cantus and tenor (Library of Congress Music Division) | Figure .: Wa, fol. r, Rex Karole/Leticie pacis, motetus (Library of Congress Music Division) | Figure .: Wa, fol. v, Deus compaignouns de Cleremunde, triplum (Library of Congress Music Division) | Figure .: De legibus Angliae, fol. v (Library of Congress, Law Library), Photo © John Bertonaschi, Library of Congress | Figure .: Diagrams of the final quire of the Britton MS. First, as now, after removal of the music leaves; second, showing the original position of the music leaves, © John Bertonaschi | Figure .: Alleluia ∕V Virga Jesse chant, Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, , fol. v (BnF) |
Chapter , Jared C. Hartt Figure .: Fusa/Manere/Labem and Jesu/Jhesu/Jesu, DRc , fols v–r (Durham Cathedral Library) | Figure .: A solis ortus cardine/ [Missing tenor]/ Salvator mundi Domine, Lwa , fol. v (© Dean and Chapter of Westminster, London) |
Introduction, Jared C. Hartt, Tamsyn Mahoney-Steel, Benjamin L. Albritton Table : Summary of Lawrence Earp’s publications
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Chapter , Tamsyn Mahoney-Steel Table .: Extract of the nodes table | Table .: Extract of the edges table |
Chapter , Jennifer Bain Table .: Contents of Earp’s Guillaume de Machaut: A Guide to Research, with pagination included | Table .: Sections and subsections in two nineteenth-century bibliographies on Hildegard of Bingen (van der Linde ; Roth and Roth ), translated into English | Table .: Lauter’s Hildegard-Bibliographie, table of contents (translated into English) | Table .: Large-scale organization of Internationale Wissenschaftliche Bibliographie (Aris and others ) |
Chapter , Andrew Wathey Table .: Yolande of Flanders, supplications – | Table .: Guillaume de Machaut as executor in papal letters of admission to religious houses
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Chapter , Kevin N. Moll Table .: Tonalities of movements in recognized manuscript mass cycles | Table .: Further manuscript mass cycles suggested by scholars of the later twentieth century Table .: Musically related ‘cycle’ à , occurring independently in the sources | Table .: Four-voice ‘cycle’ with unified tonality | Table .: Possible chronology of the Machaut Mass based on stylistic factors | Table .: Complexes of interrelated movements in ‘central’ sources |
Chapter , Anna Zayaruznaya Table .: Structures of texts in three related motets
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Chapter , Domenic Leo Table .: Line-insertion points for miniatures in the Remede de Fortune in MSS C, W, Vg, A | Table .: Machaut manuscripts commissioned by or in the collections of Bonne of Luxembourg, Yolande of Flanders, and their families |
Chapter , Uri Smilansky Table .: Distribution of markings and reading difficulties in MS G, fols r–v |
Chapter , Yolanda Plumley and Anne Stone Table .: Machaut’s polyphonic songs circulating outside the Machaut manuscripts | Table .: B, variants in the lyrics of the Italian ‘repertory’ manuscripts shared with the Machaut manuscripts and with two lyric miscellanies | Table .: Comparison of text alignment in the couplets of B (section A) | Table .: Machaut’s ludic rondeaux | Table .: Sources of R, Ma fin est mon commencement | Table .: Comparison of Lo and Un noble ray, a virelai in British Library, Add. |
Essays in Honor of Lawrence Earp
Chapter , Jacques Boogaart Table .: M, phrase lengths
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Chapter , Richard Dudas Table .: Ave, regina celorum, text and translation | Table .: Gratissima virginis species, text and translation | Table .: Vos quid admiramini, text and translation |
Chapter , Alice V. Clark Table .: Fortune/Ma doulour, texts and translations | Table .: Amer Amours/Durement, texts and translation |
Chapter , Karen Desmond Table .: Handlo, Jacobus, and the Vitriacan Ars nova on the three manners or measurements of the breve tempus | Table .: Motets in insular manuscripts notated in extended Franconian notations |
Chapter , Margaret Bent Table .: Credo text, portions set in, and omitted from, the surviving cantus voice Table .: Deus compaignouns de Cleremunde, text and translation |
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Chapter , Jared C. Hartt Table .: Extant (iso)periodic motets with medius cantus | Table .: Other extant motets with medius cantus | Table .: Texts of A solis ortus cardine/ [Missing tenor]/ Salvator mundi Domine | Table .: Translations of A solis ortus cardine and Salvator mundi Domine | Table .: Revised last row of Table . |
Chapter , Uri Smilansky Example .: B, beginning | Example .: Markings and their meaning in B, along with standard modern transcription | Example .: Two interpretations of the markings in B, cantus II and contratenor | Example .: Interpretation of the markings in B, cantus I and tenor | Example .: Three four-voice combinations for B, along with current interpretation | Example .: B and cantus I / tenor pair of B combined | Example .: B and B as a five-voice texture | Example .: R from MS G, fol. r, applying eighteenth-century accidental interpretation | Example .: Beginning of R, as written and as read/heard following Hotteterre’s practice |
Chapter , Yolanda Plumley and Anne Stone Example .: B, Mod reading, bars – | Example .: B, Mod reading, bars – | Example .: B, Mod reading, bars – |
Chapter , David Maw Example .: Word setting and rhythm in the notation of On ne porroit (B) | Example .: Word setting and rhythm in the notation of Je sui aussi (B) | Example .: Parody and tonal surprise in the cantus of Dous viaire (R) | Example .: Harmonic reduction of Dous amis (B) | Example .: Parody in developed declamation of Dous amis (B) | Example .: Harmonic reduction of Quant j’ay l’espart (R) | Example .: Recurrences of the musical refrain in Quant j’ay l’espart (R) | Example .: Harmonic reduction of Ne pensez pas (B) | Example .: Elusive tonal resolution in the refrain of Ne pensez pas (B) |
Chapter , Jacques Boogaart Example .: The tenor of M, motivic structure | Example .: Dame, je sui/ Fins cuers dous/ Fins cuers dous (transcription from Boogaart a, slightly adapted) | Example .: The descending BMM-motif |
Chapter , Catherine A. Bradley Example .: The ‘Prendes i garde’ refrain in Guillaume d’Amiens’s rondeau, chansonnier a, fol. v | Example .: Comparing rondeau and motet versions of the ‘Prendes i garde’ refrain | Example .: S’on me regarde/ Prenes i garde/ He mi enfant, Mo , fols v–r | Example .: Ci m’i tient/ Haro/ Omnes, Mo , fols v–r | Example .: Adam de la Halle, refrain of polyphonic rondeau Hareu li maus d’amer m’ochist, Ha, fol. v | Example .: The ‘Tuit cil qui sunt enamourant’ refrain in Li jalous/ Tuit cil/ Veritatem, Mo , fols v–r | Example .: Li jalous/ Tuit cil/ Veritatem, Mo , fols v–r (with bars – of the contrafactum Post partum/ Ave regina/ Veritatem, Mo , fols v–r) | Example .: En ce chant/ Roissoles ai/ Domino, W, fol. v |
Essays in Honor of Lawrence Earp
Chapter , Richard Dudas Example .: Vos/Gratissima, complete score | Example .: Hypothetical source for the Gaude gloriosa chant excerpt, modeled on the pitches of the tenor color of Vos/Gratissima, showing its irregular bipartite structure and proportions | Example .: The talea structure for the two lower-voice colores in Vos/Gratissima, analyzed in terms of their ‘head’ and ‘tail’ components and underlying rhythmic structure | Example .: Vos/Gratissima, breves – | Example .: Vos/Gratissima, breves – | Example .: Vos/Gratissima, triplum, a comparison of breves – alongside breves –, –, and – | Example .: The prominent rhythmic material used in Vos/Gratissima |
Chapter , Alice V. Clark Example .: Tenor Dolor meus compared with selected chant readings Example .: Fortune/Ma doulour, bars – | Example .: Amer Amours/Durement, bars – | Example .: Amer Amours/Durement, bars – | Example .: Amer Amours/Durement, bars – | Example .: Amer Amours/Durement, bars – | Example .: Fortune/Ma doulour, beginnings of taleae – | Example .: Fortune/Ma doulour, bars – |
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Chapter , Michael Scott Asato Cuthbert Example .: Iv, fol. r, opening of the first textless piece as transcribed by Kreyszig | Example .: Iv, fol. r, opening of the first textless piece as transcribed by Greene | Example .: Iv, fol. r, opening of the second textless piece as transcribed by Kreyszig | Example .: Iv, fol. r, opening of the second textless piece as transcribed by Greene | Example .: Rhythmic variety of the cantus in Kreyszig’s edition of the second untexted piece | Example .: Transcription of the opening of ‘Cum jejunasset dominus’ | Example .: Iv, fol. r, Universi qui te exspectant | Example .: Iv, fol. r, second untexted piece (Cum jejunasset dominus?) |
Chapter , Karen Desmond Example .: Virgo sancta Katerina, perfections – (Onc , fols v–r), with the original mensural note shapes (apart from rests) added above each staff | Example .: Iam novum, perfections – (Onc , fol. r), with the original mensural note shapes (apart from rests) added above each staff | Example .: Rosa mundi, longs – (Lbl , fol. v), with the original mensural note shapes (apart from rests) added above the staff | Example .: Virgo mater, perfections – (Onc , fol. v), with the original mensural note shapes (apart from rests) added above each staff | Example .: Candet sine spina, triplum, longs – (Bologna, fol. v), with the original mensural note shapes (apart from rests) added above the staff | Example .: Templum eya, longs – (Ob , p. xii), with the original mensural note shapes (apart from rests) added above the staff | Example .: The descending stem patterns in Laus honor and their possible realization within a ternary breve | Example .: Duodeno sydere, longs – (Ob , p. ix), with the original mensural note shapes (apart from rests) added above each staff | Example .: Multum viget, longs – (Cgc /, fols v–r), with the original mensural note shapes (apart from rests) added above each staff |
Manuscripts, Music, Machaut
Example .: Virga iesse, triplum (‘Orto sole’), beginning of second section with note shapes of Cgc / (fol. v) and DRc (fol. r) shown above modern transcription. Descending stems on the first of every three-semibreve group in DRc | Example .: Dei preco, motetus, longs – (DRc , fol. r), in mos mediocris (b) | Example .: Tribum/Quoniam, longs – (transcribed from Fauv, fols v–r), with the original mensural note shapes (apart from rests) added above each staff |
Chapter , Margaret Bent Example .: Alleluia ∕V Virga Jesse, mensural monophonic setting | Example .: Credo, cantus and tenor | Example .: Deus compaignouns de Cleremunde |
Chapter , Jared C. Hartt Example .: Jesu/Jhesu/Jesu, opening | Example .: Fusa/Manere/Labem, opening | Example .: Two extant voices of A solis ortus cardine/ [Missing tenor]/ Salvator mundi Domine | Example .: Hypothetical reconstruction of the tenor pitches in the opening three L periods | Example .: A comparison of the proposed tenor pitches with the ‘Salvator mundi Domine’ hymn melody | Example .: A solis ortus cardine/ [Salvator mundi Domine]/ Salvator mundi Domine, reconstructed |
Benjamin L. Albritton is the Rare Books Curator at Stanford Libraries. In addition, he oversees digital manuscript projects, including Parker Library on the Web, recent collaborations with the Vatican Library, and a number of projects devoted to interoperability and improving access to manuscript images for pedagogical and research purposes. He has published on the music and poetry of Guillaume de Machaut, fragmentology, and the application of digital methodologies in medieval studies. Jennifer Bain, Professor of Music and Associate Vice President Research at Dalhousie University, collaborates on numerous digital chant projects, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Digital Research Alliance. Author of Hildegard of Bingen and Musical Reception: The Modern Revival of a Medieval Composer (Cambridge, ), she edited the Cambridge Companion to Hildegard of Bingen (), and co-edited with Deborah McGrady A Companion to Guillaume de Machaut (Brill, ). Margaret Bent is an emeritus Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford and has published extensively on English and Continental music of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. Between and she taught at Brandeis and Princeton Universities and served as President of the American Musicological Society. She is a Fellow of several international academies and was awarded the C.B.E., three honorary degrees, and the inaugural Adler prize of the International Musicological Society. Jacques Boogaart studied guitar and lute, French literature and musicology. Until his retirement he taught historical musicology at the universities of Utrecht and Amsterdam. His publications deal with music up to the seventeenth century, but for the most part they are devoted to the works of Guillaume de Machaut. He is the main editor of The Motets, the ninth volume in the ongoing edition of Guillaume de Machaut, The Complete Poetry and Music (Medieval Institute, ). Catherine A. Bradley is Professor at the University of Oslo, where she leads the project BENEDICAMUS: Musical and Poetic Creativity for a Unique Moment in the Western Christian Liturgy c. –, funded by a European Research Council Consolidator Grant. Awarded the Early Music Award of the American Musicological Society for her first monograph (Cambridge, ), Catherine’s publications on thirteenth-century polyphony include articles in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Journal of Musicology, Music Analysis, and Speculum. Kevin Brownlee is Professor Emeritus of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in medieval French and Italian literature. He has published extensively both on the Roman de la Rose and on Dante’s Commedia, as well as on Guillaume de Machaut, Christine de Pizan, Boccaccio, and Petrarch. Since he has been on active retire-
Manuscripts, Music, Machaut
ment, with numerous articles published or forthcoming. He is currently finishing a book on first-person narrative from the Roman de Fauvel to René d’Anjou. Alice V. Clark is Professor of Music History at Loyola University New Orleans, where she teaches a wide range of classes in music history and medieval studies. Her research focuses on the motet in late medieval France. Recent publications include essays in The Cambridge History of Medieval Music, Plainsong & Medieval Music, and Music and Instruments of the Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of Christopher Page, as well as the Journal of Music History Pedagogy. Michael Scott Asato Cuthbert is Associate Professor of Music at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He works on medieval music, especially of Italy –, and in computational and algorithmic music research, and also publishes on minimalism, disability, John Zorn, African rhythm, and music and emotion. Cuthbert has received the Rome Prize in Medieval Studies, a Villa I Tatti Fellowship, and a Radcliffe Fellowship. He founded the Digital Humanities Lab at MIT and created the open-source ‘music’ toolkit. Karen Desmond is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Music at Brandeis University. Her research centers on the aesthetics, theories, and technologies that underpinned medieval composition, and has been supported by several SSHRC and NEH awards. Her monograph Music and the ‘moderni’, –: The ‘ars nova’ in Theory and Practice (Cambridge, ), which challenges prevailing accounts of the ars nova, won the Lewis Lockwood Award (AMS) for an ‘outstanding work of musicological scholarship (early stages)’. Richard Dudas is Professor of Composition at the Hanyang University College of Music in Seoul, South Korea, where he is a member of the Music Research Center at the university and serves as director of the college’s computer music studios. In addition to his activities as a composer of contemporary music, he has a long-standing interest in medieval and renaissance music, and is currently preparing a co-authored publication with Lawrence Earp on a recently discovered fourteenth-century manuscript fragment. Jared C. Hartt is the Margaret W. and David H. Barker Professor of Music Theory at Oberlin Conservatory. In addition to publishing several articles on medieval motets, he coedited with Lawrence Earp Poetry, Art, and Music in Guillaume de Machaut’s Earliest Manuscript (BnF fr. ) (Brepols, ), co-authored with Margaret Bent and Peter Lefferts The Dorset Rotulus: Contextualizing and Reconstructing the Early English Motet (Boydell, ), and edited A Critical Companion to Medieval Motets (Boydell, ). Elizabeth Eva Leach is Professor of Music at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of the British Academy. Leach has worked and published extensively on medieval music (c. – ), its poetry, and performance and has won awards from the Renaissance Society of America, the Society for Music Theory, and the American Musicological Society. Much of
Essays in Honor of Lawrence Earp
Leach’s work is available for free download via her publications page on her blog . Domenic Leo holds a degree in art history from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, and is the author of Images, Texts, and Marginalia in a ‘Vows of the Peacock’ Manuscript (New York, Pierpont Morgan Library MS G) (Brill, ). He taught at Duquesne and Youngstown State Universities, and specializes in French manuscript illumination with an emphasis on Machaut manuscripts. He is an independent scholar residing in South Florida. Tamsyn Mahoney-Steel is Lecturer in Digital Humanities at the University of Central Lancashire. She has published on Guillaume de Machaut’s Remede de Fortune, medieval motets and Linked Open Data, citational practices in medieval culture, and digital pedagogy. She is on the editorial team for the new edition of the complete works of Guillaume de Machaut and has written accompanying notes for new recordings of his works by the Orlando Consort (Hyperion Records). David Maw is Associate Professor in Music at the University of Oxford where he is Fellow, Tutor, and Director of Music at Oriel College and Lecturer in Music at Christ Church. He has published extensively on word setting and meter in the songs of Guillaume de Machaut in several different academic journals and is currently preparing an edition of Machaut’s music together with a monograph exploring the significance of its text. Deborah McGrady, Professor at the University of Virginia, has an abiding interest in Machaut. She has written two books that privilege his corpus – Controlling Readers: Guillaume de Machaut and His Late Medieval Audience (Toronto, ) and The Writer’s Gift or the Patron’s Pleasure? The Literary Economy in Late Medieval France (Toronto, ) – and has co-edited with Jennifer Bain A Companion to Guillaume de Machaut (Brill, ), and with Benjamin Albritton a special issue of Digital Philology. Anne-Hélène Miller is Associate Professor of French at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where she serves as Chair of French and Francophone Studies and Associate Director of the Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. She has recently completed, with the support of an NEH Fellowship, a monograph on the literary status of French in the long fourteenth century and is the co-editor with Daisy Delogu of a forthcoming volume on the Romance of the Rose. Kevin N. Moll is Associate Professor of Musicology at East Carolina University, where from – he served as director of the multi-disciplinary program in medieval and renaissance studies. His publications include Counterpoint and Compositional Process in the Time of DuFay (Routledge, ), as well as articles and reviews in Early Music History, Current Musicology, Plainsong and Medieval Music, and Speculum, among others. Additionally, he has recorded several early music CDs for the Lyrichord label.
Manuscripts, Music, Machaut
R. Barton Palmer is Calhoun Lemon Professor Emeritus of Literature at Clemson University, where he also served as Director of the World Cinema program. He is the editor of both the South Atlantic Review and the Tennessee Williams Annual Review. As a medievalist, he has produced many editions and translations of medieval literature, including several volumes – recently published and forthcoming – for Guillaume de Machaut, The Complete Poetry and Music (Medieval Institute). Yolanda Plumley is Professor of Historical Musicology at the University of Exeter. Her publications include The Art of Grafted Song: Citation and Allusion in the Age of Machaut (Oxford, ), The Grammar of Fourteenth-Century Melody (Garland, ), and Codex Chantilly, Bibliothèque du Château de Chantilly, MS (with Anne Stone, Brepols, ). She is general editor, with R. Barton Palmer, of a new edition of the complete poetry and music of Guillaume de Machaut (Medieval Institute). Julie Singer is Professor of French at Washington University in St Louis. Her research focuses on medieval French and Italian literature and culture, with an emphasis on literature and medicine, the cultural history of science and technology, disability studies, and theories of sound and voice. She is the author of Blindness and Therapy in Late Medieval French and Italian Poetry (Boydell, ) and Representing Mental Illness in Late Medieval France: Machines, Madness, Metaphor (Brewer, ). Uri Smilansky specializes in the history, analysis, notation, reception, and performance of late medieval francophone music, most notably that of Guillaume de Machaut and the so-called ars subtilior. Having studied at the University of Exeter under the supervision of Yolanda Plumley and Giuliano Di Bacco, he went on to teach at King’s College London, the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, and Shakespeare’s Globe. He currently holds a postdoctoral position at the University of Oxford. Anne Stone is Associate Professor of musicology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her research interests include late medieval songs and the manuscripts that preserve them, from the troubadours to the ars subtilior; the theory and practice of mensural notation; and the reception of the Middle Ages by modernist composers. Current projects include a new edition of Guillaume de Machaut’s polyphonic songs and a digital installation of Machaut’s Remede de Fortune. Helen J. Swift is Professor of Medieval French and Tutorial Fellow of St Hilda’s College, University of Oxford. After focusing on the fifteenth-century querelle des femmes (Gender, Writing and Performance: Men Defending Women in Late Medieval France (Oxford, )), she now explores broad questions of narrative voice and identity in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century poetry, including Representing the Dead: Epitaph Fictions in Late-Medieval France (Brewer, ; runner-up, Society for French Studies R. Gapper Book Prize).
Essays in Honor of Lawrence Earp
Andrew Wathey was Vice-Chancellor and Chief Executive of Northumbria University, Newcastle, –, after serving as Senior Vice-Principal at Royal Holloway University where he was also Professor of Music History. His published research focuses on the social and cultural history of music in late-medieval England and France. He is a co-founder of the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music (DIAMM) and has recently taken up the role of Chair of The National Archives, UK. Kathleen Wilson Ruffo is Research Associate at the Royal Ontario Museum, and former lecturer in art history at the University of Toronto. Her research concentrates on late medieval book art and material culture, and currently explores forms of spectacle and pretense in terms of identity, memory, and visuality. She has published on musico-literary and technological imagery in Machaut’s MS C, and has a forthcoming essay on (re)collecting as an expression of social resilience in a Burgundian prayer book (ROM collections). Anna Zayaruznaya, Associate Professor in the Department of Music at Yale University, is interested in the intersecting histories of composition, notation, and music theory in the later Middle Ages. Her books and articles have received numerous prizes including the John Nicholas Brown Prize of the Medieval Academy of America and the Outstanding Publication Award from the Society for Music Theory. Currently she is working on a book about composer, theorist, poet, and public intellectual Philippe de Vitry.
BnF
Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France
CMM
Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae; specific volume numbers are referenced within the text or a footnote. Complete information is provided in the bibliography: CMM = Stäblein-Harder a; CMM = Günther ; CMM = Hughes and Bent ; CMM = Apel –
c.o.p.
cum opposita proprietate; a ligature with an ascending stem on its left, indicating its first two pitches are semibreves
DIAMM
Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music,
DMLBS
Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources,
EECM
Early English Church Music; specific volume numbers are referenced within the text or a footnote. Complete information is found in the bibliography: EECM = Harrison and Wibberley ; EECM = Wright ; EECM = Summers and Lefferts ; EECM = Bent and Wathey
fr.
français
Gallica
BnF’s online repository,
Grove
Grove Music Online at ; author and entry information is provided in a footnote
lat.
latin
n.a.fr.
nouvelles acquisitions françaises
OED
Oxford English Dictionary,
PMFC
Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century; specific volume numbers are referenced within the text or a footnote. Complete information is provided in the bibliography: PMFC I = Schrade b; PMFC II and III = Schrade c; PMFC V = Harrison ; PMFC XIV = Sanders ; PMFC XV = Harrison ; PMFC XVI = Harrison, Sanders, and Lefferts ; PMFC XVII = Harrison, Sanders, and Lefferts ; PMFC XXII = Greene ; PMFC XXIIIA = Cattin and Facchin ; PMFC XXIIIB = Cattin and Facchin
RISM
Répertoire International des Sources Musicales; see
All links to online resources were live at the time of publication. Machaut’s Lyrics and Music B
ballade
Cp
complainte
L
lai
Lo
number of poem in the Loange des dames
M
motet
R
rondeau
RF
musical insertion in the Remede de Fortune
V
virelai
(For the Loange des dames, see Earp a, –; for all others, see Earp a, xvii–xviii.)
Essays in Honor of Lawrence Earp
Manuscript sigla A
BnF fr.
Aachen
Aachen, Öffentliche Bibliothek (Stadtbibliothek), Beis E
Apt
Apt, Cathédrale Sainte-Anne, Bibliothèque du Chapitre, bis
B
BnF fr.
Barc c
Barcelona, Biblioteca de Catalunya (olim Biblioteca Central), c
Barc d
Barcelona, Biblioteca de Catalunya (olim Biblioteca Central), d
BarcA
Barcelona, Biblioteca de Catalunya (olim Biblioteca Central),
BarcC
Barcelona, Biblioteca de Catalunya (olim Biblioteca Central),
Basel
Basel, Öffentliche Bibliothek der Universität, N.I. Nr (olim Musikfragment II)
Bk
Berlin, Staatliche Museen Preussicher Kulturbesitz, Kupferstichkabinett, C
Bologna
Lost leaves used as inserts in a non-musical book of the library of the monastery of San Domenico in Bologna; see Pieragostini and the description in EECM
Br
Brussels, Algemeen Rijksarchief, Fonds Sint-Goedele,
Brescia
Brescia, Biblioteca Queriniana, incunabulum C VI
C
BnF fr.
CaB
Cambrai, Le Labo (olim Médiathèque d’agglomération de Cambrai and Bibliothèque municipale/Bibliothèque communale), B
Cfm -
Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum Library, -
Cgc /
Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College, /
Ch
Chantilly, Bibliothèque du Château de Chantilly, (olim )
chansonnier a
Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Reg. lat.
Cpc
Cambridge, Pembroke College,
D
BnF fr.
Dor
Dorchester, Dorset History Centre, D-FSI, acc.
Douce
Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce
DRc
Durham, Cathedral Library, C.I.
E
BnF fr.
Esc
Escorial, Real Biblioteca del Monasterio de San Lorenzo, o.ii.
F-G
BnF fr. –
Fa
Faenza, Biblioteca Comunale,
Fauv
BnF fr. (Roman de Fauvel)
FP
Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Panciatichiano
G.
New York, Morgan Library, Glazier
Gr
Ghent, Rijksarchief, Varia D. A, ‘Ter Haeghen’
H
BnF fr.
Ha
BnF fr.
Hatton
Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton
I
BnF n.a.fr.
Iv
Ivrea, Biblioteca Capitolare,
Manuscripts, Music, Machaut
J
Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal,
JP
Le Jardin de Plaisance et Fleur de Rhetoricque (Paris: Vérard, [])
K
Bern, Burgerbibliothek,
Kassel
Kassel, Universitätsbibliothek Kassel, 4° med. 1
KBR
Brussels, Bibliothèque royale de Belgique,
KBR –
Brussels, Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, –
Lbl
London, British Library, Sloane
Lbl
London, British Library, Add.
Ltna
London, The National Archives (olim Public Record Office), E.///
Lwa
London, Westminster Abbey,
Lwa
London, Westminster Abbey,
Lwa
London, Westminster Abbey,
M
BnF fr.
Mo
Montpellier, Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire, Section Médecine, H.
Mod
Modena, Biblioteca Estense, a.M..
Nur
Nuremberg, Stadtbibliothek, fragment lat. a
Ob
Oxford, Bodleian Library, E Mus
Ob
Oxford, Bodleian Library, Canon. Pat. Lat
Ob *
Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley *
Ob
Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud Misc.
Ob
Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley
Olc LC/A/R/
Oxford, Lincoln College, LC/A/R/
Old Hall
London, British Library, Add. (Old Hall)
Onc
Oxford, New College,
PaB
BnF fr.
Padua
Padua, Biblioteca Universitaria,
Padua
Padua, Biblioteca Universitaria,
Pc
BnF fr.
Penn
Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Libraries, Fr.
Perugia
Biblioteca della Sala del Dottorato dell’Università degli Studi di Perugia, Inc. (Cialini Fragment) olim Cas. , Incunabolo inv. N.F.
Pg
Prague, Národní knihovna XI.E.
Pic
BnF collection de Picardie
Pim
Paris, Institut de Musicologie de l’Université, no shelfmark
Pit
BnF italien
Pm
New York, Morgan Library, M.
Pn
Bnf fr.
Pn
BnF n.a.fr.
Pn A
‘Sex sunt species principales sive concordantiae’, in BnF lat. A, fols va–rb
Pn
‘Cum de signis temporis variationem demonstrantibus’, in BnF lat. , fols r–r
PR
BnF n.a.fr.
Essays in Honor of Lawrence Earp
Q.
Bologna, Museo Internazionale e Biblioteca della Musica di Bologna, Q. (olim Civico Museo Bibliografico Musicale, Q.; olim Liceo Musicale )
Renart C
BnF fr.
Renart F
BnF fr.
Rvat
‘Sex minimae possunt poni pro tempore imperfecto’, in Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Barb. lat. , fols r–v
SL
Florence, Archivio del Capitolo di San Lorenzo,
Str
Strasbourg, Bibliothèque municipale (olim Bibliothèque de la Ville), C. (destroyed ); see Coussemaker’s partial transcription in van den Borren
Ta
Turin, Archivio di Stato, J.b.IX.
Todi
Todi, Biblioteca Comunale Lorenzo Leoni, Fondo Congregazione di Carità Istituto dei Sartori
Tong
Tongeren, Stadsarchief, Fonds Begijnhof
Tou
Toulouse, Bibliothèque municipale,
Tr
Trent, Museo Provinciale d’Arte, Castello del Buon Consiglio,
Trém
BnF n.a.fr.
Tu
Turin, Biblioteca Reale, Vari (formerly part of E. X. / H. )
TuB
Turin, Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria, J.II.
Ut
Utrecht, Universiteitsbibliotheek, E
Vend
Vendôme, Bibliothèque Municipale du Parc Ronsard,
Vg
Kansas City, MO, private collection of James E. and Elizabeth J. Ferrell
Vu
Stockholm, Kungliga Biblioteket, V.u.
W
Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, C
W
Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, Cod. Guelf. Helmst. (Heinemann no. )
W
Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, Cod. Guelf. Helmst. (Heinemann no.
Wa
Washington, Library of Congress, M. C Case
Wisbech
Wisbech, Wisbech and Fenland Museum, Town Library, [pr.bk.] C.
Ym
York, York Minster Library, xvi.N.
)
Pitch Specific pitches are referred to by using the Guidonian gamut in italics: A B C D E F G a b c d e f g a' b' c' d' e', in which c corresponds to C (middle c).
introduction Jared C. Hartt, Tamsyn Mahoney-Steel, and Benjamin L. Albritton
Figure 1: : MS Vg, fol. 177 v, detail (Private Collection of James E. and Elizabeth J. Ferrell)
On 5 November 1977, , a twenty-five-year-old graduate student presented his first conference paper at a joint meeting of the Mid-Atlantic Chapter of the American Musicological Society and the Institute of Medieval and Renaissance Studies of City College, CUNY. ‘Notational Variants in the Three Most Widely-Transmitted Motets of Machaut’ is what he called it, and for twenty minutes, the unassuming second-year Princeton Ph.D. student spoke about Machaut’s M8, M, M15, M, and M19, M, meticulously detailing the notational variants as they appeared in the major Machaut manuscripts and contemporaneous codices. Little did those in the audience know that this paper would serve as the springboard for a career devoted to several areas of fourteenth-century studies; indeed, this conference paper contained the ingredients of three of his major lifelong foci, the inspiration for the title of this volume: Manuscripts, Music, Machaut. Of course, today, some forty-five years later, we all know very well the name of that student – Lawrence Earp – though he is now a (still-unassuming) professor emeritus. In the span of these forty-five years, Earp has published prolifically; a complete list of his publications appears in the bibliography at the end of his volume, and a summary, organized by type, is provided in Table 1. . Regarding Earp’s work on Machaut’s manuscripts, of course
27
Manuscripts, Music, Machaut
many readers will already be (very) familiar with his dissertation, ‘Scribal Practice, Manuscript Production, and the Transmission of Music in Late Medieval France: The Manuscripts of Guillaume de Machaut’ (doubtlessly the most cited of any dissertation in the field), his seminal article ‘Machaut’s Role in the Production of Manuscripts of His Works’, and his highly-acclaimed study and color facsimile of The Ferrell-Vogüé Machaut Manuscript. And very recently, in , he co-edited a volume of collected essays focusing on Machaut’s MS C. Yet a perusal of the items listed in the bibliography and Table demonstrates Earp’s deep interest in a variety of additional topics, including texting and declamation, notation, (iso)rhythm, and the reception of Machaut and ars nova motets in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; all of these studies are drawn upon by various authors in this volume. Table : Summary of Lawrence Earp’s publications
Type
Number Publications
Dissertation
Earp
Books
Earp a; Earp ; Earp and Hartt ; Earp forthcoming
Book chapters
Earp b; Earp a; Earp a; Earp a; Earp c; Earp ; Earp ; Earp a; Earp b; Earp ; Earp
Journal articles
Earp a; Earp a; Earp c; Earp c; Earp coauthored with Calin c; Earp coauthored with Dudas forthcoming
Reviews
Earp b; Earp b; Earp a; Earp b; Earp a; Earp b; Earp b; Earp b; Earp ; Earp b; Earp ; Earp
Edition of Machaut’s B
Earp
Program notes
Earp ; Earp b; Earp
Encyclopedia/Dictionary entries
Earp a; Earp ; Earp ; Earp ; Earp ; Earp c; Earp b; Earp a; Earp c; Earp a; Earp b
Earp’s most well-known publication, without question, is his Guillaume de Machaut: A Guide to Research. The Guide is indispensable for scholars of the poet-composer, as the contributions in this volume amply attest. Not only has it provided a starting point for anyone interested in Machaut, as well as acted as a constant reference during all stages of research (as evidenced in the preparation of this very book), it has also served to unify the field. Before , Machaut studies had been somewhat fractured with musicologists, literary specialists, codicologists, and art historians working separately. The Guide unified all Machaut-related research in one volume, creating a sense of connectivity between scholars that has deepened significantly over the past twenty-seven years. As a case in point, Earp’s Guide served as the direct stimulus for this volume’s first four chapters, written by two schol • •
This publication was granted the Claude V. Palisca Award by the American Musicological Society in . The Guide was granted two awards: the ARSC Award for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research, Association for Recorded Sound Collections () and the Vincent H. Duckles Award, Music Library Association ().
Essays in Honor of Lawrence Earp
ars of medieval French, a specialist in digital humanities, and a musicologist/music theorist. This unification is important, of course, for modern scholarship, but perhaps more crucial still for an understanding of Machaut himself because he did not work in a siloed manner; rather, his musical and literary output were inextricably intertwined and he almost certainly oversaw the collection and decoration of his works. Furthermore, while the extensive bibliography in the Guide is no longer complete, the volume remains reassuringly whole. In our modern age of information deluge, there is a comfort in limit: although we have many new publications to which we can refer and with which we can enter into discourse, the Guide is an anchor, a lighthouse to which we all return. The information contained within it has been added to, but Earp’s meticulous work remains foundational. We can, in a sense, hold Machaut in one hand. Perusing the ‘number’ column in Table , we find it no mistake that the type of publication with the highest number (albeit only marginally) is that of reviews. Naturally, given his stature in our scholarly community, Earp has been asked repeatedly to review books, editions, and recordings, yet this not insignificant number of reviews demonstrates his deep commitment to – and love for – the field. Moreover, many of these reviews can be regarded as standalone journal articles, especially the review of Margaret Bent and Andrew Wathey’s Fauvel Studies, the review of Graeme H. Boone’s A Model for Text Setting, and the review of Anne Walters Robertson’s Guillaume de Machaut and Reims. His constant championing of early-music recordings over the years is reflected in his review of three releases by Gothic Voices, directed by Christopher Page; instead of simply providing an assessment of those recordings, his essay also presents a multi-page table that indexes the hundreds of pieces recorded by the group, organizes them by century, genre, and composer, and furnishes all of the necessary information for where the reader can find an edition of each work. The reader will find some surprises in Earp’s bibliography, including his article on the Eroica in the Beethoven Forum, as well as his extensive program notes on all of Beethoven’s string quartets. He also penned the program notes for two different compact disc releases, one featuring the string quartets of Mendelssohn and the other Russian oboe music; for the latter in particular, Earp doubtless drew on his background as a bassoon performance major during his undergraduate years. The reader might also be surprised to learn that upon entering Princeton, Earp thought he would pursue a career in nineteenth-century music. It was two notation courses with Kenneth Levy, however, that drew Earp to medieval music. He not only became instantly interested in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century manuscripts – and eventually those of Machaut – but he also found himself immediately drawn to their notation. A major project a long-time in the making has now developed into a short monograph that is near completion (see Earp forthcoming in the bibliography). Our first hint of this work came as a conference paper, ‘Tradition and Innovation in Machaut’s Musical Notation’, way back in at the thirty-fourth International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Throughout the past twenty-three years, Earp has continuously updated and refined this research, expanding it from a Machaut focus to ars nova motet notation in general.
Manuscripts, Music, Machaut
Finally, there is one series of publications that is not included in the table or bibliography, yet definitely merits mention. Machaut scholars in particular will be aware of Earp’s countless contributions over the years to the International Machaut Society’s newsletter, Ymaginer. His numerous bibliographies, especially since the Guide was published in , are a tremendously useful resource, and at the same time reflect his unwavering dedication to Machaut scholarship. On the whole, Earp’s output has profoundly shaped the fields of Machaut studies, codicology, musicology, and fourteenth-century studies in general. All of his work is underpinned by thorough dedication to his fields of study and a generosity of spirit that welcomes each new generation of scholars. It is by no means hyperbole to state that he has influenced every scholar active in the fields of medieval musicology and Machaut studies in the past several decades. ‘Pren dou papier, ie weil escrire’ ‘Find some paper; I wish to write’, exclaims Machaut to his secretary in his Livre dou Voir dit. So, too, the contributors of the twenty-six chapters of this volume must have thought to themselves when asked to contribute an essay in Earp’s honor (albeit using a computer rather than parchment!). Since it was up to the authors what they wished to contribute, the essays in this volume did not naturally fall into neat and tidy categories, as would be the case with a traditional monograph or even a collection with solicited chapters. To be sure, all of the essays herein have various things in common, but, we contend, the most significant of these are twofold: they all show gratitude to Earp and his work; and, they all show Earp’s influence. A continuous series of twenty-six chapters would be rather disorienting for the reader, thus – recognizing that the chapters could be grouped in myriad ways – we decided in the end to organize the contributions into seven sections, many of which acknowledge various facets of Earp’s research foci throughout his career: ‘Guiding Research’, a fitting first section owing to Earp’s magisterial Guide; ‘(Re)examining and (Re)assessing the Fourteenth Century’, a nod to Earp’s historiographical and biographical studies; ‘Reading Machaut’, literary scholarship focusing on the composer’s dits, for which Earp proposed a chronology and provided a historiography; ‘Image and Illumination’, in recognition of Earp’s influence on the burgeoning of art-historical studies of Machaut’s manuscripts; and the last three sections, ‘Machaut Musicology’, ‘Motets and Chant’, and ‘Music in Medieval England’, in tribute to his extensive, ground-breaking work on thirteenth- and fourteenth-century music. The opening section, ‘Guiding Research’, takes us on a journey from the contemplation of the concept of ‘guide’, through bibliographic endeavors, to a review of evidence for a nascent field of research. Helen J. Swift uses Earp’s Guide as a starting point for her ex •
•
All issues of Ymaginer are viewable and downloadable at . In addition to appreciating the bibliographies appearing in issues after , the reader may wish to take a look at his ‘From the President’ columns in and . (Earp was appointed to the Board of Directors at the Society’s inception in and served as Vice President from to and President from to .) Leech-Wilkinson and Palmer , – (line ).
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ploration of the meaning of ‘guide’ both for modern academia and within medieval poetry. As she explains, the act of guiding involves investment on the part of followers who confer their enthusiasm and veneration upon the guide, but it also engenders questions about the boundary between guiding and instruction. Highlighting the complexity of relationships that involve teaching and/or guiding in works such as Machaut’s Remede de Fortune, Swift shows that didacticism occurs on multiple levels and that responsibility for learning lies with both teacher and pupil. She further problematizes this pedagogical relationship by showing that within narratives (and therefore within the guiding relationships they portray), viewpoints on the story can be multiple, as can the roles an individual can inhabit (as a narrator, a protagonist, an author seeking patronage). Swift also warns us that our choice of intellectual pathfinder can set the ‘boundaries and hierarchies of knowledge’, a troubling and resonant thought in the era of attempted decolonization. Tamsyn Mahoney-Steel likewise explores an aspect of the problems associated with knowledge boundaries. Her chapter presents a citational network of articles and chapters published on Machaut, demonstrating the central place of Earp’s Guide within the scholarly community devoted to that poet-composer. Using the software package Gephi, she provides a visualization that records the majority of scholarship from the past twenty-seven years, along with a detailed methodology and analysis of results. The act of mapping prompts her to question the issues that arise from such intense focus on one person: do we risk distorting and misunderstanding our objects of study? To this end, she employs Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s ‘monster theory’ to tease out the problems and intricacies of monumentalizing a figure of the past. Ultimately, while Mahoney-Steel acknowledges these dangers, she also discusses how Earp’s guiding hand has done as much to temper our enthusiasm as encourage it. Both Mahoney-Steel and Swift note an encouraging trend towards interdisciplinary work within the field of Machaut studies, the previous lack of which Earp himself had seen as a hindrance to comprehending Machaut. They also look to the future, Swift noting that guiding and ‘companion’ volumes anticipate future research and Mahoney-Steel pondering how research communities may evolve in the times ahead. This orientation towards futurity can also be found in the chapters of Jennifer Bain and Julie Singer, both of whom provide guidance in their own fields of inquiry. Bain’s chapter takes inspiration from Earp’s Guide by approaching Hildegard of Bingen studies with the same rigor. She notes that, despite Hildegard’s status as a figure of intense study and interdisciplinary interest, no such equivalent tome exists for Hildegard researchers. As such, Bain chronicles some of the issues of information access and collation that have dogged scholars and discusses her own quest to create digital resources. Yet, her comments come with a degree of circumspection about the longevity of digital tools, reminding us that these require constant maintenance and upgrades. These online resources can be contrasted with volumes dedicated to the study of Hildegard and Earp’s own Guide on Machaut, which have stood the test of time in their paper formats. • •
Swift’s chapter herein, p. . See Earp a, xii.
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Equally inspired by Earp’s Guide, Singer presents a different set of research pathways and caveats. Exploring the role of child actors on the medieval French stage, she lays the groundwork for an exciting new area of research that hitherto has been largely neglected. Singer’s work illustrates how little we currently know about the role of children within medieval public performances. Despite the paucity of available information, her chapter synthesizes the extant evidence to suggest some fruitful ways to conceptualize the various roles in which children performed, offering four categories of medieval French child roles. Singer’s essay reminds us of the importance of questioning our assumptions as we analyze medieval sources and draws attention to several of the potential pitfalls in negotiating historical accounts. The second section, ‘(Re)examining and (Re)assessing the Fourteenth Century’, pivots from considerations of guiding and bibliography to how scholars have examined resources in order to reconceptualize key concepts associated with our understanding of medieval history and music. Andrew Wathey’s archival research has unearthed significant findings regarding Machaut’s association with the house of Flanders, and particularly Yolande, countess of Bar, who wrote supplications for expectative canonries at Verdun and Reims for both Guillaume and his brother, Jean. Additional documents, indicating payment to Machaut, have been previously overlooked but provide tantalizing new clues to Machaut’s activities and loyalties in the years following the death of John, king of Bohemia in . Further, Wathey has identified Guillaume’s personal seal, which can be found on a letter in which the composer (possibly in his own hand) identifies himself as in the service of the countess. This, and other exciting evidence brought to light by Wathey, enable us to gain a clearer picture of Machaut’s movements within noble circles. Even more new evidence, uncovered by Benjamin L. Albritton, encourages us to reexamine our knowledge of the limits of Machaut’s oeuvre. Scholars understandably have had a fascination and reverence for Machaut’s predilection for anthologizing, a tendency on his part that has left us with a securely attributable and possibly complete body of work. However, Albritton reminds us of the shaky nature of such assumptions and offers a recent discovery that leads us to question these boundaries and entertain the possibility of a lost work by Machaut. Noting that citation of unknown works by Machaut’s contemporaries may be an avenue to postulating hitherto unidentified creations, Albritton explores an intriguing reference in the Annales Hannoniae that cites a ‘Guillermus de Mascandio’ who wrote a chronicle of the counts of Rethel. Kevin N. Moll also challenges our twenty-first-century assumptions by inviting us to reconsider our view of Machaut’s Messe de Nostre Dame. Undercutting the usual unrestrained praise of the Messe, Moll raises important questions about the status of the composition and problematizes our understanding of the so-called unified Mass Ordinary cycle of the fourteenth century. Detailed study of the extant polyphonic masses reveals for Moll a tendency for collation that is less about musical and more about paleographic unity: mass movements were grouped together for expediency and do not exhibit strong internal musical connections. The placing together of items for the Mass Ordinary certainly paved the way for the kind of musical unity seen in the fifteenth century, but this impetus for the collection of li-
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turgical polyphony can really only be considered a ‘nascent meta-genre’, as termed by Moll in the title of his chapter. Further, his comparison of Machaut’s Messe with the Tournai Mass suggests Machaut was modeling aspects of his composition on the latter and the Messe’s subsequent transmission (or lack thereof ) renders it only a ‘peripheral phenomenon’. Anna Zayaruznaya also deals with the legacy of past conceptions of Machaut, in this case in relation to Philippe de Vitry. Too often these composers have been used to contextualize one another, creating a dyad that potentially skews our understanding of these two figures. Modern scholarship has generated an aura of competition: Vitry supposedly had the more impressive political career; Machaut his complete-works manuscripts. Yet, as Zayaruznaya sagely points out, based on the extant evidence there are very few true points of comparison. The one point of resemblance where we can draw genuine parallels – their respective abilities as motet writers – has been woefully warped by Heinrich Besseler’s conception of ‘classical Vitry’ and ‘romantic Machaut’. Zayaruznaya unpicks the history of an anachronism that has created bias in our views of these two figures for nearly a century, placing Machaut as a derivative who copied from Vitry, but never reached his intellectual heights. The result of her work is an exciting opportunity to reconceive the relationship between the two composers as reciprocal. The four chapters in ‘Reading Machaut’ demonstrate the range of interpretive responses to Machaut that have emerged in literary studies. Earp’s intensive work on Machaut’s involvement in the production of the complete-works manuscripts compiled during his lifetime has, in many ways, introduced a welcome tension in our approach to texts: one of ongoing negotiation between pure textual analysis and a consideration of authorial intention at every level. This tension is apparent throughout these essays, and each offers unique perspectives on poetic technique, organizational strategy, reception, and (re)reading in light of contemporary theory. At the same time, these chapters endeavor to maintain an awareness of the ever-present figure of the author guiding our reception of individual poems, their historical and social contexts, and the corpus as we encounter it in the complete-works manuscripts. R. Barton Palmer invites a reexamination of one of Machaut’s lesser-studied narrative works, the Dit dou vergier. While previous commentators have dismissed Machaut’s oldest surviving narrative work as a pale, possibly less than competent, imitation of the Roman de la Rose, Palmer builds a strong case for re-reading the poem not just in the context of literary production in the s when Machaut’s audience would have first encountered it, but also in its foundational role for all of the works that would appear in the poet’s collected-works manuscripts for the next forty years. Through a nuanced comparison of its relationship with the Prologue, one of Machaut’s last compositions, Palmer guides us through the ways in which the Vergier takes on a significant role in the poet’s framing and presentation of his life’s work. Authorial representation plays a central role in Kevin Brownlee’s exploration of the relationship between Machaut and his subject in the Prise d’Alexandre. By examining the anagrams found in the Prise, Brownlee untangles the complicated liminal space this liter •
Moll’s chapter herein, p. .
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ary device creates: one in which the real-life author/patron relationship intrudes into the fictionalized world of the dit. As with Palmer’s chapter, this study of a specific example of literary activity as part of a larger scheme in which Machaut shapes the perception of himself in relation to his subjects, and to his powerful patrons, builds on Earp’s studies of Machaut’s role in the production of his manuscripts. This engagement of the poet-composer with the transmission of his works in deluxe manuscript anthologies further complicates the historical figure vs. narrative persona relationship and forces us to re-read Machaut regularly, taking into account his overarching plans for his own reception. Anne-Hélène Miller approaches the question of authorial representation through the lens of Edouard Glissant’s concept of a ‘poetics of detour’. By tracing Machaut’s use of destour through multiple examples, she offers a reading that moves from the poet’s rhetorical strategies to a consideration of his deliberate ordering of his pieces in C, Vg, and A. Miller’s contribution provides an interesting complement to Palmer’s chapter in that both are engaged with Machaut’s overall approach to ordenance as an extension of his poetic practice. Where the complete-works manuscripts might be seen simply as anthologies gathered together by a poet for specific patrons and reflecting the tastes and influence of those patrons in their execution as much as the will of the author (particularly in terms of their programs of illustration), Miller explores a more nuanced interplay between the poems and the organizational strategies of the manuscripts. To round off the section, Deborah McGrady’s chapter explicitly addresses the process of representation with which Machaut was engaged during a period in his life when he was moving from secular courtly circles into a clerical life in Reims. Her study of the literary echoes of that shift, and the rhetorical strategies that Machaut employed to address it in the Voir dit in particular, harmonize well with the other chapters in this section. In the final third of his life, Machaut’s extra-literary activities have not only encouraged us to look for connections with the historical Machaut when we read his works but have also provided fertile ground for a variety of theoretical perspectives from which to address the nuanced and complicated relationship between historical figure and literary creation. McGrady’s investigation of the role of song, representations of masculinity, and the ways in which Machaut subverts contemporary heteronormative expectations in the Voir dit as, perhaps, a response to his own changing social situation, provides a model for the rich interpretive frameworks that can be constructed from the cross-disciplinary approach that Earp’s foundational work has enabled. Earp’s work has also been the catalyst for an upsurge of art-historical scholarship. Indeed, an important feature of his dissertation was his inclusion of a detailed listing, with concordances, of the miniatures that appeared in the Machaut manuscripts. This data, later reworked and included in the Guide, brought into focus a body of related fourteenth-century artistic works, produced across several decades; the material was presented in such a way as to invite consideration as part of a holistic approach to Machaut studies. By providing an overview of these artistic insertions in relation to the overall manuscript organization of poetry, music, and art, Earp challenged future scholars to consider the context of visual elements regardless of their disciplinary background. The three chapters in ‘Image and Il-
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lumination’ respond to this challenge with creativity and rigor, helping us to build an evermore-complex framework for understanding the integral relationship between the elements that make up Machaut’s manuscript legacy. Kathleen Wilson Ruffo’s contribution leverages an exotic motif, the plumed headdresses that appear in C, to launch a meditation on the intellectual and cosmopolitan ferment of the mid-fourteenth-century Valois court. She draws connections between literary allusion, science, magic, and cross-cultural knowledge that highlight the breadth of the world within which Machaut’s compositions were produced and received. This narrow focus on one type of visual element, and the avenues that it opens for deeper understanding of the types of allusion and reference that delighted the French audience, introduce the reader to a method of using manuscript art to ask more comprehensive questions about the relationship between the craftspeople involved in the production of a single manuscript and the audience for which that book was intended. Domenic Leo’s chapter examines one of the most overlooked of the Machaut completeworks manuscripts produced during the poet-composer’s lifetime, W. Preserved at the National Library of Wales, W is now but a shell of a manuscript; it is damaged, deliberately dismembered, and bearing little resemblance to the fine luxury manuscript it must have been when it was produced. Leo starts with a consideration of a piece of evidence remaining from the artistic program: a faded offset from a single miniature that tantalizes more than satisfies with the information it conveys. Nonetheless, a description of this lost miniature leads to a tentative enumeration of the scope and position of the now-absent decorations which strongly suggests a richly illuminated masterpiece likely intended for a patron of significant status. Leo extrapolates from the artistic evidence to speculate about possible patrons, and agrees with Earp’s suggestion that it was created for Yolande of Bar, a powerful countess with ties to the French royal family and a network of known owners of Machaut manuscripts, complementing Andrew Wathey’s chapter earlier in this volume. The last chapter in this section, by Elizabeth Eva Leach, traces political connections, linguistic puns, and artistic comparisons to posit a potential answer to a question that Leo posed more than a decade ago: do some of the characters that appear in the miniatures that accompany the Prologue in A depict specific people in Machaut’s life? Leach provides a powerful demonstration of the possibilities for further understanding of the complex evidence transmitted in a single manuscript source. She raises intriguing questions about the involvement of figures in Machaut’s circle in the production of his later collected-works manuscripts not just for memorializing the poet but also for representing a network of connected patrons and contemporaries. The final three sections of this book turn to music and offer innovative approaches to a variety of topics and repertories. Owing to Earp’s contributions to Machaut’s music and manuscript studies in particular, ‘Machaut Musicology’ begins with Uri Smilansky’s inves • •
Earp , . Leo , .
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tigation of heretofore unnoticed annotations in G. Smilansky argues that these faint lines found throughout a significant portion of the manuscript’s music section ought to be considered as performance markings. After detailing their patterns of distribution and walking the reader through their possible interpretation in several of Machaut’s songs, he proposes the markings originated from eighteenth-century musicians. Smilansky also considers what these markings can teach us not only about the reception of Machaut in the centuries after his death, but also about the relationship between scholarship and performance. Continuing with the subject of song reception, Yolanda Plumley and Anne Stone tell the intriguing story of the transmission of some of Machaut’s ballades and rondeaux that circulated in Italy. The authors offer two case studies, one on the widely circulated B that appears in numerous Italian anthologies in addition to a variety of other continental sources, and the other on a small group of rondeaux with only a modest circulation in Italy outside the Machaut manuscripts. Demonstrating the usefulness of closely comparing variants, Plumley and Stone hypothesize that additional exemplars must have been circulating c. beyond those we know were used for the major complete-works manuscripts. Further, they propose that a small group of songs – what they term ‘ludic rondeaux’ – were dedicatory and initially conceived as portable gifts for nobility, destined for Isabelle of France and John, duke of Berry, two of the children of Bonne of Luxembourg and John, duke of Normandy. Reminding us of the dangers of granting complete authority to the Machaut complete-works manuscripts in our studies, Plumley and Stone untangle a complex web of interrelationships, advancing our knowledge of the dissemination of Machaut songs. David Maw continues the focus on Machaut’s songs but approaches them through a completely different lens. Nodding to Earp’s work on declamation and word setting, Maw presents a virtuosic analysis of syllabic rhythm and tonal design in four Machaut songs. While the ‘older’ style of basic declamation is still used by Machaut in these pieces as a starting point for construction, Maw demonstrates how declamation progresses in these songs to a syllabic rhythm which is often necessitated by ars nova tonal design. Leading us from a close reading of word setting to a more holistic approach, he reveals how a song’s tonal design, while seeming to supersede the necessities of textual declamation, can in fact bring deeper meaning to the text. In the end, Maw shows how his intricate analysis has meaning for Machaut’s artistic attitude. To conclude the section on Machaut’s music, Jacques Boogaart offers a compelling analysis of Motet , Dame, je sui/ Fins cuers dous/ Fins cuers dous. Taking Earp’s observations on the generation of ars nova motets as a springboard, Boogaart shows how M is unusual in numerous respects, both in terms of the fourteenth-century motet repertory in general, as well as for Machaut himself. He describes how the materia of the motet – the incipit of both the tenor and motetus – permeates both the text and music: by noting Machaut’s musical reflection of the word ‘fin’, as well as the abundance and inconsistency of the ficta signs in the various Machaut manuscripts and how these relate to the textual and musical appearances of ‘sweet’ and ‘hard’, Boogaart guides us through an exploration of how the analyst can uncover the rich meaning of the motet.
Essays in Honor of Lawrence Earp
In keeping with a deep analysis of motet lyrics and structures, but moving away from Machaut, ‘Motets and Chant’ begins with Catherine A. Bradley’s meticulous look at a trio of dance-song motets copied in Mo. She explores a variety of apparent oppositions – of high and low register; of dance and song; of written and unwritten – and generic hybridity that has been preserved, fossilized in a sense, within the notated form of the motet. She goes further to suggest the possibility of extrapolating from motets that borrow from refrain songs in their tenors, a lost landscape of compositional approaches related to the development of forms and polyphonic practices. Hinted at by the partial survival of refrains within the complex fabric of multiple voices and texts of the motet, the interplay between compositional and performative registers in this corpus becomes an invitation to consider analyses that are aware of the cultural contexts of music-making in the period and the ways in which surviving notated examples can provide a window on a potentially rich, unnotated musical culture. Discussion of text-music relationships in Machaut’s works, especially in his motets, has proven to be a fertile area for interdisciplinary work, and Richard Dudas’s chapter extends this approach into a reevaluation of a motet attributed to Vitry, Vos/Gratissima. Dudas uses detailed analysis of formal musical structure, repeating rhythmic and melodic motifs, the choice of tenor, and textual elements in all voices to argue for a carefully planned and fully integrated compositional approach. The inspiration for this analysis grew from the evaluation of a fragmentary precursor that Vitry may have employed as a model for his own work. This puts Dudas’s essay into productive conversation with both Zayaruznaya’s chapter, as a reevaluation of Vitry, and Alice V. Clark’s contribution, as a way of understanding influence and citational practice in fourteenth-century motet composition. The intense scholarly activity that has centered around the medieval motet in the past few decades seems entirely apposite to the genre. Just as an interconnected community has formed around the discussion of these fascinating and multifarious pieces, so too were motets forged in a milieu of interaction and collaboration. The interrelated nature of motets is emphasized not only in Dudas’s chapter, but also in Clark’s essay, which centers on a pair of motets in Iv that share the same tenor. She notes that it is difficult to establish the direction of influence between these motets, pondering the possibility that the two pieces may be mutually influential, with the composers perhaps modifying the tenor together prior to creating the two motets. Clark elucidates how the two pieces share some common ground through subtle allusions, and, whichever way the influence may flow, she sheds important light on how composers worked within citational communities to produce compositions that are replete with textual, musical, and structural references. Michael Scott Asato Cuthbert’s chapter also explores music from Iv, in this case two previously unexplained two-voice textless compositions notated on that codex’s final folio. Drawing on the work of Karl Kügle, who has postulated a northwest-Italian rather than French origin for the manuscript, Cuthbert presents new findings on the two mysterious pieces that reveal stylistic similarities with some Italian secular compositions. Cuthbert shows that both Iv pieces are built on liturgical tenors and, given the context of their origins, should not be read mensurally. As such, he presents fresh transcriptions of the two pieces based on nota-
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tional practices from the Ivrea region in that era, yielding a far more musical and satisfying result than previous editions that assumed a mensural interpretation of the tenor voices. The final section, ‘Music in Medieval England’, continues with motets as well as manuscripts, but moves across the Channel and begins with an in-depth study involving one of Earp’s greatest research passions, notation. Karen Desmond addresses the question of the realization of semibreves in the context of manuscripts and repertoire originating in Britain and Ireland around the turn of the fourteenth century. Through a careful reading of the various mos (‘manners’ or ‘speeds’) described in three theoretical treatises, the most significant of which is penned by the English theorist Robertus de Handlo, she maps these mos onto the individual voices of more than two dozen insular motets that contain breves subdivided into four or more semibreves. Desmond illustrates the utility of her classification: for example, identifying the mos of each voice not only has implications for deciding on a performance tempo, but can also inform if the breves of a motet’s entire polyphonic texture ought to be interpreted as binary or ternary. Margaret Bent then turns to a manuscript fragment that has been heretofore largely ignored, perhaps due to its curious mix of contents. The fragment, consisting of two leaves, contains three unica – a monophonic Alleluia, two voices of a Credo, and a remarkable motet triplum, Deus compaignouns de Cleremunde, whose text alternates lines in AngloNorman and Latin – as well as the motetus of the widely-copied Rex Karole. Despite the undisputed French origin and anti-English sentiment of this last motet, Bent argues that the fragment and its first three pieces (for which she provides transcriptions) are indeed of English provenance. After detailed descriptions of the two extant leaves, their source volume, and the most salient features of the compositions, Bent offers a date of the very late fourteenth or early fifteenth century for the music, and perhaps slightly later for the copying of the leaves themselves. Finally, in keeping with fragmentary manuscripts and insular motets, Jared C. Hartt concludes the book with an examination of an understudied type of motet popular in earlyfourteenth-century England in which the tenor occupies the register between the triplum (above) and the motetus (below). Hartt outlines this subgenre’s general musical and textural characteristics, many of which display distinctly English features. Responding to the fact that one of these motets lacks its tenor in its only surviving manuscript witness, he demonstrates the steps involved in the process of reconstructing this missing middle-voice melody. Although, in the end, he was able to identify the tenor’s melodic source, Hartt argues that this final step is not necessary for the composition to be performable. Careful study of the melodic and contrapuntal language of the extant comparands of this kind of motet allows for plausible reconstruction in itself. In addition to the broad themes identified by the headings of each of the volume’s seven sections, several other topics figure prominently throughout, allowing further lines of inter-
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disciplinary connection to be drawn. For instance, the essays by Wathey, Albritton, Leo, and Plumley and Stone, found across three different sections, all speculate about patronage in various contexts. While all four of these contributions provide more information on Machaut and his milieu, the last three in particular challenge some of our assumed boundaries in Machaut scholarship. Were there additional but now-lost works? To what extent was Machaut in control of the presentation of his works, and what role did patrons play in this dynamic? How many and in what format did exemplars circulate? Added to this, Moll subverts the belief in the significance of Machaut’s Messe and Bent offers new thoughts on the origins and dating of sources. Reflections on disciplinary knowledge and limits also abound in the contributions of Swift, Mahoney-Steel, and Zayaruznaya, as they challenge the notion of a guiding relationship, caution the ‘monstrosity’ that might come from hyper-focus, and explode anachronisms. The destabilizing effect of these chapters in particular may be new, but Machaut scholars are all too familiar with another kind of destabilization that the poet-composer creates with his fluctuating presentation of authorial identity. Although the poetic ‘I’ has provided fodder for Machaut scholars for many decades, we find new explorations of it in the essays of Swift, Miller, and Brownlee, each of which offers new takes on shifting narrative viewpoints. McGrady’s chapter also resonates here as she explores Machaut’s presentation of his changing social status. Notions of reception and audience also form cross-disciplinary connections between essays. Both Brownlee’s chapter and Plumley and Stone’s invite consideration of how playful word games can be understood by readers. A different kind of playing interests Smilansky, who posits the engagement of eighteenth-century musicians experimenting with unfamiliar music. Boogaart, similarly, elaborates on the ways medieval performers might have navigated apparent conflicts in the notated accidentals in one of Machaut’s motets. Leach links linguistic puns to real political figures. Singer’s piece, meanwhile, takes another perspective on audience by reviewing the evidence recorded by contemporary observers about children’s participation in medieval theater. Wilson Ruffo, also interested in the reactions of medieval audiences, teases out the significance of a distinctive element of costume depicted in illuminations for Machaut’s fourteenth-century readers. The opportunities and problems of the digital world are prominent in several chapters. Mahoney-Steel and Bain both use digital tools to explore bibliography, Cuthbert leads the Electronic Medieval Music Score Archive Project (EMMSAP) which served as the catalyst for his reassessment of two Iv pieces, and Clark, Cuthbert, and Hartt have all made use of the Cantus Database in their work herein. These tools open up new research possibilities, but also generate anxieties about the curation and preservation of electronic data. Desmond, for instance, casts a critical eye on the use of uncontrolled vocabularies in metadata for digital projects and the ways in which the variability of search terms can complicate usability for scholarly purposes. While the problems of data management are wicked ones that are unlikely to recede any time soon, we must also note with gratitude the abundance of work that has gone on unabated (this volume included) during a global pandemic thanks to the efforts that have been made to digitize our scholarly sources, both modern and medieval.
Manuscripts, Music, Machaut
Additional themes connect various pairs and trios of essays. For instance, the idea of reconstruction links Leo’s imagining of W’s iconographic program with Plumley and Stone’s positing of lost exemplars and Hartt’s recreated tenor line. Plumley and Stone’s chapter also shares with Cuthbert’s and Clark’s contributions an interest in music circulating in Italy, with these latter two focusing specifically on the works found in Iv. Both Dudas and Zayaruznaya turn to Philippe de Vitry, questioning lines of influence. Patterns of modeling, citation, and reuse of past materials are also explored by several authors. Palmer reorients our thinking on the Vergier, showing that Machaut’s adoption of elements from the Roman de la Rose was not a bland reworking of older material, but a purposeful inter- and intratextual program. Bradley highlights the reuse of refrain-song tenors in thirteenth-century motets to discuss the ways that fragmentary evidence can support analysis of an unwritten musical tradition and encourage a rethinking of generic distinctions. And focusing on an aspect of the transition from ars antiqua to ars nova, Maw elucidates Machaut’s incorporation of old and new declamation styles as part of holistic meaning. These are but a few of the interconnections to be found. Just as Machaut’s oeuvre encourages non-linear reading, this book likewise invites the reader to move between its essays to discover additional interrelations. Of course, the underlying thread that unifies this entire Festschrift is Earp’s scholarship. Earp has inspired an interdisciplinary community that works together and that both supports its members and holds them academically accountable. It can be difficult to find a balance between generosity and rigorous criticism, the kind of balance that encourages emerging scholars, but which also instills in them a desire for meticulous attention to detail and logic. Earp has provided the benchmark for such balance. This volume has come together during a period in which uncertainties relating to health, politics, and institutional stability abound. Yet, when the contributors of this volume were approached, they did not hesitate to ‘find some paper’ and start writing. Indeed, the group of scholars in this volume was assembled in just one week, a testimony to Lawrence Earp who has tirelessly given of his time to a grateful community.
Essays in Honor of Lawrence Earp
Figure 2: : MS Vg, fol. 216 r, detail (Private Collection of James E. and Elizabeth J. Ferrell)
41
Guiding Research �
. A G R: ‘ ’ Helen J. Swift
With the publication of Guillaume de Machaut: A Guide to Research in , Larry Earp was affirmed as an indispensable guide for scholars researching Machaut across a range of disciplines: musicology, art history, literature, codicology. A Guide, in turn, confirmed the multidisciplinary breadth of interest in the fourteenth-century composer and encouraged the kinds of interdisciplinary collaborations on which Machaut scholarship has thrived in recent decades. It documented the past and facilitated the future, constituting a fittingly Machaldian gesture of matière and manière, furnishing both information and methodological reflection. Returning to A Guide has brought me to think afresh about the role and significance of guides in contemporary academia as well as late-medieval poetry, focusing on dits. What exactly do we mean by ‘guide’, and who are the ‘we’ who are meaning it? My subheading quotation is taken from Burgundian court writer Jean Molinet’s Oroison de St Ipolite: ‘I take you as my guide’. It reflects how ‘guide’ is not an objectively acquired title, but the result of an investment (whether of esteem or interest or both) by the follower who ascribes the term, whether implicitly as a twenty-first-century ‘follower’ of an individual or entity on MedievalTwitter or explicitly as the persona of a fifteenth-century poem. Furthermore, in a medieval literary context, neither ‘je’ nor ‘vous’ is singular: Molinet’s persona-I within the text implores the purported addressee, the saint, for intercessory guidance towards spiritual salvation; the authorial-I without seeks to secure the favor of sponsorship from the poem’s dedicatee, the financier Hyppolite de Bertholz. In addition to their narrative structure, several specificities of late-medieval literary guidance scenarios require careful consideration, not least didacticism: are we too apt to apply indiscriminately the term ‘guide’ to the authority figures of didactic literature, merging together unreflectively Boethius’s Philosophy, Dante’s Virgil, and Machaut’s Esperance in the Remede de Fortune, for example? Does this, in consequence, risk too polarizing a distinction between guided and guiding parties? How sensitive should we be to the varied vocabulary deployed to designate the latter role: the nouns ‘guide’, ‘ducteur’, ‘conduit’, ‘gaite’, and their cognate verbs? And what might we in twenty-first-century academia usefully learn from the situations of fourteenthand fifteenth-century guidance-seeking-protagonists from whom we might otherwise wish to imagine ourselves utterly distinct? Whom we take to be our guides plays a determining role in defining epistemologically not only the field of research with which we engage, but also the whole imaginary of our •
• • • •
By dit, I mean a French fourteenth- or fifteenth-century first-person narrative in verse (or prosimetrum). This furnishes a vast corpus (see, for instance, Swift , –); in the present context, I combine the subject of A Guide, Machaut, with a cluster of mid-late-fifteenth-century texts, my research into which has been much indebted to scholarship on fourteenth-century dits. Dupire a, (line ). Santucci . Kay . For example, Molinet’s Oroison addresses St Hippolytus as both ‘guide’ and ‘ducteur’; Dupire a, (line ).
A Guide to Research: ‘je vous tiens pour ma guide’
roles and expectations and how they are performed. This has been for some considerable time an urgent axiom in efforts to decolonize Western institutions of knowledge including the academy. Indeed, as Vandana Shiva affirms: ‘colonialism has from the very beginning been a contest over the mind and the intellect. What will count as knowledge? And who will count as expert or as innovator?’. In the ‘dominant academic model based on a Eurocentric epistemic canon’, boundaries and hierarchies of knowledge have been presented as self-evident by scholars of the Global North: ‘Western epistemic traditions are traditions that claim detachment of the known from the knower’; Achille Joseph Mbembe counterpoints these with ‘relationality’ as a prominent trope in Black thought. He and others argue, in place of the university, for a ‘pluriversity’: a process of knowledge production working through ‘a horizontal strategy of openness to dialogue among different epistemic traditions’. A Northern scholar such as myself expressing commitment to intellectual decolonization must recognize how I am privileged by coloniality and ‘implicated in its enduring structures of inequality’: how I may take up more space than I deserve and fail to amplify the voices of ‘decolonial scholars from the Global South who […] should arguably be at the forefront’ of the project, as our guides to research. Critiques of institutional structures of power and knowledge have also drawn attention to institutions’ indebtedness, in their commitment to decolonization, to predominantly student-led movements (such as Rhodes Must Fall). More generally, through valorizing teaching-led research and reverse mentoring practices, we as established scholars may interrogate the whole enterprise of guidance, not only challenging but also reimagining the structures through which different voices are granted space and authority: ‘what are the spaces, political positions, textual locations, discourses, and moments from which particular voices speak? When and how do they speak? Whose voice is assigned legitimacy or illegitimacy?’ Principles of self-scrutiny, porosity, and collaboration underpin A Guide – a title whose indefinite article itself registers the work’s openness to possible alternative approaches. It feels only fitting to give space here to Larry’s voice, in excerpts from the Preface, beginning with his concession to experts in fields into which he forays outside musicology: I nevertheless hope that the book will be of some service to scholars in these fields, even if only to spur on scholarship that will revise the views presented here. Too much specialization sometimes hinders our understanding of Machaut’s achievements. • • • • • • • • • •
I am much indebted to the Worcester College Decolonisation Course reading group convened by Rea Duxbury and Marchella Ward (April–June ); see . Shiva , vii. Mbembe , . Mbembe , . Mbembe , (his emphasis). Moosavi , . Moosavi , . Or to initiatives dependent on the labor of early career scholars, such as, locally to me, the Worcester College Decolonisation Course (see above, n. ). Dei and Doyle-Wood , , referencing Spivak . Earp a, xii.
Helen J. Swift
A good guide checks their epistemic limits; beyond simple modesty, though, we may discern more fundamentally an embrace of contingency and provisionality in the invitation to be superseded, as well as, methodologically, an evocation of the benefits of post-disciplinary thinking. Such future-oriented openness that yields rather than arrogates authority recurs when Larry articulates how Chapter ’s biography of Machaut ‘attempts to organize the documentary material from many sources in a fashion that will facilitate further research’. I shall consider later the guiding role of narratorial organization and the ‘ordenance’ attributed to Machaut in the opening rubric of MS A. I note here how Larry refers to A Guide as being ‘organized […] as a companion to Machaut research’, and wish to reflect briefly on ‘companion’. Beyond our appreciation as scholars of carrying the volume with us (whether physically or electronically) to accompany our studies of Machaut and the familiar use of ‘companion’ for collected volumes of essays designed ‘to structure and guide the reader towards future as much as existing work’ in a given field, the term may also be seen to gesture towards the importance of dialogue and cooperation. In late-medieval dits, the protagonist’s epistemological development is the fruit of company and conversation credited along the way or retrospectively by the narrating-I; in the modern academic book, the guidance of traveling companions is typically recognized on its threshold, in the acknowledgments. Fittingly in A Guide, Larry thanks by individual name a noteworthy range of his own guides, not only academic peers but also librarians, archivists, and graduate students, thereby guiding us into similarly collaborative paths. There is certainly much to be gleaned from careful reading of A Guide’s Preface, and one may readily counter any allegation of over-reading by referring back, via Molinet’s Oroison, to the follower’s investment in defining their guide. This situates any activity of guidance— whether primarily practical (organizational, ordering) or overtly moral or spiritual (solicited through prayer to a saint)—in the general sphere of didacticism. But how, without getting terminologically preoccupied, might we most usefully distinguish activities of guidance from instruction? As we shall see, it is more a question of emphasis and perspective than of difference, and one that privileges the role and responsibility of the guided party as self-guide: the user of A Guide, as well as the audience and the willful protagonist of a dit. Indeed, it is perhaps simply nuancing further our appreciation of late-medieval poetic didacticism itself. It thus seems appropriate to start with the dit commonly hailed as Machaut’s most ‘deeply didactic’, the Remede. Its opening passage, often seen to strike the instructional keynote, is certainly pregnant with didactic topoi, presenting itself immediately as a manual for education: Cils qui vuet aucun art aprendre A .xij. choses doit entendre. The man who thinks to master any art | Must attend to twelve matters. • • • •
Earp a, xii. Earp a, xii. Gaunt and Kay , . Palmer , (note to lines –); also online: . In their edition, Wimsatt and Kibler (, ) remark that the Remede’s most ‘salient characteristic […] is its didacticism’.
A Guide to Research: ‘je vous tiens pour ma guide’
This is complemented by repeated imperatives (‘aimme son mestre et son mestier | seur tout’ [let him love his master as well as his craft | above all else]; lines –), exhortation (‘doctrine reçoive humblement’ [let him receive instruction humbly]; line ), obligation (‘ce li est mestier’ [and he is called upon]; line ), categorical declaration (‘car chose ne puet si forte estre’ [now nothing can be too difficult]; line ), and explicit logical direction (‘einsi est il certeinnement | de vray humein entendement’ [and surely it is just the same | with the true form of human understanding]; lines –). However, beneath the clarity of this didactic surface rhetoric bubble questions and uncertainties: what are the proclaimed twelve matters (for which no source has been located)? Enumeration seems to stop after the first (‘la premiere’; line ); in the generic context of a dit, with its horizon of expectation of tricky circumstance and ironic twist, does not straightforward assertion of certitude and coherence incite anticipation of complication, incongruity, even bathos? And in whose voice is this all uttered? It remains impersonal until line when it is claimed (‘ce que j’ay dit ci desseure’ [what I have described here above]) by the retrospective narrating-I: what subjective agenda may thereby be informing his presentation of this didactic template – is it to legitimize the personal amorous experience that he will proceed to recount, or to critique it? Comic disjuncture is evident as early as line : S’avoie bien mestier d’aprendre, Quant tel fais voloie entreprendre. Que di je? Ains l’avoie entrepris, Qu’einc congié ne conseil n’en pris. (lines –) For there was much I needed to learn | Should I decide to follow this course. | What am I saying? I’d already decided | Before asking leave or advice.
The narrator recognizes the heedlessness of his youth, admitting that, instead of first having dutifully followed a course of instruction in the art of love (matters one through twelve, we infer), he dived straight in. As Sylvia Huot and Sarah Kay have both demonstrated, the didactic texture of the Remede as a whole is bumpy as regards the fruits of the lover’s education and the extent to which his ‘humein entendement’ develops much at all. Rather than passing ‘from suffering to consolation’, by following the guidance of Esperance to persevere in desire for his lady, anticipating positive change in her favor which could thus just as easily change again, he remains in epistemological uncertainty, unsure in the end whether she has now withdrawn her affections: Que je ne pos onques le voir De la mansonge concevoir. (lines –) I could not tell whether it was | Some false front or her true feelings. • • •
Palmer , – (lines –). Subsequent references to the Remede will be incorporated in the text and will be identified by line numbers only; the Remede appears on pp. – of Palmer . Kay , : ‘At the very end of the Remede de Fortune, the lover seems to be living in a fool’s paradise where his lady is concerned’; Huot a, . Palmer , (note to lines –).
Helen J. Swift
Does that mean that Esperance was a bad guide? She promised him, ‘et tu yes en la droite sente’ (for the path you follow is the right one; line ): was she leading him down the wrong path, in deficient imitation of Boethius’s Philosophy? Or did she lead him down the right path but not do so effectively – she did, after all, having undertaken to stay with him, pop off, pleading pressure of work? I would argue for neither, and propose instead that what is at issue is the persona’s implementation of guidance which is neither sound nor unsound in and of itself: it helps him (only) temporarily as a lover, and/(but) enduringly as a poet of love who continues hopefully to sing ‘the vagaries of fortune [rather than] remed[y] them’. We as audience, thus guided, can thereby reframe our reading of the opening passage’s program of education: the persona’s underlying devotion is to the ‘art’ and ‘mestier’ of composition. The complexity of the Remede’s didacticism and the questions about agency and responsibility that it raises bring us to interrogate further the role of a protagonist’s self in the activity of guidance. Individual will is expressed as a compelling driving force. On the one hand, this is a necessary initial impulsion, as when the persona of the Vergier plucks up courage to approach the company whom he encounters without a guide: ‘pour ce que savoir de leur estre | voloie’ (for I was eager to learn | who they were). On the other, it risks becoming obstinate resistance to alternative points of view, as when, in Jacques Milet’s Forest de Tristesse (), the wandering lover-persona declines Sapience’s offer of guidance out of its wretched forest of amorous desolation and she rejoins: ‘mais ta voulente voy lancee | a faire ce qui t’est contraire’ (but I see your will is set on | acting against your best interests). The Esperance of Alain Chartier’s Livre de l’Esperance rehearses a familiar maxim when she counsels: ‘celuy qui suyt son propre conseil se prive d’aultruy suyte, et seul doit fourvoier qui tout seul se guide’ (someone who follows his own advice deprives himself of others’ assistance, and the person who guides himself alone will lose his solitary way). For Milet’s lover, this risks being fulfilled when, having opted to follow Espoir rather than Sapience, he finds himself in danger of abandonment when Espoir then wants to leave him wandering alone ‘dedans la lande solitaire | ou mon gentil cueur se douloit’ (in the deserted plain | where my gentle heart felt pain; lines –). But we need to be careful when thinking about the ‘self ’ and ‘individual’ will of dit protagonists as guided parties, for a number of reasons.
•
• •
• • • •
Esperance’s plea of busyness (Palmer , –; lines –), noting that she has to divide herself in more than a thousand parts to meet the needs of lovers, is also a delightfully reflexive moment of intertextual humor, given the prevalence of her personification across late-medieval dits. Kay , . In terms of compositional guidance, the Remede has of course also been seen as a summa of lyric techniques (Hoepffner –, : xiv), whereby Esperance, within the poetic fiction, pedagogically guides the persona by teaching him newer styles at the same time that extratextual Machaut guides the reader through an evolution of compositional styles. As Tamsyn Mahoney-Steel (a) has explored, the soundscape informing the persona’s education is not limited to music. Palmer a, – (lines –). Droz and Piaget , lines – (my translation). Subsequent references to the Forest will be incorporated in the text. Rouy , – (my translation). For the maxim, see Di Stefano , : . I explain further below the context for, and identities involved in, the Forest’s scenario of guide selection.
A Guide to Research: ‘je vous tiens pour ma guide’
Firstly, it is sometimes the persona themselves who acts as guide, whether requested by a third party or by self-appointment. In the Confort d’ami, he sets out to ‘donner confort’ (offer […] consolation) to Charles of Navarre along the same lines as Esperance’s advice in the Remede to hope for change in circumstance; it yields a similarly temporary benefit, since, by the end of the Confort, the king is already requesting fresh consolation. In the Jugement Behaingne, the guidance that the persona provides to the debating knight and lady is primarily procedural and narrative: he eagerly intercedes to remedy their impasse by supplying a judge to move their situation forward. Being accosted by the lady’s little dog gives him his entrée to join their company and lead them to Durbuy: Pour avoir voie Et achoison d’aler ou je vouloie. (lines –) For it gave me the opportunity and occasion to go where I wished.
Secondly, let us recall that a fundamental principle of dit personification allegory is to dramatize the internal workings of the persona’s mind, in the same way that Boethius’s Lady Philosophy ‘is not an external agency or discipline but the protagonist’s capacity for it’. Selfhood, insofar as it represents an individual human consciousness, is thus relationally constituted, with the ‘I’ as one part of a dialogue between more or less rational and emotional impulses that find expression in personified guise—such as Sapience (prudential wisdom) and Espoir (hopeful desire) in the Forest—and a part that is continually, sometimes messily in a process of formation. A particularly striking example of the self in disjuncture, a kind of dysphoria, occurs in Achille Caulier’s La Cruelle femme en amours (), one of the poetic responses to Chartier’s La Belle Dame sans Mercy (), which develops significantly the narrative preamble to debate and the psychological state of the persona. He finds himself in ‘oubly’ (apathy), a ‘fantasïeux estat’ (bizarre state of mind) defined as an absence of perception and consciousness: ‘sans memoire, sens, ou advis’ (without memory, mind, or reason). This is not a consciously guidable state: he has been transported by Imagination to a palace, though seems not to have known it at the time (simply stating passively ‘fuz sy ravis’ [(I) was swept away]) and lacked the capacity to control his senses: ‘n’y pos mon regard arrester | Sur une chose’ (I could not fix my eye | on a single thing). He thus, for a while, is deprived of all will and capacity to participate actively in the narrative as an I/eye. A third reason for exercising caution when thinking about the guided self is that a given ‘I’ does not necessarily denote a discrete human consciousness. In dits, subjectivity is a • • • • • • •
Palmer , – (line ); also online: Palmer , – (lines –). Kay , . Wimsatt and Kibler , –. Kay , ; this principle obtains especially in pilgrimage allegories, on which, see Kamath , esp. p. . Cf. Delogu . On the ‘I in formation’, see Swift . McRae , lines , , . McRae , lines , –.
Helen J. Swift
non-unitary entity: being continually in formation, it is likewise porous and may be shared between figures in the narrative – for example, in the Behaingne, when the clerkly personaguide espies from outside the King’s court another clerk inside (‘S’i ot .i. clerc que nommer ne saroye’ [and a clerk, whom I cannot name]), this second figure may be read as sharing the narratorial vantage-point function of our protagonist, in a kind of relay that does not require each character to be a separate being. The illustrations in MS C devised for the Behaingne seem to encourage such a reading of the text by using its human figures (as well as the lady’s little dog) as markers of shifting narrative point of view. The human body can operate pictorially as a visual convention that fosters a mobile perspective on character relationality. I believe we encounter something similar in MS C’s Remede, especially its opening miniature on fol. r which, in respect of the text’s cast of characters, includes an unknown additional figure to the left of the persona as he looks towards his lady ascending the steps of her residence (Figure .). Such intersubjectivity preoccupies me here because I think the figure is inserted as a kind of guide (by, thereby, the guiding hand of the illustrator or compiler – potentially Machaut himself as supervisor of MS C), or, at least, as a cue for reflection on guidance and point of view. Who is he and what is his relation to the persona? Earp refers to him as ‘a young manservant’, which is perfectly plausible if we want to ascribe to this companion a particular identity; the lady is, after all, accompanied by maidservants in a parallel position. Using A Guide’s manuscript listing to consider persona and companion in the context of other, later opening miniatures for the Remede is interesting in respect of guidance: several show an older and a younger male in a hierarchical didactic relationship. In MS Vg, a clerk stands instructing a somewhat wriggling, inattentive boy whom a woman tries to hold still (fol. r); MS A has an elderly bearded man sitting instructing a youth (fol. v), while in MS Pm, ‘an old man holding a rod for discipline sits instructing a young man’ (fol. r). As Huot notes, ‘these figures do not correspond to any personages within the dit: they illustrate the prologue discussion of the process of learning’, and may thereby represent older and younger versions of the persona. Is this what we see in MS C? I think what we have here is rather different, and is consonant within the manuscript with the pictorial program of the Behaingne immediately preceding it, insofar as the maidservant (the ‘pucelete’ [young girl] of passing mention in that text) was used extensively in its miniatures to prompt the viewer to think about framing and point of view. The ‘manservant’ figure on fol. r operates as a kind of pivot who invites us to focus on the activity of seeing: positioned within the image, physically aligned with the • • • • • • •
Wimsatt and Kibler , – (line ). Swift a, –. Earp a, . Huot (a, ) likewise refers to him as ‘his manservant’. Earp a, . Huot a, . Huot (a, n. ) notes an intervisual link, as the Remede’s lady wears (almost) throughout the same pink hat worn by the persona of the Behaingne in its opening miniature. Wimsatt and Kibler , – (line ).
A Guide to Research: ‘je vous tiens pour ma guide’
Figure 1.1: .: MS C, fol. 23 r, detail (BnF)
persona, but with the feather of his cap protruding without the frame of the miniature and his back turned somewhat towards the viewer of the page, aligning him with our vantage Huot refers to the scene as a ‘classic representation of dous regart’;45 as such, within point.44 a dit, it is fraught with perils of misinterpretation. From one point of view, the image shows the lady exactly as described by the retrospective narrating persona in the text: [Ses yex] en riant m’ont en mains lieus Prié que par amour l’amasse. (lines 98–99) –) [Her eyes] as they smiled unceasingly | Begged me to love her.
Her intention is underscored by the pointed finger that she gestures in his direction. This is a scene, therefore, of the persona consenting to being seduced by the lady’s gaze: Et mes cuers voloit que je fusse Tous siens, et je aussi le voloie, 44 • • • 45 •
On the feathered cap, see Kathleen Wilson Ruffo’s chapter in this volume. Huot 1987a, a, 250. .
52
Helen J. Swift
Et pour ce a eaus m’en consilloie. Si qu’einsi fui, se Diex me gart, Pris par Dous Ris et Dous Regart. (lines –) And my heart wished that I were | Completely hers, which was my wish too, | And so I followed what those eyes advised. | The result was, God keep me, that right then | Sweet Laughter and Sweet Look took me prisoner.
But is the ‘dous regart’ in question definitely proceeding from her gaze and not his? Might we construe it as a wish-fulfillment projection from his ‘eaus’, through force of desiring will (the repeated ‘voloi[t/e]’), such that he in fact entraps himself by his own eyes? An alternative point of view on the miniature thus has him seeing what he wants to see: this is consonant with what he recounts in the text, but can anyone vouch for the reliability of that account when he ultimately finds (lines – above) that he cannot interpret (or, perhaps, chooses not to understand) his lady’s gaze? I contend that the presence and positioning of the additional viewer-figure encourage this sort of scrutiny and prompt a second look at how the content of the scene may be framed, opening it up as a question, and intersecting thereby with the questionable didacticism of the poem’s opening passage. Unlike the later manuscripts’ illustrations mentioned above, MS C does not portray the relationship between the two men as one of hierarchy: the manservant looks at the persona while he looks and sees what he observes, though not quite from the same angle, at one remove, set back at a slight distance; he offers, through my interpretation above, an implied commentary on the persona’s activity of seeing, guiding our view as audience of both text and image. Guides in late-medieval dits show the way physically (like the Behaingne’s bumptious conductor-persona) and verbally (as in Esperance’s speech and song in the Remede), but also visually: they are figures with whom to look, like the added figure in MS C’s Remede miniature, in order to enrich or clarify sight literally or figuratively for gain in knowledge, especially self-knowledge. The process of accompanied looking – and, for the reader/viewer, of seeing through plural eye-views – further underscores the porosity of selfhood in the dit by demonstrating ‘the intersubjectivity constitutive of what is recognizable as knowledge’. Going back to Boethius, it is the protagonist’s sight that Philosophy first targets by gazing keenly and directly at him as she strives to ‘clear his eyes of the mist of mortal affairs that clouds them’. She exhorts him repeatedly to see better: to view the shape of false happiness ‘properly and thoroughly (perspicaciter)’ and ‘direct your gaze (oculos deducis) more watchfully to discern the truth’. In effect, she is guiding him into becoming his own guide through informed self-guiding that looks forward with good judgment, since ‘it is never enough for a man to contemplate what is before his eyes: prudence must measure up how things will
• • • •
On such imaginative projections of amorous wish-fulfillment in Froissart, see Swift , –; Swift , –. Kay , . Tester , I.ii..–. Tester , III.ix.–, III.xii.–.
A Guide to Research: ‘je vous tiens pour ma guide’
work out in future’. We find a similar approach to guidance in late-medieval dits. Burgundian chronicler and poet Olivier de La Marche’s widely disseminated and translated stanzaic allegorical dream-narrative in the ars moriendi tradition, Le Chevalier délibéré (), traces the education of an aging persona in how to prepare himself to face death and achieve salvation. Notwithstanding the guidance of various personified entities including Pensee and Entendement, he drifts off down the path of Abuz, who deludes him with the illusion of reliving his youth: Je fuz de cuyder si tres plain Que je ne me recougnoissoie. Ou j’aloys, je ne le sçavoye. Abuz me mascha celle oublie: Ainsi chemine qui s’oublye. I was so filled with thought | That I lost my bearings | And knew not where I was going. | Delusion prepared this oblivion for me: | Thus rides one who forgets himself.
Souvenir intervenes to redress his view: ‘Et me bouta devant mes yeulx | Le Miroir de choses passees’ (And [Remembrance] thrust before my eyes | The Mirror of Things Past; strophe ) and the protagonist gradually begins to assume direction of his thoughts and perspective: Ainsi je me resjouÿsoie En la Viellesse ou je me vy Et en mes faiz passés pensoye. (strophe ) Thus I cheered myself | In Old Age when I saw myself | And thought of my past deeds.
He then encounters Fresche Memoire who guides him around a cemetery to help him better put on ‘the spectacles of death’ and understand that the key factor determining his fate will not be worldly status, but the state of his conscience when he dies. Fresche Memoire, picking up the relay from Souvenir, thereby holds up a mirror to his present and future: ‘Liz et retiens et cy te mire’ (read and remember and reflect; strophe ). The formula ‘[je/la] viz’ (I saw), used by the protagonist throughout in response to his guides’ ‘tu voi[s/z]’ (you see), thus evolves in epistemological purport, increasingly complemented by greater discernment in ‘je recougnuz’ (I recognized), ‘j’apperceux’ (I perceived). Delighted by the help of Fresche Memoire – ‘Heureux fuz que tel guide avoye’ (I was happy to have such a guide; strophe ) – he nonetheless recognizes both that this is a collaborative relationship – ‘Je la menay et elle moy’ (I escorted her and she me; strophe ) – and that, accordingly, he must invest effort in response to her guidance: Ce qu’elle dist c’estoit raison, Combien que ce fust fort a faire […] • • • •
Tester , II.i.–. The similarity lies in the approach; for marked difference in the guidance’s content, see Kay , –. Carroll and Wilson , strophe . Subsequent references will be incorporated in the text. See Taylor , .
Helen J. Swift
Les choses qu’elle me monstra Me firent penser a loisir. (strophes , ) What she said was right, | However hard to do. | […] | The things that she showed me | Made me muse a while.
In a richly illustrated incunable of the Chevalier, known today as the Gouda edition, a woodcut image of the cemetery scene (Figure .) seems to underscore both the importance of interaction between persona and personification and the process of seeing as discernment – of moving, in Boethius-persona’s terms, from glimpse (III.ix.) to clear view with the eye of intelligence (V.iv.) to inward understanding (me interius animadvertisse; III. ix.). It also recalls to some extent the pairing of persona and companion in MS C’s Remede miniature, insofar as it prompts us to relate the content of the scene to the points of view of those shown seeing it. In the foreground of the Gouda woodcut, Fresche Memoire has her back to us, turning to face the protagonist who stands at left facing outwards, whilst she also gestures forwards with her right arm – that is, gestures away from the reader/ viewer towards graves that we see beyond them. This spatial arrangement places the reader/ viewer in a position in parallel with the protagonist, watching him being guided by Fresche Memoire’s eye-view: she is shown displaying the cemetery’s contents to her ward, as if at a stage before he has turned to view them himself. Whence, I would argue, the heterogeneity of what is illustrated – the cemetery’s tremendously diverse mix of representations of the deceased exceeds in variety the text’s description of the graves. It is presented as material awaiting digestion – reflection and hard thought – that will process into orderly narrative his understanding of what he sees. What La Marche is relaying through his persona’s account are both the experiences of the dreaming protagonist at the time and their narrative digestion thereafter: for instance, in the above quotation from strophe , the experiencing-I’s sense was ‘what Fresche Memoire is telling me is hard to do’, which the retrospective narrating-I glosses with the matured understanding that ‘it was right even though it was hard’. A striking example of the dit’s characteristically multi-leveled narrative structure being mobilized to relay the relationship between guided and self-guiding parties occurs in French court writer Octovien de SaintGelais’s Sejour d’honneur (–). This allegorical dream narrative traces a grief-stricken persona’s journey of moral and spiritual education through a varied landscape, on land and at sea, arriving ultimately at the Hermitage d’Entendement before he awakes and writes up his peregrination. Like the Chevalier, the text is permeated with the formula ‘la vy’ that invites interrogation of the epistemological import of acts of ocular witness. I focus here on the persona’s first voyage aboard the Nef d’Abus across the Mer Mondaine. What guides
• • •
Sutch , , n. . The Gouda woodcuts are reproduced in Messerli , and the cemetery illustration is discussed in Swift b, – . I thank Jean Bonna for kind permission to reproduce this image from his private collection. Duval , II.vi. Subsequent references (my translation) are incorporated in the text. See also Swift b, –.
A Guide to Research: ‘je vous tiens pour ma guide’
Figure 1.2: .: Olivier de La Marche, Le Chevalier délibéré. Gouda: Collaciebroeders, c. 1489 (Geneva, Bibliothèque Jean Bonna)
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his view is the motion of the waves, which are wild and disorderly: Puys ça, puys la, l’ung contre l’autre hurtans, Selon que l’eau et les undes les mainent. (II.vi.–) Hither and thither, one thing colliding with another | as the movement of the water and the waves carries them.
In consequence, what he cannot see becomes at times more pertinent, and dominant, than what he is able to distinguish: Et toutesfoys assés peu j’en congneuz, Car les vagues de Mondaine Plaisance M’en osterent pour lors la congnoissance. (II.vi.–) But I could make out very little, | because the waves of Worldly Pleasure | denied me knowledge of them for the time being.
Saint-Gelais renders his persona’s chaotic vision stylistically through disrupted syntax and interjections to convey disarray, as well as the repeated construction ‘Et maintenant (And now) + [present tense verb]’ (for example, II.vi., ) to introduce his observations without clear chronological progression. The dreaming experiencing-I thus has no capacity to direct events according to his will, as he laments: ‘Au sien [=Abus] vouloir, non au mien, suis souzbmys’ (I am guided by his [=Delusion’s] will, not my own; II.vi.). There is didactic import to this narrative disorder, since what are floating scattered on the sea are the corpses of people who dedicated themselves to worldly affairs and suffered for it. The awoken writing-I is able to impose his compositional will on disrupted experience and perform thereby a kind of retrospective rescue of the identities of the dead whose bodies were irrevocably cast ‘a la mercy | Des grans undes […] | Comme chose gectee a l’advanture’ (at the mercy of the great waves […] like a thing tossed haphazardly; II.vi.–). He does so by inserting intercessory prayer, but also by adding commentary, extrapolating the deceased’s biography as in the case of Louis XI: he presents the story of his life and the sources of his renown in a series of rhyming couplets (II.vi.–), whereby each couplet constitutes a complete syntactic unit and has as its incipit the subject relative pronoun referring back to Louis; for example: Qui tant conquist, qui tant fut plain d’honneur, Si liberal et tant large donneur. (II.vi.–) Who conquered so much, who was so full of honour, | such a liberal and generous donor.
This formulaic presentation imposes order and regularity through its structural pattern, as well as, regarding content, establishing Louis as the active subject of verbs instead of the passive object of the waves. The recuperation effected by the persona’s deployment of versification and syntax is thus multifaceted: textual and narrative, but also moral – emphatically •
See Swift b, –.
A Guide to Research: ‘je vous tiens pour ma guide’
commending Louis’s contribution to worldly life – and spiritual in its prayerful commemoration. He thus acts as guide in multiple ways: in relation to his dreaming counterpart, he imposes the structure and order that the experiencing-I lacked; in organizing the material, he also intervenes interpretively to offer the reader an alternative perspective on the corpses of the Mer Mondaine. One risk emerging from the above discussion of two texts whose protagonists overcome Abuz and conclude their dreams in the company – literal and figurative – of Entendement, is that guidance comes across as a tidy, teleological process. In this final section I want instead to underline the contingencies, incompleteness, and potential messiness of guiding as a fundamentally imperfect phenomenon. Indeed, we might already point to how, whilst they ended their dreams in a mature state of self-knowledge, there is no guarantee that La Marche’s and Saint-Gelais’s personae went on to live out in waking life their enhanced understanding; the Chevalier’s protagonist already reports feeling adrift after Entendement’s departure: ‘je me trouvay tout esperdu’ (I felt completely lost; strophe ). Having recourse to a guide is prompted by perception of lack or fear of drift. Molinet advises, echoing the maxim cited by Chartier’s Esperance: A cop est on fourvoyé qui n’a guide: Tousjours bon droit a bon mestier d’ayde. Someone who has no guide immediately loses their way: | good reason is always in good need of help.
He counsels need for guidance as default, ongoing best practice. In the dramatic and self-dramatizing world of late-medieval dit personae, however, recourse is more often an emergency measure – the situation of need already at crisis point, the protagonist well astray physically and/or psychologically. They are stuck, like the Remede’s lover having shut down in response to his lady’s request to know the composer of the lay: shame, love, beauty and fear Me tollirent si le memoire Et les .v. sens que ne puis croire Qu’onques amans fust en tel point; Ne de parler si mal a point. (lines –) So robbed me of memory, | As well as of my five senses, I couldn’t believe | A lover had ever found himself this distressed | Or so utterly unable to speak.
Or like Milet’s lover lost in the wood: Tout seul cheminant me trouvoye En paine desplaisant et dure. (lines –) I found myself travelling all alone | in painful and grievous sorrow. • •
La Marche’s persona receives bedside counsel from Entendement (strophes –) on how to enter the lists against death. Dupire b, , lines – (my translation).
Helen J. Swift
Unfortunately and ironically, this is a poor state in which to come by guidance as it does not lend itself to sound judgment: we recall the persona of the Remede’s prologue recalling how, whilst recognizing himself to have ‘bien mestier d’aprendre’, he nonetheless pressed on with loving without taking ‘conseil’. In such a precarious moment, human inclination, especially one amorously disposed, is apt to pursue the readiest remedy: from ‘an appetite and impulse towards pleasure’, the soul ‘willingly turns to that which delights it’. So it is in the Forest, when the lover refuses rescue by Sapience, preferring to throw in his lot with Espoir so as to remain on the path of desire, however painful. Like Boethius’s Philosophy (I.ii.–), Milet’s Sapience identifies herself as appearing to her ward because she has been lost by him – he formerly did not lack guidance, but has himself created the need by drifting from it/her: Mais depuis Faulte de Sagesse Te fist de moy tant eslongner Qu’on peut congnoistre a ta simplesse Que tu en as a besongner. (lines –) But then Lack of Good Sense | made you stray so far from me | that one can tell by your ignorance | how much you need it.
Clueless, he tried to steer his own path, with the inevitable outcome: Et pource que tu ne sçais pas, Y es tu seul sans moy venu Tant qu’il t’en est mal advenu. (lines –) And it’s because you go about in ignorance | that you’ve come here alone without me | such that things have gone badly for you.
The lover initially implores her help to guide him out of the wood: Je vous requier: soyez ma guide Affin que de ce vil boys vuyde. (lines –) I beg you: be my guide | so that I can leave this terrible wood.
But, unwilling to give up his devotion to amorous desire, he does not care for her diagnosis of the cause of his divagation: Tu es par amours esgaré En ceste meschante forest. (lines –) You are led astray by love | into this wretched forest. • •
Robin Kirkpatrick (, ) signals the ambivalence of Marco Lombardo’s observation in Dante’s Purgatorio (xvi.) that the innocent soul when first created ‘volontier torna a ciò che la trastulla’. Absence is also pertinent to Molinet’s statement about ongoing need for good guidance in Gaiges retrenchiés (Dupire b, ), which he subtends with threat of strike action in response to a wage cut. ‘Toujours’ is thus itself contingent: here, an appeal to one Bauduin de Lannoy to intercede on Molinet’s behalf with Archduke Philip the Handsome (Brown , –).
A Guide to Research: ‘je vous tiens pour ma guide’
Stuck, he settles down to listen to Sapience and Espoir debate their alternative remedies for his misfortune: Lors m’assiz au milieu d’eux Pour mieulx leurs questions entendre Affin que j’apparceusse d’eulx Remede pour mon cas deffendre. (lines –) And so I sat down between them, | the better to hear their debate, | so that I might glean from them | a solution to my situation.
Which should he choose as his guide? He has, echoing Machaut’s Remede, a familiar dilemma: a lady who has not yet returned his favor – does he persist in devotion in the hope of change or quit from fear of woe? Sapience is trenchant, advising him to be guided by previous examples of unhappy lovers: Il pert son temps a se defaire: Aux preudhoms doit prendre exemplaire, Je luy conseille. (lines –) He wastes his time destroying himself: | he should learn from the example of honorable men, | is what I advise.
Seeing that he inclines towards Espoir, she lays her epistemic cards on the table: J’ay toute la science aprinse D’amours, sans en faillir d’ung point; Mais plus la congnois, moins la prise – Se tu me crois ne t’y metz point. (lines –) I have acquired all knowledge | of love, completely and flawlessly; | but the more you learn, the less you value it – | if you believe me, you don’t show it.
The lover decides to disregard her knowledge and incline towards promise of pleasure. As her parting shot, Sapience identifies his blinkered willfulness in guiding himself by selfinterested desire: Adieu, pensez a vostre affaire: Tel remede en voz faitz donrés Qu’il vous semblera bon a faire. (lines –) Farewell, reflect on your situation: | you will assign the remedy for your ills | that seems to you the right one.
Unsurprisingly, he comes unstuck; or, rather, he and Espoir get mired in a swamp and the latter wants to leave. Espoir then starts to sound uncannily like Sapience, advising that, to improve his prospects, the lover look to learn self-governance: Mon serment, a ce que je sens: Tu auras encores du bien Mais que tu soyes congnoissans Et que tu te gouvernes bien. (lines –) My promise, from what I can see: | you will have happiness again | if only you keep learning | and govern yourself well.
Helen J. Swift
Espoir’s change of heart seems to summon a savior, Subtilité, who rides up to offer them escape, which both now accept under her guidance (‘presentement guider te vueil’ [I wish to guide you now]; line ). Subtilité’s discourse picks up where Espoir’s ‘serment’ left off, reframing hope in a repositioned remedy beyond worldly fortune, echoing thereby Boethius’s Esperance: A bien faire te fault penser Affin que congnoisses ton fait. […] Et Dieu nous a mis entre mains De son bon vouloir charitable: Remede seur et veritable Pour nous y gouverner […] bien. (lines –, –) You must think about doing good | in order to understand your situation. | […] | And God has placed us in the hands | of his charitable benevolence: | a certain and true answer | for how to lead a good life.
‘Guider’, ‘congnoistre’ and ‘[se] gouverner’ are keywords for Subtilité, and their interrelation highlights guidance as a cooperative act, with either party, guide and guided, contingent upon the other to achieve progress: Nous guideray sans nulle faulte Mais ne m’esloignez ung seul pas. (lines –) I will guide us unfailingly | but don’t drift a single step away from me.
Forward movement also matters because of the narrative context of the dit – that is to say that it is, in its overall framework (whether or not it features intercalated formes fixes), narrative rather than lyric. That does not mean, however, that guidance always results in linear progression – indeed, part of Milet’s lover’s problem in following Espoir rather than Sapience was that further movement disabled rather than enabled progress: Cheminoye parmy la sente Mais plus exploictoye ma voye Et plus de desplaisir avoye. (lines –) I travelled along the path, | but the further on I went | the more unhappy I felt.
Why did the lover decline to follow Sapience but accept to follow Subtilité? Was it a matter of timing: earlier on he was content to stick with the path of suffering for love, but later had enough when the prospect of being a martyr for love (Espoir’s prediction: ‘Demourrons mors d’ung grief soucy’ [We shall be stuck here dead from grievous woe]; line ) became more proximate and literalized? Or was it a case of keeping company: fine as long as Espoir stuck around, but the last straw when he wanted to leave? Or does the reason lie in the differing approaches to guidance adopted by the two personifications who otherwise appear very similar in their mastery of ‘science’ (line )? Sapience counsels fear of the future based on knowledge of past and present; Subtilité steps epistemologically outside the
A Guide to Research: ‘je vous tiens pour ma guide’
contingencies of temporality and pitches her promise of remedy in a universal context of divine guidance by the one truly ‘feable guide’ (trustworthy guide), which nonetheless still requires the collaboration of human will. Are we called to be critical of Sapience for failing to secure the lover’s adherence: do we see her as having failed? Should we be classifying guides as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, like Boethius’s Philosophy condemning the poetic Muses (‘they accustom a man’s mind to his ills, not rid him of them’, I.i.–)? I think not in the dits, and this is where my insistence on the inherent imperfection of guidance comes to the fore, and I mean ‘imperfection’ without value judgment attached: it is of its nature incomplete and partial, because it is intersubjective and the fruit of distributed responsibility between guiding and guided parties (themselves not necessarily clearly separate or distinct); guides are also more often plural than singular – Boethius’s Philosophy is an outlier rather than a model in this regard. Full knowledge or total selfknowledge will never be the fruits of late-medieval dit personae – nor modern scholars – who will never surrender the partiality of their ‘vouloir’, and will at best sit (poetically) productively with the discomfort of (amorous) uncertainty, compositionally revisiting their painful experience, guiding themselves and their readers towards the present through a mapping of the past, like the Remede persona never knowing for sure what his lady meant. A scenario of guidance is an exhortation to think critically and together, in companionship, with openness to the future: whence the prominence of ‘vouloir’, a wish whose fulfillment depends on its application, as when, at the start of the Fonteinne amoureuse, the persona submits: Or pri a ceuls qui le liront, Qui le bien dou mal esliront, S’il y est, qu’il vueillent au lire Laissier le mal, le bien eslire. (lines –) Now I ask those about to read | To separate the good from the mediocre, | If there’s any, to please as they read | Forget the bad and choose the good.
His will exhorts the reader’s to discern guidance. The audiences, present and future, of a given dit and its manuscript presentation are part of that cooperative pact. How does this all relate to the overall framework of didacticism: is guidance a particular didactic orientation, or are the two synonymous? Thinking about didacticism from the point of view of guidance, and specifically of A Guide, can helpfully loosen any rigid sense of a master-pupil instruction dynamic, arrest hasty value judgment, valorize the role of an organizing gaze, and foreground the importance of collaboration and contingency: ‘je vous tiens pour ma guide’. As scholars of Machaut, we often want to take him as our guide; we point, as evidence of his guiding hand, to the stamp of supervisory authority in the rubric heading MS A’s index: ‘Vesci l’ordenance • • • • •
Rouy , . Cf. Entendement’s self-reproach for not having better guided the protagonist in Rouy , . Cf. Kirkpatrick (, ) on how the Inferno is ‘at one and the same time, a celebration and a critique of Virgil’s authority. But this critique also bears upon Dante’s own choice of Virgil as guide’. Swift , –. Palmer a, –.
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que G de Machau wet qu’il ait en son livre’ (Here is the order that G. de Machaut wants his book to have; fol. Av). But it, too, is only an expression of wish, taking the subjective mood. Interpretation of editorial organization lies with the reader in response to that wish, itself scribally reported from or attributed to Machaut-as-editor. And the onus is in fact placed on the reader in the (far less frequently cited) rubric at the end of the index that refers to a following list of lyrics: ‘Ces choses qui s’ensuivent trouverez en Remede de Fortune’ (You will find the following items in the Remede de Fortune; fol. Bv). We may be organized, accompanied, and facilitated in our (re)search, but it is up to us what, and how, we find.
. M: T G F-C P C T-F C* Tamsyn Mahoney-Steel
A few years back, an internet game emerged that asked people to open their nearest book to the fifty-second page and post the fifth full sentence. This craze did a few rounds, appearing on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. The results were somewhat amusing as people posted sentences out of context. For me there was a more interesting micro-trend: a slew of posts from friends and colleagues which read ‘blank page!’. I was included in this micro-trend because page of Lawrence Earp’s Guillaume de Machaut: A Guide to Research is, in fact, blank. It became clear that, like me, other scholars of medieval music, French literature, and manuscripts sat with one book ever at their elbow. As an anxious and bewildered graduate student, this tome became my bible; today, dog-eared, graffitied with notes, adorned with colored index stickies and the occasional doodled marginalia, it remains a constant and necessary companion. Published in , the Guide has had a profound effect on scholarship in both Machaut studies and the broader context of fourteenth-century French music, literature, and manuscripts. There are many reasons why this is the case, since the Guide is a tour de force of musical, literary, historical, codicological, and historiographical work. It would be possible to write extensively on Earp’s significance for any one of these areas of research: as a scholar, he crosses disciplinary boundaries, having written on manuscript compilation, musical structure and style, notation, and reception. However, my goal in this chapter is to take a broader perspective and try to understand the impact of the Guide within our community as a whole. Using the network diagram software Gephi to visualize the citational relationships, I demonstrate here the interconnections of scholarly communication within Machaut scholarship and the central importance of the Guide for post- publications. I begin by setting out my rationale and methodology for creating the visualization, before proceeding to analysis of what the diagram shows us. Reflecting on the importance of the Guide and the continued flourishing of Machaut studies today, I was led to some more philosophical and critical reflections on how we study, conceptualize, monumentalize, and even fetishize historical figures. In the final section I discuss Machaut as the most important fourteenth-century poet-composer of the twenty-first century and how Earp’s work has guided us through the intellectual pitfalls. *
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•
I thank my co-editors Jared C. Hartt and Benjamin L. Albritton for their generous and insightful comments on this work. I would also like to thank staff at the University of Central Lancashire Library for their help in tracking down so many of the publications for the network herein. Earp a, . Alice V. Clark (b, ) has also noted that this ‘magisterial’ and ‘unsurpassed’ work is ‘affectionately known as the “Machaut Bible”’, a hallowed moniker she uses in her chapter in this volume as well. Anna Zayaruznaya in her chapter herein also employs the term ‘magisterial’ to describe the Guide. One might surmise that both writers were hinting at the description of Machaut himself as magister (master); see Earp a, . .
The Greatest Fourteenth-Century Poet and Composer of the Twenty-First Century
Rationale The reasons for carrying out the network project are several. My hope is that the bibliography I have created, as well as the spreadsheet of interconnections (described further below), will be of use to Machaut scholars: both the data and the resulting visualizations are available in the Stanford Digital Repository. Another point of interest for me is the evolution of interdisciplinarity within academia. Studies of Machaut in the twentieth century were notoriously siloed, a disservice to Machaut himself whose craft was not limited by our modern disciplinary boundaries. The publication of the Guide, as well as later holistic studies such as Elizabeth Eva Leach’s Guillaume de Machaut: Secretary, Poet, Musician, have prompted us to rethink these borders and to cross them with the hope of better understanding Machaut and his oeuvre. However, the network diagram enables us to see where the boundaries of knowledge communities still exist and what other subject areas they most commonly abut. Related to these questions of interdisciplinarity is the specific role of the Guide itself as a hub of connection within Machaut studies. At the beginning of the project, I hypothesized that this volume would prove to be the center of our scholarly universe, and, unsurprisingly, my hypothesis proved true. In addition to my interest in the role of the Guide and whether its importance could be visualized, as a digital humanist I was curious to explore how a network diagram of this size might turn out and what it would take to produce. Network diagrams have been used to explore interrelationships in a number of different fields within the humanities. Two networks examining the history of Western philosophy are good examples of large-scale networks, however, the data collection in both cases involved using computer code to scrape Wikipedia entries for information on lines of influence between philosophers. While this technique was generally good for getting an overview of the intellectual relationships, it was dependent upon how the writers of each Wikipedia entry viewed those relationships rather than drawing on citations or expressions of intellectual debt by the philosophers themselves. By contrast, the network generated by Shawn Moore for the ‘Digital Cavendish’ project, was created by direct examination of the sources and resulted in a smaller, but more accurate representation; similarly, the ‘Six Degrees of Francis Bacon’ project also involved close engagement with primary sources. I chose to create my network diagram through direct examination of publications on Machaut instead of writing code to mine data from Google Scholar, for example. I did this because I knew the results would be more accurate, and, • •
• • •
. My thanks go to Benjamin L. Albritton for creating the record and uploading the data and images. . This network by Grant Oliveira is based on the same data collection techniques as the earlier network by Simon Raper . Oliveira’s is more interactive and allows users to click on individual philosophers for more information and localized networks of influence. . . It also became clear in the course of my work that Google Scholar and Google Books did not have all the items in the bibliography I was developing.
Tamsyn Mahoney-Steel
while this was more labor intensive, I felt this offered two important opportunities: first, by passing each piece of Machaut scholarship from the past twenty-seven years in front of my eyes, I had the chance to remind myself of the depth and breadth of scholarship while also discovering hitherto unread pieces; second, I felt that working in this manner was a more honest and fitting homage to Earp’s own work on the Guide, which involved the examination and description of around items for the rigorous bibliography included in the volume and that has been supplemented in the ensuing years by updates in the International Machaut Society newsletter. Methodology Network diagrams: key concepts Network diagrams are formed from two key elements: nodes and edges. Nodes are the actors within a network and are represented usually by circles or polygons; edges are connections between the actors, represented by lines that connect the nodes. In our network a node/actor is an individual piece of scholarship (I will elaborate below how I define this) and an edge represents a citation that one piece of scholarship makes of another. Edges can be a simple line between nodes to show that there is a connection, or they can be weighted according to number; that is, if there are multiple connections between two nodes (in this case several citations of the same publication), the thickness of the line can be increased to reflect the number of connections. As well as being weighted, an edge can also be directed; we can show the flow of communication between two nodes. Within a citation network such as the one I am creating here, the edges are marked as directed because citations are date dependent and therefore usually flow in one direction (later publications generally cite earlier publications, with exceptions being when chapters in a single volume cross-reference one another or a scholar is given access to forthcoming work by a colleague). Figure . shows a simple version of a network diagram. In this instance I have taken sections of publications by Earp and Leach and recorded their references. The node size in this particular example is adjusted proportionally according to ‘degree’, that is, the number of times each publication is notated on the spreadsheet; the nodes for Earp and Leach here appear the largest because it is necessary to record a ‘source’ entry for every citation each publication makes. In Figure . we can also see the differing thicknesses of the edges and the arrows showing the direction of citation. As is clear from the thickness of the edges in this example, both publications cite Earp (the Guide) the most. As such Earp has emerged as the central node in the network even though its overall degree weight is currently less than either Earp or Leach.
• •
Earp a, –; . For the purposes of the network, I refer to publications using the author-date system, but without the customary space. I omit spaces because this can aid legibility in a large diagram. I will adhere to this format throughout the chapter in the context of referring to any publication that appears on the network diagram; other citations follow the usual format.
The Greatest Fourteenth-Century Poet and Composer of the Twenty-First Century
Figure 2.1: .: Sample small network diagram with nodes sized by degree
Figure 2.2 . presents the same data visualized differently. In this case, I have adjusted the parameters such that Gephi has sized the nodes according to ‘in-degree’. Whereas degree simply expresses the number of times a node can be found on the spreadsheet, in-degree sizes the node according to how many other nodes are connected to it in a directed network. In other words, if we compare Earp1995 Earp in Figure 2.1 . and Figure 2.2, ., it appears larger in the latter than Earp or Leach2021 Earp2021 Leach because it is cited by two publications. In Figure 2.2, ., Avril1972, Avril, Huota, WimsattKibler1988, t1987a, WimsattKibler, and Robertson2002 Robertson all appear the same size as Earp1995 Earp because each of these nodes also have an in-degree of . 2. This may seem counterintuitive because, as the thickness of the edges demonstrates, each of these were cited fewer times by Earp2021 Earp and Leach2021; Leach; however, it is important to note that in-degree only takes account of the number of different individual nodes that connect to a particular node and not the weight of each edge (that is, the number of times it is cited by those individual nodes). In-degree will be of particular importance for this study because I am interested in the Guide’s overall influence rather than the frequency of its use by other individual pieces of scholarship.
Figure 2.2: .: Sample small network diagram with nodes sized by in-degree
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Gephi offers a number of options for visualizing networks depending on the particular needs of the research being conducted. There are different layouts to choose from, as well as the option to adjust node size (as demonstrated above with degree and in-degree), edge size, and node and edge color. One useful function is the option to color-code a network according to modularity: running the modularity algorithm within Gephi identifies subgroups within a network, and these groups can be assigned different colors for visual identification. As is shown in Figures 2.3 . and 2.4, ., subgroups that largely correspond to articles about motets and art history, respectively, can be identified within the overall network (shown in Figure 2.7). .).
Figure 2.3: .: Section of the full network diagram showing publications predominantly on motets
Figure 2.4: .: Section of the full network diagram showing publications predominantly on art history history and manuscripts
Layout algorithms can aid us in viewing these subgroups more clearly. The Yifan Hu and . shows the Yifan Hu layout ForceAtlas methods are particularly helpful here.11 Figure 2.5 • 11 •
For a description of the Yifan Hu layout see Hu 2006; ; for ForceAtlas see Jacomy and others . 2014.
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Figure 2.5: .: Full network using a Yifan Hu layout, with areas of research specialization labeled
The Greatest Fourteenth-Century Poet and Composer of the Twenty-First Century
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with node labels removed (except for Earp1995) Earp) and research clusters identified (ForceAtlas will be used in Figure 2.7 . to display a version of the full network). These kinds of algorithms produce force-directed layouts, which means that ‘the nodes repulse and the edges attract’,12 that is, the nodes push each other away, but edge connections between them draw them closer, and the higher the edge weight the stronger the attraction. By contrast, the Fruchterman Reingold algorithm visualizes the network within a circle.13 This makes it harder to see clusters, but does allow us to see the relative centrality to the network of particular nodes. Figure 2.6 . presents a Fruchterman Reingold layout with areas of disciplinary specialism labeled. As is clearly shown, Earp1995 Earp is central to the network: it is the most frequently cited work and it is cited by publications from all disciplines. While there is much interdisciplinary connection, there are clear clusters of subject interest (I will say more about this in the analysis below).
Figure 2.6: .: Full network using a Fruchterman Reingold layout, with areas of research specialization labeled
12 • • • 13 •
Jacomy and others 2014, , para. 9. . See Fruchterman and Reingold 1991. .
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The Greatest Fourteenth-Century Poet and Composer of the Twenty-First Century
Creating the spreadsheet Building a network diagram using Gephi is primarily an exercise in creating a huge spreadsheet. The Excel workbook for this project consists of several worksheets, including a master bibliography, a nodes table, and several edges tables (the edges were later collated into one table, but it was easier to work with these subdivided as there were several thousand rows). The master bibliography, consisting of over , items, was not needed to create the network in Gephi, but was important for keeping track of what I was including in the network and whether tasks had been completed. The nodes table identifies each publication with a unique number, which is essential for creating an accurate list of edges, and assigns each a label name, which is designated using the author-date-a/b/c method (see Table . for an extract of the nodes table). Labels allow nodes in the network to be visually identifiable. The nodes table was automatically generated from the master bibliography using VLOOKUP; this ensured that there were no discrepancies between the two lists. There is no requirement for the nodes to be in any particular order. Table .: Extract of the nodes table
ID
• •
Label
Earp
Leach
Stone
Maxwell
WilsonRuffo
Pyun
Goehring
Leo
Swift
Mahoney-Steelb
Plumleya
Hartt
Boogaart
Desmond
Most of these items are not in the bibliography at the end of this volume but can be found at the Stanford Digital Repository link in n. . VLOOKUP is a function within Excel that instructs the program to search a column of data for a specified string (a number, some letters, or a combination of both) and then return a value from a horizontally adjacent column. In this case, whenever I typed the assigned number of a particular publication, the formula would check for that number in the bibliography worksheet and return the publication’s identifying name in the adjoining column. Hence, every time I typed ‘’ in the ‘source’ or ‘target’ column of my edges table, for example, the name ‘Earp’ would appear in the cell immediately to the right. This is not necessary data for Gephi to generate a network but allowed me to perform long hours of data entry with the confidence that I was entering the correct numbers that corresponded with the publications. It also allowed me to generate a node table automatically from my bibliography without the need to copy and paste or retype any data; again, this allowed me to minimize potential human errors.
Tamsyn Mahoney-Steel
The edges table enables us to record the actual interconnections on a network that will be expressed as the lines connecting the nodes. For every publication I examined, I needed to record who was cited and how many times. Table . presents an extract from an edges table which shows some of the publications cited in Earp. We can see from the weight column that he cited Bowers twice and Smilansky four times. (It is this weight number that can be expressed as edge line thickness in a network diagram). Like in the nodes table, the edges do not need to be in any particular order, but it made practical sense to record the citations from each publication in the order that they were presented. For upload to Gephi, I removed the ‘Source name’ and ‘Target name’ columns. Gephi does not require these because the labels for nodes are identified in the ID column of the nodes table. Table .: Extract of the edges table
Source
Target
Target name
Type
Earp
Source name
Bowers
Directed
Weight
Earp
Smilansky
Directed
Earp
Lermack
Directed
Earp
Leob
Directed
Earp
WimsattKibler
Directed
Earp
Palmer
Directed
Earp
Plumley
Directed
Earp
Huot
Directed
Earp
Leach
Directed
Earp
Robertson
Directed
Rules for nodes and edges While the creation of the spreadsheet was incredibly labor intensive, it was a relatively straightforward procedure. However, I did need to establish clear rules for this iteration of the project to ensure that it was manageable within the timeframe and enabled me to explore the importance of Earp’s Guide for our scholarly community: ¶ Each node represents an individual publication rather than an author. This is because the focus is on the influence of the publication of scholarly arguments rather than scholars. ¶ Most items that are cited by authors are included in the node and edge tables, however there are some exceptions. I did not include references to manuscripts or digitized manuscript images. This is because the network diagram aims to show the influence of scholarly arguments about Machaut rather than the significance of his works. I also did not include citations of recordings and liner notes as these were relatively scarce. ¶ Similarly, editions of works by Machaut and other medieval writers are labeled according to the scholarly editors. Hence editions of the Remede de Fortune are identified as WimsattKibler and Palmer, for example.
The Greatest Fourteenth-Century Poet and Composer of the Twenty-First Century
¶ An individual citation is viewed as a reference to a discrete piece of information or section of argumentation that is drawn upon by an author. In practice, this often involved making judgment calls based on engagement with the body text of a piece; however, as a general rule, if an author made the point of identifying discrete pages or sets of pages rather than page ranges, I took this to mean that they were pointing to separate (albeit related) pieces of information. Hence a reference that gave ‘Earp , –’ as a source was deemed to be citing the Guide once, whereas one that gave ‘Earp , –, –, ’ was taken as three discrete citations from that volume. There were some journals that did not require an additional footnote if a citation was given in text, so it was important to take into account the referencing practices of different publications. There is an element of fallibility here since I am making tacit assumptions about how people distinguish different parts of a scholarly discussion and where they draw the line at what is a new and distinct piece of information that must count as a separate citation. However, I do not believe that small differences in this regard skew the results. ¶ For instances of citations within citations, I included only the main reference and not the citation within it because by referencing in this manner the author is acknowledging that they may not have consulted the volume referenced by the person they were citing. ¶ One type of citation I was keen to preserve that is not a publication was personal thanks. These encompassed gratitude for editorial help, personal communications, and conference discussions. These proved to be so frequent that I felt it was important to retain them in the network as an acknowledgment of our scholarly community and the fact that much work happens outside of the published record. I did not include thanks from acknowledgment sections as I was more concerned with how scholarly interaction supported the development of lines of argumentation rather than more general support. ¶ On rare occasions a reference was not specific enough for me to identify. For example, there are instances of forthcoming work mentioned, but without titles. In these cases, I did not create a new node or edge. ¶ For the purposes of this iteration of the network diagram, I am focusing on only English-language publications (although non-English items are included as unexpanded nodes). For future iterations, I will be including publications in other languages; it will be interesting to see how much cross-pollination there is with those items written in other languages. ¶ Nodes can be expanded or unexpanded. I employ this terminology to differentiate between nodes that have had their edges recorded and those which have not. Expanded nodes will only be publications that make a substantial argument about Machaut. For example, Helen J. Swift’s article in Digital Philology, ‘Picturing Narrative Voice: Communication and Displacement’ (identified in the network as Swifta), concerns the ‘critical understanding of narrative voice in text and image of Machaut’s
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¶
¶
¶
¶
• • • •
dits’ and is therefore making a substantial contribution to Machaut studies. In the course of her argument, Swift employs the work of N. Katherine Hayles to discuss posthuman identity, drawing on publications from and . These nodes are labeled as Hayles and Hayles but remain unexpanded since Hayles does not write about Machaut. Expanded nodes are limited to journal articles, chapters from edited books, and introductions to editions only. Monographs and dissertations, while included as nodes in the graph, have not been expanded. The rationale for this is that articles and chapters tend to have a more concentrated focus; most that include Machaut tend to consist at least partially of arguments regarding his life and work, and the majority contain substantial arguments. While some monographs do have a narrower focus on Machaut (Anne Walters Robertson’s Guillaume de Machaut and Reims and Leach’s Secretary, Poet, Musician are excellent examples), many situate him in a broader thematic context (for example Yolanda Plumley’s The Art of Grafted Song has extended sections on Machaut, but is concerned overall with the culture of citation in fourteenth century music and literature, and my own dissertation has a similar purview). Further, articles and chapters tend to have a similar number of citations and are, therefore, more comparable and do not skew results. I intend to expand the remit of my network in a future study. Only the nodes for publications after are expanded. While the network as a whole contains many individual nodes for publications from prior to , since my interest is in the influence of the Guide on subsequent publications, I only expanded those published after the Guide was available. For edited volumes, I have not generally included introductory chapters as expanded nodes since many do not include new arguments and the ‘references’ are only summaries of the chapters contained therein. A notable exception is Earp’s introduction to Poetry, Art, and Music in Guillaume de Machaut’s Earliest Manuscript (BnF fr. ), which contains new research on the manuscript and cites many other publications in addition to summarizing the book’s chapters. Nodes are labeled in a similar fashion to the reference practices of this volume: author-date with an additional ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘c’, or ‘d’ to differentiate multiple publications in the same year (for example, nodes , , and are Leacha, Leachb, and Leachc, respectively). While each of the nodes has a unique number that allows Gephi to differentiate between them, the labels ensure that they are human readable, too. On a few occasions a node may refer to a multi-volume work; for example, Ludwig– refers to the four volumes of Guillaume de Machaut: Musikalische Werke. Swift a, . Swift a, . Robertson ; Leach b; Plumley ; Rose-Steel [Mahoney-Steel] . Earp .
The Greatest Fourteenth-Century Poet and Composer of the Twenty-First Century
Overall, what I have chosen to include and exclude from the network was based on my judgment. Any errors or omissions rest entirely on my shoulders. Going forward, I intend to continue work on the network, with the aim of producing a larger visualization that includes all Machaut scholarship over the last years, publications in other languages, and some comparative visualizations that will enable us to see how the nature of our endeavors have changed. I am particularly interested in discovering whether our work has truly become more interdisciplinary. While we can clearly see on the network diagram that there are clusters related to certain specialist interests, such as motets and art history, the centrality of the Guide and other works such as Leach’s Secretary, Poet, Musician and Robertson’s Guillaume de Machaut and Reims, would seem to suggest that we are finding common ground between the disciplines. It will also be fascinating to see how Machaut studies evolve in the future, and I hope to include new publications as they appear. The network in its current form is accessible through the Stanford Digital Repository and future iterations will be available there. Analysis Figure . shows a streamlined version of the full network. The algorithm employed is a ForceAtlas layout. In this instance I have removed nodes that have less than two edges connecting them to the network. This was done to aid clarity of reading in book format (the volume of node labels on the full network rendered it illegible without the capacity to zoom in) and means that many items peripheral to the network (things that are cited by only one author) are omitted, however the full network can be viewed online. I had anticipated that the Guide would likely be revealed as the central node, and I was vindicated in this assumption. This result is not particular surprising, since the popularity of the Guide has remained undiminished over the past twenty-seven years; from reading publications on Machaut, it is apparent that the tome is a constant reference point. We might expect that a well-written guide for an area of study would be a popular citation in any field, yet it is pleasing to see that not only does the Guide have an enduring place in our scholarly endeavors, but that its central position also means that it has interdisciplinary value and provides a hub of connection between various disciplinary subgroups. •
• •
•
• •
For this iteration of the network, I have striven to be as comprehensive as possible. For the publications that I could not access, their nodes could not be expanded. I estimate that these missing publications would comprise less than of the total network. See n. . In the course of my investigation I also explored Connected Papers ( and Semantic Scholar and ) as potential ways to obtain citation data and generate a network; however, while both had Earp a listed in their databases, neither platform came close to having the amount of citational information that I had accrued through manual examination of publications on Machaut. Algorithms such as ForceAtlas use ‘repulsion’ and ‘gravity’ to map the network. Nodes naturally repel each other; however, edges create ‘gravity’ that draws them back together. The more edges and the greater the weight, the stronger the attraction will be between nodes. See n. . I also ran the Yifan Hu and Fruchterman Reingold algorithms and the results were similar; these alternative layouts can be viewed at the link in n. .
Tamsyn Mahoney-Steel
A different way to view the interest in Machaut is temporally. Figure . shows the approximate number of publications in English dedicated to Machaut per five-year increment. Clearly there has been a flourishing of interest since the late s that demonstrated the need for a tome such as the Guide (which was commissioned in ); that interest has continued unabated. (The drop off in figures in very recent years is most likely due to the delay in new scholarship being available for discovery in library catalogs and search engines such as Google Books; further, the – increment includes not even a year-and-a-half of scholarship.) What this graph does not show, however, is the shift in intensity of focus. For example, many of the items in the bibliography in Earp’s Guide are studies that consider Machaut in relation to figures such as Chaucer and often treat Machaut only as a comparative point or as means for broader contextualization. Since the s, work by scholars such as Earp and Margaret Bent have placed Machaut center stage, and English-language publications in the past twoand-a-half decades have followed suit. The graph is somewhat skewed in favor of pre- publications since Earp was careful to seek out items that were far more tangential to Machaut or which only gave him cursory treatment, something that I have not done for this study.
Figure .: English language publications on Machaut in five-year increments •
As Earp (a, ) explains: ‘Due to the nature of the topical chapters in this book, the bibliography includes many works that are not exclusively concerned with Machaut; in such cases the annotation addresses only the item’s connection with Machaut. For books of direct relevance to Machaut, I include references to reviews. A few book reviews containing especially important material specifically referenced in the topical chapters above have been given separate entries in the bibliography, e.g., Guesnon ’. If I had included items more indirectly related to Machaut from post, this would only serve to increase the number of publications included in the post- end of the publications graph and reinforce my point that studies about Machaut and topics related to him have flourished.
The Greatest Fourteenth-Century Poet and Composer of the Twenty-First Century
Figure 2.7: .: Full network using a ForceAtlas layout, with individual nodes (publications) labeled
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The Greatest Fourteenth-Century Poet and Composer of the Twenty-First Century
Returning to the network diagram, we can also see the significance of other volumes. Sylvia Huot’s From Song to Book (Huota) and Robertson’s Guillaume de Machaut and Reims (Robertson) both emerge as frequently cited items that also provide nexuses for interdisciplinary scholarship. Huota sits on the border between the literary area and the region in which manuscript studies and art history intersect. Robertson adjoins motets and musicology as we might expect, but this volume is connected via the center of the network because it has also been frequently cited by those working on Machaut’s biography. The subgroup of motet-related articles reveal an interesting area of intense activity (see Figure . and the bottom right in Figure ., where the nodes are in green). This focus on motets is indicative of a larger trend in medieval musicology over the past twenty years. For the purposes of this study, I can only speculate on the reasons, but I would suggest that this lines up with both literary interests in intertextuality, heteroglossia, and polyvocality, and musicological interests in polyphonic vocal textures, harmonic structure, and cadential progression. It is also likely that the complexity and scholarly nature of motets are tantalizing to academics who find the multiple possible interpretations irresistible. The strongly interconnected nature of this area of the network also indicates a high level of scholarly communication. This section, as we might anticipate, is situated near subgroups of items devoted to music theory and treatises (dark grey and brown; on the right-hand side of Figures ., ., and .); reception, modern sound, and periodization (in dark blue and pale brown; on the bottom right of the same figures); and the thirteenth century (teal; bottom middle in the same figures). Publications with more of a literary focus appear on the left-hand side in blue. Art history and manuscript-related pieces appear in purple above the literary area. There is a significant amount of overlap between these sections; close examination of the kinds of items within the art history and manuscript area reveals that illuminations are often studied in relation to dits, demonstrating an interdisciplinary trend to examine textual and visual narrative together. Domenic Leo’s dissertation and François Avril’s study are important hubs for scholarship here, alongside Huota who is valued by those studying literature, manuscripts, and art history alike. It is worth noting that Gephi’s modularity algorithm groups Earp with the art history, manuscript, and dit section (that is, it is colored purple, indicating a strong relationship), confirming that, while Earp has been important for all disciplines, the Guide has been a significant catalyst in the advancement of manuscript and art history scholarship. The network diagram as a whole suggests a strong trend towards interdisciplinarity. While subgroups clearly identify recognizable disciplinary areas, we can also see that these areas have frequent connections between them. Swift observes anecdotally at the start of her chapter in this volume that Machaut scholarship has thrived on interdisciplinarity in recent decades; the diagram supports this observation. That the Guide sits at the center of this network suggests that it has been a catalyst for such approaches. Of course, the Guide is not the only catalyst for this interconnected scholarly community. Work by Earp prior to as well as important publications by Bent, Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, Huot, and Kevin Brownlee, among others, have fueled this border-crossing
Tamsyn Mahoney-Steel
trend. The complementary papers from Bent and Brownlee on Machaut Motet , which take a musicological and literary perspective respectively, are a good example of this kind of collaboration. Further, the digital age and the availability of digitized manuscripts and online collaborative platforms have enabled scholars to communicate more effectively and broaden their perspectives. Machaut as monster The creation of the diagram has at times been a shocking and terrifying experience. It was difficult to estimate the size the network and, as it grew, I was both alarmed by the size of the undertaking and heartened by the ongoing dedication to Machaut studies that has been spurred by the flourishing of scholarly activity in the s and s. In the course of this exploration of the community of scholarship that has formed around Machaut’s life and works, I found myself questioning how research can both elucidate and distort our understanding of historical figures. I was inspired by a recent presentation by my colleague, Stephen Curtis, who employed Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s ‘Monster Culture (Seven Theses)’ to explore the legacy of Shakespeare. Curtis argues that our view of Shakespeare is warped and magnified by the monumentalizing effect of scholarship and performance. Shakespeare for us is no longer William Shakespeare the man, but a misshapen amalgam of perceptions and interpretations. In this final section I turn my attention to the ways in which Machaut – monumentalized on the one hand by his own drive to collect his works and on the other by our scholarly focus – can be viewed as ‘monstrous’ according to Cohen’s criteria. I also scrutinize the efforts we make to self-critique and self-regulate in attempt to mitigate the distortion our work may entail. Cohen’s seven theses present ‘a set of breakable postulates in search of specific cultural moments’ with a view to ‘understanding culture through the monsters they bear’. I suggest that these postulates can aid us in understanding our deep interest in Machaut. Thesis I explores the idea of the monster’s body as a cultural body, ‘an embodiment of a certain cultural moment’. This is certainly appropriate for both our understanding of Machaut in his cultural milieu and our own standpoint of interpreting the medieval era as a lens for scrutinizing our modern era. Cohen’s notion that the monster is born at a ‘metaphoric crossroads’ resonates with interpretations of the fourteenth century as a moment of cultural upheaval. While Johan Huizinga’s The Autumn of the Middle Ages has its detractors, the notion that fourteenth-century writers imagined themselves as living in an end-period of history is not unfounded. As Cerquiglini-Toulet notes, the world ‘saw itself as the last age of humanity, and found signs that Judgement was nigh’. Literature, she argues, was troubled by the lack • • • • • • •
Bent and Brownlee . Curtis’s paper, ‘Bardcore Thrills: How to Make Horror out of Shakespeare’, was presented on October as part of ‘In Conversation’, the English Literature and Creative Writing Seminar Series, University of Central Lancashire. Cohen . Cohen , . Cohen , . Huizinga . Cerquiglini-Toulet , .
The Greatest Fourteenth-Century Poet and Composer of the Twenty-First Century
of new material and styles and concerned itself with rearrangement and compilation – ideas with which Machaut himself was concerned. Yet, if we accept Cerquiglini-Toulet’s proposition that writers in the fourteenth century were suffering from a precedent form of the Anxiety of Influence, then Machaut also presents us with an interesting anomaly. The Remede de Fortune, for example, is hopeful, as its character of Hope and the central dialogue between Hope and the protagonist imply. And this turn from melancholy towards hope is accompanied by a graduation from the old musical style to the new, symbolizing the cultural change in the fourteenth century. If Machaut was preoccupied with the concerns of cultural stagnation, then it seems he was also confident that there was a way past this (and that he had the answers). Fitting, then, that our studies of him have intensified as we ourselves live through a moment of unprecedented cultural, social, and political upheaval. Machaut was certainly an equivocal figure. His works do display the melancholy and anxiety that Cerquiglini-Toulet remarks upon while also embracing hope and innovation. In his Prologue, for example, he presented matter and form as things given to him rather than of his own making, yet as a controlling author he jealously guards the integrity of his oeuvre. He acknowledges his place within the annals of authority, citing the greats of the past, but subverts this tradition with self-citation. Ultimately, however, he believes that composing words and music should come from a fount of joy as evidenced by the Prologue. Even in the Voir dit, which at times paints a picture of the love affair as mundane and frustrating, we find an older protagonist rejuvenated and reinspired by love. Cerquiglini-Toulet identifies a shift in the literary paradigm in the fourteenth century. Just as a man would turn from arms and love (armes et amours) to writing in his later years, so the fourteenth century, she claims, embraced books: ‘That the book might replace arms and love was a notion that operated according to the theory of the ages of man, a device that served as a mold for the thought of the time’. Machaut himself drew attention to this shift in the Remede: ‘Armes, amours, autre art, ou lettre’ (‘Arms, love, the other arts, or letters’). But, if there were a paradigm shift towards a new function for writing and books that also signaled an anxiety about creativity, Machaut did not simply accept and regurgitate either those changes or the worries they evinced. Rather, he played with our expectations. In the Voir dit, when the time of arms and love should have passed for Guillaume, we find him romantically engaged with a far younger woman. He even tells us (albeit with much grumbling) in the complainte A toi, Hanri (Cp) that, as an older man, he patrolled the ramparts during the siege of Reims. • •
• • • • •
Bloom . The allegorical figure, Love, brings her three children, Sweet Thought, Pleasure, and Hope, to Guillaume ‘in order to provide him with the material to carry out what Nature has charged him with’ (pour li donner matere a faire ce que Nature li a enchargié; Palmer a, –), namely, to ‘compose new poems about love’ (faire sur ce nouveaux dis amoureux; Palmer a, –). See in particular, Plumley , chaps and . See Cerquiglini-Toulet , –. Cerquiglini-Toulet , . Palmer , – (line ). Earp a, and .
Tamsyn Mahoney-Steel
Machaut’s role as a mediator on the border of a shift in culture fits with Cohen’s first thesis, but also resonates with theses III, IV, and VII: ‘The Monster Is the Harbinger of Category Crisis’, ‘The Monster Dwells at the Gates of Difference’, and ‘The Monster Stands at the Threshold […] of Becoming’. R. Barton Palmer has described Machaut as a ‘liminal figure’ who foreshadows literary modernity and the advent of the novel, a burgeoning selfdetermining author in a time when situating oneself against the authority of the past was deemed more important. Anne-Hélène Miller views Machaut as a precursor to humanism. Thesis III states that in its role as the harbinger of category crisis, ‘the monster always escapes because it refuses easy categorization’ (the notion of escape is the central point of thesis II, explored below). While Machaut explored the cultural shift of his era in his works, within them his authorial self-presentation continues to fascinate and perplex us: poet, musician, secretary, almoner, coward, warrior, lover, rejected in love, capable, confident, bumbling, awkward, author, mouthpiece of others’ voices. His character is as complex and multilayered as any of his motets, and probably even more so. Indeed, it is particularly fitting that the polyphonic, polytextual motet – a form with which Machaut experimented particularly in his earlier career – was dubbed ‘the monstrous new art’ by Anna Zayaruznaya. Cohen’s second thesis, ‘The Monster Always Escapes’, I find particularly resonant for our relationship to Machaut. The monster in culture is a figure that can always return, that eludes death, but that springs forth from ‘the intricate matrix of relations (social, cultural, and literary-historical) that generate them’. Machaut endures because he pushed the cultural boundaries of how authorship was understood. Our collective fascination with his desire to anthologize his works and to stamp his authorship upon them through multiple devices vindicates this desire and keeps him from the ultimate death of being forgotten. The recent volume dedicated solely to MS C demonstrates Machaut’s success in anthologizing (in terms of his artistic longevity) and the centripetal hold this accomplishment has upon us. MS A, the manuscript most securely associated with Machaut’s authorial and aggregating compulsion, is the base witness for the new edition of his complete works. His efforts to ensure his legacy have been passed on to twentieth and twenty-first-century scholars: as the graph from Google Books Ngram Viewer suggests (Figure .), spikes in mentions of Machaut’s name appear to coincide with the start of the publication of modern editions. • • • • • • • • • • •
Cohen , –, –, and . Palmer and Palmer . Miller . Cohen , . For Machaut’s authorial self-presentation see, for example, Brownlee ; De Looze ; De Looze ; Palmer ; and Swift . Zayaruznaya . Cohen , . See, for example, Williams . Earp and Hartt . Vols. , , and have been published (Palmer , Palmer , and Boogaart a, respectively), with ten additional volumes to come. Ludwig –, Schrade c, and the new edition (see n. ), for which the announcement was made in .
The Greatest Fourteenth-Century Poet and Composer of the Twenty-First Century
Figure 2.9: .: Google Books Ngram Viewer graph of mentions of Machaut in publications since 1800
All the while Machaut escapes our understanding. Cohen notes that ‘“monster theory” must […] concern itself with strings of cultural moments, connected by a logic that always threatens to shift’ and that ‘monstrous interpretation is as much process as epiphany, a work that must content itself with fragments’.52 Machaut’s various authorial self-presentations leave us wrangling to see the real Guillaume or to understand his authorial identity in some kind of definite way, as if such a thing were even possible. Where, then, does Earp’s work and the network diagram fit into this discussion? Somewhat like Viktor Frankenstein, who assembled, abandoned, and then hunted his reanimated hybrid, Earp is both the creator and destroyer of monstrous Machaut. Like Shelley’s character, Earp has enabled the continued existence of Machaut’s disparate parts and, through the publication of the Guide (and other significant contributions such as the Vg facsimile), has helped us to assemble the whole through interdisciplinary work.53 Yet, he also chases down this creation across the icy plains of our obsession, through wise counsel and cautionary advice. The diagram lays out the shape of our scholarly beast, with the Guide as its beating heart. Unlike Frankenstein, Earp is a more prudent creator, who has nurtured the scholarly developments spurred by his meticulous undertaking. Swift’s chapter in this volume explores the nature of the word ‘guide’, describing it as a title that is not ‘objectively acquired Over the […] but the result of investment […] by the follower who ascribes the term’.54 course of my research for this chapter, it was not only the continual reference to the Guide that was noteworthy, but the reiteration of gratitude dispersed across so many footnotes that singled out Earp for his personal communications: the hours of time spent discussing, advising, and helping that resulted in publication, promotion, and tenure for his colleagues. This is a noteworthy achievement in itself given the neoliberal, competitive drive that so infects modern academia. In fact, these expressions of acknowledgment are hearteningly • 52 •
53 • • • 54 •
Cohen 1996, , 6. . A recent project by Deborah McGrady and Benjamin Albritton, Machaut in the Book, focused on the more fragmentary aspects of Machaut’s literary survival in manuscripts outside the main complete-works tradition and digitized several more manuscripts important to our understanding of how Machaut’s work was received and disseminated. Earp 1995a; a; Earp 2014. . Swift’s chapter herein, p. 45. .
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common in our community, perhaps suggesting that this collegial comportment exhibited by Earp and others has been a touchstone. If the community assembled around our monster is a largely benevolent one, then it is also one that takes ethical responsibility for the glorious behemoth it nurtures. On the one hand, we rescue Machaut from the bad press of the past. As Leach notes within this volume: ‘The centrality of Machaut in French political life has been much underemphasized by those who see his poetry as only conventionally sycophantic or even apolitical’. Also herein Zayaruznaya challenges Heinrich Besseler’s penchant for ascribing anachronistic frameworks to Machaut and Vitry, particularly to the detriment of Machaut. On the other hand, we exercise caution with regard to our interpretations. Zayaruznaya’s chapter also points out the ongoing issues we have with understanding Machaut in relation to Vitry, and highlights that we must take care with our assumptions. Uri Smilansky quotes Earp’s eloquent comment that ‘the interpretation of the past is always an issue of the present’. Indeed, Earp’s work, as well as being about Machaut’s music, manuscripts, and poetry, has been about the reception of Machaut. This has aided us in appreciating the recognition of and engagement with the poet-composer’s output in the centuries since his death, while also unearthing the history of our scholarly (mis)conceptions and enabling us to work towards more nuanced and faithful interpretations. In my own scholarship, Earp has guided me towards a more refined view of the concept of ‘courtly love’. When I wrote rather naïve comments on the concept that perpetuated a notion of it as a monolithic and unnuanced schema within medieval literature, it was Earp who guided me to a history of the term. This helped me to unearth the problems with creating crystalized conceptual frameworks for viewing the past that are, in fact, anachronistic and which do not capture the intricacies of the continuously shifting medieval literary and musical culture. Similarly, Earp has influenced others to reexamine and reposition Machaut. Leo’s chapter in this volume not only explores more deeply Earp’s suggestions that W may have been commissioned and/or owned by Yolande of Flanders, but also poses the question of the level of influence she and other powerful female patrons may have exerted over the composition and compilation process. This idea could potentially destabilize our notion of Machaut as the controlling author figure. Shelley’s novel ends tragically, leaving us to ponder the moral limits of the human pursuit of knowledge. Fortunately, I leave you with no such admonishment. More in the vein of the song, ‘My Beloved Monster’, by the band Eels, we go everywhere with our beloved Machaut monster. When intense scholarly activity is fixated upon any cultural moment or person, we always risk distortion. What we view as historically important can often be magnified • • • • • •
Leach’s chapter herein, p. . Earp a, ; Smilansky’s chapter herein, p. . See, for example, Earp a; Earp c; Earp . Mahoney-Steel b, . See also McGrady for a deeper discussion on how Machaut may have responded to the growth of lay literacy. The song appears on the album Beautiful Freaks (DreamWorks).
The Greatest Fourteenth-Century Poet and Composer of the Twenty-First Century
by our endeavors and this obscures the conceptual places in between that are hard or even impossible to see. My colleague, Máirtín Ó Catháin, recently opened my eyes to the concept of negative history: the moments where ‘nothing’ has happened or for which we have no record. There are philosophical and critical problems with how we deal with those moments and they are rendered all the more problematic by the shadows cast over them by the neighboring people and events we study, criticize, and idolize. Vitry’s lack of complete-works manuscripts, for example, stands (however unfairly) in the shadow of Machaut’s abundant oeuvre. Recent scholarship in our field has demonstrated that we are open to deconstructing our academic past. Our interdisciplinary approaches reveal our willingness to cross boundaries to broaden our perspectives. While many factors feed this receptive attitude, we must acknowledge our central node, Earp’s Guide, and the ongoing efforts of its author as preeminent in this positive trend.
•
I thank Máirtín for sharing a forthcoming essay with me, ‘The War that Never Happened: A Negative Ontology of the Anglo-Irish War’, and for recommending further readings.
. T I H B’ B C Jennifer Bain
Lawrence Earp’s most impactful contribution to the field of Guillaume de Machaut studies is his volume, Guillaume de Machaut: A Guide to Research. While Google Scholar has found the Guide cited in publications, every study on Machaut published since the late s – whether citing it or not – owes a debt to this magisterial -page tome. Excellent research tools – catalogs, bibliographies, editions, guides to research, and databases – propel fields forward, shape disciplines, and standardize terminology and forms of reference to individual works, and Earp’s volume is no exception. Published in Garland’s series of Composer Resource Manuals (vol. ), its usefulness extends well beyond musicology, functioning as a standard resource also for scholars of French literature, medieval studies, manuscript studies, and art history, as a brief overview of the volume’s contents in Table . reveals. Table .: Contents of Earp’s Guillaume de Machaut: A Guide to Research, with pagination included
Section
Pagination
I. Biography of Guillaume de Machaut
–
II. Machaut’s Literary and Musical Legacy
–
III. The Manuscripts
–
IV. The Miniatures
–
V. The Narrative Dits
–
VI. Lyrical Poetry: The Loange des Dames
–
VII. The Music
–
VIII. Discography
–
Bibliography
–
Index of manuscripts
–
General index
–
Index of titles, first lines, and refrains
–
What makes the Guide indispensable is its combined breadth and depth, with meticulous attention to detail and cross-referencing in the Guide itself. The biography of Machaut (section I), for example, synthesizes a wealth of literature, referencing biographical details found in specific works of Machaut (sections V to VII) as well as key secondary literature in the extensive annotated bibliography found later in the book. Earp also provides an overview of Machaut’s literary and musical legacy (section II), with a particular focus on the • •
Earp a. As of March on . See Tamsyn Mahoney-Steel’s chapter in this volume to see another way of capturing the influence of Earp’s Guide.
The Impact of Hildegard of Bingen’s Bibliographers and Catalogers
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and superb catalog descriptions (section III) of all of the manuscripts that solely comprise or include works of Machaut, again with reference to items in the bibliography. He similarly provides lengthy descriptions (with cross-referencing) of the miniatures (IV), the narrative dits (V), and the lyric poetry (VI), and then discusses Machaut’s music in two large sections (VII and VIII). While section VIII furnishes an annotated list of recordings of Machaut’s music, section VII proceeds work by work (as section V did for the narrative dits), providing extensive details, such as: manuscripts that include the work (with foliation); editions of the text; translations of the text; date of the work; structure of the text; discussion of the text; editions of the music; and discussion of the music. Any research on Machaut must necessarily begin with Earp’s Guide, even though there is now scholarship from a couple of generations of scholars who are not represented in its pages (many of whom are included, however, in this collection of essays). Indeed, the Guide now functions also as a historical document, capturing the state of research in the field as it stood in . Hildegard of Bingen’s bibliographers and catalogers In the field of Hildegard of Bingen studies, there is nothing comparable to Earp’s Guide. Hildegard of Bingen (–), like Guillaume de Machaut, produced work that is studied today across multiple fields, and bringing all of that work into a single volume as Earp has for Machaut is a challenge no one has embraced. Hildegard’s first catalogers are arguably the thirteenth-century authors of the Acta inquisitionis, a document compiled for the first attempt at securing Hildegard’s canonization and that includes a cursory list of her works. There have been numerous editors, redactors, and compilers of her works along the way, including the thirteenth-century Gebeno of Eberbach who assembled extracts of her work in a collection referred to as the Pentachronon, and the compilers of the eighteenthcentury Acta Sanctorum volume that combines extracts of her works along with biographical writings about her life and output. The first significant cataloger and bibliographer of Hildegard’s output in the modern sense was Antonius van der Linde (–) in , followed quickly by F. Wilhelm Emil Roth (–) in and . The most significant bibliographer in the twentieth century was Werner Lauter, who published two volumes of bibliographies ( and ), and whose work was the basis of a subsequent updated volume published in by Marc-Aeilko Aris, Michael Embach, Werner Lauter, Irmgard Müller, Franz Staab, and Scholastica Steinle OSB. In the twenty-first century, the single volume that will have the greatest impact on the field is a catalog by Michael Embach and Martina Wallner of manuscripts containing works of Hildegard. There are, of course, • • • • • •
Hayton . Stilting . Van der Linde , –; Roth ; Roth . Lauter ; Lauter . Aris and others . Embach and Wallner .
Jennifer Bain
online resources as well, including an excellent discography originally by Pierre-F. Roberge (–) made public in the s (and maintained and updated since by Todd McComb), and two very recent bibliographies developed and published on Zotero, one a general Hildegard bibliography compiled by Maura Zátonyi at the modern Hildegard Abbey (the Benediktinerinneabtei Sankt Hildegard, founded in as a priory and elevated to an abbey in ) and the other a music-specific Hildegard bibliography that I and a number of student research assistants have been developing since , and have just released publicly. The remainder of this chapter will analyze these contributions, considering the structure and contents of each and what we can learn about the field from them and about the practice of creating these kinds of resources. Two nineteenth-century bibliographies As I have described in detail elsewhere, Antonius van der Linde’s bibliography of comprises the first fifteen pages of a catalog he published that features the seventy-eight manuscripts – including two of Hildegard’s – held at the then-named Königliche Landesbibliothek in Wiesbaden (now the Hochschul- und Landesbibliothek RheinMain). As the librarian at the Königliche Landesbibliothek, he had a natural interest in the collection for which he was responsible. His bibliography and accompanying annotations are quirky and inconsistent, but they are also frequently interesting (and sometimes helpful). As Table . shows, the bibliography has five sections – monographs, historical-biographical materials, items that reference her relics, general materials, and medical materials. The first category refers to a style of publication (an in-depth study on a single subject), while the other four categories all reflect content instead. Of these four categories, the section on literature regarding Hildegard’s relics stands out since it is not about her life and works, but rather her posthumous reception as a holy woman and saint (long before her canonization by Pope Benedict XVI). Its appearance as a category in what is otherwise an academically oriented catalog reflects local interest and veneration of Hildegard as a saint in the region. As well, the library – because of this local interest – held a number of items about Hildegard’s relics and veneration. Twenty years earlier, a parish priest from nearby Eibingen (Ludwig Schneider) was instrumental in having Hildegard’s relics authenticated and he deposited a number of pamphlets from the subsequent celebrations in the library along with a letter describing the materials.
• • •
• •
. Zátonyi and Mortelé b–; Bain and others –. See Bain and others – for a digital version of van der Linde’s bibliography, with English translations of all entries and annotations, as well as links to digitized copies of the original documents listed when available. Laura Harris, James Docking, Julie Bock, Thomas Harding, and Zack Harrison contributed to the development of this project. Bain , esp. –. Schneider . For further information on Schneider’s documentation of Hildegard’s relics, see Bain , –. For further information on the letter, see Bain , –.
The Impact of Hildegard of Bingen’s Bibliographers and Catalogers
Table .: Sections and subsections in two nineteenth-century bibliographies on Hildegard of Bingen (van der Linde ; Roth and Roth ), translated into English
Die Handschriften der Königlichen Landesbibliothek in Wiesbaden (van der Linde , –)
Bibliographie der hl. Hildegardis (Roth and Roth )
Section
Heading
Section
I
Monographic
A
II
Historical-biographical
Editions of works and translations
III
Relics
Monographic
IV
General
Chronicles and documentary
V
Medical
Heading Printed works (Druckwerke)
evidence (up to ) Assessments, bibliographies, and prophecies Liturgical Medical B
Manuscripts (Manuskripte)
What is most significant about the bibliography, historiographically, is the complete absence of reference to Hildegard as a composer. There is no section on Hildegard’s music, and none of the items included across the five sections makes any reference at all to her musical repertory. This situation is not an oversight, but instead mirrors the lack of knowledge about Hildegard’s music in the s; while the first modern performance of her music dates from , discussion of her music really only began in earnest in the s. Also absent in the bibliography is a section on manuscript sources, although this is perhaps because the bibliography appears at the beginning of van der Linde’s catalog of manuscripts, which includes details about Hildegard’s Rupertsberg Scivias manuscript (the now lost Manuscript at the Hochschul- und Landesbibliothek in Wiesbaden) and the Riesencodex (Manuscript at the same library). In contrast, F. Wilhelm Emil Roth, the next to publish a bibliography on the life and works of Hildegard of Bingen, describes sixteen manuscript sources of Hildegard’s works. Spread over two issues of the journal of a historical society for the Grand Duchy of Hesse (Quartalblätter des historischen Vereins für das Grossherzogtum Hessen), the bibliography mostly features printed works, many of which do not appear in van der Linde’s bibliography. A highly prolific author of ‘nearly publications’, some described as ‘partly unreliable’
• •
•
See van der Linde , – (Scivias) and – (Riesencodex). For details about the loss of the Scivias manuscript, see Bain , and for a shorter version translated into German, see Bain . Roth and Roth . Roth’s name is always listed as F. W. E. Roth in his publications. Secondary literature sometimes refers to him as Ferdinand Wilhelm Emil and sometimes as Friedrich Wilhelm Emil. See Fuchs and Renkhoff , for the former and Embach , and Stühlmeyer , for the latter. Fuchs , col. . For the complete list, see cols. –.
Jennifer Bain
(‘doch tlw. unzuverlässige Arbeiten’), Roth identifies several reasons for publishing a new Hildegard bibliography just a decade after van der Linde. He argues that ‘despite its richness’, van der Linde’s bibliography ‘has large gaps’ (‘die trotz ihrer Reichhaltigkeit grosse Lücken besitzt’). Moreover, he argues that the literature has grown and that he had the opportunity to examine books that van der Linde knew only from citations. He further clarifies that, unlike van der Linde, he excluded popular and world history books and that his descriptions of manuscripts were based on his own observations or from listings in other library catalogs. In addition to his list of manuscripts of Hildegard’s works, in the six sections of his printed works (Section A in Table .), Roth notably also includes a section of printed editions of Hildegard’s works as well as other documentary evidence before . Music, again, is not included at all in his bibliography, but he does have a section devoted to liturgical items. These items are liturgical books of various kinds and martyrologies that refer to Hildegard’s Feast Day or that incorporate her name in litanies. The inclusion of this section in Roth’s bibliography is similar to van der Linde’s inclusion of a section on Hildegard’s relics; both reflect Hildegard’s status in the late nineteenth century as a locally venerated saint. Twentieth-century bibliographies Just like van der Linde and Roth, Werner Lauter (–) also had a local connection to Hildegard of Bingen; he lived in the village of Eibingen, just around the corner from the parish church that houses Hildegard’s relics. Although he completed his doctorate in on the role of William Ralston Shedden-Ralston in mediating Russian literature in England, Lauter dedicated most of his own research and written output to the life, work, and reception of Hildegard of Bingen. In the foreword to his bibliography (comprising items), he states explicitly that he builds on the work of van der Linde and Roth and that he makes ‘no claim to completeness’. He began publishing his own work on Hildegard (beyond the bibliography) in the late s, coinciding with the th anniversary of Hildegard’s death in , and published a second volume of the bibliography in , with an additional items. Both volumes follow the same principles of organization, which is to categorize all items into sections or subsections according to type of publication, rather than according to content. Table . provides the contents for volume I as illustration. The first level of organization is chronological; section I includes thirty items published up to (when Roth’s bibliography was published), while section II covers –. (Similarly, the second volume begins with items published up to that were not included in the first volume, and the remainder of the volume is devoted to items that appeared from to .) Section I of volume I has two subsections: Hildegard’s works in translation and secondary literature, • • • • •
Renkhoff , . Roth , . At the Philipps-Universität in Marburg. See, for example, Lauter ; Lauter ; and Lauter . Lauter , .
The Impact of Hildegard of Bingen’s Bibliographers and Catalogers
which is then divided into monographs and writings not independently published (generally chapters in books). Section II (literature from –), which takes up the bulk of the bibliography, has more subsections and sub-subsections. It begins with editions of Hildegard’s works in Latin and then in translation (organized within the bibliography by titles of works or collections, such as Epistolae or Liber divinorum operum), followed by editions of her Vita in Latin and then in translation. Secondary literature has three subsections: monographs, writings not independently published, and then a final category of Festschriften and special issues for the anniversary year (which was the th anniversary of Hildegard’s death). Both monographs and writings not independently published begin with known authors, and then have a section within those categories where the authors are not named in the publications. The secondary literature section is followed by a section for unpublished writings, divided into translations and secondary literature. Finally, the volume ends with an index of authors. Table .: Lauter’s Hildegard-Bibliographie, table of contents (translated into English)
Sections and subsections I
Hildegard Literature up to Works, translations Secondary Literature (a) Monographs (b) Writings not independently published
II
Hildegard Literature from – Works, Latin Works, translations Vita, Latin Vita, translations Secondary Literature (a) Monographs Anonymous (b) Writings not independently published Anonymous (c) Festschriften and special issues for the anniversary year [th anniversary of Hildegard’s death] Unpublished Writings (a) Translations (b) Secondary Literature Index of authors (Namenregister)
Jennifer Bain
While a very useful contribution to the field of Hildegard of Bingen studies (particularly in pre-internet days), the bibliography with its non-thematic organization would be much easier to use if it had at least a general index of terms, subjects, and works. The index of authors is helpful, but if you are searching for articles and books on, for example, the illuminations in Hildegard’s manuscripts, or on discussions of her music, you would have to browse through all entries across the two volumes to locate items on these particular topics. The update – Hildegard von Bingen: Internationale Wissenschaftliche Bibliographie – produced jointly by Marc-Aeilko Aris, Michael Embach, Werner Lauter, Irmgard Müller, Franz Staab, and Scholastica Steinle OSB (hereafter referred to as IWB), addresses this very issue head-on through a thematic organization, a detailed table of contents, and by including a CD-ROM for electronic searching (but that is, unfortunately, over two decades later, no longer functional). Table . presents the thematic organization in IWB in very broad strokes. The volume, comprising entries, does not include a general or subject index, but the table of contents in this volume takes up six printed pages, providing researchers with a valuable tool for finding items according to topic. Where the earlier bibliographies divided material into printed works and manuscripts, or manuscripts and secondary literature, IWB is divided into manuscripts and research literature (Forschungsliteratur); this latter term seems to have been chosen quite deliberately to encompass editions as well as secondary literature. Research literature is organized into four large sections (indicated in Table .) that comprise dozens of subsections and sub-subsections, all itemized in the table of contents and used as headings throughout the text. Section , for example, includes editions (.) as well as translations (.), each subsection of which is ordered alphabetically according to the work or collection. In the translations subsection (.), each work is further subdivided into translations into German and translations into other languages. A researcher looking to find literature about Scivias and theology, for example, could scan the table of contents and find sections that specifically mention Scivias editions (...), translations of Scivias into German (....), encyclopedia entries addressing Hildegard’s theology (...), writings about Scivias (..), writings that address philosophy and theology in Hildegard’s writings (..), and writings that address mysticism and spirituality (..). Table .: Large-scale organization of Internationale Wissenschaftliche Bibliographie (Aris and others )
Sections Manuscripts (Handschriften) Research Literature (Forschungsliteratur) General Person and work in the medieval tradition Life and work Impact
The Impact of Hildegard of Bingen’s Bibliographers and Catalogers
The volume also includes a number of additional features and tools. Some entries include: annotations (indicated as ‘Bem[erkung]’) such as specific pagination within a book or article; shelfmarks of the item as it is found in the formidable Hildegardiana collection in the Bibliothek des Priesterseminars Trier (indicated with ‘Sign[atur]’); and cross-references to Lauter’s and bibliographies when applicable. Finally, the book begins with a long and useful list of fifty-five manuscript sources, each entry of which includes a succinct description of the city, the library or monastery, the shelfmark, the number of folios, the specific works of Hildegard with foliation, and the date and provenance of the manuscript. Just like Earp’s Guide for Machaut studies, the IWB became a starting point for all research on Hildegard. Catalog of Hildegard manuscripts Until Michael Embach and Martina Wallner published their Conspectus der Handschriften Hildegards von Bingen in , of the manuscripts that include works of Hildegard, the list of fifty-five manuscripts in IWB was the most comprehensive available. In van der Linde provided no list of manuscripts and neither did Lauter in and , while in and , Roth knew of only sixteen manuscripts. Before , a musicologist might know that the place to find a complete record of musical sources is the introduction to the facsimile edition of the music section of the Riesencodex (Wiesbaden, Hochschulund Landesbibliothek RheinMain, ), but would have to dig through much scholarship to pull together full source lists for Hildegard’s letter collection, for her visionary/theological works, her scientific/medical works, as well as various other outputs, including her hagiographical literature for Rupert and Disibod, the explanation of the rule of St Benedict, or individual letters that circulated on their own, such as the letter to Werner of Kirchheim. Embach and Wallner provide lengthy and detailed descriptions for each of manuscript sources, including: the current location of the manuscript, as well as the original provenance and intermediate provenance(s) when relevant; the date of the manuscript; the number of folios; the size; the contents; and, crucially, literature concerning the manuscript. While these catalog entries are indispensable, the index of Hildegard’s works cross-referenced with the manuscript sources is revelatory. It is laid out in such a way to give the reader an immediate overview about the circulation of Hildegard’s works; spaced cleanly, it itemizes her works alphabetically, providing for each work a list of the manuscripts by source number in the catalog. The list for the Ordo virtutum is very short, with only three entries, while Scivias takes up almost a full column, the collection of letters (the Epistolae) a column and a half, and the Pentachronon – the thirteenth-century Gebeno of Eberbach’s compilation of the most apocalyptic passages from Hildegard’s writings – occupies almost three full columns. While the content in the volume is indispensable for research on Hildegard, the lists themselves in the index tell us just how important the Pentachronon was for • •
See 'Kommentar' by Michael Klaper in Welker , –. Embach and Wallner , –.
Jennifer Bain
Hildegard’s posthumous reputation in the later Middle Ages and that the circulation (and impact) of her Ordo virtutum pales in comparison. By broadening our knowledge of manuscript sources and making source study more accessible, Embach and Wallner’s catalog has already begun to shape the field and will do so for decades. It has certainly alerted me to the wide variety, number, and distribution of Hildegard sources. The only way the Conspectus could be more useful would be to offer a companion website with links to digitized manuscripts to be searchable by manuscript number as they appear in the Conspectus (and perhaps also by location or shelf number, but with reference to the Conspectus numbering system). Digital discography and bibliographies In general, putting research tools online and freely available makes them more accessible and usable by anybody with reasonable access to a computer and the internet, as is the case for most scholars in the Global North. As well, the searchability features of digital reference resources are often superior to the methods available to us for searching analog materials (particularly those materials without indices). Pierre-F. Roberge, recognizing the usefulness of databases, particularly with their evergreen feature and possibility to refine and expand content, was an early adopter and began a digital discography of recordings of Hildegard’s music in the late s, hosted on Todd McComb’s website () by July . When Roberge died in , McComb continued his work adding additional items as they appear, maintaining the evergreen aspect. The site is static, providing a list of all of Hildegard’s chants by incipit on a single page (fully searchable using the find feature in any web browser). Each chant has a numbered list of recordings (provided in shortened format) that feature that particular chant, with each item acting as a hyperlink to a page with complete information about the recording, including: all formats it appears in ( rpm, LP, or CD); recording label; title; names of performers; date recorded; full contents of album; and sometimes reviews of the recording. It is a superb and extremely useful resource. Two recently released dynamic digital bibliographies on the works of Hildegard of Bingen use the free online software, Zotero, to offer the latest capabilities in the digital bibliographic realm: easy importing of new bibliographic items through a Zotero plug-in researchers can add to their browsers; tagging; notes; and exporting into a myriad of formats. The first of these online bibliographies, by Zátonyi and Mortelé, groups the items into six folders: . sources, . translations, . studies, . miscellaneous, . new releases, and . in progress. This final ‘in progress’ section includes citations that have not been fully examined and/or •
•
•
The first capture of the discography that I found on the Wayback Machine on was from August and it makes reference to an update on July . Todd McComb believes it started in the late s, but has no record of the date (personal communication, March ). Zotero is a project of the Corporation for Digital Scholarship. It was created at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. For a full listing of contributors, see . Zátonyi and Mortelé b.
The Impact of Hildegard of Bingen’s Bibliographers and Catalogers
tagged, but are provided anyway so they are available to researchers immediately. Users can browse through these folders, or use the tagging feature to sort items in a more focused way. Zátonyi and Mortelé have richly tagged the items, some in English and some in German, including manuscript sigla, themes (for example, social role or women composers), places (for example, Rheingau or Rochusberg), people (for example, Richardis von Stade or Benedict XVI), or work or collection (for example, Explanatio Symboli or Symphonia). Zotero allows users to sort items by title, by author (‘creator’ in Zotero-speak), or by date either within the bibliography as a whole, within a folder of the bibliography, or within a group of items with a shared tag. The Hildegard-Bibliographie is incredibly useful for finding literature on Hildegard-related topics, and because it is online, it is expandable. New items can be and are always being added, and Zátonyi is seeking further contributions from users of the database. Zotero allows owners of bibliographies to determine whether or not they are private or public, so they can be developed privately before being made public, or so that owners can create bibliographies just for their own purposes and never make them public. The owner can also create a team of contributors, whether or not the bibliography is private or public; if it is made public, the owner can set it so anyone can view the bibliography (without creating a Zotero account), but only team members can edit, which is how Zátonyi has configured it. While the Hildegard-Bibliographie was being created, I was developing a complementary Zotero bibliography, a Hildegard of Bingen Music Research Guide, inspired by the music section of Earp’s Guide. Earp presents each musical work alphabetically and (amongst other information) provides bibliographic references to that particular work. My main goal was to do the same, but in a digital format: to capture literature written about Hildegard’s music and to tag it by the chant incipit, so that if researchers were writing about a specific chant, they could find all of the other literature on that same chant. The process of developing the tags was iterative; because my research assistants and I realized that there is a qualitative difference between a passing reference to a particular work and a multi-page (or entire article or chapter) discussion of a work, we created a variety of possible tags for each chant: including ‘passing reference’, ‘paragraph(s)’, and ‘substantial’. We also wanted to make note of inclusion of facsimiles, transcriptions, and translations (by language), again all associated with the incipit of the chant, as well as discussions of particular manuscript presentations. Additional tags include some thematic ideas, such as chant performance practice or reception, or places, but these are fairly minimal and could be (should be?) expanded. We also used the notes function to record pagination for each tagged chant in a source, since there was no good way to do this with tagging, but these might be easily missed; in Earp’s printed Guide the pagination is kept directly with the cross-references and cannot be missed by the reader. In our Zotero bibliography, abstracts are included when available elsewhere, but were not written • • •
See ‘Aufbau’ in Zátonyi and Mortelé a. See ‘Kooperationen’ in Zátonyi and Mortelé a. Bain and others –. Numerous research assistants at Dalhousie University have contributed to the bibliography in multiple ways, including Laura Jones, Andrea Klassen, Martha Culshaw, and Lucia Denk.
Jennifer Bain
by the team. The advantage of digital tools such as Zotero is that new items can always be added, while the disadvantage (for the person(s) responsible) is that they are never complete. For a printed book, the author(s) have to make concrete decisions and once the book is in print, there is nothing further to do. With a digital resource, the tinkering never ends. Finally, there are two broader problems associated with Zotero that we have had to address. First, within Zotero there is no field to capture any lengthy documentation about why the bibliography was created and choices made about tagging; in an article or a book, authors can provide introductory paragraphs to provide explanations about why the resource was created or details about how to use it or understand it. Other Zotero bibliography creators, like Zátonyi and Mortelé, have posted documentation on external websites, and that is what we have done as well. The second and bigger issue is one of sustainability when relying on third-party software that could disappear at any time. To mitigate that risk and protect the dataset we have plans to set up a schedule for exporting data for deposit in my institutional repository, DalSpace. Conclusion The field of medieval studies has only reached its current state because of the contributions of editors, catalogers, compilers, and bibliographers, who in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries published reference materials that have provided other researchers with a solid base on which to build. These printed materials – including the Hildegard bibliographies by van der Linde, Roth, Lauter, and the co-editors of the IWB – continue to be useful for generations of scholars and serve as a window on research in a given field at a particular moment in time. In Machaut studies, we are still citing Vladimir Chichmaref ’s edition of Machaut’s lyric poetry and Friedrich Ludwig’s music editions from the s, and by examining them we learn about research methodologies, access to manuscripts, and the status of knowledge in the early twentieth century. The proliferation of digital tools since the s, including repositories of manuscripts and databases, has similarly shaped research profoundly. Scholars, librarians, funding agencies, and institutions have invested heavily in creating and maintaining these tools; given this investment, the ephemerality of these resources is sometimes worrisome. Sustainability is critical, but not straightforward to achieve. Digital tools require maintenance, and when they are not maintained or upgraded to new operating systems, they simply stop working or disappear completely. They also have to have built-in compatibility to be sustainable; the aforementioned accompanying CD-ROM in the IWB requires a Windows system, so it is not going to work on a modern MacBook Pro with an external DVD drive. And even when they are maintained and upgraded, most digital research tools are never in a final state; without a printed output at a specific moment in time, we lose these critical markers of the state of research at different historical junctures (even if we can capture parts of websites with the astonishing • •
Documentation can be found on the Digital Analysis of Chant Transmission website (). .
The Impact of Hildegard of Bingen’s Bibliographers and Catalogers
Wayback Machine on ). One-hundred-and-fifty years after van der Linde and Roth published their Hildegard bibliographies, we can access original copies of these publications. In the s, when our Zotero bibliographies will have vanished, I have no doubt that an enterprising scholar will still be able to find and learn from – and enjoy – a stray copy of Lawrence Earp’s Guillaume de Machaut: A Guide to Research.
. C P M F S: A R P E* Julie Singer
Much remains unknown about medieval performance history, especially the history of medieval theatrical performers. Despite the dearth of evidence about medieval actors, it is clear that, in French and Burgundian contexts, one cannot default to an assumption of only adult and adolescent males on stage: women and children appeared as performers, too. While female actors have attracted a fair amount of scholarly attention, especially since the s, not a single study has been devoted to child performers – even though they played silent, singing, and speaking roles in a variety of performance modes. In this chapter I propose to assemble the shreds of evidence of children’s theatrical performance that have until now remained scattered in a broad array of published sources – play texts, chronicles, financial records, and documents cited by modern scholars – in hopes that this initial review will enable more sustained inquiry, including the necessary archival work I have been unable to undertake, in the near future. This project is offered, then, in the spirit of Lawrence Earp’s Guillaume de Machaut: A Guide to Research, albeit on a far smaller scale: as Earp’s work has facilitated the emergence of new generations of Machaut scholars, I hope here to make a modest contribution to the study of late medieval French musical and theatrical performance. Medieval drama, as Robert L. A. Clark remarks, is commonly understood by contemporary scholars as a collective experience, ‘an activity which involved the broad participation of the community for which it was performed’. Even if contemporary studies have problematized the once-predominant conception of medieval drama as ‘un théâtre-miroir’ reflecting its audience’s culture, it is still reasonable to surmise that spectacles produced for a broad crosssection of an urban community could have included performers of all ages. Children were indeed present in medieval theatrical audiences, despite occasional efforts to keep them out. Medieval theater has been described as ‘the site of intense cultural and ideological negotiations involving the testing and contesting of conventional social roles and cultural categories’ * • • • •
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I thank Noah Guynn and the editors of this volume for their perceptive comments on earlier drafts of this essay, and I assume sole responsibility for all remaining deficiencies. Bouhaïk-Gironès . A brief and early attempt to write this history is found in Sadron . Twycross , Muir , Normington , Parussa , Crowder . Mazouer (, ) does acknowledge the presence of children, whom he suggests had more opportunities to perform on stage than women did, though he provides no specific evidence. It must be acknowledged that many of these published sources date from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and do not conform to more recent standards of evidence and documentation: all the more reason for contemporary scholars to revisit the question. Clark , . Rey-Flaud , . For an alternate view, according to which medieval audiences were intended to feel distance from rather than identification with the figures onstage, see Weigert . On child spectators, see Cohen , . Medieval children could be marked by the theater even before birth, as there are tales of women giving birth to monstrous children after having seen devils represented onstage; see Rey-Flaud , . Clark and Sponsler , .
Child Performers on the Medieval French Stage
– and childhood certainly constituted an important cultural category, as seen in the wave of histories of medieval childhood written in the wake of Philippe Ariès’s pioneering but controversial work. And yet, more than a social role per se, childhood is construed in much late medieval literature as a social state-of-becoming. In a theatrical context, children are a uniquely identificatory figure of category crisis: positioned on the other side of the age boundaries that most members of the audience, once children themselves, have already crossed. Childhood would therefore have been eminently relatable and representable for medieval audiences, yet also somewhat alien; the inclusion of child performers enabling the expression of perspectives both familiar and fresh. Even a cursory review of surviving medieval French play-texts, with their abundance of child characters, confirms that children, though they were non-players in most adult institutions, did figure prominently in theatrical spectacles. But the question remains: by whom were child characters in fact represented? Delving into this question presents a number of difficulties, for the overlap between child performers and child roles in surviving play-texts is likely quite minimal. Beyond the errors that stem from ‘confusing texts with performance events’ in any study of medieval theater, the excavation of child roles poses additional challenges. Child performers played roles that do not (out of context) necessarily reveal themselves to be child roles; children doubtlessly performed in events of which no records survive; and child roles were not always played by children. Infants and very young children would often, if not usually, have been represented with dolls or dummies (feintes). Some dramas that appear to have been performed by all adult-male groups, like the Miracles de Notre-Dame par personnages, nonetheless contain child roles. It is likely that in at least some productions, the roles of young children were played by older adolescents, youths, or even adults. Nor is the available evidence robust enough (yet!) to detect significant regional variations in the prevalence of child actors, or to draw conclusions about changes in performance practice over time. Even when surviving records indicate children’s participation in performances, caution is required, for it is not always clear what the terms fils/filz (boy), fille (girl), enfant (child), and jeune enfant (young child) mean for late medieval writers. References to jongleurs performing with their children tend not to specify either the children’s ages or the nature of their participation in the family business. Likewise, though a ‘fillette desguisee’ (disguised young girl) is • • • •
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Ariès . For overviews of childhood in medieval France, see Shahar and Alexandre-Bidon and Lett . Weigert , . The introduction to the plays’ recent translation into modern French reaffirms that all evidence points to the roles having been played by adult men belonging to the confraternity; see Bezançon and Kunstmann , . Richard Rastall () opined that, with respect to gender cross-play, medieval youths underwent puberty later than their modern counterparts, which might have diminished the incongruousness of youthful male players in female roles. Recent bioarchaeological research indicates that medieval adolescents did not, in fact, enter puberty significantly later than modern adolescents do – though the process appears to have been slower, and the majority of boys’ voices changed between ages fifteen and eighteen (Lewis, Shapland, and Watts , and ). This biological fact might have offered a partial solution to the problem of males in their late teens playing child roles. Two examples are the list of jongleurs authorized to perform in Paris in , and a certain Perrinet Sanson who performed with his wife, children, and animals in Saint-Hilaire-sur-l’Autise in ; see Smith, Parussa, and Halévy , , –.
Julie Singer
recorded as having performed in a production of the Jeu de Robin et Marion in Angers, neither her age nor the nature of her role is known. Corporations and sociétés joyeuses such as the famous Enfants-sans-souci were populated by adults; they use the designation enfant to evoke an affective state of joyous foolishness, linking the enfant to the sot (idiot) and the fol (fool), and not as an indicator of chronological age. Even beyond theatrical contexts, the medieval vocabulary of childhood is notoriously vague, an imprecision that medieval writers themselves lament. For the purposes of this survey, I have defined ‘children’ as people who might have been aged less than fourteen years, which is the point at which most medieval ages-of-man schemas divide childhood from adolescence or youth. Some theatrical evidence tends to indicate that this same age boundary was operative in the performance sphere: in plays where a single part is meant to be played successively by a child and then an adult, the child character is often described as being ten or twelve years old, suggesting that children of this age were perceived as being old enough to learn their lines but were still clearly visually identifiable as children. The exact ages of the performers who actually played these roles are, of course, rarely indicated in the sources. With those caveats in mind, I will now present evidence for medieval French child performances in four categories (understanding, of course, that there will be some overlap): I am calling these schoolboy roles, silent roles, voiced roles, and speaking roles. The schoolboy roles include the best-known types of medieval child actors: choirboys performing in liturgical plays, and young scholars performing in school dramas. It is well known that choirboys were regular participants in liturgical plays, especially in angel roles, but also as Innocents (in the Epiphany play from twelfth-century Laon and a thirteenthcentury drama in the Fleury playbook) and in St Nicholas plays, among others. Choirboys also participated in non-religious performances: in August , for instance, choirboys of St-Laud in Angers received payment for having performed a farce for Jeanne of Laval. And • • •
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The letter of remission mentioning this performer is cited in Parussa , . Petit de Julleville , –. Jean Corbechon remarks in his late-fourteenth-century translation of the encyclopedic De proprietatibus rerum that ‘il y a plus grant deffaulte de langage en françois que en latin, car en latin il y a .vii. aages nommez par divers noms, des quelz il n’en y a que trois en françois, c’est assavoir enfance, ieunesce et viellesce, et par ce on puet pensser quelle paine c’est de proprement translater latin en françois’ (there is greater linguistic poverty in French than in Latin, for in Latin there are seven ages designated by distinct names, of which only three have equivalents in French, namely childhood, youth, and old age, and by this one can understand what a grueling task it is to translate Latin properly into French). BnF MS fr. , fol. r. This and all other translations are mine unless otherwise noted. See Sears , Burrow , Dubois and Zink , and Youngs . The schemas most prevalent in later medieval France tend to divide human life into seven stages whose duration is measured in multiples of seven. The divide between the second phase of childhood (pueritia) and adolescence coincides roughly with the perceived onset of puberty, which medieval writers and legists typically pinpoint at age twelve for girls and fourteen for boys. See, for example, the discussion of the Mystère de saint Louis below. On the latter, see most recently Woods . Schoolboy plays are also discussed at length in Petit de Julleville , –. Cohen , . Young , –. The Fleury play of the Innocents is also discussed by Grace Frank (, ). ‘Jeanne de Laval […] accorda aux enfants de choeur de l’église de Saint-Laud d’Angers, qui avaient joué une farce
Child Performers on the Medieval French Stage
they enjoyed another type of performance that straddled the line between the liturgical and the farcical: the election of a Boy Bishop, or Évêque des Innocents. Carol Symes notes that ‘the election of a Boy Bishop at this season was a custom widely observed in cathedral towns’ and suggests that Bodel’s Jeu de saint Nicholas might have been performed by choirboys. Robert Muchembled states that ‘children’s dramatic productions were [...] prohibited in Arras at the end of the sixteenth century’, indicating that such productions were mounted prior to that era. Though choirboys are the best-known category of medieval child performer, with activities spanning music, theater, liturgy, and festival, much of the scholarship on them is to be found in older regional histories; this is an area ripe for renewed investigation. Children were key players in tableaux vivants (usually called misteres in medieval sources). These static scenes, in which children frequently played silent roles, were especially prominent at royal entries and other festivities. Children are documented as having made such appearances as early as , when they figured among the ‘mainte faërie’ (many entertainments) featured in Philip IV’s Pentecost celebration. In addition to two tableaux featuring the Christ Child, the spectacles included a ‘tornai des enfanz, | Dont chascun n’ot plus de diz anz’ (tournament of children, none of whom was more than ten years old). Along similar lines, Louis Petit de Julleville mentions that the entertainments presented in honor of Hungarian ambassadors at Tours in included ‘morisques, mommeries, et ung autre mistère d’enfans sauvaiges saillans d’une roche fort bien feinte et représentée’ (morris-dances, mummeries, and another mystery with wild children jumping from a well-simulated and realistic rock). Indeed, by the fifteenth century children had become a fixture in such festivities, as is evident in the documents related to royal entries. The illustrations in the manuscript commemorating Joanna of Castile’s entry into Brussels suggest that a child likely embodied the personnage of the young Christ in the scene of St Luke painting the Virgin’s portrait. Children
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devant elle, cinquante-cinq sols de gratification; exemple assez rare, je crois, de rôles confiés à des acteurs si jeunes’; Lecoy de la Marche , . (Jeanne of Laval gave the choirboys of the church of St-Laud in Angers, who had performed a farce before her, a payment of fifty-five sous; a rare example, I believe, of roles being given to such young actors). Graham Runnalls (, ) provides further details. On the Boy Bishops see Chambers , –; Muchembled . ‘Why shouldn’t the role of the saint have been played by the Boy Bishop, if not in the original production conceived by Jehan Bodel, at least in subsequent revivals at the Feast of Fools or on the eve of the saint’s feast, as the play’s later prologue declares? […] If the play was conceived for performance by choirboys at a time of constructive misbehavior, then its often pointed political commentary […] would have been both sanctioned and softened. Placing the play in this context not only helps to explain it but also helps to explain Adam de la Halle’s connection with it: as a choirboy at the cathedral, he may have performed in it many times’ (Symes , –). Muchembled , . The essays in Boynton and Rice present a notable exception. The term tableau vivant is anachronistic for medieval spectacle, but I use it for expediency’s sake. On the term’s history, see Weigert , . Diverrès , (line ). On this performance see Brown and Regalado . Diverrès , (lines –). Petit de Julleville , : . Guenée and Lehoux . The image is reproduced in Weigert , .
Julie Singer
and adolescents played particularly prominent roles in the entries of child kings, embodying youthful characters like David, or representing the king himself. As Elie Konigson observes, these particular performances offer, in a nearly literal sense, a living Miroir du prince. To this we must add that the boy-kings themselves, of course, play the highly visible leading role in these public performances. Such was notably the case during the Paris entry of nine-yearold Henry VI of England in : there was a tableau vivant of a boy representing the king, but additionally, the king himself, as Lawrence M. Bryant has pointed out, became a spectacle and a visual aid during an oration by his regent, the duke of Bedford. Many of the entries of Charles VIII, who acceded to the French throne at age thirteen, feature boy performers. In Paris () there was a boy representing the king, as well as a youthful David defeating Goliath, and a ‘beau fils’ (handsome lad) representing the king’s healing power; in Rouen () there were boys representing the king, young Solomon, and young Constantine, all of whom, the chronicler points out, were selected for their physical resemblance to Charles; and in Troyes () there was a David, a royal family tree with a ‘petit roy’ (little king) at the center of every flower, and a number of groups of children shouting greetings, including ‘Deux cens enfans masles qui crioient | Noel, Noel , d’environ six ans d’aage’ (two hundred male children, around six years of age, who shouted Noel, Noel). Nor could only youthful kings be represented by child performers: at the adult Louis XI’s entry, a child-king perched atop the mast of a ship of state erected at the Porte Saint-Denis. The most vivid accounts of these tableau-roles tend to occur in chronicles and, later, in mémoires. It is rare, however, for the age of the participants to be specified. Nor can we assume that children would have participated only in child-themed tableaux. Witness the duke of Bedford’s Paris entry of September , at which the Bourgeois de Paris reports ‘un moult [bel] mystère du Vieil Testament et du Nouvel, que les enfants de Paris firent, et fut fait sans parler, ni sans signer, comme si ce fussent images élevés contre un mur’ (a very fine mystery of the Old and New Testaments, which the children of Paris put on, and it was done without speaking or signing, as if they were statues erected before a wall). Or the • •
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Konigson , . The political meanings of the Biblical tableaux mounted for royal entries are also explored in Blanchard . Young members of the royal family appear also to have performed in court entertainments. For example, Smith, Parussa, and Halévy (, ) refer to a dauphin playing the role of Saint John the Baptist in an early-fifteenth-century mystère at the Louvre: they give no further details, but appear to refer to a teenaged Louis of Guyenne, born in . According to Bryant (, ), ‘Bedford counted on the real, physical presence of Henry VI to have an effect similar to that of the Host in Corpus Christi celebrations and to overawe reluctant Frenchmen. Pointing to the enthroned Henry VI, he reportedly gave an oration to nobles and officials in Paris where the ‘holy’ was clearly transferred to the person of the king’. The entry is described in Guenée and Lehoux , and in Beaune , . Guenée and Lehoux , . Guenée and Lehoux , , , . The allusion to the performers’ resemblance to the king is intriguing, given that ‘Mimesis in the Middle Ages was not bound by conventions of strict resemblance’ (Nichols , ). Dominguez (, –) and Crowder (, ) elaborate on this point. In the descriptions of royal entries, both age and class appear to be characteristics contributing to the ‘resemblance’ of performers to the king. Guenée and Lehoux , . Kipling , . Beaune , .
Child Performers on the Medieval French Stage
Tree of Jesse at Louis XI’s Lyon entry of March : though nothing in the theme of this mistere would indicate child actors, the accounts for expenditures include ‘Item plus aud. Jaques Torveon, pour VII aunes deux tiers tercelin pour abillier les enfans mis aud. arbre de Jessé’ (Item, more for the aforementioned Jaques Torveon, for seven and two-thirds aunes of fabric [about nine meters] to dress the children placed in the aforementioned Tree of Jesse) and ‘Item a Pierre Brunier, pour XIII seaulx dud. arbre Jessé a tenir dedans XIII enfans’ (Item, to Pierre Brunier, for thirteen buckets of the aforementioned Tree of Jesse, to hold thirteen children). Similarly, there is a record of ‘ enfants représentans la Cène’ (thirteen children representing the Last Supper) in a mistere in mid-sixteenth-century Dinant. In his century-old study of children in English analogues to these misteres, Harold Newcomb Hillebrand suggests that children were preferred for tableaux vivants due to practical considerations of scale and weight. Similar constraints might have motivated the use of children in pageant wagon-plays, though there is little evidence for these in the French sphere outside of Lille and a few other northern cities. Children are not known to have participated in the Mystères de la procession de Lille, but Philippe de Vigneulles describes a children’s wagonplay in Metz in : the ‘petits jones enfans’ (small young children) inside the cart included Philippe’s nine-year-old daughter. Larger-scale theatrical productions such as the urban Mystères de la Passion also included child performers in non-speaking roles. The last silent role I will cite is both unusual and well-documented: the role of fouryear-old Mary in Philippe de Mézières’s Dramatic Office for the Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple. Philippe’s staging instructions for the dramatic office – which was performed three times, in Avignon (), Paris (), and again in Avignon () – call for Mary to be played by a beautiful girl of three to four years of age. She is to be accompanied by companions of the same age, whose number would vary from one production to another. Philippe makes allowances for the uncertain capabilities of such young children: for instance, he specifies that if Mary is unable to carry a candle while climbing stairs, the angel Raphael should carry the candle. Susan Udry has argued that the young actress’s sexlessness would have facilitated the desired audience identification with the qualities of her character,
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It may, however, have been conventional to include children in Tree of Jesse tableaux in this period: small children were perched on the branches of the Tree of Jesse at Philip the Good’s Bruges entry of (Ramakers , ). For a discussion of Tree of Jesse pageants, albeit with no direct reference to child performers, see Kipling , –. Guenée and Lehoux , , . Rey-Flaud , . ‘The greatly less weight of a group of children [relative to adults] must have counted materially. In a similar way, I have supposed that the Chapel boys came into favor in court pageants partly because they could ride securely on the tops of the devices (on the battlements of castles, in many instances) where adults would endanger stability. Then, too, the size of the children may have had some influence, for they would not crowd a pageant and would be more in proportion to the scale of the construction, whereas men would seem hulking and unwieldy’ (Hillebrand , ). Muir , . On non-speaking child performers in the Mons play, see below; on the ‘pety enfant josne et tendre’ (child of young and tender age) in the Valenciennes Passion, see Enders , . The text is published in Coleman and is translated in Meredith and Tailby .
Julie Singer
regardless of the spectators’ gender. To this I will add the proposal that young children’s voicelessness, in these silent roles, also contributes to their ability to ‘resemble’ those whom they are meant to represent: as miniature adults (chivalric or savage), as mirror images of princes, as figures in the life of Christ. I am designating as voiced roles those performative modes in which children sing, shout, or speak. In such roles the function of children’s voices is determined less by the semantic content of their utterances than by their sonic quality: while chroniclers often praise the sweetness of child singers’ voices, they rarely specify what words were being sung. Children are commonly assembled en masse to greet monarchs, their voices serving as one of the sound effects that, as Laura Weigert points out, are ‘vital to the aesthetic’ of royal entries. Children crying out ‘Vive le roi’ (Long live the king) are a fixture at royal entries, including Limoges , Brive , Tournai , Troyes (as mentioned above), and Vienne . Two especially impressive examples took place in Lyon: one for Charles VI’s entry, at which the chronicler Michel Pintoin reports more than a thousand shouting children; and the other for Louis XI’s entry in , for which children were positioned on scaffolding at multiple points along the king’s route. Singing children also participated in a remarkable performance that was a part of Philip the Good’s entry in Ghent. Instead of the usual platform erected on temporary scaffolding, the children performed atop an elephant: ‘Inside a pavilion strapped to the back of the elephant sat two adults with faces painted black and dressed as “Hebrews”, along with four children, who all broke out in song’. Young children were often cast as angels in medieval French spectacles, and these could variously be silent, speaking, or singing roles. Singing child-angels were positioned in prominent locales for queen Isabeau of Bavaria’s Paris entry of , as reported by Froissart. They were the first personages to greet the queen at the first gate she crossed: ‘A la première porte de Saint-Denis, ainsi que on entre dedans Paris, et que on dit à la Bastide, y avoit un ciel tout estellé, et dedans ce ciel jeunes enfans appareillés et mis en ordonnance d’anges, lesquels enfans chantoient moult mélodieusement et doucement’ (At the first gate of Saint-Denis, also called the Bastide, just as one enters Paris, there was a canopy covered with stars, and under this canopy were young children dressed and made to look like angels, who sang very melodiously and sweetly). Later, in a tableau of the Holy Trinity, there were ‘jeunes enfans de choeur, lesquels chantoient moult doucement, en formes d’anges, laquelle chose • • • • •
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Udry . Boynton and Rice (, ) note that ‘most of the time [...] boys’ voices had no representational function’. Weigert , . Guenée and Lehoux , . Michel Pintoin writes: ‘mille et eo amplius innocentes pueri perquiruntur, qui per compita civitatis variis deambulatoriis ligneis collocati, vestimentis induerentur regiis, et regi pertranseunti laudes regias altissonis vocibus declararent’ (more than a thousand young children had been dressed in royal vestments and stationed in various places on wooden grandstands, and they loudly voiced praise for the king as he passed); see Guenée and Lehoux , . The same event was later described by Jouvenel des Ursins; see Guenée and Lehoux , . Guenée and Lehoux , . Hurlbut , . The same spectacle is also mentioned in Petit de Julleville , : .
Child Performers on the Medieval French Stage
on véoit et oyoit moult volontiers’ (young choirboys singing very sweetly, dressed as angels, which people were very happy to see and hear). A child angel descended from the heavens, through the magic of special effects, during Charles VII’s Paris entry of November . Children were also cast as angels in Passion plays such as the Châteaudun Mystère de la Passion, whose accounts include a receipt for the wool needed to make wigs for child performers: ‘lequel estaing fut mis et employé à faire les perrucques de sainct Michel et autres anges de paradis et petis Innocens et autres petis enfans qui furent mis à ung trosne qui portait la devise de monseigneur’ (which wool was used to make the wigs for Saint Michael and other angels of Paradise and the little Innocents and other little children who were put on a throne bearing our lord’s motto). Likewise, the Valenciennes Passion contract () lists ‘young children (petis enfans) who only played angels’. The final category of child performance consists of speaking roles in scripted plays. Child characters appear frequently in many theatrical genres, and especially in hagiographic plays, which often depict the enfances of the precociously holy future saints. On occasion, there is positive evidence of children having performed these roles; stage directions indicate that at least some fatistes (authors) and/or meneurs du jeu (directors) intended for such roles to be played by child actors; and sometimes textual evidence, such as a very restrained number of lines, points to the possibility of a child having played the role, without offering any conclusive proof. The compactness and simplicity of the speeches designated for child characters in many theatrical texts suggest that the roles could have been played by children of approximately the same age as the character represented. To cite but one example: the Estoire de Griseldis assigns one two-line reply to each of Griseldis’s children, at ages twelve and eight. Given the brevity, it is thoroughly plausible that the parts would have been played by children. Indeed, differences between the casts of successive productions of similar plays may account for some textual variants, such as one encountered in two printed versions of a Daniel and Susanna play: sixteenth-century editions assign lines to two boys playing Susanna’s sons, while a seventeenth-century edition, likely based on an earlier text
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Buchon , –. Le héraut Berry’s account specifies, ‘Et a l’entree de la porte Saint Denis, avoit ung enffant en guise d’un ange, qui aportoit ung escu d’azur a trois fleurs de lis d’or; et sembloit qu’il vollast et descendist du ciel’ (And at the entry to the Saint-Denis gate there was a child dressed as an angel, who bore an azure shield with three golden fleurs-de-lis, and it seemed as if he flew and descended from the sky). Monstrelet, describing the same scene, does not mention a child but does say that the angels were singing. Guenée and Lehoux , , . For a basic introduction to theatrical special effects in the period, see Normington . Couturier and Runnalls , . Muir , . These plays tend to ‘enjamber les années au point que les didascalies précisent que tel personnage, joué d’abord par un enfant, le sera ensuite par un adolescent puis par un adulte, jusqu’à la mort scénique’ (span the years to such a degree that the stage directions specify that a character, played at first by a child, will subsequently be played by an adolescent and then by an adult, up to the staged death); Mazouer , . Roques , –. Denis Hüe entertains the possibility of a mise en scène that would have used small children earlier in the play, at the moments when the nurse refers to the children’s weaning (, ).
Julie Singer
than the sixteenth-century editions, has only one speaking son. Yet the presence of child characters does not, on its own, imply the presence of child actors: for instance, the lengthy and complex philosophical disputations in which the future St Quentin engages as a new schoolboy, in the Mystère de saint Quentin, suggest that the role is unlikely to have been played by a young boy. In other play-texts, stage directions show that child actors were meant to be used, as in the Mystère de saint Louis, with its indication that ‘Ycy doit jouer le personnage de saint Loys ung homme, et devant jusqu’a cy j. enfant comme de .xij. ans’ (Here a man should play the role of St Louis, and beforehand, up until this point, a child of about twelve years). Such is also the case with some child miraculé characters, including the child drowned and resuscitated in the Miracles de sainte Geneviève. Gustave Cohen takes this play’s stage direction ‘Soit .I. enfant d’environ .IIII. ans suz aucune chose faite comme la gueule d’un puis en regardant dedens’ (let there be a child of about four years on top of something made like the mouth of a well, looking into it) as proof that children as young as four acted in plays; this is certainly plausible, as the child speaks only one line, ‘Dame, donez-moy une pomme’ (Lady, give me an apple). Children were also sometimes used to play souls. The souls of the thieves are speaking roles played by children according to the notes for the staging of a Passion play in Provençal, possibly of Savoyard origin, described by Véronique Plesch; but other souls in that same play (including that of Judas) were portrayed with dummies. There are several medieval productions for which partial cast lists are extant: all of those whose named cast members unambiguously include children date from the sixteenth century. Studies of female performers have noted that a seven-year-old girl probably played the role of young Mary in the Passion play performed at Mons in . In fact, the Mons play included several performers identified as fille or filz, and while it is difficult to assess their ages, several of them may have been children. In addition to ‘la fille [de] George de le Motte’ who played Mary at age , these include the ‘filz Jehan d’Esneulx’ as a ‘cheraphin’ (seraph) with four lines; ‘le filz dudit Gerosme Fosset’ with a total of eight lines in the roles of ‘le sang d’Abel’, ‘Coeur joyeulx’, and Benjamin; and ‘Colinet filz de Prices’, who spoke a total of twenty-eight lines as Isaac, the squire Celisander, the ‘enffant’ Zeno, and an angel. There • • • • • • • •
On the variants, and with a thorough rationale for regarding the seventeenth-century text as based on an earlier play that was integrated into the Mistere du Viel Testament, see Runnalls . Michel , . This instruction is mentioned in Hamblin , . Jubinal , ; discussed in Cohen , . Jubinal , . On the difficulty of determining whether such roles were played by children, adults, or dummies in any given production, see Dominguez (, –), who cites the son of Jacques le Gros as her only example of a child actor. Plesch , . Muir , . In line with Udry’s reading of Mézières’s Office, Twycross supposes that the Mons Mary and other prepubescent girls are allowed on stage because they are deemed ‘officially sexless, as it were’ (, ). The designation as ‘fille’ or ‘filz’ is not, on its own, enough to give a firm idea of the performer’s age. ‘La petite Waudrue, fille [de] Jorge de le Nerle’ (who played Mary at age fourteen) and the ‘filz de Jacquemin Sauvage’ who played the large role of Gabriel were more likely adolescents; other actors identified as ‘filz’ played what are clearly adult roles (Cohen ). Likewise, the accounts for the Mystère de la Passion played at Châteaudun in record that
Child Performers on the Medieval French Stage
were also non-speaking child roles in that play, such as the ‘enfans et personnages sans parler’ (children and characters without speech) present at the burial of Adam. Another known child actor of the late Middle Ages was Andrieu, the son of Philippe de Vigneulles, whom his father reported as having performed five roles in a play in . The list of actors in the Valenciennes Passion of includes the subheading ‘junes fils et junes filles juant plusieurs parchons’ (young boys and young girls playing several roles) of which, Lynette R. Muir concludes, ‘some at least […] are as young as seven to eight years old’. Lastly, there is a remarkable document brought to light by Graham Runnalls: a household book in which Jacques Le Gros, a Parisian silk merchant, records his son’s participation in a performance of the Mystère de la Passion. He boasts that ‘mon filz Jacques Le Gros, agé de dix ans ung mois’ (my son Jacques Le Gros, aged ten years and one month) played several roles: he ‘commança le jeu du petit Jhesus en l’age de xii ans’ (began playing little twelve-year-old Jesus), then played ‘ung enfant de l’entree de Jherusalem’ (a child at the entry into Jerusalem), and lastly he appeared as ‘l’ame de Jhesus’ (the soul of Jesus). The proud father even copied out nearly lines of the play, including all of those pronounced by his ten-years-and-one-month-old son. From the preceding survey, I conclude that it is not just possible, but highly likely that medieval audiences were accustomed to encountering child performers in urban spectacles. Children played silent roles in tableaux vivants, they sang or shouted (often in large groups), and they performed silent or speaking roles in Passions and other large-scale dramas. The types of character that these child performers played were determined in part by material constraints (including set design and special effects), in accordance with iconographic convention (for example, the use of children to represent souls) and the ‘age expectations’ and affective responses that children could elicit. The language of ‘resemblance’ that is used with regard to the performers in boy-kings’ royal entries suggests that, at least in some types of performance, age was considered an important component of representation. Still, as the brevity of the foregoing account indicates, there is much we do not know about the extent of children’s participation in medieval French theater. A great deal remains to be discovered at the intersection of music, text, and the pursuit of the material traces of performance.
• • • • •
several of the children of adult play participants (filles, filz, enffans) also acted in the play, but their ages are not noted (Couturier and Runnalls ). For a summary of the Châteaudun accounts, which unfortunately sheds no further light on the question of child actors, see Runnalls . Meredith and Tailby , . Andrieu was born in , according to Paulmier-Foucart (). Muir , , . Quoted from Runnalls b. There is an in-depth discussion of this household book in Runnalls a. On the development of this iconography in non-theatrical contexts see Baschet . On the ‘age expectations’ that were associated by convention with the successive stages of child development, see Youngs , .
(Re)examining and (Re)assessing the Fourteenth Century �
. G M Y F Andrew Wathey
Guillaume de Machaut’s ecclesiastical career ran substantially in parallel with, if slightly ahead of, that of his brother Jean. Both were clerks of the diocese of Reims; both were in the service of John, king of Bohemia, working in similar capacities initially as almoners and later as secretaries. With the king’s support, and in successive decades, both were granted papal graces for canonries first at Verdun and then at Reims – Guillaume in and , and Jean in and – mostly but not exclusively on an expectative basis. A frequent adornment to clerical careers at court, expectatives were intended to take effect when a suitable vacancy arose: Guillaume took possession of his canonry at Reims with its accompanying prebend and stall in ; Jean appears to have been presented directly to Verdun and enjoyed his canonry there in full from the outset. For both brothers, as it turned out, these benefices, though not their first, created lifelong connections, shaping their identity in the established church, the formal styles they used in documents, and ultimately the locations at which they were commemorated after their deaths. Yet although the end-point is discernible at the beginning of the two brothers’ ecclesiastical careers, both entered a new phase after the death of their employer in . In a supplication of November Yolande of Flanders, countess of Bar, reiterated Jean’s case for an expectative at Reims, describing him as ‘dilecto familiari suo’, a formulation indicating membership of her household or court. As Lawrence Earp points out, this document, neglected by earlier scholars, has an importance beyond Jean’s own career, illuminating a potential route of access between Guillaume de Machaut and his patrons in the s. Chief among these is Charles the Bad, king of Navarre, whose brother, Philip of Navarre, Yolande married in . Others to whom access may have been facilitated include Raoul de Vienne, the sire de Louppy, an esquire in Yolande’s service who featured in Machaut’s ballade Mes dames qu’onques ne vi (Lo), and Robert of Bar, her son, a potential patron for the Voir dit. Yolande’s supplication in favor of Jean de Machaut is preserved in AAV, Reg. Suppl. , fol. v, one of several such requests collected in a single rotulus copied into the Avignon register. What has eluded notice – slipping through the net of nineteenth-century national surveys and seemingly unknown to Machaut scholarship – is a further supplication from Yolande, of November , thirteen folios earlier in the same register, in favor of Guillaume de Machaut, who is styled identically as ‘dilecto familiari suo’. In this document, •
• •
See Earp a, –, –; Earp , –, ; Leach b, –; George , : . For their obits, see Leach b, chap. ; Verdun, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS , fol. v records Jean’s obit at Verdun. For Guillaume’s presentation at Verdun, alongside Robertus de Palacio, and papal provisions to King John’s servants more generally, see Hitzbleck , –. I am grateful to Lawrence Earp for a rich discussion on an earlier version of this chapter, and to John Cherry for reviewing the material presented here on Machaut’s seal. Archivio Apostolico Vaticano [AAV], Reg. Suppl. [RS] , fol. v, excerpted in Berlière , (nos. –). For what follows, see Earp a, –. AAV, RS , fol. r; below, Appendix, no. . The Avignon registers are drafts, usually more accurate, from which fair copies in the Vatican Registers were ultimately compiled.
Guillaume de Machaut and Yolande of Flanders
Guillaume is presented directly to a canonry at Verdun, almost in the mirror-image of his brother’s expectative at Reims; the supplication also notes the substantive canonries at Reims and St Quentin that he was permitted to hold concurrently, confirming the extent of the benefices he held at this date. It would appear therefore that each of the two brothers, probably acting in tandem, was reviving a quiescent interest at the cathedral where the other held his principal benefice, exploiting the opportunity to do this afforded by a relatively new employer. Although scholars have tended to regard Yolande’s renewed supplication for Jean at Reims as nugatory, this and its counterpart for Guillaume at Verdun probably did have a purpose, were very likely conceived in tandem, and clearly demonstrate that both brothers had reached Yolande’s service, perhaps together, by late . While Jean’s expectative at Reims later took effect, in , it is clear that Guillaume’s at Verdun did not. Following the supplication in favor of Guillaume, a letter confirming the papal grace appears to have been issued, though, in common with that for Jean’s expectative canonry at Reims, it does not survive; it was then canceled because the canonry at Verdun, vacant by the resignation of Hugh of Bar, had already been granted to Thomas de Burgo, physician to the Emperor Charles IV. The papal collector’s accounts for the diocese of Verdun compiled in confirm that Burgo’s presentation took place on February , and note that the presentation of ‘Guillermo de Macondio’ on November had not taken effect. For reasons of orthography, probably, this passage is likewise absent from Machaut scholarship, as is a reference to him in one of Yolande’s court records discussed below. No indication has come to light that Guillaume de Machaut made any further attempt to secure his canonry at Verdun. For Guillaume, the period following the death of John, king of Bohemia in remains a lacuna in a biography not otherwise rich in certainty. Guillaume and perhaps also Jean remained in the king’s service until his demise, and their employment by Yolande, marked by parallel supplications in November , might suggest that their careers followed a similar path during the intervening years. It is possible that Guillaume joined the service of Bonne of Luxembourg, King John’s daughter and first wife of John, duke of Normandy (later John II, king of France), who died on September . While there is no direct proof that Bonne was Guillaume’s employer, there is literary and circumstantial evidence for a relationship of some kind, and in particular Bonne is suggested to have been the original dedicatee of Remede de Fortune and Jugement dou roy de Navarre and of the motet Trop plus est bele/ Bi • •
•
About two-thirds of Yolande’s supplications from November–January – resulted in letters surviving in the Avignon registers, AAV Registri Avinionesi [RA] , , , and . See Table .. Kirsch , : ‘Inutilia Virdunensia anni noni. Primo de canonicatu et prebenda Virdunenense vacantibus per resignationem Huguemini de Barro fuit provisum Guillermo de Macondio . Kal. Decembris anno o. Ista gratia non habuit effectum set alia facta Thome de Burgo pro quo computatur supra folio […]’ (Fruitless [benefices] of Verdun [diocese], year nine [of Clement VI’s pontificate]. First from the canonry and prebend of Verdun vacant by the resignation of Huguemin de Barro, which was provided to Guillaume de Machaut on Kal. December in year [ November ]. This grace had no effect but another was made for Thomas de Burgo, which is accounted for above [on] leaf […]); see also p. . For Burgo see Berlière , (no. ). Earp a, –; Earp , –; Leach b, , ; Smilansky , esp. –, –.
Andrew Wathey
auté paree de valour/ Je ne sui mie certeins (M). However, it would appear, from a hitherto overlooked passage in a document emanating from Yolande’s household, that by May Guillaume had already entered the countess’s service, apparently in a secretarial or other administrative role, when as ‘Guillaume de Meschault’ he was paid fl. for robes already procured for her esquires. Two other new documents add significantly to this picture. First, a warrant of June, recording that Machaut was dispatched to Flanders by Yolande, probably from Clermont-en-Argonne, ‘pour aucunes de nos grosses besoingnes’, standard terminology for a diplomatic or other secret mission, and requiring her receiver in Flanders to pay whatever he needed. Second, in a quittance of August sealed at Bruges with the composer’s personal seal, Machaut identifies himself as ‘clers ma dame de Bar et chanoines de Reims’ (Figures . and .). It is not impossible that the hand of this second document is Machaut’s, though given that it is identical to that in the warrant of June it is arguably more likely that it was that of a clerk in Yolande’s treasury. The seal, however, is of significant interest and depicts a winged figure astride a lion, playing a harp, plausibly identifiable as Cupid, as depicted in classical iconography, or possibly as Orpheus (see Figure .). Quite literally perhaps, this image may be Machaut’s visual signature, symbolically linked to his literary oeuvre and to his strongly-projected self-image as author of, and actor in, representations of love. Of note here are the parallels with the imagery of Yolande’s own signet seal, which in an impression from February also depicts a figure, possibly winged, riding an animal that may be a lion. As for Jean, the timing of his entry into Yolande’s service is unclear. But for both brothers the apparently collaborative relationship between Yolande’s court and that of her near neighbor John, king of Bohemia at the time of his death may have •
•
•
• • •
On which see Clark a, –. Since Machaut was working for Yolande by the time of Bonne’s death, the likelihood that the motet was an epitaph recedes, though it remains possible that it was written for Bonne during her lifetime; see also Earp , n. . Not previously remarked, presumably, because of the spelling ‘Meschault’: Lille, Archives Départementales du Nord [ADN], B , no. , an acknowledgment by Yolande of sums paid out by Simon de Fau her chaplain; Appendix, no. below. A notice of the document and this passage appear in Finot , –; its other contents and date are referenced by Bubenicek , . ADN, B , no. , noted (without the name of the beneficiary) in Finot , ; see Appendix, no. below. Machaut’s mission might relate to almost any important matter, but it is possible that it was linked to the appointment of Raoul de Louppy as Yolande’s lieutenant in Flanders on June, and her disagreement with Thibaut de Bar, evident in the early days of the month; see Bubenicek , , . Yolande’s residence at Clermont lay between Verdun and Reims; physical convenience may have been an additional factor in the choice of benefices in her supplications for the two brothers. ADN, B , no. , recorded in Finot as a quittance of ‘Guillaume, chapelain de Madame de Bar’, though the word ‘chapelain’ does not appear in the document; see Appendix, no. below. See below, p. . See Figure . below. The seal, from Archives Départementales de Meurthe-et-Moselle, B , no. , is reproduced on p. of Bubenicek , and the mounted figure is described at p. as ‘un petit homme au manteau flottant chevauchant un lion dont il paraît forcer la mâchoir’ (a small man with a flowing mantle, astride a lion whose jaw he appears to force), in a reference to Samson’s and David’s struggles with lions (see also Bubenicek , , ). The trailing object behind the rider seems, however, equally legible as a wing. It is difficult to discern what is taking place in the space between the rider and the lion’s head, but there is no indication that the rider is forcing its jaw. I am grateful to John Cherry for his observations on this seal, and for pointing me towards Yolande’s other seals at .
Guillaume de Machaut and Yolande of Flanders
smoothed a path. Also noteworthy in view of Guillaume’s presumed later employment with Charles is the latter’s financial support for Yolande during , 1349, reflecting a sensitivity to her mother’s interest in the Montfort-Navarre struggle for control of Brittany.13
Figure 5.1: .: Quittance by Guillaume de Machaut, Bruges, 16 August August 1349. . Lille, ADN, B , 3247, no. 112164 (Archives Départementales du Nord)
Figure 5.2: .: Personal signet seal of Guillaume de Machaut. Lille, ADN, B 3247, , no. 112164, , detail (Archives Départementales du Nord)
Figure 5.3: .: Protarchos, Cupid playing a lyre riding a lion. Collection: Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Florence (Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 . Unported License ) )
• 13 •
See Bubenicek 2002, , 132, , 135 n. 293; ; Yolande dispatched two of her principal vassals, Colard de Saulx and Jean d’Arentières, to King John’s funeral in 1346. .
114
Andrew Wathey
Figure 5.4: .: Personal signet seal of Yolande of Flanders, used during her regency of Bar, 1344–49. –. Nancy, Archives Départementales de Meurthe-et-Moselle, B , 542, no. 41 (Arch. Dép. de Meurtheet-Moselle)
Some additional evidence, hitherto unnoticed, for Guillaume’s activities in these years is provided by three pairs of papal mandates for admission to a monastery or nunnery, in and 1347, , concern the chilwhich he is named as an executor (see Table .). 5.1).14 Two, in 1346 dren, Amelota and Gerard, of Gerard Cauchon, a Reims bourgeois, admitted to the Benedictine Nunnery of Saint-Pierre, Avenay and the Abbey of Saint-Remi, Reims respectively; the third pair of mandates, in 1349, , concerns Theobald and Johanna Collesson de Sommeville, of the diocese of Châlons, relatives of Jean Champenoys de Passeavant, sergeant at arms to Philip VI, admitted to the same houses. It is not clear that these tasks required Machaut’s presence in Reims: although three executors were appointed, only one was required to lead the process – the 1347 mandate identifies another executor for this role – and the details of admission on-site were dealt with by sub-executors. But they do demonstrate his acceptability for such tasks to local networks in Reims, and perhaps signal his periodic presence there. For the Cauchon children, Machaut may have been chosen for local reasons, • 14 •
RA 88, , fols 465 r, 505 r; RA 93, , fols 298 r–299 –r (where Reynaud Fremeri was the lead executor), and RA 99, , fol. 88 r. For presentations of this type, see Hitzbleck , 2009, ff. 182ff. and ff. 288ff. on the choice of executors, superseding the more limited study by Wipertus Rudt de Collenberg (1980). (). Philippe de Vitry was nominated as an executor in one such case, in 1342, , to effect the reception of Margaret, daughter of Jean de Crepanti, knight, ‘puella litterata’ of Paris diocese, in the convent of Jarre (RV 214, , fols 337 v–338 –r). For Cauchon, see Varin 1843, , 666, , 688, , 917, , and for the Cauchon family, Desportes 1979. .
115
Guillaume de Machaut and Yolande of Flanders
taking a share in administrative tasks parceled out in the chapter or because of a personal connection. For the Collessons, however, a wider patronage relationship may have been in play, since another of the executors nominated was Hugues de Châtillon, canon of Reims, whose interests Guillaume controversially promoted in the Reims Cathedral chapter in and with whose family he had enduring close links. As Elizabeth Eva Leach and Roger Bowers suggest, these links may predate Guillaume’s entry into the service of John, king of Bohemia and may disclose his place of origin. By this time, Hugues, a son of an important noble family and maître des requêtes de l’hôtel of Philip VI, was a senior conduit to the French royal court – indeed, the petition that preceded the Collessons’ letters was made in the name of the French king – and perhaps, through another branch of the Châtillon family, to Bonne of Luxembourg. Table .: Yolande of Flanders, supplications –
Date / Source
Beneficiary
Style
Benefice
Nov (RS , fol. r)
Guillelmo de Machaudio
dilecto familiari suo
Verdun Cathedral
Symoni Warneri de Fago
dilecto capellano suo
Auxerre Cathedral
Nov (RS , fol. r)
Symoni Warneri de Fago
dilecto capellano suo
ben. in gift of Bp, D&C of Cambrai
Nov (RS , fols r–r)
Rogero de Medekerke
dilecto clerico et familiari suo
St Donatian, Bruges
Theobaldo de Bourmonte
dilecto familiari suo
Sainte-Marie-Madeleine, Verdun
Johanni de Machaudio
dilecto familiari suo
Reims Cathedral
Symoni Warneri de Fago
dilecto capellano suo
ben. in gift of Bp, D&C of Liege
Petro Copiton
dilecto capellano suo
ben. in gift of Bp, D&C of Chalons
Guillelmo de Mocha
dilecto capellano suo
Saint-Gengoult, Toul
Petro Blondelet de Sathanaco dilecto capellano suo
ben. in gift of Abp, D, Thes&C of Reims
Warrionnio de Briey, clerk, Metz dioc.
dilecto familiari suo
ben. in gift of Abbess and Conv. of Remiremont, Toul dioc.
Henrico de Crewez, clerk, Verdun dioc.
dilecto suo
ben. in gift of Bp, D&C of Toul
• •
See Leach b, –; Bowers , –; Earp a, . RS , fol. v, the second of two linked petitions for Jean Champenoys; the first, for his son, Colesson Champenoys, asked that an earlier request for a canonry at Reims be reconsidered for Soissons; Machaut is not named as an executor in the resulting letter (RA , fol. r). For Jean, see Viard , no. . For the link with Bonne, see Leach b, .
Andrew Wathey
A wider context for the supplications made on behalf of Guillaume and Jean in emerges from Yolande’s relations with the French court. Following a rupture in October , when Philip VI effectively ended her independent rule in Bar, Yolande began a charm offensive with the French king, the church, and her neighbors in the Barrois. The accession of John II in August helped her case; she attended his coronation in Reims on September, recovering some of her powers, and for some time she enjoyed a recovery in favor, before a decline in and a complete schism provoked by her marriage into the ‘clan navarrais’ in
Type
Letter / Mandate
Executors
RA , fol. v
Dean of SaintHilaire, Poitiers
Archdeacon de la Rivière, Verdun
Official of Cambrai
RA , fol. r
Abbot of SaintVanne, Verdun
Archdeacon de la Rivière, Verdun
Official of Verdun
c/s cura
RA , fol. v
Abbot of Toussaints-en-l’Île, Châlons-en-Champagne
Archdeacon de la Rivière, Verdun
Official of Chalons
expectative
RA , fol. v
Abbot of Saint-Èvre, Abbot of SaintToul Mansuy, Toul
Archdeacon de la Rivière, Verdun
s cura
RA , fol. r
Abbot of SaintDenis, Reims
Dean of SaintHilaire, Poitiers
Archdeacon de la Rivière, Verdun
c/s cura
RA , fol. v
Dean of SaintHilaire, Poitiers
Archdeacon de la Rivière, Verdun
Official of Toul
provision provision c/s cura expectative expectative expectative c/s cura
c/s cura
Guillaume de Machaut and Yolande of Flanders
Date / Source
Beneficiary
Style
Benefice
Colardo dez Ermoises, clerk, Verdun dioc.
-
ben. in gift of Bp, D&C of Metz
Johanni Gileti de Mocha, clerk
dilecto suo
Saint-Déodat, SaintDié
Johanni Ade de Liberduno, priest, Toul dioc.
dilecto suo
ben. in gift of Bp, D&C of Toul
Johanni, son of Ferricus de Cronenbourg, militis
dilecto suo
Saint-Sauveur, Metz
Nicholao Pige
dilecto suo
ben. in gift of Abbot and Conv. of SaintVincent, Metz
Mag. Johanni de Poloigniaco, magistro in medicina et in artibus
dilecto physico suo
Verdun Cathedral
Stephano Gille de Poloigniaco, Besancon dioc.
dilecto suo
ben. in gift of Abbot and Conv. of Mouzon, Reims dioc.
Guido de Sernaco, clerk, lic. in artibus
-
Parish church of Sermonne, Reims dioc.
Johanni Colini de Sancto Michaele, clerk, Verdun dioc.
-
Saint-Théobald, Metz
Johanni de Canis de Hasbrouch, clerk of Therouanne dioc.
-
ben. in gift of D&C of Saint-Pierre, Cassel
Johanni Hugonis fabri de Fago clerk, Toul dioc.
-
ben. in gift of Abbot & Conv. of Saint-Mansuy, Toul
Jacobo son of Jacobi Bonevie de Sancto-Michaele, clerk, Verdun dioc.
-
ben. in gift of D&C of Saint-Gengoult, Toul
Johanni Simon de Novocastro, clerk, Laon dioc.
-
ben. in gift of Prior of Évergnicourt, Laon dioc.
Nov (RS , fol. r)
Petro de Sancto Michaele, Archdeacon of Vitello, Toul Cathedral
dilecto consiliario suo
ben. in gift of Abbot and Conv. of Mouzon, Reims dioc.
Jan (RS , fol. r)
Symoni Warneri de Fago
dilecto et benedicto capellano et continuo familiari suo
Toul Cathedral
In this table the following abbreviations are used: Abp (archbishop), ben. (benefice), c/s cura ([benefice] with or without cure of souls, cum vel sine cura), Bp (bishop), Bp, D&C / Bp, Thes&C (bishop, dean and chapter / bishop, treasurer and chapter), Conv. (convent), dioc. (diocese), Lic.(licentiatus), l.t. (livres tournois), Mag. (magister).
Andrew Wathey
Type
Letter / Mandate
Executors
expectative
RA , fol. v
Dean of SaintHilaire, Poitiers
Archdeacon de la Rivière, Verdun
Official of Toul
c/s cura
RA , fol. r
Dean of SaintHilaire, Poitiers
Archdeacon de la Rivière, Verdun
Official of Toul
expectative
RA , fol. r
Abbot of SaintVincent, Metz
Dean of Metz
Archdeacon de la Rivière, Verdun
c/s cura
RA , fol. v
Dean of Metz
Dean of SaintHilaire, Poitiers
Archdeacon de la Rivière, Verdun
RA , fol. v
Dean of SaintHilaire, Poitiers
Archdeacon de la Rivière, Verdun
Official of Toul
revenues up to RA , fol. r–v l.t.
Abbot of SaintNicaise, Reims
Abbot of Morimond
Abbot of Chéry
expectative
RA , fol. r
Dean of SaintHilaire, Poitiers
Archdeacon de la Rivière, Verdun
Official of Metz
s cura
RA , fol. r–v
Dean of Therouanne Archdeacon de la Rivière, Verdun
Official of Therouanne
c/s cura
RA , fol. v
Dean of SaintHilaire, Poitiers
Archdeacon de la Rivière, Verdun
Official of Toul
c/s cura
RA , fol. v
Dean of Toul
Dean of SaintHilaire, Poitiers
Archdeacon de la Rivière, Verdun
c/s cura
RA , fol. v
Dean of SaintHilaire, Poitiers
Archdeacon de la Rivière, Verdun
Official of Reims
provision
RA , fol. r–v
Abbot of SaintMansuy, Toul
Abbot of SaintÈvre, Toul
Archdeacon de la Rivière, Verdun
s cura
provision
c/s cura
c/s cura
Guillaume de Machaut and Yolande of Flanders
Table .: Guillaume de Machaut as executor in papal letters of admission to religious houses
Date
Beneficiary
Monastic house
Jun
Gerard, son of Gerard Cauchon, scholar of Reims
Jun
Guillaume RA , fol. r; Amelota, daughter Saint-Pierre, Succentor Reginald Fremeri, Avenay of Reims canon of Reims de Machaut, of Gerard Cauchon, RS , fol. r canon of Reims puella literata of Reims
Oct
Gerard, son of Gerard Cauchon, clerc, then scholar of Reims
Oct
Guillaume RA , fols Amelota, daughter Saint-Pierre, Succentor Reginald Fremeri, Avenay of Reims canon of Reims de Machaut, v–r of Gerard Cauchon, canon of Reims puella literata of Reims
Apr
Theobald Collesson de Sommeville, scholar of Chalons diocese
Saint-Remi, Reims
Dean of SaintHilaire, Poitiersc)
Hugues de Châtillon, canon of Reimsd)
Guillaume RA , fol. r; de Machaut, RS , fol. v canon of Reims
Apr
Johanna Collesson de Sommeville, puella literata of Chalons diocese
Saint-Pierre, Avenay
Dean of SaintHilaire, Poitiers
Hugues de Châtillon, canon of Reims
Guillaume RA , fol. r; de Machaut, RS , fol. v canon of Reims
Saint-Remi, Reims
Saint-Remi, Reims
Executors
Sources
Succentor Reginald Fremeri, of Reimsa) canon of Reimsb)
Succentor Reginald Fremeri, of Reims canon of Reims
Guillaume RA , fol. r; de Machaut, RS , fol. r canon of Reims
Guillaume RA , fol. r de Machaut, canon of Reims
The second pair of mandates reiterates the instructions in the first, stating the original ages of Gerard and Amelota respectively as thirteen and eleven, now fourteen and twelve. The petition in claimed that Gerard ‘habet .x. pueros ex sua uxore legitima quibus sine auxilio sanctitatis vestri providere non potest’. a) b) c) d)
Aegidius de Placentia, canon and succentor –; a great-nephew of Gregory X, and chaplain of Cardinals Jacques Gaietani and later Annibal de Ceccano. Desportes , . Canon , until death, . Official of the Archibishop, Jean de Vienne, , Provost . Doctor of Civil Law and papal chaplain. Desportes , . Oliverius de Cerzeto, Dean –. Papal chaplain and auditor. Familiar of Cardinal Arnaud de Via, . Vallière , . Canon (collation ), until death, ; eventually sub-deacon, and cantor. Desportes , .
. The wave of papal graces granted to Yolande’s supporters in late and early , a program not repeated on this scale, is of a piece with her rehabilitation at the French court. It coincides with a period when John II was active in Avignon securing largesse at scale for his own supporters and wider affinity (including the bishopric of Meaux for Philippe de Vitry). Arguably Guillaume and Jean owed their supplications to Yolande’s rehabilitation. It is possible, moreover, that both were with Yolande at John II’s coronation, and even that the • •
Bubenicek , –, –. See Wathey , .
Andrew Wathey
margins of this event provided an opportunity to broker the detail underpinning these favors. Those rewarded alongside Guillaume and Jean include Yolande’s counselors, her physician, and household officials of several years’ standing alongside more recent recruits (see Table .). In the supplication of November , Guillaume de Machaut was partnered with Yolande’s chaplain and senior official Simon de Fau, both directly presented to canonries; Jean appears in a larger group presented to expectatives and minor benefices in local control. Guillaume de Machaut is last documented at Yolande’s court in May/June during a visit to Paris shortly before her marriage to Philip of Navarre. Over three weeks spent in Paris cementing her relationships with her future in-laws, Yolande met with Philip’s brother Charles and sister Blanche, dowager queen of Philip VI, also traveling to Longchamp, StCloud, and Château-Thierry. The marriage took place in secret shortly thereafter, or possibly during Yolande’s visit on May to the Franciscan Abbey of Longchamp, a church under Navarre patronage. While in Paris, at some point in the eleven days up to and including May, Guillaume de Machaut, a ‘maistre Rogier’ – probably Roger Metekerk, her clerk – and knights and esquires of the countess’s household were paid the sum of l. s. d. Guillaume’s absence from Reims on May for the enthronement of Humbert, dauphin de Viennois as archbishop – an event of paramount importance in the local calendar with which only a truly exceptional occasion, such as a patron’s wedding, could compete – may imply that he was already with Yolande’s court. In Yolande’s marriage, moreover, it would not be unreasonable to see a step-change in the opportunity available to Guillaume to attach himself to the court of her brother-in-law Charles. The first substantive, though indirect, indication that Guillaume had established a direct tie emerges from Charles’s supplication of October for Jean de Machaut, a further reiteration of his claim on a canonry at Reims. As Roger Bowers points out, Jean’s style in this document, as simply ‘dilecto suo’, may signal that he had not entered a direct employment relationship with Charles; but practice in this regard was not always consistent, and it remains possible that either he or Guillaume, or both, had already done so. A previously unnoticed indult of plenary remission granted to Guillaume de Machaut on February , allowing him to choose a confessor to grant remission, once only, at the hour of death, may perhaps signal that his career had recently entered a new period of itinerancy. • •
• •
•
Bubenicek , –. ADN, B , fol. v: ‘a lui [Simon De Fau] pour despens faix leans pour Guillaume de Maschou, maistre Rogier que mainger leans plusieurs foix, et pour les chevaliers et les escuyers’ (to him [Simon De Fau] for sums spent there [Paris] for Guillaume de Machaut, master Roger who ate there several times, and for the knights and esquires). Referenced in Bubenicek , n. (as B ); see also Earp , . For Maître Roger de Metekerk, see Finot , xxxix, , . Bowers , ; Leach b, . Leach b, ; Bowers , n. . The supplication is at RS , fol. v; Berlière , (no. ); the letter, granting a canonry at Toul instead of Reims, is RA , fol. v. To the evidence for Machaut’s later relationship with Charles can be added the account book entry for the warrant recording the gift to him of a horse (on which see most recently Bowers , –) in Pamplona, AGN, Reg. , fol. r, and at . RA , fol. v, addressed to ‘Guillelmo de Machaudio canonico Remensis’. A similar indult issued a few days earlier on January to ‘Eveline de Machaudio mulieri Cathalaunensis’ (RA , fol. r) may reflect a family relationship.
Guillaume de Machaut and Yolande of Flanders
Machaut’s service with Yolande defers the date at which it is plausible to see him entering the service of Charles, king of Navarre until the summer of at the earliest, rendering improbable the hypothesis that he was resident in Pamplona in / and occupied there with arrangements for Charles’s coronation. It also affords latitude, if such were needed, for a correspondingly greater distance between the dates cited in the prologue of Jugement Navarre, where Machaut describes his self-isolation in time of plague between November and late March , and the work’s completion. At the same time, although its reorientation towards Charles may reposition/re-fictionalize some of the events described, it is also possible that Jugement Navarre was the work not of an insider at Bonne’s or Charles’s courts but written ‘outside-in’ from the vantage point of a seat in Yolande’s court, serving her interests, those of Machaut, or both. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that the Confort d’ami may also have been written from Yolande’s court, as a solace to her imprisoned brother-in-law. In such a setting – particularly in light of Yolande’s charm offensive in the second half of – it is also plausible to root Guillaume de Machaut’s developing relationship with John II, subsequently less positive as trust between Yolande and John soured, with implications for Machaut’s works and for what has been seen as one of the principal artifacts of that relationship, Machaut MS C. If, as Uri Smilansky suggests, MS C was Machaut’s own conception, a device to secure employment with Bonne after the death of John, king of Bohemia, then perhaps – if indeed the manuscript was part of that calculus – he succeeded in this with Yolande. Alternatively, it may be that another patronage relationship intervened. Or again, MS C may have been copied after Machaut had entered Yolande’s service, positioned amid her changing relationship with France and Navarre, and perhaps Machaut’s reassessments of his own fortunes. This last scenario is viable from early at the latest. Machaut’s presence at Yolande’s court further supports the view, convincingly established by Bowers and Leach, that Machaut continued in the service of the great courts at least until the late s, and had not yet settled in Reims. It may have implications for further works ascribed to the late s and early s. While the Remede has been associated with Bonne’s court, for other works apparently directed at a female supporter there is at least a theoretical choice of dedicatees between Bonne and Yolande. In this vein, Machaut’s comment in the Voir dit, purportedly narrating an event in , that he has not loved or served a lady ‘for ten, no, rather more than twelve years’ may in its hesitation differentiate two female patrons, leaving Yolande unnamed because of the now-compromised link with the house of Navarre. So much is perhaps speculation. But the emergence of a new employer in Guillaume de Machaut’s career who was herself a player in the gathering feud between the kingdoms of France and Navarre has a wider significance for the composer’s political associations, for his last court role, under Charles, king of Navarre, and potentially for his works.
• • • •
Advanced in Bowers , –, and refuted in Earp , –; see also Leach b, –. Smilansky , ff. Bowers ; Leach b, –. Earp a, .
Andrew Wathey
Guillaume de Machaut’s seal Applied directly to the face of this document (see Figure .), in the manner widely found in receipts, quittances, and short personal attestations from the fourteenth century onwards, is the impression in red wax, c. mm in diameter, of Guillaume de Machaut’s personal seal (it has suffered significant damage, which makes the following identifications tentative). A onesided signet seal, its impression depicts a winged figure astride a lion, playing a harp, plausibly identifiable – as Julian Gardner observed in our correspondence – as Cupid, as represented in a classical iconographic tradition disseminated in the Middle Ages through, among other means, ancient intaglios, and later frequently associated with the words ‘Amor vincit omnia’ (the famous cameo in the Museo Archeologico in Florence in shown in Figure .). The figure, dressed apparently in clerical garb, and conceivably with an almoner’s pouch at his waist (an observation I owe to Lawrence Earp), is enclosed within a band. In the manner of other medieval ‘letter seals’, this may have been intended to depict a letter ‘O’; it is possible, therefore, as John Cherry has suggested to me, that the figure was intended to represent another subject, perhaps Orpheus. Outside the band, in the border of the seal are letters forming an inscription, running clockwise from the top right-hand side of the seal and divided at the bottom, which can be tentatively read as ‘SE[L] GVIL[...] | DE MACHAUT’. The sealing clause in the text of the document confirms that Guillaume is using his own seal. As John Cherry comments in correspondence, Machaut’s seal was newly-engraved, quite probably from a pictorial source, and the engraver may possibly have had an intaglio or cameo in mind. It sits comfortably in the tradition of seals of high-status individuals, including canons and other senior ecclesiastics, who used classical imagery in their seals, sometimes emulating ancient intaglios or physically incorporating them into new seal matrices. Its wider frame of reference, and use of lion imagery, bear comparison with the seals of Philippe de Vitry, one depicting a lion with two bodies joined in a single head, with two bearded riders, and the other, his secret seal, Hercules with the Nemean lion. This is for future exploration. At least one other member of Yolande’s circle, her mother’s Lombard physician Richard de Veronne, had a personal seal with a classical subject (Hercules). Other depictions of Cupid include the seal of the late-thirteenth-century Abbot of Durham, where Cupid sits on the back of a dolphin, and possibly a bust of Cupid on the counter-seal of Jean I, duke of Brabant. •
•
• • •
I am grateful to John Cherry for his kind assistance with this description, and to Julian Gardner, Margaret Bent, Alison Stones, Martin Henig, and Lawrence Earp for generously sharing their comments on the seal and its imagery. The tentative identifications advanced here could not have been taken this far without generous input of the colleagues here acknowledged. On the basis of a less detailed image, a comparison suggested by Lawrence Earp between this figure and the ‘portrait’ of the composer riding on a horse and singing from a scroll in the Remede de Fortune in Machaut MS C (fol. v) initially appeared attractive, but proved less convincing when a high-resolution image became available. For the iconographic tradition, see, for example, Becker , ; Vollenweider , , , and Taf. Abb. ; Giuliano , – (no. ). See Cherry, Hennig, and D’Ottone Rambach ; Simonet . See Wathey , ; Roman , , , and (with sketch), , fig. . Demay , (no. ), which includes the seals of a number of Yolande’s other clerks on pp. , ff.; Durham Cathedral Archive, Misc. Ch. , image at ; Demay , , which also lists personal seals on classical subjects for some sixteen canons in cathedrals and other establishments.
A . AAV, RS fol. r: Supplicat sanctitas vestra devota in cristo filia nostra Yolandis de Flandria comitissa Barrensis et domina de Casselz, quater dilecto familiari suo Guillelmo de Machaudio de canonicatu et prebenda ecclesie Virdunensis vacantibus per liberam resignationem de eis per Hugueninum de Barro vel procuratorem suum apud sede apostolicam factam dignemini cum omnibus iuribus et pertinenciis suis providere, non obstante quod in Remensi et Sancti Quintini de Sancto Quintino Laudunensis diocesis ecclesiis canonicatus et prebendas noscitur obtinere, cum ceteris non obstantibus et clausulis opportunis ac executoribus. Fiat R. [...] Kal. Dec. [ November ] fol. r: Supplicat sanctitas vestra devota in cristo filia nostra Yolandis de Flandria comitissa Barrensis et domina de Casselz quater dilecto clerico et familiari suo Rogero de Medekerke de canonicatu sub expectatione prebende ecclesie sancti Donatiani de Brugis, Tornacensis diocesis dignemini providere cum acceptatione etc., et cum omnibus non obstantibus et clausulis opportunis ac executoribus. Fiat. R. [...] Item quater dilecto familiari suo Johanni de Machaudio de canonicatu sub expectatione prebende ecclesie Remensis dignemini providere cum acceptatione etc., non obstantis quod in Virdunensis et de Lutosa, Cameracensis diocesis ecclesiis canonicatus et prebendas noscitur obtinere cum ceteris ut supra. Fiat. R. [...] Kal. Dec. [ November ] . Lille, ADN, B , no. . May . Nous Yolens de Flandres contesse de Bar et dame de Cassel faisons savoir et cognoissant a tous. Que de nostre especial commandement a nostre chapelleins messire Symon de Fau ait paie et delivre touz les deniers et florins ci apres nomez. Premiers septante et quatre petis florins pour les draps et pennez des robes nos escuiers par Guillaume de Meschault. Item trois petits florins a Guillaume le Bouchier pour aler en Flandre. Item six vins florins a lescu a Monseigneur Aubert de Pierrefort. Item cinquante et deux escus et douze petis florins rendus au roy de Champaigne lesquez il nous avoit presteis en France pour aidier a faire nos despens. Item dix petis florins audict Roy. Item quinze florins a lescu a Jannin nostre chambellan pour xiiij aunes de drap pour nous achetees a Chaalons. Item deus petis florins a li pour ses despens et pour retondre ledit drap. Item quatre escus et treze sols a Jannin que nous li deumes pour un coupe fait a li. Item dous petis florins a nostre tresorier qu[...] a Bar. Item cinq chaieres a monseigneur Thierri de Hoquereng pour le signeur dou Bos. Item quatre vins et treize escus a Baudet nostre chambellan pour [ses ...]. Item audit Baudet dous cens petis florins de nostre dit commandement. Item vint escus a Marguerite de Rance nostre damiselle. Item trois escus rend[us a ...]s pour despens quil fait a Fontainebliau. Item trois cenz et soixante petis florins a monseigneur W… de la Manche nostre chapellain pour pourteir a mess[ire ...] florins a Hennequin Nenoufranque. Item trente escus et dous petis florins a Stoupe pour aler en Alemaingne y querir des ronces pour nous. Item un escu [...]t le seigneur Dostain. Item vint escus rendus a monseigneur Thierri de Bargeville lesquels il nous avoit prestes pour pourter a Paris par Pierre nostre taillour. Item dous petis florins delivres e Godeffroy nostre uxier pour aleir a Clermont querir escrips dez Blandi. Item treize escus a maistre Thibaut de Bourmont pour faire escrire le mandement a Vitry lequel nous faissiens a Lenoncourt et pour revenir a Blandi. Item dous escus a Guillaume Goular en descompte de ce quil nous demande et pour venir de Blandi a Bar. Item dous escus a Thierri varlet au signeur de Loupi pour ouvraige quil avoit fait pour nous. Item dous escus et douze souls parisis a Collignon et a Coguiug nos messaigers pour pourter lettres dou contremant. Item six vins escus a Jehan Vellain de Paris pour les jouyaux que nous achetames a li pour la femme Eddouar nostre fil Item trois escus et dous petis florins a Pierrot nostre taillour pour porter [... du val] de Paris et pour ses despens. Item trois escus a Guillaume le Termaire nostre clerc pour aller en Flandre. Item six escus au signeur de Belrewert pour aler de Raingue en sa maison. Item treize escus et demi escu a Jannin nostre chambelan pour aler a Troyes veoir des draps et des scendaux pour nous. Item vint escus et cinq souls fors paiez a un mercier pour acheter des rences et des crevechies pour nous. Somme toute dez parties davant dictes seize cens sixante cinq livres quatre vins et trois deniers. En somme dou piece pour trente souls et
Andrew Wathey
autre monaie a lavenant. Si mandons par ces presentes lettres a nos compteurs que la dicte somme compte au dit nostre chapellain en ses comptes sans atendre autres [commission] ou mandement de part nous. Donne subz nostre seel lan mcccxl et nuef le cinquieme jour mois de May. Par ma dicte dame la contesse P. Copitons. dorse: lettres dou vje papier . Lille, ADN, B , no. . June . Par le contesse de Bar et Dame de Cassel Receveres ~ nous envoions en Flandres Guillaume de Machau nostre ame et feal clerc pour aucunes de nos grosses besoingnes, se vous mandons et commandons que tout ce quil vous demandera dargent pour faire ses despens que sans nul delay vous li delivres et nous [...] [mie? / informe ?] des combien vous li dues baillie et nous vous en baillerons cedu[le] et les descenderons en vos comptes et ce ne laissies nullement car il nous desplairoit sil y avoit deffaut. Donne a Clermont le quatre iour de Juing lan .xlix. Added at the foot in a nineteenth-century hand, in relation to the dorse now glued to the album mount: ‘Sur le dos est écrit: à nostre amé et féal Henry de Medeke [Medekerke?] nostre receveur de Flandres’. . Lille, ADN, B , no. . August . Sachent tout, que ie Guillaumes de Machault clers ma dame de Bar et chanoines de Reins ay eu et receu par la main maist de honnourable personne et discrete maistre Rogier de Metkerke .lx. escus, pour les besoingnes de ma dicte dame de la quelle somme ie me tieng a bien paies, et en quitte le dit maistre Rogier et tous autres a qui quittance en appartient. Par le tesmoing de ceste sedule seellee de mon seel. Escripte a Bruges le dimenche apres la miaoust la[n] mil .iij.C xlix [seal; dorse blank]
. E G M: M A H J G* Benjamin L. Albritton
This might be the moment to mention a theory that Machaut authored an early version of the Roman de Mélusine, or Histoire des Lusignan of Jean d’Arras, ordered by John, duke of Berry in .
The contributions of Lawrence Earp to the field of Machaut studies are so vast that now, nearly thirty years after the publication of his encyclopedic Guillaume de Machaut: A Guide to Research, even a seemingly innocuous footnote like the one quoted above can open vistas for further research. Earp’s synthesis of more than a century of Machaut scholarship provided a snapshot of the field which has served as a foundation for research in this area ever since. The fact that he included references and theories that had been superseded, abandoned, or overlooked gives us reason to return again and again with fresh eyes to this livre ou il met tout ses choses. This essay moves from one such footnote to a reappraisal of our definition of the boundaries of Machaut’s corpus. It will take as a starting point a hitherto unnoticed reference to a chronicle of the counts of Rethel attributed to one ‘Guillermus de Mascandio’ that appears in Jacques de Guise’s Annales Hannoniae in the s. The quote with which this essay begins refers to a theory of a lost late work by Machaut. The hypothesis, first offered by Leo Hoffrichter in , argues that differences between Jean d’Arras’s version of the Mélusine, composed in the early s at the request of John, duke of Berry, and the version written by Couldrette slightly later, suggest a common but lost exemplar from which both authors drew. He suggests that this exemplar must have come from a well-known and skilled poet and chooses Guillaume de Machaut as a likely candidate primarily because of his prominence in the second half of the fourteenth century and because of his treatment of matters related to Pierre de Lusignan in his Prise d’Alexandre, completed after the death of Lusignan in . In his argument, Hoffrichter determines that such a work would have been written sometime in the period between and Machaut’s death in , offering c. as a possible date. Robert J. Nolan, a half-century later, re-engaged with this hypothesis in an attempt to reconcile Hoffrichter’s suggestions with a similar putative lost early version of the Mélusine put forward by Louis Stouff and recapitulated by Karl Heisig. In doing so, he pushed back the date of potential composition of this lost work to ‘ or ’. Mélusine scholars have largely discounted the need for an early lost copy of * • • • • • •
I am grateful to Deborah McGrady, Jared Hartt, and Tamsyn Mahoney-Steel for their helpful exchanges during the preparation of this chapter. Earp a, n. . Earp a. Hoffrichter , . See Kevin Brownlee’s chapter on the Prise in this volume. Stouff and Heisig . Nolan , .
Machaut in the Annales Hannoniae of Jacques de Guise
the tale on textual grounds, and it would be extremely difficult to argue for a lost Machaut work dating to the s or s given the intensive aggregation and anthologizing activity that produced the spectacular complete-works manuscripts upon which so much of our understanding of Machaut’s corpus and authorial persona rely. Nonetheless, the Hoffrichter hypothesis is an interesting one as it forces us to engage with our understanding of Machaut’s output and our reliance upon the deluxe completeworks manuscripts for our understandings of the boundaries of that corpus of poetry and music we can confidently ascribe to Guillaume de Machaut. The famous index accompanying A, for instance, has helped to support the foundational belief in Machaut studies that a small number of manuscripts produced during his lifetime and potentially under his supervision demonstrate an evolving and complete body of work carefully controlled by an author concerned with the organization and presentation of his lifetime’s literary and musical output. Unlike Chaucer or many of Machaut’s French contemporaries and successors for whom we have references to works which are no longer extant, Machaut’s material legacy and our understanding of his role in the production of that legacy leaves very little room for flexibility in our understanding of his oeuvre. In contrast, we might consider Christine de Pizan’s analogue to A, British Library, Harley . Here, the author was involved in the production of a ‘complete-works’ manuscript which, nonetheless, lacks several works that can be confidently attributed to her. Can we really be certain that, unlike his contemporaries, Machaut was the only one who successfully preserved his entire literary and musical oeuvre? As a field, we have accepted a level of boundary-making when it comes to Machaut’s output that might be fruitful to question periodically. The results of that questioning might be maintenance of the status quo, or they might lead to a rethinking of our basic assumptions, but the exercise of pushing at the borders of our knowledge of a medieval author’s corpus in light of ongoing discoveries and advancement of studies is core to the methodology of humanistic inquiry. Let us take, as examples, the opera dubia that appear in some of the later Machaut manuscripts, including the Dit de la cerf blanc, and the two lais notated with hidden polyphony that appear only in E. In the case of the former, the field has shied •
• • •
•
See Zeldenrust , , which dismisses the need for an early common source for Couldrette and d’Arras, referring to the comparison work done by Matthew W. Morris. Morris concludes that d’Arras was the source for Couldrette. See also Courroux who argues against attribution to Machaut, though in favor of a Mélusine story that circulated, perhaps orally. Earp (a, –) summarizes the historiography of this area of Machaut studies. See for a full digitization of the manuscript at the British library portal. The recent discussion of the application of species models drawn from the field of ecology to literary and documentary survival from the Middle Ages can be illuminating in this regard (see Kestemont and others ). While the surviving deluxe manuscripts of Machaut’s works form a special case for the era in which they were created, the overall scenario presented by Kestemont and his colleagues suggests there is reason to approach our sense of completeness in the Machaut corpus with some caution. Hoppin and Hasselman and Walker describe these two lais and outline the ‘hidden’ aspect of polyphonic settings obscured by successive notation but which can be realized by either performing the music as a round or by combining sections of music.
Benjamin L. Albritton
away from ascription to Machaut though it still can be found listed alongside, if not among, Machaut’s works, while with the latter there has been some debate, but we still find them listed among Machaut’s works in Earp’s Guide. The Dit de la fleur de lis et de la marguerite provides another interesting case: extant only in G, it was not included in early Machaut editions and was only fully edited in by James I. Wimsatt. It is fair to say that for the period from the mid-s to the s, during the period from Machaut’s first completeworks manuscript to the last made in his lifetime, we can be reasonably confident the works contained therein represent his gradually expanding oeuvre. In this manuscript-based approach to attribution, though, there are periods for which we can be less confident that we have everything. Without knowing more about the completeness and organization of Machaut’s poetic output before C was compiled, and the exact nature of his activities in the s after A was compiled, the best we can say is that there are some fuzzy borders around an otherwise well-defined surviving corpus. If the corpus represented by the complete-works manuscripts produced during Machaut’s lifetime (and possibly under some level of authorial control) can be firmly attributed to him, and we agree that there is room for debate about some of the works included in the posthumous collected-works manuscripts from the decades following the author’s death (each with intriguing and complicated transmission histories), there remains one avenue to explore when it comes to potential gaps in our knowledge of Machaut’s output: citation of currently unknown or lost works attributed to Machaut by contemporary or roughly contemporary authors. I thus now turn to the previously unremarked naming of ‘Guillermus de Mascandio’ as the author of a chronicle of the counts of Rethel in Jacques de Guise’s Annales Hannoniae.
• • • •
•
Earp a, –. Kelly is somewhat more non-committal on the topic of attribution of this work. Earp a, , –, – (including further citations about the debate regarding ascription). Wimsatt (, –) summarizes the problematic editorial history of this piece. McGrady () discusses the dangers of an overreliance on A in Machaut studies when considering the fourteenth-century context and reception of his works, to which we might add concerns about using A to define Machaut’s corpus. This area was explored in more detail in the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded project Machaut in the Book (–: McGrady and Albritton, co-PIs) which partnered with the Bibliothèque nationale de France and e-codices, the Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland, to facilitate digitization of many of the Machaut manuscripts, including anthologies which position Machaut’s output as part of a network of literary and musical output distinct from the monumental complete-works books. Some results of that project appear in Bain , Boulton , and Swift a. The Latinization of Machaut’s name varies in fourteenth-century sources. While ‘Guillelmus’ is the common translation of his given name, ‘Guillermus’ also appears. ‘De Machaut’ has more variability in its Latin forms. In Andrew Wathey’s chapter in this volume, ‘de Machaudio’ is used, while ‘de Mascandio’ appears in contemporary music treatises like the Libellus cantus mensurabilis. Even within a single manuscript witness of the Annales Hannoniae, the orthography is not consistent, and declension adds to the complexity. For the remainder of this essay, I will use the form ‘Guillermus de Mascandio’ for consistency, while recognizing that ‘Guillelmi’, ‘Willermi’, various spellings of ‘de Mascandio’, and abbreviated forms of the name all appear in the manuscript sources and refer to the same individual who I suggest is Guillaume de Machaut. See also Earp a, –; Crocker , .
Machaut in the Annales Hannoniae of Jacques de Guise
The Annales Hannoniae This is not the place for a full study of Jacques de Guise’s extensive history of Hainaut, but a brief overview will provide context for the role of the Machaut citations within it. After spending a portion of the second half of the fourteenth century in Paris, de Guise relocated to Valenciennes. Writing in the s, de Guise organized his Annales in twenty-one books divided into three volumes: the prehistoric origins of the area (including a Trojan founding myth); the emergence of the county of Hainaut as a political entity, focusing on the early counts and saints of the area (this is where the citations in question appear); and, finally, a volume devoted to the eleventh to thirteenth century history of Hainaut. He used, as sources, a number of familiar chronicles and histories (Geoffrey of Monmouth, Giselbert of Mons, and the Chronique dite de Baudouin d’Avesnes, for example) but also a fair number of sources for which we have no surviving witnesses (Lucius of Tongeren, Hugh of Toul, Nicolas Ruclery). The work was written for Albert I, duke of Bavaria and count of Hainaut, and serves as a unifying text for the area of Hainaut at a time of political unrest (a situation that would be echoed half a century later when the work was translated from Latin to French as the Chroniques de Hainaut to support Burgundian rule). De Guise’s working method for his chronicle appears to be largely that of compilation. The sources from which de Guise worked are often readily identifiable and occasionally include copies of charters and other documents. Throughout the excerpts with which we are concerned, de Guise refers to himself as actor (‘the author’) and is careful to distinguish between his interjections and the sources he cites and summarizes. In many ways, he serves as a self-conscious guide through an impressive array of excerpts from his sources – frequently admitting to unsurety and imploring his readers for additional information. While the chronicle occasionally slips into factually problematic areas, the inaccuracies often seem to arise from de Guise’s sources, rather than constituting flights of fancy on the author’s part. The impression we get, as readers, is of an extensively researched compilation with excerpts pulled together from various sources to build a historical narrative with political aims of legitimation given the complicated line of succession by which Albert I of Bavaria came to govern the county. • • •
•
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Van Overstraeten provides an excellent short summary of the historiography of the Annales Hannoniae. A modern analysis of this chronicle is overdue. For some discussion of the sources used by Jacques de Guise, see Rigoulot , , and Small , . For a full study of one of the lost sources, see van Overstraeten . Wilmans and Sackur describe many of the sources specified within the Annales. The list of sources cited suggests access to an extensive library, which may have included volumes in the author’s own collection. It is tempting to imagine that among the ‘plusieurs aultres biaus volumes’ left to the order of St Francis of Mons by the author and his brother one might have found some of the sources mentioned. See Lacroix , –. The genealogy of the counts and countesses of Rethel, particularly in the early years of the county, continues to be somewhat uncertain, though work published in the late twentieth century has provided some clarity. See, for instance, Bur, Boureux, and Lefèvre , –, and Mathieu . Wauters discusses the factual issues raised by de Guise’s chronicle but does not engage deeply with the author’s approach to compilation from diverse and occasionally unreliable sources. Van Oostrom .
Benjamin L. Albritton
The Machaut citations in the Annales Hannoniae Books and , which belong to the second volume of the chronicle that is focused on the early counts of Hainaut, contain two references to Guillermus (or Guillelmus) de Mascandio. The first of these, from Chapter of Book , appears in Figure ., with a transcription of the Latin and an English translation immediately below. In this passage, de Guise discusses a certain Manasses for whom we have no historical evidence. He relies upon the Mascandio historia to link Manasses to the better-known Reginar Longneck (c. –) for whom we have both documentary evidence and references in multiple chronicles. The historia states that Manasses was Reginar’s father and also conveys a story of Manasses interacting with the convent of St Waltrude (a seventh-century saint localized to Mons and the vicinity, who founded her own convent) and dying before he could successfully replace the nuns with a religious order that could perform more rites for the people of the area. De Guise goes on to contrast the historia’s account with a nearly identical episode described by Giselbert of Mons in the twelfth-century Chronicon Hanoniense about an unnamed count of Mons and the nuns of St Waltrude, concluding that Guillermus and Giselbert are describing the same person (the full text of Book , Chapter is provided in the appendix). Intriguingly, De Guise writes that ‘I read in an account written in the vernacular that it was Manasses who ruled the county of Mons before Reginar Longneck’. It is unclear if this vernacular account is the historia mentioned at the beginning of his chapter – de Guise’s interjections into his text are not always linear or chronologically clear and his entreaties to add more information to his narrative suggest that throughout the writing process he may have reworked passages as sources became available to him (the writing process for the Annales lasted for nearly a decade). But if this account is the historia, then the text by Mascandio was written in French. Several things therefore stand out in de Guise’s chapter. The first is that a source ascribed to Guillermus de Mascandio is being compared with a known and extant text by Giselbert of Mons to provide contextual information about a little-discussed (and probably imaginary) early count of Hainaut. The second is that the historia conveys a scene found in other sources but provides the additional detail of naming the protagonist in the conflict with the St Waltrude nuns. Finally, de Guise clearly cites this material as being from the historia Guillermi de Mascandio. The citation process reveals some tacit assumptions, most importantly that de Guise expects his readership to know of both the author he names and the text from which he draws his material. He does not refer to a title for the work, just that it is a historia: depending on translation choices, this suggests a written work dealing with •
• •
Figures . and . can also be accessed online through Gallica at and respectively. Unfortunately, the volume in which these excerpts are found has not yet been digitized in full color and the images online are reformatted from microfilm. The Latin text below Figures . and . is from Fortia d’Urban , and ; English translations my own. While Manasses is a common name among the early counts of Rethel, the specific Manasses that de Guise describes here cannot be linked with any of the later counts of that name. For an overview of Giselbert’s work, see De Hemptinne .
Machaut in the Annales Hannoniae of Jacques de Guise
Figure .: Excerpt from Book , Chapter , BnF lat. , vol. , fol. vb (BnF)
Ex historia Guillermi de Mascandio. Manasses comes Hannoniae, ex uxore legitimâ genuit Raginerum, cognominatum Longi-Colli, qui contrà Sarracenos, terram christianorum invadentes, potenter se exposuit. Hic inter caetera facta quae de eo leguntur, disposuit intentione bonâ sanctimoniales sanctae Waldetrudis ab ejusdem ecclesiâ deponere, et loco earum canonicos sacerdotes instituere, qui Deo sacri ficia sine medio pro populo offerrent: sed morte praeventus quod disposuerat perficere non valuit.
From The Account of Guillaume de Machaut. Manasses, count of Hainaut, begat by his lawful wife [a son] Reginar, nicknamed Longneck, who valiantly fought the Saracens during their invasions of the Christian lands. Among other deeds we can read about him, he arranged, with good intention, to depose the nuns of Saint Waltrude from their convent, and to put in their place clerics who could perform sacred services directly for the people; but death prevented him from accomplishing this.
historical matters – possibly a chronicle, a genealogy, or a similar account. While aspects of de Guise’s account might be suspect, it remains that he is assuming of his readership a familiarity either with the authority of a writer named Guillermus de Mascandio, a historia written by him or thought to have been written by him, or both. Aside from genre, author, and uniqueness of content, however, it is difficult to say much more about this passage other than that de Guise would have us believe this source existed and could have been known by his audience in the late fourteenth century. The second citation of this historia appears several folios later in the manuscript witnesses as Chapter of Book ; see Figure . (the full text appears in the appendix). Once again, the historia forms the basis for de Guise’s observations (focused here on Reginar Longneck), but in this chapter we are provided additional information about this source: •
The paucity of information about this historia provided by de Guise is frustrating, but the detail that it gives two different readings for the name ‘Manasses’ (with ‘Manicherius’ as an alternate) might allow identification should this text ever surface.
Benjamin L. Albritton
Figure .: Excerpt from Book , Chapter , BnF lat. , vol. , fol. ra (BnF)
Quia de Raginero Longi-Colli, comite Montensi, superiùs tactum est et inferiùs multa declarabuntur, de eo duce quis fuerit, et undè processerit, non absurdè perquirendum est. Cui quaestioni respondendo quod una sola historia, videlicet Guillermi de Mascandio, in chronicâ quam compilavit de comitibus Regicestensibus, proloquitur. Dicit enim Raginerum Longi-Colli, comitem quondàm Haynauci, fuisse Manasses, comitis Regiscestensis atque Montensis, legitimum filium; dictarum patriarum et Alsatiae, Ardennae, Vogiae Evodiique, et suprà Mosam et Mosellam atque Rhenum et fluviorum, plurium quoque patriarum, civitatum atque castrorum ibidem existentium, dominium habuisse. Quis verò fuerit ejus mater? Historiâ penitùs silet. Sed quià haec posset oriri difficultas: quis fuerit iste Manasses? Habetur in historiâ praedicti Willermi, quòd dictus Manasses, ab aliquibus Maincerius et ab aliquibus Manasses vocitatus est. Since we have already discussed Reginar Longneck, count of Mons, and he will often be discussed later, it is worthwhile to inquire about this duke and his origins. There is only one history that can help to answer this question, namely, the chronicle which Guillaume de Machaut compiled concerning the counts of Rethel. [In it] he reports that Reginar was the legitimate son of Manasses, count of Rethel and Mons. Besides these two counties, he [Manasses] was also lord of Alsace, Ardennes, Vosges and Liège, as well as various countries, towns, and castles on the banks of the Meuse, Moselle, and Rhine. But who was his [Reginar’s] mother? The history remains completely silent [on this matter]. But another difficulty arises: who was this Manasses? Guillaume, in his history, records that some called him Manasses and others called him Maincerius.
Machaut in the Annales Hannoniae of Jacques de Guise
de Guise states explicitly that Guillermus de Mascandio compiled a chronicle about the counts of Rethel. De Guise identifies the historia as a historical narrative associated with a prominent fourteenth-century family, and, if we interpret de Guise’s statement at the end of Book , Chapter to apply to this ‘chronicle’, then we can assume that it was written in the vernacular. Most of de Guise’s sources are in Latin, so his special consideration of a vernacular text on this topic is notable. In Book , the historia is used to support the statement that Reginar was the legitimate son of Manasses. Although Reginar appears in many other chronicles and histories, along with documentary evidence, de Guise had difficulty tracing his parentage and thus turned to the chronicle written by Mascandio as his only authority on Reginar’s parentage. From this source, we have the father’s name, but not the mother’s. It seems that the utility of this source, since it appears nowhere else in the Annales, is in the genealogy of these two early counts of Hainaut. While de Guise relies on other authors throughout Book to provide additional information on Reginar (extensive sections are quoted from Sigebert of Gembloux, for instance, in Book , Chapter ), he never returns to the historia in this or subsequent Books. The afterlives of the citations in the Annales Hannoniae Jacques de Guise’s Latin chronicle survives in limited numbers. That it was not widely disseminated in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries suggests a localized chronicle with a geographically limited interest and readership. However, an important series of events in the fifteenth century guaranteed that its readership and reach spread widely. This remarkable expansion occurred when Philip III, duke of Burgundy (Philip the Good), commissioned Jean Wauquelin to translate de Guise’s Latin text into French, a project started in . This reinvigorated chronicle was then used to further political goals in the region by providing a founding story, legitimization, and expression of power for the Burgundian court. It is preserved as the Chroniques de Hainaut in three luxurious illustrated manuscript volumes which survive in the Royal Library of Belgium. This version of the text was disseminated in numerous manuscript copies and even more broadly distributed when it was printed in the sixteenth century and sold in Paris through several vendors associated with the Université. For the purposes of this study, the result of this rebirth of de Guise’s text is that the reference to a chronicle of the counts of Rethel by Guillermus de Mascandio (or various translations of that name) was repeated many times over in manuscripts in the mid-fifteenth century and then in print beginning in the s. All the more curious, then, that the citation of this author and text has gone unremarked in Machaut studies, especially given the scrutiny the Annales Hannoniae and the Chroniques de Hainaut received in the nineteenth century – a period in which the interest in Machaut studies led to the earliest editions and the formation of our understanding of Machaut’s corpus.
•
KBR is the second volume, and will be discussed below. The first and third volumes are cataloged as numbers and , respectively.
Benjamin L. Albritton
As Figures . and . show, Wauquelin chose to translate the name of the author from de Guise’s Latin into French as ‘Guillaume (or Guillame) de Mascaud’. Close examination of the text shows that the scribe of KBR distinguishes between ‘u’ and ‘n’ throughout this section, with ‘n’ having a thin connector between minims at the top, and ‘u’ having a similar connection at the bottom of the two minims, allowing us to recognize the transcription in this instance as ‘Mascaud’.
Figure .: Excerpt from Book , Chapter , KBR , fol. v (Bibliothèque royale de Belgique)
Figure .: Excerpt from Book , Chapter , KBR , fol. v (Bibliothèque royale de Belgique)
A more complete study of Wauquelin’s translation process and the variant witnesses that survive might provide additional information about how a mid-fifteenth century audience viewed de Guise’s sources, and which of those sources might still have been recognizable to the readers of the Chroniques de Hainaut. An interlinear gloss in another mid-fifteenthcentury copy of the Chroniques from the Burgundian Library, KBR –, fol. r (Figure .), provides a clue to both the obscurity of Guillermus de Mascandio’s historia and to the challenges faced by the translator. In that manuscript, the scribe writes: ‘guill[au]me de mastaud en une cronique que il a compullee as contes de une seignourie qui se dit en latin Regiteste[n]‘ (Guillaume de Machaut, in a chronicle he compiled about the counts of a realm that is called, in Latin, Regitestensis). The annotation in red ink explains that ‘Regiteste[n]’ • • • •
A digitized version of this manuscript is available at , the KBR digital portal. Bousmanne, van Hemelryck, and van Hoorebeeck , –. Digital access to KBR – is available at . The scribe in this example has chosen to abbreviate the term ‘Regitestensis’, the Latin form for ‘Rethelois’, as ‘Regitesten’ with a macron above the ‘n’ signaling a contraction. That contraction is signaled here by square brackets placed around the ‘n’.
Machaut in the Annales Hannoniae of Jacques de Guise
denotes Rethel (‘cest Rettes’), suggesting that ‘Regitestensis’ was not a familiar term for the Rethelois in the mid-fifteenth-century circles in which Wauquelin’s translation was being read. By the time the text was being printed in the sixteenth century, the name, as translated from the Latin, appears as Guillaume de Mescault (or Meschault) as seen in Figures 6.6 . and . taken from a book published in 1531. 6.7 .32 Although this spelling might be more recognizable to modern readers, perhaps the memory of a poet named Machaut was distant enough to have lost its cultural impact for readers of the printed text.33
Figure 6.5: .: Interlinear annotation in Book , 14, Chapter , 5, KBR –, 10213–14, fol. 252r (Bibliothèque royale de Belgique)
Figure 6.6: .: Excerpt from Book 13, , Chapter 45, , BnF RES-M-219, RES-M-, fol. 55 r (BnF)
• 32 •
• 33 •
Wauquelin 1531. . See for the page containing Figure . and 6.6 for the page containing Figure 6.7. .. In the Latin version of Book 14, , Chapter 5, , de Guise mentions Guillermus de Mascandio and then later refers to him just as Guillermus. In the edition of 1531, , the last name is used twice: first as Guillaume de Mescault and then as Guillaume de Meschault The ways in which Guillaume de Machaut is slowly effaced as a recognizable name even as his works make the shift from manuscript into print in the sixteenth century is an area worthy of further exploration.
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Figure .: Excerpt from Book , Chapter , BnF RES-M-, fol. v (BnF)
A hypothetical ‘histoire des comtes de Rethel’ Although there may be reasons to be circumspect about the potential for the existence of a text that was compiled to trace the history of the counts of Rethel, whether by Guillaume de Machaut or a similarly-named author, let us engage in a hypothesis that such a work existed and examine the circumstances in which it might have been produced, reasons it might not have been included with the more authoritative complete-works manuscripts produced in the final decades of Machaut’s life, and try to determine if the body of circumstantial evidence is sufficient to allow us to question the reliance upon the complete-works books to represent the whole of Machaut’s oeuvre for authoritative attribution in this instance. Without physical evidence in the form of surviving witnesses of this text, what other relationships or possibilities might we consider that could support Machaut’s potential authorship of, or association with (in at least one roughly contemporary reader’s mind), a history of the counts of Rethel? The first area to investigate is Machaut’s interactions with the counts of Rethel. We have evidence for some form of relationship with Louis II of Flanders (Louis of Male) and with his daughter Margaret III of Flanders, but a brief summary of the position of the county of Rethel in the fourteenth century, both politically and geographically, will help to contextualize the importance of this territory to Machaut’s known circle of patrons. Situated roughly forty kilometers to the northeast of Reims, the county center was the city of Rethel. While the county began as an independently-ruled area with close ties to • •
While Margaret never became countess of Rethel in Machaut’s lifetime, she would have been recognized as the direct heir to Louis II. She and her husband, Philip the Bold, inherited the county in upon the death of her father. Of potential interest, the town of Machault fell within the fourteenth-century county borders.
Machaut in the Annales Hannoniae of Jacques de Guise
Reims, having been formerly ruled by the advocati of the Abbey of Saint-Remi, the last independent countess of Rethel was Joan of Rethel who inherited the title in 1285 (see Figure 36 , she married Louis I (Dampierre), count of Nevers and heir to .) . Five years later, in 1290, 6.8) the county of Flanders (as the son of Robert III, count of Flanders). Louis I of Nevers died before his father, so his son Louis I, count of Flanders, inherited the counties of Flanders, Nevers, and Rethel. Louis married Margaret I, countess of Burgundy (daughter of King Philip V of France). Louis died at the Battle of Crécy in 1346 and was succeeded by Louis II of Flanders (Louis of Male). Louis II’s marriage to Margaret of Brabant produced one child, Margaret. Margaret’s first marriage in 1355 to Philippe de Rouvre made her the countess of Artois, duchess of Burgundy, and countess of Auvergne and Boulogne. After Philip’s death in 1361, , the French crown reclaimed Burgundy. This territory was granted to Philip the Bold, youngest son of John II of France, who then married Margaret in 1369, , thereby bringing together the duchy of Burgundy and the counties of Artois, Auvergne, Boulogne, Flanders, Nevers, and Rethel (the latter three inherited when Louis II passed away in ). 1384). Margaret and Philip held the territory through the remainder of the fourteenth century.
Joan II, countess of Burgundy – 1291–1330
Bonne of Luxembourg – 1349 1315
Philip V of France – 1293–1322
Joan of Rethel d. 1328
Louis I, count of Nevers – 1322 1272
Margaret I, countess of Burgundy – 1382 1310
Louis I, count of Flanders – 1346 1304
Joanna of Flanders – 1374 1295
John, duke of Normandy
Louis II of Flanders
Margaret of Brabant,
(later John II)
(Louis of Male)
– 1364 1319
– 1384 1330
Philip II, the Bold duke of Burgundy
– 1404 1342
countess of Flanders
– 1380 1323
Margaret III of Flanders – 1405 1350
Known association with Machaut Marriage relationships Familial relationships (offspring and siblings) Members of the Dampierre dynasty Figure 6.8: .: The Dampierre dynasty dynasty of the county of Rethel
• 36 •
Names between the dashed lines in Figure 6.8 . are direct descendants in the Dampierre line of counts and countesses; sibling and marriage relationships appear to either side and are distinguished by the type of connecting line as shown in the key for the figure.
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While Louis II of Flanders, his daughter Margaret III, and son-in-law Philip II are especially of interest, Machaut may also have had connections with Louis I and Margaret I, countess of Burgundy (daughter of Philip V of France). Although Louis I died in at Crécy, Margaret continued to play a political role as regent during Louis II’s minority. She still was known by the title of countess of Rethel in the mid s. Margaret I died in , two years before her son Louis II. At the time of her death, her counties went to Louis II and thence to Margaret III in . While there is no direct evidence of links between Machaut and Louis I or Margaret I, Louis I and John of Bohemia were frequently engaged in political exchanges, including interactions with Philip VI of France in the s. Given Machaut’s role as secretary to John of Bohemia, there may have been some interaction with Louis I during this period, or at least awareness of his potential as a patron or figure of power. However, Margaret’s role in the political landscape of Northern France from the s through the end of Machaut’s life (as countess of Burgundy and Artois from forward, and as countess of Flanders, Nevers, and Rethel from the s onward), as well as her potential role in securing the marriage between Margaret III and Philip the Bold in , makes her a figure of interest given Machaut’s well-known interactions with female patrons throughout his career. Aside from the geographic and political ties to the county that must have had an effect on the life of Guillaume de Machaut (possibly born within the county of Rethel, and whose later career was spent in Reims, which had ecclesiastical ties with the county), specific evidence links the poet to at least three of the rulers of Rethel mentioned above: Louis II, his daughter Margaret III, and her spouse Philip II (the Bold). That evidence can be considered in three broad categories: books containing works by Machaut owned by one or more of the rulers of Rethel; poetry written by Machaut about one or more of these figures; and reported interactions linking Machaut with one or more of these rulers. Of these, the famous interaction in which Deschamps claims to have read portions of the Voir dit to an audience consisting of Louis II and other knights at Bruges, and also to have delivered letters on paper and a book to Louis, has been discussed in numerous studies. While the dates for this occurrence have been contested, with arguments for and , both fall within Machaut’s lifetime and point to the reigning count of Rethel, Louis II, having interacted with Machaut, at least in a literary context. Earp states that the manuscript in question, delivered to Louis, was ‘presumably a copy of the Voir Dit itself ’, a supposition supported by readings of Deschamps’s text and reiterated by Deborah McGrady and Elizabeth Eva Leach. While McGrady’s argument focuses on the role of the intermediary in this exchange, and the power that accompanies the activity of both gift and reading, we can, for the purposes of this essay, ignore the intermediary: Machaut sent letters and a book to Louis • • • • •
‘Nous, Marguerite, fille de Roy de France, contesse de Flandres, de Neuers et de Rethel’. Examples of this from and are given in Stouff , , . See, for instance, the chapters by Domenic Leo and Andrew Wathey in this volume. Summarized in Earp a, . Earp a, . McGrady , –; Leach b, .
Machaut in the Annales Hannoniae of Jacques de Guise
II sometime late in his career, whether or or somewhere in between, suggesting a material relationship and communication between the two men. While Machaut did occasionally turn toward chronicle-like texts in his career, it was certainly not a typical genre for him and nowhere throughout the corpus of his completeworks manuscripts, as we currently know it, does he address the history of the counts of Rethel as a subject. Might any of the known-but-now-lost manuscripts have been host to the chronicle? Earp provides several entries in his list of Machaut manuscripts, all now lost, which suggest a material connection between the counts of Rethel (or their heirs, the dukes of Burgundy) and Guillaume de Machaut. Earp draws on the surviving book lists of the dukes of Burgundy, which help to trace ownership of a variety of manuscripts containing Machaut’s works in the extensive Burgundian library.
•
• • •
[] BRUSSELS, lost manuscript in the Burgundian library. According to Earp, this complete-works manuscript may have served as the exemplar for M; this hypothesis is based on the description found in the inventory of the estate of Philip the Good. The book may be associated with Margaret III of Flanders and/or Louis II of Male and traced through the inventories of the Burgundian library in (?), , , , and before disappearing from the record. The inventory of the estate of Margaret III has few details about this book: Earp suggests that this and item [] below are potential candidates for the listing in Margaret’s estate. [] BRUSSELS, lost manuscript in the Burgundian library. A text manuscript that appears in the and subsequent inventories, and which began with the Loange and ended with the Fonteinne. Not enough is known of this book to suggest a direct connection to the fourteenth-century counts of Rethel, though its presence in the Burgundian library at least draws a dotted line back to Margaret and Philip through their heirs. [] BRUSSELS, lost manuscript in the Burgundian library. This book, like [], might be a candidate for the manuscript listed in the inventory of the estate of Margaret III (which might, in turn, indicate former ownership by Louis II of Male). Later inventories provide intriguing details for this item which suggest an as-yetunidentified text that concludes the manuscript. It appears in the inventory of the estate of John the Fearless, the inventory of the estate of Philip the Good, and the book list of Maximilian of Austria. In the first two inventories, the final folio is recorded as beginning ‘dont j’ay en ce rommant’ and ‘dont j’ay en ce Tania van Hemelryck () lists the Prise and the Lyon as chronicle-like texts. The opening of the Jugement Navarre contains some historicizing elements and identifiable historical references crop up occasionally throughout the corpus of lyric poetry and music. Earp a, , , , , , . Earp’s numbering of these manuscripts, provided within square brackets, is retained in this list for ease of reference See Falmagne and van den Abeele , , which describes a Machaut book written in two columns, containing musical notation, and which begins with the Vergier and ends with the Hoquetus David. Falmagne and van den Abeele , , provides the incipit and explicit.
Benjamin L. Albritton
rommant traictié’. In Maximilian’s list, the explicit is given as ‘n’a se fables non et mensonges’. There are no extant manuscript witnesses to this text, though it is tempting to imagine that this might be a lost Machaut work. [] Lost manuscript of the Voir dit of the count of Flanders. This item describes the book presumably delivered by Deschamps to Louis II described above. Deschamps’s poem does not provide enough information to determine whether or not the book he delivered contained more than this single poem. [] BRUGES, lost Burgundian manuscript of the Prise. [] BRUGES, lost Burgundian manuscript of lais. [] QUESNOY, lost Burgundian manuscript of the Mass. Of particular note is that this item is listed as having been borrowed in by Margaret of Burgundy, daughter of Margaret III and Philip the Bold.
This list of seven manuscripts demonstrates that there was an active audience collecting Machaut material – complete-works manuscripts, individual works, and collections of lyrics – within the Burgundian household over an extended period of time. The presence of an unidentified text among the Machaut materials (in []) is particularly tantalizing when considered alongside de Guise’s reference to a lost historia associated with this family. Further, a number of these items listed were in the Burgundian library in the middle of the fifteenth century at exactly the time Philip the Good commissioned Jean Wauquelin to produce his translation of the Annales Hannoniae. The presence of these manuscripts hints at a familiarity with Machaut as an author among the circles of book owners and readers at the court that would produce the Chroniques de Hainaut. It suggests the importance of Machaut at the Burgundian court from the time it absorbed the counties of Flanders, Nevers, and Rethel in the s, with ties even back to the marriage of Philip and Margaret III which brought the French royal line into partnership with the counts of Rethel. While not providing a direct example of a history of the counts of Rethel produced by Machaut, the ownership of these manuscripts, like the Deschamps ballade, links Machaut with an audience among the Rethel rulers. Finally, let us turn to the evidence within Machaut’s own writings to try to find any possible link with the counts of Rethel. Wimsatt’s study of Machaut’s Marguerite poetry provides a convincing argument for the association of the late poems dealing with the image of the marguerite with Margaret III. To summarize Wimsatt’s work, Machaut produced • • •
•
Falmagne and van den Abeele , , , . See n. . Keane’s suggestion that chronicles may have been thought of as intended for a male audience could help us postulate an intended patron among the counts of Rethel instead of the countesses. See Keane , : ‘Is this a sign that Blanche thought historical chronicles were suited to her male heirs more so than to her female heirs? Gendered book ownership is borne out by the work of other scholars, such as that of Alison Stones, who noted that portraits of women in books c. appear most often in vernacular and devotional books, whereas those of men occur most often in books for liturgy, law, and government’. See also McGrady’s discussion in this volume of Machaut’s concerns about gender during the final decades of his career. Wimsatt .
Machaut in the Annales Hannoniae of Jacques de Guise
three poems on the theme of the marguerite: a complainte (Cp6), (Cp), the Dit de la marguerite, and the Dit de la fleur de lis et de la marguerite. Two of these (the complainte and Dit de la marguerite) link Pierre de Lusignan with a woman named Marguerite who is convincingly associated with Margaret III: One imagines that in addition to her being a resident of Western Western Europe she was personally known to both Pierre and Machaut, that French was her native language, and that she was in a position of particular power whereby she might assist assist the Crusade at the time of Pierre’s tour of Western Western Europe. This set of requisites is filled particularly by Marguerite of Flanders, daughter of Louis de Mâle and widow of Philippe de Rouvre, duke of Burgundy, who from the date of her widowhood at age eleven in 1361 till her remarriage in 1369 to the second Philippe of Burgundy [Philip the Bold] was ‘unquestionably the most ‘unquestionably most important heiress of the day’.50
Chronologically, Wimsatt places the complainte as the earliest of the three works, between and 1366, 1364 , with the Dit de la marguerite c. 1366–69. –. The Fleur de lis then falls right around the time of Margaret’s marriage to Philip the Bold in 1369. . Machaut began composing his chronicle-like Prise d’Alexandre about Pierre of Lusignan sometime after Pierre’s death in January of 1369 and likely completed it in the early s. 1370s.51 It is not difficult to see a cycle of activity around Pierre of Lusignan that moves from lyric to dit to chronicle (thus the complainte to the Dit de la marguerite to the Prise) and a parallel cycle from lyric to dits focused on Margaret III. From this latter cycle, we have three poems addressed to, or taking as their subject, figures associated with the county of Rethel: Margaret as future heiress to the county being central to all three, and Philip, heir by marriage to the county being celebrated in the last of these, the Fleur de lis. Wimsatt points out the unusual transmission (and subsequent reception) of the Fleur de lis, appearing as it does only in G (beginning fol. 71v, the last textual composition before the musical section begins), and explains this placement as owing to the late compositional date and the fact that it postdates much of the anthologizing of Machaut’s complete-works manuscripts. Given the deliberate placement of the piece as the last of the poetic works (after the Prise, the Loange, and the complaintes), the work could easily be read as the last of the poetic, non-musical compositions in Machaut’s oeuvre at the time of F-G’s execution.
Figure 6.9: .: MS G, fol. 73 v, detail (BnF)
50 • • • 51 •
Wimsatt 1970, , 51. . Palmer 2002, , 16. .
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Benjamin L. Albritton
This deliberate placement of the Fleur de lis is indicated by the presence of two sets of catchwords at the bottom of fol. v (Figure .): ‘Cy commencent les lays’ and ‘Loyaute que point’ (thus signaling the end of the text section and the beginning of the music section with L). If we can assume an ordering that roughly places the last of the narrative dits at the end of the text section, and for which G is the only extant witness, we see a corpus that comes to an end between and – and for which F-G is the most ‘up to date’ of the major compendia. This suggests that the creators of F-G had access to sources not available even to the creators of A. Furthermore, it somewhat upsets the reliance upon the complete-works manuscripts to provide an unassailable list of Machaut’s later works. A, with its famous index expressing, perhaps, Machaut’s works in an order in which he wished them to be presented, lacks this important celebration of the marriage of Philip the Bold and Margaret of Flanders – a text deemed important enough to be included in the later G. At the very least, the discrepancy in contents between A and G, as minor as it is, should encourage us to ask questions about Machaut’s output in the period after when the Prise and the Fleur de lis were being composed and when, as Earp argues, several other pieces were written to ‘round off and articulate the new collection’ represented by A. We might also ask what sources the commissioner and creators of F-G were drawing upon during the copying of that manuscript that might explain the variances from A. As Earp says, ‘readings in the music section indicate that it [G] is closely related to MS A, although not a direct copy; they probably shared the same exemplars’. The cluster of activity in the s and into the s which has, at its center, Margaret III of Flanders, and for which the final composition appears to be the Fleur de lis in honor of her marriage to a member of the French royal family, leads to some currently unsolvable mysteries. To what degree was the relationship between Machaut and Margaret that of a poet and patron? That is to say, was Machaut writing about Margaret, or for her? How did the Fleur de lis circulate and amongst what audiences, given that the sole witness appears in a book made for a bourgeois with ties to John, duke of Berry? And how certain can we be that post- Machaut’s ‘poetic production was mostly broken off ’? A and F-G provide snapshots of a poetic output slowing down, certainly. But, as Earp and others suggest, did largescale poetic production end with the Prise and the Fleur de lis, while the smaller-scale poetic compositions Vezci les biens, a very brief dit in A and F, and the Prologue were produced as retrospective organizational pieces afterwards? To the point of this essay, could there have •
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• • • •
As the siglum suggests, F-G is a complete-works manuscript in two volumes. The organizational plan puts nearly all of the narrative dits in F, with the Prise, the Loange and complaintes, and the Fleur de lis as the only textual works in G along with the musical works. Uri Smilansky and Yolanda Plumley have investigated the early provenance of F-G more extensively in work that is forthcoming. For more on the figures involved in this period of copying and dissemination of Machaut’s manuscripts, see Earp , –. Earp a, . Earp a, . Earp a, . Earp a, .
Machaut in the Annales Hannoniae of Jacques de Guise
been one or more works completed in these final years which postdate our latest snapshots of Machaut’s corpus? And might one such work be a chronicle of the counts of Rethel? Conclusion Proposing a lost work for an author of the stature of Guillaume de Machaut is a risky endeavor at best. However, to confront Jacques de Guise’s citations requires us to engage with the possibility that such a work existed or examine reasons that this citation might be misleading. I here summarize the evidence presented, beginning with the citations themselves. In both occurrences, the latinate name ‘Guillermus de Mascandio’ (or ‘Guillelmus’) is attached to a history or chronicle of the counts of Rethel. This name, we can presume, meant something to de Guise and to readers in the s. For nearly years after this citation, the name reappeared in various forms and various sources, including in translation in the Chroniques de Hainaut in the mid-fifteenth century and eventually the sixteenth-century print edition where the name is written as Meschault or Mechault. Whether or not ‘Mascandio’ was our Machaut might remain an open question, but that form of his name was used in other texts throughout the fourteenth and into the fifteenth centuries. Perhaps more curious is the fact that these citations have gone unremarked in Machaut scholarship. Such an oversight might be explained by the expansive nature of de Guise’s Annales, the minor role played by these citations within the work, and the larger biases of the nineteenthcentury editors who produced the text for a modern audience, along with the nascent state of Machaut studies at the same time the Annales was being edited, not to mention political divisions demarcating the history-making of the Low Countries, Belgium, and France in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. If de Guise cited a now-lost work by Machaut, it would need to fall into the fuzzy borders of Machaut’s corpus mentioned above – either in the early years before the compilation of MS C or, more likely, toward the very end of Machaut’s life after the compilation of MS A. It would have been written for a specific patron, or family of patrons, and the only likely candidates would be Louis I of Flanders, his wife Margaret, their son Louis II (of Male), Margaret III, or Philip the Bold. Of these, the latter three are the most plausible: Louis II was count of Rethel in the s, Margaret was the heir to the county and the subject of at least three other works by Machaut, and Philip was the heir by marriage to the county after his marriage to Margaret in and also the subject of work by Machaut. The nature of these citations, along with the suggestion that the work was written in the vernacular, evokes a work like the Prise which has elements of chronicle mixed with other genres. A history of the counts of Rethel, if it existed, would not have circulated widely: it was probably limited to northern textual networks to which de Guise may have had access, but did not circulate with other manuscript witnesses upon which later copies of Machaut’s works relied. Such a work would not require us to radically reinterpret our understanding of Machaut’s career: a patron-focused chronicle would be in keeping with the Prise and its incor •
See n. .
Benjamin L. Albritton
poration of historical elements. Further, our understanding of Machaut’s interactions with Louis, Margaret, and Philip already form a cluster of poet/patron activities into which a work celebrating the genealogy of the counts of Rethel (either to flatter Louis of Male, to legitimate Margaret’s claims as heir, to strengthen Philip’s claims as heir by marriage, or to strengthen their own heirs’ claims to the region) would fit the types of patterns of exchange described by McGrady. The Fleur de lis provides a model for the transmission of a late poem that circulated among a select audience of Machaut aficionados: a unicum preserved in G, a complete-works manuscript that postdates A. We can imagine a scenario where an even later work such as our chronicle might have circulated independently amongst a small circle of cognoscenti. Or perhaps it was copied only once, into a single, now missing anthology. One such anthology is the book possibly listed in the library of Margaret of Flanders (and thus also linked to Louis of Male and Philip the Bold) which concludes with an as-yet-unidentified work. The existence of this citation should give us cause to rethink our comfort with the sense of authority that we have assigned to manuscript witnesses like A. Whether or not there is a lost Machaut text to be found may not matter as much as the fact that this citation forces us to recognize a need for further exploration of the rich and nuanced network of textual transmission in the late fourteenth century. De Guise’s reference invites us to imagine a Machaut corpus that stretches beyond the small handful of surviving complete-works manuscripts.
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See item [] in the list of Burgundian Machaut manuscripts above. Following the model of Earp and Hartt , focused on C, and Plumley and Smilansky (forthcoming), focused on F-G, we might hope to see in-depth contextual studies of more fourteenth-century sources – a scholarly enterprise of which I am sure Larry Earp would approve!
Machaut in the Annales Hannoniae of Jacques de Guise
A Book , Chapter () ACTOR. Quia verò gesta comitis Manasses reperire non valui, decrevi in isto loco conscribere illa quae de eo reperire potui: quarè supplico lectoribus, si certa tempora reperiunt in quibus regnaverit, quatenùs huic operi dignentur conscribere et me ipsum excusare.
L’AUTEUR. N’ayant pu trouver la vie du comte Manassès, j’ai cru devoir placer ici tout ce qu’il m’a été possible de découvrir à ce sujet; et je supplie mes lecteurs, s’ils savent d’une manière précise dans quel tems ce comte a régné, de vouloir bien l’indiquer dans cet ouvrage, en excusant mon ignorance.
Ex historia Guillelmi de Mascandio. Manasses comes Hannoniae, ex uxore legitimâ genuit Raginerum, cognominatum Longi-Colli, qui contrà Sarracenos, terram christianorum invadentes, potenter se exposuit. Hic inter caetera facta quae de eo leguntur, disposuit intentione bonâ sanctimoniales sanctae Waldetrudis ab ejusdem ecclesiâ deponere, et loco earum canonicos sacerdotes instituere, qui Deo sacri ficia sine medio pro populo offerrent: sed morte praeventus quod disposuerat perficere non valuit.
Histoire de Guillaume de Mascand. Manassés, comte de Hainaut, eut de sa femme légitime, Régnier, surnommé au Long-Cou, qui combattit vaillamment les Sarrasins, lors de leurs invasions dans la chrétienté. Entre autres actions qu’on rapporte de lui, on dit qu’il voulut, dans une pieuse intention, renvoyer du couvent de Sainte-Vautru les religieuses qui l’habitaient, pour mettre à leur place des religieux réguliers qui pussent offrir directement des sacrifices à Dieu pour le peuple; mais la mort l’empècha d’exécuter ce projet.
GILBERTUS. Olim etenim contigit quòd quidam comes Montensis, severo consilio habito, contrà dominas beatae Waldetrudis accensus irâ, juravit repentè quòd ab unâ die in crastinum dominas ab ecclesiâ expelleret, et clericos in eâdem ecclesiâ institueret. Quod cùm dominabus per quemdam comitis secretarium fuisset intimatum, ipsae ad terram antè corpus beatae Waldetrudis prostratae, proclamationem ad Dominum coeli fecerunt, orantes ut eas à tàm injustà oppressione eriperet. Quarum vota Deus ex alto prospiciens, ut insolito ordine et antiquâ libertate manerent ordinavit. Comes autem ille in sequenti nocte morte subitaneâ praeventus à seculo citiùs migravit; sicque quod facere malè meditabatur imperfectum remansit.
GILBERT. Un certain comte de Mons, irrité contre les religieuses de Sainte-Vautru, jura, un jour, dans sa colère, qu’il les chasserait, le lendemain, de leur couvent, et les remplacerait par des religieux. L’ordre d’expulsion ayant été intimé aux religieuses par un secrétaire du comte, elles se prosternèrent devant le corps de sainte Vautru, en priant le Seigneur de les préserver d’une si cruelle oppression. Dieu, accueillant leur voeu, voulut qu’elles conservassent leurs droits et leur ancienne liberté. La nuit suivante le comte mourut subitement, et son mauvais dessein ne fut point accompli.
ACTOR. Quis autem fuerit iste comes Gilbertus silet; sed in quâdam vulgari historiâ reperi fuisse Manassem, qui in comitatu Montensi antè Raginerum Longi-Colli regnavit: de cujus vitâ et genealogiâ pauca valdè reperi.
L’AUTEUR. Gilbert ne dit point quel était ce comte; mais j’ai lu dans une histoire en langue vulgaire que ce fut Manassés, qui posséda le comté de Mons avant Régnier au Long-Cou. Je n’ai presque rien trouvé sur la vie et la généalogie de ce comte.
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Latin and French texts from Fortia d’Urban , –; English translation my own. This passage appears as Book , Chapter , in Fortia d’Urban ; Sackur , , lists it as Chapter and alternately as signaling some confusion in the manuscript sources. I retain Sackur’s numbering throughout.
Benjamin L. Albritton
THE AUTHOR. Because I was not able to discover anything about the deeds of count Manasses, I thought I should record everything I could find about him here. I ask my readers, if they should learn the specific years in which this count reigned, to please write it down in this work, and excuse me [my ignorance]. From The Account of Guillaume de Machaut. Manasses, count of Hainaut, begat by his lawful wife [a son] Reginar, nicknamed Longneck, who valiantly fought the Saracens during their invasions of the Christian lands. Among other deeds we can read about him, he arranged, with good intention, to depose the nuns of Saint Waltrude from their convent, and to put in their place clerics who could perform sacred services directly for the people; but death prevented him from accomplishing this. GILBERT. Once it happened that a certain count of Mons, having held strict council, grew angry with the nuns of Saint Waltrude and swore that he would expel them from their convent the next day and appoint clergy in their place. When this had been communicated to the nuns by a secretary of the count, they prostrated themselves before the body of Saint Waltrude, praying to God to preserve them from such unjust oppression. God, looking out from on high, ordained that they should retain the rights of their order and their ancient freedom. But the count died suddenly the following night, and his evil plan remained incomplete.
THE AUTHOR. Gilbert does not say who this count was; but I read in an account written in the vernacular that it was Manasses, who ruled the county of Mons before Reginar Longneck, about whose life and genealogy I have found almost nothing.
Machaut in the Annales Hannoniae of Jacques de Guise
Book , Chapter Quia de Raginero Longi-Colli,comite Montensi, superiùs tactum est et inferiùs multa declarabuntur, de eo duce quis fuerit, et undè processerit, non absurdè perquirendum est. Cui quaestioni respondendo quod una sola historia, videlicet Guillermi de Mastandio, in chronicâ quam compilavit de comitibus Regicestensibus, proloquitur. Dicit enim Raginerum LongiColli, comitem quondàm Haynauci, fuisse Manasses, comitis Regiscestensis atque Montensis, legitimum filium; dictarum patriarum et Alsatiae, Ardennae, Vogiae Evodiique, et suprà Mosam et Mosellam atque Rhenum et fluviorum, plurium quoque patriarum, civitatum atque castrorum ibidem existentium, dominium habuisse. Quis verò fuerit ejus mater? Historiâ penitùs silet. Sed quià haec posset oriri difficultas: quis fuerit iste Manasses? Habetur in historiâ praedicti Willermi, quòd dictus Manasses, ab aliquibus Maincerius et ab aliquibus Manasses vocitatus est. Idem ipse est, proùt reor, qui fuerit Albonis filius, ex filiabus Walterici, comitis Haynauci et Alsatiae, proùt superiùs in XIII libro declaratum est. Verùm quià historiographi qui historias Hannoniae tractaverunt, de ejus genealogiâ omninò siluerunt, maximè ili qui ad manus meas devenerunt; ideò lectoribus supplico quatenùs, si aliquid aliud repererint de ejus genealogiâ, quatenùs hinc aggregationi conscribere dignentur. Colligitur tamen ex diversis authenticis scripturis, quòd dictus Raginerus extilit nobilis et ingenio audax et animosus, fortis et bellicosus contrà adversarios principes; sed contrà sibi subditos tyrannus, contrà infideles ferox et virtuosus; in aetate virili felix et reformidatus, sed in senectute infortunatus et oditus; longaevus valdè atque robustus; in tribulationibus magnanimus et jucundus. Gesta ejus, proùt reperi, fideliter inferiùs conscripsi. Verùm tamen de ejus obitu, aut ubi habitaverit post ejus exilium, aut quibus ejus terras et possessiones Otto imperator distribuerit; nihil penitùs adhùc reperire valui.
Puisque déjà nous avons nommé Régnier au LongCou, comte de Mons, et qu’il en sera souvent question par la suite, le lecteur a droit d’exiger que nous lui fassions connaitre ce duc, et son origine. Pour contenter ce désir, nous dirons que l’histoire des comtes de Rhétel, composée par Guillaume de Mastande, est la seule qui ait fait mention de Régnier au Long-Cou. Elle rapporte qu’il était fils légitime de Manassés, comte de Rhétel et de Mons. Outre ces deux comtés, il possédait encore les seigneuries d’Alsace, des Ardennes, des Vosges et de Liège, ainsi que divers pays, villes et châteaux au bord de la Meuse, de la Moselle et du Rhin. Mais quelle fut sa mère, c’est un point que l’histoire omet entièrement. Il peut encore s’élever une difficulté, qui consiste à savoir quel est ce Manassès. Guillaume, dans son Histoire, dit que Manassés fut aussi appelé Maincier. A mon avis, il était ‘fils d’Albon, qui épousa l’une des filles de Walteric, comte de Hainaut et d’Alsace, ainsi qu’on l’a vu dans le XIII livre. Au reste, comme les historiens du Hainaut, ceux du moins que j’ai pu consulter, se taisent entièrement sur son origine, je supplie mes lecteurs de noter sur mon livre tous les renseignemens qu’ils pourraient obtenir sur cette matière. Quoi qu’il en soit, divers textes dignes de créance ont constaté que Régnier était noble par la naissance, audacieux, ardent, brave et belliqueux dans ses guerres avec les autres seigneurs; qu’il fut tiran envers ses peuples, vaillant et cruel à l’égard des païens. Dans son âge mûr, il fut heureus et redouté; mais ses vieux ans furent en butte à la haine et à l’infortune. Il atteignit, sans perdre de vigueur, un âge avancé. Du reste, il montra dans les revers une ame tranquille et forte. Je rapporterai fidèlement sa vie, autant que je l’ai pu retrouver. Mais comment mourut-il, où se réfugia-t-il après son exil, à qui l’empereur Otton distribua-t-il ses terres et ses domaines? Voilà des points sur lesquels je n’ai jusqu’ici trouvé aucun renseignement.
• Latin and French texts from Fortia d’Urban , –; English translation my own.
Benjamin L. Albritton
Since we have already discussed Reginar Longneck, count of Mons, and he will often be discussed later, it is worthwhile to inquire about this duke and his origins. There is only one history that can help to answer this question, namely, the chronicle which Guillaume de Machaut compiled concerning the counts of Rethel. [In it] he reports that Reginar was the legitimate son of Manasses, count of Rethel and Mons. Besides these two counties, he [Manasses] was also lord of Alsace, Ardennes, Vosges and Liège, as well as various countries, towns, and castles on the banks of the Meuse, Moselle, and Rhine. But who was his [Reginar’s] mother? The history remains completely silent [on this matter]. But another difficulty arises: who was this Manasses? Guillaume, in his history, records that some called him Manasses and others called him Maincerius. In my opinion he was the son of Albon, who was married to one of the daughters of Walter, count of Hainaut and Alsace, as described previously in the thirteenth book. But because the historians of Hainaut, at least those who I have been able to consult, have remained silent about his origins, I beg my readers to note down in this aggregation [book] any information they can find concerning his genealogy. I gather, however, from various credible texts that Reginar was praised for his nobility and character, boldness and courage, bravery and bellicosity against his adversaries; but on the other hand that he was a tyrant towards his people; towards the infidels, fierce and virtuous. In his prime, he was happy and dreaded; but unfortunate and hated in old age. [He was] long-lived and very strong; magnanimous and pleasant through tribulations. I have faithfully recorded his deeds below, as much as I have been able to find. However, concerning his death, or where he dwelt after his exile, or to whom the emperor Otto distributed his lands and possessions, I have so far found no information.
. T F-C P M O: A N M-G* Kevin N. Moll
Anyone encountering fourteenth-century music for the first time through the standard survey textbooks is likely to come away with three impressions: first, that secular genres predominated over liturgical ones during this period; second, that mass composition, though essentially a derivative phenomenon, was nonetheless striving (albeit more-or-less unconsciously) toward achieving musical unification of disparate items into the so-called mass cycle – a process only fully achieved in the fifteenth century; and third, that the Messe de Nostre Dame of Guillaume de Machaut, as ‘the first complete setting of the Ordinary that is known to have been written as a unit by one composer’, represents by far the most impressive sacred work of the time. After having gained familiarity with the full corpus of French Mass Ordinary compositions from the fourteenth century, however, one is likely to conclude that mainstream interpretations such as those articulated above are in need of reexamination. Accordingly, I propose herein to focus on three questions regarding the concept of mass cycles: ) Based on the surviving body of works, in what respects can the concept of the ‘polyphonic mass cycle’ be said to have been operative in the fourteenth century? ) How does the Machaut Mass – by far the most extensively researched cycle of the period – fit into the larger corpus of contemporaneous mass settings from French and related sources? ) What is the extent and significance of the reuse of musical material in mass settings of the fourteenth century? I. Characterizing the Mass Ordinary cycle of the fourteenth century A certain preoccupation with tracing the roots of the musically unified, multi-sectional mass cycle, as it developed in the first half of the fifteenth century, has strongly colored scholar*
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An initial version of this paper was delivered on May (th Congress of Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University) at a session sponsored by the International Machaut Society and chaired by Margaret Hasselman. The other paper slated for inclusion at that time was by none other than Lawrence Earp, whose stimulating and erudite presence at such scholarly conferences has been a constant source of inspiration. Parenthetically, I would like to commend the editors of this volume for their dedication and assiduousness in all aspects of its production. Hoppin , . The variety displayed by the fourteenth-century mass repertory as a whole is striking, and one of the most serious limitations of becoming preoccupied with the mass cycles per se is that they comprise only about twenty percent of the surviving corpus – a situation which contrasts greatly with the monumental trove of Franco-Flemish masses produced during the period c. –, in which a very high proportion of individual movements are components of musically unified cycles. The discussion here is limited to settings stemming from French and related sources. It does not consider the contemporaneous production of mass music in Italy, England, or elsewhere, which in each case was evolving within a separate tradition. A seminal exploration of this topic can be found in Gossett , in which the author seeks ‘to establish some tentative principles for the study of early Mass pairs and complete Masses’ (p. ) from the early s; in this sense, ‘complete’
The Fourteenth-Century Polyphonic Mass Ordinary
ship dealing with liturgical music extending back to about . And while it is true that the earliest examples of polyphonic Mass Ordinary cycles can be shown to have originated in the fourteenth century, it needs to be made explicit that two kinds of unity are in play here: paleographical and musical. In this section I intend to develop the thesis that mass cycles in the fourteenth century were determined predominantly by paleographical and circumstantial, but not musical, factors. This situation differs greatly from that obtaining in the period from c. –, where it was normally taken for granted that polyphonic settings of the Ordinary would comprise all five of the appropriate liturgical texts, that they would be transmitted in manuscript (or printed) sources as integral entities, and that highly refined techniques (including use of monophonic or polyphonic structural models, opening mottos, common tonality, and similar patterns of successive mensuration) would be employed in each movement to unify the resultant cycles musically. Regarding the issue of unification, the Machaut Mass is a case in point. The substantial research that has been done on this composition has led many scholars to treat the work, with its six Ordinary movements, as if it were produced as an integral entity, at least from the time its component movements were selected for copying, since it is transmitted intact and in order in each of the five manuscripts in which it appears. Moreover, in the Vg manuscript, the cycle appears with the heading ‘Ci commence la Messe de Nostre Dame’. While the placement of all the movements of the Machaut Mass together in its sources constitutes a paleographical unity, certain musical discontinuities are apparent. First of all, two different compositional strategies are represented in the various movements: the Kyrie, Sanctus, Agnus, and Ite are realized isorhythmically, incorporating a literal Gregorian cantus firmus in the tenor, along with a rhythmicized contratenor, whereas the Gloria and Credo are constructed upon freely composed and unrhythmicized lower voices. Second, the sequence of chants used as cantus firmi in the various movements does not correspond to any known monophonic cycle. Third, as is shown in Table ., the movements are not set in a common tonality – although neither are they completely haphazard; rather, the first three movements have a D final, whereas the other three are centered on F. Fourth, apart
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implies that the cycle encompasses all five standard items of the Ordinary, to which a setting of the dismissal text – Ite missa est or Benedicamus Domino – may possibly be added. As is implicit in the passage just quoted, this and many other studies of its era tend to ignore the possibility that liturgical production during the s might have a historical bearing on the concept of polyphonic mass cycles. With respect to the fourteenth century, even some of the more recent offerings continue to single out mass cycles as a sole focus of attention. Thus we have Irving Godt’s ‘The Mass of Barcelona: How Many Hands? How Much Mass?’ (), dedicated largely to realizing ‘hopes of completing a cyclical mass’ from disparate movements (p. ). Latterly has appeared yet another variation on this theme (Guletsky ). In general, however, fresh research on the fourteenth-century mass corpus has tailed off dramatically since the s. That is, if one discounts a solitary appearance of the Ite missa est in Padua . See Keitel , n. . Robertson , . The Amen of the Credo is isorhythmic in all voices. Keitel , –. In order to facilitate identification of individual movements in Table . (and throughout this chapter), I am invoking the ‘ID’ numbers worked out in my dissertation for cataloging the surviving array of liturgical polyphony. This corpus
Kevin N. Moll
from its uniform textural-contrapuntal environment in four voices, no single musical device ties all the movements together, aside from the so-called generating-cell motive, which was adduced by a number of mid-twentieth-century scholars as evidence of the composer’s having achieved stylistic unity throughout the piece. That precedents existed for grouping Ordinary chants together as liturgical units was demonstrated by Leo Schrade, who adduced archetypal cycles stemming from no later than the thirteenth century. These collations (also called formularies) placed selections of disparate Ordinary items contiguously in their source (Kyrie, Gloria, Sanctus, Agnus, and dismissal – but without Credo – just as is done in the modern Graduale Romanum) as opposed to the more typical contemporaneous practice of situating like movements together. By c. , a ready model of a polyphonic mass cycle had been produced in the anonymous Tournai Mass, transmitted together in its only complete source. Further polyphonic cycles compiled in the fourteenth century that exist as contiguous entities in their respective sources include the Sorbonne and Barcelona Masses. The Toulouse Mass, however, besides missing a Gloria movement, does not exist contiguously in its source. Examination reveals that all the recognized polyphonic mass cycles stemming from fourteenth-century French sources (Tournai, Sorbonne, Toulouse, and Barcelona) display obstacles to musical coherence. For example, the Tournai Mass, although relatively homogeneous in style, betrays a discontinuity analogous to that of the Machaut Mass, and neither cycle is unified tonally with respect to the finals of its component movements. In fact, none of the cycles manifests a common tonality throughout – although the Barcelona
•
•
• •
•
•
comprises complete works, with a further fifty-seven that are incomplete or fragmentary. For a full explication of the process of selection and ordering, see Moll , chap. . Note that ID numbers higher than refer to movements preserved incompletely or fragmentarily. Reese , . See also Hoppin , . The first appearance of this motive appears in the Christe section, in the triplum. More recently, Leech-Wilkinson (, ) has characterized the question of motivic unity as a ‘pseudoproblem’, which ‘there seems little point in pursuing’. Schrade , . This evidence is corroborated somewhat differently by Billy Jim Layton (, ). See also Richard H. Hoppin’s discussion (, –), where he mentions that Credos were omitted from these collections due to a concern for saving space, as only a few melodies were associated with that text. All movements of the Tournai cycle are unica except the Credo (three concordances) and the Ite motet (one other source). The source for this mass, Tou, contains mostly liturgical monophony. Schrade (, –) claims that ‘some or more years after the completion of the Missale […], a scribe entered the cycle of the polyphonic Mass, distributing the individual movements all over the manuscript wherever he found space enough for a composition. Hence all the movements are separated from each other’. Note that Table . contains only those cycles that most likely stem from the French orbit of the fourteenth century; thus, the Franco-Cypriot cycle from TuB is not reflected in the list, as its earliest likely date of composition is the first decade of the fifteenth century. Note also that the Credos of the Toulouse and Barcelona cycles merely comprise two slightly differing versions of the same piece (ID ). That the Tournai cycle antedates Machaut’s is universally acknowledged; see, for example, Göllner , . In each of the two masses, the Kyrie, Sanctus, and Agnus on the one hand, and the Gloria and Credo on the other, are stylistically related. This fact, along with other telling correspondences, indicates that Machaut’s cycle was materially influenced by the Tournai Mass. Leech-Wilkinson , n. , avers that the Tournai Credo ‘may have provided a model for Machaut’s’. I would be inclined to put the case even more strongly.
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Mass comes close, with four of its five movements set on D, and the Credo on G with lowervoice Bb signatures, which can be regarded as a transposed D tonality. Furthermore, as will be indicated below, the ‘parody’ procedures that have been claimed for the Sorbonne and Toulouse Masses consist essentially in utilitarian reuse of preexistent material, and in my opinion do not constitute unification in the sense of an overarching artistic plan. In the Sorbonne Mass, the nature and extent of integration is further clouded by the incomplete state of all of its surviving three-voice movements. Table .: Tonalities of movements in recognized manuscript mass cycles TOURNAI
SORBONNE
ID Vv Tonality a)
ID
Kyrie
G ––#
C bb–
Gloria
F b––
F? – – – NONE
Credo
D –––
F b––
Sanctus
F b––
Agnus
F –––
Ite/Benedicamus
G –b–
a) b) c)
Vv Tonality
TOULOUSE
Movement
b)
BARCELONA
MACHAUT
ID
Vv Tonality
ID Vv Tonality
ID Vv Tonality
D –––
D – – –
D – – – –
c)
D –––
D – – – –
G bb– =
G bb–
D – – – –
D b––
C b––
D –––
F – – – –
C b(–)–
D –––
D – – – –
F – – – –
F bb
D –––
NONE
4 F – – – –
In the ‘Tonality’ columns, the final is given along with the initial accidental signatures, reading left-to-right from lowest voice to the highest. Although not occurring in the Pim manuscript, this movement (Iv ) has been suggested on the basis of musical similarities to the Sorbonne Gloria as being an integral member of that cycle. For particulars and documentation, see n. , as well as Section III below. María del Carmen Gómez (, ) suggests that the Gloria Qui sonitu melodie (Apt /Iv , ID ) be used to complete this cycle.
A consideration of the various means by which a group of Ordinary compositions might be considered an integrated entity thus reveals that none of the other commonly recognized cycles achieves structural coherence in any deeper sense than does Machaut’s. Accordingly, if one concedes that these reservations are sufficient to invalidate the status of the Machaut Mass as an organic construction in the sense that was understood by composers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, then one is probably obliged to renounce the very notion of the musically unified polyphonic mass cycle in the fourteenth century. •
•
Giulio Cattin and Francesco Facchin, the editors of PMFC XXIII, adduced evidence from Ursula Günther, whom they say ‘suggested that mass cycles had a modal uniformity’ (PMFC XXIIIB, p. ). Actually, Günther is speaking only of one set of incipits found in a series of frescos at the church of Notre-Dame at Kernascléden, saying in fact that it only ‘seems to’ be in the same mode and mensuration; see the original citation in Günther , . To use this narrow, not to mention hypothetical, criterion for making such a judgment is ill-advised, particularly in light of the divergent tonalities of most of the recognized cycles (see Table .). The Credo, Iv (lacking in Pim), has been suggested as a member of the Sorbonne cycle, primarily on the strength of the similarity of its opening to the Gloria of that mass (see Stäblein-Harder a, , as well as PMFC XXIIIB, p. ). Otherwise, none of the movements à contained in Pim is transmitted in a complete state. Regarding the Kyrie, only one of three presumed major sections survives, and given its musical correspondence with the Agnus III, it is probably the Kyrie II. In the Gloria, both lower voices are truncated, and only the discantus survives complete. From the Sanctus, the tenor of the ‘Benedictus’ survives, along with a middle voice in its entirety, whereas the upper voice is lost. Of the Agnus, both the discantus and tenor are transmitted complete, but a presumed middle voice is missing. The musical correspondences between these and other mass settings are discussed below in Section III.
Kevin N. Moll
Besides the sets listed in Table ., attempts have been made relatively recently to identify several further cycles from the fourteenth century (shown in Table .). Perhaps the most notable and least problematic of these is the so-called ‘Apt Mass’ (left column), consisting of a four-voice Kyrie, and three movements à : Gloria, Sanctus, and Agnus, all of which are placed together in that order in Apt (nos. , , , and , respectively). It must be emphasized, however, that no significant musical correspondences exist between any of these movements. Table .: Further manuscript mass cycles suggested by scholars of the later twentieth century ‘Apt Mass’ a) ID
Kyrie
A – – – – Apt
Gloria
D – – –
Credo
NONE
Sanctus
Agnus
b)
Vv Tonality
PMFC XXIII Quasi-Cyclec)
Movement
Ite/Benedicamus NONE a) b) c) d) e)
Source
Apt
A – – – – Apt D –––
Apt
ID
Vv Tonality
d) ?
D ––?
Godt Cyclee)
Source
ID
Iv
D –––
BarcC, no.
D –––
Apt (Susay)
NONE
Vv Tonality
Source
D – – – Iv
D ––––
Apt (‘Bonbarde’)
D – – – Apt
Apt
D ––––
NONE NONE
D –––
BarcC, no.
NONE suggested
See PMFC XXIIIB, –. The Benedictus and Hosanna II are missing entirely from this setting. See PMFC XXIIIB, . This grouping was first suggested in Jackson , . Only the tenor of this movement survives complete, along with the Kyrie I of a single discantus. Although no trace of a third voice exists in the source, Stäblein-Harder (b, –) considers it ‘quite possible’ that it was conceived as a three-part work. This issue is not broached in the critical notes to PMFC XXIII. See Godt , –.
Additionally, a ‘quasi-cycle’ consisting of a Kyrie, Credo, and Sanctus from disparate sources (Table ., center), has been identified by the editors of PMFC XXIII based on musical correspondences. To this group they suggest that the Gloria either of Susay (Apt ) or of ‘Baralipton’ (Apt ) could be added. Still another grouping has been proposed on stylistic grounds by Irving Godt (Table ., right). This cycle would consist of the Kyrie and Agnus of the Barcelona Mass, the Susay Gloria (Apt ), the Credo à labeled ‘Bonbarde’ (Apt ), and the Sanctus (Apt ). While there is undeniably some affinity to be found among these movements, I would point out that the very juxtaposition of three- and four-voice settings is already inconsistent with the concept of stylistic unity. Moreover, I cannot accept fully the premises upon which Godt’s argument is founded, since his reasoning places undue emphasis on rhythmic and motivic elements, along with a tonal focus on D, which I consider to be ubiquitous to the repertory at large, while taking insufficient account of textural and contrapuntal factors. • • • • •
These additional putative cycles have been identified and collated in PMFC XXIIIA, pp. xiii–xiv. The movements are placed together in PMFC XXIIIA, nos. –. Alwyn Elling (, –) had pointed out in his dissertation certain musical similarities between the Sanctus and Agnus, but Cattin and Facchin (PMFC XXIIIA, p. xiii) have accurately characterized these affinities as ‘at best, slight’. The items in question are the fragmentary Kyrie, Iv ; the Credo, Iv ; and the Sanctus, Apt . These movements are placed together in PMFC XXIIIA, nos. –. Godt , .
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For whatever it is worth, it turns out that it actually is possible to assemble a complete cycle of movements à that is unified musically to a significant degree. Curiously, this particular grouping has not previously been identified. Beginning with the three movements of the ‘quasi-cycle’ (see Table .), with additional juggling due to problems created by the fragmentary state of the Kyrie, Iv (that is, the piece must be foregone because it is unperformable), one can select a series of further movements, resulting in a set (Table .) that manifests direct musical correspondences among all its five component parts, and is stylistically more homogeneous than any of the recognized cycles listed in either Table . or Table .. Table .: Musically related ‘cycle’ à , occurring independently in the sources ID
Type
Vv
Attribution
Source(s)
Kyrie
a)
Tonality
Musical material
none
Apt (+ Barc MSS)
D –––
related to A;c) related generally to G, C, S
Gloria
Baralipton
Apt (+ Iv inc.)
D –––
related to C; related generally to K, S, A
Credo
‘saycora’
Iv (unicum)
D –––
related to S; related generally to K, G, A
Sanctus
none
Apt (unicum)
D –––
related to C; related generally to K, G, A
Agnus
none
Apt (unicum)
D –––
related to K;c) related generally to G, C, S
Ited)
none
Tou (unicum)
D –––
related generally to K, G, C, S, A
a) b) c) d)
b)
Although the Kyrie, Iv (ID , see middle column of Table .) might well be included in this list on the strength of its direct melodic correspondences with the Credo and Sanctus compositions listed here, I have excluded it due to its fragmentary nature, and particularly to the uncertainty as to its intended number of voices. The two Barcelona concordances are BarcA, no. (fol. r–v) and Barc c, no. (fol. r). Stäblein-Harder (b, –) already noted affinities between the Kyrie, Apt and the Agnus, Apt . For the sake of liturgical completeness, this troped dismissal movement (from the Toulouse cycle) has been added here, although its musical correspondence is limited to general stylistic elements.
Of these movements, two (Credo and Sanctus) contain so much identical musical material that they must be regarded as alternative versions of the same work. To these can be added the Gloria attributed to ‘Baralipton’, which has compelling musical affinities with them, particularly the Credo. The editors of PMFC XXIII propose that the Susay Gloria, Apt , ‘could as easily be suggested as a complementary Gloria’ for their quasi-cycle. This judgment is probably based on the opening counterpoint of the Susay piece, which is similar to that of the Credo and Sanctus under discussion. However, the text disposition, contrapuntal style, musical texture, and use of lower-voice bridge passages in the ‘Baralipton’ Gloria all display greater similarities to the other works than do the corresponding attributes of the Susay piece. Conversely, the Kyrie (Apt ) and Agnus (Apt ) themselves evince substantial musical affinities, and both are linked to the others in a more general sense, being of comparable •
• • •
These two pieces are very closely related both contrapuntally and texturally, not to mention their prominent melodic correspondences, as detailed in Jackson , (ex. of that study). Of course, if the Kyrie, Iv , were included there would be three related movements, not two. See PMFC XXIIIB, p. , no. . PMFC XXIIIB, p. , no. . See Stäblein-Harder b, –. These affinities are not detailed in the critical notes to PMFC XXIII.
Kevin N. Moll
musical texture and contrapuntal style, as well as being equivalent in tonality. For the sake of liturgical completeness, the troped dismissal movement from the Toulouse Mass could be added to this group without disturbing in the slightest the cycle’s continuity of compositional approach. On the strength of their interrelated musical and stylistic correspondences, then, I offer this set as constituting the most cohesive series of movements that can be drawn from the repertory; yet they are not found as contiguous items in any source, nor are they all contained in the same manuscript. This state of affairs only underscores the idea that musical coherence was not a defining characteristic of mass cycles during the time in question. Along the same lines, it must be noted that alongside the hitherto solitary grandeur of the Machaut Mass can be raised a second Denkmal in the form of a full mass cycle of disparate four-voice settings (see Table .), all set on a D final with no accidental signatures. Given the limited slate of surviving settings, however, the tonal unity of this latter collection is largely fortuitous, as is the inclusion of a single isorhythmic movement (Gloria) – a circumstance mirroring the situation in Machaut’s mass, where the Gloria is the only fully non-isorhythmic section. Table .: Four-voice ‘cycle’ with unified tonality ID
Type
Vv
Attribution
Source(s)
Tonality
Remarks
Kyrie
none
Barc c, no.
D ––––
unicum; non-isorhythmic
Gloria
none
Iv
D ––––
unicum; isorhythmic
Credo
Perrinet?
Apt + MSS
D ––––
attributed variously;a) non-isorhythmic
Sanctus
none
Iv
D ––––
unicum; non-isorhythmic
Agnusb)
none
BarcC, no.
D ––––
unicum; Barcelona cycle; non-isorhythmic
a)
b)
This Credo, which is among the most widely circulated mass settings of the period, is ascribed to ‘Prunet’ in the lost Str, and to ‘Perneth’ in Padua , as well as being provided with the designation ‘Bonbarde’ in Apt. Stäblein-Harder (b, –) suggests that the former two attributions may indicate that the composer was Perrinet, to whom is credited the three-voice Kyrie, Apt (ID ). The contrapuntal functions of this movement are analyzed in Moll , –.
Of course, the process of culling related or semi-related movements out of the larger repertory to conform to some particular notion of arriving at a cycle is essentially otiose from the scholar’s point of view. Yet this exercise is not without value, as when programming a performance or recording, or even a single church service. In any of these situations, a musical director has to make definite choices about which works to select, and a discerning individual may well choose to offer the public a slate of movements that displays some sort of tangible continuity. Ultimately, however, the chimerical enterprise of identifying new cycles – while •
•
The movements (including the Toulouse Ite) are all realized in cantilena texture and expanded two-voice counterpoint with voice stratification (apart from the Kyrie, Apt ); they also all incorporate untexted duo bridge passages (excepting the Agnus, Apt ). For definitions and illustrations of these stylistic attributes, see Moll , –, wherein is also entertained a reassessment of the ‘style categories’ ubiquitously invoked in the literature on the repertory at hand. Discussion of such issues is entertained in the liner notes to a CD, produced by the present author with the vocal ensemble Schola Discantus, of seventeen individual mass settings from the repertory: French Sacred Music of the th Century, vol. (New York: Lyrichord Discs – LEMS , ), see esp. p. . A second volume in the series, including
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admittedly an absorbing diversion – reveals more about our own modern fixation with organic integrity in art music as expressed through sophisticated cyclic interconnections (as in the symphonic repertoire of the past two hundred years), than it does about the proclivities and tastes of fourteenth-century composers, manuscript assemblers, and listeners. The evidence presented above, demonstrating both the lack of organic integration in the acknowledged cycles, and the absence of prior recognition either in the surviving codices or in the secondary literature of the one set of pieces (Table .) that arguably can most legitimately be posited to constitute a musically unified five-movement cycle, indicates rather conclusively that musical criteria of unification were not central to compilers of mass settings in the s. Another facet of the issue was emphasized by Manfred Bukofzer, who long ago pointed out the necessity to separate musical from liturgical considerations in the study of cyclic relationships among tone-settings of the mass. Subsequent ruminations on this matter by Geoffrey Chew led him to the following conclusion: Bukofzer could find no liturgical reason for [the origins of the musically unified Mass Ordinary], and he inferred that artistic and aesthetic considerations must have taken precedence over liturgical ones for it to have become possible. […] [Thus] it does not seem to be necessary to believe as Bukofzer did that the cyclic Mass represents a new and radical departure from the liturgical outlook of the Middle Ages. The Mass Ordinary became liturgically homogeneous long before it became musically homogeneous; and it became musically homogeneous in the chant before it did in polyphony.
The notion that series of movements, whether plainchant or polyphonic, were compiled essentially for utilitarian purposes, and that musical unification per se was at best a secondary consideration to composers and manuscript compilers, places the concept of mass cycles into the context that most fittingly seems to reflect the way they were understood in the fourteenth century. Such extramusical reasons for the compilation of the Machaut cycle have been suggested by Elizabeth A. Keitel and Anne Walters Robertson, both of whom have argued (although based on different premises) that the cantus firmi in that mass are consistent with performance on specific liturgical occasions. Moreover, researchers have identified elaborated chant paraphrases in the upper voices of the Gloria and possibly the Credo of Machaut’s Mass, thus challenging the opinions of previous commentators, who
•
• • •
•
•
the Sorbonne and Toulouse Masses, as well as the selection of movements shown in Table ., has been recorded and awaits release. This viewpoint is adumbrated by Hanna Harder [Stäblein-Harder] (, ) in her article on the Mass of Toulouse, where she concludes that that work ‘is likened to the Mass of Tournai and the mass of the north-Italian masters [a cycle of Italian provenance, transmitted in Pit] in that it is not musically unified’. Bukofzer , . Chew , . In this judgment I must differ fundamentally with the conclusion drawn by Schrade (, ) wherein he claims that ‘it can be proved that the extant [fourteenth-century] cycles are not arbitrary combinations; nor are they responsive to liturgical demands, but to artistic considerations’. Keitel (, –) posits the use of this cycle at a general Marian celebration. Robertson (, ) agrees, adding evidence that it was composed for the Cathedral of Reims, possibly being sung ultimately in the composer’s memory at posthumous votive services. Robertson , . See also Leech–Wilkinson , – and .
Kevin N. Moll
had tended to assume that these movements were freely composed – although it must be allowed that Jacques Handschin long ago had pointed out what seemed to him to be references in the Credo to the Gregorian Credo I. This last claim is echoed by Daniel LeechWilkinson, who makes a fairly strong case for the presence of a paraphrase of the plainchant Gloria IV in the Gloria movement of the Machaut Mass. To conclude this first section, there is little evidence at hand from the fourteenth century documenting that cycles were brought together in the sources on the basis of specifically musical relationships, or that the creation of thematically or tonally unified cycles was an issue of consequence to composers at that time. Rather, whatever compatibilities are displayed among individual movements in the manuscript cycles (particularly the Sorbonne Mass) are best explained through the model of ‘contrafactum’ (to be discussed below in Section III), even though such procedures have sometimes been accorded more historical significance than they deserve. It is apparent that those few cycles existing as such in the sources of the French polyphonic Mass Ordinary of the fourteenth century were assembled primarily for liturgical, or possibly codicological, but not musical, reasons, and that numerous efforts made over the years to trace systematic pre-compositional principles of musical unification in the mass repertory of the period have proceeded from anachronistic premises. II. Compositional context of the Machaut Mass It was something of a commonplace in music histories of the last century to single out the Mass of Guillaume de Machaut and to present it as one of the most significant products of musical culture in the fourteenth century. Usually it is the uniqueness and monumentality of the work that is stressed – its position as the earliest known complete polyphonic Ordinary cycle indisputably written by one identified composer. Commentators have often compared the Machaut Mass with other contemporaneous compositions in the genre, but in such comparisons the latter usually fare poorly, as in Gilbert Reaney’s statement that ‘to compare it with other fourteenth-century polyphonic mass settings is to realize how much better Machaut’s complete Ordinary is than other settings, usually of isolated movements’. At their most extreme, advocates of this view have represented Machaut’s Mass as a stylistically unified assemblage that anticipates the cantus-firmus mass cycles of the fifteenth century by some fifty to seventy-five years. While this last view is now largely discredited, scholars are still inclined to impute both a historical and an artistic preeminence to the Messe de Nostre Dame within the realm of liturgical polyphony. Given the stature which this • • • • •
Handschin , –. These issues are developed in greater detail in Moll , –. Leech–Wilkinson , –. For example, Gerald Abraham (, ) states that ‘Machaut’s Messe de Nostre Dame [is] the most imposing musical monument of the fourteenth century’. Reaney , . See, for example, Reese , –. At one time it was taken almost for granted that this cycle was written specifically for the coronation of French King Charles V in , yet to my knowledge no explicit evidence has ever been adduced in support of that claim.
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piece has achieved and continues to hold, I propose in the following discussion to offer a reassessment of the position of the Machaut Mass within the milieu of sacred music in France in the fourteenth century, from the standpoint of both liturgy and compositional style. As is evident from the above discussion, the Messe de Nostre Dame falls under normative criteria for what constitutes a mass cycle in the fourteenth century – criteria which, although flexible and liturgically based, seem to have been of some importance to composers, or at least, compilers. Yet despite the abundant attention paid to Machaut’s Mass over the past several decades, no consensus has yet been reached as to its dating. It is now generally agreed that it is a relatively late work, and various evidence has been adduced pointing to a probable date around for its completion. What remains uncertain, however, is how extended was the time-span over which the entire cycle was written. Certain researchers have tended to doubt that the composer set out from the beginning to write all six movements, even though it was ultimately placed together in Machaut’s manuscripts as a contiguous entity, and stylistic evidence from the Mass itself, based on attributes of tonality, musical texture, cadence types, and use of isorhythm, supports this view, to the point where it is possible to suggest distinct chronological layers (see Table .). Table .: Possible chronology of the Machaut Mass based on stylistic factors Chronology
Movement
ID
Final
Texture
Cadence typea)
Isorhythm
(Earlier)
Gloria
D
Cantilena
DC i
no
Sanctus
F
Paired upper voices
DC i
yes
Agnus
F
Paired upper voices
DC i
yes
Ite
F
Paired upper voices
DC i
yes
Kyrie
D
Paired upper voices
DC
yes
(Later)
Credo
D
Paired upper voices
DC
Amen only
a)
The abbreviation ‘DC’ refers to ‘Discant Cadence’ in a penultimate-ultimate progression, followed by the number of voice-parts that proceed in directed motion; the ‘i’ specifies that the progression is irregular. For particulars, see Moll , – and –, although in those discussions the term ‘discant motion’ is used instead of ‘directed motion’.
From a compositional standpoint, the Machaut Mass manifests certain procedures that are more or less typical of the repertory of contemporary French Mass Ordinary settings, namely the works contained in Iv and Apt and their related codices, and in the Tournai Mass and other movements of its orbit. In these works, which comprise the central corpus of French liturgical polyphony from the period, we encounter many phenomena in common with the Machaut Mass. •
• • •
Robertson (, ) reports that ‘the Mass was probably complete before , and certainly prior to the copying of Vg in the early s’. This dating is somewhat ironic in that it potentially corresponds with the occasion mentioned in n. , namely that the composition of the mass was occasioned by the crowning of King Charles V. See Keitel , –, which includes several corroborating references. See, for example, Keitel , –. This hypothesis will not be elaborated upon here. The evidence is discussed at greater length in Moll , –.
Kevin N. Moll
First, a tenor cantus firmus, while not exactly a typical attribute of the Iv/Apt repertory, is sometimes used. One of the clearest examples of this is in the troped Kyrie, Apt (ID ), which has a concordance as Iv . This three-voice Kyrie sets a mensurated (but not rhythmicized) version of the chant in the tenor, whereas Machaut’s Kyrie is rhythmicized into taleae. Second, the texture of two active upper voices above two slower-moving lower lines is the same in the Machaut Mass as that usually encountered in four-voice works of the Iv/ Apt circle. As I will discuss however, Machaut’s treatment of the lower voices is at times decidedly irregular. Third, the textless two-voice bridge passages, serving to articulate structure more clearly, occur in the Gloria and Credo of the Machaut Mass, and also in the Tournai Mass, exactly as they do in many other movements from the Iv/Apt repertory, one of the most obvious of which is the Credo, Iv (ID ). Although the duos in this work do not occur at the same text divisions as in Machaut’s Credo, their function of separating multi-phrase units of text is exactly the same. Fourth, the Gloria and Credo of the Machaut Mass share one ubiquitous characteristic with the Iv/Apt corpus, namely the presence of a distinct and separated ‘Amen’ section. These occur in so many works as to constitute a kind of signature for French mass settings of the period. A particularly extended ‘Amen’ occurs in the Gloria of the Tournai Mass, which runs to bars in Schrade’s edition. Sometimes, as in the Gloria Qui sonitu melodie (Iv , Apt , etc – ID ), a piece will be transmitted in an essentially consistent version except for its variant ‘Amens’. Fifth, there exist remarkable affinities between Machaut’s Credo and that of the Tournai Mass. Parallelisms between the two movements include the use of textless bridge passages, the initial e-f-e figure in the discantus – undoubtedly a reference to the plainchant Credo I (present in a number of other works from the corpus as well), and the typically homorhythmic character of both Credos. In a more general sense, the Machaut Mass as a whole displays some significant parallels with Tournai: they both include a setting of the dismissal formula, Ite missa est, and both cycles make use of a contrasting compositional style in the Gloria and the Credo vis à vis the Kyrie, Sanctus, and Agnus. In my view it is clear that Machaut modeled his Mass directly upon the Tournai cycle. On the other hand, a number of things about the Machaut Mass are decidedly atypical. First, as noted above, Machaut’s setting of an entire series of movements à is unique among the extant manuscript cycles. While a number of individual movements in the Iv/Apt reper • • • • •
The use of cantus firmus in Ordinary settings of the corpus under consideration is treated in Moll , –. Evidence for this point is presented in Moll , esp. –. See the analysis of this piece in Moll , –. See, for example, Leech–Wilkinson , –. As Table . shows, polyphonic settings of the dismissal formula are typically found in the manuscript cycles. The Tournai Ite is literally a motet in the accepted sense of that term, with double texts and a rhythmicized tenor, whereas the Machaut Ite sets the liturgical text only. Problematic aspects of genre in polyphonic Ite and Benedicamus compositions are taken up in Moll , –. Regarding settings of these texts within mass cycles, see also Guletsky , n. .
The Fourteenth-Century Polyphonic Mass Ordinary
tory are four-voiced (Kyrie, Apt ; Gloria, Iv ; Credo, Iv ; Sanctus, Iv ), only one movement out of the other accepted cycles is written for four voices, namely the Agnus of the Barcelona Mass. Second, and related to the first item, is Machaut’s treatment of the contratenor voice. At important points of structural articulation in four-voice works of the Iv/Apt repertory there is, almost without exception, no doubt as to which voice is the tenor and which is the contratenor, whereas Machaut often treats the two voices as interchangeable. For example, in the isorhythmic Gloria, Iv (ID ), although the two lower voices cross, the tenor invariably makes the → directed motion with one of the upper voices at major cadences (bars –, –, –, –). In contrast, Machaut just as often makes the → cadence with the contratenor (Kyrie, bars –, –, –, for example). Indeed, in the Kyrie movement Machaut indulges in this practice even to the extent of allotting at the final cadence the descending stepwise motion to the contratenor rather than the tenor – a phenomenon otherwise virtually unprecedented in the mass settings of this period. This idiosyncratic approach to voice function at cadences is one of the most distinctive elements of the Messe de Nostre Dame, and represents a significant departure from the normative contrapuntal procedures of the Iv/Apt repertory. Third, as Otto Gombosi was the first to point out, Machaut appears to have built a strophic aspect into the textual structure of the Gloria and Credo of his Mass. This observation has since been seconded by Leech-Wilkinson, who acknowledges it as ‘perhaps the most important discovery yet made’ about the Mass. In his article, Gombosi showed how the structure of Machaut’s Gloria could be interpreted as an introduction (bars –, cadencing on D) followed by four tripartite ‘stanzas’, whose cadences correspond loosely to the ouvert and clos phrase endings of contemporaneous secular songs. These tripartite divisions each consist of an ouvert cadence either a step above or below the final (E or C), followed by two successive passages ending with clos cadences on the final (D). This appropriation of formal characteristics out of the secular formes fixes appears to have few parallels among mass settings of this period – a paradoxical state of affairs considering the number of scholars who have proceeded from the assumption that fourteenth-century mass compositions ‘do not comprise an individual sacred style; on the contrary, they take over their forms out of the secular music’. In light of the above evidence, it seems that, contrary to what one routinely encounters in secondary sources, Machaut was not breaking new ground in realizing his Mass as an entity occurring contiguously in its manuscript source. As already discussed, codicologi • • • • • • •
For a detailed consideration of four-voice compositional conceptions in ‘the Machaut Era’, see Moll . BarcC, no. (ID ). See Tables . and .. See the edition of the Messe in Leech-Wilkinson , –. Gombosi , –. Leech-Wilkinson , . These places are identified by text incipit in Gombosi , , and by bar number in Leech-Wilkinson , . Dannemann , . This opinion was still maintained by Stäblein-Harder (b, ) and many other commentators.
Kevin N. Moll
cal evidence clearly indicates that organization of Ordinary cycles – both monophonic and polyphonic – was a growing practice in the fourteenth century. The various similarities between the Tournai Mass and Machaut’s – the former being indisputably the earlier of the two cycles – make it rather evident that Machaut knew the work, and in fact imitated it in certain respects. Thus, regarding the cyclic aspects of the Mass, one can safely assert with Leech-Wilkinson that ‘Machaut was following a tradition rather than creating one’. However eccentric the work may be in some respects, the Messe de Nostre Dame stands as an achievement of notable individuality. Those who attribute a certain genius to the composer may well point to its innovative elements, such as the quasi-strophic layout in the Gloria and Credo movements. In my opinion, however, the Machaut Mass should not be assessed unreservedly as the artistically preeminent achievement of its time. For while some of the Iv/Apt settings are arguably uninspired, a number of them are remarkably powerful, as for example the Gloria, Iv (ID ), with its strikingly low tessitura and highly effective rhythmic urgency, as well as the aforementioned four-voice Credo, Apt , which I would put forward as the most musically interesting liturgical artifact that survives from the fourteenth century. Most others display respectable craftsmanship at the very least. In general, the mainstream mass settings are treated more rationalistically than are Machaut’s, although certain of the compositional procedures used in the Messe de Nostre Dame are not normally found even among Machaut’s own works. This is true particularly with respect to tenor taleae, where the composer does not indulge in the mensural alterations of his motets. Also, there are no repeats of color in the isorhythmic sections of the Mass. Yet given that Machaut’s primary sphere of activity appears to have lain within the realm of secular song, one should perhaps not be surprised upon encountering singular effects in his sole essay into liturgical composition. And finally, regardless of how one may account for its compositional idiosyncrasies, Machaut’s Mass can only be assessed as a peripheral phenomenon from the standpoint of transmission, insofar as it exists exclusively in sources transmitting solely the composer’s own works, and no part of the cycle is found in any of the manuscripts heretofore identified as central to the repertory of French liturgical music in the period. III. Use of common material in polyphonic mass movements One outcome of previous researchers’ emphasis on tracing organic musical connections has been the identification of a complex network of links existing between various movements within the repertory, some of which I have already touched upon. Of these, the most consequential is a series of interconnections that have been claimed to represent ‘parodistic’ processes. In view of the skepticism registered above regarding organic musical unification in • • • •
Leech-Wilkinson , . This phenomenon may of course correlate with the genre of mass as opposed to motet and chanson, to which the composer’s musical production is otherwise almost entirely restricted. See Moll , –. The Ite missa est, alone, is transmitted in a tangential Italian manuscript (Padua ). The use of the word ‘parody’ in connection with mass cycles was coined during the nineteenth century in reference to
The Fourteenth-Century Polyphonic Mass Ordinary
fourteenth-century mass cycles, one must acknowledge that these interrelationships (often involving reuse of material in more than one voice simultaneously) do indeed exist between a number of movements in the corpus at hand. I therefore propose to present here an overview and critique of these affiliations. The first study that focused upon identifying musically related movements within the repertory was an article of Leo Schrade’s entitled ‘A Fourteenth-Century Parody Mass’. Here the author illustrated interconnections among various movements of the Sorbonne Mass, as well as several alleged affinities with the larger repertory transmitted in Iv. In particular, Schrade demonstrated specific musical congruencies between the Kyrie and Agnus of the Sorbonne Mass (IDs , ), between the Sorbonne Sanctus (ID ) and the four-voice troped Sanctus, Iv (ID ), and between the Sorbonne Gloria and the Credo, Iv (ID ); for this last pair of movements, Schrade says the relationship of ‘is that of parody’, a procedure explained by the author as follows: The relation between the Gloria and Credo is not limited to the identity of the beginning. Although the texts, entirely different in character, length, and liturgical usage, should preclude a further relationship, the link between the two works is actually maintained. First the composer, literally and fully in all parts, quotes the initial passage, sufficiently long to allow recognition of the parody. Moving along with greater freedom after the literal quotation, the composer then begins to work with the material of the composition from which he first quoted.
•
•
•
•
• •
the standard approach to reworking preexistent material in the period c. – (regarding the evolution of its usage, see Lockwood ). This locution seems to have gained currency through Peter Wagner’s pathbreaking Geschichte der Messe (Wagner , as, for example, ). Since the s, however, the term has been progressively abandoned due to its marginal relevance historically, as well as its quasi-pejorative overtones. In treating such phenomena I prefer to speak of various types of ‘modeling’ techniques, which may be based either on monophonic templates (such as a cantus firmus) or on polyphonic ones. An instructive orientation to technical and artistic issues pertaining to the so-called parody mass of the sixteenth century is provided in Quereau . Of the many musical interrelationships that have been proposed by various commentators, only the most clear-cut and documentable examples are discussed below. The specific relationships are not entertained in detail since they are developed at length in studies cited herein. A concise overview of issues impinging on this topic can be found in Berke , –. Schrade , –. A few years earlier, certain processes characterized as ‘parody’ in mass settings by Italian composers (principally Zacara de Teramo) around the turn of the fifteenth century had been explored by Pirotta () and Ghisi (). The similarities between the surviving voices of the various movements of the Sorbonne Mass have allowed for a full – albeit speculative – reconstruction of the Kyrie, Sanctus, and Agnus of the cycle, even though none of these movements exists complete in the source. See PMFC XXIIIA, nos. , , . For example, Schrade (, ) notes ‘a particularly close [stylistic] affinity’ between the Sorbonne Gloria (ID ) and the Gloria, Iv (ID ). I find this connection especially forced, despite Schrade’s claim that ‘the stylistic relationship is the nearest imaginable’ (, ). To the contrary, I assert that the two passages adduced by Schrade evince specific equivalencies neither in their register, nor in their melodic contour, nor in their tonality. The best that can be said is that they draw upon a common stock of rhythmic characteristics and that they utilize comparable means of text disposition. As a barometer of the validity of Schrade’s claims it is significant that neither Stäblein-Harder (b, –) nor Cattin and Fachin (PMFC XXIIIB, pp. and ) troubled to mention them in their respective critical notes to the two movements in question. Schrade , . Schrade , .
Kevin N. Moll
Subsequent research has confirmed and expanded several of the relationships proposed by Schrade, but ironically, the extent of musical correspondence between the Sorbonne Gloria and the Credo, Iv , is the one that has been subjected to the most criticism. In an earlier article Schrade had suggested another possibility, namely that the Ite movement of the Toulouse Mass is related musically to the Credo, Iv (Apt ), but this hypothesis, too, was rejected on account of the vagueness of the correspondences. Schrade’s most viable findings from the two studies already mentioned were expanded by Roland Jackson in a article that has since become the most widely cited study on the topic at hand. The most important results of Jackson’s research are two. First, his article demonstrates that the Agnus from CaB (ID ) has substantial musical affinities to the Sorbonne Sanctus, and to the troped four-voice Sanctus, Iv (ID ) – a connection that had already been noted by Schrade. Second, the author identifies three other movements having very close relationships through clearly definable reuse of musical material: Kyrie, Iv ; Credo, Iv ; and Sanctus, Apt (noted also in Table . above, center column). Table . shows these correspondences in graphic form: Table .: Complexes of interrelated movements in ‘central’ sources )
Sorbonne Mass:
Kyrie à (ID )
↔
↔
Agnus à (ID )
Sanctus à (ID )
↓↑
(Pim: , , )
Agnus à , CaB (ID )
↓↑ Sanctus à , Iv (ID )
)
Sanctus à , Iv (ID )
↔
Credo à , Iv (ID )
↔
Sanctus à , Apt (ID )
As intimated above, only the most documentable and extensive cases of musical correspondence are shown in Table ., but many additional instances of musical borrowings have •
•
•
•
Stäblein-Harder (b, ), questions Schrade’s methodology in comparing internal relationships between the Sorbonne Gloria and the Credo, Iv . She claimed that in Schrade’s article, ‘neither the movements as a whole nor even the voices as a whole are compared, but only specific parts selected out of each voice’, so that ‘the element of chance seems […] to be too great’ (n. ). However, she closes by saying that ‘if we consider that the Kyrie, Sanctus and Agnus of the Sorbonne Mass appear to stem from compositions of the Ms Iv, then we may accept it as probable that Iv served as the point of departure for the Gloria of the Sorbonne Mass’ (n. ). Schrade , –. This and other issues were taken up again by Gómez () in an article which, in focusing on the Aragonese sources, reviews the repertoire stylistically, noting many correspondences and variant readings among the mass cycles and individual movements, some of which had previously been identified by Schrade, Günther, and Stäblein-Harder. Stäblein-Harder writes ‘that the resemblances are only of a general nature (same rhythm, similar melodic structure). It is not likely that any identity exists between the beginning of the Ite and the Laudamus te of the Gloria Iv [… and] it is not apparent that the T[enor] of the Ite “is very much like the Contratenor of the Mass [the Gloria setting].”’ She concludes that certain melodic correspondences between individual voice parts ‘seem to [her] to be striking, but still too isolated to indicate a definite connection between the two compositions’ (b, ). Jackson , –.
The Fourteenth-Century Polyphonic Mass Ordinary
been identified by various scholars. In the critical notes to her edition of the Apt/Iv mass settings, Hanna Stäblein-Harder reviewed the issue of musical interrelationships by defining five means of treating preexistent material in the ‘central’ French mass repertory of the s: ) A composition is provided with another text, and, apart from this, only slightly altered. An example of this is found in the Sorbonne Mass, where the first and third voices of the Kyrie à recur in the two-part Agnus of the same Mass. ) A more extended composition is dissected, some of its sections are put together again and provided with a new text, without the sections of the original being altered much. This is the case with the three-part Sanctus Apt and perhaps with the two-part Kyrie Iv [renumbered in RISM], where different sections of the three-part Credo Iv appear. ) Parts of a composition are transferred to another, changed or provided with new elements. To this category belong the three-part Sanctus and the two-part first Agnus of the Sorbonne Mass, whose sections are adapted from the four-part Sanctus Iv ; this in turn has its origin in the Agnus Cambrai , the parts of which appear unaltered as well as altered. In the Amen of [the Cordier Gloria,] Apt [ID ], elements of the Amen of [the Tapissier Credo,] Apt [ID ] are combined to form a new unity. ) Only the T[enor] of a polyphonic movement is used as the basis for another composition, as in the case of the T[enor] of the two-part Kyrie Iv , which is used in the three-part Kyrie of the Sorbonne Mass. ) One composition is treated merely as the starting point for another, e. g. the Amen of BL [the Tapissier Credo, ID , as transmitted in Q.] makes use of only the first two [longs] of the Amen of [the same work as it exists in] Apt , and in this manner, too, the first two measures of the Credo Iv [ID ] recur in the Gloria of the Sorbonne Mass [ID ]. The above, then, are the characteristic means of reusing musical material one finds in the network of applicable sources, distilled by a scholar whose familiarity with the repertory is irreproachable. I maintain that such procedures are more akin to the contemporary practice of contrafactum than they are to the so-called parody techniques developed to a high degree of sophistication during the sixteenth century in the mass cycles of such masters as Gombert, Clemens, and Willaert. Thus, contrary to Schrade’s contentions, the extant examples from the s are not directly comparable to the later artworks in that they do not manifest a systematic pre-compositional plan. Indeed, Jackson himself registered the opinion that ‘this later technic is far more subtle and consists of the elaborate reworking of the polyphonic fabric of the original’. Subsequently, he characterizes the fourteenth-century procedures of borrowing as follows: • • •
The list presented here is taken from Stäblein-Harder b, . The Agnus is realized in three voices in PMFC XXIIIB, no. . Jackson , . These sentiments are echoed in Fischer , .
Kevin N. Moll
The fourteenth century practice […] consists mainly in the rearrangement of musical sections drawn from another work. […] In the sixteenth century the parody mass became a vehicle to demonstrate the ingenuity of the composer, to show what could be done with the borrowed material. […] And since we know that this earlier practice occurred in the fourteenth […] century it might be best to evolve a more specific term for what can now be considered not merely a predecessor, but a separate technic in its own right.
In a footnote to the passage, Jackson characterizes the procedure as ‘paraphrased contrafactum’. I would concur that this term conveys well both of its essential components, namely its basic adherence to the traditional means of reusing material, yet allied with what is evidently a progressive tendency toward employment of musical variety. On the other hand, we must not rule out the possibility that some of these instances of musical borrowing were occasioned simply by a composer’s need to flesh out a given piece for upcoming performance. To close out this consideration of musical correspondences, I should like to sketch out one further and intriguing instance occurring in the repertory, namely the parallelisms that exist between the Credo (ID ) attributed to ‘Cameraco’ in the now-lost manuscript Str, and the Credo (ID ) transmitted in the Turin codex, TuB (no. ). Given the insular nature of TuB, any noteworthy connections between its contents and the mainstream French repertories are going to be of substantial interest because that particular source, although betraying many characteristics that are palpably French, has no known concordances with any other contemporaneous manuscript. The musical similarities of these two movements à do not take the more obvious form of specific motivic congruences, but rather are expressed throughout both works in the melodic profiles of the upper voice, in their general method of treating counterpoint (chanson style), and in their shared use of a rhythmic fingerprint e q e | e q e in the lower voices – particularly the contratenor. Equally important, many aspects of pitch ordering in both Credos are identical: final, signatures, tenor pitch set, ultimate sonority, as well as text disposition (both pieces text the upper voice only). In addition, the ambitus of the lower voices are identical (C–e) and the ambitus of the respective discantus lines are nearly so (a–b’ as against b–b’ in the Turin work). Finally, neither work makes use of either a preexistent cantus firmus or isorhythm. • • •
• • • •
Jackson , . Jackson , , n. . Presumably not even J. S. Bach was exempt from the deadlines of professional music production, as witness his reuse of material from his Orchestral Suite No. (BWV ) in the opening movement of his Christmas cantata, ‘Unser Mund sei voll Lachens’ (BWV ). Apart from its presence in Str, the ‘Cameraco’ Credo is transmitted in two further sources: Barc d and Q.. For example, Hoppin (, ) claims that the texts of Incessanter expertavi/ Virtutis ineffabili (motet in TuB) and Philippe de Vitry’s Impudenter circumivi/ Virtutis laudabilis are ‘exactly parallel, in both construction and rhyme’. For a capsule orientation to these issues as they apply to the fourteenth century, see Moll , –. In this respect it is telling that the two works’ ‘ID’ numbering is contiguous, insofar as that ordering is keyed to genre and objective musical characteristics such as are enumerated above. Regarding these points, see Moll , – and –.
The Fourteenth-Century Polyphonic Mass Ordinary
The TuB Credo is paired in its source with a Gloria (ID ), but based on the above factors – especially in combination – its musical relationship to the ‘Cameraco’ Credo is even closer. If the evident similarities between these two Credo movements are indeed meaningful, then one might be justified in positing a direct musical connection – probably one of authorship – between the pieces, and this possibility would in turn yield a new perspective onto the relationships between the decidedly ‘peripheral’ TuB and the central repertory comprised of the French/Spanish codices (represented by Barc d) as well as the lateral sources (Str and Q.), since the ‘Cameraco’ Credo is transmitted in manuscripts belonging to both groups.
Having reviewed various elements impinging on the question of multi-movement unity within the corpus of French polyphonic mass compositions stemming from the fourteenth century, we find that the practice of combining movements into liturgical ‘cycles’ within manuscript sources, and the ‘musical unification’ of disparate settings, are largely separate phenomena. On the one hand, evidence of the collating of individual movements – both of plainchant and of polyphony – into cycles formatted in single codices is incontrovertible. On the other hand, it is equally evident that composers were striving in some measure to achieve musical integration amongst disparate movements, although manifesting such unity does not seem to have been an overriding concern to compilers of the extant manuscript cycles. An important outcome of this study is therefore that paleographical deployment outweighs musical unification in forming the basis of the concept of mass cycles during the ars nova era. And to that extent, one is justified in speaking of the polyphonic Mass Ordinary during this period as a ‘nascent meta-genre’, prefiguring the liturgical inclusivity of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century cycles, but not yet concerned with realizing the sorts of innovative thematic-structural processes developed in the ‘plainsong-mass’ and ‘tenor-mass’ cycles beginning around – procedures which ultimately yielded the tightly integrated polyphonic model masses that became the standard after c. .
. C V/R M* Anna Zayaruznaya
In the penultimate paragraph of her pioneering book on Guillaume de Machaut, Elizabeth Eva Leach summarizes the poet-composer’s achievements and reputation. After reminding her reader of Machaut’s literary status as evidenced by his being the first French poet to be called ‘poète’ in the vernacular (a circumstance which places him in the ranks of vernacular path-breakers Dante, Petrarch, and Chaucer), Leach turns to the question of his musical legacy: As a musician he shared an international contemporary reputation with Philippe de Vitry. In light of the fact that Vitry partook of the literate tradition of music theory and that much of his influence on the musical tradition can be linked to this fact, Machaut is by far the more influential on other composers through the media of music and poetry.
It’s not a competition! I found myself objecting as I read, surprised not least because Vitry had barely made an appearance in the book up to this point. But it’s not not a competition. And Leach is hardly the first to compare these two in terms of their achievements and excellence. Near the beginning of his introduction to Machaut’s Mass, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson turned to Philippe de Vitry immediately after summarizing the key events of Machaut’s biography, in order to contextualize Machaut and his achievements: The most obvious comparison, with Philippe de Vitry, whose career began in a similar fashion at the French court, makes Machaut appear a rather unremarkable figure […] By the age of […] when Machaut had already retired to Reims; Vitry had become one of the most powerful figures in the French establishment […] Like Machaut, Vitry composed […] and like Machaut he wrote poetry […] But if in their origins and in their literary and musical interests the two composers seem to be comparable, in terms of political and intellectual achievement Vitry is by far the more significant figure.
Although Vitry comes out ahead in this comparison, Leech-Wilkinson’s volume focuses on Machaut. He goes on to suggest that despite Vitry’s achievements Machaut ‘seems so much more engaging [...] to the student of medieval literature and music’ in part because of his idiosyncratic musical and poetic languages (these ‘seem more intriguing than does the classical perfection of Vitry’s surviving motets’) but mainly because Machaut self-anthologized in volumes expensive enough to be preserved even after they had become unfashionable. This earlier critique explicates Leach’s turn to Vitry, framing it as an implicit retort to a tacit suggestion that the survival of Machaut’s manuscripts is random and should not be used to bolster his excellence. Indeed, Leach’s comparison with Vitry is preceded by a rebuttal of this claim. * • • • • •
For Larry, a locus both of classical precision and of grand Romantic ideas. Leach b, . Leach b, , , , n. , , n. , , , and –. Leech-Wilkinson , . Leech-Wilkinson , –. ‘What this sketch of Machaut’s immediate reception history shows is that, wonderful as they are, the Machaut manuscripts have not misrepresented or overrepresented his historical importance’; Leach b, .
Classical Vitry/Romantic Machaut
The history of Western music is full of dyads, both diachronic and synchronic. Take, for example, the conference in honor of Christoph Wolf held at Harvard, which was called ‘The Century of Bach and Mozart’. In this frame Bach and Mozart serve to represent the different parts of their shared century and also the baroque and classical as chronological and aesthetic categories. But one of the conference’s panels, cleverly titled ‘The Century of Handel and Haydn’, complicated this scheme by introducing two more dyads: Bach vs. Handel, Mozart vs. Haydn. I also heard an anecdote about a scholar who quipped, when presented with the claim that Perotin was the Mozart of his time, that no, Haydn is the Mozart of his time. Along these lines there can be no question that, historiographically speaking, Philippe de Vitry is Guillaume de Machaut’s significant other. When two composers together define an era, some amount of comparison between them is probably inescapable. And in the case of the two foremost composers of the French fourteenth century, there are extra circumstances which may make us want to throw them into the ring. Clearly Vitry and Machaut are comparable: both were court administrators and clerics; both wrote music and poetry, including surviving motets; both were named by their contemporaries as musical and poetic innovators, sometimes adjacently as in the Meditations of Gilles li Muisis and the anonymous Règles de la seconde rhétorique. And if Machaut is, as Leach suggests, on par with Petrarch for being ‘the first poet to be called “poète” in the French vernacular’, it is also pertinent that Petrarch himself called Vitry ‘poeta nunc unicus Gallicarum’ (the only poet among the French). But most of all, Vitry and Machaut are alike in being known to us in some robust way; for the majority of their contemporaneous colleagues we have only a name, very little in the way of biography, and no attributed works at all. But if Vitry and Machaut share the fact that we know something about them, it is also true that the kinds of things we know can seem frustratingly incommensurable. For Vitry we have an exact date of birth in , several books with annotations in his hand, robust documentation of his renown as a poet and composer, a small corpus of securely attributed works, and quite a few anonymously transmitted pieces that can be attached to him with various levels of assurance. And chronology is a mess: the main manuscript to transmit Vitry’s secure works – Iv – was in all likelihood compiled after his death. For Machaut, we need to guess at a birth year, we have no demonstrable autograph, and documentation of his reputation is spottier than we would like. On the other hand, attribution and dating are usually far from the minds of Machaut scholars, who have the advantage of several • • • • • •
The proceedings were eventually published as Gallagher and Kelly ; ‘The Century of Handel and Haydn’ is the title of James Webster’s contribution to this volume. Kervyn de Lettenhove , ; Langlois , . Leach b, . Dotti , . It should be noted that in context this phrase does not read as unambiguous praise, as I show in the final chapter of my forthcoming monograph, The Making of Philippe de Vitry. On Vitry’s book annotations see Wathey ; for his contemporary reception and on questions of attribution see Bent and Wathey’s Grove entry, ‘Vitry, Philippe de’. Karl Kügle () suggests that Iv was copied c. –; Vitry died in .
Anna Zayaruznaya
complete-works manuscripts compiled during the composer’s life. These not only tell us everything we could want to know about attribution, but also, through their progressively bigger collections, testify to aspects of chronology – at least during the third quarter of the fourteenth century. We even have pictures of Machaut! For Vitry, I tend to resort to a medieval illumination of a rooster in acknowledgment of Petrarch’s nickname for him (Gallus). And of course, all these incommensurables are magnified by the differing availability of research tools: nothing like Lawrence Earp’s magisterial Guide to Research exists for Vitry. The upshot of all this is that it can be difficult to discuss Machaut and Vitry in the same breath. When we are talking about Vitry, chances are we are working on attribution or reception – when about Machaut, the topic on the table might be song forms, authorial voice, bookmaking, or biography. The exception to this – the kind of study that can address both composers together – is of course one that focuses on the evolution of style and techniques in motet writing. And it is within this tradition that we come across a trope that connects the two composers in an unintuitive but influential way: that of classical Vitry and romantic Machaut. In the remainder of this chapter I trace this trope backwards from the s to its s origin in the writings of Heinrich Besseler. For Besseler the comparison between a romantic Machaut and a classical Vitry was decidedly to Vitry’s advantage, doing the work of minimizing Machaut’s importance in the history of the motet. But I will suggest that his comparison also had the – likely unintended – consequence of exaggerating Vitry’s historical primacy relative to Machaut, encouraging later scholars to assume that any influence between the two ran from Vitry to Machaut. Contrary to this, the chronologies of Machaut’s and Vitry’s motet output as currently understood confirm that the two composers were active in the same decades, complicating the received picture of a unidirectional student-master relationship. Instead, my concluding case study argues, there is evidence of mutual influence and borrowing between the two most prominent composers of the French fourteenth century.
We already had a brief exposure to our object of study in Leech-Wilkinson’s appraisal, quoted above, of ‘the classical perfection of Vitry’s surviving motets’. We can find a much fuller manifestation of this trope in a footnote published some eight years earlier in the article ‘Related Motets from Fourteenth-Century France’. Here, Leech-Wilkinson began by describing what he perceived to be the ‘clearly differentiated styles’ of the two composers in the domains of text underlay, harmonic usage, voice-leading, rhythmic language, and poetic style. In all of these, he claimed, Vitry’s approach is marked by rigor and clarity, while Machaut dwells in the domain of the irrational:
• •
See Earp a, –. For a recent important nuancing of the early chronology of Machaut see Smilansky . Leech-Wilkinson –, n. .
Classical Vitry/Romantic Machaut
Where, for instance, Vitry strives to bring about regular relationships between text- and music-structures, Machaut’s texting is often haphazard in the extreme, even where regularity could easily have been achieved. Similarly, while Vitry’s harmonic language and voice-leading are notable for their clarity of texture and direction, Machaut’s are often, even by comparison with the rest of the repertory, highly eccentric. Much the same may be said of their rhythmic languages and literary styles.
Lest we read this as a criticism (although how could we not?), the author hastens to add that ‘none of this is necessarily a matter of varying degrees of competence’, and that we might instead characterize the differing approaches of the two composers as ‘the difference between a classical and a romantic attitude to artistic representation’. After citing Heinrich Besseler (a citation to which I return below), Leech-Wilkinson ties up this lengthy footnote by drawing attention to the facility of the comparison, which he blames on the state of the field: ‘If a parallel were to be drawn with the different approaches of, for example, Stravinsky and Schoenberg, it might also serve as a timely reminder – ignoring, as it does, almost every significant aspect of their music – of the appalling superficiality of our present understanding of medieval musical styles’. So much for that. But then why make the comparison at all? Perhaps because it goes back farther. Consider, for example, this characterization by Gabriel Zwick, who described not stylistic but personal differences between Vitry and Machaut as analogous to the classical and the romantic: Two markedly diverse temperaments reveal themselves in Philippe de Vitry and Guillaume de Machaut: Vitry more the theorist, rigorous without coldness, boiling with life, but rational; Machaut more the musician, sensitive, tormented, submitting to form and at the same time dominating it. The former responsive to external events and bringing us a quasi-historical testimony; the other, personal, exposes to us his amorous joys and torments. The one indeed classical, the other romantic (Besseler). And yet, the two are contemporaries, both Champenois, clerics, notaries to princes, poets and musicians. Strange resemblance of destinies, but no less strange dissimilarity of persons!
This account is almost Austinian in its juxtaposition between the two composers, and I suspect not a few of my readers will join me in a sort of wistfulness (itself Romantic?) for a time when scholars could feel such certainty about the personalities of long-gone people. It does not help that these characterizations stem from a comparison of two motets purportedly by Machaut and Vitry but of which the first is highly unlikely to be authentic. There are plenty of other objections to be made as well: that Vitry’s invective motets certainly show
• •
•
Leech-Wilkinson –, n. , emphasis mine. ‘En Philippe de Vitry et Guillaume de Machaut deux tempéraments très divers se révèlent: Vitry plutôt théoricien, rigoureux sans froideur, bouillant de vie quoique rationnel; Machaut plus musicien, sensible, tourmenté, se soumet à la forme et la domine tout à la fois. L’un attentif aux événements extérieurs et nous apportant un témoignage quasi historique; l’autre personnel, nous expose ses joies et ses tourments amoureux. L’un véritablement classique, l’autre romantique (Besseler). Et pourtant deux contemporains, tous deux Champenois, clercs, notaires auprès de princes, poètes et musiciens. Ressemblance étrange des destinées, mais dissemblance non moins étrange des personnes!’ (Zwick , ; translation mine). Zwick edits and discusses O Canenda/Rex which is almost certainly by Vitry, and Li enseignement/De touz which is ‘surely not authentic’ (Earp a, ).
Anna Zayaruznaya
him to be sensitive – even perhaps oversensitive; that Machaut is the one who provided quasi-historical testimony in the verse chronicle Prise d’Alexandre and in the opening account of the plague in the Jugement dou roy de Navarre; that the irregularities of Vitry’s motet forms, which often feature partial taleae and incomplete repetitions of borrowed chant melodies, reveal an ambivalent relationship to form. Much of this was probably not apparent to the scholarly community in , and it may well be that the most salient polarity at play in Zwick’s account is that between someone considered to be primarily a theorist (as Vitry was then) and a known composer. In any case, this comparison demonstrates how easily polarities proliferate in a discourse when the activity at hand is comparing two people in a relative vacuum. Both Leech-Wilkinson and Zwick cite Besseler as their source for the mapping of a classical/romantic dichotomy onto Vitry and Machaut, and both are referring to his ‘Studien zur Musik des Mittelalters II’, published in . Near the end of this enormous article Besseler makes a lengthy excursus occasioned by his consideration of Machaut’s ballade De toutes flours. In it he ) makes musical observations to associate Vitry and Machaut with the classical and romantic sensibilities respectively; ) alludes to the literary output and biographical details of both composers to extend the comparison to their personalities as manifest in their relationship to feudalism; ) nonetheless positions Machaut’s motets and poetry as more traditional than those of Vitry by recourse to the idea of a fourteenth-century Restoration – all in less than words. The Appendix provides this passage in full, in the original and in translation. In order to understand Besseler’s motivations it is important to note first that the topic at hand is the evolution of French motet forms in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; his subtitle is ‘Die Motette von Franko von Köln bis Philipp von Vitry’. Machaut’s motets are fully accounted for in the article’s copious tables and analyses, but the passage in question makes the case that Machaut and his compositions belong to a different era, exemplifying ‘the Romanticism of the fourteenth century’ (‘die Romantik des . Jahrhunderts!’). This observation is supported by an account not of a motet, but of De toutes flours. This ballade’s ‘nervous [...] agility’, the ‘expressively charged swelling of [its] syncopated dissonances’, and the ‘freedom and fragility of the lines which overflow each downbeat and break up the underlying chord structure’ rendered it liminal for Besseler: The renunciation of rational classical transparency, the abandonment of overall architectonic form, the revaluation of the structural for the sake of the atmospheric; in a word: the Romanticism of the fourteenth century! Machaut is its pioneer and first great representative. The classical ideal – the communication of content in a rationally cultivated form – no longer applies to him, nor to his motets. • • • •
For Vitry the offended see his motets In virtute/Decens, Cum statua/Hugo, and Phi millies/O creator (all discussed in Zayaruznaya , –) and his poetic exchange with Jehan de le Mote (ed. Diekstra ). On Machaut as a historical source and on his use by historians see Leach b, –. For one of Vitry’s irregular motet forms see the account of Colla/Bona in Zayaruznaya b, –. As of the Grove entry on Vitry, ‘his musical compositions are lost’ (Smythe ); by the first volume of PMFC was out and Vitry had a corpus of works attributed to him. Thus Zwick is writing in a time when Vitry’s identity is shifting, and is contributing to the shift with his careful attention to O canenda/Rex.
Classical Vitry/Romantic Machaut
Yes, Machaut wrote motets, but Besseler classifies these works as derivative, opining that ‘for Machaut the motet is no longer primarily an expression of artistic sentiments, increasingly serving only traditional, discarded attitudes. New musical tendencies emerge in it only slowly and secondarily’. Yes, Machaut tried to write French motets in line with these new romantic sensibilities ‘in an effort to make the traditional motet forms subservient to the new artistic will’, but ‘this attempt was unsuccessful’. It is in his ballades that Besseler sees Machaut as most innovative, but this innovation is acknowledged grudgingly. In the late ballade Ne quier/Quant Theseus, which Besseler compares to a motet because it features two texted upper voices over a lower-voice pair, even the melody alone reveals the full contrast: instead of the uniform, smooth, strict motet voices with their by-then-already-formulaic triplets, there is here a smooth flow, abundant use of syncopation, dissonance, dotted rhythms, flexible overlapping of voices, free, shifting groupings, a dissolution of isorhythmically bound motet foundations into a highly differentiated nervously crumbled soundscape. So easily was the classical-style Ars nova motet musicalized and rendered perishable: its grand architectonic form proved unsuitable to this romantic turn to the atmospheric and impressionistic.
My reader may begin to suspect at this point that Besseler did not like Romanticism, and this is borne out elsewhere in his work. Just a year earlier, in , he had defined ‘classical’ and ‘romantic’ modes of listening, the former characterized by ‘active’ or ‘synthetic’ hearing, the latter ‘passive’. These are not neutral distinctions, and a similar valence is palpable in this case. For if Machaut is associated with a later historical period, he is not, for all that, cast as progressive. In Besseler’s telling Machaut’s output is generic and his worldview is antiquated: ‘for him is it is a point of honor to be the true servant of his master John of Luxemburg’ and his work ‘serves to glorify the chivalric ideals of this society and above all of the rhetorically rehabilitated courtly love’. The importance of the Middle Ages and of medievalism to the origins of German Romanticism is well-appreciated and need not be rehearsed here. By associating the literary Machaut with Romanticism and characterizing the poetic ‘seconde rhétorique’ as ‘a renewal of courtly love song in a Romantic spirit’, and by evoking Machaut’s natural place in ‘the fixed social structure of the fourteenth-century Restoration’, Besseler creates a Machaut who is conservative and regressive relative to the slightly older Vitry, whom Besseler’s portrays as an original, multifaceted and socially progressive persona: Philippe de Vitry is rooted as a personality in the civic and courtly society of the outgoing thirteenth century, which is already in a state of decay and restructuring. He comes into his own by setting himself apart. His protest against the societal order (Colla jugo subdere) is an essential expression of his artistry, upon which his own world is founded.
Compare this with Machaut, who serves as a mouthpiece more for his era than for himself: ‘His audience expected neither a communication of content nor the expression of personal experiences’. Even in the late and personal Voir dit, ‘The figure of Machaut reveals itself, as it does in his earlier collected works: despite all of its romantic luster [it is] much narrower and •
Besseler .
Anna Zayaruznaya
‘more medieval’ than that of Vitry, by no means comparable with the latter’s complexity and versatile spirituality’. Overall Machaut comes off as irrational, more concerned with surface than structure, subservient, and old-fashioned, whereas Vitry ends up playing the role of the spiritual, authentic, self-aware composer beholden to no one and rebelling against society. In terms of the internal logics of Besseler’s article, the main work that this comparison does is to establish Vitry as the correct terminus, justifying the account as one of the motet from Franco to Vitry, not to Machaut. Superimposing Machaut onto a different musichistorical era turns him into a stale coda in the story of the medieval motet rather than a terminus in the genre-history that interests Besseler (‘Although still numerically well represented in Machaut, [the motet] is no longer primarily an expression of artistic sentiments, increasingly serving only traditional, discarded attitudes’). Bracketing Machaut allows Vitry to be more obviously cumulative. What motivated Besseler to frame his history in this way? Perhaps Machaut really did not fit into the story of the motet genre as Besseler understood it. As is often noted, the motet becomes a Latin and ceremonial genre by the early fifteenth century. If its fourteenthcentury history is written with Vitry as a terminus, then it is easy to paint Machaut as peripheral, his French love motets beckoning back to the thirteenth century. But then of course, Machaut wrote Latin motets, and Vitry wrote French ones. Or perhaps it was a matter of personal preference. It is possible that Besseler, like so many of us, wanted to create his favorite objects of historical study in his own image. I am struck by Edward Lowinsky’s description of his colleague in an obituary published in : Besseler was an unusual writer and an unusual man. Commanding in personal appearance, but strangely reserved, unable to give himself with ease in personal and social contacts, he was in fact a passionate man, but poured the strength of his feeling entirely into his work. At the same time he was a disciplined thinker. From the tension between passion and discipline, feeling and reserve, sprang a style at once taut and colorful, exact and evocative, concise and vibrant.
In his own terms, Besseler certainly comes off as more of a Vitry than a Machaut (in mine, more of a Miranda than a Carrie). And what man of his era would publicly identify with the passive, the subservient, the nervous, and the irrational? Besseler was no less a product of his times than he believed Machaut to be, working on German classicism in a field that would not embrace the study of Romantic music for at least another fifty years. Besseler’s article is almost years old, and while these passages stand as interesting documents of early thinking about the two composers, it would hardly be productive for us to agree or disagree. But ideas have long lives – hence the need for reception history. As we have seen, in the century since Besseler’s article the trope ‘classical Vitry, romantic Machaut’ has done various other kinds of work, whether as a tool of biographical and temperamental comparison (Zwick) or as a sort of aesthetic cop-out (Leech-Wilkinson). And we have also seen how the imagined rivalry between Machaut and Vitry stemming from these comparisons directly colors even relatively recent scholarship. •
Lowinsky , .
Classical Vitry/Romantic Machaut
But apart from setting up an aesthetic polarity between the two composers, I suggest that Besseler’s trope had the perhaps unintended consequence of distancing the two chronologically. To state the obvious: the real classical and romantic eras had their heydays some thirty to forty years apart, and aligning Vitry with the earlier style lends him temporal as well as stylistic primacy. It is true that Vitry seems to have been Machaut’s elder – but only by about a decade. And yet the chronology of both composers’ motet output, once this began to be established, made Vitry’s works significantly earlier. Perhaps this was in part a response to Besseler’s ideas. Indeed, it is probably no coincidence that the article in which Leech-Wilkinson referenced the classical/romantic dichotomy was the same one in which he first outlined a schema according to which many of Vitry’s motets were placed very early in the century and were argued to be influential on Machaut. Where he found structural similarities between motets by Vitry and Machaut, Leech-Wilkinson argued that it was always a case of Machaut imitating Vitry, leading him to suggest that ‘early in his career Machaut enjoyed a master-disciple relationship with Vitry’. In a subsequent () article on the origins of the ars nova, Leech-Wilkinson further argued that – aside from Petre/ Lugentium from – all of Vitry’s motets should be placed early in his career: ‘there seems no reason why Vitry should not have completed all the motets we associate with him by the time he first appears in royal service in the s’. Machaut’s period of motet composition, meanwhile, had long been considered to begin with Bone pastor/Bone pastor (M), associated with Guillaume de Trie’s elevation to the archbishopric of Reims. This chronology renders Vitry’s and Machaut’s motet output largely non-overlapping, cementing an idea of Vitry as somehow significantly earlier than Machaut, despite their mostly coinciding lifetimes. The notion of the two composers as somehow belonging to different eras has bolstered analyses which confirm Vitry’s primacy in cases where structural similarities between pairs of motets have raised questions about directions of influence and borrowing. All of this makes sense if we think of Vitry as ‘the earlier composer’, and associating him with the earlier of a pair of adjacent styles makes it easier to think of him this way. After all, given similarities between, say, the works of Beethoven (–) and Berlioz (–), it is not exactly controversial to opine that the influence goes in the obvious direction. But there is nothing obvious about the chronology of Vitry’s motet output, and recent developments in the state of ars nova studies call for a reexamination of the directions of influence between Machaut and Vitry. The earliest motets associated with Vitry are still considered to be ones interpolated into Fauv, compiled c. –. But there is some reason to •
• • • •
Vitry’s date of birth – October – is known from a marginal annotation in his hand; see Delisle , – and Wathey , –. Machaut’s birth date has been given as ‘c. ’ since Antoine Thomas in the s, and Earp suggests that a date of – is consistent with his career trajectory (Earp a, ). Leech-Wilkinson –, . Leech-Wilkinson , . Earp a, . For example, Kügle (discussed below) and Brown . Boogaart b raises the possibility of ‘exchanges of ideas’ between Vitry and Machaut, though the examples adduced tend to imply Vitry’s primacy.
Anna Zayaruznaya
view the Vitriacan Ars nova treatise, which cites a number of motets that must predate it, as a product of the later s or the early s. In addition, several other Vitry motets can be shown to have been written or revised in the s and even the s. On the other hand, Uri Smilansky has suggested that all of the materials for Machaut’s earliest collected works manuscript, MS C (which includes nineteen of his twenty-three motets), were likely to have been delivered to the scribal workshop in . In other words, Vitry’s period of compositional activity is stretching later, spanning the years c. – without a discernible break, while Machaut’s most intense engagement with the motet form can be localized to the mids–s, with M perhaps from the early s and M, M, and M from c. –. Given all of this, how can we be so sure that Machaut was always following in Vitry’s footsteps? It is nonsense to think about Myerbeer’s effect on Mozart, but it might be fruitful to ask what Vitry might have learned from Machaut. In the remainder of this essay I turn to a complex of three motets: Flos/Celsa and Impudenter/Virtutibus, attributed to Vitry, and Martyrum/Diligenter, Machaut’s Motet . Whereas it has previously been suggested that Machaut drew upon both of Vitry’s motets in crafting his own, I will argue that in this case the influence was bi-directional. The three motets in question have long been acknowledged to be related for a variety of structural and textual reasons. For starters, all three make use of monorhymed texts. This device was not at all common in the fourteenth century, and its recurrence is unlikely to be a coincidence. Indeed, the triplum texts of Flos/Celsa and Martyrum/Diligenter are identical in their form and length: both consist of thirty-six lines of monorhyme on ‘-ia’. In Impudenter/Virtutibus, the motetus voice is monorhymed on ‘-ilis’ (see Table .). Table .: Structures of texts in three related motets
Motetus
Triplum
Vitry, Flos/Celsa
lines, decasyllabic, ababbcbcbc
lines, octosyllabic, monorhyme on ‘-ia’
Machaut, Martyrum/Diligenter
lines, alternating octoand heptasyllabic, cross-rhyme quatrains
lines, octosyllabic, monorhyme on ‘-ia’
Vitry, Impudenter/Virtutibus
lines, octosyllabic, monorhyme on ‘-ilis’
lines, octosyllabic, cross-rhyme quatrains
• •
• • •
Desmond a; Zayaruznaya . In a monograph on Vitry that is currently in progress I argue that the fragmentary [...]/Per grama was dedicated to Pierre Roger during one of his elevations to a bishopric or papacy, either in the s or in . I also locate Phi millies/O creator with (Zayaruznaya forthcoming). Further, I suggested that the hocket section on the end of O canenda/Rex was added in a subsequent stage of composition (Zayaruznaya ). Smilansky , . Earp a, . On this dating of M see Hartt , –. The rest of the repertory offers only three more examples, all of them French texts monorhymed on ‘-our’: the motetus of Machaut’s Trop/Biauté (Motet , twelve decasyllabic lines on ‘-our’), the triplum of Mon chant/Qui doloreus (thirty decasyllabic lines on ‘-our’), and the motetus of Se paoür/Diex (twelve decasyllabic lines on ‘-our’).
Classical Vitry/Romantic Machaut
Moreover, Karl Kügle noted that Martyrum/Diligenter and Impudenter/Virtutibus are cross-related formally, triplum-to-motetus: the triplum Impudenter circumivi shares with the motetus Diligenter inquiramus a use of cross-rhymed quatrains (abab, cdcd, etc.) and an opening syntax in which an adverb is followed by a first-person verb and an accusative subject: Machaut, Martyrum/Diligenter, motetus, lines –:
Vitry, Impudenter/Virtutibus, triplum, lines –:
Diligenter inquiramus Quintini preconia; congaudenter impendamus numini suffragia.
Impudenter circumivi solum quod mare terminat; indiscrete concupivi quodquod amor coinquinat
Diligently let us examine the praises of Quintinus; joyfully let us send out approbations to God.
Brazenly I walked about the earth which the sea bounds; indiscreetly I desired whatever love defiles.
Meanwhile the motetus Virtutibus laudabilis and triplum Martyrum gemma latria are united by their use of monorhyme octosyllabic verse, and by a shared syntax: ‘Both are cast as a single, extended clause ending in a plea for mercy’. Kügle further pointed out that the motets are structurally linked: both begin with a twelve-breve triplum solo and both use a thirty-note chant fragment in the tenor which is organized by sets of taleae stated five times. Kügle thus suggested that Martyrum/Diligenter borrowed elements from both Flos/ Celsa and Impudenter/Virtutibus, making it doubly an ‘hommage by Machaut to the slightly older master’ Vitry. In terms of chronology, it seems clear that Flos/Celsa is the earliest of the three motets, whether we place it in c. (as Leech-Wilkinson and Kügle did) or in the s (as does Margaret Bent). Martyrum/Diligenter and Impudenter/Virtutibus both seem later than this, but are both also hard to date based on their historically unspecific texts. Martyrum/ Diligenter praises St Quentin, and scholars since Ernest Hoepffner have connected this work with Machaut’s canonicate in the collegiate church of St Quentin – a position he held by , and which he still retained in . Kügle suggested that Machaut’s offering to his • • • • • •
•
Kügle , . Translation by Leofranc Holford-Strevens from Orlando Consort, Philippe de Vitry and the Ars Nova, CD-SAR . Kügle , . Kügle , . Martyrum/Diligenter includes five tenor taleae in total, while Impudenter/Virtutibus has two sets of five taleae over two statements of the color. Kügle , . Leech-Wilkinson –, (‘’); Kügle , (‘between April and August, ’); Bent , (‘the motets of Vitry it most resembles have usually been dated in the s’). I lay out a case for the later dating in Zayaruznaya forthcoming. Earp a, –, .
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chapter would probably have been made early in his tenure there, deducing that Martyrum/ Diligenter was ‘more likely […] to have been composed before than after’. But more recently Anne Walters Robertson has questioned the notion that Machaut composed the motet upon receiving the canonry, suggesting that ‘it seems more logical to associate the work with events that can show a palpable change in the significance of Saint Quintinus in the mid-fourteenth century, rather than with generalized notions of a composer celebrating his obtainment of a job in a particular church’; she points to a collection taken up by the canons of St Quentin ‘sometime between and ’ that funded the carving of bas-reliefs with scenes of the saint’s life onto a wall that was finished in . The earliest manuscript to transmit Martyrum/Diligenter, C, was finished sometime around and possibly earlier; as noted above, Smilansky suggests that its contents were in place by around . If Martyrum/Diligenter was indeed written in the s as Robertson suggests, perhaps its penultimate position in the motet section of the manuscript reflects this. If, as Kügle suggests, Vitry’s Impudenter/Virtutibus served as a precedent for Martyrum/Diligenter, then it would gain a terminus ante quem of c. by this reasoning. In fact, Impudenter/Virtutibus is much more likely to be a response to Martyrum/Diligenter than the other way around because Vitry’s motet is both bigger and more structurally and notationally intricate than Machaut’s. Both works begin with a twelve-breve introitus and are built on a thirty-note tenor fragment stated twice. But Martyrum/Diligenter is unipartite, distributing its sixty tenor pitches across five identical taleae (see Figure .). In contrast, Impudenter/Virtutibus is bipartite. Its first section, consisting of five taleae, is almost as long as the whole of Martyrum/Diligenter, and is followed by a second section in which the tenor is in diminution. Moreover, Vitry’s motet has a contratenor, while Machaut’s is in three voices. Thus although the two motets set texts that are roughly of the same length, Impudenter/Virtutibus might be said to contain Martyrum/Diligenter, building outward from it by adding a contratenor and a diminution section.
•
• • •
Kügle , . Kügle’s dating is consistent with those of Schrade, who tentatively assigned Impudenter/Virtutibus to the s based on what he perceived as a stylistic similarity between Vos/Gratissima and O canenda/Rex, on the one hand, and Impudenter/Virtutibus and Vos/Gratissima, on the other; he placed O canenda/Rex in the s because of the political climate evoked in its text (Schrade a, –). Sanders, too, placed it ‘ca. ’, citing Schrade (Sanders , ). Leech-Wilkinson considered Impudenter/Virtutibus to be Vitry’s latest four-voice motet (though he knew Petre/Lugentium as a three-voice motet), later than Vos/Gratissima and O canenda/Rex because of the complexity of interactions between the tenor and contratenor taleae (Leech-Wilkinson , –); but given that he considered most of Vitry’s output to be early, this ‘latest’ status is relative and may still have been meant to point to the s. Robertson , , n. . Smilansky . I do not intend to imply that the motets are in strict chronological order; much work suggests that they are arranged programmatically to varying extents. Nevertheless, it seems possible that they are in an order that is partially chronological; the later manuscripts add three motets to the end of the motet section. See Robertson and Bain . Note however that M, not present in C, is placed between M and M in A. Whereas this has traditionally been seen as an accidental omission, Hartt makes a convincing case that this motet in fact postdates those compiled in C (Hartt , –).
Classical Vitry/Romantic Machaut
Machaut, Martyrum/Diligenter (M) intr.
talea I ( í)
talea II ( í)
talea III ( í)
talea IV ( í)
tenor cursus
talea V ( í)
tenor cursus
Vitry, Impudenter/Virtutibus intr.
talea I ( í)
talea II ( í)
talea III ( í)
talea IV ( í)
tenor cursus
talea V ( í)
( í) ( í) ( í) ( í) ( í) tenor cursus
Figure .: Formal features of Machaut, Martyrum/Diligenter (M) and Vitry, Impudenter/Virtutibus
As far as notation is concerned, Machaut’s tenor is less advanced than Vitry’s (see Figure .). Machaut’s talea, notated in perfect modus and tempus, consists of longs and breves, the latter imperfected by semibreve rests during the hockets that fall near the end of each talea. Dots of division, used on two occasions, clarify the boundaries of the perfect modus groupings. Vitry’s tenor talea uses all of these values as well as maximas and semibreves. It is written in imperfect modus and tempus, against which a syncopated long in the first section becomes a syncopated breve in diminution. The contratenor, partially notated in imperfect modus in contrast to the tenor’s perfect modus, adds an extra dimension of complexity. Martyrum/Diligenter (M), tenor talea
Impudenter/Virtutibus, tenor talea
Figure .: Aspects of tenor taleae in Martyrum/Diligenter (M) and Impudenter/Virtutibus
By these same measures Flos/Celsa is a plausible precursor to the other two motets. Its tenor talea is simpler, consisting of a maxima followed by a series of longs and long rests ÛÛ Û (íí|í|í|í| Û í|í|í|í| ÛÛ), transformed by diminution into a long followed by breves and breve rests Û (í|ííí Û íííí Û). It has no contratenor. As Robertson notes, Martyrum/Diligenter is Mach-
Anna Zayaruznaya
aut’s only motet devoted to a saint. It seems not implausible that, in writing such a work, Machaut might have looked to the evidently popular Flos/Celsa. It is also worth noting that Martyrum/Diligenter is one of only three motets of Machaut’s copied in Iv, an important Vitry source, and that it is copied there directly after Flos/Celsa. By contrast, the similarities between Martyrum/Diligenter and Impudenter/Virtutibus are much more explicable if Machaut’s motet is the earlier one. Taken together, I suggest that this trio of motets gives us a glimpse of Vitry reacting to Machaut reacting to Vitry. While such a narrative has never before been suggested, it is hardly far-fetched. Further work remains to be done before it can be determined to what extent this kind of mutual influence might have been par for the course. In doing this work we will inevitably keep running into problems created by the differing natures of the archives that preserve what we know about these two composers. Machaut’s extant corpus will forever be larger than Vitry’s, and Vitry’s demonstrable fame will probably continue to make us insecure on Machaut’s behalf. Nonetheless, further analysis and continued attention to notational usage, chronology, and biography for both composers is sure to yield insights into the lives and legacies of each. Perhaps in another years it will be clearer than it is now to what extent Machaut was also the Vitry of his time – and vice versa.
• • •
•
Robertson , . Flos/Celsa is attested in seven musical sources and one text-only source; see Kügle , . Flos/Celsa is on fols v–r and Martyrum/Diligenter on fols v–r. Impudenter/Virtutibus is copied earlier, on fols v–r. The other two Machaut motets included in Iv are Amours/Faus Samblant (M) on fols v–r and Qui es promesses/Ha! Fortune (M) on fols v–r. If Impudenter/Virtutibus is later than Martyrum/Diligenter, and if the latter was written between c. and , that would put Impudenter/Virtutibus into the later s or s. There is nothing implausible about this from either a stylistic or a biographical perspective, and indeed the motet shares some of its rhythmic and notational aspects with other demonstrably late works of Vitry. See further discussion in Zayaruznaya forthcoming.
Classical Vitry/Romantic Machaut
A: Besseler , –. Translation mine. Keine Ars nova-Motette zeigt eine derart nervöse Beweglichkeit und Ausdrucksintensität wie [De toutes flours]. Das Espressivo der schweren Vorhalte T. 4, das ausdrucksgeladene Anschwellen der Synkopendissonanzen T. 5 und 10, die Freiheit und Labilität der Linien, die jede Schwerpunktsgrenze überfließen und das feste Akkordgefüge auflockern – das bedeutet Abkehr von klassisch-rationaler Durchsichtigkeit, Verzicht auf architektonische Großform, Umwertung des Konstruktiven zum Stimmungshaften, mit einem Wort: die R o m a n t i k des 14. Jahrhunderts! Machaut ist ihr Bahnbrecher und erster großer Vertreter. Das klassische Ideal: Mitteilung von Gehalten in rational durchgebildeter, gestalthafter Form gilt für ihn nicht mehr, auch nicht für seine Motetten. Philipp von Vitry wurzelt als Persönlichkeit in der bürgerlichen und höfischen Gesellschaft des ausgehenden 13. Jahrhunderts, die bereits in Zersetzung und Umschichtung begriffen ist. Er kommt zu sich selbst, indem er sich absondert. Sein Protest gegen die gesellschaftliche Ordnung (Colla jugo subdere) ist wesentlicher Ausdruck seines Künstlertums, in dem seine eigene Welt gründet. Ganz anders Machaut. Er steht von vornherein im festen Gesellschaftsgefüge der Restauration des 14. Jahrhunderts. Für ihn ist es ein Ehrentitel, der treue Diener seines Herrn Johann von Luxemburg zu sein ( Je fus ses clers ans plus de trente). Sein Schaffen dient der Glorifizierung des Ritterideals dieser Gesellschaft und vor allem der rhetorisch erneuerten Minne. Sein Zuhörerkreis erwartet weder eine Mitteilung von Gehalten noch den Ausdruck persönlicher Erlebnisse. Nicht auf das Was kommt es an – denn darin lebt ein jeder: in Ethos und Erotik der Feudalaristokratie – sondern auf das Wie, die kunstreiche Form und rhetorische Bildung mit antik-mythologischem Apparat. Die ‘seconde rhétorique’ ist Erneuerung des Minnesangs aus romantischem Geist. Die französischen Motettentexte Machauts, die ganz und gar auf dieser Linie liegen, zeigen sein Bemühen, die überkommene Motettenform dem neuen künstlerischen Willen dienstbar zu machen. Dieser Versuch mißlang. Machauts eigentliche schöpferische Leistung liegt zweifellos auf dem Gebiet der Balladenkomposition, die damit zur repräsentativen Kunst der französischen Restauration und weiterhin der abendländischen Aristokratie aufrückte. Erst sein letztes Werk aus den Reimser Altersjahren ist eine persönliche Dichtung, seine einzige. Die Gestalt Ma-
No ars nova motet shows so nervous an agility and such an intensity of expression as [De toutes flours]. The espressivo of the heavy suspensions in bar 4, the expressively charged swelling of the syncopated dissonances in bars 5 and 10, the freedom and fragility of the lines which overflow each downbeat and break up the underlying chord structure – this signifies the renunciation of rational classical transparency, the abandonment of overall architectonic form, the revaluation of the structural for the sake of the atmospheric; in a word: the Romanticism of the fourteenth century! Machaut is its pioneer and first great representative. The classical ideal – the communication of content in a rationally cultivated form – no longer applies to him, nor to his motets. Philippe de Vitry is rooted as a personality in the civic and courtly society of the outgoing thirteenth century, which is already in a state of decay and restructuring. He comes into his own by setting himself apart. His protest against the societal order (Colla jugo subdere) is an essential expression of his artistry, upon which his own world is founded. Quite the opposite with Machaut. From the outset he stands in the fixed social structure of the fourteenthcentury Restoration. For him it is a point of honor to be the true servant of his master John of Luxemburg (‘Je fus ses clers ans plus de trente’.) His creative work serves to glorify the chivalric ideals of this society and above all of the rhetorically rehabilitated courtly love. His audience expected neither a communication of content nor the expression of personal experiences. What mattered was not the ‘what’ – because everyone lived in it: in the ethos and erotics of feudal aristocracy – but the ‘how’, the artful form and rhetorical formation with an antique-mythological apparatus. The ‘seconde rhétorique’ is a renewal of courtly love song in a romantic spirit. Machaut’s French motet texts, which altogether lie along these lines, show his effort to make the traditional motet forms subservient to the new artistic will. This attempt was unsuccessful. Machaut’s actual creative achievement doubtless lies in the domain of ballade composition, which thereby moved up into the position of the representative Art [genre] of the French Restoration, and of the Western aristocracy. Only his last work from the late Remois years is a personal poem, his only one. The figure of Machaut reveals itself there, as it does in his earlier collected works: despite all of its romantic luster [it is] much narrower and ‘more medieval’ than that of Vitry,
Anna Zayaruznaya
chauts zeichnet sich in ihr ähnlich ab wie in seinem früheren Gesamtschaffen: trotz aller romantischen Lichter viel geschlossener und ‘mittelalterlicher’ als die Vitrys, gar nicht vergleichbar mit dessen Problematik und vielseitiger Geistigkeit. So ist es nicht verwunderlich, daß die neu sich anspinnende Tradition aristokratischer Balladenkunst Machauts Namen und Werk bis weit in das 15. Jahrhundert hinein tragt), während der Außenseiter Vitry bald in Vergessenheit gerät und höchstens in Musiker- und Theoretikerkreisen noch genannt wird.
by no means comparable with the latter’s complexity and versatile spirituality. So it’s not surprising that the newly developed tradition of courtly ballade composition carried Machaut’s name and work well into the fifteenth century, whereas the outsider Vitry soon fell into oblivion, and was still referred to mostly in musical and music-theoretical circles.
Hiermit ist bereits angedeutet, daß es bei Machaut noch nicht zu einer Umprägung des Motettenstils kommt. Selbst seine großen Spätwerke aus den 1350er Jahren entfernen sich im Gesamtbild nur sehr wenig vom klassischen Typus. Melodiebildung und Melismatik sind der Vitryschen aufs engste verwandt und lassen nichts von den neuen Möglichkeiten ahnen, die Machaut selbst in seinen Balladen erschlossen hatte. Um die Kluft zwischen seinem Motettenund Balladenstil zu ermessen, vergleiche man etwa mit einem Spätwerk wie *Felix virgo – Inviolata die noch spätere vierstimmige Doppelballade *Ne quier veoir – Quant Theseus, die rein klanglich (Oberstimmenduett über zweistimmigem Begleitfundament) dem Motettentypus nahesteht.
In this vein it has already been suggested that in Machaut the motet style is not yet subject to a reshaping. Even his great late works of the 1350s depart very little from the classical type. Melodic structure and melismatic writing are closely related to Vitry’s, and do not foreshadow any of the new possibilities which Machaut himself had developed in his ballades. In order to appreciate the rift between his motet- and ballade-styles, compare for example a late work like Felix/Inviolata with the still later four-voice ballade Ne quier/Quant Theseus, which purely in terms of sonority (an upper-voice duet over a two-voice supporting foundation) is close to the motet type.
Schon die Melodik läßt den vollen Gegensatz erkennen: an Stelle der gleichmäßig ruhigen, strengen Motettenstimmen mit ihren bereits formelhaft gewordenen Triolen hier überall geschmeidiges Fließen, reiche Verwendung von Syncopen, Dissonanzen, Punktierungen, elastisches Ineinandergreifen der Stimmen, freie, labile Gruppenbildungen, Auflösung des isorhythmisch gebundenen Motettenfundaments zu einem höchst differenzierten, nervös zerbröckelten Klanguntergrund. So leicht die Motette im klassischen Ars nova-Typus musikalisiert und verklanglicht worden war: für diese romantische Wendung zum Stimmungshaften und Impressionistischen erwies sich ihre architektonische Großform als ungeeignet.
Even the melody alone reveals the full contrast: instead of the uniform, smooth, strict motet voices with their by-then-already-formulaic triplets, there is here a smooth flow, abundant use of syncopation, dissonance, dotted rhythms, flexible overlapping of voices, free, shifting groupings, a dissolution of isorhythmically bound motet foundations into a highly differentiated nervously crumbled soundscape. So easily was the classical-style ars nova motet musicalized and rendered perishable: its grand architectonic form proved unsuitable to this romantic turn to the atmospheric and impressionistic.
Obwohl bei Machaut zahlenmäßig noch reich bedacht, steht sie als Ausdruck der künstlerischen Gesinnung bereits nicht mehr an erster Stelle, dient immer mehr nur noch traditionellen, abgedrängten Haltungen. Neue musikalische Tendenzen treten an ihr nur langsam und sekundär hervor. Daher hat nunmehr auch für die stilkritische Untersuchung die Balladenkomposition den Vorrang. In Machauts
Although still numerically well represented in Machaut, it is no longer primarily an expression of artistic sentiments, increasingly serving only traditional, discarded attitudes. New musical tendencies emerge in it only slowly and secondarily. For this reason, ballade composition now takes precedence for critical investigation as well. In Machaut’s motets, new no-longer ‘classical’ tendencies are admittedly manifest in the
Classical Vitry/Romantic Machaut
Motetten machen sich zwar in der reicheren Klanglichkeit, Ausnutzung der musica ficta, den öfteren verunklärenden Synkopen in den Mittelstimmen, besonders dem unübersichtlich-komplizierten rhythmischen Ineinandergreifen von Tenor und Kontratenor neue, nicht mehr ‘klassische’ Bestrebungen bemerkbar, doch beginnen erst unter den Händen einer jüngeren Generation die technischen Einzelheiten sich fühlbarer zu wandeln.
rich sonority, use of musica ficta, the frequent obscured syncopation in the inner parts, and especially the complex rhythmic interaction of tenor and contratenor, but only in the hands of a younger generation do these technical details begin to change more tangibly.
Reading Machaut �
. M’ D P : S T* R. Barton Palmer
Appropriating the Rose In the introduction to his edition of the Dit dou vergier (‘Story of the Orchard’), Guillaume de Machaut’s first narrative poem (composed c. ), Ernest Hoepffner somewhat apologetically observes that ‘comme tous les poètes de son époque’, Machaut ‘a subi l’influence profonde du Roman de la Rose’. According to Hoepffner, the looming presence of the Rose in late medieval literary culture stifled at first the creativity of the young poet, with the result being the supposedly insipid Vergier, which can be dismissed as merely an ‘imitation servile’ of that literary monument that merits only the barest minimum of commentary in his edition. Hoepffner imagines the poet-apprentice as so intimidated by the evident aesthetic quality and uncontested repute of the sprawling thirteenth-century dream vision that, even though bent on imitation as he started his career, he could fashion only a pale simulacrum of the Rose’s extended allegorical account of a lover’s attraction toward and eventual seduction of his inamorata. Most famously, the Rose’s staging of this scenario is enlarged and enlivened by the debating among a host of loquacious allegorical personages such as Pitié, Jalousie, Franchise, Doux Regard, and Raison (Pity, Jealousy, Generosity, Sweet Look, and Reason). These characters are not reticent to explain themselves, often entering into long-winded, disputatious discussion with their fellows about an ever-surprising range of issues, especially in Jean de Meun’s section of the work. According to Hoepffner, Machaut errs fatally in eliminating this central structural feature of his source. In his poem, the locus amoenus that the lovesick narrator enters in search of comforting diversion is far less grand than that of its model and more thinly populated. In any case, this orchard is not a stage for lively confrontation even when the waking world, where the protagonist is solitary, has been temporarily transformed, revealing its true nature as the court of the God of Love. Hoepffner’s dismissal of the aesthetic value of the Vergier seems to have insured a lack of interest among scholars who were, until my own edition in , only able to read the work
*
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Machaut studies on my side of the Atlantic have flourished in the last four decades, and Larry must be accorded the lion’s share of the credit. Few works of scholarship can truly be said to be as indispensable as his Guide to Research, which provides in a user-friendly form the essential facts of Machaut’s oeuvre. The book’s marshaling of a universe of details, assembled with painstaking care, has proven to be the ultimate collegial gesture. It is an open invitation to push further our knowledge of and appreciation for the most remarkable figure of the late French Middle Ages. More important, perhaps, has been Larry’s own deep engagement in that work as both a musicologist and a philologist/editor. Every scholar who works on Machaut owes him a huge debt of gratitude. Hoepffner –, : lvi (Like all the poets of his era, Machaut fell under the deep influence of the Romance of the Rose). All references to the Vergier are to the edition and English translation in Palmer a, –. Revised and corrected editions of both the Vergier and the Prologue will appear in the forthcoming Guillaume de Machaut, The Complete Poetry and Music, vol. : Love Visions (Prologue, Le Dit dou Vergier, Le Dit de la Fonteinne Amoureuse). Full discussion of dating and manuscript traditions may be found in Earp a. Hoepffner –, : liv–lvii.
Machaut’s Dit dou vergier and Prologue
in the edition he had himself taken great care to prepare. It is indeed strange that, if this dit is merely a ‘véritable oeuvre d’école sans originalité’, as his editor suggests, Machaut shortly thereafter was able to begin fashioning a varied body of poetry marked particularly by a striking originality in the reuse of the thematic and structural givens of the Rose. Hoepffner falls into a familiar evaluative trap, not only misjudging the success of an adaptation (or ‘imitation’ as he calls it) by its relative faithfulness to the source, but also failing to consider the aesthetic significance of what is transformed, left out, or added in the process of textual remaking. Paradoxically, the Vergier is faulted for being overly conventional and also ineptly innovative. This first effort of one of the era’s greatest artists, however, deserves a more appreciative reading, particularly because the poem served as the model for the Prologue that Machaut composed for the legacy presentation of his oeuvre in complete-works manuscripts that were prepared probably under Machaut’s supervision toward the end of his career: A and F-G. What modern editors designate as the Prologue is a specially composed, untitled vision poem (a mix of lyric and narrative verse in the style made most famous by Machaut, but imitated in the works of others) that figures as an introduction in these manuscripts. It is closely modeled on the Vergier and directly connected to it without a reliance on those manuscript rubrics that otherwise separate the different works in the collection. Both the Prologue and the Vergier (fictionalized by Machaut as anterior to all the texts that follow), in turn, connect closely in terms of theme and form to the two debate poems, the Jugement Behaingne and Jugement Navarre, themselves constituting a trans-textual series (the Judgment or Debate series in critical parlance), that immediately follow them in A and F-G. All of Machaut’s dits in these collective codices are placed generally in the order they were composed, but though other works intervened in fact between the two jugement poems, the Navarre is placed immediately after the Behaingne, signaling unmistakably that the former is in some sense a sequel to the latter. This textual unit is best described as manifesting the relationship hypotext/hypertext, as anatomized by Gérard Genette. The connections between the two jugement poems are many and complicated, but for the most part obvious; what Genette calls the ‘liens’ that bond hypotext (source) to hypertext (adaptation) together are especially strong in this case since the Behaingne ‘as itself ’ plays a • • • • • •
• •
See McGrady and Bain for an otherwise encyclopedic multi-author account of the poet’s body of poetry and music that contains not a single mention of the Vergier. Hoepffner –, : lvi (a genuine schoolboy exercise lacking originality; emphasis mine). The only exception here is the Prise d’Alexandre, the crusading chronicle written in the late s; see Palmer for details, as well as Kevin Brownlee’s chapter in this volume. F-G may have been the last of the manuscripts prepared under the supervision of Machaut; it was probably copied from same exemplar as A (Earp a, ). See Palmer a, –, for the text, translation, and a literary analysis of the Prologue. It also appears in the posthumous Pm (c. , probably copied from A), and incompletely in E and H; see Earp a, – and –. The Vergier first appears in C (which does not contain Navarre), but in the fourth position, after the Behaingne, Remede, and Alerion. See Earp a, , for a table that shows the order and growth of all of Machaut’s works in each of the complete-works manuscripts. See Palmer , esp. –. Genette .
R. Barton Palmer
role in the fiction of the Navarre, making it actually (if fictionally) present there as the cause of a disagreement between the poet and his patroness. The strong thematic and formal links across these four texts are more subtly drawn, but they would nonetheless be obvious to any reader of A or F-G who started with the Prologue and read through to the Navarre. This series of works might conveniently be termed the jugement suite. Just to anticipate further discussion below, the subjects of this suite of texts are the nature of love as both experience and subject matter, the poet’s role in providing music and poetry for its celebration in response to the commands of exalted authorities, and, more humorously problematic, the judgment passed on his performance when, angrily disagreeing with his patroness, he violates, at least in the view of his betters, the cardinal rule that women should be honored, never demeaned or defamed, bringing down a lighthearted condemnation on himself by foolishly and fecklessly contesting the opinion of a lady of high estate. If the first four works in A and F-G all recycle elements from the Rose, they do so in part to flesh out a tradition of text-making to which the Prologue’s allegorical figures as the highest of authorities insist Guillaume should contribute, honoring his ability and fitness for the task with this commission. However, in the Navarre, the fourth work of the jugement suite, his success in fulfilling this required labor is called into serious question by yet another exalted authority. Found guilty of defaming women (and also of arguing his own case badly), Guillaume is once again authorized to compose love poetry after he completes an artistic penance of three lyrics demonstrating his commitment to the rules that govern the lover/poet, as laid out in both the Prologue and the Vergier. Apparently, only one of the assigned works was completed; the Lay de Plour follows the Navarre in Vg and M, but not in A, where it is instead included towards the end of the manuscript alongside other lais. In A a separation of the works into distinct genres appears to take precedence over the link with the Navarre. The lyric is also absent in F-G for reasons that are unclear; however, given its inclusion elsewhere, this likely seems an error of some kind rather than an editorial decision. Because of the significant role played by the Prologue, the ‘drama’ of the jugement suite is not compositional but presentational, related not to some artistic plan ab initio, but rather emerging sometime during the design of this section of the complete-works manuscripts that Machaut worked out many years after he wrote the Vergier and the two jugements. In this plan, the Vergier came to occupy a central place because it established the link between ‘I’ narration and personification allegory that would become the formal foundation of Machaut’s aesthetic. The Vergier: A portrait of the poet as a young lover In the Vergier’s mere lines, Machaut, with considerable ingenuity, reworks the Rose to his own purposes and succeeds in recapitulating the key elements of what is presented in the , verses of his model. In the language of modern criticism, the Vergier is an appropriation. As opposed to an adaptation or imitation properly speaking, an appropriation effects, in the words of narratologist Julie Sanders, ‘a more decisive journey away from the informing
Machaut’s Dit dou vergier and Prologue
source into a wholly new cultural product and domain’. An appropriation, as she indicates, is a liminal form that is marked by a striving after originality, even as some ‘informing’ intertextual presence is, at least most often, clearly referenced. Since the revival of interest in his substantial artistic legacy during the last decades of the twentieth century, Machaut’s love dits have been understood as constituting a ‘decisive journey away’ from the Rose even as they place themselves within the tradition of that great poem. Appropriation, that is, constitutes the basis of his approach. The growing consensus is that they make up an impressive portfolio of ‘new cultural products’, works that were refashioned with both brio and inventiveness from the givens of a dominant literary tradition. What has not yet been properly appreciated is the way that the Vergier marks the first bold step in this project, setting a pattern for the works to follow in their deployment of both personification allegory and I-narration, features of his dits that are complexly interconnected. These textual elements are certainly ‘borrowed’ from the Rose, but developed by Machaut in his own distinctive fashion as he appropriated what he found appealing elsewhere while searching for a usable literary past. This essay stakes no claim of an artistic excellence for the Vergier that by the very high standards of Machaut’s subsequent dits the poem simply does not possess. Instead, I argue here that the Vergier clearly establishes that Machaut was determined not to reproduce the form of this hallowed monument from an earlier age whose influence, because of literary fashion, he could not have avoided even if he had so wished. Like most medieval works, the Vergier is derivative, but the larger point is that it can hardly be labeled as simply an imitation, ‘servile’ or otherwise, of the Rose. Instead, Machaut’s first dit offers more of a summarizing epitome of that extraordinary work, delivered as a primer for the as yet uninitiated, even as it stakes out an artistic position and method that has in fact a quite different source. In the Vergier the God of Love outlines the forms of amorous obsession, in all its allegorized twists and turns, giving voice to every conventional theme and motif, in order to enlighten the attentive, unquestioning narrator, and do much the same for Machaut’s readers, not all of whom would have been familiar with the mass of detail from the Rose that the Vergier summarizes in the course of the God of Love’s informative disquisition. With skill and reverence for an honored source, Machaut reduces to its essentials the Rose’s story of the lover’s triumph over the lady’s supposedly inherent resistance to his importuning, the female quality personified in the love vision tradition as Dangier, a term that denotes ‘power’ and ‘arrogance’. As the Rose reveals, however, this foundational story can be told in two ways. It can be dramatized as a psychomachia in which opposing or complementary male and female vertus debate as they struggle over the granting of the lady’s consent, which is of course a foregone conclusion as mandated by Nature. Alternatively, love’s story may be imagined as initiated by youthful male desire that is thwarted by the man’s untutored ineptness. Though finding himself refused or otherwise blocked, the protagonist proves unable to abandon the deep affection he feels and is reduced to bemoaning his fate. The break •
Sanders , .
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ing of this impasse requires the intervention of exalted, sometimes even divine figures, who deign to teach him the essential truths of love. This enlightenment has its practical side, as befits its ultimate origin in Ovid’s handbooks for amorous indulgence. Most important, the lover cannot succeed in his suit until and unless he adopts, then puts into practice, a womanrespecting mentalité based on his complete submission to his lady’s will and dominion. In terms of love allegory, Dangier must either be won over or hoodwinked, but this is only to be expected in a jeu (game) whose outcome is predetermined. In the Vergier, Machaut emphasizes the second of the two ways that the Rose’s story can be told, reducing to detailed summary the lively allegorical conflictus he found in his source. Beyond a brief opening section in which the narrator explains his emotional distress and his visit to a beautiful orchard where he falls asleep, the Vergier is in essence an extended dialogue that is reported by the lover as its I-narrator; the poem consists entirely of the explanations of the God of Love, interrupted only by brief interchanges with the narrator, who seeks divine assistance, as well as by the would-be lover’s solitary affirmation at vision’s end that he will follow the ‘rules’ as the God has explained them. What the God reveals buoys the confidence of the inexperienced acolyte, who, upon his awakening, still suffers from love sickness, but now feels confident he knows the way to his lady’s healing acceptance. Notably, however, this is a projected rather than a represented conclusion. The poem ends not with some constitution of this couple, as they speak their vows to one another (the conclusion offered, for example, in Machaut’s Remede de Fortune), but with the narrator’s bold, one might even say self-satisfied, statement of inner transformation, which is registered in the poem not dramatically, but through his I-narration, as he speaks to himself and then, as the poem’s narrator, reports this conclusion to its readers. He concludes his tale with a resolve to serve, honor, and respect his lady, accepting her domination: Pour c’en doubtance et en cremour Vueil ma douce dame obeïr, Servir, celer, et sans partir Vivre en son amoureus dangier. (lines –) Because in fear and trembling | I intend to obey my lady | Serve her discreetly, and never abandoning her | To live under her loving domination
Concluding in the Platonic manner (that is, with the purported discovery of the truth), the dialogue as reported to the poem’s readers attests both to the power of love as an existential fact, and also to the proper docility of the narrator, who, confronted by his lady’s apparent refusal of his faithful service, had fallen into a profound moral quandary about what course to follow. His unconscious seeks out in a vision the specific knowledge he needs in order to overcome the lady’s reticence. The poem’s emphasis on the immiserated inner self, healed by the understanding of emotional truth it provides itself, contrasts with the flurry of erotic action (also a product of the unconscious imagination of course) that, in expressing a quite different understanding of success in love, concludes the Rose with an act of (metaphorical) sexual possession.
Machaut’s Dit dou vergier and Prologue
The Vergier offers the story of a dialogue. The Rose does not, instead narrating a succession of encounters, including a series of dialogues and other actions that assume dramatic shape in the narrator’s dream state. There was a ready model that Machaut likely followed in his reconfiguration of materials drawn from the Rose: Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, c. ). As scholars have often and comprehensively observed, the Rose appropriates for its own purposes much of the content of the Consolation, promoting, for example, a character aptly named Raison who rejects, in the anti-emotionalist philosophical traditions that Boethius admires, the whole enterprise of love, but who, tellingly, does not prevail in the poem’s marshaling of different views on what is important in human experience. In the decades after beginning his poetic career with the Vergier, Machaut would appropriate material from this most acclaimed of late Latin works more fully for two dits, the Confort d’ami () and Remede (before since it is cited in Confort). Boethius should be acknowledged as yet another of the Vergier’s ‘informing’ appropriations. In fact, as will become clear, the intensely concentrated dialogue structure of Machaut’s poem mirrors more faithfully Boethius’s restorative encounter with Lady Philosophy than it does the more diffuse, and often inconclusive, adventures of the Rose’s Amant with a gallery of distinctive allegorical personages. The Vergier and the Consolation both identify ignorance as the ground of the emotional and mental suffering that afflicts the narrators (also main characters) in each case, extolling the healing power of the knowledge, whose exposition is the main focus of the dialogue that follows. Philosophy tells Boethius that ‘quid ipse sis, nosse desisti’ (I.vi.), literally ‘you have forgotten what you are’, which, as she discovers, obligates her to offer him a reintroduction to the main tenets of the eclectic tradition of thought he had spent a lifetime studying. Stoic, Aristotelian, and Neoplatonic elements are properly harmonized and marshaled toward a focus on the Highest Good, thereby restoring the suffering man’s proper understanding of the limited value of material rewards and accomplishments, while relieving his anger at what he wrongly supposes is the injustice that caused his fall from grace. A sense of loss and the resulting pain are not to be lamented, because, as Philosophy demonstrates in Book I, these are the symptoms of a disorder that point clearly to its cure. She does not offer consolation, properly speaking, but rather a different way of looking at what only seemed, through ignorance, to be for him an unmerited disaster, but is actually a fortunate goad that restores him to a proper understanding of how life might best be lived. Likewise, the Vergier does not show how the pain of love can be eliminated, but instead revalues suffering and submission as the essential uncertainties of love service and, more important, as what will lead him to a greater understanding of the amorous life and the role he is expected to play in it. The God of Love casts himself immediately in the role of a teacher, recognizing the innocence of the bewildered lover, who needs to appreciate the power that • • •
See Wetherbee for a useful recent survey of work on Boethius’s pervasive and substantial influence on medieval literature. Texts and English translations of the Remede and Confort d’ami are in Palmer , along with discussion of Machaut’s Boethianism. On the dates of these dits, see Earp a, . In-text references to the Consolation are to the edition and translation in Tester .
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Love exerts over human relations. He does not yet know how to overcome his lady’s reluctance because he is unaware of the existential forces that ensure success if he properly aligns himself with them. Dominating both works is this connection between emotional self-indulgence and healing knowledge. In the case of both men, an insupportable emotional burden seems impervious to rational control and prompts the appearance, due to the apparent intervention of Providence, of supernatural figures such as Fortune who are not reticent to make themselves known. The God and Philosophy both take charge of wretched men who have been rendered impotent by pointless emotional indulgence, rendering them receptive to visions that answer to their inner impulses. The mission in each case is to provide a proper knowledge of the forces that shape and control human life, advocating how one might best live in accord with these inalterable truths. In the Consolation, Lady Philosophy casts herself in the role of a physician who, more interested in cure than complaint, intends to heal the spiritual and intellectual woes of her faithful servant (I.ii.–); the opening of the Vergier offers the narrator’s confession of a deep spiritual malady, including his inability at present to distinguish good from evil (lines –). This self-analysis recalls the lack of energy and direction preventing the proper functioning of the intellect, what Philosophy diagnoses as the ill that causes Boethius to be ‘lethargus’, that is, lacking the name of action and given to the theatricality of emotional self-indulgence (I.ii.). Similarly, the God of Love is acknowledged as not just the narrator’s lord, but his physician as well: ‘Quant je vi que c’estoit mes sires | Qui des maus amoureus est mires’ (Since I saw that this was my master | Who is the physician for love sickness; lines –). Both works move through diagnoses of inner unbalancing toward dialogues in which the acquisition of crucial knowledge is the main theme, with a restoration of purpose, equilibrium, and, especially, freedom being the results foreseen and attained. ‘Love’ and ‘Philosophy’ become characters in order to make it possible for Boethius and Machaut to dramatize essential and powerful aspects of human experience, which can also thereby be effectively anatomized. In the Consolation and the Vergier, the movements of the soul acknowledge the seeming paradox of both universal order and also individual human freedom, elevated themes whose exposition in each case can be rendered most usefully and dramatically through the plain speaking of allegorical personifications. Whatever seems mysterious, whether the frustrations of love longing or the injustice of false accusation, is provided with an explanation by an authority figure whose wisdom is beyond reproach. In the Consolation, Boethius as character denounces the randomness embodied in the figure and power of Fortune, but Philosophy shows that Fortune is ultimately subject to universal order. After Boethius rids himself of paralyzing self-pity, he finds himself able to accept the truth that, though Providence directs the universe, ‘freedom of the will remains to mortals inviolate’. Philosophy’s final advice is thus simple and straightforward: the prisoner should turn away from vices and cultivate virtues (V.vi.–, –). Similarly, after Love’s detailed description of his nature and powers, the Vergier concludes with the narrator’s informed acceptance of the God’s overlordship, even though, as he has just learned, the shape of his erotic destiny depends on him.
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Her nature compels the lady to submit at the proper time to the power of his unquestioning service, but the lover must act in accord with the rules upon which Love insists in order to keep her consent. Paradoxically, he has been advised to pursue the affection of his beloved by submitting to her ‘dangier’ (line ), the poem’s last word and, as suggested above, one of fin’amor’s most loaded, multivalent terms, with its evocation of a properly feminine virtue – reticence – that points toward the self-preserving instinct, making it the sometime source of caprice or cruelty. A similar difficult double truth is endorsed at the end of the Consolation. Providence, so says Philosophy, offers Boethius the certainty of a just and rational universe, even as he must assume responsibility for his actions. As these are not to be seen as mandated by necessity, he must not consider unjust either eternal punishment or reward (V.vi.–). Providence does not eliminate free will, and so in the universalist perspective the work adopts, the attainment of the highest good, is open to one and all who turn aside from a materiality whose goods are necessarily either limited or false. Machaut signals his dependence on the Consolation by repeating its foundational, subjectifying gesture. This is the startling installation of an apparent intratextual version of the author, authenticated by a detailed biography, in what is otherwise a complex dialogue on traditional material: the presence of the author as character personalizes his encounter with the majestic figure of Lady Philosophy. She embodies a tradition, marking her as existentially distinct from her interlocutor, who shares the experience of all his fellows but remains from beginning to end a particular man. With Philosophy as the source of knowledge, the Consolation develops themes that are universal and trans-historical in the best traditions of Greek and Roman metaphysical speculation. In this context, Boethius’s public ‘life’ becomes relevant because his sorrow, which Philosophy has come to assuage, can only be experienced as personal, as the transitory, material stuff of life that the wise man, looking to the ‘highest good’, is thereby enabled to transcend but not discard. At the same time, the Consolation’s Christianity, evident more in tone than in doctrine, insists on the perdurable individuality of the main character/author, who never reduces himself to a type, following the model of Augustine’s Confessions (written between and ), which was for the Middle Ages the most influential first-person account of spiritual turmoil and its assuaging (and so more generally a distant ‘informing’ context for the firstperson, self-analyzing, and troubled narrators of the love vision tradition). In all these works, the primary focus is on an at least apparently autobiographical ‘I’ who seems willing to tell all to a figure of exalted authority, and also to the readers who are enabled to overhear their conversation. Much space in the Consolation is devoted to an impassioned, detailed evocation of his political fall in a series of resentment-filled questions, which, if not a narrative formally speaking, functions as one in which Boethius, if only rhetorically, refutes the false charges against him (I.iv). Faced with the man’s anger and disillusion at what he considers an unmerited fate, Philosophy must force him to acknowledge that he is a man like other men, imposing a universal perspective on someone at first understandably obsessed with his individual difficulties (I.v). Starting with the Vergier, Machaut’s dits are often structured around a similar, consolatory movement from the individual to the universal, even as Machaut, in
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a move that is very un-Boethian, comes to focus increasingly on his authorship, including his reputation among the aristocracy. The ‘story’ of his oeuvre is that of an ‘I’ that becomes less and less a conventional formal device (identified with the role of the amant or lover) and more a means to enfold the writer in the text, eventually in the Voir dit collapsing to complex aesthetic effect the difference between experience on the one hand and its fabulized, if ‘truthful’, re-versioning on the other. Absent in the Consolation is any self-reflexive acknowledgment that Boethius is the author of the very text in which his encounter with Philosophy is recounted, nor is there any reference to his considerable career as an author devoted both to transmitting, in a series of handbooks, much of the classical tradition of education, and also to defending orthodox belief in the face of the continuing threat from Arianism. The Consolation is spoken by an experiencing-I, but this narrator never renders himself obtrusive by acknowledging either his role in creating the text in which these experiences are related or, at a more basic level, that such a text has come into existence as a result. Because Boethius never figures in it qua author, the Consolation offers nothing of the play between textual insides and outsides that is a familiar element in Machaut’s writing, no gestures that establish the encounter between Philosophy and Boethius, as well as the lyrics thereby generated, as constituting a text that in speaking of itself connects with the author as extradiegetic character, that is as a palpable narrating presence concerned with the reportorial and aesthetically appropriate shaping of his vision. Somewhat in contrast, the Vergier, when first circulated, invited being read as authorial autobiography even if the narrator was unnamed and not specifically identified with Machaut (here the pattern of the Rose is followed). However, the story of education and commitment that it dramatizes might also be understood as a mise-en-abîme of how the knowledge of fin’amor was transmitted to the young and inexperienced poet by the genial guardians of this literary tradition. Specifically, the Vergier might seem a suitably fabulized version of Machaut’s reading and study of love poetry, with submission to his lady and the God a metaphor for the acceptance of a compositional command that, if issuing from within, required his emotional commitment in order to be fulfilled. Importantly, this understanding of the poem is confirmed as the poet’s intention when Machaut, undertaking his final act of ‘composition’ with the design and execution of the complete-works manuscripts, reconfigures the work as an essential part of the jugement suite. In that suite, the Prologue, the most intensely personal of Machaut’s works, which, now preceding it in A and F-G, anticipates the themes and structures of his first foray into the fabulizing of the love experience. The strong implication is that the narrator in the Vergier is now to be understood as the fictional avatar of the poet himself, who is ‘in’ his work as its ‘I’ from the outset. Machaut’s first and last poetic texts are interestingly linked through parallels that readers following manuscript order can scarcely overlook. It was the Vergier, written decades earlier, that provided Machaut with a model for his elaborately stylized representation of his election to the service of Love in the Prologue. Of crucial importance to establishing the linkage of the two works is the dominant presence of the figure of Amour, to whom the poet, having pledged himself to his service in the Prologue, does homage again in the Vergier even as he there reaffirms his previously
Machaut’s Dit dou vergier and Prologue
pledged resolve to honor ladies in all that he composes, an undertaking that the poet in the Navarre will be found guilty of betraying, only once again at the conclusion of this elaborate work to have his commission renewed once he accepts the rebuke. It might be true, as Hoepffner dismissively opines, that the Vergier is in point of origin something of a schoolboy exercise, a simple first attempt to fictionalize the initial steps in his exploration of the givens of tradition that will in the course of time manifest itself in works of more precious complexity and sophistication. However, late in life, designing how he wished his works to be understood as a whole, the Vergier was assigned a more significant role, one that connected it to a sequence of works concerned with Machaut’s performance as a servant of women. As I have suggested above, in this ultimate configuration the Vergier establishes the particular Boethian form in which personification allegory will be subsequently deployed in most of Machaut’s dits, drawing on the formal and thematic outline presented in the Prologue. What the Prologue sketches out as an artistic agenda is given fictional shape in the Vergier through its fabulizing, in the most conventional ways, of the love experience of the narrator/ poet. Generally, the later poems focus, at least in part, on similar allegorical dialogues, as exalted otherworldly figures encounter experiencing-I narrators who are increasingly identified with the poet himself and sometimes bear his name. By mid-career, with the composition of the Navarre, this narrator has been further transformed into a fully-obtrusive producing-I, a version in the text of the author who is clearly named as its existential creator. The arc of the Machaldian narrative bends toward the success of a lover’s suit, but it usually features an emphasis on amorous lore and the need for inner transformation that, in terms of models, is less Ovidian and more Boethian. This pattern is established early on in the Vergier, in which the narrator, as in the Consolation, figures as not only patient but also as pupil, which is the role the reader is also intended to occupy, as some brief discussion of its details reveals. In the narrator’s ‘trance’, the deserted orchard where he sits has become a scene of action (lines –). He is surprised to catch sight of six young men and six maidens who are making merry in the meadow before him (lines –). In their center is a single tree, in whose branches yet another male figure, quite different in appearance, is perched. He grasps a firebrand in one hand, brandishing a dart in the other, while two wings, folded behind him, mark him as more than human. This full-size blind Cupid is the God of Love, as he reveals, and the young men and women, handsomely attired according to the latest fashion, are his courtiers. These personifications, familiar to readers of the Rose, bear names such as Grace and Dangier. As the God points out, they serve him by attending to the lovers who seek commitment and consolation. The God and the narrator, who both are established as present in the orchard, are in effect the only characters to ‘appear’ to any effect in this wished-for world, with their qualities and actions explained by the God himself, who of course knows all. His courtiers are spied • •
See Palmer b and Palmer for further discussion. For a description of the miniature that accompanies this scene in C, see Leo .
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by the narrator, and acknowledged as such by the God, but they are not heard. Their natures and roles in the continuously reenacted game of love are only recounted, not performed. What was shown in the Rose, now is told in the Vergier, with the dramatic, ‘small-scale’ aspect of the action eschewed for a discursive, ‘distanced’ approach in which the relationship between the account and the nature, as well as interests, of the narrator and his interlocutor become the only significant elements of the presentation. The Vergier refigures as reportage the complex psychomachia involving the courtiers. Their struggles with each other and with would-be lovers become the subject of the long disquisition that the God of Love delivers to the narrator, who is no dreamer, but has fallen into a trance that prompts what he calls a ‘vision’ (line ). According to the Macrobian typology of dreams, the visio features the appearance of an authoritative figure who accurately reveals the future, which is what the God soon does. Here the experience is of course ‘waking’. Machaut’s use of the term vision is thus technically appropriate as a description of the nature and value of the singular dialogue that takes place during the narrator’s altered state of mind. The God first enlightens his interlocutor with a detailed description of his considerable powers. With no sense of modesty, he proclaims: ‘J’ay seur tous cuers humeins puissance | Il sont tuit en m’obeïssance’ (I have power over every human heart | They must all be obedient to me; lines –). What follows is a detailed description of the contentious passage from attraction to satisfaction that is set in motion when a sorrowing lover, eager to learn the ways of love, but frustrated by his lady’s indifference, enters the orchard and seeks his assistance. Although this state of desperate love-misery is precisely what besets the thwarted lover, no such restorative drama catches him up despite the presence and obvious willingness of the deity. As it turns out, the dreamer is there present so that he might hear from the mouth of the God himself how he will gain his lady’s love should he prove obedient to the rules that are explained to him. In the meadow where he sits, so the God informs him, many distraught, would-be lovers have gained the favor of their ladies with the aid of his twelve courtiers. However, this is not a drama he will himself witness or participate in, at least not for the present. Only in some vague future time will he become one of its participants. For him at this moment, the meadow, and the all-powerful divinity who holds sway there, provide only enlightenment (particularly about the overwhelming power of love to master nature) and, more important, instruction about how individuals can properly accommodate themselves to these truths. Like the poem’s readers and listeners, the narrator depends completely upon these words, and the tale they relate, in order to experience vicariously through the God’s description, the archetypal story of the smitten heart, whose subject he is not at this moment. Spoken by the God in the theater of the dreamer’s unconscious, these words only point out how his frustration will be alleviated, according to the work’s projected closure. Brought back to consciousness by the God’s sudden departure, the lover accurately and fully recounts the code of behavior that has been explained to him, taking enthusiastic pos • •
For a comprehensive and fairly recent discussion of these central narratological issues see Klauk and Köppe . On Macrobius, see Spearing .
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session of the truths he thinks will serve him well. The Vergier is first set in an everyday world where love sorrow is experienced as irremediable and where the special powers of Love are invisible. The trance reveals the orchard as fully itself, its secrets revealed, with a solution to suffering and isolation rendered up by the unconscious self, which conjures up the presence of the God. In this vision, the narrator now is made aware of what he did not know that he already knew: such is the prophetic quality of the vision as a powerful expression of a truth that is always already within. In the apt phrase of the God, love is a ‘noble signourie’ (noble governance; line ) that once recognized as such in the theater of the self can henceforth be lived out fully in the waking world. Previously the narrator had not realized that there was a divinity to whom he had to make homage in order to succeed in his suit. Foreign to the Rose is such an exclusive emphasis on this movement of consciousness to commitment and resolution, on an innerness that is only accessible in plain language through the narrator’s I-speech and is not projected onto the abstractness of personification allegory and rendered as spectacle. As has often been recognized, first and most delicately by C. S. Lewis, the Rose’s formal excellence consists in its fragmenting exteriorization of the universally human flow of contradictory impulses and feelings, whose anthropomorphizing projection the two poets manage with contrasting brands of wit, insight, and sophistication. The Rose’s memorably dynamic anatomy of what we would now term ‘psychology’ is appropriately acknowledged within the Vergier, but, significantly, it has been refigured as the body of knowledge that the God conveys to the would-be lover in the movement of consciousness that the poem focuses on representing. Drama is condensed into the lore that assuages sorrow. By restating in the waking world what the God enjoins him to do in the dream, the narrator takes possession of the truths to which he has been made privy and assumes the responsibility for bringing his suit to a successful conclusion. Near the poem’s end, like a star pupil he repeats his teacher’s dicta: Ainsi jamais ne fineray; Car plus chier a definer ay, Et toudis je vueil endurer Tant comme je porray durer Son tres dous voloir sans mesprendre, Humblement, et de cuer attendre Le don qui m’a esté promis Dou dieu se je sui vrais amis Qui dessous tous est pleins d’onnour (lines –) And so I will never end, | For I prefer to die | And intend, always and humbly, | As long as I can last, | To accomplish her sweet will, | Doing no wrong, and to expect in my heart | The gift that was promised me | By the god should I act the true lover | Who, more than all others, is replete with honor
•
See Lewis .
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The lengthy disquisition of the God of Love establishes him as the authority who wields control over all the elements that establish what, in contrast to the Rose, is his ‘story’. He commands a pattern that might be played out in any number of ways, providing an endless source of invention for the talented poet/musician. This is exactly what happens of course in the dits to follow, each of which offers a different inflection of what the God tells the dreamer and what the dreamer reframes for those who listen to him. From this perspective, the Vergier is less a love poem per se than a useful introduction to the themes and form of love poetry in general, which is of course exactly how the work figures in the Machaut oeuvre (except for in C and W), that is, as a kind of prolegomenon to more complex, lengthier reinventions of the Rose tradition that would follow in the course of a long career. In this dialogue between allegorical personification and the lover, it is the ‘I’ that is allimportant, either in the spoken interchange between the two or in the lover’s narration of his experience and, more important, his account of the inner transformation he undergoes at its end. The ‘I’ of the God’s speaking voice corresponds to the ‘I’ of his mostly listening interlocutor, who, as dreamer and narrator, experiences the tale told by the God and subsequently as narrator retells it. What the God says, the narrator repeats in his own voice; such is the meaning of what we call quoting, and the reason for the use of diacritical marks in the modern languages to denote this fact of double-voicedness. The poem’s I-narrator thus subsumes the I-narration of the work’s embedded I-narrator. In effect, the narrator speaks ‘for’ the God; we are meant to notice the blending of two voices in his long disquisition, an entirely appropriate effect since the point of the vision is that the narrator will accept and internalize the God’s instruction. Thus, the form of the work – its layering of two ‘I’ discourses – reflects the nature of its almost ritualistic ‘action’, which is, roughly speaking, an authority figure conveying a body of information (or perhaps better a moyen de vivre) to an initiate. That this detailed disquisition is authored, as it were, by his unconscious justifies his expectation that he will then receive the gift of his lady’s love, as promised in his vision (lines –). Machaut here provides a more concentrated version of how in the Rose, and the tradition it inspired, the deployment of first-person narration heightens themes of innerness, subjectivity, and mentalité more generally. The vision is a drawing inward, an unsocial and quintessentially private motion in which the mind locates a landscape where the most personal of exchanges, or meditations, can be properly set. There is also within the elaborate cultural tradition that these texts exemplify the sense that the ‘God’ is only trans-subjective, not a real divinity, but a way of establishing a hierarchical structure for an elaborate form of behavior shared by those whose noble hearts qualify them to do so. The class-bound ability to love in a refined manner is innate, a capacity that cannot be learned, only discovered within, as the Vergier recounts. Although the lover, unlike the God, does narrate what passes for action in the poem, some of his words can also be understood as self-speech, when the lover, as in the closing lines quoted above, talks to himself about his newfound resolve. If reportage in the firstperson is, as in the Vergier, inevitably subjectified and personalized, such self-speech is especially important because it anatomizes an interiority marked by constantly shifting moods,
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thoughts, and feelings that finds its most potent expression in the dream itself. Consider the meditation that precedes the narrator’s falling into a trance. Prompted by the beauty of the orchard where he finds himself, he explores the contents of his own mind: Car par pensee remiroie La grant biauté qui me maistroie, Le scens, le valeur, et le pris Par qui je suis d’amer espris (lines –) For in my mind I marveled | at the great beauty that mastered me, | The intelligence, the value, and the worthiness | That had inflamed me with such love
But these pleasant thoughts are soon countered by others filled with ressentiment and confusion: Mais quant je pensay ensement Comment je l’aim tres loiaument, Et elle n’a cure de moy, Einsois me fait peinne et anoy, Et me fait en dolour languir, Pour ce que je l’aim et desir, Et qu’elle me deïst par droit Des biens amoureus orendroit Faire aucune joie esperer (lines –) Yet as I was thinking about | How very loyally I love her | While she has no thought for me | But gives me pain and grief, | Makes me languish in misery | Because I love and desire her | And she, to be just, should | Make me hope for some joy | In lover’s goods with no delay
For the Middle Ages, the ultimate rhetorical source of this kind of approach to the inner life is undoubtedly the Confessions. Augustine’s inventorying of his imperfections to God often turns to considerations of the painful collision of human desire with the remoteness of the divine as its object. These are themes that are also central to the Consolation and the Vergier, but developed slantwise since neither Philosophy nor the God of Love are the proper objects of desire. They are instead the means to a proper relationship with the divine, the source of all goodness, and the lady, who is for the lover ‘de toutes les dames la flour’ (the flower of all ladies; line ). A powerful sense of conflictual innerness, prompting a dialogue with an exalted authority figure, is a characteristic Machaut theme, surfacing early on in the Vergier but developed to more complex effect in the later works, such as in the Remede de Fortune (see, for example, lines –). In the Remede, Lady Philosophy is remade as Lady Esperance (‘Hope’), who guides to an encounter with his beloved the lover/poet, hitherto reduced to miserable inaction by an apparent paradox in the rules that govern the proper behavior of a lover, which causes him to mistake his situation as a predicament admitting of no honorable solution. She then oversees his establishment of a mutually satisfying connection with this lady previously loved only from afar. If this narrative is indebted heavily to the Consolation, it also replays the ways in which the Vergier had appropriated from that same source the dialogue
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between suffering lover and comforting authority figure, accommodating it to the tradition of fin’amor. In the relationship that develops between the lovers in the Remede, the narrator’s writing plays a crucial role once it becomes clear that his composing and then presenting in public a lyric in honor of his lady, revealing by implication his true feelings for her, has not violated the lover’s commandment of maintaining secrecy. Esperance makes it clear that the lover’s artistic pursuits pose no problem for his courtship of the lady, as the poem explores the problematic at the heart of the late medieval lyric: that the emotions it voices are authentic and personal (in the sense that they belong to an author whose does not feign them) even as they conform to experiences that, if restricted by class, are truly trans-subjective since they express conventional movements of consciousness, anatomizing sentiments shared by all those who, like the narrator in the Vergier, have pledged fealty to the divinity who has revealed himself to them. In the realm of Love, as in the Neoplatonic order summoned up by Boethius, the individual paradoxically finds fulfillment and a sense of self in the universal as the distance collapses between the ‘I’ that speaks the text and the disputatious but helpful personifications who are thereby summoned into loquacious diegetic presence. The composition of the Prologue, and the links the poet forges for it with the three works that immediately follow, reveal Machaut’s late career interest in emphasizing how from the outset of his first poetic project he focused on the ‘I’ who is first experiencing, but then is understood as also producing (just as suggested by the sequence of different selves in the two interconnected jugement poems). After the Navarre, the Machaldian ‘I’ is the voice of a lover who submits to his lady while serving as a poet who answers to his patron and who thus is moved by two reasons to compose both poetry and music. Interestingly, in the Navarre it is his performance as poet, rather than any commitment he fulfills as lover, that is the focus of the debate. The fabulizing of his artistic career points toward a larger, but neglected aspect of the Machaut oeuvre: the self-referentiality of its ultimate material form. The drama of Machaut’s career unfolds within the individual fictional worlds of his dits, at least in the first section of the complete-works manuscripts A and F-G, in the interconnected suite of works, which has its own story to tell. In the Prologue and the three works that follow it, his authorship is announced, then confirmed by the Vergier’s doctrinal conformity, only to be called into question by his supposed indecorousness in the judgment that emerges from the Behaingne, which he defends to his embarrassment in the Navarre, an error that is lightheartedly condemned by the assembled authorities. For amends, he is sentenced to continue writing, making sure this time to avoid anything that ladies might find offensive. This is yet another way an ‘I’, both experiencing and producing, emerges from the Machaut oeuvre. The jugement suite As discussed, the Vergier lacks the impressive formal intricacies of Machaut’s later works, which are much celebrated for their finesse and sophistication. Unlike masterpieces such as the Remede de Fortune and the Voir dit, this short dit has a simple structure that features no interplay between the narrative and lyric (or lyric and epistolary) insertions; no dependence
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on an obtrusive narrator who negotiates a rich intersection between narrative insides (the world of the story) and outsides (the space of its composition); no fabulized invocation of authorial biography; no references to the aristocratic patrons with whose lives and experience the poet was familiar; no reworking of familiar genres like the love debate or the falconry treatise. Machaut’s first dit, however, plays an indispensable role in the posthumous presentation of his creative legacy, creating a version of the ‘I’ that was designed to endure as long as his works were copied and read. Placed at the head of A and F-G, the Prologue has been understood as a general introduction to the complete works. However, it is clear that this late work also serves a more ‘local’ purpose in that its concluding lines connect directly to the Vergier. After ‘Guillaume’ affirms that he will forthwith begin a life of composing works in the honor of ladies (‘seur l’onneur des dames fondees’; line ), he proclaims: Or pri a Dieu qu’il me doint grace, De faire chose qui bien plaise Aus dames; car par Saint Nichaise A mon pooir quanque diray A l’onneur d’elles le feray. Car vraiement trop mefferoie En cas qu’einsi ne le feroie. Et pour ce vueil, sans plus targier, Commencier Le Dit dou Vergier. (lines –) Now I pray God to give me the grace | To compose whatever would greatly please | Ladies; for, by St. Nicaise, | To the best of my ability whatever I say | I will do in their honor. | For truly I would go too far wrong | If ever I did not. | And so I intend, without further delay, | Beginning with The Story of the Orchard.
In this way, the Prologue forges a direct link between a fabulized autobiographical moment in which the poet is tasked with composing works in the honor of ladies, and an equally fabulized account of the composition of the poet’s actual first text, actually composed three decades or so earlier, whose structure and thematic concerns the Prologue interestingly recapitulates and expands upon. Two moments of composition separated by decades are collapsed as the oeuvre is provided with a quite different, thoroughly fictionalized sense of space and time that is focused on the emergence of the poetic self and his use of first-person address, which was designed to turn his authorship into a textual element. Introductions are usually both anticipatory and retrospective; they identify in codices what is therein acknowledged as having been composed earlier and to which they retrospectively refer. In the fictional space it fashions for Guillaume’s authorship, the Prologue anticipates the writing of the Vergier as the initial fulfillment of the undertaking just made to both Amour and Nature to accept the mission of composing poetry and music according to conventional and proper principles. The works that follow the Vergier in the oeuvre are positioned as the further products of Guillaume’s authorship, his composition, après la lettre, of works designed to celebrate ‘l’onneur des dames’ (the honor of ladies; line ). In the Vergier, the God of Love’s lengthy disquisition and self-description elaborates on, even as it recapitulates much of, the
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explanation of love as emotional experience and the poetic subject matter offered by Amour in the Prologue. In these works, Guillaume’s ‘I’ is thereby provided twice with the sentiments that this literary tradition requires him to express, as well as the language and form he will need to deploy in his own efforts, which are required to be ‘nouviaus’ (new; line ). Guillaume’s promise to respect the honor of ladies is actually made twice in the closing lines of the Prologue. This cardinal rule is then repeated in the Vergier, where it is as enthusiastically endorsed by the lover, as it is by the poet in the Prologue when he admits he would go quite far wrong if he did not compose what would please the women of the court. There he anticipates the misogyny with which Lady Bonneürté will charge him in the Navarre, even as in an earlier passage, where he shows deep sympathy for a man disappointed at his lady’s indifference, he demonstrates something of the gender partiality that perhaps affects his judgment in the Behaingne that the man betrayed by his beloved suffers more than the lady whose lover is killed (see Prologue, lines –). The various bonds that connect the four texts of the jugement suite require more comment than can be provided here, but the general form of their interconnections is clear enough, including the fact that they not only limn the outlines of an artistic commission but trace, humorously and to the ultimate credit of the poet, his trials in remaining faithful to the foundational value that such poetry should honor rather than defame women. There is no doubt that in late middle age, as his career drew to a close, Machaut was intent on shaping his legacy, as evidenced not only by the composition of the Prologue and the configuration of the jugement suite, but also by the considerable task of assembling what he had composed in a form that highlighted the depth and breadth of his amazing creative career, arranging to have produced the elaborate A and F-G complete-works manuscripts. There is good reason for thinking that Machaut was involved personally in the production of A and to a lesser degree in the case of F-G, which gives them unique (if not sole) authority in the determination of the poet’s final intentions regarding the general form and particulars of his different works. These manuscripts carry a certain preeminence, if not an absolute authority in all cases, for editors of Machaut’s poetry and music. Significantly, A has been selected as the base manuscript for the ongoing editorial project, Guillaume de Machaut: The Complete Poetry and Music. The late-commissioned codices are crucial to establishing a critical history of the poet’s aesthetics, especially as we have seen his characteristic deployment of personification allegory and an ‘I’ narration that identifies the intratextual speaker with his existential counterpart, the poet himself. The Prologue thus explains Machaut’s decision to devote much of his life to the composition of both poetry and music, even as it provides important insights, • • • •
On the importance of female patronage in Machaut’s milieu, see the chapters by Andrew Wathey and Domenic Leo in this volume. Earp a, – offers a full discussion of Machaut’s project to commission complete-works manuscripts. In certain cases, however, it has been argued that C seems to be more reliable; see the discussion in Leach , –. The project is sponsored by the Machaut research team based at the University of Exeter, the TEAMS consortium at the University of Rochester, and Medieval Institute Publications. See also n. above.
Machaut’s Dit dou vergier and Prologue
both explicit and implicit, into his practice. This work dramatizes the transforming encounter between the two forces that have shaped the poet’s life, and does so by turning him into a character who speaks directly to the divinities who have imposed this destiny upon him. As discussed earlier, it is not anticipated by anything in the Rose, and if in a formal sense, the Consolation served as the poet’s model, the Prologue is thoroughly un-Boethian in its focus on the formation of the artistic self and of the responsibilities of the position to which Machaut has been with much ceremony elevated. Interestingly, his career in the traditional sense ends not with his death or incapacity, events that often leave behind unfinished projects as well as a welter of texts that require posthumous, order-bestowing editing. With foresight, good luck, and the wisdom to make full use of his existential opportunities, Machaut instead determined to act as his own literary executor ante factum. As Lawrence Earp observes, in the last years of Machaut’s career it ‘was the organization and preservation of his life’s works – rather than the composition of new works – that was his main preoccupation as an artist’. I would add only that there seems to have been a third intention. MS A in particular contains the works, presumably in their best available form, organizes them in certain ways, but also presents them, that is, makes them available to-be-read, both individually and as a part of a textual flow that begins on the first folio and ends with the last. The particular nature of this codex should be of interest to critics reading individual works, within many of which Machaut ostentatiously figures as a presence. So it is with the complete oeuvre, which is nothing less than another version of this proud ‘I’, its trans-textual reach furthered by the materiality of the collection in which individual works are organized into a series designed for sequential reading. For many – perhaps most – modern authors, the notion of oeuvre is material in only a single sense, designating the range of works produced, bestowing a singularity on them by virtue of the fact of their shared authorship. In the case of Machaut, the oeuvre is also a material object, the final production of a meta text, whose design in A he likely oversaw, perhaps quite closely, that contains all of his works. It might not be too radical to claim that the planned codex itself constitutes a mise-en-abîme for its contents, also an eloquently silent admonition to consider them in a trans-textual, serial presentation therein that constructs in part what they are meant to say. How many exemplars of this collecting, compiling project came to exist is unknown; the labor involved in producing each one would have imposed enormous costs on any prospective buyer, but then Machaut was blessed with rich patrons and admirers who had the needed resources. It is easy enough (and I plead guilty to the charge) to see what Machaut scholarship terms the complete-works manuscript tradition as only a resource, that is, as only the to-betreasured receptacle of the works themselves, of which, at least in most instances, it provides a version that can be considered as embodying the final wishes of the poet. That such a collection came to be was, of course, yet another gesture – proof of the author’s power in promoting a life lived through accomplishments that would not be stilled by death. These •
Earp a, .
R. Barton Palmer
codices not only preserved the works Machaut had created. Through a carefully calculated deployment of paratextual devices (including an index, explicits and incipits, leaf numbering, and miniatures), they also shaped their presentation for readers, constructing for the first four works liens that turned them into mutually dependent elements of the same compositional story. Most important about these guides-to-reading additions was the Prologue, which remakes the dialogue between the poet and the God of Love as Machaut had already dramatized it in the Vergier. In the Prologue, the ‘I’ that is featured prominently as character, narrator, and speaker in the works themselves now takes its final, and quite revealing codical form. The ‘I’ that speaks in the Prologue, so Amour and Nature affirm, will be the author of an incredible diversity of works both poetic and musical, but this imagined future of accomplishment has in fact already come to pass and exists in the well-ordered collection of compositions the reader has in hand and is presumably ready to peruse. The Prologue connects explicitly to the ‘self ’ who figures in many of these as Machaut’s intratextual reflex. This ‘I’ is shown to have existed before the texts themselves came to be composed (which is of course true) even if this text was the last of them to be composed. In any case, the Prologue shows that the ‘I’ exists outside the other texts as a paratextual guide to their understanding; it is established as belonging to their existential author, who is named. The authorial ‘last word’ is also the first word in terms of its placement in the codices. As a presence, this ‘I’ is contained within a text that is and is not part of the collection, whose purpose is to frame the various elements of the elaborate apparatus designed for the presentation of the oeuvre while anticipating the forms they will take. Machaut here plays with the notions of beginnings and ends, and riffs on the incongruity of a new text anticipating the ones already written and present in succeeding pages. Thus, it is fitting that the Prologue is linked by theme and form to the Vergier, the composition in which Machaut first assayed his own version of the dialogue structure he found in the Consolation. It was there that, in a form reminiscent of that most famous text, he detailed for readers the love lore he had gleaned from his own careful study of the Rose, anticipating the continuing acts of re-creation that would come to constitute the literary side of his artistic career.
. M P F P ’A* Kevin Brownlee
The Prise d’Alexandre is unique among Machaut’s works in that it explicitly combines historiography with poetry, as many critics have pointed out. It was also the very last of his long poems, and was placed on fols r–r of the complete-works manuscript A, which contains both his poetry and his music. This poem was written after the assassination of King Pierre I of Cyprus in , and since it is quite long, Lawrence Earp proposes an extended period of composition, dating it to c. –. In the textual context of the Prise, Machaut consistently treats himself in the first person as an active artist figure. In the present essay I am particularly interested both in how Machaut the poet-author of the Prise presents himself as such, and in the explicit distinction that this poet establishes with King Pierre, his heroic but deceased protagonist. This explicit distinction most dramatically occurs at the beginning and the end of the text, and involves the difference between the historiographic protagonist (tied to meaning) and the figure of the narrative poet (tied to form). The specific verbal context in both cases is that of the anagram containing the names of both figures. Machaut’s practice of crafting anagrams in this poem recalls the vast majority of his earlier dits, in which the anagram of identity functions quite importantly, and goes back to his first use of the anagram of authorial identity in the Jugement dou roy de Behaingne, lines –. In the Prise, the first passage of the double anagram (bolded below) occurs directly after the opening mythological presentation of Pierre de Lusignan’s birth (which combines the pagan gods with the nine worthies) and just before the opening of Machaut’s extended recounting of Pierre’s real life in an overtly Christian context. The poet explicitly addresses *
• •
•
• • •
My contact with Lawrence Earp has been long and fruitful. The two of us have shared an important relationship since we were together in graduate school at Princeton. Throughout my academic career I have profited immensely both from Larry’s superb publications and from his friendship. It is a special pleasure to participate in his Festschrift. For all quotations and translations from the Prise I use the excellent edition of R. Barton Palmer (). Palmer uses A as his base manuscript, dealing with his editorial policy on pp. –. See in particular Ribémont . Bernard Ribémont’s entire set of seven articles on the Prise (from to ) is important. I am currently working on an extended study of Machaut’s Prise d’Alexandre that will address Ribémont’s highly significant work more directly. My key starting point here is Lawrence Earp’s analysis in his indispensable Guide to Research (a, –). Elizabeth Eva Leach (b, ) states: ‘Towards the end of his life, in the early s, Guillaume de Machaut decided to collect his complete works together into an organized book, which we know as manuscript A’. Indeed, A plays a key role in Leach’s ground-breaking book, beginning with chap. . For Machaut’s role in the production of A, see in addition Earp a, –; Huot a, –; and Avril , –. The single earlier edition published before Palmer – that by Louis de Mas Latrie in – also uses A as its base. The Prise first appears in Vg on fols r–v; see Earp a, –, for the bibliographic details of the Prise, including a complete list of manuscripts, some now lost, that contain the work. Earp a, . For the Jugement Behaingne, I cite the edition and translation of Wimsatt and Kibler , –. Earp (a, ) notes that Hoepffner (–, : xxix) reveals that this is the first time that Machaut uses the authorial anagram in his works. The nine worthies were first described as such by Jacques de Longuyon in his Voeux du Paon (1312) as exemplary chivalric heroes. They involve three groups of three: three pagans (Hector, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar), three
Machaut as Poet Figure in the Prise d’Alexandre
the reader in this transition from mythology to history: Or est raison que je vous nomme son nom telement que tout homme le puist legierement savoir et le mien sans grant peinne avoir vesta lenfancon baptisa et nom li mist que molt prisa vezci comment se bien querez son nom et le mien trouverez prenez ce plus prochain notable si les y trouverez sans fable en .ii. vers dune grosse fourme dont le darrenier vous enfourme que .h. seule y ajousteres et dou premier .mar. osteres mis les ay par tele manier adieu ma vraie dame chiere pour le meilleur temps garde chier honneur a vous quaim sans trichier mais il couvient desassambler ses lettres et puis rassambler si supplie a tous de cuer fin sencor met ces vers en la fin de ce livre que desprisier ne men veuillent ne mains prisier car savoir ne puis nullement de ce livre le finement si vueil dire eins quil soit parfais et moy nommer qui nuit et jour y vueil entendre sans sejour. (lines –) Now is it right that I name for you | This man’s name and my own as well, | In such a way that anyone | Could readily come to know them. | Vesta baptized the infant | And gave him a name she highly esteemed. | Look here how if you search ably | You will find his name and my own. | Go to the next notable passage. | Where you will uncover them, and no lie, | In two verses written in large letters, | The last of which to you reveals | That you need only add an H | While suppressing the letters MAR from the first. | I’ve fashioned them as part of the following: ‘Farewell, my true lady dear, | Keep your thoughts on better times; | Honor to you, whom I love without deception’. | Now you must take the letters | Apart and then reassemble them. | With a pure heart I ask everyone | That if I repeat these verses at the end | Of the book they will not think less of me | For so doing, or hold me in lower esteem, | But I cannot know at all | If this book will be completed. | And so I will proclaim before it is finished | The name of the lord for whom I’m composing | And name myself as well – for night and day | I wish to attend to this without rest.
Jews (Joshua, David, Judas Maccabeus) and three Christians (King Arthur, Charlemagne, Godfrey of Bouillon). The final hero, of course, is the French re-conqueror of the Holy Land. This set of nine heroes shortly became widespread in medieval literary works.
Kevin Brownlee
This passage not only looks forward to the end of the work for a key repetition, but it carefully differentiates the work of the author-poet from the life of the protagonist-hero. At the same time, an important difference between the life of the writer and that of the protagonist is established. The protagonist is already dead, but the writer is not. And the projected activity of the writer is clearly linked to the narration of the text itself. In addition, Machaut in the anagram depicts himself within the context of courtly love, a depiction which does not occur in the storyline of his Prise. He thus here associates himself quite powerfully to his status as a poet in his earlier works, where he was frequently identified with courtly love. The Voir dit (which immediately precedes the Prise in MS A) is particularly privileged in this context. The second authorial double anagram comes at the very end of the work, after the account of the royal protagonist’s murder and the narrator’s Christian blessing of him. It opens with the explicit naming of the pair, with the name of the king in first position and the name of the poet in the rhyme position two lines later: Pierre roy de jherusalem et de chypre le nomma len et moy guillaume de machaut qui ne puis trop froit ne trop chaut si que nos .ii. nons trouverez se diligemment les querez en ces .ii. vers de grosse lettre .mar. ostes et .h. y faut mettre Si les trouverez proprement or les querez diligemment et vezci des vers la maniere adieu ma vraie dame chiere pour le milleur temps garde chier vostre honneur que jaim sans trichier. (lines –) Explicit la prise dalixandre Pierre, king of Jerusalem | And Cyprus, he is called, | And me, I am Guillaume de Machaut, | Who cannot stand too much cold or heat; | And you will find our two names, | Should you seek them diligently, | In these two verses in large letters. | Remove MAR and you must add H; | Then you will properly recognize them. | Now look for them closely, | See here the verses in question: | ‘Farewell, my true lady dear, | Keep your thoughts on better times; Honor to you whom I love without deception’. | Here ends The Taking of Alexandria.
Significantly, the anagram as such serves as the equivalent of a signature for Machaut the poet, and is often connected with his separate role in service to love. He has used it in eight of the long dits that precede the Prise in MS A. In this context, as I have already indicated, the Voir dit plays a particularly important role, since it promises the revelation of the names •
•
The term ‘courtly love’ has become somewhat problematic, as highlighted in the key publications of David Hult () and Sarah Kay (), for example. I use it in this context simply to indicate that Machaut wrote predominantly amorous poetry for a courtly audience. See Earp a, for a table that summarizes the order of all of Machaut’s works in the complete-works manuscripts.
Machaut as Poet Figure in the Prise d’Alexandre
both of the poem’s first-person lover and author, as well as that of his beloved lady, ‘ma dame jolie’ (my beautiful lady; line ). The title of the work is then given in the rhyme position of line . Continuing in the reverse order in which they appear in A, the anagram in the Fonteinne amoureuse (lines –) encrypts the names of both Machaut and ‘celui pour qui je fais ce livre’ (he for whom I compose this book; line ), with the poet placed under the control of ‘courtly love’ (that is, the ‘amours fine’ of line ). In the Confort d’ami, there is a double concern with naming that is not exactly an anagram but that clearly resembles its form. At the beginning of the text (lines –) the reader is promised to receive later the name of both ‘mes sires’ (my lord; line ) and the writer (line ). Near the end of the dit (lines –) the reader is carefully instructed on how to discover ‘nos .ii. noms’ (our two names; line ): he or she must go to the small town of Glurvost (where ‘ma dame’ [line ] goes to dine) and there someone will be found who will reveal ‘mon nom […] | et pour qui j’ai fait ce traité, | que j’ay mis en rime et traité’ (my name […] | and for whom I have made this text, | which I have set out in narrative rhyme; lines –). While this is not an anagram, strictly speaking, it offers the same invitation of a puzzle to be solved. At the end of the Dit de l’alerion, there is, on the other hand, a classic anagram (lines –), whose resolution will give the name of the poet-narrator: ‘qui a fait ceste rime toute’ (‘who has composed all of this rhyme’; line ). To finish the poem, there is a clear concern with the author’s social identity, as well as the presentation of an alternative title for the work as a whole in its last line: ‘Par ce verrez, tout clerement | Se cils est clers ou damoiseaus | Qui fist ce Dit des quatre oiseaus’ (By this means, you will clearly see | If he’s a clerk or a young knight | who wrote this Tale of the Four Birds; lines –). In the Dit dou lyon, the poem is explicitly named towards its end (line ), just before the poet-author gives the anagram (lines –), which will reveal ‘mon nom et mon seurnom sans faille, | car lettre n’i a qui y faille’ (My first name and my family name both complete, | for there was not a single letter missing; lines –). Although his name is not explicitly presented in the text, the first-person figure presents himself there as owned by Love and as having a courtly lady. The Remede de Fortune ends with a classic Machaldian anagram (lines –) that instructs the reader how to find the poet-author’s full name. The dit then concludes as the first-person protagonist dedicates himself to the service of ‘Bonne Amour’, hoping that his courtly lady will see positively his rhyme and be pleased with it (lines –). In the Jugement dou roy de Navarre, the situation differs. In the extended love adventure (lines •
• • • • • •
For the passage in question, see lines – in Leech-Wilkinson and Palmer . These are lines – in Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet’s revision of Paul Imbs’ critical edition of the text, with her highly significant modern French translation; see Imbs and Cerquiglini-Toulet . For text and translation, I use Palmer a. See Palmer for text and translation. For King John of Bohemia’s appearance in the Confort, see Palmer , lv–lvii and Hoepffner –, : xi–xiii. For the Dit de l’alerion, I use the text and translation of Gaudet and Hieatt . I use the text of Hoepffner –, : –; translation mine. I use the text and translation of Wimsatt and Kibler , –. I use the text and translation of Palmer , –.
Kevin Brownlee
–), the first-person male protagonist names himself explicitly to the Lady: ‘C’est la Guillaumes de Machaut’ (line ). This name is used in the rest of the long section. At the end, Machaut abandons the playful subterfuge of an anagram, concluding with (a last) unmistakable self-naming: Je, Guillaumes dessus nommez, Qui de Machau sui seurnommez, Pour mie congnoistre mon meffait, Ay ce livret rimé et fait. (lines –) I, the Guillaume named above, Who has the surname de Machaut, In order the better to acknowledge my fault, Have composed and rhythmed this little book.
Finally, in the Jugement Behaingne, we have near the end the very first anagram used by Machaut in all his works (lines –). Only the name of the first-person writer is involved here, and he presents himself as an (unsuccessful) lover in lines –. His name is not explicitly given. In this context, it is crucial to note that Machaut, the poet-author-composer figure of his complete works, inserts his ‘personal’ genealogy into the text of the Prise while he is describing King Pierre’s travels to Europe as king of Cyprus in –. In presenting the import of the death of the John II, king of France (on April ) for King Pierre’s crusade, Machaut the poet presents his own (professional writer’s) privileged relationship in the past with the ‘bon roy de behaingne’ (line ), namely with John of Luxembourg, king of Bohemia. Machaut speaks about him with great praise, and specifies the time of his own life that was spent with him in the past (that is from c. –): Cils behaingnons dont je vous conte not pareil duc, ne roy, ne conte ne depuis le temps charlemeinne ne fu homs cest chose certeinne qui fust en tous cas plus parfais en honneurs en dis et en fais je feu ses cler ans plus de .xxx. si congui ses meurs et sentente sonneur son bien sa gentilesse son hardement et sa largesse car jestoie ses secretaires en trestous ses plus gros affaires sen pui parler plus clerement que maint autre et plus proprement. (lines –) These Bohemians that I’m telling you about | Had no duke, or king, or count his equal; | Not since the time of Charlemagne | Had there been a man – and this is certain | – Who was in every way more perfect, | In his accomplishments, his words, and his deeds, | I was his clerk for more than thirty years
•
See n. .
Machaut as Poet Figure in the Prise d’Alexandre
| And I knew well his manner and his beliefs, | His honor, his virtue, his gentility. | His courage and his generosity, | For I was then his secretary | In all his most important dealings. | Thus I can speak more properly | And truly about him than many others.
This tying of Machaut to King John in the Prise at the same time links him as poet to an extended series of references in his earlier long dits, in which Machaut the author had repeatedly associated himself as a person with this royal patron. Closest to the Prise in this context is the Fonteinne amoureuse, lines –. Here Machaut presents himself as a professional writer obliged by circumstances to be brave since he is riding next to his patron, whom he blesses: Et comment que je soie clers Rudes, nices et malapers S’ay je esté par mes .ii. fois En tele place aucune fois Avec le bon Roy de Behaingne, Dont Dieus ait l’aim en sa compaigne, Que maugré mien hardius estoi (lines –) And though I might be a clerk | Who is ignorant, incapable, and inept, | Yet I’ve been by my two faiths | In such a place several times | With the good King of Bohemia, | And may God keep his soul among His company, | And despite myself I was brave
The dit immediately before the Fonteinne amoureuse in MS A is the Confort d’ami, in which the poet-author elaborately praises John of Luxembourg as an ideal ruler throughout Europe in order to teach honor to King Charles of Navarre: Pren garde au bon roy de Behaingne, Qui en France et en Alemaingne, En Savoie et en Lombardie, En Dannemarche et en Hongrie, En Pouleinne, en Russe, en Cracoe, En Masouve, en Prusse, en Letoe Ala pris et honeur conquerre. (lines –) Follow the example of the good king of Bohemia, | Who in France and Germany, In Savoy and Lombardy, | In Denmark and Hungary, | In Poland, Russia, Krakow, | In Masovia, Prussia, and Lithuania | Did venture to win glory and honor.
The profound praise of King John by Machaut both as author and as person in this extended passage continues through line of the dit. This praise is then picked up again in lines – and in lines –, ending in the first-person affirmation of the final religious conclusion: Aussi faisoit il autre chose Dont s’ame Dieus prise et alose, • •
See Earp a, –. John of Bohemia is here identified (in line ) as the son of the first Holy Roman Emperor of the House of Luxembourg, Henry VII, whom Dante had so explicitly supported in Paradiso, .–.
Kevin Brownlee
Et je le tesmongne encor tel, Qu’onques en .i. pechié mortel Ne volt se couchier ne armer. Devoit on bien tel homme amer? (lines –) And he did something more | For which God may prize and value his soul. | And I bear witness to it even now, | Namely that never in a state of mortal sin | Would he sleep or take up arms. | Should not such a man be greatly admired?
From the Dit dou lyon, Earp cites two passages (lines – and –) in which the author speaks of the ‘dangers of travel in the [lands] that Machaut may have passed through while in the service of John of Luxembourg’. Finally, in the foundational early dit, the Jugement Behaingne, there is (in lines –) an extensive and positive portrayal of Durbuy castle, leading to the courtroom of the king of Bohemia himself surrounded by his allegorical courtiers, where Machaut passed his time, both as a person and as an author. In the extended context of MS A then, the poet-author’s reference to the king of Bohemia in the Prise serves as a key marker of Machaut’s identity as a professional poet, active over his entire lifetime. This framework makes his final reference in the Prise (lines –) to the dead King John particularly relevant in terms of Machaut’s status as a narrative poet telling his version of the story of Pierre’s entire life. Machaut presents King John’s death (with his body rotting in the earth while his soul is in Paradise) as rendering completely legitimate King Charles V’s refusal to go on the crusade, since he is obliged to defend his own ‘rightful lands’ (that is, France) from the English. In this framework, it is important to point out Machaut-as-poet’s use of an additional (and complementary) structural principle for the Prise, which involves a threefold division of the poem that gives special emphasis to its ending. This involves the explicit statement that King Pierre is the tenth worthy. The first time that this is mentioned is at the beginning of the work: this is in anticipation of the poet’s recounting of Pierre’s entire life in the Prise as narrative poem. Mars, the allegorical character of the pagan god, here speaks, first laying out the nine worthies: ce sont li bons rois alixanders qui conquist angleterre et flanders et tant quist terre et mer parfonde quil fu signeur de tout le monde hector et cesar julius et puis judas machabeus david, josue, charlemainne et artus qui ot moult de peinne et dux godefroy de buillon qui par son or et son billon son sens, sa force, et sa vaillance et de son grant bien lexcellence
• •
Earp a, . See Wimsatt and Kibler and Palmer .
Machaut as Poet Figure in the Prise d’Alexandre
mis toute en sa subjection la terre de promission ou au mains la plus grant partie en la fin y laissa la vie (lines –) These are the good king Alexander, | Who conquered England and Flanders, | And campaigned through so much of earth and ocean | He became lord of all the world; | Hector and Julius Caesar | And afterward Judah Maccabee; | David, Joshua, Charlemagne, | And Arthur, who suffered mightily, | And Duke Godfrey of Bouillon, | Who, through his gold and wealth, | His cunning, his power, his valor, | And the excellence of his great virtue, | Made subject to him |All of the promised land, | Or at least its greatest part; | There in the end he laid down his life.
Mars then states to the other gods the absolute need to come up with a tenth worthy who can successfully reestablish Duke Godfrey’s crusade in the Holy Land: si deveriens tuit labourer au bon godefroy restorer et querir homme qui sceust maintenir sa terre et deust (lines –) Thus we must, all of us, struggle | To restore his land to noble Godfrey | And seek out some man who has the power | And the duty to maintain that domain.
It is precisely in this context that the birth of Pierre de Lusignan takes place in the narrative that immediately follows, with Machaut moving from his use of the allegorical pagan gods to his evocation of the literally omnipotent Christian God (in lines –). The second time that Pierre is identified in the text as the tenth worthy occurs after all of the narrative events involving his battles up to the moment when he has returned to Cyprus with his men after visiting the Pope. From his kingdom he continues to fight the Saracens for the Christian cause, but Machaut-as-poet does not write down these events, explicitly contrasting the accomplishment of deeds with their being recorded in the poem: car trop longue chose seroit qui toutes les y meteroit et anuier porroit au lire qui toutes les vorroit escrire (lines –) For the tale would be too long | Were all of those mentioned | And to read such things might be tiresome | Even for the man eager to write them down.
King Pierre is then presented by Machaut-as-poet as having already fulfilled his religious and military destiny, and thus for qualifying as the tenth worthy. Again, there is reference to the writing of the poem, with mention of both its opening and its forthcoming conclusion: or querez un roy qui ce face na qui dieux doint si belle grace quades .c. contre .i. se combat et sa victoire ou quil sembat a dire est que si annemy sont .c. pour .i. encountre li or parlons des fais dalixandre et dector qui ne fu pas mendre
Kevin Brownlee
des autres preus qui ont este que ja ci devant recite comment que homme donneur na tant comme ot hector le combatant mais qui bien raison li feroit de .ix. preus .x mes. Seroit si que je li adjousteray quant ce livre parfineray quil est preudons et sest estables lies, larges, loiaus, veritable justes, sages, bien aviez et si tres bien le deviez en tout est de si bon affaire com nature peut home faire asses vous en deviseroie mais jamais dire ne porroie le bien lonneur le sens le pris qui sont en sa bonte compris (lines –) Now find me a king who might do such a thing | Or on whom God bestowed such great favor | He could fight with the odds a hundred to one | And has brought away the victory wherever he made war. | We must report that his enemies | Truly numbered a hundred against his one. | Let us speak of the deeds of Alexander | And Hector, for he was hardly inferior, | And the other valiant men that have lived | And who were mentioned by me earlier; | Though no man has as much honor | As Hector the fighting warrior did possess, | Even so any man who followed reason | Would make him the tenth of the nine worthies. | And so I’ll add him to them | When I bring this work to completion | Because he is valiant and trustworthy, | Affable, generous, loyal, and truthful, | Fair, wise, well advised; | And if you were to describe him fairly, | In all things he is as worthy a man | As Nature could create. | I could continue describing him, | Yet never could I relate | The goodness, the honor, the intelligence, | And the worthiness that constitutes his virtue.
The third and final time that King Pierre is referred to as the new tenth worthy comes at the end of the poem, directly following the recounting of his murder. It thus serves as a justification of his conflictual relationship with Florimont de Lesparre, followed by a Christian interpretation of his extraordinary death sequence. Again, we see the important distinction being drawn between protagonist and poet, between living an ‘exemplary’ life and writing a significant poem. At the same time, we have a stunning example of Machaut’s service to his aristocratic patron: plourez la foy de jhesu crit car je ne truis pas en escript que depuis le tens godefroy de buillon qui fist maint effroy aus sarrazins, fust home ne par qui si mal fussent mene ne qui tant leur feist contraire quar de chypre jusques au caire les faisoit trembler et fremir doit on bien plourer et gemir la mort de si vaillant homme il fu si vaillans cest la somme
Machaut as Poet Figure in the Prise d’Alexandre
que ce sera honneur et preuz sil est mis avec les .ix. preus si que ce sera li disiemes (lines –) Weep for the faith of Jesus Christ, | For I find no evidence in writing | About any man born since the time | Of Godfrey of Bouillon, who so harassed | The Saracens and put fear in them, | Has any other caused them such distress, | No man who opposed them this stoutly | For he made them tremble and quake | From Cyprus to Cairo. | Shouldn’t the death of such | A valiant man be mourned and regretted? | He was so valiant – here’s the main point | – That it would be honorable and fitting | For him to be numbered among the nine worthies | So that he’d make the tenth.
This third and final use of the motif of the protagonist as the tenth of the classic nine worthies who are standard in medieval literature thus reinforces the author’s identity, as the one whose writing notes King Pierre’s accomplishments and places him among the worthies, while it presents the protagonist’s life as matter for the poet’s written text. I would like to conclude this brief essay by considering the last words of Machaut’s treatment of the Prise’s plot, which follow the preceding quotation directly. Here the poet asks himself the key question posed by the entire life story of the protagonist followed by his grisly murder by members of his own family. The ultimate answer is a Christian, religious one, and there is the suggestion that King Pierre’s life and death should be read against those of Jesus in the Gospels. Again, the events of his earthly existence are implicitly presented as the matter for a written book, of which Machaut is the poet-author. Its place in MS A is thus entirely justified: car einsi comme nous disiemes quant nous avons parle de li onques rien ne li abeli tant comme honneur chascuns le voit et mars lavancoit et levoit dont moult souvent saloit combatre quil en trouvient .c. contre .iiii. et savoit victoire et honnour si que signeurs se je lonnour vous nen devez avoir merveille mais dune chose me merveille comment jhesu cris pot souffrir tel homme a tele mort offrir car onques mais certeinnement de si tres bon commencement je ne vi si piteuse fin or prions a dieu de cuer fin quil le preingne et mettre en sa gloire sara noble et digne victoire (lines –) For just as we’ve been saying | When we’ve spoken about him, | Nothing made him stand out so much | As honor – so saw every man. | And Mars favored and exalted him | So that he often sought out war | In which he found a hundred to his four. | And victory and honor were his, | And so, lords, if I honor him, | You should not think it strange. | But one thing I do wonder about: | How could Jesus Christ allow | Such a man to be delivered to this kind of death? | For never – and this is certain | – Have I seen such a wonderful beginning | Come to such a miserable end. | Now let us pray God with a pure heart | To receive and admit him to His glory: | This way he’ll achieve a noble and worthy victory.
Kevin Brownlee
Returning to my opening query regarding Machaut’s presentation of himself as poetauthor in relation to the subject of the Prise, King Pierre I of Cyprus: through the various naming strategies Machaut employs (anagram, self-naming, and inclusion of the work in manuscripts devoted to a single, named author), it is evident that the lines between literary and historical figures become blurred. The ‘hidden’ naming of an anagram implies a network of readers who are engaged with the poet’s and patron’s identities in an extra-literary way and who might recognize them as ‘real’ people appearing within the literary space in an altered form. That form of reception works differently than the more obvious placement of the poem within a collected-works manuscript, or even the appearance of a poet named Machaut within the lines of the Prise during acts of self-naming. The anagram creates an incursion of the historical context into the literary domain that not only hints at a name, but at a ‘real life’ separate from the text itself, and draws attention to that incongruity. Along with the inclusion of biographical elements which establish Machaut as an author with a history of his own, and one who provides a link between two kings (Bohemia and Cyprus) elevated to near-mythological status through his poetry, this device provides another level of control for the author to help shape his own status and define that of his subjects, particularly his two ideal princes, John of Bohemia and Pierre of Cyprus. Ultimately, this allows him to mythologize his subject and divert focus from the circumstances of Pierre’s murder toward a reshaping of his life from historical character to literary figure.
. T P M’ L-N * Anne-Hélène Miller
Medieval poets were passionate about forms of debate and dialogue which, similar to the scholastic disputatio, highlighted opposing arguments. From the tensos or partimens of the troubadours to the jeux-partis of the trouvères, poets reconceptualized dialogic forms and transposed them into the realms of love and politics. This reimagining of disputatio, eloquently expressed in the Roman de la Rose (especially in the part attributed to Jean de Meun), epitomized the kind of open-ended quest towards which medieval poets gravitated. Most of the works of Guillaume de Machaut, notably the so-called lyrico-narrative dits, illustrate this intricate kind of dialogic practice. The Jugement dou roy de Behaingne (c. ) and Jugement dou roy de Navarre (–), with their named interlocutors and staging of contrasting points of view in the context of a debate, are explicitly part of this tradition. The Remede de Fortune (c. ), the Confort d’ami (), and the Dit de la fonteinne amoureuse (–) also emphasize verbal exchange, especially between the poet and the lover. In the Livre dou Voir dit (c. ), Machaut created a particularly sophisticated mise en scène of contrasting viewpoints, that, like a montage, points to the complex articulation of the relationship between truth and fiction. With Machaut, indeed, an exploration of truth is not exemplified by the simple exposition of divergent points of view, but rather by a more complex demonstration of contrasts that highlight semantic and generic diversity. Machaut’s interrogation of a rich array of contrasts is essential to our understanding of his sense of artistic composition and ordering, including where he positions his own voice or persona within such debates and dialogues. So, when considering this poet’s work, one must not only think in dialogic terms, but also look at the positionings of certain texts within the manuscripts, narrative devices, voices, and protagonists. In particular, we should examine those elements that may seem displaced or decentered, as those are integral to the artist’s choice to investigate meaning and truth. In this essay, I examine how such forms of displacement are paradigmatic to our understanding of Machaut’s poetic craft and its reception. I suggest that the recurrent use of the word destour encapsulates such a poetic strategy. In middle French, destour can mean a separate place, or the position of a recluse. This word can also have a more subtle connotation, like a pretext, a subterfuge, or even a playful diversion. In Machaut’s works we find various * • • • • •
This essay is written in gratitude and in honor of Larry Earp whose extraordinary scholarship on Guillaume de Machaut made it possible. See Novikoff , –. Novikoff traces the history of disputatio from its origins in the practice of dialectics in the monastic schools. See Harvey and Patterson . On debate poetry, see Altmann and Palmer , –. On Machaut’s debate poetry in particular, see Cayley . See Cerquiglini-Toulet , –, as well as p. where she talks of a ‘montage polyphonique’. See also Taylor and Miller . See Greimas , .
The Poetics of destour and ordenance in Machaut’s Lyrico-Narrative dits
expressions of destour not only in his lyrics but also in illuminations that feature a setting in nature. Destour thus functions like a poetic locus and, as such, destour enacts a territorializing impetus for the personage of the poet-narrator, one that fosters what the contemporary theoretician Edouard Glissant calls ‘une poétique du détour’ (a poetics of detour), one that plays with oppositions, with camouflage. I propose that thinking of Machaut’s poetics of destour is useful for understanding his abstract quest for meaning and truth that is either hidden, delayed, or left for interpretation. Such forms of camouflage, delays, or open interpretations are rendered possible by the dialogic structure of his oeuvre. Moreover, I suggest that expressions of destour are integral to Machaut’s sense of ordenance. For the poet, ordenance can encompass various meanings, such as a unique art of composition, a particular placement of a figure, a word, a text within a manuscript, or an overall desire for ordering. Machaut’s poetic use of destour is not, therefore, a random disordering or chaos, but rather represents a meaningful, deliberate form of displacement. I suggest tracing these concepts of destour and ordenance in the arrangement found in MS C. Research, particularly that undertaken by Lawrence Earp, has confirmed the precedence and importance of C as a ‘complete-works’ manuscript; that is, as a codex that gathers exclusively and entirely the poetic and musical works of Machaut. For Earp, to study the work of art that is C, one must consider the composition of the Remede de Fortune: he argues that ‘this single work captures the design of the entire manuscript in nuce’. While I agree with Earp regarding the overall importance of the Remede, this work is neither at the beginning nor at the center of C. Instead, it occupies the second position in the manuscript (fols r–v) after the Jugement dou roy de Behaingne (fols r–v). This is noteworthy because the decentered place of the Remede, immediately after the first dit in C, is indicative of Machaut’s interest in meaningful forms of displacement, or what I view as poetics of destour and ordenance. I thus propose a kind of ‘archaeological’ reading of Machaldian poetics that explores the joint staging of the literary and iconographic instances of destour and ordenance and their relation to manuscript placement as seen at the beginning of C, as well as in later complete-works manuscripts, in particular Vg and A.
The very first folio of C exemplifies the poetics of destour in both text and image. Looking first at the text, we can see how the manuscript’s opening lines act as a key to enter into Machaut’s creative world:
• • • •
Glissant . See, for example, Earp , x–xi and –. See also Leach . For earlier scholarship, see Avril , as well as Kibler and Wimsatt , –. Earp , . I use the word archaeology in the Foucauldian sense, which encompasses the discovering and uncovering of the traces of the formation of a discourse. Machaut’s MS C is the first extant complete-works manuscript in which we can explore this process of discovering and uncovering a certain discourse or poetic stance.
Anne-Hélène Miller
Au temps pascour que toute rien s’esgaie, Que la terre de mainte coulour gaie Se cointoie, dont pointure sanz plaie Soubz la mamelle Fait Bonne Amour a mainte dame belle, A maint amant, et a mainte pucelle, Dont il ont puiz mainte lie nouvelle Et maint esmay; En ce doux temps, contre le mois de may, Par .i. matin cointement m’ascesmay, Com cilz qui tres parfaitement amay D’amour sceüre. (lines –) At Easter time when everything rejoices, when the earth adorns itself with many happy colors, and Good Love enters without a wound beneath the breast of many a fair lady, many a lover, and many a maiden, which afterwards causes them many new joys and many cares; in this sweet season, in the month of May, one morning I arrayed myself like one who loved most perfectly with constant love.
These first lines of ‘Au temps pascour’ (what will eventually become known as the Jugement dou roy de Behaingne) are respectful of the topos of the poetry of fin’amor, which associates the emergence of the sentiment of love by the poet with the rebirth of Nature. In this spring-like setting in nature, the lyrical poet chose to follow the sound of a bird: Si en choisi en l’air .i. voletant Qui dessus tous s’en aloit glatissant: ‘Ocy! ocy!’ Et je le sievi tant Qu’en .i. destour, Sur .i. ruissel, prez d’une belle tour, Ou il avoit maint arbre et mainte flour Souëf flairant, de diverse coulour, S’ala seoir. (lines –) I caught sight of one in flight which outsang all the others, crying: ‘Oci, oci!’. I followed it until it came to rest in a secluded place above a stream, near a beautiful tower, where there were many trees and sweet-smelling flowers of various hues.
Led by the inviting song of the bird, the poet-narrator finds himself in a destour, a space apart in nature that presents all the elements of an ideal poetic landscape or locus amoenus: the stream, the trees, the flowers. The poet finds enjoyment in this locus: ‘[…] je me delitoie | En son tres dous chanter que j’escoutoie’ (I was delighting in listening to its sweet song; lines –). This opening scene may be quite conventional for anyone familiar with the poetic tradition of fin’amor, but what happens next is less so. In this destour, the poet becomes the fortuitous hidden witness to a debate between a lady and a knight whom he deduces are lovers:
• • •
Wimsatt and Kibler , –. Wimsatt and Kibler , –. Wimsatt and Kibler , –.
The Poetics of destour and ordenance in Machaut’s Lyrico-Narrative dits
Si m’apensay qu’amis ert et amie. Lors me boutay par dedens la fueillie, Si embuschiez qu’il ne me virent mie. (lines –) It seemed to me they might be lover and beloved. I ducked beneath the leafy branches, so hidden that they could see nothing of me.
The poet thus observes and listens to the couple’s dialogue from his hidden destour. One may wonder at this point if the focal point of the dit has now moved on to the love debate or if it remains about the poet’s first-person narrative and his standpoint; or, one might interpret this moment in the poem as a combination of both perspectives. To illustrate this intricate scene, a frontispiece occupies the top half of fol. r; see Figure .. The illumination features a green natural landscape on the edge of a distant forest. The trees in the middle- and foreground are spaced out in a less dense configuration than the forest in the background. In the foreground center is a cluster of bushes that separates the poet, on the left, from the lovers, on the right. The poet can therefore be seen as either central to the focus of the scene or, if our attention is drawn to the lovers, on its margin. The presence of the bushes emphasizes a contrast of places, but also of viewpoints, which is at the core of Machaut’s engagement with dialogues and debates. The gestures of the couple indeed indicate that they are in dialogue, while the poet has his arms crossed and his gaze raised upwards. He does not yet seem to be looking at them, but he could be listening, and certainly engaging his mind with the conversation. Inspired by nature, the poet seems to be in a state of ‘revêrie’ in the sense of Gaston Bachelard’s definition: when the mind experiences a form of relaxation, and the soul watches, without tension, rested, but active at the same time. The image can be read in various ways: either from left to right, that is from the position of the poet towards the debate; from the dialogue of the two lovers as a central element, then to the left, where the poet is hiding; or we could see an exchange that engages the three protagonists all together. Not only does the illumination encourage active engagement on the part of the reader, but it also captures the various possible interpretive vectors of Machaut’s dialogic poem. This first text and the image together express the poetics of destour that differ from the traditional expectations of the poetics of fin’amor and are emblematic of a certain Machaldian poetic strategy. The effect produced by the juxtaposition of the text and the frontispiece image of the poet-narrator in a natural destour contributes to a sense of ordenance. Placed on the first folio, this lyrical and iconographic scene guides us to a possible reading of the dit as a whole, and it can even be interpreted as a nod to our understanding of the entire manuscript as a montage of voices and places. The ordenance can therefore refer not only to the arrangement and placement of the images and music in the manuscript, but also to the order of Machaut’s works, and would correspond in this way to a unique sense of a narrative ordering that is not
• •
Wimsatt and Kibler , –. Bachelard , . See also Miller . This state could also be seen as similar to the ‘classic mnemonic state’ that enables memory and would therefore permit the narrator to remember and recount the encounter that is later inscribed in the manuscript (Enders , ).
Anne-Hélène Miller
Figure 11.1: .: MS C, fol. 1r (BnF)
223
The Poetics of destour and ordenance in Machaut’s Lyrico-Narrative dits
fixed, but rather interactive. Ordenance can also imply an order arranged by desire, subjective command, or choice. In MS A, the poet uses the word in a way close to that meaning: he presents himself, in the third person, as having supervised the layout and organization of the work, according to his own wishes. In the famous note at the outset of A, it is written ‘Vesci l’ordenance que .G. de Machau wet qu’il ait en son livre’ (Here is the ordenance that G. de Machaut wants to have in his book). As Alexandre Leupin suggests, it is as if Machaut had granted the process of writing fiction some autonomy and agency. Independently of any external constraints, presumably patronage or particular circumstances, Machaut’s work could stand alone and speak for itself. For Leupin, one word, ordenance, encapsulates this virtuosity and confidence in ‘the law of saying, the order of fiction’. In a destour, the poet plays with forms of engagement and disengagement with his work. The poet is at the same time part of and apart from the dialogue; he is central and decentered. Whatever Machaut’s participation in the execution and arrangement of the illuminations in relation to the poems may have been – in the case of C, possibly none – the illuminator of C nonetheless captures this meaningful poetic displacement. Often, the poet presents himself at the beginning of his lyrico-narrative dits in a position that has similar features of intended disorientation and disconsolation, and he is often in a melancholic state. For instance, at the beginning of the Voir dit, before he is interrupted by external elements, he finds himself in nature, surrounded by greenery and trees (in a destour). The poet writes: ‘La navoit chose qui lencombre’ (There was nothing there in his way; line ) and ‘Mais einsi comme la pensoie | Tous seuls et merencolioie’ (But just as I was meditating there | All alone and lost in sadness; lines –). Another example can be found at the beginning of the Fonteinne amoureuse. The poem begins with a representation of the poet alone at home, in his bed where he cannot sleep because ‘[…] aucune merencolie | avec ma pensee se lie’ ([…] some sad mood | Dominates my thoughts; lines –). Again, he is interrupted in his thoughts, startled not by a visual apparition, but by an outside voice, that of the prince. The poet likens himself to a cowardly cleric, and asserts: Car je vueil tesmongnier et dire Que chevaliers acouardis Et clers qui vuet estre hardis
•
• • •
MS A, fol. r. For Sylvia Huot, there is no doubt: ‘Machaut was deeply concerned with the orderly arrangement and visual effect of his books; the iconographic programs of MSS and reflect his manipulation of poetic voice and of the role of lover, writer, and performer’ (a, ). Deborah McGrady uses reception theory to reevaluate the role of specific audiences in the definition of a text, including analysis of cultural expectations that help to both shape the creation of a work and guide the responses to that work. McGrady writes: ‘Only through this multilayered approach in which the reader occupies a primary role can the literary scholar perform an ethical reading of literature, a reading that captures both the uniqueness of a work and an understanding of the role it fills in the greater scheme of literary and social history’ (, ). ‘Tout se passe comme si Guillaume de Machaut accordait à l’écriture de fiction le pouvoir de tout dire et de dire le tout. Cette virtuosité et cette confiance se cristallisent en un mot: ordenance, la loi du dire, l’ordre de la fiction’. Leupin , . Leech-Wilkinson and Palmer , – and –. Palmer a, –.
Anne-Hélène Miller
Ne valent plein mon pong de paille En fait d’armes ou en bataille, Car chascuns fait contre droiture. (lines –) For I intend to testify and state | That a cowardly knight | And a clerk who would be brave | Aren’t worth my hand full of straw | In a passage of arms or battle | For each is acting against what is right.
Machaut here confirms that traditionally courage belongs to the knight, but not the cleric. He is scared by the prince’s outburst: he has never found himself in such an unsafe situation. He thus transitions from a sentiment of melancholy when he was alone to a state of fear provoked by the sudden presence of the prince, and seeks an escape from such discomfort: Et comment que je soie clers Rudes, nices et malapers, S’ay je esté par mes .ii. fois En tele place aucune fois Avec le bon Roy de Behaingne Dont Dieus ait l’ame en sa compaigne, Que maugré mien hardis estoie, Car il n’i avoit lieu ne voie Ne destour ou fuïr sceüsse. (lines –) And though I might be a clerk | Who is ignorant, incapable, and inept | Yet I’ve been, by my two faiths | In such a place several times | With the good King of Bohemia, | And may God keep his soul among His company, | And despite myself I was brave | Since there was no place, no path | No secluded space where I knew I could escape.
The poet takes the king of Bohemia as the epitome of chivalric bravery, which establishes a contrast with his own lack of courage and sophistication and incapacity to find an escape or refuge – a destour would be suitable for his condition. The poetics of destour implies a certain comfort because it offers a retreat, but it also implies forms of self-devaluation, suffering, and even longing that can come from sentiments of melancholy. Such contrasting feelings are integral to the rich experience of the love poet of fin’amor. Indeed, troubadours and trouvères, whose desire for a lady of a higher status is unrequited, present themselves in a devalued position. For Machaut, melancholy is the proper state of mind for poetic composition. This sentiment of melancholy that is associated with the locus of destour is best expressed in Machaut’s lyrical compositions, especially the lais. For instance, in J’aim la flour (L): Dont mes dolereuses dolours, Pleinnes de plours, En sont tous jours Assez grignours En mains destours. (lines –) My painful pains, (they) are full of tears, always, rather long in many secluded spaces. • • •
Palmer a, –. Palmer a, –; translation of line emended. L appears in Chichmaref , : –; translation mine.
The Poetics of destour and ordenance in Machaut’s Lyrico-Narrative dits
Destour can also be associated with a more profound sentiment of aching in Aus amans (L): Quant a li pense en destour Dont se mal m’atour Que ma grief dolour (lines –) When the mind (is) in the secluded space whose unhappiness surrounds me, such is my sad pain
Similarly, in Malgré Fortune (L/, also known as one of the two ‘Lays de plour’ composed by Machaut), the poet declares: De mes larmes en destour L’arrouseray, N’autre confort ne querray De ma dolour. (lines –) With my tears in the secluded space I will shower her, I wish no other comfort for my pain.
And such emotions of love despair are echoed in the Remede: Dame, ou sont tui mi retour, Souvent m’estuet en destour Plaindre et gemir, (lines –) My lady, my every resource, often I was in a secluded place to lament and mourn.
Later in the Remede, the sentiments of sadness he experiences lead him to write the complainte about Fortune. In this case, the poet explicitly describes the destour as a locus of poetic inspiration: Si m’en alay en .i. destour, Et la fis je de ma tristour Et de Fortune une complainte, Par qui ma joie estoit estainte. (lines –) I went to a secluded space and there I composed a complainte about my sad state and about Fortune, who had extinguished my joy.
The poet can find respite in his destour, but it can also serve as a reminder of the devalued condition and the melancholic mood the poet needs in order to perform his craft. The cavernous depth of the ‘ou’ sound resonates with the ‘l’, ‘r’, and ‘t’ alliterations, which mix rolling and whistling sounds to capture the contrasting states of mind. The opposition of respite and melancholy is expressed by the repetitive rhyming of ‘destour’ with ‘plour’, ‘tristour’, ‘doulour’. By setting the poet in a secluded space or in a displaced position, the destour can thus be a source of melancholy, but also represents a form of alienation. Returning to Glissant’s framework, although he does not discuss medieval poetry, his concept of a poetics of detour as applied to contemporary literature finds common ground with Machaut’s use of destour, especially regarding the alienation that comes from the poet’s • • • • •
L appears in Chichmaref , : –; translation mine. The other, more well-known, ‘Lay de plour’ is Qui bien aimme (L/). L/ appears in Chichmaref , : – (as no. ); translation mine. Wimsatt and Kibler , –; translation emended. Wimsatt and Kibler , –; translation emended.
Anne-Hélène Miller
displaced position. For Glissant, the detour is an ‘extraordinary experience’: ‘you must look for it (alienation) elsewhere to become aware of it. The individual then enters the distressing universe, not of the unhappy consciousness but, truly, of the tortured consciousness’. There is a certain level of anguish in Machaut. He can present himself as unable to escape his service to his patrons, like in the Fonteinne amoureuse. The narrative at the beginning of C is significant in this regard. The poet tries to get closer to the natural flight of the bird whose trajectory he follows ‘au temps pascour’ (at the time of Easter). He finds pleasure in following the bird in the destour, but he is quickly overtaken by the circumstances of his position as a courtly poet, signified by the eruption of the love debate between the noble lady and the knight. This interruption of solitary peace reminds him that his work as a poet is also a service to the noble caste. The destour is thus associated with both feelings of pleasure and sadness for the poet, and in a sense his own identity as a composer of love poetry who depends on patronage. The poet nonetheless expresses a desire for independence and can possess forms of agency in the face of uncertainties of politics or health. While in a melancholic state, the poet can, for instance, take on the role of a solitary observer or reclusive witness, even commenting upon real-world events from his place of isolation. In the opening of the Jugement Navarre, following the evocation of the summertime and autumn, he describes the deadly plague and political disorder which took place in . The poet deplores at that moment that ‘riens n’a ordenance’ (there is no order to anything; line ) in the world. Such invocation of a worldly lack of ordenance, meaning chaos and confusion, contrasts with Machaut’s poetic ordenance as a precise construct of order including significant displacements, such as the destour. Whereas the disorder outside of his poetic world is meaningless and disempowering for the poet, he creates poetic displacements that are meaningful and give him some agency. At that moment, significantly, the poet-narrator seeks a secluded space, and shuts himself up in his home. He writes: ‘Si que la merencolioie | Tous seuls en ma chambre et pensoie’ (So there I suffered sadness | All alone in my room and thought; lines –). The only power left to the poet is to displace himself and withdraw from the world. He will not come out until the following spring, the appropriate time to compose and possibly regain his sense of purpose and agency as a love poet. Such poetics of destour and ordenance are thus not solely expressed in C (the Jugement Navarre is not in C), but are also meaningful when approaching other complete-works manuscripts, especially A, often considered as the manuscript of reference for modern editions. Furthermore, Earp’s study of Vg has led him to consider a crucial form of ordering or ordenance regarding the manuscripts that contain all of Machaut’s works. Earp writes:
•
• •
‘Extraordinaire vécu du Détour il faut aller la (l’aliénation) chercher ailleurs pour en prendre conscience. L’individu entre alors dans l’univers taraudant, non de la conscience malheureuse mais, bel et bien, de la conscience torturée’ (Glissant , ; translation mine). See also Britton . Palmer , –. Palmer , –.
The Poetics of destour and ordenance in Machaut’s Lyrico-Narrative dits
if we attempt to fathom the production and reception of cultural objects from the point of view of this particular fourteenth-century poet in the context of fourteenth-century patronage, it is possible to come to some understanding, understanding, at least least a hypothetical understanding, understanding, of calculations that accrued to Machaut’s advantage regarding the otherwise perplexing change of large-scale ordering of the contents of the manuscripts: an early state state represented by C, a middle state state by Vg, and a late state state represented by A and F-G.30
Earp’s elucidation of an evolving ordenance from early, to middle, and finally to late states implies an ongoing engagement by the poet with the overall presentation of his works. While C provided ample evidence for reading Machaut’s poetics of destour in image, text, and ordenance, we must examine whether or not later manuscript layouts work in a similarly complementary fashion between elements and, if they do not, how does that impact our interpretation? If Vg represents a middle state of Machaut’s approach to ordenance, we notice a further displacement by the inclusion of the Loange and the Vergier before the Behaingne. If the evolving ordenance still supports a reading of structural displacement in the manuscript, and the text of the Behaingne still begins with the literary introduction of a trope of destour, the artistic elements of Vg, with which Machaut likely had no involvement, no longer play such a strong supporting role. The dialogic nature of the text seems circumvented in this initial iconographic interpretation which might be expected given the poet’s lack of involvement in its production. The artist, however, depicts the poet taking center stage (Figure .). 11.2).
Figure 11.2: .: MS Vg, fol. 47 v, detail (Private Collection of James E. and Elizabeth J. Ferrell)
• 30 •
Earp 2014, , 34. .
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In both Vg and A, the change in the ordering of the dits is very significant. By the time of A’s production, ‘Au temps pascour’ had become formally titled as the Jugement Behaingne, but like in Vg, it is further displaced from its opening position in C. In A, it appears after the Vergier, which is immediately preceded by the famous Prologue. These works are themselves preceded by a table of contents, which explains that the ordenance of the manuscript is, as we have seen, in conformity with the desire of the poet himself. Ordenance makes sense here as a poetic, even dialogic, conjointure, and the correlation between ordenance and the concept of destour as a unique natural space for the poet takes on its full meaning. Ordenance and destour together become the stance from which internal differences of writing are both disguised and revealed by forms of displacement. In MS A, the poet has fully realized his identity made of contrasting feelings, and control over his own production. Such an understanding of Machaut’s strong poetic stance in A is possible when one considers the perspective of a progression, as discussed by Earp, from C to Vg and A. Such perspective gives a newer and richer meaning to the famous Prologue that precedes all of Machaut’s works in A. The poet, who is not introduced as the fortuitous witness of a courtly dialogue as at the beginning of C, but in relation to nature, is, in a way, in dialogic opposition with himself. The Prologue begins indeed with a dialogue between his poetic persona and the allegory of Nature: Je, Nature, par qui tout est fourmé Quanqu’a ça jus et seur terre et en mer, Vien ci a toy, Guillaume, qui fourmé T’ay a part, pour faire par toy fourmer Nouviaus dis amoureus plaisans. (lines –) I, Nature, by whom everything is created, everything up and above and on the earth and in the sea, come here to you Guillaume, whom I have created separately, in order to have made by you, new and pleasant poetry on the subject of love.
The poet is introduced as ‘fourmé […] à part’ (created separately or differently) by Nature. The position of the poet in a natural setting takes on a whole new dimension, perfectly illustrated by the famous miniature in A, in which Nature is now personified and introduces her three children, Sens, Rhetoric, and Music to the poet (see Figure .). This illumination reflects the direct dialogue between the poet and Nature. Although Nature appears to take center stage, she seems to bow to the poet who stands at the threshold of a building or confined space, with the top of a tree right above his head. The poet does not seem melancholic or cowardly, but rather occupies a strong position in this dialogue. If the manner of situating the poet at the beginning of the manuscript is any indication of how the poet may wish to be perceived throughout, we should also consider the image that ac • • • •
Douglas Kelly () provides a detailed discussion of the problematic term conjointure; the term is used here to describe the arranging and joining of elements. Hoepffner –, : . Swift , . On this image and Sens, see Elizabeth Eva Leach’s chapter in this volume.
The Poetics of destour and ordenance in Machaut’s Lyrico-Narrative dits
Figure 11.3: .: MS A, fol. Er, detail (BnF)
companies the opening passage of the Jugement Behaingne that appears thereafter on fol. 9 fol. v (see Figure 11.4). .). Interestingly, in that illustration, the poet is found completely enveloped by the bush. The destour and the poet curiously seem to have become one, as if the poet had removed any spatial divide or contrasts. It seems that the poet has accepted his own natural camouflage. This reading might gain even more credence if we are to believe that Machaut supervised the ordenance of MS A. In this illumination, the poet may be in a lower position than the courtly ladies and the nobleman since he seems to be on his knees in the bush. Yet the debating characters and the dog have their heads turned towards the poet, which suggests that the position of the poet has unambiguously become the focal point of this illumination for the humans, and for the flora and fauna too. Machaut has taken full control of the representation of his work and station as a courtly poet in a natural setting. Returning again to the philosophy of Glissant, the concept of detour is developed in writing as political and social critique. The detour is a necessary reaction to power relations. Glissant sees it as an essential recourse for those whose domination is concealed. ‘We must look elsewhere for the principle of domination’, he writes.35 As a mode of existence, even, one might say, of subsistence, the detour embraces an attitude of escape, of camouflage, but also of cunning. The detour can be a defensive strategy that decenters the main narrative fiction • 35 •
‘Il faut aller chercher ailleurs le principe de domination’ (Glissant ; 1981; translation mine).
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Figure 11.4: .: MS A, fol. 9v, detail (BnF)
and highlights the meeting points, the passages between different standpoints and subjectivities. According to Glissant, the practice of detour provides a distancing capable of reflecting on the separations, but can also be employed to explore the borders between narration, poetry, music, writing, and illumination. In the case of Machaut, the destour can provoke such reflection on the borders (the boundaries), like the bush at the beginning of C between the protagonists of the debate, but also the relation between the narration and the lyrics, the text and the illumination. The strong relationship of the author to the image is charged The different presentawith meaning, even when his posture may portray his inferiority.36 tions and representations of Machaut’s persona and of nature/Nature shed light on his idea of a poet’s vocation, that can only be expressed in – and through – poetic expressions and iconographic representations. The rich relation between these two artforms enlightens the mode of reception of Machaut’s works, including by their illuminators. Given Machaut’s highly regarded status in fourteenth-century France, there is little doubt that his work would have inspired poets who picked up on Machaut’s unique and idiosyncratic poetic stance in the destour. In a ballade of Oton de Granson, Car j’ay perdu ma jeunesse, ma joye, for example, the destour is a moment of solitary pleasure:
• 36 •
On this subject, see Kay 2007, , 3–4 – and 97–99. –.
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The Poetics of destour and ordenance in Machaut’s Lyrico-Narrative dits
Fouir m’en fault a chace d’esperon, Loing de tous biens, ou Deser de Tristour, Et y feray lever une maison Pour moy mucier, en ung petit destour. (lines –) Flee I must, as fast I can spur, Far from all good into the Desert of Sadness, And I will have a house constructed there In which to hide, in an isolated corner.
Granson’s take on destour resembles that of Machaut’s in ‘Au temps pascour’ at the beginning of C, but also embraces the poet’s attitude to hide in his own newly constructed home. In one of Eustache Deschamps’s love ballades, the poet addresses the lady with these words: ‘quand je me voy loing de vous en destour’ (when I envision myself far from you in a secluded space). For Deschamps, the word has become an adverbial phrase of place, literally a poetic locus associated with the position of the poet. Similarly, in the Livre des quatre dames by Alain Chartier, the poet happens to find himself in such a locus: La me vient un acez seurprendre De Desir qui me fist esprendre ; Et en alant sans garde prendre Ne sans penser a mon retour, Me trouvay loing en un destour. (lines –) There came to me a surprising surge of desire that made me fall in love; then, without being wary nor thinking about returning, I went and found myself afar in a secluded space.
After Machaut, poets seem to find themselves by chance in a condition apart or ‘loing’ (far or further), using Machaut’s idea of the destour, as well as reinventing aspects of the poetry of fin’amor. Chartier for instance, combines the two poetic aspects of Machaut’s works: the poet’s social condition as set apart and that must be differentiated from that of the clericwriter, and the idea that his artform is like the poetry of fin’amor, a poetry of desire, in which the lovemaking is made of obstacles, and truth and meaning are thus constantly postponed. Moreover, providing names and titles indirectly or with a certain delay is a frequent occurrence in Machaut’s works, which can be interpreted as the result of a desire for a particular ordenance. For the Jugement Behaingne, for instance, ‘ci commence le temps pascour’ announces the dit in Vg on fol. v, but its title comes at the end, on fol. r: ‘Explicit le jugement du bon roy de Boëme’ (There ends the Jugement dou roy de Behaingne). In A, this dit is announced at the end of the Vergier on fol. r: ‘Ci apres commence le jugement dou Roy de Behaingne’ (Hereafter begins the Jugement dou roy de Behaingne). Dit titles also appear elsewhere. In the Fonteinne amoureuse, for example, the title is announced exactly halfway through the work:
• • •
Nicholson and Grenier-Winther , –. From the ballade amoureuse DXXVIII, line ; Dauphant , ; translation mine. Laidlaw , –; translation mine.
Anne-Hélène Miller
Et pour ce elle est ditte et nommee Partout ‘La Fonteinne Amoureuse’ (lines –) And thus it is named and called | Everywhere ‘The Fountain of Love’.
Other forms of important postponing or delay can be found in Machaut’s dialogic works. In the Voir dit, for instance, following a long debate without conclusion between the poet and his secretary regarding whether he should go and see his lady, a noble friend suddenly intervenes. This friend interrupts the dialogue and takes the poet aside to discuss with him a representation of Cupid dressed in an outfit ‘plus vert que fueille de boscage’, (greener than a leaf on a bush; line ). Such diversion in nature and a secluded space is an astute strategy to set their debate into perspective. The friend explains to the poet that the constraints of love are inscribed in the garment ‘de pres et de loing’ (from near and far; line ), and that such constraints in love lead to those of existence ‘a mort et a vie’ (in death and in life; line ) because: Einsi l’amour qui est couverte Doit estre au besoing descouverte. […] Et la lettre qui est entour Dist qu’en presence et en destour, Soit loing soit pres amis sera Qui parfaitement amera. (lines – and –) Similarly, a secret affection | Should be disclosed in times of need. […] And the letters that surround it | Say how in his presence and in a secluded space, | Be it near or far, he’ll be a friend | Who’ll love to perfection.
By suggesting that the covered be uncovered, he invites the reader to actively participate in the discovering of meaning and truth. It recalls the integument (involucrum) which, according to theological tradition, defends that meaning is veiled, or hidden. This attitude towards interpretation is related to the way Machaut uses the idea of a camouflage or a hidden space, like in the destour that suggests various interpretations. Overall, by incorporating elements of realia, Machaut’s lyrico-narrative dits play with truth and fiction. His dits engage directly with the external world: with the plague, the war, or socio-political contexts. The expression in the first person is set into perspective in various contexts. The lyrical ‘I’ is forced into dialogue with external elements, including with courtly patrons, a secretary, a friend, or Nature. For Michel Zink, the lyrical ‘I’ is ‘based on a principle of external organization: enumeration or distribution (telling or counting, conversing and dividing are the same words)’. Zink adds that ‘as opposed to the growing • • •
Palmer a, –. Leech-Wilkinson and Palmer , –; translation of lines and emended. Dennis John Costa (, ) explains this concept concisely: ‘The Christian allegorization of classical texts and the typological reading of the Bible were types of poetic-theology, the methodology of which Bernardus Sylvestris called “integumentum” or “involucrum,” enveloping the literal in the symbolic in order to convey a fuller experience of the truth to those disposed to receive it’.
The Poetics of destour and ordenance in Machaut’s Lyrico-Narrative dits
idealization of the self which characterizes the great courtly song (of the fin’amor), it builds a particular image of the ‘I’ based on the circumstantial and the contingent’. The destour can thus be a strategy of poetic resistance to the external worldly elements, including the other figures and protagonists such as the lovers at the beginning of C who disturb the poet in his personal secluded space. In his dialogic works, Machaut invented a space of his own, which at times sets him aside from the debate, at others, places him at the core of it. The iconography at the beginning of C of the natural destour (Figure .), indicated by the bush which acts as a border between the poet and the lovers, is emblematic in that regard. This scene represents a certain philosophical approach to the truth that can be hidden or deferred. The frontispiece of C illustrates a polysemous poetics of destour which reflects a complex way of understanding the world and the human condition of the lyric poet. Machaut’s philosophy of destour underscores the contrasts and the dialogic nature of his works that engage the audience and inspire artists. In a state of rêverie himself, he lets the work speak for itself to his audience, as Leupin has suggested. Poetic harmony comes naturally from ordenance, the ordering of parts, and the search for a truth. The iconography of destour in the frontispiece of C signifies a highlighting of contrasts, just as significant, if not more so, than the debate that animates the lovers. The destour is not a divide, but rather encourages, if indirectly, dialogue. The primordial staging of the poet in the destour in C makes it possible to reflect on another way of thinking about lyricism, in the manner of a singular territorialization based on arrangement, difference, and the quest for unity. If C represents an early version of Machaut’s impetus to compile his works, a process that was developed further in Vg and culminated in the deliberate ordenance of A, then within the understanding of that process we can begin to find an ‘exegetic’ schema with which to contemplate some important traits of Machaut’s poetics, and its relevance in later medieval contexts.
•
•
‘[…] se fonde sur un principe d’organisation externe: énumération ou distribution (conter ou compter, deviser et diviser sont les mêmes mots)’; ‘par opposition à l’idéalisation croissante du moi qui caractérise le grand chant courtois, il construit une image particulière du “je” fondé sur le circonstanciel et le contingent’ (Zink , ; translation mine). I thank Karen Buntin and Emma C. Miller for their assistance, and Thomas Herron for his help with the translation of this essay.
. S S R M M’ V * Deborah McGrady
Although there is good reason to believe that Guillaume de Machaut was celebrated during his lifetime as an accomplished composer and poet, he appears to have been especially preoccupied with securing his reputation in the final third of his life. It may have been that his slow transition from secular activity to the clerical life at the Reims Cathedral provided him the leisure to attend to his legacy. It is equally likely that the forced recalibration of his social standing upon entering the clerical community triggered anxiety about his status with his primarily secular audience. That he had time to attend to his art is manifested in the quantity, complexity, and ambition of his creations from this period. The majority of his lengthy verse writings, including the Fonteinne amoureuse, the Voir dit, and the Prise d’Alexandre, also date to his affiliation with Reims, as do the overarching Prologue that sets out to organize his disparate compositions into a unified corpus and at least one complete-works manuscript, the famed MS A, likely produced under his supervision. His investment in music during this period is especially significant; in addition to integrating music into his verse narratives as well as his complete-works collection, he composed his Messe de Nostre Dame. This robust production has long been mined to celebrate Machaut’s unique self-fashioning and self-promotion as a vernacular author. Less common is consideration of how the transition from secular life to the clerical world impacted Machaut’s fiction and contributed to his authorial construction. Instead, scholarship has tended to focus on how Machaut’s clerkly learning influenced his treatment of amorous affairs. A few studies, however, stand out for their attention to instances where Machaut appears to confront secular views on clerical life; in these cases, music figures prominently. Bruce Holsinger has argued that in the Dit de la harpe, Machaut addressed accusations of homoerotism linked to cathedral schools, through a dramatic rewriting of *
•
• • •
Since the first paper on Machaut that I delivered in the context of the sponsored sessions of the International Machaut Society at Kalamazoo, I have benefitted from Larry’s input as a thoughtful and generous listener of my work. More than once, the Society’s luncheons provided a venue for me to talk directly with him about ‘all things Machaut’. In my mind, everything I’ve ever written on Machaut is directly linked to Larry, both because of my constant dependence on the ‘Bible’ of Machaut Studies (his Guide to Research) and because of his willingness to hear out my arguments and to ask questions that have always led me to rethink and refine my ideas. This essay is no different. Machaut began acquiring benefices as early as the s. A concise overview of Machaut’s ecclesiastic professional advancements is provided by Earp a, – and for narrative account of the same information see Leach b, –. Scholars generally agree that Machaut frequented the Reims Cathedral in the s, although he did not take up full-time residency until the late s (Bowers ). In the intervening years, he continued to produce works for noble recipients; see Andrew Wathey’s chapter in this collection. For a description of the musical situation at Reims during his lifetime, see Robertson , –. On Machaut’s involvement in the making of MS A, see esp. Earp a; Earp locates Machaut at least part-time in Reims beginning c. – (a, ). See especially Brownlee and Calin . See Brownlee, , –; Cerquiglini-Toulet, , –; Huot ; Huot .
Silencing the Sirens and Rethinking Masculinity in Machaut’s Voir dit
Orpheus in which ‘an extended instrumental allegory virtually bursting with homoerotic anxieties’ is transformed ‘into a straightforward celebration of heterosexual desire’. For Elizabeth Eva Leach, song is transformed into a vigorous masculine space of homosocial rivalry in the staged lyric competition between Guillaume and his friend Thomas de Paien in the Voir dit that culminates with Guillaume using his music-making skills to ‘efface and sonically obscure’ his rival’s voice when setting their paired poem to music. Where Holsinger and Leach have explored two late works in which Machaut identifies music as a space where conventional hetero-masculinity is championed, Sarah Kay has recently observed that in the slightly earlier Remede de Fortune, Machaut had already reimagined contemporary stereotypes concerning the destructive singing powers of sirens over men to designate himself, the clerkly voice on love, as not the victim of sirens but as a privileged apprentice who is instructed in their sonic powers of enchantment. In each of these studies, the bravado of a poet and composer counters the abiding view that affiliation with music threatens one’s masculinity. That all three of these works date to the s or later, hence at the moment Machaut was transitioning to a clerical lifestyle, is not to be downplayed. Moreover, given that the complex compositions Machaut favored had become in his lifetime the near-exclusive domain of learned men trained in the cathedral schools, and given that this community had long been deemed emasculating and effeminate, there is good reason to rethink Machaut’s later compositions not as self-congratulatory writings that confirmed consensus but as works eager to defend his new social identity as a cleric. This essay returns to the Voir dit as an especially rich example in which Machaut deals directly and extensively with these questions. This hybrid work consists of a verse-line narrative into which are inserted sixty-three poems, ten songs, and forty-six prose letters that record a lengthy exchange between the lover Guillaume and his lady, Toute Belle. This romance presents itself as focused on the couple, but as has been well established, it is also a metatextual composition that draws attention to its production and reception as well as the construction of the author-figure. As this study will show, an important component of constructing the author-figure in the Voir dit concerns dispelling the ‘narrative of emasculation’ surrounding song in medieval culture. In this regard, the embedded episode studied by Leach in which song allows Guillaume to assert his masculine dominance over his competitor is symptomatic of the text at large in which the clerical poet-composer strives to secure his own legacy by reclaiming authority over and through song. This essay tracks three stages in the rewriting of the dominant medieval narrative concerning song. The Voir dit first • • • • • • • •
Holsinger , . Leach , . Kay , . Earp acknowledges the challenges of dating these three works. He tentatively dates the Remede to ‘before ’, the Harpe is dated as ‘s?’ and the Voir dit, ‘–’ (Earp a, ). Page . On the negative depiction of music, see Holsinger , –. The songs are notated in several of the extant manuscripts; for details, see McGrady , –. McGrady ; Brownlee , –. I borrow this terminology from Irvine , .
Deborah McGrady
investigates the gendered representation of song through Toute Belle who is presented as a siren-like figure whose influence on Guillaume is both restorative and destructive. The work then shifts to the reception of the couple’s relationship by an exclusively male audience made up of Guillaume’s servants and lords who adopt conventional arguments to conclude that Guillaume has been emasculated through the affair. Rather than end the story here with an expected misogynistic reading of heterosexual romance, Machaut turns the myth of sirens on the secular male community to question their perverse treatment of women as both objects of desire and repulsion, and to reposition the cleric not as a marginalized member of society but as a new model of masculinity. In this manner, Machaut’s doppelgänger secures his own legacy as not simply a poet and composer but as a vital member of society worthy of imitation. Toute Belle as siren: muse or menace? The Voir dit begins with a sirenic call. When Guillaume first hears of Toute Belle from a friend, she is credited with singing talents and an enchanting beauty that recall the sirens. This friend bears promising news for the self-declared aged poet who laments his loneliness and, worse yet, his inability to compose ‘aucune chose de nouvel’ (something new; line ) because he has neither ‘sans, matiere ne sentement’ (idea, material, or feelings; line ) to inspire him. The friend reports that Guillaume has an admirer: a young noble woman who is Gente, juene, jolie et jointe, Longue, droite, faitice et cointe, Sage de cuer et de maniere, Treshumblë et de simple chiere, Belle, bonne (lines –) noble, young, pretty, likeable, | tall and thin, shapely and elegant, | wise in her heart, and in manner | very humble and of uncomplicated welcome | beautiful, good.
But her most distinctive qualities are her sirenic talents: she is la mieulz chantans Qui fust nee depuis .C. ans, Mais elle danse oltre mesure (lines –) the best singer | born in the last years, | not to mention that she dances exceptionally.
Guillaume enthusiastically accepts her admirative declaration and after so many months of non-creativity, feverishly begins composing poems and music to satisfy his lady’s desire to sing only his works. She stands in as the poet’s much-needed muse who inspires, even if others liken her to the sirens who were best known for their destructive behavior:
•
All citations in the original French are from Imbs and Cerquiglini-Toulet . Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
Silencing the Sirens and Rethinking Masculinity in Machaut’s Voir dit
Car vraiement tuit la comperent A la fleur de lys en blancheur, A la rose en fine douceur, En honneur a la tresmontaine Et en chanter a la seraine (lines –) For truly, everyone compares her | to the white lily, | the sweetest rose, | in honor of the highest one | and in song, to the siren.
Guillaume’s rehearsing of public opinion about Toute Belle blends innocent praise with hints of the well-worn narrative inherited from classical and biblical traditions regarding sirens who were described as half-woman/half-bird or half-sea creatures and were commonly feared for their capacity to destroy men through song. Yet, far from destroying Guillaume, Toute Belle rejuvenates him and inspires him to sing anew: Car si tresdoucement chantoit Que ses doulz chanter[s] m’enchantoit. Et quant son doulz chanter m’enchante, Je n’en puis mais se pour li chante (lines –) For she sang so sweetly | that her sweet songs enchanted me | and when her sweet song enchants me, | I can do nothing else but sing for her.
Similar to Kay’s findings regarding the positive attribution of siren-like qualities to Esperance in the Remede de Fortune, Toute Belle is first credited with ‘re-educating’ the ailing poet who rediscovers his voice. Yet, her productive influence is intertwined with allusions to the danger represented by her song that is said to envelop and overtake the poet. Clear intertextual allusions to the famed tale of Ulysses’s struggle against the sirens comically positions Guillaume as the opposite of Ulysses who tied himself to the mast of his ship to resist the sirens’ pull. Guillaume, in contrast, eagerly entwines himself in Toute Belle’s song, much like Ulysses’s men who in the Ovide moralisé are said to have plunged to their death in an effort to sing with the sirens: ‘Par lor douces vois en chantant | vont les notoniers enchantant’ (Through their sweet voices in song, sailors follow under enchantment/go singing). Machaut intensifies the experience with his own seductive array of poetic strategies, including the deployment of the rhetorical strategy of adnominatio (chansonette, chant[er], enchant[er], chanter) and the strong presence of leonine and rich rhymes (lines – and –, respectively) that entangle the reader in turn. The lyrical intertwining of Toute Belle and Guillaume’s voices is far afield of the sublimation that Esperance proposed in the Remede and, as will become quickly apparent, Toute Belle’s desire for a physical romance is perceived as the greatest threat to Guillaume’s wellbeing. Before meeting Toute Belle for the first time, Guillaume makes clear that he is physically ill-equipped to fulfill the role of lover. In what may be read as an allusion to Machaut’s • • • •
For extended treatment of this dual tradition from an art-historical perspective, see Leclercq-Marx , and in literature, see Kay . See n. . Boer , Book V, lines –. Huot , .
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real-life shift from the secular to the clerical world, Guillaume identifies as the cause for his inability to write his recent exile from the court of love by no other than Love herself: Qu’Amours, qui or fort me maistrie, Sur moy n’avoit nulle maistrie; N’elle en riens ne me maistr[i]oit, Ainçois de ses gens me tryoit (lines –) That Love, who now has a strong hold on me, | previously had no mastery over me; | in no way did she master me | and thus she separated me from her followers.
Additionally, in his first letter to Toute Belle, Guillaume casts himself as an unlikely candidate for love when describing himself as ‘assourdis, arudis, mus et impotens’ (deaf, halfwitted, mute, and impotent/disabled; Letter IIa, p. ). Guillaume will go on to provide ample evidence of his inability to live up to the conventional heterosexual model of masculinity regularly referenced, as we shall see, throughout the Voir dit, which privileged bravery and sexual conquest. The closest he comes to even imagining battle is in terms of braving the roads to visit his lady. Even if he should succeed in his travels, he fears that his physical state will hinder his chances of actual amorous conquest, as he confesses in a letter to Toute Belle to explain his delayed visit: Si vous plaise a savoir que j’ai une trop grief pensee et une trop mortel paour ; car vous me faites vivre en paix et en joie long de vous, et, se je estoie en vostre presence, je porroie bien querir ce que je ne vorroie mie avoir. Et voi cy la cause: je sui petis, rudes et nyces et desapris, ne en moi n’a scens, vaillance, bonté ne biauté par quoi vos doulz yeus me deussent veoir ne regarder (Letter VIc, p. ) If you must know, I am gravely concerned and consumed with dreaded fear; for you allow me to live in peace and with joy when I am far from you but if I were in your presence, I could very well acquire just what I do not want to have. Here is the reason: I am small, unrefined, dense, and unsophisticated, nor is there in me any intelligence, worthiness, goodness or beauty and for this reason, your sweet eyes should neither see nor gaze upon me.
In seeming response to his reservations about performing as a lover, Toute Belle repeatedly questions Guillaume’s masculinity, first through taunts and then through physical aggression. Her initial message troubles gendered dynamics when she is reported to have said that if she were a man, she would come to him without hesitation (lines –). When they do meet and Guillaume confesses that he would never dare attempt to seek the merci he so desires, she directly taunts him by questioning his masculinity: Amis, j’oi bien vostre complainte Et vostre dolereuse plainte, Et que n’avés pas hardement De requerir couardement La chose que plus desirés […] Que volez vous que je vous die? Onques couars n’ot belle amie (lines – and –) Friend, I hear your complaint | and your dolorous lament | and that you do not have the courage to seek out cautiously/cowardly | the thing you most desire | […] | What do you want me to say to you? | The coward never gets the girl.
Silencing the Sirens and Rethinking Masculinity in Machaut’s Voir dit
As the story progresses, Toute Belle will, in fact, assume the action-oriented role she attributes to men. She will eventually visit him, at which time, she interrupts his novena, accompanies him to Mass, and ultimately sneaks a kiss in the church before leaving (lines –). Later, on their second pilgrimage, she orchestrates an intimate reunion in her bedchambers and, continuing to play on the comic role reversal, we learn that she calls for him ‘.II. fois ou .III.’ (two or three times; line ) before he timidly makes his way to her bed. Then, in response to her embrace, he behaves like a violated woman, crying out ‘On m’efforce!’ (I’m being forced!; line ). While the sexual consummation of this relationship would conventionally have confirmed Guillaume’s manhood, it has come at the expense of his masculinity. Within the secular sphere of heterosexual romance, Guillaume emerges as an effeminate lover and the victim of an emasculating campaign. Moreover, as Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet has pointed out, Guillaume’s status as a ‘clerkly-lover’ constitutes a ‘transgression maximale’ that further jeopardizes his role as a man of the church. With every step that brings him closer to performing as a lover, Guillaume becomes increasingly entangled in clerical transgressions that concern the fundamental obligations of clerical life. Canon law furnished the clergy with a meticulous prescription for the expected performance of clergymen in an effort to distinguish them from secular men. Beyond the most obvious transgression concerning sexual abstinence (canon ), Guillaume breaks rules concerning the obligation to practice frequent private prayer and meditation (canon ), to attend Mass (canon ), and to undertake religious pilgrimage (canon ). To canon , Guillaume informs his reader that he was reciting his prayers when Toute Belle first distracts him with her song (line ) and he confesses that no saint could keep his attention during devotions, so intense were his thoughts about his lady (lines –). Regarding canon , he may attend Mass, but he spends the time embracing Toute Belle. Finally, Guillaume does go on two pilgrimages with Toute Belle, but spiritual affairs are hardly of concern; in fact, the couple’s consummation on pilgrimage occurs while fellow travelers attend Mass. Upon his return from pilgrimage, Guillaume’s actions verge on blasphemy: he installs a portrait of Toute Belle in his private chambers, where he kneels before her altar rather than that of the Virgin Mary, not to mention that his waking hours are dedicated not to clerical activity but, rather, to writing poetry, composing music, and addressing letters to Toute Belle at the same time that he seeks to compose the Voir dit to memorialize their love. When kept at a distance and sublimated through song, Toute Belle’s sirenic talents inspire and rejuvenate the poet; but when she turns her attentions to making him participate in a physical romance, she appears to continue the nefarious tradition of sirens as destroyers of men. Specifically, Toute Belle puts Guillaume at risk when she leads him to break the code
• • •
Cerquiglini-Toulet , . On clerical masculinity, see Cullum and Murray . For a description of the obligations of the clergy as detailed in canon law, see the ‘clergé’ entry in Villien and others . For an introduction to the situation of the secular clergy in the late Middle Ages, see Tanner , esp. –.
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of clerical masculinity to conform to the heterosexual expectations of secular masculinity. Machaut appears to channel the warning found in Liber de modo bene Vivendi, ad sororem about the existential threat represented by secular women – whom he associated with sirens: Et sicut sirena per suaves cantilenas solet navigantes mare a recto itinere deviare, atque in perditionem perducere; ita saecularis femina per blanda verba ac seductoria, solet Deo servientes a sancto proposito retrahere, et in periculum animarum suarum perducere. And like the Siren with her sweet melodies has the habit of distracting sailors from the right path and to lead them to perdition, secular woman through her seductive and caressing words has the habit of distracting God’s servants from their saintly resolution and placing their soul in danger.
Similar to the warnings issued by this work, Toute Belle pulls Guillaume away from his religious role and, in turn, distances him from the male community. The homosocial community’s call of the siren It is important to acknowledge the prominent role assigned to the male community in the Voir dit. After all, it is Guillaume’s male acquaintances from all walks of life, including servants, lords, clerics, and even strangers, who encourage the relationship. Collectively they put the couple in contact, facilitate their encounters, stage their first kiss, furnish the lover with the lady’s portrait, and encourage Guillaume’s creative musings by seeking out copies of his work. In spite of their encouragement of the affair and no mention of Guillaume’s clerical transgressions at the outset, these men change their tune once the affair is consummated and urge Guillaume to return to the clerkly fold. Guillaume’s servant is the first to encourage him to abandon the affair when there is talk of a return visit to Toute Belle. The servant revives Guillaume’s earlier fears that he is not equipped to serve as lover when he references anew his master’s physical weaknesses, identifying him as ‘uns tenres homs’ (a weak man; line ) who suffers from gout (lines –). Moreover, the servant urges Guillaume to think of his brothers and friends who would suffer immensely should harm come to him (lines –). Rather than directly attack Toute Belle, the servant evokes several mythological tales in which the songs of women destroyed men. His exempla include Circe who bewitched countless men, Caeneus whose song even bewitched the mountains and wild beasts who submitted to her every whim, and Galatea who uses song to orchestrate the giant Polyphemus’s loss of an eye, the same giant who once sang of his love for her (lines –). Unpersuaded by his servant, Guillaume continues on his way, stopping at court where his lord will revive the servant’s reference to the homosocial community. In contrast to Guillaume’s earlier identification of the God of Love as a woman, this lord depicts Love as a young man concerned with homosocial bonds. True love is friendship among men and what binds this community is that ‘each man is always to aid his friend against his enemy’ (chascuns tousdis son ami | Aidier contre
• •
Liber de modo bene Vivendi, ad sororem appears in vol. of the Patrologia Latina; see . My translation. For earlier discussion of this homosocial community, see Sturges , Sturges , –, and McGrady , – and –.
Silencing the Sirens and Rethinking Masculinity in Machaut’s Voir dit
son anemi; lines –). The lord assures Guillaume that he is just such a friend: ‘Just such a friend I am to you, I swear it and I do not lie’ (Telz vous sui je, je le vous jur, | Amis, et pas ne me parjur; lines –). He well may be a friend who seeks to aid Guillaume, but the lord first informs him that he is not behaving as a man; instead, Guillaume is accused of being ‘mad’ (affolés; line ) and of ‘foolishly wasting his time’ (Et folement vo temps usés; line ) in his stubborn pursuit of false love. If the servant warned of the emasculating risks associated with love, the lord directly charges Guillaume as effeminate. Guillaume again resists this advice and proceeds to the next court where he endures increasingly open derision as again his servant, friends, another lord, and even strangers in the street mock him as someone tricked by love. This relentless and ever-growing chorus of men who directly defame Toute Belle eventually causes Guillaume to vow to distance himself from his lady and to return to more serious matters. In a striking turn of events, the romance reveals itself to be an ‘affair between men’, to channel Eve Sedgwick’s work on the homosocial erotic triangle in which the female object of desire serves to reinforce bonds between men. Guillaume ultimately follows the advice of this community by turning attention to more learned activities. While reading Fulgentius, he finds confirmation of the male community’s warnings. The codex he reads contains an image of Fortune, which Guillaume carefully describes as depicted with five circles upon which are etched her words (and which is famously reproduced with Latin inscriptions in MS A; see Figure .). Two circles are of particular importance. The circle on the upper right records Fortune’s statement that she sings falsely or in falsetto – ‘faussement’ – and thus her ‘song is deceptive, false, and full of lies’ ( Je chante et m’esbat faussement, | Ma chanson dessoipt, fausse et ment; lines –). For this reason, the circle englobing the entire image addresses the reader and issues a command: ‘think and consider who I am and when you understand this, hate me and flee’ (Pense et regarde qui je sui; | Quant tu le saras, hé me et fui; lines –). Guillaume’s meditation on these words leads him ‘to compare [his] dearest lady | to Fortune’ (A comparer ma dame chiere | A Fortune; lines –). Guillaume offers up a new reading of Toute Belle in which her seductive singing is likened to Fortune’s ‘falsetto’ song: Plus douce que voix de seraine, De toute melodie plaine Est sa voix; car quant elle chante Mon cuer endort, mon corps enchante, Ainsi com Fortune enchantoit Ses subgés quant elle chantoit Et les decevoit au fausset, Pour ce que mauvaise et fausse est. Ce tour m’a fait ma dame gente (lines –) Sweeter than the voice of a siren | that is so melodious | is her [Toute Belle’s] voice because she sings
• •
Sedgwick . The image provides Latin translations of the French found in the body of the text. The upper right circle reads: Ludo, compsallo, de ludens carmine fallo and the outer circle/main wheel reads: Affluo, discedo, talis ludus cui me do.
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| she puts my heart to rest rest and enchants/casts enchants/casts a spell on my body, | just just as Fortune enchanted | her subjects when she sang | and when she deceived them with her false voice/in falsetto. | For this reason she is false and bad. | This is the trick my dear lady played on me
Toute Belle’s enchanting, melodious, sirenic voice of the past now assumes the false, otherworldly tone of Fortune and it arouses a complex spectrum of sexual anxiety that goes far beyond his lady’s presumed deception. Regarding his own status, Guillaume acknowledges loss of mastery (lines 8257–58), –), adding that she caused him to forget God (line 8295) ) and to descend into madness (lines 8322 and 8325). ).
Figure 12.1: .: Image of Lady Fortune from the Voir dit, MS A, fol. 297 r, detail (BnF)
If the story ended here, we could dismiss the Voir dit as yet another medieval misogynist text that reflects faithful adherence to a long clerical tradition of sermonizing about the dangers represented by women. In a surprising turn of events, Machaut will question this narrative, which he identifies not with the clerical world as one would expect but with the secular world. He proceeds to launch a devastating critique against the men who endorse this vision of love: these men, not Toute Belle, are identified as the true sirens.
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Retuning the siren’s song and disrupting secular masculinity It will be a fellow cleric, identified as a ‘friend, a priest, and a master of logic’ (ami, qui estoit prestres | Et en l’art de logique mestres; lines –) who will challenge Guillaume’s comparison of Toute Belle to Fortune and yet who will join the growing chorus that mocks him as effeminate. The friend first accuses Guillaume of behaving like a woman – ‘Vous avés maniere de fame’ (you have female manners; line ) – for Guillaume is the one who is ‘muables’ (inconstant; line ), two-faced like Fortune (lines –), and ‘folz’ (foolish; line ). But in an unexpected turn of events, his foolishness is due to believing his friends who sang of Toute Belle a ‘song that is neither beautiful nor respectable to record’ (une chanson qui n’est pas belle | Ne gracieuse a recorder; lines –). The friend then turns to Guillaume’s use of Fulgentius and offers up an alternative tale of Fortune said to derive from an ancient pagan tradition (a tale invented by Machaut) in which Fortune’s sirenic song is shown to be calmed by the soothing sounds of virginal singers. The friend implicitly associates these singers with Toute Belle when he echoes Guillaume’s earlier description of his lady’s voice as ‘plus douce que voix de seraine’ (line ) when describing these virgins as also singing ‘plus doucement que seraines’ (more sweetly than sirens; line ). In contrast, he opposes Guillaume’s friends and their gossip to the soothing songs of the sirenic virgins; for, these men have triggered rash behavior with their ‘ungracious’ tunes. In filling his ears with falsehoods, it is they, argues the friend, and not Toute Belle, who have emasculated him by making him ‘meüs’ (inconstant; line ), subject to ‘merancolyeuses pensees’ (melancholic thoughts; line ), and causing him to act dishonorably towards his lady (lines –). The friend concludes that rather than run from Toute Belle, Guillaume ought to ‘hate, flee, and defame’ (Haÿr, fuyr et diffamer; line ) their words, which he describes as ‘gossip with a whorish air’ (dis mesdisans de pute aire; line ). This language proves all the more striking given its intertextual association to Le Roman de Troie in which Benoît de Sainte-Maure referred to the Sirens as ‘very evil and with the air of a whore’ (mout sont males e de pute aire). But not only does Machaut cast the secular men of the Voir dit as the true sirens, he casts them in the role of music makers, specifically clerical polyphonic performers, who had famously been described by John of Salisbury as an ‘ensemble of Sirens’: In the very sight of God, in the sacred recesses of the sanctuary itself, the singers attempt, with the lewdness of a lascivious singing voice and a singularly foppish manner, to feminize all their spellbound little followers with the girlish way that they render the notes and end the phrases. Could you but hear the effete emotings of their before-singing and their after-singing, their singing and their counter-singing, the in-between singing and their ill-advised singing, you would think it an ensemble of Sirens, not of men.
In Machaut’s dramatic reinterpretation of the myth of sirens, it is neither women nor clerical singers who are associated with effeminate ways or emasculating abilities. Instead, it is the homosocial community of secular society that is revealed as effeminate and emasculat • •
Constans –, line /. John of Salisbury, Policraticus (c. ), quoted from Dalglish , .
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ing. According to Guillaume’s friend, it is these men – Guillaume’s servant, his lords, friends, and even the raucous public – who have failed to model appropriate masculine behavior because they prove ungracious towards Toute Belle and have led Guillaume to behave ‘like a woman’.
Judith Peraino has argued that ‘musical technologies invite individuals to question their subjectivity and social identity’ and, furthermore, that ‘music can lead to questioning the ideological superstructure of “compulsory heterosexuality”’. In the Voir dit, song and its attendant links to desire and deception become the medium through which Machaut confronts competing forms of masculinity and dares to challenge the behaviors of his secular male readers towards women and love. Guillaume’s relationship with Toute Belle celebrates the inspirational role women can play in the creative process while redirecting the myth of sirens to the men who present a contradictory and destructive reading of love. Secular masculinity is exposed as ‘toxic’; it is a system built on irreconcilable contradictions, from desiring and disdaining women, identifying amorous conquest as both manly and emasculating, and using disreputable tactics to accuse women of disreputable behavior. That this toxicity is exposed through an extended meditation on the sirenic power of song is all the more striking given that the romance ultimately establishes the marginalized figure of a lovelorn cleric known for his poetic and musical talents and thus conventionally categorized as, at best, an effeminate man, as the one individual who merits admiration at the end of the work. For, he alone proves himself able to conquer both the sirens and the myth of sirens. David Halperin’s definition of queer as a subject position that is ‘at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant […], a positionality that is […] available to anyone who is or who feels marginalized because of her or his sexual practice’ helps us appreciate the extraordinary positioning assigned to Guillaume in the Voir dit. Guillaume’s outsider/queer status as a cleric who takes on the role of lover, and as a composer of song and writer of lyric, ultimately queers heterosexual love itself by countering heteronormative models of the aggressive cycle of conquest and repudiation of the female object of desire with a narrative of intimacy that begets creativity.
• •
Peraino , . Halperin , .
Image and Illumination �
. F F F, , M M* Kathleen Wilson Ruffo
Please [slight chuckle], call me Larry! So began my first meeting with Lawrence Earp who quickly passed over formalities to engage in friendly conversation about a conference paper I had just given. Relatively new to Machaut studies at the time, I was naturally in awe of this formidable scholar who had fundamentally reoriented modern perceptions of Guillaume de Machaut’s musico-poetic legacy, and placed this now-celebrated author squarely on the map of medieval studies. What left a lasting impression from that first encounter, though, was Larry’s openness to scholarly exchange and experimentation within a field that owes him so much: as he himself recently put it, ‘[T]he conversation must continue’. A well-deserved feather in his cap, this volume honors Larry’s inspiring scholarly and collegial example, and in that spirit, I offer the following as an experimental ‘detour’ around and beyond Machaut’s world, with a view to expanding accepted boundaries of interpretation and exploring less charted territory. Since its modern rediscovery in the s, the work of the so-called Master of the Remede de Fortune has, like that of Machaut, shifted from being a relatively unknown quantity to a serious phenomenon, with the artist’s most spectacular illuminations in MS C inevitably attracting the most attention. But at the edges of the Master’s work, on the periphery of certain compositions in MS C, something rather ‘strange’, even ‘exotic’, can be found. The allure of this underpins the present discussion, its focus a distinctive accessory of costume that potentially reorients and broadens our perspective on Machaut and the court context with which he was affiliated. Twice this accessory appears within the Remede section of this earliest complete-works manuscript, each time in relation to a figure who joins the lover-protagonist in watching the lady dancing a carole (Figure .a) or standing before her castle (Figure .a). Difficult to miss, the outrageously feathered headgear of these two companion-figures (Figures .b and .b) seems a contrived yet calculated addition when compared with other examples associated with the Remede Master. In a very similar dance scene, for instance, portrayed in a contemporary edition of the Jeu des échecs moralisé, the artist/atelier maintained the compositional layout but clearly opted for less exotic wardrobe choices. * • •
•
•
With gratitude to the editors of this volume for their wonderful support, suggestions, and encouragement; to Domenic Leo for wanting to know more about my magical meanderings; and to William Wilson for teaching me to wonder. Earp , . François Avril’s earliest publications on the Remede Master date to the s; his first sustained analysis of the Machaut manuscripts appeared in Avril . See also Pyun , , –, for a summary of Avril’s contributions and for new perspectives on the Master. Recent analyses of the artist’s Remede frontispiece or ‘Wheel of Fortune’ miniature in C appear in Ingham , –; Singer , –; Wilson Ruffo , –; and Wilson Ruffo forthcoming. MS C is available in digitized form on Gallica. My use of the term ‘exotic’ throughout this chapter is intended to reflect the western medieval sense of the foreign, alien, or non-native, that is, something or someone ‘from outside’, based on the Ancient Greek ἐξωτικός via the Latin exoticus and Middle French exotique. For an art-historical overview of medieval perceptions of the exotic, see Strickland . New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, Glazier , fol. r. A digitized version of this manuscript is available at: .
Fine Feathered Friends, or, Machaut and the Magicians
Figure 13.1a: .a: Lady and courtiers dancing, Remede de Fortune, MS C, fol. 51 r (BnF)
Figure 13.2a: .a: Lady before her castle, castle, Remede de Fortune, MS C, fol. 23r (BnF)
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Figure 13.1b: .b: Feathered turban-wearer, with two others, MS C, fol. 51 r, detail (BnF)
The pronounced plumes in C give us pause, as larger-than-life accessories that point to a cultural investment in costume as a carrier of meaning. That such investment is often found at the nexus of socio-political identity and the literary imaginary is pivotal to this discussion which approaches the feathered headwear/ figures as polysemous, at once evocative of exotic, royal, magical, and authorial encounter.5 What interests me here is how these feathered friends open up alternative perspectives on contemporary court culture that I see as necessarily entangled with Machaut’s own concerns as creator of a pilot compilation project intended for royal consumption. In what follows, I first assess the feather’s relevance to the Valois during the last years of Philip VI’s reign (d. ), 1350), a period coinciding with the genesis of C and illumination of its Remede fascicle, both of which have been linked in scholarship to Philip’s son, John II (the Good), king of France, and his wife Bonne of Luxembourg.6 This period is also marked by a royal fixation on alterity, manifested in spectacular forms and settings, that speaks to both an increased global engagement beyond Europe and significant technological experimentation on the home front. Although certainly well-documented in relation to the children of John and Bonne, especially Charles V and John, duke of • 5 •
• 6 •
Figure 13.2b: .b: Protagonist Protagonist and companion wearing feathered cap, MS C, fol. 23 r, detail (BnF)
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Dress as a socio-political device is explored, for example, in Blanc 1997 and 2002; ; and Dimitrova and Goehring . On literary approaches to clothing/textile, see 2014. Burns 2004; ; and Wright 2009. . See also Helen J. Swift’s chapter in this volume for another literary perspective on the feather portrayed in C. Earp 2021, , 23–31, –, for a recent summary of C’s connections to Bonne of Luxembourg and John II. Concerning the possible circumstances of C’s creation, see Smilansky 2020. . Stone 2021 details the physical layout and gathering structure of C’s Remede section, likely the first fascicle assembled.
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Berry, such engagement evidently began at least a generation earlier, most notably under Philip VI. French fervor to recover the Holy Land took hold during the s and s, and not surprisingly, coincided with a surge in the Parisian production of Histoire d’Outremer manuscripts. Royal commissions for these and related books, some profusely illustrated with othered portrayals of non-Christian ‘adversaries’, betrayed a preoccupation with estrangeté that was otherwise fed by the focused acquisition of foreign curiosities – including objects, animals, plants, substances, mechanisms, and especially new forms of knowledge. The theory and practice of magic counted among such novelties as an epistemological source of wonder at court, the value of which Machaut seems to have recognized and applied to his own oeuvre. With this in mind, I turn to consider the feather/figures portrayed in C as a device of the writer’s craft, imbued with magical potential, that has a direct bearing on Machaut’s book project itself as a new kind of curiosity worthy of attention. We will begin with the more provocatively dressed figure attending the dance (Figures .a and .b) whose distinctive ensemble instantly designates difference within this scene. Among its seemingly obvious details, though, there are degrees of meaning and perception to tease apart; Suzanne Conklin Akbari’s observation that ‘modern constructions of Orientalism’ can often diverge from medieval conflations of ethnic and religious categories is instructive here. The plumed turban, together with the robe and long beard, would certainly flag a ‘foreign/eastern’ identity for the late medieval viewer, conditioned by a longstanding artistic practice of using details of dress, physiognomy, and/or anatomy to graphically particularize religious, racial, cultural, or gender difference, especially within hegemonic Christian agendas of crusade, colonization, or religious polemic. Ruth Mellinkoff identifies headgear in particular as a potent agent of alterity throughout the medieval period that could also serve more ‘benign’ (that is, acceptably Christian) portrayals: turbans, for instance, certainly appear (sometimes feathered) in scenes stigmatizing Jews, Ishmaelites, Saracens, and other ‘heathen’ figures, but also in more ‘favorable’ depictions of magi (Nativity and Adoration scenes; fictional romance imagery) and ‘virtuous New Testament Jews’. With increased cross-cultural encounter during the late medieval period, however, a shift in European conceptions of the turban as ‘exotic’, and even desirable, points to a greater degree of exposure and understanding: as Joyce Kubiski notes, the turban and its different designs • •
• • •
On the importation and significance of foreign goods at the French court in relation to John, duke of Berry’s activity as political diplomat and avid collector, see Autrand , –; and Cruse , –. Histoire manuscripts and connections to Philip VI are discussed in Leson –. See also Pérez-Simon , , where the author identifies a specific appeal to crusade in the illumination of Philip VI’s copy of Le Roman d’Alexandre en prose (London, BL Royal D. I, c. ). Depictions of the Other are equally conspicuous in John II’s contemporary edition of the Grandes Chroniques de France (BL Royal G VI, c. –); see also n. below. On Hesdin Castle and Park as a famous royal ‘repository’ of imported animals, plants, horticultural specialists, and mechanical engineers, see Goehring ; McAvoy, Skinner, and Tyers ; and Farmer . Akbari , . Grinberg (, ) notes how later medieval depictions of long beards often signified religious orientation, usually Jewish or Muslim/Saracen. Mellinkoff , –; also – on the Phrygian cap and ‘Jew’ hat. Concerning the polemics of alterity in European literary and visual culture, see Jirousek ; Higgins ; Strickland ; Akbari ; and Frakes .
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were accurately associated by 1400 with various groups, from Byzantine to Middle Eastern (Islamic/Persian, Mongol) to North African (Mamluk) to Central Asian (Turk).12 A miniature of ‘Princes of the East’ (Figure 13.3) .) painted by the Cité des Dames Master in an early fifteenth-century edition of Tomaso di Saluzzo’s Le Chevalier errant captures this eclectic range in its remarkably accurate portrayal of exotic headdresses, circumstantial evidence of artists’ increased access to and interest in authentic foreign models/sources around 1400. .13 Predating this image by a half-century, the Remede turban seems to anticipate this concern for authenticity as it does bear some resemblance to a tall, teardrop-shaped Islamic headdress pictured, for instance, in a contemporary copy of the Persian Shahnama (Figure 13.4). .).14
Figure 13.3: .: Princes of the East, East, Cité des dames Master, Master, from Le Chevalier errant by Tomaso di Saluzzo, Paris c. 1400. . BnF fr. 12559, , fol. 162 r (BnF)
• 12 • • 13 •
• 14 •
Kubiski 2001, , 164, , and figs. 4 and 5. . On medieval turbans generally, see Stillman and Stillman 2000, , 16–17, –, 54–55, –, –, 91. 80–81, . The exotic allure of turbans is analyzed in Friedman 2008 and Ashley . 2000. Sterling (1987, (, 291) ) surmises that Parisian miniaturists consulted Islamic manuscripts by the early fifteenth century but offers no evidence. Kubiski 2001, , 162–64, –, associates two events with increased exposure to eastern influence around : the Battle of Nicopolis against Sultan Bayezid and his Turkish forces in 1396 1400: (which resulted in the capture of many French), and the diplomatic mission of Byzantine Emperor Manuel II to Paris where his court resided at the Louvre from 1400–02. –. This manuscript, infamously disassembled and dispersed by the Belgian art dealer Georges Demotte in the early twentieth century, features thirty-seven different turban designs; its Islamic variations are categorized and reproduced in Kubiski 2001, , fig. 4. .
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Figure 13.4: .: Islamic turban example (third figure from left), The Reign of Bahram Bahramiyan, from the Book of Kings (Shahnama) by Firdausi, Tabriz c. 1330–60. –. Dublin, Chester Chester Beatty Library, Pers 111.6.v ..v (© The Trustees of the Chester Chester Beatty Library, Dublin)
Even so, the Remede accessory of the feather is an odd addition to this specific form of Islamic turban which was usually embellished with a precious stone or jewel at the top (as in Figure 13.4), .), or sometimes with tiraz, bands of fabric intricately embroidered with inscriptions affirming the wearer’s identity, status, or accomplishment.15 Ostrich plumes – fulsome, shaggy, and curled in form – are certainly featured in both the ‘Princes of the East’ and Shahnama miniatures where they provide an elegant flourish to different headdresses. But the type of feather painted by the Remede Master is long, straight, and transparent in structure suggesting a different species, pheasant perhaps. Such feathers and those of related wildfowl do appear in some types of eastern headgear that were certainly known in France by the mid-thirteenth century. In William of Rubruck’s account of the Mongol court of Khubilai Khan (1253–55), (–), written for Louis IX of France, the Franciscan missionary describes female courtiers wearing the boqta, a columnar silk head-covering adorned at the top with a stiff cluster of sticks, mallard, and peacock feathers. Residing at the Khan’s court for just over a year, William may have also witnessed the longstanding Mongol practice of decorating military headgear with pheasant feathers, perhaps indirectly relevant here as well: from the mid-thirteenth century on, European helmet design and portrayals of it began to incorporate feather embellishments – largely ostrich plumes acquired through an expansive Mediterranean trade network – as a sign of high military status and prowess. That such headgear likely influenced a later fashion trend (c. 1380) ) for extravagantly plumed hats at the 16 French and Burgundian courts is not surprising. • 15 •
Shea 2020, , 99–100; –; Stillman and Stillman 2000, , 121; ; Micklewright . 1991.
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If the Remede portrayal of the turban-wearer (Figure .b) reflects any of these far-flung sources or practices, it does so as a pastiche of ‘eastern foreignness’ that parallels the equally ambiguous contemporaneous construct of Saracen as pagan (usually Muslim) Other. Authenticity gives way to artifice in this figure – and perhaps that is the point. The impression of ‘foreign Saracen’ actually falters here somewhat, given the obvious items and details of contemporary French dress our turbaned friend wears (the black open-work shoes, the robe with decorative border and dagged hemline) as well as his rather generic physiognomy. Yet, as some authors point out, attempts among western artists to represent non-European garb before were uneven at best, and often resulted in imaginative, certainly reductive, amalgams of dress that nevertheless passed for ‘foreign’ among European audiences. In some instances, distinctions between European and Other appearance could range considerably within a single context, from extreme to minimal. A revealing example is John II’s edition of the Grandes Chroniques de France (c. -) which includes blatantly racialized depictions of Muslims in some crusade-related scenes, and yet undifferentiated or non-descript portrayals in others. Our feathered friend’s identity is similarly vague, as he seems to hover between possibilities – is he a foreign guest at the Remede lady’s court or a costumed courtier impersonating a Saracen? – that are actually interrelated through shared connections to eastern identity, influence, and artifice. An early fifteenth-century anecdote involving the use of costume and ethnic impersonation at the Valois court offers some insight in this regard: the young son of John the Fearless (and great-grandson of John II and Bonne of Luxembourg) is said to have played in Hesdin Park dressed up as a ‘Turk’ by his father. This ‘playful’ episode was of course charged with political resonance, given the involvement of John the Fearless in the Battle of Nicopolis and his capture by Turkish forces years before. Underscoring a tension in western perceptions of ‘foreign/Turk/Muslim’ as fascinating yet fearsome, this anecdote also highlights a contrived performance amidst the quirky artifice of
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On Mongol headgear and William of Rubruck’s account, see Shea , –, n. ; also –, for Mongol influence on western textile trade, manufacture, and clothing trends. See Rizzolli and Pigozzo , –, concerning European helmets and the late medieval market for ostrich feathers. A feathered helmet (not ostrich) is depicted twice in MS C, fol. v (Alerion) and fol. r (Lyon). The complex origins of the term Saracen are traced in Scarfe Beckett , –. Akbari , , describes the medieval conceptualization of Saracen as ‘an amalgam of Oriental body and Muslim soul’ within her analysis of the ‘orientalist discourse’ formulated by Edward W. Said in Orientalism (). See also Heng , –. Compare Akbari , –, on western literary portrayals of the ‘Saracen Body’ as physically ‘different’, especially in terms of skin color, facial hair, and coiffure. Mellinkoff , –; Grinberg . BL Royal G VI, available digitally at . Compare, for example, fols r (white, clean-shaven Saracens wearing chainmail) and r (barefoot Saracens wearing tunics and knotted headbands, with gray or brown skin and beards). Conspicuous variation in Saracen portrayal, sometimes within a single manuscript, is addressed in Strickland , , and Leson –, –. Kubiski , . The child here became Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy (r. –). What form his ‘Turk’ costume took is unknown, although Stuard , , points out that, of any headdress, the turban ‘crossed from Muslim communities’ and was readily accepted by Europeans. On early modern turban appropriation in Europe, see Friedman and Jirousek .
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Hesdin Castle, that pleasure-playground of the French elite that was also an ever-evolving site of foreign contact and cultural knowledge exchange. With several Sicilians and northern Italians among its staff who introduced new botanical specimens to its gardens and, possibly, Byzantine- and Islamic-inspired elements to its architectural design, Hesdin was a provocatively ‘exotic’ (if fake) setting in which to act out. Our feathered turban-wearer, likewise, evokes a somewhat contrived estrangeté (and possible attendant anxieties), yet his portrayal in the dance scene as a member of the lady’s circle suggests a more positive form of cross-cultural encounter reflected in both the medieval romance tradition and the cosmopolitan character of later medieval courts. Within the literary imaginary especially, constructive contact with the foreign could verge on ‘performativity’, entailing acts of ingenuity, impersonation, and – significantly – magic. One such encounter plays out in a work composed within a few years of the Remede, Boccaccio’s novella of ‘Torello and Saladin’ (Decameron .). Set during the Third Crusade, the tale relays the fictional adventures of Messer Torello di Strà, a Pavian gentleman, who meets and entertains a merchant-stranger visiting Tuscany; this stranger, in fact, is Sultan Saladin of Egypt traveling incognito to spy on enemy territory. Years later, back in Alexandria, the sultan encounters and then frees Torello who had been taken captive during the crusade. With the help of a flying bed gifted by Saladin in thanks for the kind hospitality enjoyed in Tuscany, Torello arrives back in Italy disguised, in turn, as a Muslim ambassador who then secretly watches his wife (engaged to remarry) from afar to determine if her loyalties lie elsewhere. Eventually assured of her love, Torello reveals his true identity and all ends well. Studies of this tale and its pictorial representations rightly emphasize themes of productive cultural, mercantile, and marital interaction, but the relationship between costume and magic is revealing here as well. The exotic outfit Torello dons (involving a turban, rich robe, and long beard) together with his magical lift home (an enchanted carpet upon a bed) are all supplied by Saladin and readily accepted, without question, by Torello. The subtext here – that magic is naturally and essentially Saracen in origin, association, and power – certainly reinforces a trope in medieval romance linking magical devices to ‘exotic/eastern’ characters, especially rulers and magicians. Equally intriguing is the paradoxical notion that magically-arranged performance involving concealment and forms of deception can facilitate greater awareness and understanding. Nowhere were such theories of magic more consciously – or extravagantly – tested than at the fourteenth-century French court, a venue of learned debate among local and foreign •
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McAvoy, Skinner, and Tyers , –, most recently address foreign horticultural intervention at Hesdin. On connections between the Hesdin ‘gloriette’ and Norman pavilion ‘La Zisa’ (c. ) in Palermo, see Farmer . Goehring , –, provides an overview of Hesdin’s history. See, for example, Smarr ; Baskins ; and Grinberg . For example, Floire et Blancheflor (the Babylonian palace of the emir has garden walls decorated with ‘singing’ brass birds, and the court magician Barbarin produces smoke from thin air to confuse his audience); Roman d’Alexandre (two golden statues ‘guard’ the tomb of the emir of Babylon); Aymeri de Narbonne (the Saracen stronghold at Narbonne features ‘chirping’ metal birds); Voyage de Charlemagne (the palace of King Hugon in Constantinople ‘revolves’), discussed in Gaffney , –, and Rollo , xx–xxi. On western medieval perceptions of Saladin’s chivalrous character or even French ancestry, see Leson –, –; Heng , .
Kathleen Wilson Ruffo
scholars that was heavily invested in the pursuit of knowledge and the spectacle of power. The court of Alfonso X, king of Castille, Léon, and Gallicia (r. –) set a significant precedent through translation and dissemination of Islamic texts – some notably magical in theme, including several associated with the biblical paragon of wise rulership, Solomon. One particularly influential text was the Liber Razielis which describes Solomon’s discovery of a magical (divinely-given) book containing secrets of God’s creation. The biblical king’s eventual understanding of these esoteric revelations then empowers him to govern justly. The Liber Razielis is but one apocryphal source that shapes Solomon’s extraordinary medieval mystique as king-magician; another is the curious collection of objects attributed to him over the course of the medieval period, including his celebrated throne (which inspired later ‘copies’ like the levitating mechanism at the Byzantine court); his seal (a signet-ring with the power to control demons or speak with animals); bottles to contain evil spirits; a shamir to cut through stone and diamond; and a flying carpet. The allure of this magical Solomonic tradition – and the political power it promised – was readily embraced at the French court: among other Solomonic texts, two copies of the Liber Razielis were kept in the Valois library, and John II reputedly owned a ring thought to possess talismanic power, gifted by the dauphin (the future Charles V). As a clearly recognized branch of natural study related to the astral sciences, magic and its practitioners were involved in a knowledge exchange at the mid-fourteenth-century court that was increasingly tethered to technology. While ancient occultism and hermetic magic had long suppressed knowledge, their arcane secrets guarded by an erudite few, courtsponsored forms of magic were often far more demonstrative, fired by impressive public feats of engineering. The Valois dynasty seems to have operated in a blur of science and spectacle, engineering and entertainment that was very much geared towards a marvelous, mechanized ‘politics of display’. But the technology of magic and the magic of technology also profoundly transformed epistemological inquiry at the court, triggering new insights through consciously orchestrated displays and ingenious stratagems designed to reorient or reimagine ‘reality’, and thereby challenge powers of discernment. Within the social ritual of the court banquet in particular, technology set in motion artful yet insightful ‘experiments’ that afforded equal opportunity to revel in and reify royal power. Beginning in the reign of • • • •
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Cadden ; Boudet , –. New perspectives on learning and its sponsorship at the later court of Charles V are offered in McGrady . Véronèse , –. See also Page , –, on the indirectly related twelfth-century Ars Notoria, which describes a divine vision to Solomon, granting him wisdom and learning, as magical in source. Iafrate , –, on the Byzantine throne-mechanism with roaring lions; Iafrate , concerning Solomonic magic objects. Boudet , ; Cadden , . John II’s fascination with rings extended to his Order of the Star, founded in , which required members to wear two star badges, a brooch on formal occasions and a ring at all times; see Boulton , , . The epithet of John’s son and successor, Charles V (‘the Wise’), maintained the Valois connection with Solomon who appears in a later manuscript made for the young king, Le Policratique de Jean de Salisbury (Paris, BnF fr. , fol. r). Lightsey , , whose focus is automated court marvels. See also Williams and Eamon .
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Philip VI, decadent feasts with theatrical interludes elevated the concept of dinner-theater to extravagant extremes that demanded, as Christine Normore notes, sophisticated coordination of various technical specialists including cooks and servers, of course, but also actors, musicians, artisans, stage-hands, engineers, and writers. The banquet scene in C’s Remede (Figure .) vividly captures the energy of these events, with its elegant guests conversing while sampling different dishes, and frantic servants clearing tables (and sneaking leftovers) amidst the blare of bagpipes and trumpets. Attention to material splendor was paramount at such gatherings: tables strewn with an assortment of entremets, from lavish dinnerware to frivolous trinkets, held visual, tactile, and semantic appeal for guests between courses. For a banquet arranged in his father’s (Philip VI) honor, John II made a point of commissioning several bejeweled baubles to dazzle attendees. Beyond the sheer spectacle of such glittering party-favors, tableware could carry more profound intention as well, shaped by the social mores and expanding worldview of the court. A favorite vessel in this regard was the nef or saltcellar, a metal container for storing salt as well as spices, cloths, and plates, whose location upon the banquet table was understood to affirm social hierarchy: ‘to sit above the salt’ was an honor reserved for those of high standing. Usually cast in the shape of a miniature ship mounted upon a pedestal and embellished with gems or rock crystal accents, the nef’s nautical form also flagged the global reach of the spice trade, the importation and assimilation of exotic materials, and an abiding desire to venture en Outremer. A particular taste for masquerade also marked banqueting as a transformative and highly interactive experience that often involved feather and bird imagery. Roasted wildfowl could be fantastically reimagined, for instance, in dishes served revestu with full plumage and skins reassembled in lifelike poses. Here, to the delight of guests, the line between inanimate and animate dissolved as culinary creation ‘revived’ natural creature, the power of its illusion artificially engineered through the use of sticks, wires, wax, and sometimes paint – only to be deconstructed and transformed once again through consumption. Amusing tableware staged other ever-shifting illusions that similarly engaged and toyed with guests’ expectations, piquing curiosity: trick-vessels known as cantepleure (‘sing-and-cry’), that ‘magically’ emptied when one tried to drink, could take the form of a bird bobbing above a basin, its beak ajar as if chirping in playful reference to the device’s name. Operating by means of a •
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Normore , –. An oft-cited example of such theatrics is the re-enactment of Godefroy de Bouillon’s siege of Jerusalem at a banquet hosted by Charles V in , complete with painted stage-set and actors manning a large ‘ship’ set afloat in the flooded royal hall. See Walters . The event is depicted in an edition of the Grandes Chroniques de France (BnF fr. , fol. v). Rouse and Rouse , . Normore , . Three golden nefs are portrayed, for example, in the banquet scene mentioned above (see n. ) involving foreign encounter through crusade. Concerning the medieval spice trade, see Freedman . On rock crystal as a foreign import, see Hahn and Shalem . Normore , . See also the Remede feast scene in C (Figure .) where platters of poultry are paraded about and consciously displayed. Illustrated, for example, in the Portfolio of Villard de Honnecourt (Paris, BnF fr. , fol. r). See also Barnes , –.
Kathleen Wilson Ruffo
Figure 13.5: .: Banquet at the lady’s court, Remede de Fortune, MS C, fol. 55 r (BnF)
gravity siphon or hydraulic oscillator, this and related devices likely reflected the influence of more distant sources, especially Islamic precedents such as those documented in the Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices by Ismā’īl ibn al’Razzāz al-Jazarī. Among the surviving fourteenth-century editions of this technical treatise (originally written in ) 1206) are several viable designs for peacock automata, including a water clock surmounted by two peacocks as well as an elaborate handwashing device with peacock-spout intended for an elite audience (Figure .). 13.6).36
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According to al-Jazarī’s detailed description of the handwashing mechanism, water should pour from the peacock’s beak into a basin while two miniature ‘servants’ emerge from a cabinet beneath the bird to offer soap and a towel to the user (al-Jazarī 1974, , 149). ). See also Hepburn 2016. . On western medieval knowledge of Islamic technical texts (including magical and mechanical), see Sannino 2019. .
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Figure 13.6: .: Drawing of a peacock hand-washing device, from the Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices by Ismā’īl ibn al’Razzāz al-Jazarī, Damascus 1315. . The Cleveland Museum of Art, Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund ..a 1945.383.a (Open Access, Courtesy of The Cleveland Museum of Art)
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The Valois shared a passion for this bird as a symbol and focus of court allegiance specifically within the context of banqueting. The first year of John II’s reign (–) was celebrated at court by la colle le paon (‘the peacock feast’ ) for which a magnificent peacockshaped silk hat with full plumage was commissioned. Such pageantry was certainly influenced by the ‘Peacock Cycle’, a series of three tales composed and interpolated into the Alexander romance tradition during the first half of the fourteenth century. The first of these, the Voeux du paon by Jacques de Longuyon (c. –), sets a chivalric tone with members of the court of Alexander the Great swearing oaths upon a roasted peacock during a banquet, while the continuation of the story (Li restor du paon, by Jean Brisebarre, c. ) features a golden peacock crafted to resolve an unfulfilled vow. Jean de le Mote’s conclusion to the Cycle (Li parfait du paon, ) involves the golden peacock once again as a focus of oath-taking that ends in a bloody massacre. This final installment was commissioned by the royal goldsmith Simon de Lille who, Richard and Mary Rouse speculate, may have intended to honor Philip VI with this last story, together with an object the orfèvre himself crafted, a bejeweled peacock. One such ‘creature’ appears in a later Valois inventory (c. ) among the possessions of Philip VI’s grandson, Louis I, duke of Anjou, described as a peacock-shaped nef covered in mother-of-pearl and enameled silver, and richly studded with garnets and pearls. Presumably displayed on the occasion of royal feasts ( John II’s colle le paon perhaps?), this marvel of a saltcellar (now lost) would have brought a range of cultural experience – visual, material, literary, sartorial, and culinary – into fascinating dialogue (art imitating life imitating art…). The nef would have also assured Alexander the Great’s ‘place’ at the royal table, as an indirect reminder of his chivalrous example of leadership and conquest of the ‘pagan East’. But I suspect these were not the only associations that might have arisen as one passed the salt. The ‘Alexander’ portrayed in various medieval retellings of his legend is a complex, ambivalent character whose exotic encounters and exposure to new forms of knowledge transform him in ways that compare with Solomon’s esoteric tradition. The apocryphal origin story of Alexander as the son of Nectanebus, magician/astrologer-king of Egypt, significantly complicates the Macedonian ruler’s profile, providing some context, as Jonathan Morton emphasizes, for his trickster nature and cunning ingenuity (engin) in •
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Rouse and Rouse , , , note that the wearer or purpose of the hat (now lost) is unknown. I wonder, though, if this flamboyant headdress was intended as a reference to crusade and also magic: descriptions of the celebrated crusade hero, Godefroy de Bouillon (c. –), as le chevalier au cygne stem from a legend that his ancestors could transform into swans. See Griffin , . The knightly practice of swearing oaths upon cooked fowl at banquets, especially those promoting crusade campaigns, possibly began at the court of Edward I in , and continued in French and Burgundian territories well into the fifteenth century. Gaullier-Bougassas ; Leo a on illuminated manuscripts of the Voeux du paon. Rouse and Rouse , –, esp. –. Whether Simon de Lille crafted the nef listed in the inventory is unknown. Rouse and Rouse , . See also Pérez-Simon , . See Cizek, ; Akbari , –. In the fourteenth-century Kyng Alisaunder, an emphasis upon ‘accessibility and portability of eastern wealth’ rather than its wondrous qualities – noted by Akbari (p. ) – may also attest to expanding trade networks and western acquisition and consumption of goods during this period.
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twelfth-century versions of his legend where the quest for knowledge is intertwined with magical invention and intervention. This intriguing side to Alexander (and Solomon) as paradigmatic ruler empowered by magic surely appealed to the French royalty whose penchant for the extraordinary would prevail for several generations. Viewed against this backdrop of the Valois court as a transformative and dissimulative site, brimming with inventive illusions, luxurious foreign goods, and the magical mystique of ancient rulers, the Remede turban-wearer acquires special agency within the context of C which he shares with our second feathered friend, the companion-figure in the Remede frontispiece (Figures .a and .b). While these feathered figures certainly bring to mind the songbird imagery of medieval lyric and romance, I focus here instead upon a rarely discussed aspect of Machaut’s work relevant, I believe, to his first book project. Both figures are expressive, I would suggest, of the magical potential of literary matter and the ingenuity of those (magicians and poets) who summon and direct such potential, especially in the interest of knowledge-acquisition. The identification of author-as-magician I propose here is not without significant precedent. Jan Ziolkowski demonstrates how Virgil’s legendary literary reputation became entwined with the ‘strange alter-ego’ of magician by the fourteenth century, and, as with Solomon in the Liber Razielis, it is the discovery of arcane knowledge within magical books that endows the poet (or king) with exceptional powers. David Rollo also notes a tendency in late medieval romance to align magic with the writerly process, as a kind of revelatory act that confers a certain prestige upon the literate author. Likewise, in Machaut’s oeuvre, the line between the literary and the magical can become rather blurred, often in the interest of authorial control. Sarah Kay notes, for example, a recurring use of homonymy in the Remede, Confort d’ami, and Voir dit that conflates the acts of singing and magical incantation (chant, enchantement, en chantant), inducing trance-like states in the poetic protagonist, narrator, and even reader. Effecting a kind of metamorphosis (from cognizance to confusion, stupor, or delusion), the bewitching power of chant approaches that of Orpheus-as-magician whose music-making can (in the Ovidian tradition) alter and animate nature itself, by summoning animals and trees, and causing rocks to dance. Machaut’s invocation of this ancient magician-musician towards the end of the Remede confirms this chant-enchantement connection while offering further insight as well: Et s’i ot des musicïens Milleurs assez et plus scïens En la vieus et nouvelle forge Que Musique qui les chans forge, Ne Orpheüs, qui si bien chanta •
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Morton , –, –, notes the complexity of the late medieval term engin, associated variously with a mental capacity (ingenuity, intelligence, wit); a mechanical device (invention, tool, machine); or clever stratagem (ruse, trap, artifice). On magical and mechanized inventions attributed to Alexander the Great during the medieval period, see Iafrate , , , –. Ziolkowski , , ; Rollo . Relevant here is the magical connotation of the Middle French term prestige, from the Latin praestigia, related to conjuring tricks or spells (Rollo , ). Kay , –.
Kathleen Wilson Ruffo
Que tous ceaus d’enfer enchanta Par la douçour de son chanter, Devant eaulz ne sceüst chanter. (lines –) And [at the lady’s feast] there were musicians more skilled and knowledgeable in both the new and old styles, and who could sing better than Music, who writes the songs, or Orpheus, who sang so well that he charmed all the inhabitants of Hades by the sweetness of his song, in front of those who did not know how to sing.
Orpheus, and even Music, are now eclipsed by modern musicians whose skill is clearly meant to mirror Machaut’s own accomplishment that actually materializes in the prosimetric Remede where an impressive array of lyrico-musical genres is interspersed. Deftly rewriting Ovid’s account of Orpheus, Machaut also draws attention here to displays of knowledge and know-how (or lack of, as in line ) which, rather appropriately, unfold in the context of a (fictitious) court banquet. Vividly conjuring this scene in C (Figure .), the Remede Master ensures we do not lose sight of this authorial intention. In fact, this artist practices his own subtle form of ‘magic’ – sometimes deceptive in nature – that works wonders for C as a novel authorial endeavor. Most notably, the companion’s cap in the frontispiece (Figures .a and .b) seems to gesture towards Machaut’s book-objective from the outset of the Remede, its quill-like feather poking ‘onto’ the bare parchment beyond the frame of the miniature as a pointed reminder of the author’s plume and creative power to craft all manner of illusion. That this trompe l’oeil trick – staged by the Remede Master – occurs within the frontispiece is rather revealing, given the Solomonic allusions otherwise embedded within this miniature that complicate objects and subjects of viewing, and thereby trouble conventional wisdom. The issue of seeing and understanding ‘properly’, that is, in terms of a single or monolithic interpretation, is further unsettled in the dance scene witnessed by the turban-wearer (Figures .a and .b) which seems to fracture and disperse acts of looking. In contrast to the unity of gaze in the frontispiece (all eyes upon the lady), the various glances exchanged here toy with our perception of both image and text. We are left wondering, for instance, why the lady casts an eye towards those who watch the dance: is the lover actually dancing with her (as the story describes) or does he accompany the turbaned figure on the sidelines? Interestingly, the tell-tale pink hat that otherwise helps us to identify this protagonist-figure in the Remede miniatures (as in Figure .) suddenly disappears here, an artistic ploy perhaps to throw us off balance. Of course, our feathered turban-wearer adds a further layer of confusion since his appearance misleads by conjuring multiple identities. The ‘exotic’ feathered turban links him, on the one hand, to the foreign philosopher-magus of medieval romance often characterized as a wise and •
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Wimsatt and Kibler , –. The final line here is my translation, as these editors do not translate it for some reason. On the significance of forging here as a metaphor for musical crafting, with connections to automata, see Wilson Ruffo forthcoming. For a fuller discussion of these allusions involving the lady as ymage and Solomon’s idolatry, see Wilson Ruffo , –, –. See also Akbari , –, for a useful discussion of the nexus of visuality and knowledge; and the discussion of Merlin below.
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prestigious counselor of the court. On the other, his contrived, quasi-French costume cues the ingenuity or deception of an impersonator, impostor, or enginëor (inventor of magical devices) in a way consistent with Machaut’s own stratagems that often seem to delight in subterfuge and misapprehension. One other fictional magician, whose medieval literary tradition is bound to the powers of insight and also deception, bears consideration here for several reasons, among them, his peculiar identification with feathers. The shape-shifter Merlin, synonymous with the Grail tradition and its various continuations, is by nature and name associated with a species of falcon (merlyon, merilun), described in certain stories as retreating on occasion to his esplumoir, or moulting-cage, a site of transformation. Merlin, like the ancient Proteus and Morpheus, is a multifarious creature whose capacity to assume and/or manipulate various animate and inanimate forms is matched by his impressive aptitude for prophecy, dream-interpretation, knowledge, and counsel. His tradition has also been compared to that of Alexander in terms of a shared propensity for clever ingenuity and artifice, and is often interwoven with literary forms of transformation that confuse meaning: as Miranda Griffin points out, Merlin’s unstable (bodily and literary) identity effectively ‘uncouples the conventional relationship between vision and knowledge’. In these respects the Arthurian magician offers indirect insight into the work of both Machaut and the Remede Master presented in MS C. Merlin’s fluid identity, for instance, compares with that of Machaut’s various literary avatars whose diegetic function as narrator, lover, and/or witness-participant adjusts throughout the Remede tale and even across the compilation as a whole. In the Remede miniatures, the changing mental state of the lover is also subtly portrayed by the artist, always within the transformative space of a garden or park setting: throughout the complainte on Fortune especially, depictions of the lover freely shift between alter-egos, from the self-fixated ‘Narcissus’ sitting by a gushing spring (fol. v) to the melancholic ‘Job’ lamenting on a hillock (fols v, v). Like Merlin, Machaut’s poetic personae can also assume the interrelated roles of court fool and counselor: the fumbling Remede lover, who flees in a panic from the lady and then launches into a belabored rant about life’s misfortunes, often discloses unexpected ‘truths’, if only through his questionable example. Accompanying this lover’s complainte in C, the Remede Master’s spectacular ‘Wheel of Fortune’ miniature (fol. v) models a similar process of disclosure through its accurate rendering of the inner workings of Fortune’s mechanism, the viable design and operation of which are based upon technological exemplars of the period. • •
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Page , . On the nuances of esplumoir, also esplumëor, see Nitze . See also Vadé , –, on Merlin and hunting-bird imagery; and Walter , –, on Merlin’s feather associations. A reference to moulting appears in Machaut’s Dit de l’alerion where the protagonist-narrator describes himself, ‘Lors muay je ma volenté’ (line ); on this moulting metaphor and possible associations with the dauphin, future Charles V, see Leo . See also Chrétien de Troyes’s ‘Amors tençon et bataille’ where the lyric voice is placed within a moulting cage, referenced in Griffin , . Griffin , ; also –. See also Knight , –; Morton , –. Brownlee ; Swift . See also Griffin , : Merlin’s ‘mutability is intimately bound up with his function as an embedded fictional author of his own tale’. See also Wilson Ruffo , , –.
Kathleen Wilson Ruffo
As noted throughout this chapter, the curious interplay of deception and disclosure, and concealment and revelation in various magical tales, traditions, and spectacles often calls for refined powers of judgment, adjustment in viewing practice, and/or exposure to strange or foreign sources to gain better understanding. If Solomon, Alexander, Merlin, Saladin – even the Valois – all subscribe to this strange epistemological strategy, it is the pair of feathered friends in the Remede who draw particular attention to Machaut’s indispensable role as (magical) mediator in such processes of knowledge-acquisition in MS C. The compositional placement and poses of our feathered figures are actually pivotal in this regard. Their liminal position and folded arms might be construed as passive, melancholic, defensive, even sociallymarginalized. But there are alternatives at play here: in what might be described as a pictorial ‘sleight of hand’, these alluring feathered friends draw our eye from the center and ‘main’ attraction of the lady to the edge, thereby widening the field of vision and facilitating unexpected cross-cultural and semantic encounters beyond the scope of these miniatures. Tantamount to anamorphosis, the ‘distortion’ in perspective they embody in C is not about redirecting to another single, ‘correct’ point of view (or didactic lesson) but rather, about weighing diverse possibilities – including deception, delusion, debate, and doubt – to get at the ‘truths’ of a matter. In this way, they endow Machaut’s first compilation with the rare power to summon multifarious meaning, offer choices, and enable new forms of self-directed learning – ‘magical’ forms of knowledge that, I suspect, the Valois would find rather irresistible.
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Knight , –, on Merlin as advisor. For a fuller analysis of the ‘Wheel of Fortune’ miniature and clockwork sources, see Wilson Ruffo forthcoming. See Jolly , , where she contends that doubt is crucial to the effect of anamorphosis.
. N R P P M M M* Domenic Leo
The National Library of Wales holds one of the fourteen manuscripts with the collected music and poetry of Guillaume de Machaut, known by the siglum W. Although neatly written with elegantly decorated initials and musical notation, W has been long neglected by art historians – all miniatures were removed at an unknown time, a likely testament to their beauty and potential financial value. In , however, Lawrence Earp reflected on its place within the Machaldian manuscript tradition; his understated conjecture that its possible original owner was Yolande of Flanders (–) has placed a spotlight on W. In the first section of this chapter, I present a brief overview of Earp’s scholarship on W and offer a reconstruction of the manuscript’s iconographic program, proposing that it may have contained forty-eight miniatures. I also describe the appearance and possible contents of the single miniature that remains only as an offset. In the chapter’s second section, I examine the repercussions of the newfound importance of W, elucidating a network of female patronage for Machaut manuscripts. Placing Earp’s work in the context of recent studies of female courtly households in the late Middle Ages allows for speculation on W’s former glory. W and a reconstruction of its iconographic program Earp was the first scholar to describe W in detail. He initially wrote about W in his important article, ‘Machaut’s Role in the Production of Manuscripts of His Works’. He returned to it in his keystone Guide to Research in . In the Guide, C, as the earliest known complete-works manuscript, served as his point of reference for dating W c. (just after the completion of C), and he used C to establish the matrix for studying subsequent patterns of transmission in which the arrangement of Machaut’s poetry and music differed. * •
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I would like to thank the editors of this volume for the time they invested in this chapter and Anne D. Hedeman and Martha Easton for their suggestions. Of the fourteen identified as complete-works manuscripts (and which include works by Machaut exclusively), nine are extant and five are documented; for descriptions and an introduction to the manuscript tradition, see Earp a, – (and on W specifically, pp. , –). Earp , : ‘I also wonder if Machaut MS W […] was destined for Yolande of Flanders’. Evidence presented in Andrew Wathey’s chapter in this volume supports this hypothesis; see below, as well as Wathey’s chapter herein. See Earp a, for a list of the earlier cursory work on W. Earp a, – n. , , –. Earp a, –. Earp recently revised the probable starting date for the planning and execution of C to the mid-s – about four years earlier than once thought. The second portion of this manuscript, known as CII, was completed by after a period of delay in the wake of Bonne’s death (); see Earp , –, –. In and of itself, Earp’s establishment of a slightly earlier date for C has consequences for reflections on the chronology previous scholars have created for the development of style in manuscript illumination during the second quarter of the fourteenth century in Paris; and one wonders if this new date for C would leave the possibility for an earlier date for W. Given the absence of miniatures, it is not possible to date W on art historical grounds.
Notes on Reconstructing the Pictorial Program in a Mutilated Machaut Manuscript
Much information can be gleaned from a comparison of W and C, because the former was in many ways dependent on the latter. Earp found W notable in relationship to C for several reasons, citing the ‘small extent of the Loange section’ and ‘the column format of the surviving motet folio’, the latter shared only with C. He fully articulated the argument for dating W to ‘immediately after C, i.e., c. ’, based on the extent of the contents of the manuscript, in particular the identity in the size of the Loange section with that of C, the lack of any trace of poems after Alerion […], the manner in which the motet Quant en moy (M) is copied, and the corruptions in the text of the Jugement Behaingne.
Despite these similarities, W differs from C in that the Loange des dames, a collection of lyric verse, takes a new position at the head of all of Machaut’s poetry and music. In addition, as we shall see, the Loange in W was likely heavily decorated with miniatures. MS W is not only precious as a record of Machaut’s oeuvre and artistic activity, but also because it once had miniatures. Full folios containing miniatures (and most of the musical notation) were removed at an unknown time, but there is one exception: the miniature on fol. v was cut out from the bottom left of the folio leaving the rest of the folio intact and an offset of the miniature on fol. r. I return to this below. After the full folios were removed, the volume was then rebound and the remaining folios were numbered consecutively in the upper right-hand corner of each page. There are only three other extant Machaut manuscripts with illuminations which were created during his lifetime, C, Vg, and A; five if the partial complete-works manuscripts J and K are included. W therefore holds a special place as one of two manuscripts (with C) created at the beginning of his ‘publishing career’.
•
• • • • •
•
MS C stands out among all of Machaut’s illuminated complete-works manuscripts, however, because of the artistic quality of the miniatures, the work of artists consistently employed by French royalty, and the complexity of their iconography and close rapports with the text. On its status as the ‘first’ Machaut manuscript, see esp. Leach . Earp a, . Earp a, . On the Loange des dames, see most recently Mahoney-Steel b. The manuscript in its present state is viewable at . Although containing several short jeux and a ballade by other authors, the partial complete-works manuscripts K, dated to , and its ‘copy’, J, are included here because of the density of their illumination; for descriptions, see Earp a, –. The remaining illuminated complete- and partial complete-works Machaut manuscripts are posthumous: Bk (s), E (c. ), F-G (s), Pm (c. –), and D (c. ); for descriptions, see Earp a. On the illuminated single-work manuscript Bk, see Earp (a, ) who notes that there are codicological indications that Bk was ‘removed from a larger manuscript’. This manuscript was left unfinished, with only ten of thirty planned miniatures painted indicating that, if Earp is correct, the ‘larger manuscript’ would have been luxurious. In his catalog entry, Earp suggests a date of c. based on an assessment by François Avril. For an art-historical study on Bk that establishes its close relationship to Vg (c. ), see my commentary in Earp , –. One of the artists who worked in Bk – there are at least two – is Perin Remiet or Jean de Nizières, both of whom were studied by Michael Camille (). Given the prolific nature of these artists and their continued use of a style that can only be roughly dated by fashion trends beginning in the s, it is difficult to pinpoint a date for much of their oeuvre. This applies to Bk, which was plausibly executed towards the very end of Machaut’s life or shortly thereafter. For a date to the s, see Camille , ; and Leo , . The other four date to the s, near the end of his life, at a time when he was a canon residing in a large, extra-clausal house – a likely center for the production of his manuscripts. On Machaut’s house, see Brejon de Lavergnée .
Domenic Leo
Aside from the excised miniature on fol. v, the most important physical evidence for the lost miniatures in W is the placement of vestiges of secondary decoration on stubs, mostly the tips of gilded chestnut leaves and stems. This visual information, in tandem with what I gleaned from an examination of the manuscript in , makes it possible to identify the areas where the folios extant only as stubs had been illuminated. Additionally, Earp’s detailed codicological reconstruction of the manuscript allows for the identification of places where folios have been excised; in what follows I suggest there was one miniature on each excised folio. Together, these two sets of data can be used to reconstruct an iconographic program (Figure .) with approximately forty-eight miniatures in W. Had these miniatures survived, W would certainly have taken a place among the most important illuminated Machaut manuscripts, if not for the quality of its miniatures, which we cannot determine, but for their quantity. Figure .: Hypothetical iconographic program of W
Eacb lost folio (indicated with —) and each stub with vestiges of secondary decoration suggest placement of a now lost miniature. Gathering
fol.
Contents
(Hypothetical) Miniature
stub
[Loange]
r v stub
Lo– –Lo, strophe
r v r v r v
•
•
Lo–
–Lo
In , I attended a meeting of the Early Book Society in Wales, Lampeter, where I delivered a paper ‘The Transmission of the Iconographic Program for the Illuminated Machaut Manuscripts: Assessing the Evidence’. I am grateful to Alcuin Blamires, head librarian at the time, for allowing me to consult W. The first three columns of Figure . are drawn from Earp a, –. I am indebted to Jared C. Hartt who drew my attention to additional missing folios that needed to be taken into account, thereby updating my earlier estimate of thirty-eight possible miniatures to forty-eight. I thank Hartt and Benjamin Albritton for constructing Figure . and for revising Table . below. See Leo , – for my earlier hypothetical reconstruction.
Notes on Reconstructing the Pictorial Program in a Mutilated Machaut Manuscript
Earp's hypothetical structure of a now-lost gathering that contained fol. :a) Gathering
fol.
Contents
(Hypothetical) Miniature
r v
–Lo, line –Lo, line
stub
r v r v r v r v
Lo, line – –Lo, line Lo, line – (see Figure .)
–Lo, stophe , line
a)
stub
stub stub
stub
(; already counted)
Earp a, . Since several folios of W have been removed, the present gathering structure does not account forall of the manuscript’s contents. For example, gathering concludes with Lo, but gathering begins with line of Lo. And gathering omits from Lo, line through Lo, line . Both of these omissions are now accounted for in Earp’s hypothetical gathering. The same reasoning applies below to another of Earp’s hypothetical gatherings that accounts for missing lines – of the Remede in gathering .
Domenic Leo
Gathering
fol.
Contents
(Hypothetical) Miniature
r v stub
Lo, strophe , line – –Lo (RH column blank) [Behaingne]
r v r v r v r v
Behaingne, line –
stub r v stub
glued to fol.
r v r v r v r v r v r v r v r v r v
b)
–line blank blank [Lyon after this point?]b) Vergier, line – (glued to fol. )
[at least 1?]
Earp (a, ) posits that ‘Vergier probably began on a verso near the end of a now-lost gathering, which may have included the missing Lyon’. The proposed miniature for Vergier (numbered ) would have been on the verso of the folio that immediately precedes what is now numbered r. (Recall that after the folios containing miniatures and/or music were removed at some unknown time, the manuscript was in turn rebound and the folios were then numbered.)
Notes on Reconstructing the Pictorial Program in a Mutilated Machaut Manuscript
Gathering
fol.
Contents
(Hypothetical) Miniature
r v r v r v r v r v r v stub
–line
stub
stub r v
[Remede] Remede, line –
Earp's hypothetical structure of a now-lost gathering that originally began with fol. :c) r v
–line
stub
c)
Earp a, .
Domenic Leo
Gathering
fol.
(present structure) r v r v r v
Contents
(Hypothetical) Miniature
–line line –
–line )
r v stub
line – –line
r v stub
stub
(; already counted)
r v r v r v
line –
–line
stub
stub
stub
Notes on Reconstructing the Pictorial Program in a Mutilated Machaut Manuscript
Gathering
fol.
Contents
(Hypothetical) Miniature
r v r v r v stub
line –
–line
[Alerion]
[Alerion]
r v r v r v stub r v r v r v
Alerion, line –
–line line –
(sewn to fol. )
r v r v r v r v r v r v r v r v
Domenic Leo
r v r v r v r v r v r v r v r v
r v r v r v r v r v r v r v r v
–line , expl. / [Lais] L– –L / th-c. inscriptions blank
r v stub
L,d) line – –line
r v r v
L, line – –line blank [Motets] M (trip. lines –)
Total miniatures: + or more from Lyon? Loange: Behaingne: [Lyon?: at least ?] Vergier: Remede: Alerion: Lais: d) The music of L1 has been removed from W.
Notes on Reconstructing the Pictorial Program in a Mutilated Machaut Manuscript
François Avril judged the importance of Machaut manuscripts based on the density of their illumination (for both the total iconographic programs for each Machaut manuscript and those of individual works within them). Consideration of the reconstructed pictorial program for W within this framework reveals it to be at once unexpected and notable. This manuscript would constitute the only surviving Machaut manuscript with a significant number of miniatures for the Loange des dames – seventeen; this is striking in comparison to the single miniature for the Loange in the slightly earlier C and the four miniatures in the much later Vg. We will return to the importance of this discovery below in the discussion of patronage. An analysis of the density of illumination in W also highlights the Remede de Fortune, and a comparison of the line-insertion point programs for the Remede in the four main illuminated Machaut manuscripts (C, W, Vg, A) is likewise revealing; see Table .. With its twenty-one proposed miniatures, it reconfirms that this dit, ostensibly made for Bonne of Luxembourg, retained its preeminence at the time of the creation of W, and that manuscripts C and W, linked by their iconographic treatment of this dit, are distinct from the complete-works manuscripts compiled much later in Machaut’s lifetime: Vg (c. ) and A (early s). There are two additional, crucial variables that may further increase the status of W. First, Earp surmised that the long, narrative poem the Dit dou lyon, written for Bonne’s father, John, king of Bohemia, may also have been part of W (see Figure .), leaving the possibility that W had an even lengthier iconographic program. Second, it is possible that some folios had more than one miniature. What remains of MS W’s only miniature on fol. r is an offset from the original on fol. v (Figure .a). The miniature was small: only seven lines high. Earp notes that it filled a ‘missing third strophe to Lo [Ne cuidiez pas], a ballade also defective in C’. Flipping the offset horizontally reconstitutes the original appearance (Figure .b), revealing the outline of a gilded(?)/painted double frame and three sets of tiny leaves along the vertical line outside the frame on each side of the miniature. Manipulating the color levels and saturation gives a rough idea of outlines and fill-in color (bear in mind that both the ink and pigment had bled due to water damage which affected much of the manuscript before it was mutilated). The black outlines of the underdrawing or defining lines of silhouettes reveal a
• •
• •
For the two main editions (with translations into English) of the Remede, see Wimsatt and Kibler ; and Palmer . Wimsatt and Kibler , –, present a strong case that this poem was written for Bonne. Within the context of contemporary Parisian manuscript illumination, manuscript ‘producers’ and/or scribes generally ‘customized’ literary texts rather than replicating them; this is also the case with the creative process in illumination. This correlates with Paul Zumthor’s linguistic concept of mouvance; see Zumthor . For an overview of mouvance, see . Rouse and Rouse discuss the dynamic of ‘copying’ manuscripts with an accent on illumination. For a discussion of mouvance which applies to both texts and images in the illuminated Voeux du paon cycle illuminated manuscripts, see Leo a, . In C, the Dit dou lyon has twenty-four miniatures, and in Vg thirty-one. Earp a, n. ; in the same note, he points out similarities with the later Vg: ‘Miniatures Vg – fill in small blanks left by the lacking third strophes of some ballades. Two similar blanks later in the Loange, after Lo and Lo, were left unfilled’.
Domenic Leo
Line
C ()
W (?)
Vg ()
Table .:
A ()
Line-insertion points for miniatures in the Remede de Fortune in MSS C, W, Vg, A
LI
LI
LI
LI
LI
LI
LI
LI = Large Initial Grey cells indicate specific line-insertion points. Because the present state of W prevents establishing this level of specificity, the black cells represent potential ranges for line-insertion as follows (and compare with Figure ):
¶
¶ ¶
¶ ¶
¶ ¶
LI
LI
miniature would have occurred at the beginning of the Remede No miniatures occur between lines and miniatures may have occurred between lines and No miniatures occur between lines and miniatures may have occurred between lines and No miniatures occur between lines – miniatures may have occurred between lines and the end of the Remede
Notes on Reconstructing the Pictorial Program in a Mutilated Machaut Manuscript
standing person, at right, on a green lawn, as Earp described in his Guide. The traces of costume can be read as a layered, reddish pink-over-white dress or clerical robe; the reddish pink hue is not indicative of gender because it was used for the costume color of both sexes in contemporary and earlier manuscript illumination. The eyes are prominent because the paint is no longer present, leaving the outlines. Are the round appendages braided hair fashionably wrapped in cornettes? At left are the outlines of what may be the front half of a person on horseback; one would imagine a horse with the front leg raised, the body partially occluded by the frame. The section of visible clothing (or a shield?) seems to be the same reddish pink as the central figure. The possible appearance and contents of the lost miniature, even if these suppositions are sketches, shows one which would be in keeping with the generic images which illuminate the Loange ballades in Vg, created over a decade later. The prosaic composition of the miniature – two figures(?) on a green lawn – is nothing out of the ordinary for a very fine illuminated manuscript at the time. The image would have elegantly and efficiently conveyed enough information to link to the text, thereby creating a visual narrative for the reader. There are no traces of gilding aside from the frame (mentioned above), but there are traces of a painted, diapered background. This indicates the overall compositional tenor of a reasonably expensive iconographic program, but one which falls short of the resplendence of C. Despite the condition of the offset in W, it is possible to use roughly contemporary Parisian miniatures to get a better idea of its original appearance. Miniatures of this lineheight size and rectangular shape, with similar decoration, and with comparable decorated initials in alternating colors, appear regularly in dated or datable Parisian Roman de la Rose manuscripts, by far the most popular illuminated secular text at the time. A Rose manuscript of the early s with Parisian illumination (New York, The Morgan Library, M.), dated on the basis of men’s fashion, serves as an especially good litmus test. It approximates W in size – the Rose measures × mm and W × mm – and has figures of both genders wearing pink. Although the rectangular miniature shown in Figure . is slightly larger at eleven lines high, it has multiple similarities: foliate decoration with tendrils, a double frame with gilding, and the ‘lettres rechampies échancrées’ that Earp documents in his description of W. There are at least two artists working in the Morgan manuscript, and the miniatures are both square and rectangular in format to accommodate the apportioning of lines, initials, and space for illumination. Importantly, its quadripartite frontispiece, on fol. r, with elaborate borders and delightful marginalia, may also evoke the original beauty and diverse nature of the illumination in W. • • • • • •
Earp a, . I am using ‘reddish pink’ to describe the color based on what I can see in the online reproduction of the image and my manipulation of it. Perhaps one day an analysis of the residual pigment can identify it exactly. For a description of these miniatures, see Earp a, –. For description, images, and bibliography, see . W is the smallest of the extant Machaut manuscripts. Earp a, .
Domenic Leo
a. unaltered
b. reversed and color-emended Figure 14.2: .: W, detail of offset from fol. 6v on fol. 7r, a lady(?) stands watching a man(?) on horseback(?) (By permission of Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru/The National Library of Wales)
279
Notes on Reconstructing the Pictorial Program in a Mutilated Machaut Manuscript
Figure 14.3: .: New York, Morgan Library, M.324, M., Roman de la Rose, fol. 23 v, Paris, early 1350s, s, ‘Frankness and Pity speaking to Danger’ (The (-) in 1907; ; Morgan Library & Museum. MS M.324, M., fol. 23 v. Purchased by J. Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913) Photographic credit: The Morgan Library & Museum, New York)
W and royal female patronage of Machaut manuscripts If Machaut’s illuminated manuscripts are any indication, his renown was strongest in the circles of royal women associated with the court from c. 1345 to c. 1400, , beginning with Bonne of Recent art historical scholarship has brought Luxembourg, who was the likely owner of C.26 to light more information on female patrons. We have a fuller picture, not only of the responsibilities of royal women both as mothers and as politicians, but of their collecting patterns as connoisseurs and patrons of literature, music, illuminated manuscripts, textiles, statues, and If we can, as Earp suggests, link W with Yolande of Flanders, then it is significant as jewelry.27 another example of female patronage and, perhaps more importantly, provides evidence that these women formed a network of powerful connoisseurs who influenced one another and
• 26
• 27 •
Bonne has been tentatively linked to C by scholars over the years, but Earp’s recent writing ties her to the manuscript and the milieu of its production more closely than ever: ‘I presume that the vast majority of Machaut’s early works […] respond to cultural activity in the household and court of Bonne de Luxembourg, perhaps from as early as 1338’ ’ (Earp , 21). 2021, ). Earp’s arguments reinforce the identification of Bonne as the destinatrice for this first collection of his works. Among others, see Keane 2016, , who describes the agency of Blanche of Navarre, queen of France (1331–98), (–), and Proctor-Tiffany 2019, , who delves through the lengthy inventory of Clementia of Hungary (–), (1293–1328), the second wife of Louis X of France.
280
Domenic Leo
the culture they consumed and commissioned. Before exploring more deeply the hypothesis that W can be associated with Yolande and the repercussions this implies, I will elucidate the ongoing patterns of patronage and ownership of Machaut manuscripts within Bonne’s family, which was connected by marriage with Yolande (see Table . and Figure .). I will also consider Bonne’s significance as a tastemaker within her circle. While there is not a great deal of extant documentation linking Bonne with Machaut, he makes explicit his connection with her in the Prise d’Alexandre: […] ce fu ma dame bonne bien le say car moult la servi mais onques si bonne ne vi (lines –) […] this was my lady Bonne. | I knew her well, having performed much service for her. | But never did I lay eyes on any woman this ‘good’.
Earp contends that while Machaut may have functioned as secretary to John of Luxembourg, Bonne’s father, the poet-composer’s production of music and poetry was in the service of Bonne. Although direct evidence of Bonne’s influence is limited, we can be certain that the education of royal children was a significant societal expectation of queens and royal married women. In this regard Machaut’s work may have also served to educate and glorify Bonne’s children. As Earp, Elizabeth Eva Leach, and I have argued, it is very likely that three of Bonne’s young boys are depicted, however fictionally removed, in some of the large miniatures of C, especially those with Lady Fortune in the Remede and the frontispiece to the Dit de l’alerion. After Bonne’s death, her husband rose to the throne in to become John II (the Good), king of France, and their children succeeded in becoming important rulers and patrons of the arts; many owned or commissioned richly illuminated manuscripts, both secular and sacred. At the time of W’s creation c. , Bonne’s four sons, future bibliophiles, were around the ages of , , , and – to become, respectively, Charles V; Louis I, duke of Anjou; John, duke of Berry; and Philip II the Bold, duke of Burgundy. Of Bonne’s daughters, three survived infancy ( Jeanne of France, Marie of France, and Isabelle of France); they married well and became powerful women and patrons of the arts. Subsequent patronage of the Machaut illuminated manuscripts supports the close ties between Bonne’s children and Machaut. Bonne’s first son, the dauphin who solidified Valois •
• • • • • •
The genealogical tree in Figure . is, of course, not complete; rather, it lists only those names necessary to show who owned (or in the case of Violant of Bar, had temporarily in her possession) a Machaut manuscript. Ownership (or possession) is indicated with green. Palmer , –. There is also the play on bonne amours/Bonne in the Remede that could indicate Bonne’s association with the dit ; see the discussion in Wimsatt and Kibler , – and Earp , . Earp , . On the topic of mothers using manuscripts for education, see Leo , –; on the education of children in general see Sheingorn and Shahar , . On the iconography of children and education in the context of C and Vg, see, respectively, Leo , –; and Leo in Earp , –. See Leo , –; Earp , n. ; Leach , –; Leo , , –. On Bonne’s daughters, see Earp , and Table .; and Pyun , .
Notes on Reconstructing the Pictorial Program in a Mutilated Machaut Manuscript
Table .: Machaut manuscripts commissioned by or in the collections of Bonne of Luxembourg, Yolande of Flanders, and their families
MSa)
Date
Family of Bonne of Luxembourg
C [Earp ]
CI mid s; CII by
Bonne of Luxembourg
W [Earp ] / possibly [Earp ]
early-mid s
[Earp ]
c. ?c)
Amadeus VI (m. to Bonne of Bourbon, sister of Joanna of Bourbon, wife of Charles V, son of Bonne)
Vg [Earp ]
c.
John, duke of Berry (son of Bonne); borrowed by Violant of Bar (granddaughter of Bonne)
[Earp ]
before ? d)
Trém [Earp ]
original index dated to
French Royal Court under Charles V / Philip II the bold, duke of Burgundy (son of Bonne)? e)
[Earp ]
c.
Marie (daughter of Bonne)
[Earp ]
before ? g)
Margaret of Flanders? (m. to Philip II) and later Philip the Good
[Earp ]
c.
Charles of Navarre (m. to Jeanne, daughter of Bonne)
E [Earp ]
c.
John, duke of Berry (son of Bonne)
Penn [Earp ]
c.
[Earp ]
before ?
[Earp ]
before ? m)
Margaret of Flanders?
[Earp ]
before c.
Philip the Good (great-grandson of Bonne)
[Earp ]q)
before c. r)
Charles the Bold (great-great-grandson of Bonne)
a)
b) c) d) e) f) g) h) i)
Isabeau of Bavaria? j) (m. to Charles VI of France, grandson of Bonne) k)
o)
Giangaleazzo Visconti (m. to Isabelle, daughter of Bonne)
This table includes Machaut manuscripts, be they complete- or partial-works, as well as manuscripts with one or more works by the poet-composer. The number that Earp has assigned to each of these manuscripts appears in the first column. Earp –Earp = complete-works manuscripts; Earp –Earp = partial complete-works manuscripts that include works by others; Earp – = manuscripts with individual works by Machaut and anthologies of a single genre; Earp – = anthologies with isolated Machaut works. See Earp a, –. On the possible identification of the lost manuscript as W and its association with Charles of Orléans, see Earp a, , , and . The date is linked to a documented payment to Machaut for a ‘roman presented to Amadeus VI’; see Earp a, . Earp a, . Earp (a, ) writes that this manuscript was ‘perhaps copied for the French Royal Court under Charles V’, and notes that de Winter (, and ) suggests that it belonged to Philip II the Bold from its outset. Earp a, . I am using the date of Louis of Male’s death as a conjectural terminus ante quem. Earp a, . Earp a, .
Domenic Leo
Family of Yolande of Flanders
Notes Illuminated by the Master of the Remede de Fortune; Master of the Coronation Book of Charles V
Yolande of Flanders?
[Earp ] is a lost manuscript in the library of the Bastard of Orléans (Charles of Orléans originally)b) lost manuscript in the Savoy library
borrowed by Violant of Bar (granddaughter of Yolande)
Illuminated by the Master of the Coronation Book of Charles V and Parisian artists associated with the French Royal Court under John II, Charles V, and Charles VI
Louis of Male (cousin of Henry IV, Yolande’s first husband)
lost manuscript of the Voir dit
(Marie, daughter-in-law of Yolande by marriage to Yolande’s son Robert)
lost manuscript of the Voir dit of the king of Aragon, given to him by Marie f )
Louis of Male? and then his daughter, Margaret of Flanders?
lost manuscript in the Burgundian library h) lost Navarrese manuscript of Confort ordered by King Charles in i)
lost Visconti manuscript of Lyon l) Margaret of Flanders?
lost manuscript in the Burgundian library n) lost Burgundian manuscript of the Prise p) lost manuscript in the Burgundian library s)
j) k) l) m) n) o) p) q) r) s)
See Earp a, – for this manuscript’s connection to the duke of Berry’s manuscript E. This date corresponds to the death of Giangaleazzo; see Earp a, . It should be noted, however, that he married Isabelle of France in . Earp (a, ) notes that ‘Most of the ninety books in French [contained in the inventory that lists this manuscript] were probably inherited from Giangaleazzo’s mother, Blanche of Savoy’. I am using the date of Margaret of Flanders’ death as a conjectural terminus ante quem. Earp a, . This is the date of an inventory of Philip the Good’s library as provided by Earp a, . Earp a, . Earp (a, ) speculates that ‘an alternative hypothesis is that Bk is a surviving fragment from MS []’; given my personal dating of Bk, this would place Earp [] in the s. This is the date of an inventory for Charles the Bold’s Burgundian library as provided by Earp a, . Earp a, .
Notes on Reconstructing the Pictorial Program in a Mutilated Machaut Manuscript
Figure 14.4: .: Genealogical tree with the interrelated families of Bonne of Luxembourg and Yolande of Flanders and their descendants
Yolande of Flanders – 1326–1395
Henry IV, count of Bar – 1315–1344
Robert, duke of Bar – 1348–1372
Marie of France – 1344–1404
(cousin)
Isabelle of France – 1348–1372
Giangaleazo Visconti – 1351–1402
Charles of Navarre 1332–1387 –
Jeanne of France – 1343–1373
Violant of Bar – 1365–1431
Isabella of Portugal – 1397–1471
Charles the Bold – 1433–1477
claims to the throne (the future Charles V), never directly commissioned a manuscript from Machaut.35 However, it may be the case that A was part of the poet’s personal recueil until his death in 1377 and then taken into the king’s collection; Earp also compiled significant documentation to indicate that Charles V and Machaut had a close friendship from the Bonne’s third son, John, the duke time the former was dauphin to the end of Machaut’s life.36 37 of Berry, owned two illuminated manuscripts of Machaut’s complete works, one created • 35 • • 36 • • 37 •
On Charles V’s manuscripts, see, Avril and Lafaurie 1968; ; for a different point of view on the patronage of C and a close study of the collecting patterns of Charles V, see McGrady, 2019. . Earp 1995a, a, 42–46. –. The provenance of A remains uncertain; see the discussion of its possible provenance in my piece ‘Illuminating the Voir dit’, forthcoming in the fourth volume of the new edition of Machaut’s complete works. For a compilation of documented evidence for Machaut’s relationship with John, duke of Berry, see Earp, 1995a, a, 40–42. –.
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John, duke of Normandy (later John II) – 1319–1364
Louis of Male – 1330–1384
Margaret of Flanders – 1350–1405
Philip II, the Bold, duke of Burgundy – 1342–1404
John, duke of Berry – 1340–1416
Bonne of Luxembourg – 1315–1349
Joanna of Bourbon – 1338–1378
Charles V – 1338–1380
Bonne of Bourbon – 1341–1402
Amadeus VI – 1334–1383
(sister)
Margaret of Bavaria – 1363–1424
John the Fearless – 1371–1419
Isabeau of Bavaria – 1370–1435
Charles VI – 1368–1422
Philip the Good – 1396–1467
late in Machaut’s career and the other posthumous: Vg, c. 1370, , and E, c. 1390. . MS Vg was intimately linked to Machaut himself, as Earp has discussed in detail, before passing into the hands of the duke.38 Bonne’s daughter, Marie, a known bibliophile who would later become the daughter-in-law of Yolande, commissioned a manuscript of the Voir dit for King John I of Aragon. Table 14.2 . and Figure 14.4 . demonstrate just how prevalent the ownership of Machaut manuscripts was within the family circle of Bonne. We can speculate on her role as a tastemaker within this circle. That many of her children chose to emulate her enthusiasm for Machaut’s work is one indicator of her cultural influence. Alongside her putative ownership • 38 •
Earp 2014, , 35–38. –.
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of C, we can also look to another of Bonne’s exquisite possessions as evidence of her taste and patronage. She is well known to art historians for the magnificent prayer book which bears her arms, renowned for its iconography and quality (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cloisters Collection, .). Although regularly dated close to the princess’s death in , no stylistic evidence precludes an earlier date; Kathleen Wilson Ruffo suggests its production could have begun as early as . The prayer book’s main illuminator, Jean le Noir, used the highly stylized manner of Jean Pucelle. Bonne’s ownership of two such prized artifacts – one sacred, one secular – make her a figure of importance in the patronage of illuminated manuscripts in the second quarter of the fourteenth century in France. Earp has emphasized the unique quality of the manuscripts of Machaut’s collected works in the context of secular manuscript illumination. This suggests that a culture of intense appreciation had sprung up around Machaut’s output that engendered a demand for such deluxe codices, a culture which centered around Bonne’s extended family. That she owned two beautiful books in very different styles allows us to speculate further on her importance as a tastemaker. The prayer book represented a ‘classicizing’ or ‘retardaire’ style given Jean le Noir’s emulation of the earlier illuminator Jean Pucelle. But the artists working in C (the Masters of the Remede de Fortune and the Coronation Book of Charles V) – and we can now establish that C was being painted close in time to the prayer book – incorporated a new ‘naturalizing’ stylistic trend. Since these manuscripts were created at roughly the same time but in very different styles, we might conjecture that Bonne was experimenting with and evolving her personal taste, especially if C came after the prayer book. There were strong connections between the families of Bonne and Yolande which were cemented with the marriage of Bonne’s daughter, Marie, to Yolande’s son, Robert, although this was some years after Bonne’s death. We can guess at the kind of influence Bonne’s cultural prowess may have had on Yolande, eleven years her junior. We know that Yolande •
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See for images, general information, and bibliography. Bonne may have been involved in or at the very least referred to in its iconographic program, perhaps a tribute to her giving birth to the dauphin Charles in , an event that would solidify the Valois dynasty at an otherwise perilous moment. There are distinct references to fertility and reproduction couched in the highly original iconography of this manuscript: on fol. r, where she and her husband kneel before a crucified Christ, rabbits, symbols of both lust and fertility in miniatures and marginalia, inhabit the rinceaux above her; the more prominent image depicts a close-up view of the side wound of Christ, fol. r, perhaps a veiled reference to the female pudendum, which has been discussed at length by art historians; see Leo b, –. Wilson Ruffo , . Jean Pucelle is the artist of the renowned Hours of Jeanne d’Évreux (New York, The Cloisters Collection, Accession Number ., c. –), see . See Christina Frieder Waugh’s important dissertation () on these stylistic crosscurrents in the Bible moralisée of John the Good (BnF fr. ; –). On the rise of the ‘naturalizing’ stylistic trend, see Leo b, esp. the checklist of pertinent manuscripts, – (the Machaut manuscripts in this list are numbers , , , and ). See what is likely John’s original copy of the Jeu des échecs moralisé, G., discussed in the context of C most recently by Earp (, –) and by Anne Stone (, –); for general information, images, and bibliography, see ; on questions of style, see Leo b, –.
Domenic Leo
owned a spectacular manuscript (London, British Library, Yates Thompson ), which was illuminated by the same artists as Bonne’s prayer book. Perhaps Bonne was a role model connoisseur for Yolande to emulate? Earp’s hypothesis that C may have been commissioned by Queen Jeanne of Burgundy as a gift for and celebration of Bonne, would lend further weight to the notion that Bonne was someone who inspired imitation. For Yolande to own a Machaut manuscript could have been a status symbol that signaled her admittance to an illustrious circle of female patrons. If we accept the hypothesis that Yolande was in some measure influenced by Bonne’s taste, her proposed acquisition of W reflects this relationship. What can we make of the differences between C and W? The Loange heads MS W and, unlike all other extant Machaut manuscripts, is heavily illuminated. Does this reveal anything about the patron? Earp has described the reception of the later Vg, which is also headed by the Loange (albeit with four rather than seventeen accompanying miniatures): The Ferrell-Vogüé manuscript reifies a completely different relationship to a patron; at first blush, it may even seem a manuscript in search of a patron. By beginning with the Loange […] we encounter a looser overall form that provides a more appropriate entry point for many readers, less demanding than a long narrative dit, and yet, if one keeps dipping into the collection, it is an approach that provides numerous themes and formulations that will cumulate and resonate in new contexts.
W, therefore, may bear testimony to a shift in taste from Bonne – possibly a connoisseur of the lengthy dits – to, perhaps, a less erudite persona but an equally ardent admirer who took delight in the shorter lyrics in the Loange. And could the continued dense illumination of the Remede, the dit associated with Bonne, be testimony to and commemoration of a friendship between the two patrons? We cannot with any security surmise the aspirations of the patrons or producers in this scenario, but we can state that W unerringly points to Machaut’s continued fame in courtly circles after the death in of Bonne of Luxembourg. While we can only speculate on the significance of the proposed acquisition of W by Yolande and her relationship with Bonne, there are some good historical reasons to believe that Yolande was also personally connected with Machaut during the very period when W was created. Michelle Bubenicek has noted that Machaut was present in Yolande’s house •
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For a detailed description of this manuscript and select images, see: . See Bubenicek and Keane for historical and artistic context. Like W, it was badly damaged by water and had many miniatures removed, but it was so grand that it passed into the hands of Charles V. Jeanne of Navarre, Yolande’s mother-in-law, also owned a manuscript by Jean le Noir (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, nouv. acq. lat. ). For a brief introduction to the relationship between Yolande and Jeanne’s books of hours, see Avril , –; on the Hours of Jeanne of Navarre, with color plates, (dated to ‘after ’), –; on Bonne’s prayer book, with color plates, –. For a detailed description and digital reproduction of Jeanne’s book of hours, see . Earp , . See also Chavannes-Mazel and Keane . Earp , . This is the second highest number within the Machaut manuscripts: as shown above in Table ., there are thirtyfour in the slightly earlier C, twenty-one in W, and twelve in the much later A. In contrast, there are only three in Vg, and two each in E and F-G.
Notes on Reconstructing the Pictorial Program in a Mutilated Machaut Manuscript
hold in , and that like Bonne, she had him in her service. Andrew Wathey’s chapter in this volume provides even firmer evidence for Machaut’s connection with the house of Bar. Machaut’s career pivoted not once, as previously thought, but twice in the two decades after his years in the service of King John and, probably, his daughter Bonne. Wathey provides evidence that Machaut was in the service of Yolande in , and suggests that the earliest that Machaut was with Charles II, king of Navarre, was in the summer of ; Charles married Bonne’s daughter, Jeanne of France in . Since we now know that Machaut served Yolande of Flanders from (or before) to (or after) – during a period that overlaps the creation of W – Earp’s hypothesis appears all the more likely. Yolande’s granddaughter, Violant of Bar, queen of Aragon, also demonstrated enthusiasm for Machaut’s works. Earp notes a reference to the later MS Vg in a letter from Violant to her cousin Gaston Fébus. It recounts that the duke of Berry gifted Vg to Fébus as part of a plea for the hand of the latter’s ward, Jeanne of Boulogne; and that Fébus, in turn, loaned Vg to Violant. Violant may well have gained an appreciation of Machaut through her mother, Marie of France (Bonne’s daughter), but we can imagine the possibility that she heard Machaut’s music and poetry at the court of her grandmother, Yolande, who lived until Violant was thirty.
Although Yolande cannot be named for certain as W’s original patron, she seems a likely candidate. Certainly, one can hardly imagine somebody outside the French royal circle. The possible ‘commissioners’ of or destinateurs for a collected-works Machaut manuscript within Bonne’s immediate family are numerous. The network of royal women associated with Yolande include Bonne of Luxembourg, Jeanne of Navarre (Yolande’s mother-in-law through her second marriage to Philip of Navarre), and French queen Jeanne of Burgundy (Bonne’s mother-in-law). Did these women comprise the majority of Machaut’s early audience before, during, and after his career with Bonne’s father, John of Luxembourg, king of Bohemia? Did Machaut provide a much-needed diversion from multiple, internecine wars, the potentially shaky Valois hold on the French throne, and the horrible years of the Plague, which took Jeanne and Bonne in and struck again in ? Thanks to Earp’s scholarship on W over the years, we can begin to appreciate how this manuscript clearly held, and holds, a much more important place in the manuscript tradition of Machaut’s works than once thought. New scholarship on the significance of female patronage and evidence from Wathey placing Machaut at the court of Bar enables us to understand W’s potential role in a nexus of powerful connoisseurs and gain further insight to • • • •
Bubenicek , n. . Charles II, a contender to the French throne, murdered John II’s reputed lover, Charles de la Cerda. Charles II commissioned the long, narrative poem Confort d’ami; on this dit, see Earp a, –. Earp , . Earp , –; Alberni , –.
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Machaut’s relationship with female royalty. Further, this is an enduring testimony to Machaut’s popularity. Indeed, the poet-composer’s creation of complete-works manuscripts and the esteem in which his oeuvre and manuscripts were held have attracted scholars from all disciplines, like Earp, who have dedicated careers to study them.
. S S: A P T G T B* Elizabeth Eva Leach
Extensive and vigorous scholarship on the works of Guillaume de Machaut has been inordinately facilitated and sustained by the work of Lawrence Earp, whose Guide to Research on Machaut continues to provide a weighty resource for all work on the poetcomposer. When the Guide was published, I was a year into my own graduate work and was fortunate enough to be given a copy as a gift by my supervisor Margaret Bent, who had earlier supervised Earp himself. The present chapter, like all of my work on Machaut, would not have taken place without Earp’s research guide, nor by extension without Bent’s expert supervision of both Earp and me. My interaction with both these impressive scholars gave me access to the broader network of Machaut researchers whose work and collegiality have nourished my own interests in medieval music. It is a pleasure that so many of them are represented in the current volume and seems fitting, therefore, that my chapter concerns Machaut’s intellectual and patronage networks.
Having reached his eighth decade, Guillaume de Machaut decided to collect his complete works together into an organized book, which we know as manuscript A and which has two innovative bibliographic framing devices: a prescriptive table of contents and a short versified statement of musical poetics prefaced by two pairs of ballades with accompanying largeformat illuminations. The latter’s admixture of image, lyric, and narrative verse is usually referred to as the Prologue after its title in a later source – a title I shall use for convenience, even though it is probably not authorial. While both these framing devices offer powerful interpretive tools for the reader of Machaut’s works, my focus here is specifically on the Prologue, in particular the iconography of its two large-format illuminations and the identity of the two other male figures that greet Machaut in the two author portraits. The Prologue opens with four ballades, each preceded by an extensive rubric explaining the circumstances of composition and introducing its speaker. The first pair of ballades presents a conversation between Nature and Guillaume de Machaut, the second between
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An earlier unpublished version of this chapter appeared on my website and is accessible via the Oxford Research Archive at . The title occurs only in the posthumous manuscript E, which omits the narrative section (see Earp a, ). The table of contents does not list the Prologue, reflecting the Prologue’s paratextual status as effectively part of the table of contents itself, especially as one other item added later (the Voir dit) has its title squeezed in; see Stone forthcoming. The Prologue, like the table of contents, seems to have been written especially for A, which is its earliest copy. Stone proposes using the term ‘double frontispiece’ that is found in McGrady . On the musicality of the Prologue see Leach b, –. Leach b, – provides an extensive discussion of the Prologue’s short but effective summa of Machaut’s multimedia artistry and earlier work on it, particularly that of Leo , now superseded for discussion of the Prologue by Leo .
Seeing Sens: A Picture of Two Guillaumes and Two Brothers?
Love and Machaut. Each allegorical figure presents Machaut with three children: Sens, Rhetoric, and Music from Nature (Figure .a); Sweet Thought, Pleasure, and Hope from Love (Figure .a). The Prologue expounds on the projected use of these allegorical offspring in the practice of authorship and, in its terminal narrative section, on the relationship of music and joy. The paired pictures that open the Prologue in A appear on consecutive rectos, not across an opening. The reader must turn the page to see the second image. Yet the striking mirror imagery of the two portraits, and the fact that they articulate a number of meaningful binary oppositions germane to the whole of Machaut’s output, pair them incontestably. Of the ten figures that make up the Prologue miniatures, no fewer than four appear to be instances of portraiture in the sense understood today, that is, realistic likenesses of living figures. Two of these – the person common to both pictures – represent Guillaume de Machaut himself. The other two are the male personifications that stand at the head of each of the sets of children: Sens in the premier presentation of Nature (Figure .b) and Sweet Thought in the secondary set of Love (Figure .b). Their maleness is also remarkable: versions in later Machaut manuscripts have only female allegories in these places. Domenic Leo gives a detailed description of the physiognomic features of each figure and asks: ‘Are these portrait-like qualities meant to denote reference to specific people who played important roles in Machaut’s life? […] Is this a facet of the “puzzle” that was meaningful for a very specific audience, namely the patrons?’ Leo’s suspicion that Sens is a portrait of a living contemporary leads me to venture a candidate for this friend of Machaut and, because of the pairing, to suggest, albeit more tentatively, an identity for the equivalent figure in the second image, that of Sweet Thought.
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The foliation here is modern and was added ‘when the appended bifolium in A was bound incorrectly, hence the inverted folio order for the miniatures’ (Leo , n. and –). See also Earp a, –. Using the modern foliation, the folios of the Prologue should be read in the order E, D, F, G. While some authors who have suggested that the inversion of the folios was deliberate (see the discussion in Stone forthcoming), I agree with Stone that this is, given the rubric’s clear presentation of a sequence that is correctly followed in other manuscripts, unlikely to have been Machaut’s (or anyone’s) intention. The word sens will remain untranslated here, partly because the link with the place Sens and its archbishop is central. It has a variety of meanings, ranging from the perceptual (the faculty of sense, or act of sensing), through the intellectual (reason, comprehension), moral (moral sense or wisdom), to the idea of an act or attitude (understanding, opinion), or content of what is understood (meaning, interpretation, signification); see as well as the link there for ‘FEW XI a: sensus’ (). The lyrics are followed by lines of narrative poetry in the rhyming octosyllabic couplets typical of most of Machaut’s other dits and found significantly in the first dit proper, the Dit dou ergier. The explicit of the Prologue functions as an incipit rubric for Vergier, in that the final couplet of the Prologue locks its title into its rhyme: ‘Et pour ce vueil, sans plus targier, | Commencier le Dit dou Vergier’ (And so I wish, without further tarrying, to begin the Story of the Orchard). Hoepffner –, : , lines – (translation mine). Leo , . Leo , . Leo , and n. . Leo , .
Elizabeth Eva Leach
Figure 15.1a: .a: Machaut, Nature and her children, MS A, fol. Er (BnF)
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Seeing Sens: A Picture of Two Guillaumes and Two Brothers?
Figure 15.1b: .b: Sens, detail from MS A, fol. Er (BnF)
Figure 15.2b: .b: Sweet Thought, detail from MS A, fol. Dr (BnF)
The Prologue pictures were painted by the Master of the Bible of Jean de Sy, an artist formerly known as the Master of Copses (‘Le maître des boqueteaux’) because of his trademark use of grouped trees, who illuminated a number of French royal manuscripts during the reign of Charles V.11 The Prologue miniatures are the only works of the Jean de Sy Master in A.12 These pictures and their accompanying four ballades occupy folios that were added later.13 Only the narrative section of the Prologue forms part of A proper, and it evinces a change in the ruling of the page and the scribal hand.14 The miniatures in the rest of A, those in the originally foliated part of the book, are far less accomplished – François Avril terms them ‘provincial’ and has even suggested that they were done in Reims, perhaps under Machaut’s supervision.15 Avril notes that they resemble the illuminations in a French • 11 •
12 • • 13 • • 14 • • 15 • •
See Avril 1978, , 28 and 96–103 – (Plates 29–32). –). See for the Bible of Jean de Sy. My analysis (Leach 2011b, b, 95) ) of Machaut being humble only as a figure of Mary and not fully abasing himself before the nobility is supported by the visual resonance between the depiction of the god of Love in Figure .a and that which illustrates the Roman de la Rose in Morgan M.132. 15.2a M.. This copy of the Rose is possibly also the work of the Master of the Bible of Jean de Sy or someone associated with him, from a period roughly contemporary with A. Further resonance can be seen also with the Annunciation in the Hours of Philip the Bold, fol. 13r, available online at : . . This artist also worked on Vg, however. See Earp 1995a, a, 133–34. –. See Stone forthcoming. See Earp 1995a, a, 205, , and 205 n. 47; ; and Stone forthcoming. Avril 1982, , 126–27. –. See Leo 2011, , 102. .
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Elizabeth Eva Leach
Figure 15.2a: .a: Machaut, Love and his children, MS A, fol. Dr (BnF)
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Seeing Sens: A Picture of Two Guillaumes and Two Brothers?
translation of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, which is generally thought to have been illuminated in Metz in the first third of the fourteenth century and was known to be in the possession of a Messine family in the sixteenth century, although the decoration on the smaller initials is reminiscent of the style rémois. This manuscript is a close match for the style of the rest of A, but one of its miniatures resembles closely the composition of the Prologue miniatures. At the start of book (fol. v), Boethius is depicted lying down in the center of the image. He is flanked by Philosophy on the left carrying two codices, and two figures representing the liberal arts on the right: furthest right is Music bearing a notated oblong object, and between her and Boethius is a figure holding a goblet that J. Keith Atkinson cautiously identifies as Rhetoric (which would fit with the text of book , prose ), but whose crown gives her some visual resonance with Nature in the first Prologue miniature. Is it possible that the same artist who worked on the Boethius manuscript and the rest of MS A originally drafted the Prologue’s images too, using models similar to those familiar from their work on the Consolation? And were these opening miniatures then replaced by upgraded copies, based compositionally on the originals but executed more stylishly by the favorite royal artist, perhaps at royal instigation? This would tie in with a hypothetical historical scenario in which a royal patron chose to ‘upgrade’ the dying Machaut’s final complete-works book ‘some time after’ its original completion by commissioning a redrafting of the opening miniatures from a painter far better than the one Machaut himself had been using locally for the manuscript. It would also tally with the fact that the bifolio with the two large-format illuminations is tipped in where there are now stubs that were part of the original gathering. The painter they used for this upgrade had illuminated at least one Machaut manuscript before and understood Machaut’s regard for the role of image in the construction of his authorial persona. It seems, however, that it was not just Machaut’s ‘portrait’ that this painter was asked to paint. The Master of the Bible of Jean de Sy is thought to have trained in a similar milieu to a painter who was responsible for a fresco depicting the legendary Genealogy of the Luxembourgs in Karlštejn castle in the Czech Republic. The surviving fragments of this work also use ‘physiognomic differentiation’ and depict the French dauphin Charles de Valois (the
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Montpellier Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire, Section Médecine, H.; see comments in Porcher , , fig. and cf. the decoration of fig. . See also Leo , ; Avril , n. ; and the description in Atkinson , , where he compares it to a missal from Reims (Bibl. mun. ). This miniature is reproduced as fig. . in Leach b, . See also p. n. . A digitization of H. can be found at . Leo , ; for a fuller description of the hypothesis, see Leo , . This hypothesis would also require that the original copy of the opening four ballades and their accompanying miniatures were also originally on a bifolium that was a later, separate addition to the manuscript. This is, however, not impossible, as the two parts of the Prologue are clearly recognized as such in other sources (notably those that omit the narrative verse section). See the further discussion in Stone forthcoming. Leo , –. On the role of the Master of the Bible of Jean de Sy in Vg, see Earp a, –. Leo , .
Elizabeth Eva Leach
future Charles V) together with his maternal uncle, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV. Both Charles V (of France) and Charles IV (Holy Roman Emperor) are closely connected to Machaut: the latter was the son of Machaut’s employer, John of Luxembourg (king of Bohemia); the former, who was king at the time of MS A’s compilation, stayed at Machaut’s house in Reims when he was regent in the early s and remained a patron. He is also the main patron of the Jean de Sy Master. Realistic portraiture – the creation of likenesses – in the fourteenth century was renewed as a viable mode of depiction, prompted largely by the demands of patrons rather than the skills or desires of artists. Before the later Middle Ages, depiction of specific individuals was signaled by other visual features of a portrait, such as dress, accoutrements, or a verbal text. The idea of a portrait, especially as used in fourteenth-century French (‘portraire’, ‘portraiture’) meant the capturing of the inner essence of identity of a subject as opposed merely to the external surface features, something for which the term ‘contrefaire’ (counterfeit, resemble) was used. Georgia Sommers Wright has argued that this late-medieval reinvention of the physiologically differentiated likeness should be approached cautiously, and outlines strict criteria for their identification: the likeness must have been produced during the lifetime of the patron and must be one of at least two that resemble one another. She discusses the only four historical figures – Pope Boniface VIII, Rudolf IV of Austria, Emperor Charles IV, and Charles V of France – that she believes satisfy such strict criteria. The likeness of Machaut here would arguably also fit the bill, but not the figures of Sens and Sweet Thought. Although I agree that it may be ‘wiser to insist upon […] criteria of multiple images, resembling one another, made during the life of the patron’ (my emphasis), these criteria are overcautious, especially given records of now lost representations which might have helped meet the second stipulation. Wisdom, here, might well be over-ruled by Sens. Despite his suspicions that they are portraits, Leo does not propose a concrete historical figure for either Sens or Sweet Thought. While I have a far more tentative suggestion for the latter, I would like to argue strongly for the identification of the figure of Sens as Guillaume II de Melun (d. ). A discussion of who Guillaume II de Melun was, and why this figure might be him, involves an examination of the administration of the troubled reign of King John II of France. John (‘Jean de Valois’) was born in and, aged thirteen, married Bonne (‘Guta’) of Luxembourg, daughter of Machaut’s employer, King John of Bohemia (she was seventeen), and between and the couple had eleven children, of whom seven would survive into • • • • • • • •
Leo , ; see also Sterling , –. Earp a, –. Leo , . Wright , . Wright , . See Perkinson . Wright , , . Wright , . If, for example, the labeled statue of Guillaume II de Melun mentioned below was a likeness, its loss makes the difference between the fulfillment and non-fulfillment of these criteria.
Seeing Sens: A Picture of Two Guillaumes and Two Brothers?
adulthood. Bonne herself died, aged , just over a year before John, then duke of Normandy, became king of France in . The events of the last fourteen years of John’s life, while he reigned as John II of France, are the most important for the arguments advanced below. The throne of France was at this time significantly challenged by the victories of Edward III’s English forces in the early stages of the Hundred Years Wars. And from the early s on, John had another trial to his kingship in the figure of Charles d’Evreux, crowned king of Navarre in , who like Edward III claimed descent through the female line. Unable to get the Estates to agree to an increase in general taxation, King John was reduced to constant currency devaluations to finance the wars; these, in turn, led to unrest and calls for reforms. The period between and was turbulent: reformers who blamed France’s misfortunes on John’s mismanagement were attracted by the figure of the new pretender to the throne, Charles of Navarre. King John and Charles of Navarre came into sharper conflict over Navarre’s complicity in the assassination of the constable of France, Charles de la Cerda of Spain, in January . The following year saw the renewal of hostilities with the English who invaded Normandy. Allied with Edward III, Charles of Navarre was arrested in Rouen in April and imprisoned. After the Battle of Poitiers in , John II of France himself was held captive in England until , leaving his young son, another Charles (the newly installed dauphin de Viennois), in charge. The reformers saw their chance to influence the dauphin Charles as regent of France, and Charles of Navarre decided to champion the reforming tendency among the prelates and upper nobility, who angled for Charles of Navarre’s release. In the event Charles escaped from prison in , initially keeping a low profile in his native Normandy, but he returned to Paris in the wake of the peasant uprising known as the Jacquerie to press his advantage against the dauphin. Charles of Navarre’s attempts to strike an alliance with the Parisians in June and July was impeded by their suspicion; his erstwhile ally, Etienne Marcel, was murdered by the mob on July. The dauphin soon returned and took control of government; Charles of Navarre and his partisan Robert le Coq (the Bishop of Laon) left Paris and continued war by alliance with the English, negotiating peace only in the autumn of . In May , after signing the Treaty of Brétigny, John II of France returned from London. Historians have commented on the marked homosociability of King John II’s human relations, despite his high level of sexual reproduction. He seems to have found it difficult •
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They were married in the collegiate church of Notre-Dame de Melun. All four children to die young were daughters. Specific details can be found on the website of the Foundation for Medieval Genealogy (), for example, here at . . Earp a, ; Cazelles , . There is a family link between the Melun brothers and Charles of Spain: in Charles’s mother Isabelle d’Antoing married the Meluns’ father, Jean I de Melun, as his second wife (he was her third husband), making the Meluns and Charles de la Cerda stepbrothers; see Cazelles , . See . See Funk , –. See Funk , . Charles of Navarre made a treaty with Edward III on August ; Funk , n. . Cazelles , –, .
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to work with men who were not personal friends and he freely visited those he counted in this group at their private houses. His fidelity was remarked, as was his demand for love and loyalty in return. His chancellor, Pierre de la Forêt signed off a letter to him as ‘your humble creature, your little cardinal of Rouen’; and even contemporaries remarked on the strength of the love between the king and his constable and favorite, Charles of Spain, implying that this love might be improper. Guillaume II de Melun fell into this group of royal intimates amongst whom he was first in terms of efficacy and importance, he played a particularly important role in the period immediately following John’s return from London, and he was central in the administrations of both John and his son Charles throughout the middle decades of the century. Having been awarded an expectative prebend at Chartres in by Pope John XXII on the petition of Philip VI, by , while he studied at the University of Paris, Guillaume II de Melun held canonries at Paris, Orleans, and Amiens. It seems likely that he studied law at Paris, since on January he was named a counsellor-clerc in the parlement. From he was custos at the collegiate church of St Quentin, but there was a strong family tradition of being archbishop of Sens, the metropolitan see of Paris. His uncle (also called Guillaume de Melun) was an earlier archbishop of Sens (from to ) and when another uncle, Philippe de Melun (archbishop from ), died in , Guillaume not only headed the list of executors but also effectively ‘inherited’ the spirituality. Raymond Cazelles stresses how seriously Guillaume took being archbishop. He reinvested the see with power and energy, visiting its various dioceses and abbeys, arbitrating conflicts and disputing visitation rights. Guillaume II de Melun could be quite forceful. Sometime between and , in an altercation with the abbot of Saint-Germaine d’Auxerre over the payment of dues, Guillaume grabbed the abbot by the beard, pulled out a lot of hairs, and demanded payment. When the Abbot complained about this literally rebarbative treatment Guillaume sarcastically taunted him by saying ‘you’ll get your revenge when they make you pope’. Unhappily for Guillaume II de Melun, in this same abbot, Guillaume Grimoard, was elected Pope Urban V, which is of course how we know of this incident at all. Urban V called Guillaume II de Melun to Avignon, reminded him of his earlier insult and promptly translated him from the prestigious metropolitan see to the basically honorific patriarchy of Jerusalem. It was necessary for the French king, John II, to go to Avignon in person to intervene on Guillaume II de Melun’s behalf; at John’s instigation, he was restored to his former see. Guillaume II de Melun was not just interested in financial order but was also a fine administrator with interest in political and ecclesiastical reform. He put in place serious hygiene measures against the Great Mortality of . As well as being a man of the church, • • • • •
Cazelles , –, . Cazelles , . Cazelles , . Cazelles , –. His obvious piety did not prevent him having at least one son. Cazelles , .
Seeing Sens: A Picture of Two Guillaumes and Two Brothers?
an administrator, and political advisor, he was also a fighter, being taken with John II at the Battle of Poitiers in . In he founded the feast of St Quentin at the church of Sens with a solemn service at the eve of All Saints. He played an important role before and during the negotiations of the treatise of Brétigny, singing mass at the latter. His central role in stabilizing the currency and creating the gold franc on Dec is shown by the fact that the discussions that led to this step took place in his residence in Paris. The combination of the theoretical calls for a stable currency (by Nicole Oresme) and seeing the practice of such a policy during his years captive in England meant that Guillaume II de Melun was a strong advocate of this new policy. In he sang the mass at the funeral of King John II. Guillaume’s own funeral arrangements in Sens on May give evidence that his service extended into the reign of Charles V: although the canons of Sens initially opposed the person who sought to preside over the funeral (Pierre de Villiers, bishop of Troyes), they eventually allowed him to officiate only out of respect for the king ‘in whose service the said Guillaume of good memory persisted in the time that he was living’. In short, as Cazelles summarizes, ‘this prelate played a major political role over a long period of time’. In what follows, I argue that Sens in Machaut’s Prologue could be a portrait of Guillaume II de Melun and that the equivalent figure in the second image is someone closely related to him, his brother Jean II de Melun, the count of Tancarville. Two pieces of circumstantial evidence can be adduced to lend credence to the idea that the person at the head of the children of Nature is Guillaume II de Melun. First, as well as being so prudent that he arguably personifies the various qualities of sens in its several distinct meanings, the allegorical personification Sens is a metonymic way of referring to Guillaume II de Melun by his office rather than his given name, since Guillaume II de Melun was the Archbishop of Sens from until his death in . Second, by the time of manuscript A’s compilation he had already been personified as the allegorical character Sens in the long mid-fourteenth-century narrative poem the Roman des deduis by the king’s chaplain, Gace de la Buigne. In this poem, Sens (that is, [The Archbishop of ] Sens) functions as the most important advisor of the king, John II of France: • • •
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•
Cazelles , . Cazelles , . Cazelles , ; n. bis notes that the new franc of December had the motto ‘Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat’, the same three acclamations that the archbishop of Sens had to pronounce at the masses said at his accession, Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost. See Cazelles , –. Cazelles , . Cazelles , . Zoltán Rihmer (personal communication) notes that when ‘prelates were mentioned in the third person rather than addressed directly, the office seemed to be more important than the person who held it’ and could be used to refer to the person concerned; see . Cazelles (, –) claims it was started in June or July and finished in Paris the following year. His source for this information is not stated. Blomqvist agrees with the start date but notes it was not finished until some time between and , since it mentioned Pierre d'Orgemont as chancellor of France and Edward III of England as still living.
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Sens l’est alez servir premier, Raison l’a voulu compaignier [...] Ou siege s’est assis le roy Et a sa destre pres de soy A mis seoir Sens le premier Comme son maistre conseillier. Sens had come to serve him first, Reason wanted to accompany him […] On the throne sat the King and on his right, near his person, was placed Sens, the prime minister as his master counselor.
Sens organizes the other personified virtues in the first part of the poem, deciding their seating arrangement and proximity to King John, mediating their speeches and preparing them for a battle with the vices in which the first part of the poem culminates. As Guillaume II de Melun effectively ran John II’s administration in much this way, the identification of Sens with the archbishop of Sens would have been unavoidable for contemporaries. This poem’s second part contains a long jugement in which two related questions are debated: which is nobler, hunting with dogs or hunting with hounds, and which of these is the better pleasure? This debate amplifies and refers to a shorter earlier one which forms a -line verse section of what is otherwise a prose work, the Livres du Roy Modus et de la Royne Ratio. Modus, like Deduis, has two parts, although in the case of Modus it is the first part that is the cynegetic treatise. Gace’s Deduis is much longer, more rhetorical and elaborate than that in Modus, although it makes many of the same points. In both Modus and Deduis the jugement is made within the poem by submission to a third-party arbitrator. In Modus, the arbiter is the count of Tancarville. In Deduis, the judge is King John II of France, who had asked for the poem to be written for his son, Philip (later duke of Burgundy) during the period of the French king’s exile in England (–) after the Battle of Poitiers. As shown above, the king is aided by a number of personifications, which include both Sens (identified as standing for Guillaume II de Melun, archbishop of Sens) and, in the second part, Reason, who is described as Sens’s ‘brother’. Reason aids John II in deciding the outcome of Gace’s jugement poem, where he is aided by the same figure who was the main judge in Modus, the count of Tancarville. • • •
•
•
Blomqvist , lines – and lines –. For a discussion, see Leach , chap. . Tilander . The poem is by Henri de Ferrières and copied by Denis d’Hormes. An online copy of the fifteenth-century printing can be seen at . The abbey of Ferrières is in the archdiocese of Sens and was visited by Guillaume as archbishop. See Cazelles , . Its second part is titled Le songe de pestilence. Accordingly, the first part is usually called the Deduis du Roy Modus et de la Royne Ratio and is only not known as the Deduis in modern scholarship so as to prevent confusion between the two – in the same way that the two poems called the Roman de la Rose in the Middle Ages are given deliberately different names in modern scholarship (with Jean Renart’s being clarified as being about Guillaume de Dole). Modus and Deduis form a complementary pair in many ways and their similar medieval titles (both Deduis) would have linked them in the minds of their original audiences. Gace’s work refers to two bishops, composer contemporaries of Machaut’s – Philippe de Vitry and Denis le Grant – citing musical pieces by them as points of authority within the debate; see Leach , chap. . For a comparison of the debates in each, see Blomqvist , –.
Seeing Sens: A Picture of Two Guillaumes and Two Brothers?
In reality the Archbishop of Sens and the count of Tancarville were related as closely as Sens and Raison: they are brothers. The count of Tancarville, the arbitrator of Modus, is Jean II de Melun, the older brother of the archbishop of Sens, Guillaume II de Melun. In contrast to his brother’s spiritual power, Tancarville’s is a more a military and noble one, but one politically no less influential. Given the ecclesiastical/secular pairing of the two pictures, if Sens is the archbishop Guillaume II de Melun, it is therefore conceivable that the courtly figure of Sweet Thought represents Jean II de Melun. Jean II de Melun fought for the French since hostilities with England began in , at which time he was an equerry and already married. As hereditary constable of Normandy he was an intimate of King John II from the time when John was merely duke of Normandy. Jean II de Melun was Chamberlain of France, and, from December , sovereign master of the waters and forests of the kingdom. He took up the county of Tancarville in February , whose title placed him in the highest echelons of the nobility. Like both his own brother Guillaume and the king, Jean II de Melun was captured at Poitiers. When John II and his retinue (including both the Melun brothers) returned from captivity, the count of Tancarville took the lead role in war with the brigands whose unlicensed pillaging was threatening law and order throughout France (Machaut has the narrator Guillaume mention these routiers in the Voir dit as a reason for not being able to travel to see Toute Belle). When the fifteen-year-old Philippe de Rouvre died of the plague in Nov and the Duchy of Burgundy thus reverted to the crown, King John II gave the count of Tancarville orders to take possession of the duchy on his behalf, a role Jean II de Melun fulfilled for many years. That the count of Tancarville might be pictured at the head of the children of Love visiting Machaut is plausible. We know that Machaut knew the count of Tancarville because he mentions him in the complaint Sire, a vous fais ceste clamour (Cp), a work which has been dated to the s on the basis of manuscript transmission, but which could be slightly earlier. The •
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This fact strengthens Cazelles’s identification of Sens in Deduis with Guillaume II de Melun. Other aspects of his career are salient. Jean II was count of Tancarville from February (Earp a, ). He returned to the dauphin with the second Treaty of London and stayed in his council after its rejection during the invasion of Edward III in the period December to February (Earp a, , item ..b). He was present when the Treaty of Brétigny was negotiated (– May ) and went as hostage to London under its terms until when he returned to France. He brought back the body of King John II in (who died in in London on a visit to negotiate with Edward III) and thereafter served Charles V. His (and his brother’s) sister, Isabeau, was Dame de Houdain, the place where by July at the latest Machaut held a perpetual chaplaincy; see Earp a, item ..b. Cazelles , –. Both Gace de la Buigne and Henri de Ferrières were also Normans, as was Charles of Navarre. Cazelles , –. The Duchy of Burgundy was also claimed by Charles of Navarre until he renounced his claim in . Earp a, – gives the early s on the basis of the manuscript transmission; on p. he gives more specifically early . It is transmitted only in the later manuscripts M, A, and G and is addressed to a king. M represents a stage of the collection between Vg and A (see Earp a, ). Several candidates for the king who is addressed have been proposed including the kings of Bohemia ( John), France ( John or Charles), Cyprus (Pierre), or Navarre (Charles). Only the first of these is impossible (the poem must date from after Jean became count of Tancarville in , by which time John of Luxembourg had been dead for six years). The speaker (Guillaume de Machaut’s authorial persona) refers to himself as the king’s secretary, which makes it possible that the addressee is Charles of Navarre, since although there
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complaining ‘je’ laments that the king used to treat him well when he made him his secretary, but now the count of Tancarville has sent him a horse in such a poor condition that he is effectively without a horse; the ‘je’ would happily travel to France to see the lord but his way is blocked by brigands and he fears weather, gout, plague, and falling into a ditch. The tone here suggests that Jean II de Melun could take a certain level of teasing and was probably a trusted patron or friend of Machaut. The question of how Machaut might have known Tancarville’s brother the archbishop of Sens, however, cannot be answered by adducing such literary or documentary evidence, although both knew King John II, either directly or through his wife (Bonne) or father-inlaw ( John of Luxembourg). In addition, there is some circumstantial evidence putting them in the same institution at the same time. From Guillaume II de Melun was custos at the collegiate church of St Quentin, where Machaut held a benefice gained sometime between and , without papal intervention, which he kept until at least . Although the holding of a sine cura benefice does not imply that Machaut was ever present in St Quentin, as a canon at Reims he might well have traveled there as part of an annual delegation of canons from all twelve chapters in the archdiocese in St Quentin. This tradition, existing since the thirteenth century, seems to have been reinstituted in as an important part of ecclesiastical politics after the resolution of a dispute with the pope over the election of Guillaume de Trie as archbishop. Machaut’s motet , which names Guillaume de Trie in its upper voices, is paired in all sources with one that uses a tenor taken from a Responsory for St Quentin (M). Anne Walters Robertson has raised the possibility that Machaut might have served as a delegate to these meetings in St Quentin and offered this pair of motets as a ‘sort of anthem for the canons’ who attended. Guillaume II de Melun and Guillaume de Machaut, therefore, could have met at St Quentin any time between and at least . Failing such a meeting, the links both Guillaumes had to Charles de Valois in the period of his regency might nevertheless point to an acquaintance at least two decades old at the time of the compilation of A (c. –), at which point both Guillaumes were old men: de Melun pre-deceased de Machaut by only one year in . Jean II de Melun, the count of Tancarville, did not die until . Depending on the exact timing of the last-minute upgrading of the manuscript, the patron who organized it might have been either Guillaume II de Melun celebrating his family’s closeness to Machaut’s artistry, or Jean II de Melun memorializing both his own dead brother and the noble rhetorician Machaut.
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is no formal record of the nature of Machaut’s service to Charles, it is assumed that he was working for him in the early s (see Earp a, –). It was this last date when he was taxed on the livres a year it brought him; see Earp a, – item ..e and – item ..b. Desportes , –. Guillaume de Trie was elected March and died September ; see also Maurey , – and Desmond . Robertson , –. Robertson , . In this case the ‘portrait’ would show him as much younger than his actual age, although this would not be unusual (one thinks of the depictions of the ‘je’ of Remede as a young lover in MS C).
Seeing Sens: A Picture of Two Guillaumes and Two Brothers?
Guillaume II de Melun may well have wanted to celebrate Machaut’s work as he was extremely interested in what might broadly be considered the artistic aspects of his contemporary culture. There are surviving fragments of polyphonic music in ars nova notation that survive from Sens Cathedral, the dating of which may point to a tradition of sung polyphony in a style Jacques Chailley compares positively with that of Machaut’s motets. Guillaume II de Melun also invested money in buildings and their artistic contents, and commissioned deluxe manuscript books: several beautifully illustrated manuscripts survive that bear his arms. Appending his arms to items was one way in which Guillaume II de Melun made his patronage clear: a stone statue of the Virgin in the cathedral in Sens apparently bore his arms on her feet. But he was also interested in having himself represented within the picture: at the south side of the main altar in the cathedral of Paris another statue of the Virgin was accompanied by a nearby representation of Guillaume himself, complete with a label identifying him and attesting to his role in the provision of the statue. Whether this statue was a likeness or not cannot now be ascertained. Although the Prologue image lacks a ‘label’ within the frame of the picture itself, as discussed above, the poem’s refrain names him as ‘Sens’. As already argued, the political situation in France in the s and s was complex, especially given the joint threats to the throne posed by Edward III of England and Charles of Navarre. Machaut and the Melun brothers were never allied with the English, but all three have connections to Charles of Navarre who was, at least intermittently, so allied. While John II was captive in London, the dauphin and regent Charles of Normandy had difficult dealings with Charles of Navarre in which Machaut was probably involved. The centrality of Machaut in French political life has been much underemphasized by those who see his poetry as only conventionally sycophantic or even apolitical, especially those also influenced by the designation of Charles of Navarre as Charles ‘le Mauvais’ (Charles the Bad – an epithet given him by a sixteenth-century Spanish writer), which views him as a traitor to the two kings of France designated respectively John ‘le Bon’ ( John the Good) and Charles ‘le Sage’ (Charles the Wise). Both Machaut and his brother Jean can be linked to the house of Navarre. For Jean de Machaut, Charles of Navarre renewed a request for an expectative canonry and prebend at •
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The alternative is that the upgrade was commissioned by Charles V himself. The idea of memorialization is supported by the portrait nature of the images since funerary monuments at this period were noticeably more likely to represent the deceased with a realism approaching modern concepts of portraiture; see Binski , –. The idea of Machaut as a ‘noble rhetorician’ was used to lament his death in the double ballade déploration texts of Deschamps; see Leach b, –. Cazelles , –. See Chailley and the images at . His pontifical is preserved as British Library, Egerton and carries the arms of Melun and the archbishop of Sens (see the online image at ); his will left a large missal to the chaplains of Saint-Laurent in the archbishop’s palace at Sens; see Cazelles , . Cazelles , . Wathey argues that Machaut was working for Charles of Navarre’s future sister-in-law, Yolande of Flanders, which places him very neatly in the midst of the tense relations between the French and Navarrese factions; see his chapter in this volume.
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Reims in and another at Toul, listing him as ‘dilecto suo’ (his favorite). Roger Bowers has argued that Guillaume de Machaut entered Charles’s service after the death of John of Luxembourg in ; Andrew Wathey pushes this date back to at least the summer of and suggests he first served Yolande of Flanders, who was married that year to Charles of Navarre’s brother, Philip. At least two of Machaut’s longer poems – Jugement Navarre and Confort d’ami – are dedicated to Charles and the latter expresses clear reformist sympathies. Although Charles of Navarre was a rival for the French throne with Charles de Valois in the s, to be in his service was not the treasonous behavior that later historians perceived it to be. Neither the Confort d’ami (which Machaut sets while the French crown had Charles of Navarre imprisoned at Arleux, from where he escaped in ), nor the earlier Jugement Navarre were subject to a politically motivated airbrushing from history; both retained a central place in Machaut’s later collected works, as attested by their inclusion in A. The participation of reformers in the events of – did not harm the careers of those who had sought reform; on the contrary, John II and his son Charles drew their chosen servants from the ranks of the reformers of the Estates most of whom were one-time partisans of Charles of Navarre. Both Guillaume and Jean II de Melun were part of a stable group of reforming nobles and higher clergy that remained fairly constant from the period after John II’s return from England in until the end of the reign of his son Charles V. This period, in important contrast to the early s, saw twenty-five years of currency stability in France, a shift in fiscal policy for which Guillaume II de Melun was largely responsible. The broader group of reformers included Raoul de Louppy and Louis Thésard both of whom certainly knew Machaut. Both the Melun brothers also had broad Navarrese sympathies in the s and yet retained their centrality in the Valois administration after the breakdown of relations between Charles of Navarre and the dauphin in May . The subsequent reconciliation between Charles and the dauphin shows that a vassal that strays can nevertheless be forgiven. This feature of political life in this period of French history applies not just to the higher echelons of the nobility but also to their administrators and servants, especially members of the higher clergy and possibly also culturally high-profile secretaries. This very situation of • •
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Earp a, , item ..f. Wathey (p. – above) points out that the same rotulus that confirms Jean’s earlier service to Yolande of Flanders (Charles of Navarre’s brother’s wife from ) also notes Machaut’s presence, confirming that both had ‘reached Yolande’s service, perhaps together, by late ’. At this point, Charles was offering financial support to Yolande ‘reflecting a sensitivity to her mother’s interest in the Montfort-Navarre struggle for control of Brittany’ (Wathey, p. ). See also Earp a, –; Bowers . Earp a, , items ..a–c. See the comments in Cazelles , . On Raoul de Vienne, Sire de Louppy see Cazelles , , , and Guillaume de Machaut’s Loange ballade, Lo. See also Wathey’s chapter, p. , where he suggests that Machaut knew Raoul through his work for Yolande of Flanders. Louis Thésard, a canon of Reims from to , was elected archbishop there in , although Machaut did not attend his installation (see Desportes , –). Others in this group included Philippe de Troismons, Pierre de Villiers, Raoul de Renneval, Louis d’Harcourt, Aleaume Boistel, and Nicole Oresme. Funk , ; Cazelles , , , .
Seeing Sens: A Picture of Two Guillaumes and Two Brothers?
one’s difficult political alignment seems to be hinted at in a passage from the Voir dit which appears also to make a further cryptic reference to Jean II de Melun. In the closing part of the Voir dit, after explaining how the five articles of Titus Livius’s Fortune can be applied to Toute Belle, Guillaume concludes that his lady and Fortune could be good friends because they are both changeable, like a molting sparrow hawk. He elaborates this into a story about how a well-bred falcon can be trained and rewarded for its service with the heart of the bird it has killed for its master (lines –). The equation of women and hawks – famous to English-speaking scholarship because of later uses such as that in Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew – was one that Machaut had already made at length in his didactic Dit de l’alerion, which compares four different kinds of birds to different female beloveds. The narrator Guillaume’s reading of the story in the Voir dit (lines –) seems to follow the precedent of the Alerion by casting the lady in the role of the wayward bird. But Guillaume’s interpretation makes little logical sense and is undercut by the action that he takes as a result: that is, Guillaume does not suggest berating and starving a lady who will not see reason and, like the well-trained hawk, return to her proper ‘prey’. Instead, he concludes that one ought to cease crying and plaining and thank her with head held high, saying ‘if it’s what pleases you, I strongly agree’ (lines –). This line, ‘Puis qu’il vous plaist forment m’agrée’, which appears in this context to be delivered through gritted teeth in the face of provocation, was already a refrain in the thirteenth century. Machaut himself had already used it at least twice, most pertinently here as a repeating refrain in the virelai Se ma dame m’a guerpi (V), in which the lover responds to being cast off by his lady. The lover in the virelai ought to conclude that such a lady’s love is worthless because she lacks loyalty. The exemplum in the Voir dit thereby hints at a more triangular relationship, one that would better fit the context of the role of the court poet that the Voir dit so thoroughly explores. The falcon hunts birds on behalf of his master much as Machaut woos and praises ladies on behalf of his patrons. Like the falcon, if the poet starts to stray, he can be called back and redirected to the prey that is desired. And like the falcon, the poet does not himself get the bird, which is reserved for his master’s degustation, but he has its heart to sustain him and keep him from hunger. Similarly, the poet addressed the lady on behalf • • • •
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The sparrow hawk is the first bird that the narrator-protagonist of Machaut’s Alerion loves and trains; he loses it because it molts. See Gaudet and Hieatt . This and ensuing references to the Voir dit follow the edition by Leech-Wilkinson and Palmer (). William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, act , scene , lines –; on Alerion see Calin , chap. ; Brownlee , –. Se ma dame m’a guerpi (V) uses this line as an unchanging refrain in both the refrain proper and in the tierce section. The extra repetition it thus gains – the refrain melody serving only this text – draws attention to it, its over-emphasis reinforcing the sense of the ‘je’ attempting to convince himself to feel genuinely the pleasure he claims that he ought to feel. The line is the second half of vdB (see ), which is found in the thirteenth-century motet, De mes amours/ L’autrier/ Defors Compiegne, where it makes up the last line of the song tenor. Boogaart a, does not mention its use in V, but cites the motet tenor as a previously unnoticed source for both the Voir dit’s use and the refrain of Douce dame, vous ociés à tort (Lo). This is like the third bird of Alerion, the gyrfalcon, which goes after an ignoble prey. In Alerion the narrator-protagonist is so well-schooled by Love at this point that he gets over this loss very quickly.
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of the patron but is nourished by the love of his audience, whose hearts are his; this sustains him financially as he receives payment and gifts for his work. Guillaume introduces this story within the Voir dit as one he has heard recounted by a count, who is his lord and great friend (lines –) and a man who has placed all his entente in the delight of falconry (lines –). The count ‘en scet trop plus que homs | Et trop plus quautres si deduit’ (knows more about it [falconry] than anyone else and enjoys it more than others; lines –). Although falconry was almost universally practiced among the European nobility in this period, the most famous and respected devotee of the pastime in the s was perhaps Jean II de Melun, the count of Tancarville, who is the judge of the debate between the hawkers and the huntsmen in Henri de Ferrières’s Modus and assists the king in judging the similar debate in Gace de la Buigne’s Deduis. Re-reading the Voir dit we might therefore see that a servant of the king (the count of Tancarville) tells the court poet Machaut a tale that might have amorous resonance in its local position in the Voir dit, but hints at a greater applicability as a moral tale for patronclient relations. The hawk is like those court administrators or reforming nobles who were temporarily attracted by another prey – allying themselves with Charles of Navarre, for example – before returning at the prompting of their lord (King John and his son and regent Charles) to the true path. Like the hawk they can be forgiven, nourished, and cherished: this is as true for Tancarville as it was for Machaut. If it is the archbishop of Sens who greets Machaut at Nature’s behest and the count of Tancarville whom Love introduces in the second miniature, manuscript A’s iconographic upgrade would reflect the enduring love and forgiveness due to a hawk whose prey was always the noblest.
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See Leach , –; Tilander , lines – (section ).
Machaut Musicology �
. S S: P M M M G* Uri Smilansky
Lawrence Earp’s encyclopedic knowledge of the Machaut manuscripts extends beyond their material detail and creation histories, covering also their subsequent use, rediscovery, and extended influence on modern scholarship. While engaging with these sources myself, I was lucky enough to have benefited from his insightful advice. Indeed, the focus of this contribution stood at the center of one such exchange, and I would like to humbly dedicate its results to him in recognition of his patient endurance of my inquiries. I wish to discuss the multiple – yet, to date, unstudied – annotations found in the music section of Machaut’s MS G. In doing so, I make the case for understanding them as performance markings, most likely of eighteenth-century origins. Viewed in this light, they offer a unique vantage point on the musical reception of Machaut’s songs and on the influence of practical, theoretical, and aesthetic parameters on readership. I begin with the markings themselves, discussing patterns in their distribution and interpretation. A middle section considers the relationship between these markings and our knowledge of this manuscript’s history, locating their likely point of origin. Finally, I explore what they can teach us about the historical reception of the past and suggest some avenues for further exploration.
The musical annotations in G form a set of faint, fluid strokes, irregular in shape, strength, and distribution; they clearly postdate the manuscript’s copying. These annotations seem to demarcate mensural divisions – or ‘bar lines’ – in thirty-four of the forty-eight songs copied into fols v–v. As far as I can tell, they do not appear in the remainder of this source’s music, nor do they have equivalents in the other Machaut manuscripts. In this section, I analyze their distribution and positions in order to identify the practices which led to their creation. Table . presents an overview of the annotations I was able to locate using G’s digital copy on Gallica and from a few hours of direct access to the manuscript on September . Lines are often hard to discern and easy to imagine, as they interact with the many erasures, bleed-throughs, ink transfers, and other damage sustained by this source. Their abrupt disappearance after fol. v, for example, may attest more to the deterioration of parchment quality at this point in G, causing me to be less confident in identifying them, *
•
This text was written at the University of Oxford in the context of the ERC project ‘Music and Late Medieval European Court Cultures’ (, –) led by Karl Kügle. The project received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon research and innovation program (grant no. ). Much of the research on which it builds was undertaken as part of the Leverhulme Trust funded project ‘Guillaume de Machaut: Music, Image, Text in the Middle Ages’ (–) led by Yolanda Plumley and based at the University of Exeter. Particularly important contributions in this regard are Earp ; a; a; a; a; ; and .
Singing from the Source: Performance Markings in Machaut Manuscript G
than to their non-existence. Thus, I chose to avoid counting markings and giving the impression of numerical precision. Instead, I signify relative degrees of intensity of distribution. Beyond presence, the table provides some information regarding interpretation. The ‘Reading errors’ column highlights songs in which one of two patterns are evident: either they contain evidence of repeated, changed readings (suggesting an attempt to correct a perceived initial error), or their markings suggest a mensural reading different from the currently accepted norm. Occasionally, both elements appear, as we shall see below. Instances of incorrect application of imperfection and augmentation rules are not collated here. Likewise, the ‘Errors in MS’ column skirts over most of the erasures, changes, corrections, and omissions present in this source. It draws attention only to those cases in which I considered faulty presentation in G to have led directly to difficulties in reading. After all, an ambiguously positioned rest, dot, or note can undermine the interpretation of an entire section, especially if the reader has no access to concordances. The first annotation I could find illustrates this, and at the same time exemplifies how these lines are often difficult to spot: Figure . shows the only annotation entered into Helas! tant ay doleur (B, fol. v). More visible at the top of the staff, a thin grey line halves the excerpt’s lone breve. This excerpt is located close to the end of the ballade’s A section, and seems to indicate that the marker believed a ‘bar line’ or ‘down beat’ appears in the middle of this note. This syncopation, however, does not appear in the modern edition. Still, I contend that this ‘error’ resulted from the original scribe’s substitution of a semibreve rest with a minim rest a few notes previously, not from a reading or counting error by whomever added this line. Table .: Distribution of markings and reading difficulties in MS G, fols r–v
Folio(s)
Work, voices*
r
B:
–
B:
r
B:
v
r
v
Minimal
B:
–
B:
r
B:
B:
r
v
v–r
B: ()
B:
v
v–r
B:
r
B:
v
B:
v–r
B:
B:
r
B:
v –
B:
r
B:
v
Occasional
B:
v
v
Intensive
r
None?
Reading errors
Errors in MS
Uri Smilansky
Folio(s)
Work, # voices*
140 v
B: 3 B19:
–r 140v–141
B: 2 B20:
141
B21: B: 4
r–v
–r 141 v–142
B: 4 B22:
r 142
B: 3 B23:
142
B: 2 B24:
v
–r v–143 142
B: 3 B25:
143
B: 3 B26:
r
– –144 143
B: 3 B28:
144r–v
B31: B: 3
–r 144 v–145
B: 3 (3) B29: ()
145
B: 3 B32:
v
r
v
–r v–146 145
B: 3 B33:
– –147 146
B: 4 B34: (2) ()
r 147
B: 1 B37:
v
*
r
Minimal
None?
Reading errors
Errors in MS
B: 3 B35:
v
–v 147v–148
B36: B: 3
148 v
B: 3 B38:
149r
B: 3 B39:
v 149
B: 3 B40:
150
r
R: 3 R1:
r 150
R: 2 R2:
150
R3: R: 2
r–v
150 v
R: 2 R4:
150
R: 2 R5:
v
–r 150v–151
R: 2 R6:
151
R: 2 R7:
r
Occasional
B: 2 B27:
143v
147
Intensive
151r–v
R: 4 R9:
v 151
R: 4 R10: B, B29, B17, B, and B34 B are polytextual; the italicized number in parentheses indicates the number of different texts
I am, as yet, unable to offer a conclusive material analysis of the markings in MS G’s music section.2 They appear to be executed using metalpoint rather than ink, but within this category, Figure 16.1: .: MS G, fol. 134 v, detail of B2 B (BnF)
• 2 •
Certainty here would require using intrusive or prohibitively expensive forms of analysis. For a summary of currently available analytical techniques, see Macková and others 2016. .
313
Singing from the Source: Performance Markings in Machaut Manuscript G
lead and graphite are notoriously difficult to separate by eye, especially when appearing on unprepared backgrounds. I believe lead pencil is more likely, although clearly not the same one used for the ruling of the manuscript early in its production history. Ascertaining the material used would aid dating, yet perhaps not to the degree that we would wish. It is true that graphite-based writing implements did not become available before the mid-sixteenth century, necessitating a post-medieval date for the use of that material. This, however, did not immediately translate to widespread use, and lead-based implements remained popular for centuries to come. Indeed, graphite was particularly slow to penetrate the French market due to the poor political relations between France and England (the latter being where graphite was mined). In France, graphite pencils became more widespread only following the patent given to Nicolas-Jacques Conté (–), which enabled their manufacture using lower-grade graphite mixed with clay. Even then, alternatives remained popular for a long while still. Thus, if lead pencil was used for making these marks, this could have happened at virtually any point since the manuscript’s completion in the s. The simplicity, adaptability, and inconsistency of these faint lines make them impossible to date on paleographic grounds. Table . identifies a number of further patterns. The annotator was primarily interested in vernacular songs and had the tendency to prioritize larger polyphonic settings. Most two-voice compositions appear in the ‘minimal’ or ‘none?’ columns (B–B, B, B, B–B, B, B, B, R–R), far fewer in the ‘occasional’ column (B, B–B, R), and only B and R in the ‘intensive’ column. Likewise, the two polytextual three-voice ballades (B, B) contain very few markings. This is probably due to their presentation: each of their voices is followed by its own residual strophes, making them look like small collections of monophonic songs. In contrast, the first clearly discernible three-voice ballade (B) was marked intensively, and many more larger-scale songs appear in the ‘intensive’ and ‘occasional’ columns than in the other two columns (for B see below). A second habit interacts with this seemingly systematic approach, one which I characterize as a ‘sampling’ attitude. This manifests itself in two ways. On the one hand, the tendency to prefer larger settings was inconsistent: we have seen the intensive annotation of a pair of two-voice songs, and I could find no marks in the three-voiced B, B, or B. On the other hand, areas of close engagement (be that with one or more songs) are often followed by a gap before markings reappear. For instance, after the intensive marking of B, I found no lines in B–B. Likewise, they are absent from B–B after B, and from B and B after B. It ap •
• •
Watrous (, ) advises that under the microscope, lead-point markings appear more striated, their particles more ‘eccentrically deposited’ in comparison with graphite marks. As Watrous goes on to explain, surfaces destined for metalpoint drawing were usually prepared first, using a mixture of minerals, pigment, and adhesive in order to make the metal deposits more visible and durable. For a more detailed examination of metal points in drawing (rather than in writing), see Duval, Guicharnaud, and Dran . I warmly thank Charlotte Denoël for her input on this question, which included direct examination of the manuscript. See Petroski . I use the term in its statistical meaning of a selection from within a group, not its musical one, involving extraction and reuse more akin to the practice of citation.
Uri Smilansky
pears that there was no attempt to first master seemingly simpler examples before moving on to more complex ones. Similarly, the locations of lines within each song combine distinct patterns with inconsistencies and exceptions. Some songs contain lines only in their opening moments (in all voices), with annotations petering out upon encountering difficulties. This suggests the act of annotation to be a sign of positive engagement and that absence demarcates the end of that engagement. For example, the markings in Ma chiere dame (B, fol. v) stop not long before each voice encounters a figure containing two semibreves followed by a breve (see Example ., in which these locations are highlighted with red squares). In the correctly identified context of perfect tempus with minor prolation (43), this would call for the second semibreve to be augmented. Apparently, the procedure flummoxed the annotator, causing engagement with the song to stop. Nevertheless, the contratenor contains a similar rhythmic pattern earlier on – but with the first semibreve replaced by a semibreve rest – which has been interpreted correctly (highlighted within a green oval in Example .). This inconsistency is interesting. It attests to an approach that is not entirely systematic or strict, with varying degrees of creativity employed to solving local problems. As we shall see, both augmentation procedure and ligature interpretation were correctly dealt with in other songs. This suggests that voices were annotated simultaneously, not consecutively in isolation: although the contratenor could have been read further, this was deemed pointless without the ability to keep going with the other two voices. It was forsaken due to difficulties in interpreting the polyphonic texture, not its individual linear detail. These discrepancies in reading technique between the voices demonstrates varying levels of adaptability. This gives rise to the possibility – which I entertain further below – of multiple readers engaging with the notation simultaneously, rather than a single reader working through each voice in turn.
•
• • • •
My examples intentionally avoid a standardized editorial practice. Examples which concentrate on what can be seen in the source (Examples ., ., and, in part, . and .) use original note shapes and preserve the visual impact of the manuscript’s underlay. I chose to avoid inserting further interpretive layers and refrain from indicating word divisions or poetic lineation through capitalization. Modern notation is used when the example’s emphasis is on interpretation. Even here, I have included only information relevant to the topic at hand. For example, when discussing mensural combinations in Examples .–., I removed both text and ligature indications to make the scores more concise and their comparison easier. In all of the examples, the markings in G are rendered as dashed bar lines. The difficulty here may have been compounded by the appearance of ligatures in these locations in the tenor and contratenor. That is, the markings make clear that the rest began a unit, as did the breve. Whether the semibreve in-between was doubled in duration or some other procedure resulted in it and the rest lasting the required amount of time, one cannot tell. I interpret the apparent mark before the last note of the contratenor’s line as an offset from the hem of the lady’s dress in the illumination on fol. r. With a writing block of . × . inch (that is, just shy of the surface of A paper), G is the second largest of the Machaut manuscripts (with E being the largest). While simultaneous reading may not have been particularly comfortable, experience with reading from the smaller Vg facsimile (Earp ) leads me to believe it would nonetheless be possible (especially if – as evidence discussed below suggests – the poetic text was not engaged with closely). For a discussion of manuscript size, see Bain .
Singing from the Source: Performance Markings in Machaut Manuscript G
Example 16.1: .: B40, B, beginning
In other songs, however, it is clear that a different procedure was employed. We have already seen evidence of reading without annotation in B, B2, where a single mark appears part way through the song’s texted voice (Figure 16.1), .), but not at its beginning or in its tenor voice. (B, fols 145v–146 –r) Likewise, lines in J’aim miex languir (B, (B7, fol. 136 r) and Nes qu’on porroit (B33, are located only towards the very end of their respective texted voices. Such usage suggests that, in these cases at least, successful reading proceeded without annotation, with marks being added only according to subjective need, when encountering a perceived problem. Nevertheless, while the proliferation of lines in a particularly syncopated song such as Tant doucement (R9, (R, fol. 151 r) supports the view that lines were added due to perceived rhythmic difficulties, other cases challenge its logic. There is no technical reason for the second half of B to have been harder to interpret than its beginning. Even if it was, what challenge could B7 its last note offer that it required an explanatory annotation? In other songs, repeated melodic and rhythmic figures are matched by repeated marks, suggesting a function more akin to a reminder than to the solution of a puzzle. In my view, it is likely that systematic and erratic annotation procedures coexisted, with lines (or even the mechanical action of marking them) acting as momentary aids in a negotiation between the linear and the vertical. I also propose that while the absence of marks within certain sections of a song does not indicate it was not read, complete absence might be understood as a lack of engagement. The markings demonstrate some proficiency with medieval notational principles, along with an acceptance of certain aesthetic possibilities. To begin with, scale relationships
316
Uri Smilansky
between minims, semibreves, breves (and occasionally longs) were clearly understood. In Figure 16.1 . we have already encountered the acceptance of a syncopated breve. The markings in Figure 16.2 . (taken from the contratenor of R9) R) show an understanding of syncopated semibreves, and the correct interpretation of c.o.p. ligatures as equivalent to two semibreves, which is demonstrated throughout the annotated section. When marked, other ligatures were interpreted (usually correctly) as comprising a succession of breves. All four medieval mensural possibilities were used, and no other groupings are suggested.11 Imperfect tempus major prolation (68) is least common, with markings suggesting a preference for perfect (B, fol. 147 r), tempus major prolation (98). An example can be seen in Dame, se vous m’estes (B37, as discussed directly below. It is impossible to ascertain precisely how the markings in G interact with the notational rules of perfection. In many cases, a variety of workarounds may have been sufficient to interpret long stretches of music correctly. Occasionally, two notated minims or semibreves were taken to fill the time duration expected of three such notes. Still, it is unclear whether this was thought of as part of a systematic augmentation process, as two equal durations (dotting), or as an inexplicable anomaly. As we have already seen, and will encounter again below, there is also evidence to suggest that semibreve augmentation was not well understood, and that arriving at a situation where its application was called for was taken as evidence of an erroneous reading. Procedures akin to imperfection are more common. The groupings marked in B37 B (Figure 16.3) .) show an acceptance of the inherent flexibility of breves to contain either two or three semibreves, and of semibreves to contain either two or three minims.
Figure 16.2: .: MS G, fol. 151 r, detail of contratenor of R9 R (BnF)
The annotation of B37 B is interesting for other reasons. For one, it gives evidence of multiple interpretation attempts. The top staff in Example 16.2 . shows all the markings present. I see this apparent confusion as reflecting the following procedure: having decided to interpret this song in perfect tempus major prolation (98), its opening breve was taken to be ternary, filling its entire first mensural unit (‘perfect’ in medieval parlance, represented by the second staff of Example .). 16.2). This reading, however, was deemed a mistake, as it culminates in the need to augment a semibreve at the end of the song’s first staff in G, or else to syncopate the breve that follows. Forsaking this attempt, a new set of markings was en-
• 11 •
2 4, 3 68, and 98 time signatures without Medieval mensural theory results in grouping patterns equivalent to the modern 4, necessarily suggesting modern stress patterns. For opposing interpretations of the relationship between mensuration and stress, see Maw 2004 and Smilansky 2021. . The theory had no equivalent to the modern 44 (offering 2 × 42 instead), a grouping that is not found in the markings.
317
Singing from the Source: Performance Markings in Machaut Manuscript G
Figure 16.3: .: MS G, fol. 147 r, detail of B37 B (BnF) Example 16.2: .: Markings and their meaning in B37, B, along with standard standard modern transcription
MS G V
–
Da
2
me
se
vous
mes
tes
ra men
bran
ce
lon
tein
ne
9 V 8 ˙. 6 V 8 ˙.
par
p[ro]chain ne
‚‚‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ ‚‚ ‚‚ ‚
‚ ‚‚‚ ‚ ‚ –
pas
nest
mes
cuers
de
vous
est
nuit
et
jour
de
vous
9 œ œ œ. œ. œ œ œ œ œ œ. œ. w V 8 ˙ . œ . œ œ œJ J Car
1
‚‚‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ ‚‚‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ –
œ œ œ œ œ œ. œ. œ œ œ œ œ œ. œ. ˙.
J
J œ . . œœœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ. œ. ˙. J J
loin
teins
?
œœœ œ œ œ œ œ œ J œ J œ œ œ J œ.
J
J
œœœ œ œ œ œ œ œ J œ J œ œ œ J œ.
J
J
Œ œJ œ œ œ œ œJ ˙ .
1. Œ œJ œ œ œ œ œJ w .
:
tered, reading both breves as binary (‘imperfect’), which resolved the later issue and allowed reading to carry on until the end of the section (third staff of Example 16.2). .). It may also be significant that neither the note spacing nor the underlay pattern affected the interpretation of the song’s mensural context (see the second staff of Figure 16.3 . and compare with the last staff of Example 16.2). .). Perhaps a preoccupation with the notes precluded engagement with the text. I shall return to the implications of both aspects later on. B is the only monophonic song to have attracted much attention. As we have seen, B37 polytextual songs which might look monophonic on the page were not engaged with deeply, –r) and virelais (fols and markings are absent in the generic collections of lais (fols 74 r–102 –v). I propose that its presentation explains this interest. B37 B appears directly after v–163 154 –r), and is followed by empty space at the Ne quier veoir/ Quant Theseus (B34, (B, fols 146v–147 end of an opening dedicated to these two ballades (see Figure 16.4). .). I suspect that they were
318
Uri Smilansky
first read as comprising a single unit. B is an unusual, rhythmically challenging, four-voice setting, with two texted and two untexted voices. It is generously peppered with markings throughout the beginnings of all its voices. Nevertheless, this song exemplifies the difficulty of interpreting the meaning of the markings. To begin with, it is not clear how its texture was perceived. In G, B’s cantus I (Ne quier veoir) is followed directly by its tenor and only then by cantus I’s residual strophes. This arrangement is then duplicated for the cantus II and contratenor voices. At first glance, its presentation suggests two independent two-voice settings. That each pair of voices was marked in a different mensuration supports this as an initial impression. The cantus II and contratenor pair is marked according to a fully binary division (42). Even here, however, questions remain regarding the way the voices relate to each other. As I cannot identify a line going through the first long of the contratenor, the question of whether it was interpreted as consisting of one or two breves remains open (reading it as a breve would allow the first marks of both voices to coincide). Both versions are presented in Example .. The resulting two textures are more or less equal in terms of the distribution of dissonance. I can see a further fourteen lines in cantus II beyond the section transcribed here, but no more in the contratenor. Perhaps this was the result of uncertainty concerning the interpretation of the three-note ligature that ends the transcribed fragment or maybe the non-simultaneous arrival at the end of the second transcription may have been the culprit here. Either way, the continued marking of cantus II may hint at this voice having been read against at least one other voice other than the contratenor. Otherwise, this independence would be hard to explain. Example .: Two interpretations of the markings in B, cantus II and contratenor œ œ
2 ˙
C II V 4 ˙ 2 C II V 4 Ct Ct
2 V4 2 w V4 w
œœœ œœœœ
œ œ œ œ
2 ˙ C II V 4 ˙ 2 C II V 4
œœœœ œœœœ
Ct
œ œ œ œ
Ct
2 V4 2 ˙ V4 ˙
˙ ˙
œœ œ œ œœ ˙ J J œœ œ œ œœ ˙ J J
j j œ œ œ ‰ j j j œ œ œ œ œ ‰ j œ œ
œ œ œ œ J J œ œ œ œ J
œ œ
J j j ‰ j œ œ œ j j œ œ œ œ œ ‰ j œ œ
J
j œ œœ ‰œ œ œ œ jœ œ œœ ‰œ œ œ œ œ ˙ ˙
œœ ˙ œœ ˙
œ œ ˙ J ˙ œ
J œœ J
œœ œ ˙ J J œœ œ ˙ J
‰ j œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œj œ ‰ œœœœ œ œœ œ œ
J
˙ ˙
œœœœ w œœœœ w
œœ œ œ œ J J œœ œ œ œ J J ˙ ˙
œœ œ œ J J œ œœ œ œ J J œ
w w
œœœœ w œœœœ w w w
Problems become compounded when examining the other two voices (cantus I and tenor). As Figure . and Example . show, locating annotations is hampered by material deterioration. The tenor voice is less affected, and was clearly thought of as depicting a ternary time signature. Indeed, the fifth demarcated unit only makes sense if ternary divisions are applied to both rhythmic levels (98), but the grouping here may also be a simple error. Under-
Singing from the Source: Performance Markings in Machaut Manuscript G
Figure 16.4: .: MS G, fols 146 v–147 –r, B34 B and B37 B (BnF)
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Uri Smilansky
321
Singing from the Source: Performance Markings in Machaut Manuscript G
standing how cantus I was read is more difficult. The top of fol. v has suffered some water damage, obscuring the first few lines added. Still, only perfect tempus major prolation (98) can accommodate both a ‘downbeat’ arrival on the first visible line and the placement of the markings that follow. Doing so, however, requires some creative application of augmentation rules. While it matches the apparent organization of the tenor, and results in a joint – if irregular – arrival point at the end of the marked section, it also results in strong dissonance. This version is presented in Example .. Example .: Interpretation of the markings in B, cantus I and tenor
9 œ. ˙. CI V 8 T
9 V 8 ˙.
water damage obscuring lines
œ. #œ œ œ œ. ˙.
œ. Œ. œ.
œ. ˙.
œ. œ.
œ œ œ ˙. ˙.
Œ.
˙.
œ.
j ‰ œ œ œ Œ.
œœ J ‰ œ œ œ. œ œ w. J j œ. w. œ. œ œ œ.
Anyone working through this musical section would likely have realized that voices labeled ‘tenor’ and ‘contratenor’ are complementary, and that when only one untexted voice appears, it is always labeled a ‘tenor’. It is thus entirely conceivable that careful readers would attempt to combine these two two-voice textures. Example . offers three possibilities, followed by the currently accepted transcription of all voices in 42. The implied combination of different time signatures would likely have challenged readers of any period, as they necessitated a choice between conflicting measure-, beat-, or note-lengths. In practice, neither minim equivalence (avoiding proportional relationships on the level of note-duration; Example .a), semibreve equivalence (aligning beat duration, if not measure duration; Example .b), nor breve equivalence (equal measure length; Example .c) leads to convincing results. It is therefore unsurprising that the annotators did not progress any further. As mentioned, however, I believe that the entire opening (fols v–r) was regarded as one song, combining B and B into a single texture. After all, B’s perceived mensural organization mirrored that of the cantus I / tenor pair of B, and had these voices been put together first, the result would likely seem promising (see Example .). Of course, creating a five-voice texture would not solve the difficulties discussed above for a four-voice one, but neither would the addition of B make matters worse: Example . presents one version of a five-voice texture using semibreve equivalence, in which I have highlighted pitches and melodic progressions that are shared by both B and B. At least in this combination, not only does the beginning of B reproduce many of the pitches of B, but when divergence occurs, it provides primarily consonant counterpoint. In many other songs, errors and misunderstandings in the marking pattern resulted directly from the faulty versions included in G. It is important to note that while the annota • •
The texture of B is spelled out as part of the narrative of Machaut’s Voir dit which appears in MS F, fols v–v. Reading that dit would thus help inform musical readers here. See Leech-Wilkinson and Palmer , (lines –). Such practices would most easily have been accepted by readers conversant in so called ars subtilior practices, yet even here, the complete lack of signification would have made usage unusual. See Smilansky , –.
©
Uri Smilansky
Example .: Three four-voice combinations for B, along with current interpretation
CI T
9 œ. ˙. V8 9 V 8 ˙.
œ. #œ œ œ œ.
œ.
œ 2 ˙ œœœ œ œœ œ J J
C II V 4 Ct
CI T
2 V4
˙ œ œ
9 œ. ˙. V8
œœ ˙
. œ. œ œ œ ˙ œ. Œ.
œ. ˙.
œ.
œœœœ œ œ œ œ 2 ˙ J J ˙ œ
j j ‰ œ œ œ Œ. œ. œ œ œ. œ. w.
˙.
œœ ˙ J Jœ
˙
a. minim equivalence
œ. #œ œ œ œ. ˙.
9 V 8 ˙. œ. Œ.
2 V4
œ. Œ.
œœœœ w
˙
j œ j j œ œœ ‰ j œ œ œ ‰ œ J œ Jœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ w
C II V 4 Ct
˙.
œ.
Œ. œ.
œ . Jœ œ ‰ œ œ œ . œ œ w . J
˙.
. œ. œ œ œ ˙
˙.
œ
œœ ˙
j j œ œ œ ‰ j œ œ
œ . Jœ œ ‰ œ œ œ . œ œ w . J
˙.
j j ‰ œ œ œ Œ. œ. œ œ œ. œ. w.
˙.
œ œ J
˙
‰ j œ œ œ œ œ œœ œœ
œ ˙ J
œœœœw
˙
œœ J œJ œ
œ
w
b. semibreve equivalence
CI T
9 œ . ˙. œ . #œ œ œœ . . œ . œ œ œ ˙. V8 ˙ 2 ˙
Ct
CI T
2 V4
2 œœ V4 2 V4 ˙ 2 ˙
2 V4
œœ œ œ œ œ J Jœ œ
˙
œ œ
œ #œ œ œ œ
œ Œ
œ
œ œœœ ˙
œ
œ œ œ œ œœœœ
œ
œœ œœ w
œ œ œ ‰œœœ J
w
œœ w J œJ
j ‰œ œ œ Œ
œ œœ ˙
œœœœ w
j j j œ œ œ ‰ j œ œ œ œ œ ‰œ œ œ© œ œ œ
œœ œ J J
œ œ
˙
œ Œ
œ œ œ œ œ ˙ œ J J œ
˙
‰ j œœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œœ œ œ J J œ œ
c. breve equivalence
œ
œœ œ ˙ J J
˙
œœ ˙
j‰ j j œ œ œ œ œ œ œ
w
C II V 4 Ct
j j ‰ œ œ œ Œ. œ. œ œ œ. œ. w.
9 ˙. œ. Œ. ˙. V 8 ˙. œ. Œ. œ. œ.
C II V 4
œ . Jœ œ ‰ œ œ œ . œ œ w . J
˙.
˙ ˙
d. modern transcription
œœ œ ˙ J J
œ œ
w
w
Singing from the Source: Performance Markings in Machaut Manuscript G
œ. ˙ œ. ˙.
#œ œ œ œ. œ. #œ œ œ œ. Œ. œ. œ.
. pair of B34 œ . combined Example 16.6: .: B37 B and9cantus I / tenor B V8 9 B34, C I V 8 9 B34, T V8 9 B34, T V 98 V8 B37 9 V8 B37 B34, C I
œ œ V J œ œ V J V œ.
‰
˙.
˙. ˙.
œ. Œ. œ. œ œ œ œ œ œ. J œ œ œ œ œ œ. J
˙.
œ œ œ. œ œ œ.
‰j œ œ j V œœ . œ œœ œ œ J V J œ œ œ œ J V J
œ.
œ.
œ œ J œ œ œ. J
œ. œ. œ œ œ. J œ œ œ. J
œ. œ. œ.
œ.
˙.
œœ . .
˙˙ ..
œ. ˙. œ œ œ œ œ œ. J œ œ œ œ œ œ. J
œ œ œ ˙. œ œ œ ˙. ˙. Œ. ˙. Œ. ˙. œ. ˙. œ.
˙. ˙. ‰
‰œ œ
œ.
j œ œ œ j œœ œ œ œ œ J œœœ œ J
œ. Œ.
Œ. œ œ J œ œ J
w.
w. w.
w. œ œ Œ Jœ œ œ œ J œ œ œ œ œ œ Œ J J
w. w.
.: B34 B and B37 B as a five-voice texture Example 16.7:
tions suggest creativity in interpreting the materials, they never amend the readings of the original. For example, De Fortune me doy (B, (B23, fol. 142r) is marked up in perfect tempus minor prolation ( 43) instead of imperfect tempus minor prolation ( 42), as it is perceived today. Opting for longer breves, however, may have arisen from the multiple omissions at the beginning of this song: the cantus here omits a semibreve rest after its first note, and in the tenor, two semibreves (G, followed by rest) are missing immediately following its initial breve. The choice of mensuration created subsequent difficulties, yet at least it allowed for a joint arrival at the end of the song’s first line of text. Likewise, annotations in Mes esperis (B, fol. 149 (B39, r) correctly interpret a three-note © ligature as consisting of three breves and clarify that a long contains two mensural units, but also indicate that reading diverged from © the song’s current accepted transcription. The first change (relating to the first note of the tenor) involves the avoidance of imperfection, and results in improved counterpoint. The next change, however, was problematic and seemingly generated multiple reading attempts. Instead of notating a semibreve-minim group, the original scribe of the contratenor added tails to both notes, yielding two minims, but then over-corrected by erasing both tails in-
324
Uri Smilansky
stead of just one, resulting in two semibreves. As it stands, the manuscript version does not work, which explains the inconsistencies in the markings here and their disappearance shortly thereafter. Even when accepting these multiple difficulties, it would be unfair to characterize the annotations as representing only confusion and failure. For example, although G’s notation of R contains some mistakes, all four of its voices were annotated in their entirety, successfully navigating their abundant syncopations. Dous viaire gracieus (R, fol. r, transcribed as Example . and discussed further below) is likewise marked throughout in all three of its voices, attesting to a seemingly correct rhythmic interpretation. In this case, semibreve augmentation did not derail reading, multiple ligature shapes were interpreted correctly, and dots were read as having a flexible meaning: either for elongation or as signifiers of mensural division. We are left with a mixed picture: annotations depict a flexible interpretive approach applied logically, yet inconsistently to a substantial number of polyphonic vernacular songs. It seems clear that voices were annotated in relation to each other rather than in isolation, and that larger settings were more appealing than smaller ones. While the reading of most songs was forsaken having reached some kind of impasse, a few were annotated throughout, suggesting a complete reading. A number of medieval conventions seem to be mirrored in the annotations, yet they were not made by readers proficient in the theory and practice of black mensural notation. I now turn to explore who these readers may have been, and the context of their interaction with G.
Identifying those responsible for the markings in G would benefit from a few words on reception and book history, as it is widely acknowledged that the treatment of both texts and objects changed through time. In particular, I am interested in placing the act of annotation within the gradients of performativity and intervention. By performativity I mean the degree to which annotations draw attention to themselves; publicize the work of their originators; or attempt to affect subsequent reading, interpretation, and use. Performative annotations – from the addition of a royal coats of arms to a library stamps – are generally designed to denote ownership. When they interact with the text as well as with the material object of the book, they tend to denote a more private, engaged ownership. Intervention, by contrast, relates to whether additions manipulate a text or maintain its integrity. The process of manuscript production, for example, is inherently interventionist, as the many erasures, corrections, and additions found in Machaut’s manuscripts attest. Along this spectrum are the signs and markings added by later readers. A familiar case
• •
A seminal text is Gadamer . An important difference in our case is that the goal of annotation relates to the understanding of signs rather than exegesis. For a catalog and analysis of such interventions in the music section of Vg, see Earp , –. See also Earp , and in relation to professional Parisian workshops, Rouse and Rouse , and Smilansky .
Singing from the Source: Performance Markings in Machaut Manuscript G
would be the addition of a manicule or nota which provides an obvious signpost left by one reader to later readers and indicates relative value or importance of the highlighted passage. These readers’ signs have both performative and interventionist characteristics. The markings in G, however, are entirely non-performative. They have minimal visual impact and, in preserving multiple readings, they attest to interpretations that were clearly thought of as erroneous at the time they were made. They do not attract attention to themselves, nor do they advertise the actions that brought them into being. This non-performativity suggests a private, intimate engagement context, yet a tentative one, by readers other than the book’s owner. Furthermore, the lack of curation apparent in the presence of partial readings, or of forsaken ones that visually compete with ‘better’ attempts, suggests that the intended benefits of these annotations were directed solely to the immediate, single (even if extended) context of reading. Their lack of differentiation between success and failure (in relation to both the presence and absence of lines) means they do not help – and were not intended to enable – repeated engagement. The act of intervention (or its avoidance) projects the relative degrees of authority apportioned to the book on the one hand, and to its owners on the other. A propensity to make substantive changes places the owner’s functional needs as superior to the independent value of the manipulated object. This occurs while circulating objects remain in active use and retain a measure of currency. A refusal to introduce change attests to the process of both text and book becoming sacrosanct as valuable objects of study. The annotations in G are distinctively interpretive in nature. They do not improve the source material but suggest an attempt to understand its readings without manipulating their fabric. In the relationship between object and annotator, the very existence of these lines shows the book was still open to intervention when they were made. However, the refusal to introduce change transfers authority to the artifact: its readings were perceived as more reliable than readers’ ability to interpret them. They attest, therefore, to a readership that either professes itself to be non-specialist, or to be far enough removed from the manuscript’s original context for such difficulties not to incur censure. These various characteristics associate the annotations in G with a liminal period in the book’s history, when readers still felt comfortable leaving a physical mark on the manuscript but after its content had begun to resist their interpretive efforts. These readers did not follow the practices or have the knowledge expected of the book’s original target audience, but nevertheless were active before the book assumed the status of an historical artifact not to be interfered with. In order to place such readers in a more concrete setting, I now move to examine the history of F-G more closely, beginning with evidence relating to scholarly engagement with its music.
• • •
On the manicule, see Sherman . For further discussion of the types of signs and interventions used by early modern readers, see Sherman and Fredell . It could, of course, be that songs that were deemed to have been read successfully were then memorized or copied out. For this process, see Rudy .
Uri Smilansky
Machaut was referred to by multiple medieval theorists. None, however, provide evidence of direct consultation with a large compilation manuscript such as F-G. They more likely relied on a combination of widely circulating repertoire and other theoretical writings. Furthermore, the early history of F-G does not offer any ready points of contact with such a readership, and it is hard to imagine consumers knowledgeable enough to compose their own treatises – even in the late fifteenth century – having the kind of difficulties evident from the visible markings. At first glance, more recent scholarly interaction with this source seems a promising locus for identifying annotators. MS F-G was used as the base manuscript for some of the earliest systematic cataloging and transcription of Machaut’s music in modern times, including the complete incipit catalog by Friedrich Ludwig (–) and the partial one by Auguste Bottée de Toulmon (–). Indeed, Toulmon’s catalog covers all the ballades and most of the rondeaux: the exact same section in which markings are to be found. A few parameters, however, caution against their association with the work of either scholar. First, the inconsistencies and lack of systematization we have encountered are hard to reconcile with the practice of incipit collection. Second, early scholars saw diplomatic copying as a central tool of their trade, using transcriptions for personal study and annotation beyond the consultation period and as material for publication. Ludwig testifies to having copied out all of the music of F-G as an aid to variant-collation and transcription work. Intellectually, neither scholar inhabited the liminal space described above, where direct annotation of the original was deemed appropriate. Third, marking-distribution throughout entire songs or in areas other than their beginning would suggest an interest in complete transcription. It seems unlikely that Ludwig, who transcribed Machaut’s complete oeuvre successfully, would have marked only fols v–v, doing so in such a partial manner, or would have had the aforementioned difficulties. A similar argument could be made for Toulmon, whose papers contain complete transcriptions of B, B, R, and R. While markings suggest R was worked through, none of the other three songs are heavily annotated. Also, Toulmon paid considerably more attention to transcribing and discussing the Mass, motets, and lais than the polyphonic songs, yet markings there are absent. Conversely, full transcriptions of intensively annotated songs • •
• • • •
See Earp a, –. For the early history of this source, see Plumley and Smilansky (forthcoming). Indeed, it seems more conducive for practical, social use. Its first owner, Aubert de Puychalin, is discussed also in Earp , –, for his role in the transfer of Vg from John of Berry, via Gaston ‘Fébus’ of Foix, to Violant of Bar, queen of Aragon. For discussions of wider musical reading and performance practice, see, for example, Alden , Smilansky , and Smilansky ; for the courtly context, see Smilansky and Lewon ; for the bourgeois environment, see Plumley and Stone and Plumley and Stone , . See Earp a, . Overviews of such work and the publications of diplomatic copies (alone, or coupled with transcriptions) are available in Earp a, –; and a. For changing attitudes to the treatment of collectables, see Pearce ; part V in particular engages the material and sexualized politics of access and manipulation. See Earp a, n. .
Singing from the Source: Performance Markings in Machaut Manuscript G
(such as R) do not appear in his collection. Finally, F-G was incorporated into the royal collection by c. , placing these scholars’ work beyond our liminal period. There is an earlier set of readers, however, that should not be neglected here. Private, owner-scholars of the eighteenth century were more likely to annotate their books (or allow others to do so) than later professional custodians at royal libraries. D, for example, contains prolific notes in the hand of its last owner before being integrated into the royal collection in . As Figure . demonstrates, the mid eighteenth century saw much Machautrelated activity, both commercial and intellectual, including a period of three to four decades during which F-G remained in private hands. The first systematic appraisals of Machaut’s biography and output were presented to the Académie royale des Inscriptions et BellesLettres in and , with interest in his music following very soon after. A musical fragment dating from the late s contains a successful transcription of the beginning of Machaut’s Gloria in the hand of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (–). The mid eighteenth century, therefore, offers precisely the kind of ownership, book, and intellectual culture in which the annotations in G were made. Rousseau’s transcription of the Gloria probably continued on a now-lost page, yet we do not know the extent of this continuation, nor whether he tried his hand with any other genre. As I could find no equivalent markings in the Gloria – neither in G, nor in any other source potentially available to him – it seems unlikely that Rousseau authored the markings discussed here. His achievement was not widely known, and, on the whole, eighteenth-century historians considered Machaut’s musical impenetrable. As Charles Burney (–) eloquently commented: Neither the Abbe Lebeuf, nor the Count of Caylus, have produced specimens of Machau’s musical compositions; indeed, the Count frankly confesses, that, though he has studied them with the uttermost attention, and consulted the most learned musicians, he has been utterly unable to satisfy his curiosity concerning their intrinsic worth. A correspondent at Paris had promised me transcripts of some of these pieces, which however are not yet arrived; and the confession of M. de Caylus renders my disappointment mortifying; as I could hardly hope to succeed in solving enigmas which have already defeated superior sagacity.
• • • • •
• • •
For a relevant study of the changing attitudes and institutionalization of scholarship over the ages, see Haines . For a social analysis of collecting, see Pearce . See Earp a, or more widely, Chatelain , –. Details in Figure . are collated from Martin ; Earp a; a; , –. The numbers in square brackets refer to the manuscript numbers assigned by Earp in his Guide (a, –). All three presentations were published in (in the same publication). Lebeuf relied on a long period of analysis of F-G, while the other two, Caylus a and b, were based on a relatively shorter examination of E. This fragment (Bibliothèque publique et universitaire de Neuchâtel, MS R , fragment ) is reproduced, transcribed, and discussed in Martin . Duchez (, ) contends that Rousseau first became acquainted with Machaut via F–G, while Martin (, –) argues that the transcription was based on E. To my mind, these statements are not mutually exclusive. See Martin , . Along with the Burney quotation, this is confirmed also by Rive . Burney , –, discussed also in Earp a, .
Uri Smilansky
1680
1690
1700
1710
1720
1730
1740
1750
1760
1770
1780
C [1]; A [5]; M [10]; H [17] already in royal library. C [1] and A [5], however, misidentified and wrongly catalogued.
Louis XIV, 1638–1715
Louis XVI, 1754–93
Louis XV, 1710–74
Colbert collection bought by royal library Pcc [38], F F:: P Pn n8 833 33 [48]): 1 1732 732 (including B [4], P
Châtre of Cangé, c. 1680–1746 ✹
1724 1 724
1733 1 733 1743 1 743
Count of Argenson, 1696–1764 ✹◎ 1740 1 740
1748 1 748
◼
Count of Caylus, 1692–1765 742 Introduction: 11742
▼
1747 1 747 1 1753 753
Transcription of Gloria?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1712–78
Jean-Baptiste de Sainte-Palaye, 1697–1781
Copying of dit from E [7]
Duke of La Vallière, 1708–80 Louis-Jean Gaignat, 1697–1768 Jean Lebeuf, 1687–1760
✹
c. 11780-82 780-82
c. 11748-50 748-50
✹
c. 11768-70 768-70
1751 751 1743 1 743 1 ▽ ◼ ▼▼ ◎ ☐ c. 11735 735 1746 1 746 1 1753 753
Jean-Joseph Rive, 1730–91
▼ 1780 1 780
Jean-Baptiste de Machault, 1701–94 ✹
c. 11748-50? 748-50?
Charles Burney, 1726–1814 1680
1690
1700
1710
1720
1730
1740
1750
1760
1770
1782 1 782
▽ 1780
Key:
✹ = acquisition
◼ = presentation ▼ = publication ◎ = ‘discovery’
◻ = reference ▽ = reference
D [11] J [16] E [7] F-G F -G [6] Vgg [3] V
Figure 16.5: .: Timeline of Machaut reception activity c. –c. 1680–c. 1780
I read this description as outlining the following procedure: Caylus, having failed to make headway with the music from a scholarly-historical perspective, resorted to a sonic approach, encouraging musicians to use their distinct skill set to make the music ‘work’. Indeed, the description of his musicians as ‘learned’ implied an intrinsic acceptance of their specialist knowledge.33 I imagine a select group of professionals being brought together for • 33 •
See Weber 1980. .
329
Singing from the Source: Performance Markings in Machaut Manuscript G
a ‘try-it-out’, ‘trial-by-error’ session. Musical polyphony would have been at the core of such an event, as – like in transcription – the best way of judging whether a reading was correct was through voice alignment. While, for Caylus, this did not lead to a satisfactory result, the attempt nonetheless testifies to the curiosity that the music created and the efforts made in understanding it. It recasts Caylus’s ‘inability to satisfy his curiosity concerning [the music’s] intrinsic worth’ as aesthetic as well as technical. Even where he could read some of the music, he simply could not make sense of it. I return to this in the last section of this chapter. I find the most attractive parameter of Burney’s quotation to be its explicit introduction of practicing musicians as eighteenth-century readers of Machaut’s manuscripts. As I can imagine neither a medieval theoretician, an eighteenth-century scholar, nor a later systematic editor translating voice-parts into scores as having ended up with this particular set of markings, I find invaluable any evidence that points to performer-readers. A professedly performative readership, where annotators engage with the music in ensemble and react to sonic results in real time, can explain the marking patterns explored above. Performers would have approached problem-solving through the prism of creativity and intuitive musicality rather than primarily through the identification of consistent rules or systems. This would make sense of the markings’ apparent interpretive flexibility; their inconsistency of application (in terms of song selection, between voices, and within each voice), and of their visual fluidity and unobtrusiveness. Performers were more likely to adapt to the notation, making interpretive rather than interventionist markings. Also, simultaneous performative reading is ephemeral. Once the sounds of a reading-attempt die out, it is gone. In comparison with the leisurely analysis of scores, dissonances are immediately and more keenly noticeable in a live read-through. Nevertheless, it is much more difficult in a live read-through to locate the source of the dissonances; to decide whether they were intentional or accidental; and to ascertain whether they were the outcome of a reading error or of a problem with the manuscript. Consequently, markings are more likely to cover both challenging areas and sections that on paper seem obvious, and an inability to make sonic sense of the music is more likely to result in the group moving on to the next song. Imagining an event of this sort also supports the impression that the markings were produced in a single sitting. If this was indeed the case – as I think is most likely – the quality of the musicians’ reading and the flexibility they demonstrated were outstanding, yet by no means beyond the realms of possibility. Caylus worked primarily with E. A literal reading of Burney’s quotation thus suggests it was not ‘his’ musicians that marked up F-G. On the other hand, Burney’s words must •
•
Burney goes on to note his inability to offer a single example of early polyphony. ‘Intrinsic worth’, therefore, relates to the presentation of any acceptable example of polyphony, not to an assessment of Machaut’s individual style or his position within a wider historical narrative. Personal experience has led me not to underestimate the ability of practitioners to read at least some notational types without appreciating their rules and theoretical aesthetics, given enough good will, patience, and creativity. This insight was gained perhaps most forcefully while undertaking ‘sight reading from original notation’ classes at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis. The student body comprised of interested performers, but who often were not yet familiar with either the repertoire or the system employed in its notation. While the two contexts are not at all similar, the experience of interpretation without knowledge or theory is nonetheless of some relevance.
Uri Smilansky
have referred to long-past events, as Lebeuf died in and Caylus in (see Figure .). Furthermore, while E was transferred from one library to another, F-G (which was first to emerge and be analyzed) was bought twice by private collectors, offering more opportunities for curious examination and allowing for easier private access. Either way, Burney’s description offers a heuristic window for considering eighteenth-century performative engagement with Machaut’s music precisely within the liminal period from which the markings likely originate. Combining these strands of evidence, I believe the annotations in G to be evidence of an eighteenth-century attempt to compensate for an inability to understand the rules of mensural notation by enlisting the services of a performing ensemble. It remains, however, to explain why historians continued to consider Machaut’s music as impenetrable despite its seemingly correct rhythmic interpretation. This question leads to engaging with aesthetics and performance practice.
Let us assume that Burney’s report was faithful to Caylus’s practice: that musicians were indeed consulted, and that a similar contemporary interaction resulted in the markings in G. I contend that in assessing the implications of this scenario, we must take into account eighteenth-century notational and performance practice. This should warn us against conflating a successful rhythmic interpretation of notational data with a successful musical reading, or even musicians’ ability to make aesthetic judgments in relation to content and style. Using the example of R, I argue that performative input would have helped compensate for a lack of theoretical notational knowledge. At the same time, however, performance would have created new challenges for the appreciation the resulting musical aesthetics. Example . presents R in its entirety. The regularity and consistency of its markings suggest a complete reading, akin to a modern edition in which ligatures and the concepts of imperfection and augmentation are clearly understood. Yet, as far as we know, none of these procedures were understood by eighteenth-century scholars. I would suggest that practicing musicians would have been more flexible in attempting to make rhythmic sense of the notation without recourse to a consistent system of interpretation. Instead, they would be guided by joint points of arrival and imitation. Real-time performance would have encouraged this approach. For example, deciding that all voices should move together after an initial long note would have made immediate sonic sense, nullifying worries about why the breve is dotted in one voice but not the other, or about how the shape of the ligature translates into the required duration. The difference in approach between a scholar-reader and a musicianreader is, therefore, crucial here, even if both roles could in practice have been performed by a single person. •
F-G’s earlier history raises other unique performative possibilities, yet these remain beyond my remit here.
Singing from the Source: Performance Markings in Machaut Manuscript G
Performance would have created new complications. Musicians likely applied their own practice to the materials, potentially undermining the rhythmic success apparent in this example. For instance, eighteenth-century convention is that an accidental applies only to the immediately adjacent note (unless that pitch was repeated) regardless of the accidental’s vertical placement. This contrasts sharply with the medieval privileging of an accidental’s vertical position and its potential to affect more than one note. Moreover, ‘correcting’ or ‘improving’ sonorities through the addition of musica ficta was no longer practiced at this point. Example . follows eighteenth-century practice concerning accidentals, yielding a harmonically and melodically impossible outcome. Adopting a different stance – ignoring all accidentals, for example – would solve some of these issues, but at the same time highlights the inability of the musicians to understand R using the practices of their day.
‚ ‚
‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ b‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ – ‚ ai gra ‚ re–
Example .: R from MS G, fol. r, applying eighteenth-century accidental interpretation b
3 V4 3 Tr V 4 3 C V4 3 C V4 3 T V4 3 T V4 Tr
#–. #–. b –. b –.
Dous
# –.
Dous
# –.
‚ ‚ ‚ V ‚ ‚ ‚ #‚ V ‚ fin #‚ V ‚ # ‚ fin‚ ‚ ‚ V #‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ V
V
‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ vi
‚ ‚
‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ vi ‚. – ‚. – #‚
‚ ‚ ‚ ‚
ai
– –
re
gra
‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ b‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ bay‚ bay‚ – b‚ –
‚ ‚ ‚ #‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ cuer ‚ cuer ‚ ‚
‚ vous ‚ vous – –
‚ ‚ ‚ b‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ –. ‚ ‚ ‚ b‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ # –‚ . ‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ . – #‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ ci eus ‚ . de – ci
‚ ‚
–. –.
eus
de ▐
▐
‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ – ‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ – ‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ – ‚ ser ‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ vi– ser ‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ vi– ‚ ‚ – ‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ ‚
‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ ‚ ‚
To further differentiate score- and performance-based analysis, Example . gives some sense of the dramatic effects of French eighteenth-century ornamentation. Guidelines concerning ornamentation practice suggest application on an almost note-by note basis. Fol •
• •
Saint-Lambert , – discusses placing accidentals above, below and occasionally after a note, and pp. – provide multiple examples of repeated signification. Movable type printing was particularly prone to difficulties in vertical positioning: the earlier Faignient , for example, always places sharps on a staff-line, regardless of the location of the note which they affect. For a useful (if dated) English overview, see Niecks (–). For a performative discussion, see Paulsmeier , chaps and . It is impossible to give an impression of well-executed ornamental figures in precise notation. Lack of clarity, after all, forms the raison d’être of many ornaments. See, for examples, the translation of Hotteterre treatise in Douglas , or of Montéclair made partially available at . The earlier treatise was very popular, was endorsed by Montéclair, and enjoyed multiple reprints well into the s.
©
Uri Smilansky
Example .: Beginning of R, as written and as read/heard following Hotteterre’s practice
Tr
V #–.
‚ ‚ ‚
C
V b –.
‚ ‚‚‚
vi
V #–
–
Dous
T
‚.
b‚ ‚
To
ai
‚
A la Minuette
3 œ #œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ. V4 3 V 4 b˙.
3
3
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
3 V 4 œ #œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ. 3
3
œœœœ œ œ
œ
œœœ
œ œ œ œ. 3
3
3
œœœœ œ œ œ œ œœ
bœ œ œ
œ
œœœ
œ
œœœœ
œœœ
œœœ
œ
œ
lowing these practices was considered a basic component of performance technique, more akin to the instinctive application of ‘correct’ fingering or bowing technique than to elective flights of fancy. As such, ornamentation was considered part of what it meant to play an instrument, or to read a line, and was intuitively added also when sight-reading. Other types of performative input specific to this reading context include the aesthetics of vocal or instrumental timbre, or conventions regarding speed, tuning, phrasing, emphasis, and rhythmic manipulation. They embody a potential for making performed materials sound more recognizable to a contemporaneous listener. At the same time, they challenge what we imagine it meant for such listeners to engage with Machaut’s music; how they came by their value judgments, and what they based them on. Performance thus provides a mechanism through which the impressive rhythmic interpretation apparent in the markings in G can be understood alongside the self-proclaimed inability of eighteenth-century scholars to make sense of mensural notation. To my mind, it makes these markings’ association with this period more convincing. It may also explain why the torturous history of Machaut-revival in the nineteenth century relied first and foremost on theoretical understanding and technical evaluation, eschewing performance for a long while. It is tempting to take this brand of cultural relativism further. After all, the last few decades have seen considerable scholarly analysis of the relationship between cultural context ©
• • •
More creative ornamentation differentiated the expert performer from the dabbler. For the eighteenth-century French notes inégales tradition, see Bryt . The role of changing tuning systems in shaping attitudes to the past is discussed less often, yet I believe it has a great effect on aesthetic appreciation. See Earp a.
Singing from the Source: Performance Markings in Machaut Manuscript G
and the appreciation of the past. Attitudes towards R also reflect this process within musicological discourse, as the evaluation of its counterpoint has transitioned from despair in the nineteenth-century to positive appreciation of its experimental and expressive nature in the twentieth. Likewise, a survey of the available recordings of this song demonstrates the use of multiple modern performance traditions to transform the partial information provided by the notation into sounding versions that are less foreign, or more exotic, or in any case, palatable to the general public (and, indeed, to specialists). Executing what we now believe to be ‘correct’ rhythmic interpretations was never enough to make music acceptable and communicative, nor to guarantee the stability of its sonic realization. As a much greater authority has more eloquently put it: ‘the interpretation of the past is always an issue of the present’. My association of the markings in MS G with eighteenth-century performance teaches us about more than the state of notational understanding during a hiatus period in the appreciation of Machaut’s polyphony. It reminds us of the non-linearity of culture, and the subtle interaction between scholarship and performance. On the one hand, it exposes the problematic nature of our continued preference for abstracted, score-based analyses (where performance practice often remains suspect and is regularly excluded) and of our difficulties in disentangling the historical, intellectual, academic, environmental, and economic parameters in contemporaneous performance. On the other hand, the interaction between scholars and performers creates positive cross-fertilization: performers do things scholars cannot strictly understand or accept, while scholars preserve, mirror, and generate new or revived aesthetics that extend beyond performers’ horizons. Consequently, this unassuming set of nearly-invisible annotations embodies great potential: with more analysis – and perhaps some sonic ‘experimental archaeology’ – I hope it will generate new streams of research to spring forth from the fountain of Larry’s knowledge.
•
•
•
•
See Leech-Wilkinson , with Haines being another classic example. In relation to the formation of still current performative traditions, see, for example, Page b, and an expansion of Page’s ideas in Greig . For more recent work, the pair of articles Daolmi and Giuliano examine aesthetic manipulation in both the thirteenth and the twentieth centuries; Smilansky and Lewon analyze this in relation to improvisation; and Schab explores the cross-influences between early rock, folk, and early music recording and programing. On the many tensions between notation, cultural conditioning, and current performance practice, see Leech-Wilkinson . The process is described in general terms in Earp a, –. The political context for the disparaging remarks in Kiesewetter , ex. (p. of musical appendix), along with further thoughts concerning historically positioned listening technique are offered in Leech-Wilkinson , chaps and respectively. A case of more positive exemplification can be found in Eggebrecht , –. For a partial discography, see Earp a, ; provides updates. Not listed there, but perhaps more relevant to the situation discussed here, is the solo guitar version by Noël Akchoté (Guillaume de Machaut – Integral Vol. , Ballades & Rondeaux, Believe Digital, IGM-, ) and Kurtág’s transcription performed by the piano duo Bugallo-Williams (Kurtág: Játékok – Games, Complete Works for Piano Duo and Selected Transcriptions, Wergo, WER, ). For a useful discussion of some aesthetic patterns in Machaut performance, see Leech-Wilkinson . Earp a, .
. M L I: T C S Yolanda Plumley and Anne Stone
Guillaume de Machaut's splendid and numerous extant complete-works manuscripts dominate our modern view of the poet-composer. They reflect a prodigious life’s work in both poetry and music, and establish Machaut as a preeminent creative force in elite circles of his day, in particular in the French royal milieu. Surprisingly, as is well known, only a handful of his musical works circulated outside those deluxe anthologies, and nearly all of those that did were transmitted anonymously; as Lawrence Earp has noted, were the Machaut manuscripts to disappear, the composer would be known as the author of only four compositions. Earp’s foundational work on the Machaut manuscripts nearly forty years ago ushered in a new era of interest in these documents and provided a bedrock for all subsequent work. Among the many other resources he put together for us there, he presented a helpful table of those of Machaut’s musical works that appear in other manuscripts of the later fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries and this has provided a springboard for our essay here. In recent years, as we have been preparing a fresh edition of Machaut’s songs for the new edition of Machaut’s complete poetry and music, we have become intrigued once again by the question of the songs that broke free: why did some songs circulate and others not? Can patterns of transmission be gleaned from close readings of variants? What can the wider circulation of Machaut’s songs tell us about the musical tastes and habits of consumption of people both close to the direct sphere of Machaut’s activities and further afield? And what can it tell us about the central Machaut sources from which those ‘foreign’ copies presumably derived? To begin to tackle these questions, we have updated Earp’s table, focusing on the ballades and rondeaux, adding sources that have been discovered in recent decades (though omitting music-theoretical citations); we present it here as Table .. While many potential patterns might be noted, we are especially intrigued by the relationship between song form and transmission. First, we note that no virelais with music are found outside the central Machaut sources. Second, of the rondeaux and ballades, some were disseminated widely with musical settings (such as R and B, with eight and eleven surviving sources respectively) while others to date have been found only in a single source outside the Machaut sources. Table . reflects how the disparity in the patterns of circulation largely maps onto song form: five rondeaux with musical settings (of a total of twentytwo) and thirteen ballades (of a total of forty-two) are found outside the Machaut sources. Among the rondeaux, it is striking that four of the five (R, R, R, and R) appear in only • • • • •
This essay was researched and written with the generous support of The Leverhulme Trust, for which we are very grateful. Earp , . Earp , –. Plumley, Smilansky, Stone, and Palmer forthcoming. Some of the virelais, however, are found without their music, notably in Penn.
Machaut on the Loose in Italy: Two Case Studies
Table .: Machaut’s polyphonic songs circulating outside the Machaut manuscripts
M T-O S No
INCIPIT
R
Cinc, un, trese
R
Se vous n’estes
R
Tant doucement
R R
Ma fin est mon commencement Dix et sept
B
Biaute qui toutes
B
De petit po
B
Il m’est avis
B
De Fortune
B
Honte, paour
B
De toutes flours
B
Ploures dames
B
Ne quier/Quant Theseus
B
Gais et joli
B
Phyton
B
Mes esperis
B/ RF B/ RF
ITALIAN SL
Ch
• •
• • • •
•
Vo dous regars
R
Certes, mon oueil
R
Douce dame
B
Riches d’amour
B
Se quanqu’amours
B
Une vipere
B
Je puis trop bien
B
De triste/Quant/Certes
B
Se pour ce muir
Mod
Other
•
•
•
•
Brescia
• •
• • •
Fa
•
•
•
•
• •
•
Fa
Todi
•
•
• •
T- C INCIPIT
PR
Ob Iv
Dame, de qui
R
Pit
•
En amer
No
FP
Yolanda Plumley and Anne Stone
FRENCH/LOWLANDS/EMPIRE CaB Trém Str Gr
•
•
•
TEXT ANTHOLOGIES Ta Penn I Lwa
Pg
Other
•
Tong
• •
Ut
•
•
•
• •
•
•
•
Nur
Vu
JP
•
• •
•
Ut
• • •
• •
• •
•
•
• Ut
• •
Vend
• •
• • • • • •
•
•
•
Kassel
• Ta
Penn
• •
I
JP
• • • • •
•
Vu
•
• • • •
Lwa
• •
•
Machaut on the Loose in Italy: Two Case Studies
one source, while only two of thirteen ballades (B and B) are singletons. These numbers change slightly when we take into account collections of lyrics without music, but the basic disparity remains: rondeaux were less likely to circulate at all outside the central Machaut sources than ballades, and those that did were much less likely to circulate widely (R seems to be the interesting exception, a topic for another day). As might be expected, songs that circulated widely tended to accrue more variants, and we even find that some picked up extra voices. This gives us the impression that these songs were circulating among musicians who may or may not have been aware of the composer’s name and were certainly not aware that, as he explained to Toute Belle in the Voir dit, he preferred that nothing be added or taken away from his songs. The songs that survive as singletons outside the Machaut manuscripts, on the other hand, do not have any spare voices or significant performative variations, and, in general, are absent from the main Florentine and northern Italian ‘repertory’ anthologies, notably Ch, PR, Mod, Pit, and SL , to name the largest. To bring the two types of circulation into sharper comparative focus, we offer here a case study of each type and consider how it circulated in Italy. Our first case study is the widely-circulated B, De petit po, a song that accrued a dizzying number of textual and musical variants, not to mention an entirely new contratenor voice, as it made its way through northern Italy and Tuscany. We attempt here to sift through the variants to demonstrate that not only were myriad exemplars of the song available to Italian scribes c. , but that it is extremely difficult to pinpoint a single original source for those copies from among the surviving complete-works manuscripts. Rather, we suspect that other authoritative, but now lost, Machaut sources were available in the French princely milieu and generated further copies of the songs. Our methodology for the second case study, the barely-circulated group comprising R, R and its text-only companion R, is completely different, since there are very few variants to evaluate. As we move from a superabundance of evidence to a radical paucity, we attempt to connect disparate dots in the transmission histories of these rondeaux to tell a story that fits the fragmentary surviving evidence but must by necessity remain speculative: we suggest that R–R found their way south because they were created as portable gifts for a noble patron and traveled in the entourage of their dedicatee, though not necessarily in the hands of musicians; once in northern Italy, however, we believe they made their mark on the local musical and literary cultures. Case study : De petit po (B) B enjoyed a particularly wide dispersal, and it survives in many sources from across Europe but especially from Italy. As Table . shows, some eleven sources with music for B are now known in addition to the six main Machaut manuscripts, C, Vg, B, A, G, and E. In the latter, the song is presented in three voices (with triplum). B also appears in the •
Leech-Wilkinson and Palmer , –.
Yolanda Plumley and Anne Stone
index of Trém, a manuscript made in for one of the French princes, and in two sources from the north: in CaB, where it is scored for four (or possibly five) voices, and in Gr, which presents just cantus and tenor. A two-voice version with cantus and tenor appears also in Pg from Strasbourg, while the Austrian fragment Nur transmits only the tenor with a new contratenor. A new three-voice arrangement sporting this new contratenor along with Machaut’s original cantus and tenor survives in full in six Italian sources: Mod, Ch, FP, SL , Pit, and Brescia . Finally, B’s text is transmitted without its music in three lyric anthologies: in Ta and I, which originated in France and Savoy in and c. , respectively, and in JP, a printed collection from . Why B came to be copied repeatedly in the Italian peninsula remains obscure, as does the nature of the exemplars that transmitted it. In what follows, we undertake a fresh analysis of the song that focuses in particular on the relationship between the Italian copies and those of the central Machaut manuscripts to see what new light may be shed on the exemplars present in Italy c. , specifically in Florence, with which city five of the six Italian copies can be connected. The copies of Machaut’s songs found in the so-called ‘repertory’ manuscripts listed in Table . have long been thought to have stemmed from E, which itself has generally been considered the least authoritative of the main Machaut manuscripts. Our consideration of B now integrates data from the SL palimpsest, the newly discovered fragment Brescia , and two contemporary text-only sources, with those from the more familiar Italian sources Mod, Ch, Pit, and FP. The evidence that emerges points to a rather subtler and more complex genealogy, one that evokes additional, now lost ‘cousins’ of the main Machaut manuscripts that we believe spawned further copies of B, including a series of exemplars that traveled to Italy. The patterns of textual and musical variants that we trace here reveal, too, that a surprising number of exemplars bearing differing versions of the song were available in Florence in the years around . This provides fascinating insight into the avid interest in imported French-texted polyphonic songs in the French ars nova style, including those of older vintage like Machaut’s, at the time of the great Church councils in the early fifteenth century. The lyrics E’s peculiarities in its ordering of Machaut’s works, the faultiness of some of its content, and its provision of new voice parts for several of the songs are factors that have contributed to the view of this source as something of an outlier in relation to the other extant completeworks manuscripts. This is rather surprising given that the manuscript is known to have belonged to princely maecenas John, duke of Berry, grandson of Machaut’s long-term patron John of Luxembourg and also the dedicatee of Machaut’s dit, the Fonteinne amoureuse. The status and history of E has been a subject of some reappraisal in recent years, but is now all the more tantalizing in light of exciting recent findings that now place its princely owner • •
Dömling ; Bent ; Earp a. Notably, Bent ; Earp ; Leach ; Earp a; McGrady ; Maxwell ; Bain .
Machaut on the Loose in Italy: Two Case Studies
at the nexus of the extant Machaut manuscripts: these discoveries, made independently by scholars in Spain and England and first reported in , have revealed that the duke of Berry gifted Vg to Gaston Fébus in , and that soon after F-G was illuminated for his chamberlain, who had been instrumental in that transaction. In recent years, it has been demonstrated that about half of E’s songs were copied from B, itself hastily drafted from Vg, but the remaining exemplars that served E remain mysterious. Lawrence Earp recently suggested that more study of Machaut’s song lyrics in particular might shed further light on this matter, and in the spirit of that challenge we have undertaken here a detailed comparison of the various copies of B’s text, in addition to the music, in order to gain more insight into how this song was transmitted, both within the French princely courts – ‘Machaut manuscripts headquarters’ – and beyond, specifically south of the Alps. In what follows, we argue that traces of additional authoritative Machaut exemplars emanating from the French court milieu but now lost may be glimpsed in the textual readings of Ch, Mod, and SL , and in the two copies of similar date transmitted without music, Ta and I. From Earp’s meticulous work on the sources for Machaut’s output, and from research in progress by Plumley and Smilansky, we know that further complete-works manuscripts existed in and close to the milieu of the French princely courts in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries; good alternative copies of Machaut’s songs thus must surely have been available. In his doctoral dissertation, Earp reminds us that one of the greatest challenges in interpreting variants is distinguishing the reasons behind them, which, as one philologist he cited there explains, can embrace accidental omission or inattention, misunderstanding due to changes in orthography or ignorance of the language or content, or deliberate editing by the scribe. As Earp wisely proposes, we are certainly on more secure footing when attempting to group sources according to their variants if we can pinpoint common errors and establish how these came about. To begin our analysis, however, we offer a simple comparison of the orthographical variants in the lyrics. Although such variants, taken in isolation, are not considered strong evidence with which to establish relationships between sources, we were curious to see how the patterns would play out, in light of some preliminary observations noted by Elizabeth Eva Leach and from our own previous experience of working on the Chantilly codex and the Modena manuscript. Our close study of Ch led us to conclude that the scribe had little grasp of French and so tended to copy faithfully what he saw, with •
• • • • • • • •
These findings by Anna Alberni, and by Yolanda Plumley and Uri Smilansky, were first presented at an international conference hosted by Plumley, Guillaume de Machaut: Music, Image, Text in the Middle Ages, at the University of Exeter on – April . Alberni . Plumley and Smilansky forthcoming. Bent ; Earp a; Leach . Earp a. Earp ; Earp a; Earp a; Earp . Plumley and Smilansky forthcoming. Earp , . Leach ; Stone ; Plumley and Stone .
Yolanda Plumley and Anne Stone
variable success, and that any regional interferences in the texts were probably from Italian rather than Catalan as had been previously postulated; our sense was that much of the variability in the orthography of the texts stemmed from the exemplars from which the scribe was copying. The same seems to be true of the French texts in Mod, which feature many northern elements along with Milanese regionalisms that were presumably introduced by the scribe. We decided to make a simple table using color to communicate visually the main orthographic variants presented in the lyrics of those three Italian copies that carry the text in relation to the reading of E in particular, while also considering the other main Machaut manuscripts, to see what patterns of alignment emerge. As we will see, while the versions in the Italian manuscripts relate closely to E in some respects, they also transmit elements from the other Machaut manuscripts, notably C. Table . presents the lyrics of SL , Ch, and Mod alongside E, with which they share several specific orthographies (the main ones shown here in blue font): nine such elements feature in Ch, and five in Mod; SL , which only transmits the first stanza of the lyric (and some of which is illegible), presents one of the four orthographical matches with E from that stanza (where Ch has three). At first glance, this evidence seems to confirm a close alignment between the Italian readings and that of E. This seems especially to be the case for Ch, but although Mod shares statistically fewer, its sharing of E’s idiosyncratic variant ‘sy les’ in the penultimate line (in place of the usual ‘s’il les’) may strengthen its connection with that manuscript. But how strong, in fact, is the connection with E? We note that neither Mod nor Ch replicates E’s erroneous ‘Ne vers’ in line ; instead, both manuscripts transmit ‘N’envers’ like the other Machaut manuscripts. Moreover, only one of the nine orthographies that Ch shares with E is peculiar to E alone (‘faulz’, line ); the remaining eight feature also in one or more of the remaining later Machaut manuscripts: Vg (one example) or B (five), or in A or G (one each). In Table ., the main orthographic matches with Vg, B, A, and G are colored in green. The high number of alignments between the Italian versions and B is intriguing, not least because B is not thought to have served as exemplar for E’s copy of this song. Indeed, as Table . indicates, B presents several alternative orthographies to E that align instead with Vg, A, or G but also appear in one or other of the Italian manuscripts. E has been shown to have been copied carefully from its exemplars, so these textual dif-
• • •
• • •
Terence Scully () had argued that the scribe was Catalan; María del Carmen Gómez () independently reached the same conclusion as ourselves that this was not the case. On the French texts in Mod, see Locatelli , –. Leach . Leach suggests this shared element is evidence that Mod’s scribe made the copy from dictation, but other idiosyncrasies seem to us to point more readily to copying errors, such as those discussed below (‘pier’ in line , and especially ‘nul’ and the repeated ‘dis’ in line ). One in A (‘moult’, line ), three in B alone (‘veult’ line , ‘voulenté’, line , and ‘sy’, line ), one (‘pouvoir’, line ) in B and G, and another in B, Vg, and G (‘souffisance’, line ). Bent ; Leach . Bent , Earp a.
342
20
15
10
5
Et s’aucuns ont vilaynement parlé A ly de moy ye les met tous au pis Qu’onques vers ly feisse fauseté N’envers autrui nul ne doit leurs dis faus dis Tost croire ne ly movoir Ains doit avant la verité savoir Et si les croit et me layt per ainsy Onque n’ama [qui pour ce peu hay]. Et s’atens ont vilaynement parlé A luy de moy je les mes tous au pis Qu’onques vers lui feisse fausseté N’envers autrui n’il ne doit leurs faulz dis C’est croyre ne luy mouvoir Ains doit avans la verité scavoir Et s’il les croit et me laist par tel sy Onques n’ama qui pour si peu hay.
Et s’aucuns ont villainnement parlé A ly de moy je les mez tous au pis C’onques vers li feisse fausseté Ne vers autrui n’il ne doit leurs faulz dis Tost croire ne li mouvoir Ains doit avant la verité savoir Et sy les croit et me lait par cel sy Onques n’ama qui pour si pou hay.
Mod (26r) De petit peu de nient volenté De mult assés doit prendre ce m’est avis Cascuns amans de s’amie en bon gré Lasse doulent or voy que mes amis Ne vuelt soufissance avoir Sour volenté ne mon petit pooire Croire ne puet ains m’a pour ce guerpi Onques n’ama qui pour ce peu hay. Amours scet bien que ye l’ay tant amé Et aym encor et ameray toudis Que on ne puet plus mais mesdisans grevé Moult envers ly qu’en ly a tant d’avis De bien d’oneur de savoir Que mon povoir ceust bien concevoir Et nonpourquant se s’amour pier ensi Onque n’ama qui pour ce peu hay.
Ch (18v) De petit peu de niant voulenté De moult assés doit prendre ce m’est vis Cascuns amans de s’amie en bon gré Lasse doulente or voy que mes amis Ne vuelt soffissance amoir Sur voulenté ne mon petit povoir Croire ne puet ains m’a pour ce guerpi Onques n’ama qui pour sy peu hay. Amours scet bien que je l’ay tant amé Et aim encor et ameray tousdis Qu’on ne puet plus mes mesdisans grevé M’ont envers luy que luy a tant d’avis De bien d’onneur de scavoir Que mon povoir sceut moult bien dosepnoir Et nonpourquant se s’amour pres ainsy Onques [n’ama qui pour sy peu hay].
SL 2211 (90r) De petit peu de ni[ent volenté De moult] assés doit prendre ce m’est vis Chascuns amans de [s’amie en bon gré Lasse] dolente or vei que mais amis Ne vuelt souffissance avoir Sur volenté ne mon petit povoir Croire ne vuelt[?] ains m’a pour ce guerpi Onques n’ama qui pour [si peu] hay.
Amours scet bien que je l’ay tant amé Et ains encor et ameray toudis Qu’on ne puet plus mais mesdisans grevé M’ont envers ly qu’en ly a tant d’avis De bien d’onnour de savoir Que mon povoir sceust bien concevoir Et nonpourquant se s’amour pers ainsi Onques [n’ama qui pour si pou hay].
E (147r) De petit po de nient volenté De moult assés doit penre ce m’est vis Chascuns amans de s’amie en bon gré Lasse dolente or voy que mes amis Ne vuelt souffisance avoir Sur voulenté ne mon petit pooir Croire ne puet ains m’a pour ce guerpi Onques n’ama qui pour si pou hay.
Table 17.2: .: B18, B, variants in the lyrics of the Italian ‘repertory’ manuscripts shared with the Machaut manuscripts and with two lyric miscellanies
Table 17.2: B18, variants in the lyrics of the Italian ‘repertory’ manuscripts shared with the Machaut manuscripts and with two lyric miscellanies
Machaut on the Loose in Italy: Two Case Studies
343
G (140r): 1: volenté; 2: mout, penre; 5: veut, souffisance; 6: seur volenté; povoir; 7: eins; 8: po hay; 10: aim; 11: c’on, mais, mesdisans; 12: mout envers li qu’en li; 14: povoir; 15: einsi; 17: vileinnement; 18: li; met; 19: c’onques vers li, 20: n’envers; leurs faus; 21: li mouvoir; 22: eins; 23: s’il les; laist; tel.
bold = main differences with E; blue text = main alignments with E; yellow highlight = main alignments with C (note: some are echoed in E, and/or in Vg, B, A, G); green highlight = alignments with Vg, B, A and/or G; blue highlight = error or idiosyncrasy; underlined = shared variant of significance (an error, for example); [square brackets] = missing or not visible (SL 2211) in the manuscript
voy; 5: veult, souffisance; 6: sur voulenté, povoir ; 7: croire ne ains; 8: pou. 9: amours tu scet; 10: ains; 11: qu’on; mes; 12: mont devers luy qu’en li; 13: d’onneur; 14: povoir sara bien concevoir; 15: pert ainsy; 17: Ce ceulx qui ont; vilainement; 18: mes; 19: qu’onques vers li; faussetté; 20: ne vers; n’il; faulx; 21: ne li movoir; 22: ains, savoir 23: s’il les croit, lait, tel sy; 24: oncques, ci pou.
.
M (240r): 1: volenté, po; 2: mlt assez; penre; 5: veut, souffissance 6: seur volenté, povoir; 7: ains ; 8: po; 10: aim; 11: c’on, mais; 12: envers li qu’en li; 13: d’onneur; 14: pooir; 15: ainssi; 16: po; 17: vilainnement; 18: li; mes; 19: Qu’onques; leurs faus; 21: li movoir; 22: eins; 23: s’il les; lait; tel si.
B (303v): 1: voulenté; 2: mout; penre; 5: veult souffisance; 6: sur voulenté; povoir; 7: eins; 8: onques; po; 10: aim; 11: c’on, mais; 12: envers li qu’en li; 13: d’onneur; 14: povoir; 15: einssi; 16: po; 18: li, met; 19: Qu’onques, 20: n’envers autruy; faux; 21: li mouvoir; 22: eins 23: s’il les; laist; pour tel sy.
I (19v): 1: peu, voulenté; 2: moult assez, prendre; 4: dolente; or voy que m’est avis; 5: veult, souffisance; 6: sur voulenté, povoir; 7: Ains m’a peut ce de guerpy; 8: sy hay pou hay; 10: ains; 11: c’on ; mais; 12: ly qu’en bien; d’amis 13: d’onour, savoir; 14: Que mon povoir sceut moult de bien concevoir (abbrevs cf Ch); 15: pers ainsy; 16: pou; 18: mes; 19: c’onques, ly; faulceté; 20 ne ver, n’il ne doyt pas leurs diz; 21: Tout croire ne il mouvoir; 22: Ains, savoir; 23: s’il les croit, lait, tel sy; 24: sy pou.
A (463r): 1: volenté; 2: moult, penre; 5: veut, souffissance; 6: seur volenté, pooir; 7: ein; 8: po; 10: aim; 11: qu’on, mais, mesdisant 12: li, li; 14: pooir; 15: einsi; 17: villeinnement; 18: li; moy; met; 19: Qu’onques; 20: n’envers, faus; 21: li mouvoir ; 22: eins; 23: s’il les; laist; tel; 24: po.
Vg (305v): 1: volenté, po; 2: mout; penre; 4: m’est avis 5: veut, souffisance; 6: seur volenté de; povoir; 7: eins; 8: qu’onques; po. 10: aim; 11: c’on, mais; 12: envers li qu’en li; 13: d’onneur; 14: pooir; 15: einssi; 17: villeinnement; 18: li, met; 19: c’onques, 20: n’envers autrui, faus; 21: li mouvoir; 22: eins; 23: s’il les croist; laist, tel si.
Ta (6r): 1: peu, voulenté ; 2: moult assez, prendre ; 4: doulente ; or
TWO LYRIC MISCELLANIES
C (199r): 1: volenté, peu; 2: mout; prendre; 4: or voi ; 5: veut, souffissance ; 6: sur volenté, pooir 7: ains; 8: pou; 9: l’ai; 10: aim; 11: C’on, mes; 12: li; 13: d’onnour; 14: pooir; 15: m’amour, ainsi; 17: vilainement; 18: lui, met, tout; 19: Qu’onques; 20: n’envers, leur faux; 21: lui mouvoir; 22: ains; 23: s’il les; laist; tel si.
MACHAUT MANUSCRIPTS
Yolanda Plumley and Anne Stone
Machaut on the Loose in Italy: Two Case Studies
ferences with B strengthen the hypothesis that B was drawn from a different exemplar. Meanwhile, the orthographic patterns displayed in the three Italian copies hint that, rather than in E itself, their roots lay in a now-lost Machaut exemplar that shared elements with E but also with the remaining late Machaut manuscripts, especially B. As well as their alignments with E, the three Italian copies also show traces of an earlier tradition that is reflected in C (highlighted in yellow in Table .). Leach noted this particularly in the case of Ch, citing the shared use of ‘prendre’ in line in C and Ch in place of ‘penre’ that is found in E and the other Machaut manuscripts. However, although Ch presents a couple of further orthographic matches with those of C alone (for example, ‘aim’, line , ‘mes’, line ), SL and Mod also show traces of this early tradition: like Ch, they share not just ‘prendre’ with C but also the latter’s ‘peu’ in line instead of the distinctive ‘po’ of the remaining manuscripts, as well as further elements present in C but not in E. In addition, we observe that Mod and Ch share several orthographies that are present in both C and E. In one case (line ), where Ch presents ‘voulenté’ (like E), SL and Mod align with C in giving ‘volenté’. However, the latter reading also features in Vg, A, and G, and, indeed, Mod shows further elements in common both with C and with this later tradition; overall, Mod has more matches (five) with Vg, B, A, and G than does Ch (three), although Ch (and also SL ) at times also aligns with those readings rather than with E’s. In sum, although several orthographic variants in the Italian sources may seem at first glance to link their readings most closely to E’s, a significant number are shared with C, especially in the case of Ch, evoking an earlier manuscript tradition behind the latter’s reading, as Leach suggested. Our analysis shows, however, that this earlier tradition is also glimpsed in Mod and SL , albeit to a lesser extent. Moreover, our study highlights that some of those elements shared with C bypassed E, yet are present in one or other of the later Machaut manuscripts, Vg, B, A, and/or G, with which the Italian manuscripts also share alternative readings to those of E. Thus, it appears that the exemplars that served the Italian sources were informed by an early manuscript tradition that is reflected in C, and elements of which are found in E, but that at the same time these transmitted details found in the later central tradition represented in Vg, B, A, and G. On the basis of this evidence, we suspect that the ancestor from which the Italian sources stemmed was very close to the central Machaut manuscript family, perhaps a cousin of the later manuscripts. As we suggested above, the weight one should attach to such simple orthographical variants is debatable, not least given the variability of orthography in the fourteenth century, • • • • • •
•
Bent , Leach . Leach . For instance, ‘ains’ in lines and , where most of the other Machaut manuscripts offer ‘eins’. Accents presented in the transcriptions in Table . are editorial. For instance, ‘met’ in line (seen in C and Vg, B, A, and G), where Ch’s ‘mes’ is closer to E’s ‘mez’. An example is ‘sour’ at the start of line , which seems to reflect ‘seur’ given in Vg, G, A, and M, as opposed to ‘sur’ in C, E, B, Ch, and SL . The illustrative variants to show Ch’s alignments presented in the table on p. of Leach are inaccurate. Leach .
Yolanda Plumley and Anne Stone
even within individual sources. That said, detailed knowledge and understanding of individual scribes’ preferences and habits can help inform our interpretation of such data. It has been noted, for instance, that E’s musical copies from B reflect that source closely, even sharing the latter’s errors (whereas B’s scribes were less accurate in copying from Vg), so we might be justified in concluding that E’s version of B’s lyric accurately mirrors its exemplar. Our own conclusion that the Ch scribe tried to copy exactly what he saw when transcribing French lyrics, his poor grasp of the language preventing him from correcting where his exemplars were corrupt or illegible, is well illustrated in line of B: here he wrote ‘dosepnoir’ instead of the correct ‘concevoir’, an error to which we return below. Had Ch’s exemplar for B derived from E, we might have expected to see E’s variant ‘Ne vers’ in line in Ch. Errors – and especially conjunctive variants relating to these – nonetheless offer stronger evidence with which to group sources more decisively. Each of the Italian versions of B’s lyric presents a few idiosyncrasies of its own, certain of which can be attributed to simple mistakes of transcription by foreign scribes, or, occasionally, to interference from the scribe’s own language. Yet despite these idiosyncrasies, the exemplars that served the Italian versions were evidently similar in several respects, beyond those elements they share with one another and with the various Machaut manuscripts that we discussed above. In addition to sharing certain distinctive spellings, such as ‘vilaynement’ in line , Ch and Mod both present an anomaly in line : they give ‘pres’ and ‘pier’, respectively, where E and the other main Machaut manuscripts clearly transmit ‘pers’, suggesting that their exemplars shared a corruption or illegibility at that spot. In line , on the other hand, an error separates them: here Mod anticipates the final word ‘dis’, giving ‘N’envers autrui nul ne doit leurs dis faus dis’, while Ch follows the main manuscripts more closely with ‘N’envers autrui n’il ne doit leurs faulz dis’. At this point, it is valuable to consider the evidence of copies of B’s lyric transmitted without music, which casts some intriguing light on exemplars that were in circulation in the late fourteenth century and that informed those copies that made their way south. Although •
• • •
Indeed, a search across Machaut’s collection of lyrics known as the Loange des dames, using Plumley’s Je chante ung chant database () demonstrates that several of the alternative orthographies discussed above appear within a single source: across different lyrics in C, for instance, we find the use of ‘po’ as well as ‘peu’, ‘penre’ in addition to ‘prendre’, and ‘povoir’ as well as ‘pooir’. Sometimes such alternatives even occur within a single work, as we see in the case of B’s lyric in the readings of Vg and M (for instance, they feature both ‘pooir’ and ‘povoir’, while C and A favor ‘pooir’, and B and G favor ‘povoir’). Earp ; Bent ; Leach . Plumley and Stone . ‘Amoir’ in line of the Ch readings (for ‘avoir’) is an example of the scribe’s frequent misinterpretation of minims in the script of his exemplars; another misreading may be the cause of his writing ‘s’atens’ in line (instead of ‘aucuns’), while ‘C’est’ in line may reflect the scribe’s confusion on seeing a curved capital T in ‘Tost’ in his exemplar. Mod’s ‘avis’ at the end of line (instead of ‘vis’) could be explained as an eye skip to ‘amis’ at the end of line – though we will return to this variant below – while its variant ‘n’il’ in line may represent a simple misreading of ‘nul’. ‘Ye’ in line , on the other hand, is a regional interference, one that is witnessed in other sources that, like Mod, originated in Lombardy; for instance, we find ‘ye’ for ‘je’ (‘ie’) frequently appearing in London, British Library, Add. , a collection of lyrics linked to the court of Giangaleazzo Visconti of Milan. ‘Moult’ in line of Mod in place of ‘m’ont’ seen in all other manuscripts except G may be a simple error although it is possible that it relates to the erroneous ‘mout’ present in G.
Machaut on the Loose in Italy: Two Case Studies
it transmits a sizeable number of Machaut’s works, M has received little sustained attention from scholars. Earp supposed it to be a copy made in the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century of a now-lost Machaut manuscript from the late s that ‘represented the stage of the collection of Machaut’s works between Vg and A’. However, in Plumley reappraised the script and noted its similarity with that of one of the scribes of B, which led her to conclude that M might instead date to the s or s, an assessment with which Earp now agrees. Thus redated, M now provides a further example of a complete-works Machaut manuscript made in, or close to, the French courts toward the end of the poet-composer’s lifetime, or very soon after, to add to those main manuscripts with music on which we tend to focus our attention. In terms of its orthographic trends, M’s reading of B’s lyric aligns most closely with those of C, Vg, A, and G (see Table .). It is not especially closely linked with those of the Italian manuscripts; amongst its varying orthographic alignments is ‘mais’ in line with E and Mod (and Vg, B, A, G), ‘mes’ in line with Ch, and ‘qu’onques’ in line with C, B, A, Ch, and Mod. The abbreviation M presents for ‘pers’ in line is interesting, though, illustrating the kind of graphic challenge that might have caused the scribes of Ch and Mod to proffer the idiosyncratic, erroneous readings they presented at that point (they each expand the word but wrongly, as ‘pres’/‘pier’, respectively). Rather more suggestive is the relationship between Ch and Mod and two other textonly sources that date from the early fifteenth century. The lyric anthology Ta is a modest manuscript that comprises over French lyrics; it was made in the first quarter of the fifteenth century using paper booklets of the kind that usually served for bureaucratic purposes. The section copied in includes the famous Cent ballades, which was composed in by French courtier Jehan Le Seneschal and includes responses by John, duke of Berry and other French nobles. Ta also features a number of other lyrics: in addition to B, we find further song lyrics by Machaut, such as B, which, like B, appears in SL . Intriguingly, we find there, too, lyrics that connect with the song collection of Ch and Mod: this includes a unicum attributed to Cazerte, whom we suspect is the composer Philipoctus de Caserta known from both Ch and Mod, Ma douce amour by Hasprois, which is found in both Mod and Ch, and other lyrics that are modeled on song-texts by Vaillant and Trebor that feature in Ch. Although the copies of Hasprois’s lyric in Ch and Mod are similar, Ch’s
• •
• • •
Earp a, . Plumley’s (unpublished) hypothesis for this revised earlier dating for M was reached mostly on the evidence of the script, the style of which she observed closely resembles that of one of the hands in B, though not identical with it. She is grateful to Larry Earp for their exchange on her suggested redating of M to the s or s, with which he is now inclined to agree while standing by his previous assessment that this source was a direct copy of another manuscript, likely one with music (private communication, August ). Plumley extends thanks also to Daniel LeechWilkinson for their recent stimulating discussion about M’s shared content with the Voir dit, which he suggests puts the copying of M to after at the very earliest (private communication, February ). Ch shares some five orthographic variants with M, while Mod features seven. Vitale-Brovarone ; McGrady . Plumley .
Yolanda Plumley and Anne Stone
is closer to that of Ta. The second text-only anthology is I, which was copied by Norman Humanist Simon de Plumetot, probably in the s, from exemplars originating in the French royal courts. This collection features a large number of lyrics by Deschamps, twelve by Machaut and, again, some known to us from songs from Ch and other of the ‘repertory’ music manuscripts, including Puisque je sui fumeux, which in Ch is attributed jointly to Hasprois and Jaquet de Noyon. Although not identical, each presenting certain errors or idiosyncrasies of their own, the copies of B’s lyric in Ta and I feature a significant number of similarities with those of the Italian sources: the particular alignments they display with C and B (highlighted in peach and green, respectively in Table .) and with E (shown in blue font) place them in close relationship with Mod and Ch. Especially interesting are two points with significant variants in I that link this reading with Mod, on one hand, and with Ch, on the other. The end of its fourth line ‘que m’est avis’, which chimes with Vg, suggests that Mod’s ‘ce m’est amis’ was perhaps not the result of an eye skip after all, but instead likely reflects what the scribe saw in his exemplar. Similarly, I’s reading in line sheds intriguing light on the garbled formulation given at this point in Ch. Where E, for instance, supplies ‘Que mon povoir sceust bien concevoir’, I instead gives ‘Que mon povoir sceut moult de bien concevoir’ (our italics). In light of this, it seems probable that Ch’s exemplar presented something similar but with a slight variant in the word order – ‘Que mon povoir sceut moult bien de concevoir’ – and featured abbreviations for ‘concevoir’ like those seen in I, which, along with other probable illegibilities, led the Ch scribe to reach his garbled interpretation: ‘Que mon povoir sceut moult bien dosepnoir’. Although the two lyric miscellanies present several errors in their readings of B that indicate their relationship with the Italian manuscripts was not a direct one, their content nevertheless suggests they shared a common ancestor, one made in French court circles, perhaps at a similar time to E in the s. This ancestor itself presumably had drawn on an exemplar for B that was close to the one used for E but that also featured some of the readings found in the other Machaut manuscripts, notably in B and Vg. This analysis reminds us that circulating alongside the extant complete-works manuscripts were further authoritative exemplars of Machaut’s works now lost from view; the varying patterns in the readings that we have described here offer us tantalizing glimpses of the nature of such sources. That Ch’s copy of B presents an attribution to ‘G. de Machant’ suggests that the • • • •
• •
Plumley , . Delsaux ; Boulton . On I, see Connolly and Plumley ; more on Puisque je sui fumeux and its composers appears in Plumley forthcoming a. The print anthology JP from shares some of the patterns of orthographic variants with Ta and I, including several they share with E (notably ‘Ne vers’ l. ) and with C (l. ‘peu’, l. (‘prendre’). However, it presents several idiosyncrasies of its own. Ta includes the Cent ballades and its Responses, which was devised between and c. ; that work and the lyrics of interest here were copied into a section dated , suggesting the scribe was using recent exemplars. Leach (, , n. ), on the other hand, suggests in passing that some of the Machaut lyrics (unspecified) in I were copied directly from E, as Earp (a, n. ) has suggested was the case for Penn.
Machaut on the Loose in Italy: Two Case Studies
song was drawn from an exemplar that presented it alongside works by other composers; that source may have been similar to those drawn upon by the scribes of E for the songs that were not copied directly from B, some of which evidently carried attributions to Machaut.46 As for the relationship between the three Italian manuscripts, the versions of the lyrics presented in Ch and Mod are similar yet, as we have seen, they present differences that reflect the stemmatic histories of their respective exemplars. The proximity of the readings of SL 2211 and Ch, on the other hand, is intriguing given that both sources are connected with the city of Florence. We know from an inscription on its title page that Ch was in the possession of two Florentine bankers by the s, 1460s, but it is not known whether, like SL If indeed 2211, , Ch was copied in Florence or only came there at a later point in its history.47 Ch was made in Florence, and at a similar time to SL 2211, , the above evidence suggests that the exemplars for B18 B drawn upon by the respective scribes of these two sources presented related but not identical versions of the lyric. Comparison of the layout of the text in the manuscripts, the alignment of the words and the music (that is, what we generally refer to as ‘text underlay’), and the musical content of SL 2211, , Ch, and Mod provides further insights that support the above findings and confirm that multiple exemplars of B B18 were circulating in Florence in the years around 1400. . Text-music layout in the manuscripts compared We turn now to consider how the music and text was copied in the Italian manuscripts and how the layout of the two elements compares with that of the main Machaut manuscripts. In this period, the text of a song was generally copied first; differences between the sources in the exact layout of the text may offer us glimpses of the exemplars that served the scribes. The first musical section of the ballade sets the first four lines of the initial stanza. Since they are sung to the same music, lines 3 and 4 are positioned beneath lines 1 and , 2, as seen in MS A (Figure 17.1). .).
Figure 17.1: .: Layout of the couplets in section A of B18, B, MS A, fol. 463 r, detail (BnF)
However, how exactly the two couplets are laid out and their constituent lines aligned varies from source to source. A comparison of the positioning of lines – 1–4 in SL 2211, , Ch, 46 • • • 47 •
See Earp 2011a, a, 230. . Plumley and Stone 2008; ; Janke and Nádas 2016. .
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Yolanda Plumley and Anne Stone
and Mod with that of the various Machaut manuscripts is summarized in Table 17.3. .. The details presented there suggest that Ch’s exemplar was closest to C in this regard (Ch matches C’s alignments at four out of five points), and then to A and E (sharing three out of five alignments). Mod’s text layout, on the other hand, shows greater similarity with Vg, B, and G (matching two out of five alignments); at only one of the five spots surveyed in Table . 17.3 does its alignments coincide with those of Ch (‘assez’ / ‘doulent(e)’, where both treat ‘lent(e)’ as a single syllable though only Mod omits the -e), suggesting that their exemplars differed in this respect. From what is visible, SL ’ 2211’s alignment of the couplets chimes with that of Ch and C in one place but in at least two other spots it aligns rather less closely with the Machaut manuscripts than do either Ch or Mod (though ‘prendre ce’ / ‘vei’ is most like Mod). SL 2211 is thus something of an outlier in relation to Ch and Mod in this regard. Table 17.3: .: Comparison of text alignment in the couplets of B B18 (section A)
Source
couplet 1 / couplet 2
C
peu de / a-mans
[volen]té / bon
De / gré
assez / do-len[te]
prendre ce / or voi que
A
po de / -mans
[volen]té / bon
De / gré
[asses / do-len[te]]
pendre ce / or voy que
Vg
po de / amans de
[volen]té / gré
De / las-
asses / do-len[te]
penre ce / or voy que
B
[po de / amans de]
[voulen]té / gré
De / las-
asses / do-len[te]
penre ce / or voy que
G
po de / mans de
[volen]té / gré
De / las-
assez / [do]-len[te]
penre ce / or voy que
E
po de / -mans
[volen]té / bon
[De / gré]
asses / do-len[te]
penre ce / or voy que
SL 2211
peu de / a-mans
–
–
[as]ses / dou[-lente]
prendre ce / vei que mais
Ch
peu de / a-mans
[voulen]té / bon
De / gré
assez / dou-lente
prendre ce / or voy que
Mod
peu de / [amans] de
[volen]té / gré
De / las-
assez / dou-lent
prendre ce / voy ye que
Suggested Suggested Groupings:
Ch, SL 2211 + C; Vg, E; Mod
Ch + C, A, E; Mod + Vg, B, G
Ch + C, A, [E]; Mod + Vg, B, G
Ch, Mod; SL ; 2211; C, [A], Vg, B, E; G
Ch + C, A, Vg, B, G, E Mod, [SL ]; 2211];
[bold, blue, and italics highlight different groupings of sources for each example; normal font = outliers]
The alignment of music and text across the Machaut manuscripts, on the other hand, displays considerable uniformity overall. In the first phrase (bars 1–8; –; see text line 1 in Table . and Figure 17.1, 17.2 ., which shows the underlay in A), with the exception of B, they all agree in their placement of the first line of text in relation to the music: they begin with a four-bar melisma on ‘De’ then present an identical, more or less syllabic, setting of ‘petit peu de nient vol-en-’, which is followed by a short motivic flourish that leads to the cadence on c on ‘-té’. B, however, anticipates the placement of ‘pe-[tit]’ and ends the line three semibreves short of the cadence, suggesting the scribe was rather more casual about alignment of words and music. Ch mirrors the main Machaut manuscripts’ text-music placement up to this point, while in Mod, on the other hand, the text placement after the first four syllables stands apart from the other sources. Mod’s scribe has been shown to be sometimes interventionist in relation
349
Machaut on the Loose in Italy: Two Case Studies
to musical content,48 but also to be quite careful in his handling of text underlay;49 the differences Mod displays here thus might have been introduced by the scribe himself or reflect his The setting of line 2 in the Machaut use of an exemplar that was divergent in this respect.50 manuscripts shows similar consistency up to the second syllable of ‘prendre’ (syllable 7), ), this time including B (with the exception of the first word ‘De’, which is placed before the end of the cadence of the first phrase). After this point, though, we see an interesting split between the Machaut manuscripts (see Figure 17.2): .): while C, A, G, and Vg share their placement of ‘ce m’est’, in both B and E ‘m’est’ is placed two semibreves later; in E, ‘ce’ also occurs later than in the others.
MS A
MS E
MS B Figure 17.2: .: Comparison of text alignment in a portion of B18 B in MSS A, E, and B (BnF)
The three Italian sources reflect this later placement seen in B and E. SL 2211 aligns most closely with B at this point, while in Ch, where the position of the first five syllables of line 2 (‘De moult assés doit pren-’) aligns with that of the Machaut manuscripts, ‘-dre ce m’est’ is pushed yet later than in E or B; this is also the case in Mod, although up to this point its text-music arrangement is more haphazard. Given its more syllabic nature, the second
48 • • • 49 • • 50 •
Stone 2005. . Zayaruznaya 2013. . One possibility might be that the scribe in Mod was collating from two exemplars, one with the text, the other with the music, and thus was making his own decisions regarding the placement of the text.
350
Yolanda Plumley and Anne Stone
musical section, section B (starting at line ), reveals less disparity between the manuscripts overall, though once again, Mod stands apart: its refrain text does not start until halfway through the refrain subsection. Finally, an interesting divergence in the word-music alignment of the final five syllables of the refrain again groups the manuscripts: the placement of ‘qui’ (line ) in B now pairs this source with C, while that of E, A, G, and Vg forms a second group, and that of SL , Ch, and Mod a third. Overall, then, Ch’s text underlay/music overlay connects it most closely with C but also relates it to B and E, with which SL and Mod also coincide most. The evidence suggests that the exemplars that served the three Italian scribes shared some common features in this regard but were not identical. Musical readings Finally, what light does the presentation of the music in the Italian copies of B shed on the exemplars that were circulating in Italy c. ? To Ch, SL , and Mod we now add FP, Pit, and Brescia , all of which, like SL , originated in Florence. All of these Italian sources transmit the ballade with a contratenor part that is not present in the main Machaut manuscripts. Mod alone adds to this the original triplum to present four voice parts; one possibility is that its scribe had access to two exemplars, one that presented the song in three parts with triplum like the Machaut manuscripts, and the other that gave the song in three parts with its new contratenor, and that he conflated their content to provide a version that presents all the parts together. Mod’s triplum does not reflect a variant reading present in E (in bar ) but instead aligns with the other main Machaut manuscripts there; the Florentine sources, on the other hand, share a ligature in the tenor in bars – that appears only in E of the main Machaut manuscripts. Although certain small errors that feature in E are not replicated in the Italian sources, a variant in E’s reading in bar in the cantus (a minim instead of a semibreve on d) relates to the variants that certain of them present at this point, which avoid the mutatio qualitatis Machaut had evidently designed (whereby the perfect breve of minor prolation is imperfected by a single minim) and that features in the other Machaut manuscripts. See Example ., which presents the Italian readings; the base manuscript for the edition here is Mod. While SL follows the main Machaut manuscripts by giving in bar a breve on d imperfected by a minim on c, FP joins Mod in transmitting a breve d followed by b c minims. Ch and Pit, on the other hand, offer a further alternative, in which the breve on d is followed by a semibreve on c. This suggests that the exemplars which generated the Italian copies, with the exception of SL ’s, might have stemmed from a version close to E’s but that this underwent various amounts of editing or correction before reaching the various scribes, though we cannot preclude that certain of the Italian scribes themselves effected some changes. Certainly, the scribes of Ch, Pit, and Brescia seemed to have had access to similar readings: these •
The musical examples are taken from Plumley, Smilansky, Stone, and Palmer forthcoming. Accidentals are annotated with manuscript sigla indicating their presence or absence (-).
Machaut on the Loose in Italy: Two Case Studies
Example .: B, Mod reading, bars –
Ch, Pit
˙
œ
Mach MSS, SL 2211
b Ch, SL 2211
œ œ J
3 œ V4 34
cantus
ne
tenor
puet
3 V4 œ
œ œ œ bœ
? 43 b ˙
œ
˙
œ œ
œ
ains
-all others
œ
Œ
m'a
˙.
n˙
œ
-SL 2211, Pit
contratenor
œ J
˙
b
bœ œ œ œ -E, Ch
œ
œ
-Pit
Œ
œ
‰ Jœ œ
sources share a further variant, this time in their contratenor in bars – (see Example .), which is provided with the same florid embellishment; SL presents an alternative reading to the others in the ensuing bar of this voice part. Example .: B, Mod reading, bars –
j j 3 V4 ‰ œ œ œ ‰ œ œ 40
triplum
cantus
V 43 œ
ques
tenor
V 43 œ
b SL 2211, Pit, Ch
œ J œ
n'a
-
œ œ J
bVg, B # FP
Œ
ma
œ œ œ œ ˙.
‰ œj œ œ œ # œ w .
œ œ œ
b Ch
œ œ œJ œ
qui
pour
œ
©
‰ œj Jœ œ
j œ œ
SL 2211
Ch, Pit, Brescia 5
j ‰ œ œ œ œ œ contratenor
j V 43 ‰ œ œ
b FP, Pit
œ
j ‰ œ œ œ J
b Ch
œ w. J
œ b
ce
peu
œ
œ
œ
œ
hay.
w.
œ œ œ œ œ œ
j œ ˙
# FP
œ
˙
œ ˙.
In bars –, FP, Nur, and Ch each presents a slightly different variant to Mod’s reading of the contratenor, while Pit and Brescia offer a different solution again (see Example .). In bars –, indicated in the example with plus signs, FP and Nur continue as Pit and Brescia do, while Ch shares Mod’s reading. These details imply that multiple copies
Yolanda Plumley and Anne Stone
of the three-voice version of B with contratenor were available in Italy c. , and even within Florence itself. Intriguingly, given the mystery of its origins, Ch’s reading resembles sometimes one, sometimes another of the Florentine sources. Finally, the copies of B in Pit and Brescia were made by the same scribe; unsurprisingly, these two copies present many similarities, suggesting that the scribe returned to the same exemplar or used his own previous copy when he made whichever was the later of the two. What is particularly intriguing is that the readings of these two sources share many details with Nur, which originated in Austria at a similar time. Example .: B, Mod reading, bars –
j V ‰ œj œ ‰ œ œ ˙
10 triplum
cantus
Vœ
Œ bœ
VŒ
˙
te gre
tenor
de las
bC b
‰ jœ œ
j ‰œœ
œ
b G, Ch b
œ œœœœ œœ œ œœœ œ
-
mult se
œ ˙
œ.
as dou
-
ses lent
œœ
b FP
‰ œj ‰ œj œœ
‰ Jœ œ œ œ Œ œ doit pren or voi
œ b œj ˙ . -SL
j ‰ œj œ ‰ œ œ
-
dre ye
Œ
˙
ce que
FP, Nur, Ch
‰ œj œ
Pit, Brescia 5
contratenor
j V œj œ œ œ œ ˙
œœ œœœ
+ FP, Nur
œ
j œœœ ‰œ
‰ œj œ b œ œ œ œ œ ‰ œj ‰ œj ‰ œj œ œ +Ch
In sum, the case of B and its myriad copies sheds fascinating light on the extraordinary dissemination of a single song, and the complexities involved in any attempt to unravel the stemmatic histories of the versions that survive. As we have seen, the various versions that have been preserved present numerous divergences; although overall they align closely with one another, even the main Machaut manuscripts display different patterns of orthography, an aspect not usually considered to offer significant evidence for the grouping of sources, yet, as we have suggested here, one that appears to shine some light on the relationship between these sources. The complex patterns of variants presented by the Italian manuscripts make it difficult to link their copies of B directly to any one of the extant Machaut completeworks manuscripts with which we are familiar. What our analysis suggests is that while they © certainly share some elements with E, their stemmatic history likely began in another, now • •
Campagnolo . Slight differences in the pattern of ligatures between Pit and Brescia suggest that this dimension may simply have been one that was subject to variability even in the work of a single individual.
Machaut on the Loose in Italy: Two Case Studies
lost Machaut manuscript; that manuscript ancestor, we believe, shared certain features with E (and C) but others that are reflected in the remaining later Machaut manuscripts. Finally, the relationship between the Italian sources themselves suggests that B enjoyed a wide circulation and that multiple copies were available even within the city of Florence c. . The close musical relationship between Pit, Brescia , and Nur prompts intriguing questions as to how the copies of this particular French song traveled about: did an exemplar with B, along with other French songs, including further ballades by Machaut, arrive in Italy via Rome, where a growing number of northern singers came to join the papal chapel from c. ? Or did it arrive from France with one of the delegations sent by John, duke of Berry and other French dignitaries to the Church councils at Rome or Pisa in the early s? Or did such a source travel down from the north across the Alps with other musicians, spawning on its way copies like that of Nur, or might the latter have been generated subsequently by a copy that made its way from Florence back north across the Alps? These are questions awaiting further exploration. Case study : The circulation of Machaut’s ludic rondeaux We turn now to our second case study, one that stems from our observation of the curiously limited circulation of Machaut’s rondeaux. As pointed out at the beginning of our essay, the few rondeaux with musical settings that appear outside the Machaut manuscripts tended to be found in only one source, suggesting a radically smaller circulation than that of the ballades, including the promiscuous B. Notably, three of the four rondeaux that survive as singletons (R, R, and R), all in Italian sources, have a specially marked ludic text and in two of these the texts are overtly dedicatory, signaling they are occasional works. We suggest that these features – the very restricted circulation and the ludic and occasional nature of the texts – are related, and that the limited dispersal of R, R, and R is likely tied to their status as gifts to a noble dedicatee. It is well known that the late medieval rondeau was predisposed to verbal game-playing. Its circular format, encoded in its generic name, encouraged metapoesis, and the use of equivocal end-rhyme was particularly on display in this highly repetitive poetic form. Whether Machaut invented the ludic trend in rondeau writing or merely participated in an already extant tendency, his experiments in the genre were congruent with his overall poesis of self-presentation and irony. In all, four rondeaux of his twenty-two with musical settings extend the ludic nature of the rondeau (see Table .) into the music and we have given the name ‘ludic rondeaux’ to identify this tendency.
• • •
Di Bacco and Nádas . For further details on repertory shared by Brescia and Nur, see Cuthbert . The fourth, R, is found only in Trém and the lyric collection Penn, both French sources proximate to the central Machaut manuscripts. Johnson ; Newes .
Yolanda Plumley and Anne Stone
Table .: Machaut’s ludic rondeaux Earliest Machaut MS appearance
Title
Concordances outside Machaut manuscripts
C
Cinc, un, trese (R)
SL
dedicatee is ‘Jehan’; presence in C gives terminus ante quem of early s
B [Vg?]
Ma fin est mon commencement (R)
Ob
absent from Vg; copied in Ob in proximity to a group of compositions with links to Milan
B [Vg?]
Certes mon oueil/ Dame, qui veut (R/R)
I, JP
dedicated to ‘Isabel’; absent from Vg. Only surviving concordances outside Machaut manuscripts are text-only.
Vg
Dix et sept (R)
Iv
Comments
dedicated to ‘Peronne’; genesis described in Voir dit
The texts of R, R and its text-only partner R, and R all encode names of dedicatees. R, Ma fin est mon commencement, is the well-known song whose second half is a retrograde of its first, and whose text and layout playfully comment on this situation. Although this song does not name a dedicatee, its text is entirely devoted to explaining the game of its composition and performance, which leads us to speculate that it was also a dedicatory song intended for a specific recipient. One important feature uniting R with the naming rondeaux is that its game is visible, devised so that it can be read on the manuscript page by a dedicatee who is not necessarily a performer. The readerly aspect of all these works allies them with Machaut’s use of anagrams in his narrative texts: a self-conscious game devised by the poet for his readers that lays bare the entire process of authorship, readership, and literary signification. While songs like B seem to have traveled in a rough and tumble world of musicians, and were subject to a lot of variation and emendation, we suspect that the ludic rondeaux traveled in different and possibly more rarified circles, because they began life as gifts to noble dedicatees. In what follows we will flesh out this hypothesis, focusing particularly on R–R, suggesting that this trio of works was dedicated to Isabelle, daughter of John II of France and his first wife, Bonne of Luxembourg, on the occasion of her wedding to Giangaleazzo Visconti of Milan in . We propose that Isabelle took these three songs by Machaut, possibly together with others, to Milan, and that she may well thus have been the earliest conduit for the arrival in northern Italy of Machaut’s works and therefore for the marked emulation of those ludic works seen in francophone works produced in Italy in the next generation. The story we have to tell is a little bit like a paint-by-numbers picture where most of the numbers are missing and must be supplied by what we are calling historically-informed intuition. But when we floated the outlines of our idea a couple of years ago to Earp himself, we were encouraged by his positive response, and this emboldened us to present it here.
• • •
De Looze . Domenic Leo’s chapter in this volume also explores links between the production of Machaut’s works and the patronage of powerful women within Bonne of Luxembourg’s circle. Email from Lawrence Earp to Anne Stone, June .
Machaut on the Loose in Italy: Two Case Studies
R’s fictionalized genesis In making the case that these songs were dedicatory and likely given in written form to their dedicatees, we begin with R, whose genesis and status as a gift is recounted in the Voir dit. The rondeau is mentioned in several exchanges of letters between Machaut and Toute Belle in July and October . In letter , Machaut informs Toute Belle that ‘several great lords’ know about their affair and have asked to see her compositions, as well as those that Machaut wrote to her in return. Later in the letter he tells her he has enclosed a rondeau, and will send the music by the next messenger, ‘and there is your name, just as you will see in the cedule enclosed in the present letter’. The name encoded in the rondeau is present via a series of numbers, each of which correlates to the ordered series of the alphabet. The numbers , , , , yield R E N O P and have sent scholars for over one hundred years searching for a noble woman named Peronne. Dis et sept cinq trese quatorse et quinse Ma doucement de bien amer espris,
Seventeen, five, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen Has sweetly inflamed me with virtuous love,
Pris a en moy une amoureuse emprise. Dis et sept .v. xiij. xiiij. et quinse
Has captured me in a lover’s embrace. Seventeen, five, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen
Pour sa bonté que chascuns loe et prise Et sa biauté qui seur toutes ont pris. Dis [et] sep[t] .v. trese quatorse et quinse Ma doucement de bien amer espris.
Because of her virtue which every man esteems and praises, And her beauty that they value above all others, Seventeen, five, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen Have sweetly inflamed me with virtuous love.
That ‘cedule’ (notice) mentioned in letter makes us very curious: could it be a sort of canon, explaining the game of the letters transformed into numbers? As we discuss below, Machaut supplied just such a canon, in the form of the supplementary R, for R. In letter , Toute Belle says she received the rondeau and found her name in it, and in letter she specifically asks Machaut for a little rondeau set to music: send me less material, she says, but send me something I can sing because I do not want to sing anything but what you write! In letter , dated September , Machaut tells Toute Belle that he has set to music ‘the rondeau that has your name in it’, and in letter ( October) that he is waiting to send it to her until he can hear it performed. He is confident that she will like it, though, because he thinks it is one of the best songs he has composed in seven years. Although fictional, the description of the genesis of R allows us a glimpse of what might be true circumstances around the creation of a dedicatory song. First, the initial impulse to write a rondeau with Toute Belle’s name encoded into it seems to be more or less coterminous with the publicization of their affair. The name in the rondeau therefore has the flavor of the performance of intimacy, rather than constituting a genuine secret between • • • •
Leech-Wilkinson and Palmer , . See most recently Leech-Wilkinson and Palmer , introduction; Findley . Translation R. Barton Palmer for Plumley, Smilansky, Stone, and Palmer forthcoming. Leech-Wilkinson and Palmer , –.
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the lovers. The performative nature of the encoding of the name is reminiscent of Machaut’s practice of anagrams in his narrative dits, a practice that Laurence de Looze has shown rests upon a fictitious mystery of the author’s name: the reader hunts for the anagram already knowing Machaut’s name. In the case of R, the audience for the performance of the name is not just Toute Belle but also the noblemen who know about their affair, and who have specifically requested poetic evidence of it. It is reasonable to imagine, therefore, that not only did Toute Belle receive her copy of the song in its notated form, but so did one or more of the noble onlookers as well. This offers us a prototype for considering how the two other rondeaux that encode names (R and R) might have come into being: they were very likely composed for a person with whom Machaut had a personal relationship of some degree of intimacy, or at least significant personal acquaintance, and whose gift was a public performance of that intimacy. R’s transmission to only one slightly peripheral source outside the Machaut manuscripts is congruent with the description of its genesis, fictional though that description is. It is the only song by Machaut in Iv, a source that primarily collects masses and motets, with older French songs in secondary positions. Karl Kügle believes that the repertory of Iv was copied by French cleric-musicians in Ivrea, members of an ecclesiastical circle that had ties to Orléans, and who appeared also to have connections to Paris and the Valois court c. , and he believes it contains a repertory that dates largely to before . It seems possible that R found its way into this repertory group via one of the noblemen to whom Machaut promised copies of his songs in the Voir dit. The Machaut sources of R contain a larger number of variants than we find with many other rondeaux, and the Iv copy is not obviously indebted to any of them, suggesting a circulation independent of the central Machaut sources – or at least not clearly following a single source. The songs for ‘Jehan’ and ‘Isabel’ Using the account of R as a model, we can now consider the two other naming songs in Table . that we suspect were composed under similar circumstances, R and R/R. Machaut did not invent the naming procedure of R when he composed it, but rather he drew upon the already completed R for its format. In R, the numbers spell out E, A, N, H, I/J, or ‘Jehan’: Cinc un trese huit nuef d’amour fine M’ont espris sans definement,
Five, one, thirteen, eight, nine of pure love Have set me to an endless burning,
Qu’Espoirs vuet que d’amer ne fine
For Hope intends me to never stop loving. Five, one, thirteen, eight, nine of pure love –
.v. un trese huit nuef d’amour fine, • • • •
De Looze . See Kevin Brownlee’s chapter in this volume for further discussion of the performative nature of anagrams in Machaut’s dits. Kügle ; Kügle ; Diergarten . Kügle , –; Kügle , –. Plumley, Smilansky, Stone, and Palmer forthcoming.
Machaut on the Loose in Italy: Two Case Studies
Si que, plus que fins ors, s’affine Mes cuers pour amer finement; Cinc un trese huit nuef d’amour fine M’ont espris sans definement.
So that, more than pure gold, my heart Is purified through perfect loving. Five, one, thirteen, eight, nine of true love Have set me to burning endlessly.
In addition to the list of numbers making up their first lines, the texts of R and R share the virtuosic equivocal play with the end-rhyme phonemes ‘fine’ (highlighted in bold) and ‘pris’, respectively, and also some specific features of language: the poetic speaker is ‘espris’ in the second lines of both poems, and ‘bien amer’ (R) and ‘fine amour’ (R) are thematized in both refrains. The two poems, in other words, seem like close cousins and we suspect that when Machaut came to write R that he drew on the idea and the structure of R for his model. The game of naming is slightly different for R/R but no less visible: in fact, R’s text comprises the verbal canon needed to read the text of R, removing the ‘v’ from the threesyllable equivocal rhyme ‘vi-sa-bel’ to reveal the name ‘Isabel’: R Certes, mon oueil richement visa bel Quant premiers vi ma dame bonne et belle,
Truly, my eye aimed richly and well When first I spied my lady, beautiful and good,
Pour ce que gent maintieng et vis a bel, Certes, mon oueil richement visa bel.
Because she has a gentle manner and lovely face, Truly, my eye aimed richly and well.
Ne fu tel fleur des que des fu vis Abel, Quant fleur des fleurs tous li mondes l’appelle. Certes, mon oueil richement visa bel Quant premiers vi ma dame bonne et belle.
There’s been no flower like her since Abel lived, Because all the world calls her the flower of flowers. Truly, my eye aimed richly and well When first I spied my lady beautiful and good.
R Dame, qui vuet vostre droit nom savoir, Voie ce dit, qui en chantant l’enseingne.
Lady, whoever would learn your true name, Let him see this poem, which, being sung, will teach him it.
Ma .v. de vis faut oster et mouvoir, Dame, qui vuet vostre droit nom savoir.
My ‘v’ from ‘vis’ must be taken out and moved, Lady, whoever would learn your true name.
Or le vueilliez en bon gré recevoir, Car je l’ai fait pour vous a telle enseingne Dame, qui vuet vostre droit nom savoir, Voie ce dit, qui en chantant l’enseingne.
Now please receive it in good grace, For I composed it for you to be such a sign, Lady, whoever would learn your true name, Let him see this poem, which, being sung, will teach him it.
R is a tour de force of rondeau composition, marshaling the genre’s tendency toward equivocal rhyme by making the equivocal syllables a name, and then directing the reader’s attention to it by appending a second rondeau (R) as a canon: ‘my “v” from vis must be taken out and moved’. This canon is obviously aimed at a reader of the song as opposed to a
• • •
Trans. R. Barton Palmer for Plumley, Smilansky, Stone, and Palmer forthcoming. Trans. R. Barton Palmer for Plumley, Smilansky, Stone, and Palmer forthcoming. Trans. R. Barton Palmer for Plumley, Smilansky, Stone, and Palmer forthcoming.
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Figure 17.3: .: Cantus voice of R15 R in MS G, fol. 153 r, detail (BnF)
performer, who does not need the canon to perform the song. However, there is also an aural component to this game. The rondeau is extremely melismatic, especially in its A section, but becomes syllabic at the end, highlighting the last three syllables of each line. In the A section this allows the name ‘[v]isabel’ to pop out of the texture very audibly; see the underlay as found in G in Figure 17.3. .. (The B section participates in this game to a somewhat lesser degree: its endings are ‘bonne et belle’, ‘vis Abel’, and ‘monde l’appelle’.) The question of the identity of these dedicatees has been debated by scholars,71 but it seems to us to be more than coincidence that the two names encoded in R6 R and R15/R16, R/R, Jehan ( John) and Isabel (Isabelle), are the names of two of the children of Bonne of Luxembourg and John, duke of Normandy (the future John II, king of France). Machaut’s relationship with Bonne of Luxembourg has been the subject of considerable research by Earp, and there is no doubt that Machaut was familiar to her children; indeed, Earp and others have argued Jehan ( John, duke of Berry, 1340–1416), –), was the third of for a relationship of some intimacy.72 her children who survived into adulthood, becoming an important patron of Machaut and of the arts in general, and Isabelle (1348–72) (–) her eighth and last. We think it likely that R6 R and R/ were created as gifts for the two noble children in a gesture of performative intimacy R15/16 similar to that of R17 R for 'Peronne'. R6 R is copied into C, whose completion by the early 1350s s fell within the duke’s childhood, while R15/R16 R/R likely date to later, but still within the period
• 71 • • 72 •
Earp 1995a, a, 300, , describes early theories of other scholars who suggested R R6 was written for John of Berry’s wedding in to Jeanne d’Armagnac. Since MS C has been redated to the early 1350s 1360 s at the latest, that theory is no longer tenable. Earp , 2021, –; 21–30; Leo , 2005, –. 131–35.
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of Isabelle’s youth. We thus imagine these gifts were mobile in the same way as R was, that is, to have been given to their dedicatees at the time of composition, setting in motion the circulation independent of the ‘greatest hits’ circuit that transmitted certain of Machaut’s ballades, like B, and his R. How does the circulation of these songs outside the Machaut manuscripts support our hypothesis regarding the dedicatees? While R’s copy in Iv, as stated above, does not closely align with any one Machaut source, R’s musical text in the relatively late Florentine SL reveals several idiosyncratic readings shared only with the early C, including a different starting pitch for the tenor; a different sequence of pitches in bars – of the tenor; and two missing notes in the cantus, bar . These readings are all changed in R’s transmission in the later Machaut sources. The musical connection to C is complicated when we compare the readings of the poetic texts. SL only transmits the three-word incipit but the orthography of these words shows variation among the Machaut sources: siglum
text
C
Cinc vii trese
A, G
Cinc un trese
E
Cinq un treze
B
Cinc un treze
SL
[C]inc utresq[ue]
SL ’s very corrupt reading ‘[C]inc utresq[ue]’ we believe is a result of the scribe’s confusion over the numeral vii (a seeming error) found in C, which he turned into a u and elided with the following word ‘trese’. We cannot explain the mysterious ‘q[ue]’ that follows it, however. But SL shares the final c of ‘cinc’ with all the other sources and against E, as well as the s of ‘trese’ with C, A, and G and against E and B, supporting – or at least not contradicting – the idea that SL ’s R exemplar descended from C. None of the other Machaut songs transmitted in SL reveals a stemmatic connection to C over the other Machaut sources, suggesting that R’s transmission path to Florence could have been different than that of the other Machaut songs collected there. The implications of this odd circumstance – one of the latest copies of Machaut’s songs being indebted to the earliest of the complete-works manuscripts – needs teasing out at length, but for now suffice it to say that we suspect that an early gift of a copy of the song to the dedicatee, sharing the reading of C, made its way to Italy through noble or diplomatic channels, while at the same time the song was tweaked and recomposed as it passed from one ‘central’ Machaut source to another. •
• •
On the idea of songs as mobile gifts, see Plumley . Two examples of songs that seem likely to have been gifts are Belle, bonne, sage and Tout par compas, both transmitted in Ch in a spectacular pictorial presentation; see Plumley and Stone . Plumley, Smilansky, Stone, and Palmer forthcoming. We do not agree with Earp (a), who suggests that C’s version of R might be preferable to those transmitted in the later Machaut sources. Plumley, Smilansky, Stone, and Palmer forthcoming.
Yolanda Plumley and Anne Stone
The circulation of R, together with its supplement, R, is the cornerstone of our hypothesis about the mobile circulation of the ludic rondeaux, despite the fact that it does not survive with a musical setting outside the Machaut manuscripts. Our story, though, imagines that it did. It begins with an interesting glitch in their transmission within those sources, namely that they are absent from Vg, but present in B, which we know was copied directly from Vg. In B they are copied on a single folio, together with R, that was tipped in incorrectly to the ballade section of that manuscript, likely when it was bound in the fifteenth century. A missing folio in Vg (fol. r–v) between R and R very likely contained the three rondeaux, but as Earp explains, that folio also had been tipped in and was not part of the original gathering. In short: the three ludic rondeaux, R, R, and the text-only R, occupied a single folio in their earliest incarnations, and those single folios were mobile from the start, physically distinct from the manuscripts (Vg and B) in which they were placed. Earp believes that the missing folio in Vg was planned from the beginning as an extra folio, not part of a gathering; this unusual decision, according to Earp, was prompted by the difficulties in copying provoked by the upside-down texting in R. As Earp points out, all the scribes of R’s various incarnations struggled with its layout, suggesting perhaps that they worked from an exemplar that had a traditional layout with written instructions for the inversion of the text. Yet it is hard to understand why B’s folio would have also been made as a single folio, since the scribe of that manuscript presumably had only to copy what he saw in Vg. Was the copying from Vg to B so slavish that it reproduced also the irregular gathering structure with an extra single folio? We are not convinced that the extra folio in Vg was planned from the start; rather, we suggest that detachment of the folio containing the three rondeaux from the gathering structures of both Vg and B stem from its origin as a folio-sized gift for the dedicatee named in R: Isabelle. We suspect further that B’s version of the folio was not copied from Vg; our suspicions on this score depart from R’s odd layout in MS B (see Figure .). First, it seems that the scribes of B were not copying from an already-formatted version of R. The text scribe seems to have mistakenly copied the final ‘fin’ above rather than below the topmost red stave. When the music scribe went to copy the music, he realized it needed to start above, not below the word ‘fin’ and so drew an extra stave above in black ink, then dispersed the music very approximately across the too-abundant staves. If he were simply copying from Vg, which was presumably already laid out correctly, why did he make this mistake? A second puzzle concerns the notation of the contratenor voice, which is copied over two halflines rather than continuously across one line. Again, this makes no sense if we assume that the B scribe was copying what he saw in Vg but might be explained if he were copying from a different source in two columns, with a layout similar to that of G. Finally, the residual • • •
Earp , . Bent . Earp , .
Machaut on the Loose in Italy: Two Case Studies
Figure 17.4: .: R14 R in MS B, fol. 309r (BnF)
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text in B is presented in poetic form, with each poetic verse on a new line, unlike any of the other residual texts in Vg’s rondeaux, all of which are placed horizontally into empty spaces with puncta marking the divisions of poetic lines. In short: we think B’s exemplar for R was not the now-missing folio in Vg, but one that was incompletely realized and might well have had a two-column format. Our alternative suggestion, therefore, is the following: when the twelve-year-old Isabelle went to Milan to be married to Giangaleazzo Visconti in October of , Machaut composed an elaborate musical gift for her: a rondeau set to music that encoded her name (R), with a supplementary accompanying rondeau text explaining the game (R), plus a special puzzle rondeau with upside-down text and elaborate instructions for performance (R). Stone has already noted that R’s layout is considerably more complicated than it needs to be. Its music consists of a three-voice A section of forty breve measures that is retrograded to form its B section, a challenging contrapuntal feat to be sure, but not a challenging notational one. In its simplest layout, all three voices would resemble the layout of the contratenor as found in the sources: a musical line, representing half the song, that is sung first forward and then backward. But instead, the layout of cantus and tenor superimposes a further level of faux complexity upon the structure: the cantus and the retrograde of the tenor are copied into a single musical line with the ludic instruction that the line be sung simultaneously from the beginning and from the end. Thus, one singer sings cantus then retrograde tenor while the second singer sings tenor then retrograde cantus. This seems to us exactly the kind of delightful game that would enchant a young noble patron. If Isabelle brought this folio with her to Milan in the fall of , perhaps together with a small packet of music and poems by France’s most illustrious poet-composer, it might explain the ‘surprising’ transmission of R in Ob , one of the fragments of polyphony associated with St Giustina of Padua c. . Our theory is that R traveled to Padua from Milan in the company of a handful of other works copied in its vicinity that seem to have Milanese connections. Jacopo da Bologna’s motet Lux purpurata is dedicated to Luchino Visconti (c. –), ruler of Milan, whose name is found in an acrostic. Copied onto the verso of the folio containing R is the virelai Sus une fontayne by Johannes Ciconia, which strong circumstantial evidence connects to the court of Giangaleazzo Visconti sometime after . A Sanctus in the same gathering, according to Michael Cuthbert’s reconstruction, is attributed to ‘Mediolano’, an otherwise unknown composer from Milan. Finally, in the margin of the Sanctus attributed to ‘Barbitonsorus’ is written the tag ‘Ambrosius’. Cuthbert’s explanation for this note is that after the manuscript was disbound, that bifolio was used as the cover of a book of letters of St Ambrose so that ‘Ambrosius’ identifies the host volume to which the fragment was assigned. Yet both the ink color and the style of writing appear co • • • • •
Stone . Cuthbert , . See the reconstruction of Ob in Cuthbert , –. Strohm ; Nádas and Ziino ; Stone ; Plumley . Cuthbert , –.
Machaut on the Loose in Italy: Two Case Studies
terminous with the rest of the folio and it seems more likely to us that it was written by the text scribe of the original manuscript. Could the name Ambrosius have instead been copied from the exemplar, furnishing another connection to Milan and its Ambrosian liturgy? Once again when we compare the reading of R in Ob to those of the central Machaut sources, no clear affiliation is apparent, but a case can be made that Ob ’s reading stems from an early source. As Table . shows, the Paduan source follows E in opposition to the other Machaut manuscripts in two telling respects: it labels the second voice ‘tenor’ instead of ‘contratenor’ (and copies the label upside-down like the text underlay) and uses an F rather than C clef to notate it. In addition, Ob and E both lack the residual text of the rondeau, the text that clarifies the performance of the song, and this would seem to argue that they share an exemplar with a later and less authoritative status. Yet the ligatures, layout, orthography, and underlay are different enough between E and Ob to discourage the idea that E is a close stemmatic cousin to Ob . Margaret Bent has established that B was not the exemplar for E’s version of R, once again raising the question of the nature of the exemplars available to E’s scribe. It is possible that the scribe had access to an exemplar that was made early in the song’s life – perhaps John of Berry, E’s owner, possessed a copy of the folio that was made for his sister? – at a point when the second voice was labeled with an upside-down ‘tenor’. Table .: Sources of R, Ma fin est mon commencement
Source
Naming of lower part
Clefs
Order of voices
What is upside down
Residuum
Other comments
B
contratenor
C/C,
cantus then contratenor
cantus text only
Y
occupies a whole folio in B, layout suggests an exemplar in columns; top line containing beginning/end looks like it was added because stave is black, not red like the others; guide letter for initial M right side up, not executed
A
contratenor
C/C
cantus then contratenor
cantus text only
Y
beginning of cantus is at the bottom of fol. v
G
contratenor
C, /C
cantus then contratenor
cantus text only
Y
decorated initial M upside down
E
tenor
C/F
tenor then cantus
cantus text and ‘tenor’ voice cue
N
decorated initial M upside down
Ob
tenor
C, /F
cantus then tenor
cantus text and ‘tenor de ma fin’ all across tenor voice
N
initial M upside down; text very corrupt
If we had to guess what other dedicatory compositions Machaut might have prepared for Isabelle to take to Milan in , we would propose two ballades found in the lyric collection, the Loange des dames: Lo, ‘Il n’est confors qui me peüst venir’, whose first four lines •
Bent .
Yolanda Plumley and Anne Stone
contain the anagram ‘Isabelle’, and Lo, ‘Onques dame ne fu si bele’. This last text contains features that suggest to us that it was written in Isabelle’s honor specifically for her wedding to Giangaleazzo Visconti. First is the rhyme word ‘bele’ that ends the first line, potentially invoking her name in a manner similar to R (see Table .). The most telling indication, though, is the phrase ‘a bon droit’ in line (‘Que chascuns a bon droit l’appelle’): this motto is inscribed on the emblem reputedly given by Petrarch to Giangaleazzo upon his wedding to Isabelle, depicting a turtledove and a sun, which the ruler used enthusiastically thereafter. Significantly, a manuscript collection of French lyric texts linked to the Visconti court in the later fourteenth century, British Library, Add. , contains thirteen lyric poems that contain the motto among other Visconti emblems and references. Other thematic resonances between Lo and texts found in the London collection include thematizing of the rose and its odor, found in a number of lyrics therein; in addition, the particular rhetorical structure of the poem’s opening, containing a negative comparison (no woman was as beautiful, nor was any new rose in May so pleasant in color and odor as the sweet face), is found in several of the texts in the London text manuscript. We include in Table . one of these texts, Un noble ray, for comparison. This virelai likely celebrates Giangaleazzo Visconti, with reference to the ‘ray’ of the sun featured in his emblem. But it also shares with Lo the reference to the rose (bolded) and its odor, the negative comparison using ‘ne onque’ (in rose-colored font), and the motto ‘a bon droit’ (underlined). Whether Machaut was participating in a poetic exchange with the anonymous poet[s] of the London manuscript, or whether his poems simply served as a model for the latter, as we know they did, we think it likely that both Lo and a group of these texts were written in Isabelle’s honor at the time of the wedding.
If the painting that emerges from our connect-the-dots exercise has merit, it can contribute to our understanding of Machaut’s reach as a composer in specific and multiple ways. Giftgiving has long been recognized as a central activity in the late medieval courtly context, and Plumley has studied the specific phenomenon of the song as a mobile gift for New Year celebrations in the post-Machaut era. Machaut may well have had a formative role to play in the development of the idea of the song as a thing, able to be transacted, or indeed capable of agency and voice. It was during his lifetime, and likely in part because of his attention to manuscript preservation, that songs became so enmeshed with writing. The codification of musica mensurabilis into largely fixed rules over the course of the fourteenth century, to • • • • •
Wilkins , . Novati , –. Wallis . The London collection features two songs that start by citing songs by Machaut, De Fortune and De toutes flours; see Plumley , –. Plumley .
Machaut on the Loose in Italy: Two Case Studies
Table 17.6: .: Comparison of Lo Lo221 and Un noble ray, a virelai in British Library, Add. 15224
Lo (fol. 207 Lo221 v) a) Onques dame ne fu si belle, Ne pleinne de si grant douçour, N’onques en May rose nouvelle, Ne fu d’odeur et de coulour Si plaisant com le dous vis De celle qui seur toutes [ha le pris], Desa me[r] ou dela mer. Telle la doit on amer.
Never has there been a lady this lovely Or filled with such great sweetness, No May rose ever so fresh, So pleasing in its aroma, Or color, as the sweet face Of her who beyond all other women takes the prize On this side of the sea or on the other shore. A man must must love such a one as her.
Mais se ma joie renouvelle Qu’elle a tant bonté et valour Que chascuns a bon droit l’apelle De tous biens l’onneur et la flour, Et dit que ses corps faitis Est de tous biens parez et assevis, Est Si qu’on n’i puet amender. Tele la doit on amer.
Yet this redoubles the joy I feel, That she has such beauty and worthiness That every man rightly names her The honor and the flower of every virtue, Saying that her shapely form Is endowed and graced with every form of goodness, Leaving the lady beyond any improvement. A man must must love such a one as her.
Mais de l’amoureuse estincelle estincelle N’ot onques ses cuers la chalour. Einsois vueil bien qu’on sache qu’elle Ne sot onques que c’est st d’amour Dont se je l’aim, ser, et pris Seur toute rien, n’en doy estre estre repris, Car par m’ame elle n’a per. Telle la doit on amer.
But of love’s spark Her heart has never felt the heat. So my fervent wish is that it be known That never has she realized it is with love I love, serve, and esteem esteem her More than anything else, nor should I be reproached, Since she has no equal, upon my soul. A man must must love such a one as her.
a) b)
Text ed. by Plumley, trans.. R. Barton Palmer for Mahoney-Steel, Plumley, and Palmer forthcoming. Text ed. by the authors; trans. by the authors and R. Barton Palmer, to whom we extend our thanks.
gether with an increased attention to preserving songs in writing, allowed the song-as-gift to become tangible, both visual and aural, a place where ‘sight met sound’.90 The specific self-conscious compositional play explored by R R14 seems to have spawned imitators in the early fifteenth century, as considered some years ago by Virginia Newes.91 Even more: by giving the song its own voice, R R14 also hypothesizes the song’s corporeal existence, and might have served as a model for other songs in the first-person voice, including the canon Andray soulet by Milan-based composer Matteo da Perugia, as well as Senleches’s La Harpe de melodie, both of which feature a canon in the voice of the song explaining how it is to be performed. La Harpe de melodie was copied in Milan in the s, 1390s, and while we have no reason to imagine it was composed there, its presence might reveal a receptivity to self-referential composition nurtured by the earlier presence of Machaut’s ludic rondeaux.92 90 • • • 91 • • 92 •
Zazulia 2021. . Newes 1990. . Strohm 1989. .
366
Yolanda Plumley and Anne Stone
BL Add. 15224 (fol. 33 r), virelai b) Un noble ray en mon songe veoie Dez estoiles estoiles si tres bien atournez Que cuer humein ne poroit onques mez Tant de pleisir comprendre ne de joye. Et toute foiz si voit damour trez fine Le gientil rai a l’estoile stoile iournee, Que plus luisoit que la rose englentine Ne flaire prez que le apris la rosee. Mez a bon droit le devoit toute fie, Quar en li est est amour renovelez De biaulx atourz si tres bien acointez Que nulement diviser la sauroie.
In my dream I had a vision of a noble ray So richly adorned with stars stars That no human heart might ever Comprehend such pleasure or joy. And yet with a most most pure love moves The gentle ray from the day star, star, Which shines more brightly than the dog rose Bursts with scent only after the morning dew. Bursts Nevertheless, quite rightly I owed it all my trust, trust, For it is there that love will be renewed By those appealing charms, so well appointed That never would I be able to describe them.
Our hypothetical but very specific case study of the circulation of these rondeaux perhaps further helps to tie together disparate strands of Machaut reception in Lombardy. For example, the little-known composer Antonello da Caserta, who wrote an Italian ballata praising Giangaleazzo Visconti’s elevation to the title Duke of Milan in 1395, ,93 also set to music a ballade text by Machaut, Lo, Lo140, Biauté parfaite, a lyric that otherwise is not known to have circulated beyond the central Machaut sources. Matteo da Perugia, the maestro di cappella of the Duomo of Milan in the first two decades of the fifteenth century, quoted two Machaut ballades in his own ballade Se je me plaing de Fortune and supplied a con This deep engagement with the works of Machaut by two early tratenor for Machaut’s R7. R.94 fifteenth-century composers tied to Lombardy is puzzling unless we consider the possibility that his works, with his name attached, had already circulated at the Milanese court. 93 • • • 94 •
Nádas and Ziino 1990. . Stone 2011. .
367
Machaut on the Loose in Italy: Two Case Studies
Finally, although our two case studies were chosen in order to demonstrate disparity – in number of exemplars, transmission routes, and relation to a living, traveling repertory – they notably both point to the presence of good exemplars of Machaut’s songs beyond those of the surviving complete-works manuscripts, once again reminding us that more sources of Machaut’s works existed than we normally take into account. (Indeed, we know that there was a book containing Machaut’s work in the Visconti library in Pavia in its earliest inventory from , though all we know about it is that it contained the Dit dou lyon.) This is most clearly suggested by the case of E and those of its songs that were not copied from B, which Earp proposes may have been culled from small exemplars that were available at the court of John, duke of Berry. While Earp envisions that these exemplars represent a ‘living repertory’ pointing to Machaut reception c. , we suggest that at least some of those exemplars may have been older authorial copies, in the possession of the duke of Berry or other members of the French nobility who had longstanding ties to the composer. The very recent findings relating to Vg and F-G have further highlighted the significance of this particular court, but we know, too, from Trém that Machaut’s songs were performed also at the court of John’s brother Philip II ‘the Bold’, duke of Burgundy, alongside other contemporary songs and motets. By the end of Machaut’s lifetime, in short, his songs were still circulating within the Parisian princely courts and being collected with other northern songs and motets. And by the end of the century, they were also being copied without their music within and close to the French princely courts, and with their music in sources from further afield. Mixed musical anthologies containing songs by Machaut alongside those of his contemporaries may have been transmitted to northern Italy via the Burgundian Lowlands, as Reinhard Strohm has suggested, where they were copied in sources like PR and Mod, and perhaps from there they made their way further south. Alternatively, such sources, or smaller exemplars, may have reached Florence via papal Avignon with singers who sought their fortune in Rome in the last years of the century, or who attended the Church councils in the retinue of dignitaries. In other cases, like the ludic rondeaux studied here, songs seem to have traveled not as part of anthologies but individually in very specific circumstances. Disambiguating the different channels of transmission can nuance our understanding of the way Machaut was received in the decades after his death. Though it is challenging to assess Machaut’s legacy and the impact his works had on the generation of composers who succeeded him, we believe that further work detailing the specific trajectory of his music, through study of the surviving exemplars and by reconstructing now lost ones, should surely help to bring his influence into sharper focus, and to confirm his continuing importance in the years after his death, both at home and abroad. • • • • • • •
Earp a is a notable exception. Pellegrin, , , mentioned in Earp a, . Earp a, –. On the Vg findings, see Alberni , and on F-G, Plumley and Smilansky forthcoming. Strohm . PR shares a significant number of French songs with Trém, as discussed in Plumley forthcoming b. Plumley and Stone .
. M S S: M’ W S David Maw In affectionate tribute to Larry Earp on his seventieth birthday.
One of Larry Earp’s most important contributions towards the understanding of Guillaume de Machaut’s music has been his recognition of the importance of word setting. Machaut was first and foremost a poet, and his music grew from and developed his poetry. Yet the issue of how exactly the poetry and music fit together is often ignored or sidelined. The issue is a difficult one. Machaut did not set his music in accordance with humanistic virtues of speech rhythm or musical subservience to verbal meaning that are often taken for granted now. On the contrary, he seems often to have acted in a way directly contrary to such values. Larry has made important observations about Machaut’s handling of verse in song and has advanced proposals for ways in which we can make sense of it now. My own work in this area has drawn greatly on Larry’s, and I hope in developing it further to be paying him an appropriate tribute. The particular question that I shall explore is how Machaut’s word setting reveals a specifically novel dimension in his creative practice. In his songs, Machaut drew on techniques of poetic declamation that derived from the ars antiqua. Yet his practice was not a simple continuation of the previous period. I shall consider how analysis of Machaut’s word setting can contribute to an understanding of the specifically ars nova component in the compositional process of his songs; and then from this, I shall explore what this word setting reveals about the compositional aesthetics of Machaut’s particular version of the ars nova. Four of Machaut’s early songs enable various aspects of this analysis to be pursued within a more-or-less unified phase of the composer’s stylistic development: Dous viaire (R), Dous amis (B), Quant j’ay l’espart (R), and Ne pensez pas (B). The texts and translations of the poems of these songs are given for reference in the Appendix. Syllabic placement as rhythmic notation in Machaut’s songs As Larry’s pioneering paleographic work demonstrated, the compilers of the Machaut manuscripts took great care to show the placement of syllables of the poem in the musical lines of his songs. This care is reflective of the high importance of the word setting in the text of these pieces. Syllable change constitutes qualitative difference in the vocal timbre; and where consonances are involved, quasi-percussive effects can be created. The pattern of syllable changes is a significant component of a song’s rhythm. The rhythm of a poem preceded that of the music setting it, which can be thought of as having grown from it.
• • •
Earp a; Earp . Translations of all texts are my own. My discussion of Machaut’s songs proceeds from the revised text of my edition:
Earp , –.
Making Song Speak: Machaut’s ars nova Word Setting
Ars nova rhythm tends to be understood through the prism of music-theoretical writing of the time. The approach is understandable, as theoretical writings are a necessary first point of call for scholars aiming to make sense of the notation. Yet it is inevitably limited: music theory does not represent the totality of musical practice; and too heavy a reliance on theory may distort musical reality if it is not leavened by consideration for the specific practicalities of individual notational uses. Fourteenth-century theorists aimed to find a theoretical framework adequate to address the diversity of musical practices they identified. They adapted existing notational resources, an undertaking that brought its own challenges and limitations; and with these, they created a system of relationships between the durations of notes of different lengths. Their approach conceived musical rhythm exclusively in terms of the quantities of its constituent elements rather than considering the no less important qualitative differences that arise in the musical use of such durations. Syllabic rhythm is an aspect of song rhythm that differentiates durations qualitatively, overlaying its own rhythmic carapace. The focus of innovation in ars nova notation was on the ways of subdividing the breve. The increased use of shorter note values meant that the larger values of breves and longs were less immediately clear than they had been. Such longer values were often expressed through syllable placement which could contribute significantly to the effect of the rhythmic organization. It could, in fact, be an additional element of rhythmic notation. The opening of On ne porroit (B) proceeds in the cantus by breves, semibreves, and minims (Figure . and Example .). Taken in its own terms, the musical notation may indicate a rhythm proceeding simply in breves, each one functioning as a metrical unit. This is how Leo Schrade barred the song in his edition. However, the positioning of breves every four imperfect-tempus units suggests that the rhythm is organized at the higher metrical level of imperfect modus, which is how Friedrich Ludwig barred the song in his edition. The syllabic rhythm is explicit about this higher rhythmic organization, grouping notes in longs and breves as well as semibreves and minims. The imperfect (binary) modus structure of the rhythm is clearly discernible in it: the first syllable in the first bar; the next four syllables paired within the following two bars (the caesural syllable at the beginning of the third bar, marked + in the example); then four syllables paired within the beats of the fourth bar before the rhyme arrives at the beginning of the fifth bar (marked *). This structuring of a decasyllable as a linked pair of phrases across five bars was often used by Machaut.
•
•
Johannes de Muris was explicit about the need for musical notation to be able to notate all that was sung: ‘For everything that is performed should be notatable’ (‘Omne enim, quod profertur, debet figurari’); Michels , . See also Desmond a, –. See Schrade c, : –; Ludwig –, : .
David Maw
Figure 18.1: .: MS G, fol. 134v, detail (BnF) Example 18.1: .: Word setting and rhythm in the notation of On ne porroit (B3) (B)
& ‹
œ œ ≈ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ ‰ œj bœ œ œ œ œ œ Œ
œ ì & 2 œ œ ≈ œ œ ì œ œ œ œ œ ì œ ‰ œj ì bœ œ œr œj œj ì œ Œ ‹ On ne por - roit pen - ser ne sou -hai - dier syllabic rhythm:
˙
œ
⁕ œ ‰ œ œ™ œ œ œ œ Œ J
œ
+
Musical rhythm needs, then, to be read within the syllabic rhythm. Without the syllable placements, the durations of the musical rhythm may be metrically ambiguous or may lack crucial metrical indicators. The beginning of Je sui aussi (B20) (B) is rhythmically similar to that of On ne porroit and might be understood as falling similarly in imperfect modus (Figure . and Example 18.2). 18.2 .). Again, the syllable placements put notes into larger groups of longs and breves. In this case, the syllabic rhythm shows that the song actually opens in perfect (ternary) modus, with an underlying second-mode rhythm.6 The musical rhythm was developed as a setting of the words and cannot be fully understood without the context of the syllabic rhythm that results from placing the text in the melodic line. The setting of the words needs to be read as an integral part of the notation of the song. Syllable placements were central to the rhythmic form of the song; and musical rhythm functions as a development of poetic rhythm. Discerning ars nova tension in Machaldian syllabic rhythm Machaut’s vision of the ars nova stood as a tension between old and new styles. There is, then, an analytical challenge to identify those points where the two styles pull against each other. As regards word setting, my proposal is that it can be analyzed in two stages: first by • 6 •
Maw 2004, , 90 and 92–93. –.
371
Making Song Speak: Machaut’s ars nova Word Setting
Figure 18.2: .: MS G, fol. 140 v, detail (BnF) Example 18.2: .: Word setting and rhythm in the notation of Je sui aussi (B20) (B)
œ ™ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ bœ œ ˙ & œ œ ‹ ™ œœœœœ œ œ œ ì bœ œ œ ˙ & œ ‹ Je sui aus - si syllabic rhythm:
œ
˙
œ
˙
+
œ™ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ#œ ™ œ œ œ Œ
œ ì œ™ œ œ œ œR œ œ œ œR ì œ œ œnœ#œ ™ œ œ ì œ Œ R R com
cils
qui est
ra - vis
œ
Ϫ
œ œ™
œœ
(Q
H
⁕
Q
qui
n'a -ver -tu
H
)
+ œ™ œ œ œ Œ
discerning traces of an implied, regular rhythmic structure for declaiming the syllables of the poem, the ‘basic declamation’, which is reconstructed as a starting point;7 then by identifying the deformation of the basic rhythm in the actual ‘syllabic rhythm’. In crude terms, the basic declamation may be identified with the old style; the deformations in the syllabic rhythm are manifestations of the new.8 By viewing the word setting in this way, novelty is located at particular points in the song, which can then become the focus of analytical investigation: to see what the altered declamation permits to occur that would not otherwise have been possible. In proposing this distinction, I am not suggesting that the two sorts of declamation constitute distinct stages in a compositional process; rather that the different rhythms constitute distinct levels of the compositional order: the basic declamation is part of a structural order guaranteeing coherence; and the syllabic rhythm is part of a stylistic order facilitating expression. My intention with this distinction is not to afforce a strict separation of structure and expression. On the contrary, I shall suggest that structure and expression work also • 7 •
• 8 •
Declamation is widely recognized as an important element in understanding the structure of Machaut’s songs. Two dimensions are identified within it: a grouping structure of the syllables; and rhythmicization of the grouping structure within a particular metrical scheme. See Dömling , 1970, –; 25–32; Lühmann . 1978. Earp 2005a a has articulated this tension in terms of dissonance. I view his idea within a more broadly dualistic account of Machaut’s word setting in Maw 2020a. a.
372
David Maw
within the two levels. Yet the initial characterization is useful as an orientation. The word setting provides the primary formal characterization of the song. Every component of form needs to be understood as a function of it. Dous viaire (R) is Machaut’s shortest song, and structurally the simplest. Its poem is an isometric simple rondeau of heptasyllables (Figure .a). Both lines of the refrain are set by single phrases. The poem’s formal simplicity is matched in the setting of the first line by a declamation that is typical of Machaut’s heptasyllables: the first two syllables are paired in the first bar of an imperfect-modus meter; the next four are paired within the beats of the second bar; the rhyme is placed at the metrical stress of the third bar. This pattern creates the basic declamation of the song, and can be inferred for the second line, which has the same poetic form. The syllabic rhythm of the second line is different but demonstrably related to the basic declamation. It is varied: by running directly into the first line, creating a momentary change of meter; by a semibreve-delay (or ‘articulation pause’) to the second syllable of the second part; and most significantly by augmenting the length of the fifth and sixth syllables. The starting point was a basic declamation approaching the two lines isometrically. In the composition, Machaut retained this rhythm intact for the first line in order to demonstrate its manipulation in the second. The musical setting destabilizes the exact symmetry of the poem between the two lines of the refrain, creating a tension in the song that adds to its characterization as a composition in the new style. Dous amis (B) develops this approach in a more complicated structure. It is one of Machaut’s twofold ballades (ballada duplex, in Egidius de Murino’s terms), songs in which both parts of the stanza are repeated. The stanza is consequently a long one for a ballade, with fourteen lines. Like Dous viaire, it uses heptasyllables, but it has also shorter lines, tetrasyllables and trisyllables; these, though, are used in complementary pairs, so that the heptasyllabic rhythm is maintained throughout. The stanza is effectively one of ten heptasyllables of which four have fourth-syllable internal rhyme. Again, like Dous viaire, the song begins with a line presented in a standard declamation pattern, in this case that of the second rhythmic mode, which can be used as the basis for inferring a basic declamation for the whole song (Figure .b). Comparison of the basic declamation and syllabic rhythm, shows that regular second-mode rhythm is used for the first three lines, setting the second and third as a single phrase (with only an articulation pause on the first syllable of the third line to break the lines), so that there are effectively two four-bar phrases. The fourth line represents the first real departure from the basic declamation, with the pairing of the first four syllables within a single second-mode unit initiated by an articulation pause. The third musical phrase is thereby reduced from four bars to three.
•
•
For example, the selection of second-mode rhythm within the basic declamation of Dous amis is an expressive choice, whilst the similarity between the altered declamations at the ends of the two parts in the syllabic rhythm of Quant j’ay l’espart is structural. Coussemaker –, : .
Making Song Speak: Machaut’s ars nova Word Setting
I = first part II = second part + = caesura * = rhyme
R1
I
basic declamation:
AP = articulation pause Aug = augmentation Dim = diminution IB = inserted bar MEx = melismatic extension
2 Ϫ Ϫ
⁕ j j ™ œœ œœ œ
2 Ϫ Ϫ
j j œœ œœ 3œ ‰
A7
AP
syllabic rhythm:
j j œœ œ œ
II B 7
Ϊ
Ϫ Ϫ AP
Dim
Aug
⁕
˙™
Aug
j œ™ ‰ œ 2 œ œ œ™ h ™ ˙™
a. Dous viaire (R)
B� I BD:
a�
a4
⁕
⁕
a�
b�
⁕
3 œ ˙ œ ˙ œ ˙ ˙™ œ ˙ œ ˙ œ ˙ ˙™ œ h
œ ˙ ˙ ™ ™™
j r r 3 œ ˙ œ ˙ œ ˙ ˙™ œ ˙ œ ˙ ‰ œ ˙ ˙™ ‰ œ œ œ œ
œ ˙ ˙ ™ ™™
AP
SR:
Dim Dim
�‰
II
b4
b�
⁕
˙™ œ ˙
BD:
œ
˙™ œ ˙
Dim
e
h�
œ ˙ œ ˙
⁕
œ h
œ ˙ ˙ ™ ™™
j j ˙ 3 ‰ œ ˙ ‰ œ ˙ 2 œ œ 3 œ ˙ ˙ ™ ™™
Au�
AP
˙™ 2 ˙
˙™
a�
⁕
˙
Au�
SR:
⁕
œ˙
AP
Dim
displacement syncopation
hemiola
b. Dous amis (B)
R5
I
BD:
A4
3 ˙™
⁕
˙
A4
œ ˙
œ
˙
IB
SR:
II BD:
3 ˙™
˙
œ ˙
A4
˙™
˙
œ Dim Dim
SR:
2 ˙
⁕
œ
˙
œ h
h
AP
œ ˙™
B4
⁕
MEx
‰ œj 2 ˙
A4
˙ œ AP
˙ MEx
j j œ eœ 3 ˙ ‰ œ 2 ˙ ˙
Dim Dim
˙ ˙ œ
AP
˙
MEx
r j œ œ ≈œ h h 3 ˙
displacement syncopation hemiola
hemiola c. Quant j’ay l’espart (R)
˙™
Dim
j r r œ œ œ œ 3 ˙™
4 ⁕B
œ
q
⁕
spare imperfect modus bar
œ
⁕
˙™
Dim Dim
j rr œ œ œ ˙™
David Maw
B�� Vers ouvert/clos I a�� BD:
2 ˙™
�
œ ˙
˙™
A��
SR:
3 �™
BD:
˙ œ œ ˙
˙™
œ �
˙™
2˙ œ œ ˙
˙™
œ �
A��
œ ˙
�™
b��
˙™
�
œ ˙
˙™
˙™
A��
SR:
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˙
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AP
œ
A��
SR:
A��
�™ 3 h ™
�™
⁕
˙ q
q h �™
™™
h ™ q h �™
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A��
œ � œ �™
œ ˙™
Oultrepasse b�� II BD:
⁕
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˙
˙™
A��
˙™
A��
Dim
2�
�™
˙
⁕
œ œ ˙
˙™
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œ � œ œ ˙
˙™
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AP
h
hemiolas ��
c BD:
˙™
œ ˙
A��
SR:
�™
œ
˙
A��
œ ˙
⁕
˙™
A��
œ ˙
h ™ 3 �™
œ ˙
œ
A��
œ ˙
�™
œ � A��
h ™ �™
Refrain c�� BD:
˙™ A��
SR:
A�� A��
�™ h ™ h ™
˙ œ ˙
MEx
�™
A��
�™ 3 �™™ 2 �™
A��
⁕
˙™ MEx
A��
�™ 3 �™ h ™ 2 �™ �™ �™ �™ �™
d. Ne pensez pas (B)
Figure .: Development of basic declamation in R, B, R, and B
˙™
Making Song Speak: Machaut’s ars nova Word Setting
Extrapolating from the first part, the second would have a basic declamation of two balanced four-bar phrases in continuous second-mode rhythm. The syllabic rhythm differs more sharply from the basic declamation here than in the first part, suggesting a different basis. The first two lines adopt third mode rhythm, rather than second mode. Instead of running the two short lines together, the first is detached and the second is run into the final, long line, creating an inherently asymmetrical phrasing. Thus, two bars of second mode become three bars of third mode. In fact, Machaut extends three bars to four by augmenting the length of the rhyme syllable. The enjambment of the second and third lines is animated by a dislocated hemiola that creates a displacement syncopation: the first syllable is set as two bars of imperfect modus; second-mode rhythm resumes for the other two syllables of the line and the first four of the final line; the rhythm is contracted for the fifth and sixth syllables, completing the hemiola and ending the displacement syncopation, so that the cadence arrives with a restoration of the underlying perfect (triple) meter. As in Dous viaire, the word setting remains close to the basic declamation throughout. In the first part, a different strategy from that of the rondeau is adopted, contracting rather than expanding the final line. In the second part, a more extensive reworking of the structure is undertaken: separating but expanding the first line, to create a four-bar unit (the standard phrase length of the song); expanding the beginning of the second line, but running it into the third, and coupling the two through a displacement syncopation. This latter device is a particularly bold manifestation of the new style, played against the second-mode rhythm typical of the ars antiqua. Syllabic rhythm did not have to hold so closely to the basic declamation as in these two songs. The structural prop of the basic declamation could support a wide deviation in the word setting. Quant j’ay l’espart (R) is unique amongst Machaut’s rondeaux in using tetrasyllables throughout, three in each part. It is a companion piece to Dous amis, which is also based in perfect modus and shares figural ideas. Where the basis of Dous amis is secondmode rhythm, that of Quant j’ay l’espart is the first mode. The first-mode model is established in the first phrase (Figure .c). The second line follows the model but augments the first syllable by interpolation of a bar. The second line of the second part is expanded similarly but by extension of the second syllable. By contrast the first line of the second part is contracted through reduction of the second bar into a single beat, changing the meter from perfect to imperfect modus. The declamation here mediates between the first-mode rhythm of the other lines and the different style of setting used in the final lines of the two parts, where the first-mode model is abandoned for rapid declamation of syllables into the cadence. The final line of the second part differs from that of the first by extending its first syllable in a melisma.
• •
Whilst the syllabic rhythm is based in the first mode, the musical rhythm often favors second mode, as in Dous amis, particularly at cadences. I restrict the concept of melisma in Machaut’s word setting to instances where a syllable does not stand in rhythmic relationship to adjacent syllables. See Maw , n. .
David Maw
Much more is ceded to the independent development of musical phrases in this song than in Dous amis, in particular through the deployment of hemiola. The bunching of syllables of the third line of the first part follows the extension of the final syllable of the second line; and at this point the music breaks out of perfect modus into a hemiola of three bars of imperfect modus. A broken hemiola, similar to that of Dous amis, begins the second part, with the first line set to two of the three imperfect bars, the third coming after a bar of perfect modus in displacement syncopation, which sets the join between the first and second lines. Having completed the hemiola, the music does not revert to perfect modus but presses on with a third hemiola, extending the second syllable of the second line and leading into the last two syllables of that line. Nor does perfect modus resume immediately. There is a single bar of imperfect modus interpolated into the setting of the first syllable of the final line; then perfect modus is reinstated. Despite the initial dominance of perfect modus, and despite the previous use of imperfect modus in hemiola-groups of three, the song cannot be reduced overall to perfect modus, unlike Dous amis. Nor can its forty-seven breves be reduced to imperfect modus. Machaut here has composed an example of what Johannes de Muris designated ‘irregular song’ (cantus irregularis). Indeed, it seems intended to be an epitome of the idea, with a near balance of the perfect (nine bars) and imperfect (ten bars) meters. The three songs examined so far have involved the setting of homorhythmic verse forms. In each case, the poems have furnished a simple rhythmic outline which the musical setting has developed into more intricate rhythmic and metrical patterns. The final example considered here is a ballade with more varied metrical elements. The two-voice song, Ne pensez pas (B), uses decasyllables and octosyllables and a mixture of oxytonic and paroxytonic rhymes. As a regular fourth-syllable caesura is articulated in the decasyllables, and the hemistichs are treated semi-autonomously, these lines are similar to pairs of tetrasyllables and hexasyllables, meaning that the poem has three different metrical elements, of four, six, and eight syllables. Unlike Machaut’s other ballades with music the song has just one stanza. The statement of this stanza is self-sufficient; and, as Jehannot de Lescurel left four ballade-type songs with a single stanza, it looks as if the single-stanza ballade was a subgenre. The basic declamation can be inferred from the elements common to the setting of the various lines (Figure .d). The decasyllables have four-bar phrasing, with cadence at the fourth-syllable caesura, whilst the octosyllables have continuous declamation through threebar phrasing. Comparison of the syllabic rhythm with the basic declamation shows a pattern of progressive divergence. The first two lines are set in rhythms close to the basic declamation. The deviations are few but significant. In the first line, the first and fourth syllables are lengthened, creating a hemiola of perfect modus across the imperfect modus that dominates. The
• • •
Michels , –; see also Desmond a, –. There is a clear difference in Machaut’s approach here, with a cadence in the basic declamation at both the caesura and rhyme, to that of the tetrasyllable-trisyllable pairs in Dous amis, which are run together by continuous declamation. Amours, que vous ai meffait, Amours, trop vous doi cherir, Bien se peust apercevoir, and Fi, medisans esragié.
Making Song Speak: Machaut’s ars nova Word Setting
second line is also extended: the sixth and seventh syllables are tripled in length, moving at the modus rather than tempus level of the rhythm. This increases the length of the line by a bar. The first line of the oultrepasse applies the same techniques more elaborately. The first three syllables are augmented (the second and third tripled), shifting the meter again from imperfect to perfect modus. Perfect modus is maintained through the rest of the line, but with a change of quality, as the tempus shifts from perfect to imperfect, creating hemiolas against the prevailing imperfect modus. The second line develops the octosyllabic declamation with augmentation of the first, fourth, fifth, and rhyme syllables. The declamation is shifted within the meter, which momentarily switches from imperfect to perfect, and gives the shorter line phrasing similar to that of the preceding decasyllable. The final line extends the syllabic rhythm so that it is longer than the two preceding lines put together. With the fourth and rhyme syllables set melismatically and the other durations augmented, the structure of the basic declamation is all but completely effaced. Through the development of the declamation, Machaut achieved a formal balance in the song completely at odds with the intrinsic shape of the poem. As the number of syllables reduces in successive sections, so the length of the music in that section increases in the setting: section
syllables
length in breves
vers ouvert/clos
(+)
(+)
oultrepasse
(+)
(+)
refrain
This necessitates a syllabic rhythm that shows increasing development of the basic declamation as the song progresses, until its distinctive rhythmic profile is subordinated by melismatic setting in the closing section. The form of the setting lends a dynamic element to the song through the progressive attenuation of the rhythmically close-knit relationship of words and music embodied by the basic declamation at the outset. These four examples show Machaut composing from simple declamatory models to more complicated forms. In each case, enough of the model is retained for it to act as a foil for deviations from it. Of the techniques employed, augmentation and insertion of a bar retain the rhythmic profile of the basic declamation through the change. Because of the structure of the rhythmic system, diminution of values tends to lose the distinctive profile of the initial rhythm, unless the rhythm is folded within itself (as in Dous amis). Melisma, which destroys the rhythmic profile on which declamation structure depends, is sparingly used in these songs. Machaut needed the rhythmic outline of declamation as a structural prop for musical form and invention. Changes to the declamation are often integral to metrical change in the music. Hemiola and displacement syncopation are two devices handled by Machaut through manipulation of declamation in these songs. Such is the consistency in the procedures by which declamation is developed that there is good reason to suppose that some sort of precompositional planning of the declamation was part of Machaut’s creative process. •
Jacques Legrand’s terms – vers ouvert/clos, oultrepasse, and refrain – will be used for the sections of the ballade. The term ‘refrain’ is employed for convenience, despite the absence of any recurrences in the song. See Langlois , –.
David Maw
Music as disruptive agent in song Comparison of the word setting against an inferred basic declamation characterizes the finished song as a manipulation of a simpler, more regular form. Whilst these manipulations are apparent in the word setting, they are not motivated there. Changes to the basic declamation do not derive from that rhythm itself. They are symptomatic of other causes. It is the music that provides the impetus for syllabic durations to expand or contract in the declamation. Consequently, the points at which such expansion and contraction occur are those at which the force of the music is particularly strong in the compositional thought. Such points are of particular analytical interest as opportunities to consider the impact within the song of tonal and thematic design. In Dous viaire, elongation of the second line through manipulation of the basic declamation enables a tonal surprise (Example .). The second phrase proceeds initially as a parody of the first, the harmonic structure and outline of the cantus melody being retained, though with the texture varied by melodic imitation through the voices at the outset and the cantus melody developed. At the point in the form where the parody structure would end, the music is still in G minor. In the extra bar created by augmentation in the declamation, a surprise change of tonal goal from G minor to Bb major is made. Example .: Parody and tonal surprise in the cantus of Dous viaire (R) ⁕ syllabic rhythm:
j j œœ œœ 3 œ
2 Ϫ Ϫ
Cantus
ì & b 2 œ™ œ œ œœ œj œ œ œ 3 œ J ‹ œ™ ì& b ‹
œ #œ œ œ œ™
Triplum
‰ œ
j 2œ œ
Ϫ
˙™
⁕
˙™
‰ ‰ œ #œ 2 œ œ œ œ œœJ œœ œ œ œ œ œ œ ≈œ œ œ œ œ œ ˙ ™ ≈ Tenor
extra bar occasioned by development of declamation
•
The account of tonality here employs a harmonic conception of polyphonic texture within tonal areas characterized as major or minor; a full exposition of this approach is currently in preparation for another forum. Polyphonic intervals of a third, fifth, and octave constructed on the same ‘bass’ note are taken as being harmonically related through the lowest-sounding note and are referred to by reference to this note (thus, G-fifth, F-third, and so on). On account of this harmonic relationship they are accorded cognate tonal functions despite differences between them in sonic effect and contrapuntal syntactic implication. The contrast between imperfect and perfect intervals and the necessary resolution of the former into the latter, which constituted the medieval view of harmonic tonality, is understood as a contrapuntal rather than a harmonic principle, which complements rather than contradicts the harmonic view. Cadence in the vast majority of cases is made by both harmonic progression between different notes and contrapuntal progression between different intervallic types. In tonality, a simple contrast of major and minor is sufficient to provide a starting point for discussing individual songs. Although Machaut’s music uses a variety of other modal inflections, these do not assume a structural function; and frequent use of ‘non-modal’ finals (Bb, C, and A) militates against assimilation of the tonal practice to modal theory of the fourteenth century. In any case, the basic affective orientation is binary, with major mode predominant, in keeping with Machaut’s musical aesthetics of ‘joie’ (see below, n. ).
Making Song Speak: Machaut’s ars nova Word Setting
Changes to the declamation have a subtler impact on tonal action in Dous amis (Example .). The song has a complicated tonal plan, moving between three tonal goals: it oscillates between D minor and F major in the first part; that oscillation continues into the second part but is capped by a surprising move into C major at the end, similar to the Bb major of Dous viaire. The development of the syllabic rhythm enhances the effect by which this plan is sustained. Example .: Harmonic reduction of Dous amis (B)
⁕
1 a7
2 a4
D
I
œ & 3 œ ˙˙ œœ #˙˙ œœ œœ œœ ˙˙ ™™ ‹ Tonal eme
& ‹ F
II
˙™ & ˙™ ‹
3 a3
⁕
⁕
4 b7
F
bœœ ˙ œ œœ œ œœ ˙˙ œœ ˙ œœ ˙œ œ œ ˙˙ ˙ œ œ œ œ 5
F
10
˙™ ˙™ #˙˙ ™™
™ œœ ˙˙ ™ clos
ìì œœ ˙ ⁕ F
2 b3
3 a7
⁕ D
j j ™ 20 œœ b˙˙ 2 ˙˙ œœ œœ 3 œœ ˙˙ ˙œ œ œœ 2 œœ œœ œœ œœ 3 œ œœ œœ œœ ˙˙ ™ œ D
15
D ouvert
2nd
w ww w ⁕
1 b4
⁕
C
2nd
& ‹
ouvert
™™
clos j j œ 3 œ œœ œœ ì œ ˙ ìì œ˙ œœ
The first phrase sets up the principal tonal theme, the contrast of D and F, at the outset, a common strategy in Machaut’s early songs. D orientation is then confirmed by Emajor-third leading harmony. The phrase cadences on E-minor-third, ambiguously poised for resolution onto D or F. The second phrase resolves it onto D via G-minor-third leading harmony. It maintains four-bar phrasing but responds to the poem’s break into shorter lines with two-bar sub-phrasing, making cadences on D and F, developing the tonal duality. Compression of the declamation of the fourth line reduces the phrase to three bars, accelerating progression into the cadence, on D (ouvert) or F (clos). The contrasted iterations of this cadence clarify the tonal direction as an overall progression from D to F. Accelerated phrase-rhythm enhances the impact. The declamation is more significantly developed in the second part. Where such development occurs, Machaut uses parody-type reworking of material from the first part of the song (Example .). The first phrase of the second part reaffirms F before moving to D, though the cadence on D is delayed into the beginning of the second line, which then • •
See also Helas! tant ay (B), Riches d’amour (B), J’aim miex (B), and Esperance qui (B). Reworking of the material from the first part in the second is an example of Machaut’s parody technique. See Maw , –, .
from II
from I
Example .: Parody in developed declamation of Dous amis (B)
material expanded to inaugurate hemiola
5
7
cadence on F shared by trisyllables
hypothetical version in regular perfect modus to show elision at completion of the hemiola
‰ œj œ œ œ œ œ ‰ ì & 3 œ ˙˙ ì œœ œœ#˙ ì œ™ œœœ œ œ œ ì ˙ ™ ™ ì bœœ h ì ì ì œœ œœ œ˙ œ œœœœì œ œ œ œœ œ œ œ ˙ œ œ ˙ œ œ œ œ™ œ œ H J ‰J ‹ 15 j 20 ì &(3) œ˙™œ œ œ œbœ œ œ œ ì #˙™™ ì œ ≈œ œœbHœ œ œ bœœœœì 2 œ ‰œ œ ì œœ œ œ œ œœ œì3 ‰œœœœœœœ œœ œ œœ ì ‰œœ œ œ œ œœ ≈œœœ ì 2 œœ œœœ œ œ œ ì œ ˙ ≈ œ≈ œ œ œ œ œ œ≈ œ œ ≈ ≈ œ≈ œ œ ‹ ‰ œj œ œ œ œ ‰ œ œ & œ œ extension of rhyme extension of �rst syllable œ ì œ œ œœJ œœœ œ œœ œ ì œ ‹ of tetrasyllable of trisyllable J
David Maw
returns to F. The cadential pattern here of the tetrasyllabic and trisyllabic lines on D and F repeats that of the first part. Extension of the final syllable of the tetrasyllable occasions recall of both the E-major-third and G-minor-third leading harmony from the first part in an unsettled juxtaposition. Similarly, the extension of the first syllable of the trisyllable as the beginning of the broken hemiola is made by reworking material from the first part. The third line reiterates the D-F progression from the beginning of the song, but it is interrupted by the movement onto C, the first onto this pitch class in the song. The progression concludes the displacement syncopation, which emphasizes this important point of tonal arrival through metrical effect. The relationship between Dous amis and Quant j’ay l’espart suggests that the ballade was written first and the rondeau subsequently, drawing on the experience of the earlier song and developing some of its ideas further. The tonal design of the rondeau centers, like the ballade, on F major and D minor, but it works this tonal scheme in a more linear fashion (Example .). After an initial progression from A to F, the first part remains centered on F, twice recalling the approach from A before cadencing irresolutely on E-octave, an ouvert cadence. The first phrase of the second part makes the first cadence onto D. The second phrase confirms it but returns to F for its own cadence. The third phrase recalls the linear descent from A at the end of the first part but this time completes it to a clos cadence on D. Manipulation of the basic declamation is used in the second part to reinforce the tonal design, in a way similar to that of Dous amis. •
This is not the only instance of such pairing; see Maw b, –.
Making Song Speak: Machaut’s ars nova Word Setting
Example .: Harmonic reduction of Quant j’ay l’espart (R)
⁕ 2 A4
1 A4
A
˙ œœ œ ˙ ˙ œ ˙™
F
˙ œœ œ & 3 œ œ œ œ ˙™ ˙ ‹
I
1 A4
II
⁕ D
A
A
F
3 B4
⁕
œ œ œ œ 2 œ bœœ œ œ œ œ œ œ 3 ˙ ™ œœœœœ œ œ œ ˙ ˙™ ⁕ F
2 A4
œ ˙ œœ œœ œœ 3 ˙ œœ œ 2 œ # œ b 2 œ œ œ œ ˙ & ˙ ‹ emphasized by displacement syncopation
⁕ F
3 B4 A
ouvert
œ œ œ œœ œ bœœ œ œ œ œ 3 œ ˙ œ œ œ œ ˙™ F
⁕
D
œ˙ œ˙
emphasized by completion of the hemiola
Contraction of the first phrase into two imperfect-modus bars, the first two thirds of a broken hemiola, marks the first arrival on D; and completion of the hemiola after the brief displacement syncopation again marks a cadence on D. The following hemiola emphasizes a harmonic arpeggiation in its progression up to A for the final phrase. Elsewhere, the deviations from the basic declamation relate to handling of the musical refrain, a phrase that is stated three times, each one taking a slightly different form. Its basic form corresponds to the declamatory phrase-pattern of the piece, with an anacrustic first-mode rhythm, though it is never actually set in this way (Example .). The expansion of the first syllable of the second line is set to the first statement, starting on G and ending on E in perfect modus. The final phrase of the first part states the refrain beginning a degree higher on A and now in imperfect modus, completing a hemiola extension of the rhyme of the second line and setting the third line at its cadence onto E. The final occurrence is the last phrase of the song, setting the third line of the second part. Here it is a complete descent from A to D, beginning in imperfect modus but continuing in perfect modus. This complete presentation of the phrase is emphasized by placement of the first syllable of the third line at its head, aligning musical phrase and poetic line. Realization of the complete refrain phrase is what the song is directed towards, and it represents both a tonal and thematic fulfillment. The changed tonal context of the second part, with its tonal anchor in D, causes the repetitions of the refrain to be heard with different tonal qualities. Ne pensez pas has the most extended music of these songs. Like Dous amis, it pursues three tonal goals, but unlike that song, these are set out at the start, and the music is sustained by developing the interplay between them, often through parodic reuse of material (Example .). The first phrase sets up a tonal model: an initial progression from F to C • •
A paradigmatic analysis of the material of Quant j’ay l’espart is given in Maw , . Maw , –, . The analysis here proposes a more developed view of the technique in this song from that identified
David Maw
Example .: Recurrences of the musical refrain in Quant j’ay l’espart (R)
implied syllabic rhythm line 2
lines 2-3
line 6
&(3) ‹
œ
œœ œ œ
˙
⁕
œ
œœ œ œœ œœ œ œœ œ ˙ œ
œ œœ œœ œ œœ œœ œ &(2) œ œ ˙ ‹ œ œœ œœ œ œœ œ œœ œœ œ 2 3˙ ( ) & œ œ œ ‹
˙
œ œœ œ œ œ œœ œ
œ œ 3œ œ œ ˙ ˙™
ìì
œ œœ œ˙ œ ˙
ìì
œ œ
followed by movement to G and elaboration of G in preparation for a return to F, which occurs at the beginning of the second phrase. The second phrase repeats the model completing the circuit by allowing the G harmony to reach F. The ouvert cadence is made on E-octave, implying resolution to F, which the reprise supplies; the clos reaches the F-fifth with which the song began. The tonal model is so far a closed circuit in F. The second part begins by reversing it, so that F leads to G leads to C. This in turn proceeds back to F, but now tonal progress stalls, and through the remainder of the oultrepasse, F and G alternate, implying (but not reaching) tonal completion on C. This resolution is attained in the final section (which would be the refrain in a multi-stanza composition), but in a roundabout way: first by ascent from G (essayed twice, neither time successful); then through descent from F (also unsuccessful, stalling at D); melodic direction is reversed again, the tenor ascending to G, from where a final descent to C is successfully undertaken. Resolution is finally attained by replacing the initial progression of F-fifth to C-octave with one from G-fifth to C-octave. The setting of the poem is very clear at a basic level, with each line set to a separate section of music, two in the first part and three in the second. However, the relationship between musical phrasing and poetic line changes as the song progresses. Beginning in a regular way, with each hemistich of the two decasyllables in the first part corresponding to a phrase, it develops in the first line of the oultrepasse, which spreads the decasyllable across three phrases. The octosyllable is also set across three phrases; but in the closing section, the syllables are distributed unevenly across four phrases, as the relationship of musical and poetic forms is divorced in favor of the music. The manipulations of the basic declamation in the first two sections enable various aspects of the tonal plan to be emphasized and developed. At the outset, augmentation of the
•
there. See also the comments in Dömling , –. There are some striking similarities between the tonal plan of Ne pensez pas revealed here and that of J’aim miex as analyzed by Sarah Fuller (). Machaut adopted this approach in a number of other early ballades; see also S’Amours ne fait (B), Helas! tant ay (B), N’en fait (B), Pour ce que tous (B), Dame, comment qu’amez (B), Sans cuer/Amis/Dame (B), and Se quanque amours (B).
Making Song Speak: Machaut’s ars nova Word Setting
Example .: Harmonic reduction of Ne pensez pas (B)
Vers ouvert/clos 1 a10' F I
+
2 b10
œ œj œ™ œ™ œ™ & œ™ œ œ œ™ œ™ ‹ J Oultrepasse 1 b10 F
œ œ #œ ™ & œ œ œ™ ‹ J
G
⁕
+ C
F
II
⁕
3 œ™ œj œ œ œj ˙™ œ™ œ™ 2 œ œj œ œœj w ™™ & 2 œ™ œ œ œ™ œ œ œ J w ˙™ J J ‹ C
G
Refrain 3 c8 G (III)
˙™ & ˙™ ‹
C
F clos
+ G
F
œ œ œ™ ™ œœ œœœ œ œJ œ ™ 3 œ œJ œ œ œœJ œœ 2 œœ ™ œJ œ J
F
G
œ™ œ œ œœ œ œJ œ J œ 3 œ ™
B(!)
#œ ™ #˙˙ ™™ œ™ ˙™
(c8 cont.) F
& 3 ˙˙ ™™ ‹
j ™™ œ œœ œœ œ œ ˙ ™ œ œ œ ˙™
F ouvert
⁕ F
2 c8
˙™ & ˙™ ‹
⁕
œ ™ œ œ œ œ œj œ ˙ ™ œ ™ œ œ œ œ œœ œ œ ˙ ™ J G
œ ™ œœ œ™ œJ œ
œœ œœ œœ œ 2 œ œ œ bœœ œ œJ œJ J J œ
(C)
˙™œ™ œ™
G
⁕ G
F
œ™ ™ œ™ Œ
(A)
œœ™™
Ϊ
B
œ™ #œ ™ œ™ ™ œ ™ œ œJ 3 œ™ œœ ™ œœ™™ 2 ˙ ™œ ™ œ ™
⁕
œœ ™™
D (E F) G C j œ ™ œ œj œ œj œ œj œ ™ j œ œ™ œ œ œœ œœ ˙˙ ™™ œ™ œœ ™ œ ™ œ™ ˙™ J J
declamation gives more emphasis to the C harmony that will be the ultimate tonal destination. In the second line, augmentation of the sixth and seventh syllables gives time to complete the progression from G to F before setting up the formal cadence at the end of the part. Extension of the first syllable of the fifth line gives time for the reversal of the principal tonal progression; whilst augmentation of the second and third syllables emphasizes and develops the progression from C back to F and then to G. The setting of the second hemistich of this line emphasizes the movements between F and G. The syllabic rhythm continues to point up these progressions in the following line. Extensions of the first and fourth syllables draw out returns to F from G. The augmentation of the rhyme syllables enables a cadential progression onto A-fifth, setting up arrival on G at the beginning of the final section.
David Maw
The techniques here are similar to those used in the other songs. Where Ne pensez pas takes a different path is in its final section (Example .). There is a sudden change of style, with the musical movement becoming noticeably slower. At the heart of the music is a parodic pair of phrases, one on G, the other recalling the song’s opening in a progression from F to C. Neither of them is completed, and the frustration of their expectations leads the music in unusual directions. At the cadence of the first, which sets the first four syllables in augmented declamation, a surprising B-fifth replaces the anticipated G-octave. Subsequent progression to C is unconvincing as resolution because of the melodic tritone. It prompts a second attempt, again from G-octave, and this time with a linear sequential progression in contrary motion. This should cadence on C, but that destination is dodged in favor of B again. Augmented declamation of the next four syllables begins, taking the music to F-fifth and to a parodic reworking of the refrain’s initial phrase. It cadences on D rather than C; and so, a further phrase is needed to complete the song. The phrase in question picks up the figural ideas of the first phrase but pursues a winding trajectory to C, first via ascent to F then via descent from G. The bulk of the refrain section is taken up with melismas on the fourth and eighth syllables. The breakdown of the declamation is matched by a breakdown in the musical logic, which fails to achieve its goals in directed fashion. The musical character of this section is a calculated contrast with the focused progressions of the preceding sections, which establish a strongly directed tonal plan. Example .: Elusive tonal resolution in the refrain of Ne pensez pas (B)
model
œ™™ œ™#œ ™ œ™ œ™œ ™œ™œ œœ ™œ™ ˙™™ . ì ˙ ™™ ì ì ˙™™ & ˙ ™™ ‹ qu'a
b
ne
c
. œ™™ œ™ #œ ™ œ ™ œ ™ ì œ ™™ œ ™ œ ™ ì œ™™œ™œ™ œ™ Q ™™œ ™œ ™ìQœ™™ J G
C
PEN
-SE ou
œ™™ œ™#œ ™ œ™ œ™œ ™œ™œ œœ ™œ™ ˙ ™™ œ™™ œ™ #œ ™ œ ™ œ ™ ‰™ ™ œ ™ì ™™ œ™ì2 œ ™™ œ œ™ œ™œ™ ì ˙™™ ì ˙ ™™ ìhQ ™™Q ™™ œ ™™ œ ™ œ ™ ì 3 œ™™œ™œ™ œ™ Q™™œ ™œ ™ œ‰ ™œ™ & ˙ ™™ œ™ ™ ‰ J ‹ 1
parody
a
vous
model
model
™ & œ™™ œ™™ œq ™™ ‹
q™
F
2
™ œ™ œ ™ œ™™ q ™ ì œ™ œ™™ œ œœ ™ œœ™ œ™ ì œ ™™ J C
c a j œ™ œ ™ ™ ™ œ œ œ ‰ œ™ ì œ ™ œ™ œ ™ œ œœ™ œ ™ ì ˙™™ ìì ™ œ™ œ ™ œ™ œ œ œ ™ œ™ ì œ ™™ œ ™œ™ ì œ™ œ™ œ™ & 3 œ™™ œ ™ œ™ œ ™ œ™ œ™™ ‰ ™ œ ™ œ™ œœ ™™œ œ ì œ™ œ™™ œ ™™ œ ™™ œ™™ œ™™ œ™™ J J ˙ ™™ ‹ que
je
TOUR-
3
4
F
D
b
-NE.
c
G
C
Making Song Speak: Machaut’s ars nova Word Setting
Word setting and meaning It is widely recognized that the music of Machaut’s songs includes moments where it matches the meaning of the words. These do not serve a pictorial aesthetic but engage in an exchange between musical process and verbal meaning. They are a semantic facet of the art’s formality. It is on this basis that the relationship of words and music can be explored in its most far-reaching manifestations, and the word setting contributes to it for the songs considered here. Although the poem of Dous viaire may appear superficially a bland declaration of loyalty, its sentiment comes into focus in the fifth and sixth lines: ‘Se je sui un peu honteus | Ne me mettes en oubli’ (If I am a little timid | Do not forget me). The apposition of self-professed timidity with a desire for memorability is the key to the song: for the fifth line is set to the first phrase, whose correspondence to the formal constraints of the ars antiqua rondel may have seemed timid at the time Machaut was writing; and it contrasts with the sixth line, which is set to more memorable music, with elaborated texture and a tonal surprise. The musical setting attempts that memorability to which the poetic expression aspires. Where in Dous viaire the poem itself offered a pretext of the dialogue within the song between the conventional and the unusual, the poem of Dous amis is committed to a single sentiment. Each stanza develops the theme of the lover’s suffering from the absence of the beloved. Yet there is an underlying duality between negative experience and positive sentiment: between the sufferings experienced and the love expressed. The quant that heads the refrain line raises the prospect that the absence described by the poem is neither inevitable nor permanent. The music picks up this duality in its movement between D minor and F major; and in finding ultimate resolution in C major, it underlines the positive sentiment that is only obliquely present in the poem. The listener is led to assess the poem in a different light. Already apparent is the joyous nature that Machaut later attributed to music in his Prologue. The syllabic rhythm enables the music to characterize the D minor area in the second part as turbulent, through apposition of E-major-third and G-minor-third leading harmony and reworking of ideas in imperfect meter. Unsettling the meter through a hemiola compounded by displacement syncopation enables a moment of reconciliation when the perfect meter is restored, and the arrival of C at this point reinforces the redemptive trajectory of the musical discourse and its contribution to understanding the sentiment of the poem within the context of the song. As a response to the negative tenor of Dous amis, Quant j’ay l’espart develops an affirmative image of the lady’s look as a spark of sweetness within the lover dispelling sadness. It plays on quant from the refrain of Dous amis, which was the cause of suffering there but now instigates • • •
Dömling ; and for an overview to its date of publication, Earp a, . The masculine gender of the beloved addressed by the poem raises a question as to the gender of the singing lover and the nature of the sexuality represented. See the Prologue, lines – (Palmer a, ).
David Maw
delight. Where in Dous amis D minor was tortured, in Quant j’ay l’espart it is serene, unfolding straightforwardly as a descending scalar progression from A to D. As in Dous viaire, the tonal destination is not disclosed until the second part; but that destination is the fulfillment rather than the denial of the direction set up previously. Indeed, fulfillment seems to be the governing idea of the song, and one that the syllabic rhythm assists. Development of the declamation facilitates the progressive exposition of the refrain phrase. It accommodates increasingly insistent hemiolas against the initial perfect meter so that a mixture of meters is normal at the close. In terms of tonal, metrical, and thematic processes, the song embodies spreading of the spark of sweetness in the lover. Thus, when in the second half of the refrain the words ‘son dous espart en moy espart toute doucour’ (its gentle spark spreads in me all sweetness) are sung, it is the song itself singing of the lady’s influence on its own musical invention. Identification of poetic expression with musical substance is complete in Ne pensez pas, where the je of the poem owns the song directly. The poem is a declaration of amorous dedication through physical absence. The poet is so often away from his Lady that she might think his love to be waning; he attempts to forestall this impression by reasserting his affection. The first four lines, set in the first part of the song, declare commitment; the second part states the consequences of this commitment in terms of action, the dedication of the poet’s whole being to the Lady wherever he goes. One of the reasons that the poet-composer sees his Lady less often than she might like is that he is engaged in the activity of composition. This is what he means by ‘en vous cuer, corps et vie employ’ (I use heart, body and life for you). Machaut echoed this thought later on in the Prologue, similarly mixing the dedication of physical being and spiritual action, when he wrote of his work: Einsois y doy mon sentement Mettre et tout mon entendement, Cuer, corps, pooir, et quanque j’ay […] Car je ne puis mon temps user En milleur n’en plus bel usage (lines – and –) Thus, I should put there my feeling | and all my understanding, heart, | body, capacity, and whatever I have | […] | for I cannot employ my time | in a better or more fitting way
So, when in Ne pensez pas he says at the end ‘ou que je tourne’ (wherever I turn), it is the creative ‘turning’ of ideas in the process of compositional invention that is meant. The shift from song, on the one hand, to singing about the creation of song, on the other, is depicted in the change of musical style. The improvisatory character that the music assumes enacts the turning of the creative process. The loosening of the word setting brings the music fully into focus. Whilst poetry was for Machaut always a strictly formal art, his music could entertain moments of fantasy that broke through the formal mold. The final release of the poem’s grip on the music gradually eased through the oultrepasse occurs at the word •
Palmer a, .
Making Song Speak: Machaut’s ars nova Word Setting
pense. It is one of the strangest moments in Machaut’s oeuvre: first the unexpected B-fifth, an interval not previously heard in the song; followed by a tritone descent to C; and then the music starts up again with new sequential material which again fails to reach cadence on C, but instead falls to B. The pauses on B-fifth and C-unison seem like the music stopping to think. The attempted resolution to C does not work. A second attempt is made, also unsuccessful. The word pense begins and ends on B harmony, indicating that thinking is an ongoing process. The tenor descends leading into the F-fifth with which the song began, and a new phrase commences setting the remainder of the poetic line but extending the final word, tourne. Just as the music thinks at pense, so it turns at tourne: trying to reach C by descent from F, it is deflected to a cadence on D; then there is cautious ascent, alternating tenths and octaves, to G-fifth; finally, the tenor descends by step to C, finding the looked-for resolution. Where the end of a song is usually achieved by clinching the tonal direction, in Ne pensez pas the refrain all of a sudden brings an uncertainty of direction. Resolution on C is reached, but through divagation. The unexpected stops and changes of direction represent the compositional act – pondering, testing of alternatives, changing of mind. The song articulates a moment of self-conscious identification, where poetic thought and musical deed are one. The poem describes the music and is thus absorbed into it. Yet this is not a distraction from the song’s content. Machaut equates composition with those things that do not distract him from thinking of his lady. She is the inspiration for his work, and whilst he is composing, his thoughts are focused on her. The music’s thinking of its own creation is simultaneously a thinking of the lady. Re-enactment of the compositional process is re-enactment of the composer’s thinking of the lady. Expression of the compositional act is expression of amorous devotion. Poem as music’s utterance Machaut’s songs are grounded in a counterintuitive aesthetic: the poem precedes the music both formally and compositionally; yet in the aesthetic order of the song revealed by the word setting, the relationship is reversed: the music dominates the poem. In each of the songs considered here, there is a moment where the correspondence of musical and poetic meanings is such that the poem is made to utter what the music does: the contrast of the conventional and memorable in Dous viaire; the closing redemption of love’s suffering through song in Dous amis; the spreading of the sweet spark as compositional fulfillment in Quant j’ay l’espart; the creative thinking and turning of the life dedicated to the lady in Ne pensez pas. Clear links are established in each case between the music and the meaning of the poem. This is quite different from madrigalism, as the music is not trying to illustrate the words. The je of the poem is the song itself. For Machaut the relationship between the meaning of a poem and its musical setting was strongest when the words were an apt description of the music. This is more or less explicitly the case in Ne pensez pas, where the music thinks •
Günther , .
David Maw
and turns and in doing so is identified with the lyric je; but it is so implicitly in the other songs considered. In each, the poem is revealed as the music’s utterance; and the means of articulating this condition is the syllabic rhythm. Ars antiqua song was a monophonic art. Words and music were united in the solo singer’s voice. Music heightened the delivery of the poem and was thus subservient in the lyric partnership. Ars nova song added a new element of polyphony to this. In addition to the solo voice of the singer declaiming words of love to his lady were purely musical lines of uncertain meaning and value, whose relationship to the statement of the voice was unclear. The absorption of the poem into the music at the end of Ne pensez pas addresses this concern. By announcing the music’s action, polyphonic music is dedicated to the lady. Music ceases thereby to be a medium for conveying words and becomes the voice of the song. The synthesis of music and poetry revealed here is achieved by asserting and manipulating the role of music in song. Music in Machaut’s songs becomes disruptive, constantly seeking to draw attention to itself. To accomplish this Machaut had to maintain a careful balance in the relationship of words and music: the formal organization of the words, represented by the basic declamation, had to be sufficiently clear for the nature of the music’s contribution to become apparent. Music was permitted to ‘speak’ within the act of the song through changes in the syllabic rhythm to the regular declamation that it implied. Machaut’s conception of ars nova song was realized through a dialogue between old and new styles. The aesthetic effect required that elements of the old style were present as a façade, more or less ruined, through which the new could appear.
•
It makes no difference in this context whether instruments or vocalizing voices were actually used in performance: the lines without words are effectively instrumental. The performance issues are summarized in Page .
Making Song Speak: Machaut’s ars nova Word Setting
A: Poems and translations Dous viaire (R) rondeau: AB aA ab AB Sweet gracious countenance, I have served you with a tender heart. Please be compassionate to me, Sweet gracious countenance. If I am a little timid, Do not forget me. Sweet gracious countenance, I have served you with a tender heart.
Dous viaire gracieus De fin cuer vous ay servi. Vueilliez moy estre piteus, Dous viaire gracieus. Se je sui un peu honteus, Ne me mettes en oubli. Dous viaire gracieus De fin cuer vous ay servi.
Dous amis (B) ballade: aaab aaab bba bbA x Dous amis, oy mon complaint: A toy se plaint | Et complaint, Par defaut de tes secours,
Dear lover, hear my complaint: There laments and complains to you For want of your care,
Mes cuers qu’amours si contraint Que tiens remaint; | Dont mal maint Ay, quant tu ne me secours
My heart, which love so constrains That I am held firm; from which I have great Pain, when you do not care for me
En mes langours, | Car d’aillours N’est riens qui confor m’amaint.
In my weakness, without which Nothing brings me comfort.
S’en croist mes plours | Tous les jours, Quant tes cuers en moy ne maint.
So, my tears increase each day When your heart does not reside in me.
Amis, t’amour si m’ataint Que mon vis taint | Et destaint Souvent de pluseurs coulours
Lover, your love attacks me so much That my face flushes and pales, Often with several colors
Et mon dolent cuer estraint; Si le destraint | Qu’il estaint, Quant en toy n’a son recours.
And grips my sorrowing heart; Your love so constricts it that it stops beating When it has no refuge in you.
S’a jours trop cours, | Se n’acours Pour li garir, car il creint
Thus, its days are too short, if you do not hurry To cure it, for it fears
Mort qui d’amours | Vient le cours, Quant tes cuers en moy ne maint.
Death which comes from love When your heart does not reside in me.
Mon cuer t’amour si ensaint Qu’il ne se faint | Qu’il ne t’aint Pour tes parfaites doucours;
Your love wounds my heart so much That it does not pretend that it does not love you For your perfect charms;
Et ta biauté qui tout vaint Dedens li paint | Et empraint Aveuc tes hautes valours.
And your beauty which conquers all Penetrates within it and imprints it With your lofty virtues.
S’en sont gringnours | Mes dolours Et plus dolereus mi plaint
So, from this my sorrows are great And my lament more painful
Et en decours | Mes vigours, Quant te cuers en moy ne maint.
And my strength in decline, When your heart does not reside in me.
David Maw
Quant j’ay l’espart (R) rondeau: AAB AAB aab AAB aab aab AAB AAB Quant j’ay l’espart | De vo regart, Dame d’onnour,
When I have the flash Of your look, Lady of honor,
Son dous espart | En moy espart Toute doucour.
Its gentle spark Spreads in me All sweetness.
Car main et tart | M’esprent son dart De fine amour,
For early and late Its dart of tender love Inflames me –
Quant j’ay l’espart | De vo regart, Dame d’onnour,
When I have the flash Of your look, Lady of honor –
Et me repart | D’un ris qui m’art. Mais celle ardour
And gratifies me With a smile that burns me. But this ardor
Par son dous art | De moy depart Toute doulour.
By its sweet art Dispels from me All sadness.
Quant j’ay l’espart | De vo regart, Dame d’onnour,
When I have the flash Of your look, Lady of honor,
Son dous espart | En moy espart Toute doucour.
Its gentle spark Spreads in me All sweetness.
Ne pensez pas (B) ballade: a’b a’b bc’c’ Ne pensez pas, dame, que je recroie De vous amer, se souvent ne vous voy,
Do not think, Lady, that I retreat From loving you, if I do not see you often,
Car nullement faire ne le porroie, Tant vous aim je de cuer en bonne foy;
For I could not do it, So much do I love you with heart in good faith;
Einsois en vous cuer, corps et vie employ, Ne riens qui soit ne me destourne Qu’a vous ne pense, ou que je tourne.
Thus, I use heart, body and life for you, Nothing that would distract me From thinking of you, wherever I turn.
19. To . T See S or Not N to See: S: M’ Motet Machaut’s M 11, , Dame, D, je sui/ / Fins F cuers dous/ / Fins F cuers * dous* Jacques Boogaart
Figure 19.1: .: M11 M in MS A, fol. 425 r, detail of the tenor (BnF)
Imagining a form-generating program for a work will look mainly to surface features that seem to demand explication, features that push against against norms and defaults. Two points of departure are possible: either one may begin by noting something out of the ordinary in the music that appears to demand an exterior stimulus stimulus and then seek an explanation in the text, or else one may begin with the text and imagine ideas that might elicit a musical response and then look to the music for potential answers. (Earp 2018a, a, 94, , about the interpretation of motets)
If one had to single out a motet from Machaut’s oeuvre for ‘features that push against norms and defaults’, Dame, je sui/ Fins cuers dous/ Fins cuers dous (M11) (M) would be a good candidate. The work is unusual from the outset: the lady is addressed in direct speech in all three voices, as ‘Dame’ in the triplum and with the metaphor ‘Fins cuers dous’ in the motetus and tenor. In the genre to which the chanson tenor belongs, the virelai, such an address is quite common (nine of Machaut’s virelais open with ‘Dame’ in its first line), but in a fourteenthcentury motet it is not: invocation pertains to allegorical persons (M3, (M, M8, M, M9) M) or serves in 1 a ceremonial, political, or religious context (M, (M18, M, M19, M, M21, M, M22, M). M23). To emphasize this address musically, the motet opens with an imperfect consonance that resolves to a perfect consonance built on the final, G. This is the way the motet should end, not begin, and thus, in combination with the text, its opening presents us, in Earp’s words, with ‘something out of the ordinary’, here in both the text and the music.
* • 1 •
My special thanks go to Eddie Vetter for his generous advice. In the thirteenth-century motet it is more common although not frequent. Only in M M1 is the lady addressed directly, also as ‘Cuers dous’, but more casually, partway through the motetus text. M1 M and M11 M have a special relationship in Machaut’s ordered series of motets (see the introduction to my edition, Boogaart a, 2018a, –). 16–22). In MS A they are the only two with an illumination: a miniature for M1 M and a decorated initial for M M11 (see Figure .). 19.1).
393
To See or Not to See: Machaut’s Motet
M is uncommon also in other ways, even within Machaut’s extraordinary series of motets. It is the first of his three chanson motets (along with M and M) and within this small group it has a special place as being the most irregular in structure. Remarkable in its texts is the doubling of the tenor incipit in the motetus, and the minimal difference in the number of lines between the poems of the upper voices, seventeen and sixteen for the triplum and motetus, respectively. In its mensuration – perfect modus and tempus – the minor prolation is hardly relevant since there are but a few minims. This might suggest that the notation is antiquated and hence that M is an early work. Another explanation, proposed in the literature, is to read the notation as written in augmentation, suggestive of a lively tempo. The overall movement is more homogeneous than in any other motet: the voices are very close in rhythmic profile, melodically the upper voices are much less differentiated than in other motets, and there is an unusual amount of imitation and parallelism. The phrases of the upper voices are coordinated but slightly irregular in length. The surprising opening is followed by a number of cadences on G during the first half of the work, whereas in most motets it is only towards the end that the final is emphasized. When first hearing the motet, the impression is of a rather dense structure; spaciousness and transparency, characteristics of most of Machaut’s motets, are lacking. In contrast to Machaut’s other motets, M’s somewhat shaky transmission presents difficulties for the analyst. None of the manuscripts offers an entirely performable version, due to a small number of errors in note values and pitch, although these are easy to correct. More difficult to solve, the ficta signs differ in each manuscript and no version seems internally consistent. Especially for the note b it is often unclear whether it is to be inflected to bb or not, both in the upper voices and in the tenor. It seems that, for this piece, Machaut’s original version in the tantalizing book ‘ou toutes les choses sont que je fis onques’ (where all the things are that I ever made), and from which the various manuscripts most probably •
• • • •
A compact harmonic analysis of M was given by Hellmut Kühn (, –), and Sarah Fuller made brief remarks about its opening (, –). An extensive analysis of its texts and music formed a subchapter of my (unpublished) dissertation in Dutch (Boogaart b, –), which can now be consulted on DIAMM. Since then M has been discussed by several authors. Jared C. Hartt () has published a harmonic and motivic analysis of the three chanson motets, pointing out their special contrapuntal structure compared to the chant-based motets. A section of Justin Lavacek’s dissertation is devoted to an analysis of counterpoint and texts of the motet (, –). In the same year Tamsyn Rose-Steel (Mahoney-Steel) treated the work in a case-study of her dissertation, pointing to related texts in Machaut’s oeuvre (, –). Lastly, Alice V. Clark has published an article about the chanson motets, concentrating on form problems and text-music relationships (a; on M see pp. –). Unavoidably there is some duplication between my earlier unpublished work and these articles; there is, however, hardly any contradiction in the various observations and conclusions. It may seem sometimes that I take over the remarks of other authors without reference to their work but that is because I had made the same remarks in my dissertation. The difference in the present chapter is that I elaborate some points regarding the text-music relationships considerably further. Although a larger difference exists between the amounts of syllables ( vs ), it is still less than the average (in M vs , in M vs ; in other motets the differences are even larger). In Machaut’s only other motet with this mensuration, M, the prolation level is far more prominent. Günther , ; Earp a, ; Hartt , , n. . Notation in augmentation allows the motet to be notated without the use of semiminims. See the commentary in my edition: Boogaart a, –.
Jacques Boogaart
were copied, was unclear to the scribes; perhaps it was blurred by deletions, blots, and second thoughts scribbled in between the notes. How would contemporary performers and listeners have approached this puzzling work? I imagine that after an initial attempt they would have read the texts, not only to understand what the piece is about – its materia or subject-matter – but moreover to seek an explanation for its particular problems, in order to realize a satisfying performance of this beautiful motet. Texts and themes M is centrally placed in Machaut’s ordered motet collection, especially in the initial corpus of twenty motets. The work shares a thematic relationship, ‘heart and eyes’, with the surrounding motets. In M the burning heart of the lover is the subject, in M the sad heart of the lover and his wish never to have seen his lady who is as capricious as blind Fortune. In M the subject of the tenor is the lady’s sweet and pure heart, while the two upper voices concentrate on the eyes and seeing: the lover is banished from his beloved’s view. (The texts and a translation are given in the Appendix.) Why he is no longer permitted to see her – to test his loyalty or to keep their love secret? – remains unsaid. The lover’s tribulations are experienced in markedly different ways, although both I’s eventually submit to the lady’s will. In the motetus the ban is formulated in a passive way: ‘on me deffent de par vous’ (I have been forbidden on your behalf ). In the triplum the I presents the case at first with selfconfidence: ‘je sui cils qui vueil endurer vostre voloir’ (I am the one willing to endure your will). In both texts the lover foresees his death as a consequence of his lady’s harshness. During the second half of the texts the voices diverge again: the lover in the motetus prefers to be loyal and to die, rather than being false and receiving ultimate joy though gazing at the lady’s beauty. In the triplum he would be contented if he could hope, at the moment of his death, to see her again; all his efforts and feats will be inspired by her and without her he could achieve nothing. Thus, the motetus speaks of complete renunciation whereas •
•
•
•
• •
This book is mentioned in the Livre dou Voir dit, in Lettre X and end of Lettre XXXIII (Imbs and Cerquiglini-Toulet , and ; Palmer and Leech-Wilkinson , and ). In Lettre XXXIII it is called the ‘livre ou je mets toutes mes choses’ (in which I put all my compositions). Zayaruznaya (b, ) interprets Egidius de Murino’s well-known materia de qua vis facere motetum as ‘the materia out of which you wish to construct the motet’ (her latest translation) instead of the usual ‘about which’; that seems wrong to me: the preposition ‘de’ is the normal indication of what a chapter is about, like De colore, De imperfectione (‘About color’, ‘About imperfection’), etc. For the ordering according to themes and to musical criteria, see the introduction to my recent edition (Boogaart a, –). M forms a pair with M: both have a chanson tenor and both have a similar division by three hockets (M is twice as long as M). Furthermore, both motets are measured in perfect tempus, with major prolation in M, whereas the minor prolation is hardly relevant in M; the modus is perfect in M but hardly relevant in M which has but one long as its very last sound. Nineteen are preserved in MS C. Earp sees signs suggesting that M was accidentally left out in a recopying process of C (, –; a, n. ). See also Smilansky , –; for counter-arguments, see Hartt , –. M, M, and M, four-voice compositions, were composed later in Machaut’s career. For an interpretation of the texts in an allegorical and spiritual sense, see Robertson , –. The manuscripts show an interesting difference at this point: C and A have ‘avec ma mort’ (at my death), Vg, B, and E ‘avant ma mort’, G ‘avent ma mort’ (before my death).
To See or Not to See: Machaut’s Motet
the triplum still entertains some slight hope, albeit in extremis. The lover begins to accept his fate at the textual and musical midpoint of the motet, in the motetus between lines and (‘Et si m’en faut abstenir || Pour faire vostre plaisir | Ou envers vous faus seroie’; And yet I must abstain from seeing you || for such is your pleasure; otherwise I’d play you false), in the triplum between lines and (‘[…] einsi ay de ma mort exemplaire. || Mais la doleur […] Douce seroit, se un tel espoir avoie’; thus I prefigure my death || but the grief […] would be sweet if I entertained such a hope). A similar divergence between the attitudes of the two upper voices can be seen in Machaut’s first motet in the corpus. In its conclusion the lover in the motetus prefers to languish and die rather than harming the lady’s honor (M, lines –, ‘Car j’aim miex einsi languir | Et morir’) whereas the triplum’s protagonist opts to live in hope of fulfillment (lines –, ‘Car j’aim miex vivre en esperant | D’avoir mercy’). The upper voice texts of M end in a comparable mindset: ‘dying […] rather than receiving, against your will, complete joy by gazing on your beauty’ (motetus) and ‘for without you […] I would not be able to make the attempt’ (triplum). There are several other common threads with M, as will be seen below. The source of the tenor is unknown and several possible identifications have been proposed. As long as no chanson is found with this text and melody it will remain uncertain which song is quoted here. Machaut’s contemporary Jehan Acart d’Hesdin used the same incipit for two of his ballades in La Prise d’Amours: IV, Fins cuers dous, gente et gentieux, and VII, Fins cuers dous, quant paieront vostre oel ce qu’il m’ont pramis. In the only source for the Prise, BnF fr. , room was left for music, but it was never filled in. Nine rondeaux and nine ballades are interpolated into the narrative. In Ballade IV the lover praises the lady’s beauty and especially her eyes which have attracted him to serve her. In Ballade VII he asks her when at long last these eyes will fulfill their promise; the lover is afraid of having been misled when he gave himself over to their charm. The theme of seeing, then, is common to Jehan’s and Machaut’s texts. Jehan’s work is precisely dated, to April , and Machaut’s composition might well be roughly contemporaneous with it. It is not likely, though, that these songs were Machaut’s source, since the texts do not at all fit the rhythm of M’s tenor; • •
•
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The || indicates the point of reversal. Most authors who have discussed this work (except Rose-Steel ) as well as previous editors have taken over Chichmaref ’s emendation of the word ‘si’ in line of his edition: ‘si m’en faut abstenir’ into ‘s’il’, and all translate it as ‘if ’. Yet the manuscripts uniformly have ‘si’, meaning ‘thus’ or ‘yet’. Ludwig (–, : –) supposed that the tenor incipit simply doubles the motetus text; however, Machaut could also have used the tenor tag as a source of inspiration for his poem in the motetus, a common procedure in the motets (for example, M Amara / Amour, M Suspiro / De souspirant, etc.). On the grounds of the near-imitation of the tenor in the motetus at the start of the motet, Rose-Steel (, –) surmises the source could be the opening of an unknown two-voice chanson. A Salut d’amors (van den Boogaard , refrain ), a source proposed by Clark (a, ), is a good possibility; Oxford BL, Douce , lxviii, ballette Mercis ie vos proi fin cuers doz (Atchison , ) is also mentioned. Eddie Vetter drew my attention to yet another occurrence of the incipit, in the thirteenth-century Bestiaire d’amour rimé: ‘En la fin de mon Bestiaire | Vous pri, fin cuers dous, debonnaire, | Pour franchise et pour amistié, | Que vous aiez de moy pytié’, lines – (). Hoepffner , – (Ballade IV) and – (Ballade VII). Although staves were drawn for all the songs, Earp (b, –) doubts that Acart set the texts to music.
Jacques Boogaart
it seems, rather, that both authors quoted the same song. Whether they knew each other’s texts is of course unknown. Certain words demand attention, by their ambiguity, their frequency, or their position. It has not yet been observed that ‘Fins’, the first word in the tenor and motetus, comprises a double meaning which I think is essential for understanding the piece. As an adjective ‘fin’ includes all nuances of ‘perfect, pure’, but taken as a noun, the word has the meaning of ‘end’. Machaut reveled in the ambiguity of words and often made use of equivocality, especially in his lais and rondeaux, but the motets as well feature many examples. As for ‘fin’, it is part of a comparable pun in the motetus of M: ‘De vous | Cuers dous | Amer sans finement | Et quant j’aim si finement’ (to love you, sweetheart, with endless love, and when I love so perfectly). The sense of end leads to a key conceit in M, the impending death of the lover. The emphasis on ‘morir’ or forms of that word is remarkable: it occurs five times, a frequency that makes M comparable to two other somber works, both in maximodus mensuration: M and M. The initial stress on the words ‘durer’, ‘endurer’ (to last, to endure) points equally to the idea of time and duration, although they also allude to the hardness of the lady which the lover must endure, another equivoque. ‘Dure’ in the sense of ‘hard’ occurs only one time, its opposite ‘dous’ once in each of the triplum and tenor and twice in the motetus. Forms of ‘veoir’ (to see) – that which the lover is forbidden to do – appear more often than in most motets except M. The emphasis on ‘voloir’ or forms of it at the beginning and end of the texts link it again to M, where, like here, the lady’s and the lover’s wills are opposed. Although M belongs to the motets about love, the words ‘Amours’ and ‘amer’ are less prominent than one would expect, whereby, as Alice V. Clark remarks, ‘amer’ (motetus, line ) could also be read in the sense of bitter (as happens in, again, M). More often than in Machaut’s other motets the texts have a common or related rhyme sound, simultaneously or in immediate succession (see Example .): bar ‘com’–‘on’, bars – ‘avoir’–‘voie’, bars – ‘traie’–‘voie’, bar ‘vraie’–‘say’, bars – ‘Que’–‘Que’, bar ‘Douce’–‘Ou’, bar ‘avoie’–‘seroie’, bar ‘gré’–‘loyauté’, bar ‘soie’–‘voloir’, bar ‘Car’– ‘Par’, and, most remarkably, bars – ‘saroie’–‘joie’; that both upper voices end on the same rhyme is highly unusual in the motets. Together with the numerous melodic similarities, to be discussed shortly, it appears that Machaut strove for an extremely blended sound of words and counterpoint in this particular work.
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• • •
The only reference to this ambiguity is in Boogaart b, . Although it would not then have the masculine ‘-s’; ‘fin’ is feminine. I therefore doubt that the brisk tempo proposed in the literature (Earp a, ; Hartt , , n. ) is an apt recommendation. In my opinion Gothic Voices’ original recording from (The Mirror of Narcissus, track ) renders the spirit of the piece far better than their later and faster remake from (The Study of Love, track ). The notation in large note values may well have been chosen to suggest a slow tempo. For an extensive discussion of that theme and its musical rendition, see especially Clark a, –. Clark a, . In M the upper voices both end on ‘Amen’ and the tenor on ‘amis’ but that word is not part of the rhyme scheme; M ends on ‘pace’-‘pacem’.
To See or Not to See: Machaut’s Motet
The music Tenor The refrain line of the chanson tenor (the first system of Example .) sounds like a simple tune with iambic rhythm and with G as its main tone, but the complete tenor, a somewhat enlarged type of virelai, with the scheme A-b-b-b'-a'-A, features a more sophisticated construction. Example .: The tenor of M, motivic structure
1
A
Refrain
2
5' 5
?
4
3
hocket
b+b
4
3
b'
5 in larger values
?
3 fifth filled-in
hocket
4 transposed
5 as in b
a'
5' transposed
A
6
. Refrain
6
hocket ? .
The refrain begins on G’s upper neighbor a and ends on the final G. The melody develops stepwise, except for one upward leap of a fifth. Six concatenated motifs can be distinguished, which also play a role in the melodies of the upper voices. Motif is a descending filled-in third; motif is an upper-neighbor figure. Motif ’s upward leap gives impetus to the melody; motif is a lower-neighbor figure. Motif is a downward run of a fourth and ' includes the same run but begins on the preceding c # and extends through a fifth (both forms occur in the elaboration of the refrain). Motif , a rising filled-in third, mirrors motif . • •
Editions in Ludwig –, : –, Schrade c, : –, Boogaart a, –. Example . is slightly revised from Boogaart b, Appendix, . Hartt (, ) gives a similar motivic analysis of the refrain, with different letters; other authors, cited in n. (Kühn, Lavacek, Rose-Steel, Clark), give the main division of the tenor. I diverge from them in that I prefer not to distinguish a different C-section, since it is only an extension of b.
Jacques Boogaart
In the two b-sections the middle part of the refrain is elaborated. The d of motif is prolonged and the downward run of motif ' is slowed down, now in steady breves; c # and b are lowered to c§ and b b. In the b'-section the fifth leap of motif is filled in, further slowing down the melody; the downward run of b () follows. The a'-section consists of the second part of the refrain ('), the downward run in its original quicker values but transposed down a tone, and followed by A’s last part, motif . Finally, the entire refrain A is repeated. Thus, the listener hears the refrain, a gradual removal from it and a slowing-down in sections b + b + b', a re-enlivenment and return to the second half of the refrain in a', and finally the original tune. It seems possible that Machaut borrowed only the refrain from his source and elaborated parts of it in the b-sections, or at least reworked the song to fit his idea. Upper voices Compared with the phrases of the tenor, the upper voices not only show the customary phase-difference but moreover are slightly irregular in length; the composer may have done so to confuse the listener who is used to hearing regular phrase lengths in motets. Consequently, the rests appear successively but each time in a different voice-order save the last two: Tr-Mo-T (bars –), T-Mo-Tr (–), T-Tr-Mo (–), Mo-T-Tr (–), MoT-Tr (–). The text is fairly evenly divided over the music. As shown in Table ., the phrases of the upper voices do not break up the poetic lines; only in bar the motetus is one syllable ahead into the next line. In breves and number of lines: Table .: M, phrase lengths
T Mo lines Tr lines
A
b
b
b'
a'
A
It is striking how much similarity there is in the upper voices. Their melodic movement is mostly stepwise; upper- and lower-neighbor note patterns, and small downward runs of a third or fourth dominate the texture. Leaps are relatively rare and occur mostly in a descending direction. In bars –, the triplum and motetus have descending fifths in imitation against the upward fifth of the tenor. By contrast, the few upward fifths and fourths (bars •
•
•
This mirroring recalls the tenor of M where the beginning and end also miror each other (a-b-c…F-E-D) and where one fifth leap interrupts the general downward direction of the stepwise melody. The image of the mirror is essential in this motet (see Boogaart ). Problematic in the refrain is the pitch b and if at each instance it should be sung as bb or b §. In bar no sign is given in any manuscript, but the fa-sign written after the b in MS G strongly suggests bb (as an afterthought of the scribe?); it would otherwise have no function, since no b follows on that staff. Moreover, just before, in bar , the motetus has an undisputed bb. However, at the same place in the return of the refrain (bar ) the manuscripts disagree with each other: C and A have a mi-sign for the b, G, Vg, and B a fa-sign while the f # in the triplum suggests a b§. Could a contrast have been meant between the first and last refrain or should the first refrain have b§ as well? Also in the b-sections it is not always clear which b (or b') should be sung. Earp (a, n. ) finds the text declamation problematic, like in M, M, M, M, and M.
To See or Not to See: Machaut’s Motet
Example .: Dame, je sui/ Fins cuers dous/ Fins cuers dous (transcription from Boogaart a, slightly adapted)
Dame, je sui/ Fins cuers dous/ Fins cuers dous (M11) (-) G I I œ œ œI œ œ œ #˙ œ œ œ œ
A E mQ ˙ œI œ œ œ # ˙ œ Jœ œ œ œ I ˙ . 3 J V 3¿4
MS A, A fols 424v-425r (-)
Da - me, je sui cils qui vueil en - du - rer
I
3 V 3 ¿4 # ˙ . 3
Fins
V 3¿4 ˙ . 10
V V
˙.
pas
˙.
fent
V ˙.
I
œœœ ˙
œ
Fins cuers dous A
œ œ
# w ..
œ
œ
i
lon - gue - ment l'en - du - re
˙
œ bœ
(-) E
De
œ
œ
œ œ œ #w. V
˙ œ œ œi œ
tes si du - re
dous
V ˙. 28
V V
˙
ve - oir la
˙
Mais
V
œ œ
w.
œ œ
vrai
˙.
par
w.
˙.
œ œœ œ œ
˙
#w.
œ
vi - ai - re
œ
tres grant
œ
-
œ
˙
m q
œ
œ œ
mort
œI
˙
È
i
vous
que
plus
ne
#˙.
˙
œ
˙
˙.
œ
œ œ œ
Ó.
˙.
w.
œ
œ
gent
Qui
w.
Ó.
œ ˙
I œ œ œ ˙.
œ
e - ment, je ne say
˙.
œi œ
Œ
De vo
˙.
Vo
˙.
˙
vous me
vous
-
m'es -
œ
stre
œ œ œ œ trai - e, Sans plus
œ œ œ ˙
œ
d'a - mer m'a mis en voi - e;
œ œ
Œ
w.
˙. b
œ œ
Œ
gent corps
qui tant
œ ˙
œ ˙
Com - ment
je m'en
a - ten
w. œ
de
-
˙ œ œ ˙
voi - e
œ ˙ ˙.
quant
œ œ œ œ œ
˙
Ó.
a - voir,
˙
def
˙ œ œ œ œ œ
˙.
œ
Que vous vo - lés qu'en sus
biau - té vrai - e
˙.
Sans
(-) Vg B
œ
œ #œ œ œ
me
I
˙
I
I G Vg B E
˙
qm
on
(-) C E
w.
que
˙.
dous,
19
V
w ..
cuers
˙
Vo - stre vo - loir, tant com por-ray du - rer, Mais ne cuit
˙.
i
˙.
G Vg B E
œ œ œ
˙.
a de va - lour
mQ
w.
-
ray
(-) C Vg B
˙.
Ó.
Jacques Boogaart
˙. V ˙. V 37 ˙. V Ó. 37V ˙. V Ó. V Ó. V ˙. V Ó˙b . 46 œb V ˙. 46V œ b V ma . 46V ˙ œ ma V b 46V ˙ . œ ma V ab˙ . 37 37
i ab V ma ˙˙i .. V
G Vg
˙ ˙
Ó. Ó.
œ œ
œ œ
vous es - tes
des
es - tes
des
mo - rir
ne
œ ˙ Que vous œÓ . œ œ b ˙ œ œœ ˙ œÓ . œ œ Que b ˙ vous Que brief - ment Que
œ Que
V
˙.
œ œ œœ es
-mort
I
˙.
I ˙ I ˙
œ œ
i
i
[ ]C [ ]C
œ œ œ des œ ne des ne œ
-
Et si mil ay œ . -œ lour. œ Las! ˙ . ein - si m'en œ. œ
doi
œ
vers
œ vers
œvers œ
œœ
par
vo
par
vo
loy - au
vo -
˙. en Œ Œ˙ . Œœ Œœ
œ loy b˙. œ˙ . bloy bloy ˙.
œ ˙ œ˙ par
˙ - par au
mQ
doi- nes bon ˙ - laœe,
˙
i
G Vg B
œ œ
-
- au
-
˙. vous seIun
˙. ˙. vous .˙ . ˙vous ˙. gré˙ . ˙. gré ˙. ˙˙ .. gré ˙. té gré w. té w˙ .. té w.
b˙.
w.
e,
G Vg B
vous
té
vo-
- au ˙
-
˙.
i œ œ œ si˙˙ ..
˙. Et
- - vers se roit,
-
˙ œ ˙ œ
mQ
ay de œ œ œ ˙ . mQ ˙ œ œ œ œ [I˙i] C - lour. œ Las! bon - nes la mil ein - si ay i de G Vg B i ˙œ œ œœ [Iiœ]GCVgœB œi ˙œ . œ œ œ œ ˙. ˙œ -œ lour. œœ Las! ein -œsi ay˙ . mQ œi de˙ œ bon - nes la mil ˙. ˙. ˙ - œe, Et œ œ faut doi si m'en
en ce
˙ ˙. ˙˙ . en
˙. ˙.
mil - lour. Las! ein - si
en
Ó. nir Ó˙ .. œ nir Ó. œ Óceœ. ce ˙ œ˙ ce
œ œ œ œ œ œ
bon - nes la
˙ œ ˙ ˙.m œ ne . Ó doi - œe, ˙ .Et Q ˙ œ m Ó . Mais œ la˙ .˙ . Q ˙ œ m Ó . Mais œ la˙˙ .. mQQ . Ó ˙. ˙ ˙ .. mmQ la ˙ Q Ó . œ œ Pour Ó˙ . Mais ˙ . mQ Pour la Ó. ˙ . Mais w. ˙˙ .. m Q Pour w˙b'. Ó . ˙. œ b' œ ˙ Pour. œ ˙ œ w. œ œ ˙ b' se w- . roit, seIun ˙ . tel œ œ œ ˙ se b'- roit, tel œ seIun ˙. œ œ seIun œ ˙. se - roit, tel
ste ex - em --plai - nir re. ˙.
˙˙ .. I ste ˙˙ .. ˙. ste ˙˙. .
œ œ œ œ œ œ
œ œ
œ œ œœ tes
œ Que œ - rir brief œ mo vous es b ˙ - ment w. œ w . - tesœ wœ . œ œ brief wœ . - rirœ Que œ mo b ˙ - ment œ mo w . œ œ briefœ - ment w˙.. - rir œQue ˙. œ œ œ œ œ . wmort w. ex - em - plai - re. œ œI œ œ ˙. œ mort ex - em - plai - re. ˙˙ .. œ - re. œ ex˙œI . - em œ - plai œ mort ˙. ˙. ste nir
V ab˙˙i G.. Vg 55 ˙ - œ V ab˙ . 55V i˙ G Vg œ V trai ˙ . - re Dou ˙˙. . 55V ˙ œ C (-) Vg B re Dou -(-) mQ ˙. mQ V trai ˙ . (-) C . ˙ 55V m ˙˙ . - reœ(-)mQ Vg B Dou ˙. trai -Q V sir, Ou (-) C (-) Vg B mQ ˙. m Q sir, Ou ˙ . trai re Dou V w. (-) C V (-) Vg B mQ ˙. mQ sir, Ou w ˙ . V 61 w . œ œ Ou œ œ V sir, Œ 61V Œ œ œ œ œ Œ Œ w . V Qu'a - vec ma mort 61V œ œ œ œ - vec Qu'a Œ ma˙ mort V bŒœ ˙ œ 61V œ œ œ˙ - vec œŒ maœ˙ mort bŒœ Qu'a VS'aim trop miex ma trop ma œ ma ˙ mort b˙œ. Qu'a ˙ - vec miex VS'aim ˙. V ˙ . trop S'aim miex œ˙ . ma ˙ V bœ ˙ ˙. ˙ . ma miex VS'aim trop G Vg
œ œ
tel
œ œ
œ Ó. œ vous Ó. vous vous
vous Ó.
Ó.
˙ si˙ . œ ˙ œ . do - ˙leur ˙ œ do - leur ˙. ˙˙ . - leurœ do
#˙ (-) E #˙ (-) E
#˙ ˙ (-) E #˙˙ qu'il qu'il (-) E qu'il
˙È re - leur qu'il [ i] Èw . - [ i]re ˙w . iœ œ œÈi fai ˙ . i - [ i]reÈiw . œ œ œ [ i] aw . ˙ . esœi - poir œ œi es - poir a ˙i . œ . œ œi ˙ - poir a es
˙. fai do ˙. ˙˙ .. fai
-
fai
re
faus
˙ .- poir faus es b˙. faus b˙. faus b ˙œ.
œ œ voœ- streœ plai ˙ vo - stre œplai ˙ œ
˙ voi œ œ ˙œ œvoi voi
œe œ œœe
-
e
se - roi - e.
˙. se œ˙ . - roiœ - œe.
- voi
-
re - voi
-
œ
œ œra voœ--stre œ con me ven -plai
vo - stre plai -
se œ - roiœ- - œe.e a - voi
œ œ
œ b ˙re. œ
i
faut ˙ œ de˙˙ .. ˙ . œi faut m'en ˙˙ .. œ œ ˙œ . Iœ œfaut ˙.œ m'en Iœ œ œ œ ˙. me con - ven˙ .- ra I œ œ œ conœ - ven me - ra œ Iœ œ œ œ -œœra œ conœ - ven me
œ
œ re - voi re - voi
˙ . - roi - e. se
-
˙. ˙e;. ˙e;. ˙. ˙e;.
Gar
-
Ó. Gar ˙Ó .
-
˙e;. - Gar Gar Ó.
Ó.
-
To See or Not to See: Machaut’s Motet
œ œ œ ˙ œ œ ˙ œ œI œ œI œ œ œI ˙ œI œ œ œ ˙ . . Ó V 67 œ œ œ ˙ œ œ ˙ œ œI œ œI œ œ œI ˙ œI œ œ œ ˙ . . Ó Da me,Iet se ja mes cuers riens en tre prent Dont mes corps ait hon - neur V 67 I. I I ˙ œI œ œ œ ˙ . œ œ œ ˙ œ œ ˙ œ œ œ œ œ œ ˙ mes cuers riens œ # œ œ en˙ - tre - prent Dont mes corps ait hon . Da # Ó me,Iet se ja œ ˙ V ˙˙ . 67 I I I ˙ œœI ˙œ . œ œ ˙ . œ œœ œœ - neur œ V œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ . ˙ ˙ œ # ˙ seœ ja mes cuers riens# œ œ en˙ - treœ - prent. Dont mes corps aitœ hon Ó˙ .. Da œ me,Iet - neur œ V der, ˙ . ˙ et par vo - stre gré Mo - rir, se vos˙ cuers œ l'ot - troi V œ # œ œ en˙ - tre - prent Dont mes corps ait hon # ˙ seœ ja˙ . mes cuers riens me,Iet - neur œ ˙ . Da ˙ œ se˙ . . der, et par vo - stre gré Mo - rir, vos˙ cuers œ œl'ot œ- troi V ˙ . b ˙ œ . ˙ . ˙ V ˙. wœ # œ œ ˙ #w. #˙ œ # . œ ˙. œ se˙˙ .. œ œl'ot œ- troi et par vo - stre gré Mo - rir, vos˙ cuers V bder, ˙ a'˙ . œ ˙ œ #˙. V w. #w. . 76 Iet I - troiœ der, par vo - stre gré vos cuers l'ot i Mo - rir,i se˙ a'œ˙ . œ ˙ œœ . ˙ œ w b # w œ œ . . ˙ . Ó œ œ V œ w œ #w. #˙. V ˙. 76 I I i i œ b a'œ˙ . œ ˙ œœ w . ˙ . œ ven œ vous œ que V œ - ra, œ ˙#lon De wvous - #w. teins .w . œ com V n'a - vanI - ce - ment,˙ œ # ˙Ó. . 76 I œ œ i ˙. œ œ w. I . œI ˙ œœ b(-)˙œi E. a'œ ˙ œ teinsœœ bque œ vous # w . œ Ó œ n'a - van - ce - ment, De vous ven - ra, com lon œ œ . œ ˙ ˙ V 76 I (-)i E V œ œI œ wÓ .. i ˙œ . œ ˙ œ teinsœ bque œ vous w˙ .. ÓœI . œI ˙ vousœ bven œ #lon œ com - ra, V n'a˙e,. - van - ce - ment, Ó . Qu'˙en œ- con œ - De tre voE stre vo V (-) ˙ . - ra, com (-)lon œ vous ˙C. B E œ ˙ vousœ bven œ teinsœ bque œI œ œI De n'a - ˙ ˙e,. - van - ce - ment, ˙en œ- con . Ó Qu' tre vo stre vo (-) E V . Ó ˙œI . œ œI w˙ . œ b ˙ . ˙ œ œ bœ œ V w˙ .. #(-)w˙C...B E ˙en œ- con . Ó e, Qu' tre vo stre vo V . Ó. ˙A. Vw w. # (-)wC..B E I 85 I ˙. œ Qu'œe.n œ- con œ œ vo # œ - œI œ trew˙. œ voœ œ - œ stre˙ . A.˙ ˙e, . œ Ó ˙ Œ Œ V w (-) C B E # w .. V I˙ œ œ œ œI 85 ˙. œ Óœ. œ œ œ # œ œI œ ˙ . A.˙ . loi - au - ment, Ne #sans V w˙ . - œe, Car Œ A - mours Œ em - prensoi ja sans vous, ˙que j'aim wtres w .. V I˙ œ œ œ œI � � 85 ˙. œI œ œI A œ # œI œI . loi - au˙I .- ment, Ne sans œ tres ˙ . œ œ Œ Aœ˙- mours ˙ . - œe, Car ˙ . j'aim œ # ˙ œ œ Œ soi ja sans vous, que em œ I˙ œ œ œ œI � � œ œ œ œ # ˙œ- pren 85V I ˙. œI œ œI V œ I œ ˙. ˙˙ . œ Œ ˙ . - œe, Car ˙ . j'aim # ˙ œ jaœ sans œ que ˙ .- ment, Ne sans œ œ A˙- mours Œœ emI - prenœ -vous, tres loi - au V soi vo stre biau - té ve - oir, Re - ce - ˙us V loir, Par �˙ � ˙ . loi - au˙I .- ment, Ne sans I - pren˙ . - e, Car ˙ . j'aim tres # ˙ œ jaœI sans œI que œ œ œ A˙- mours AœGem soi œ -vous, B - oir, - ˙us loir, Par vo stre biau té ve Re œ - ce Vg . ˙ w V # ˙ � . � È ˙ I I I . w œ . . ˙ I V ˙ .. ˙ ˙ œœ œ ˙ . #˙ œ œ œ œ ˙. AœG Vg˙B Par vo stre biau w . - té V loir,. #ve˙ . - oir,˙ Re œ - Èce˙ - us œw. V˙ ˙. A 94 -œ loir, œ Par stre biau ve - oir, ˙ vo ˙ Re œ - wÈce..˙G Vg- usB œwœ. - ˙ té œ œ # ˙ . œ œ œ # w . w . . . V ˙Œ ˙ V A G Vg B 94 œ wœ ˙ ˙ wœ. œ ##˙w.. œ wÈ..˙ œ œ ˙ œ œ œ . . . V ˙ ˙ Œ nel sa roi e. V- dre 94 œ œ ˙ œ œ œ œ œ ˙ we. .. #roiw . - Œœ dre nel sa - œ ˙ œ œ ˙. . 94V ˙ ˙ w . V ww .... œ œ ˙ œ œ œ œ œ ˙ œ #roiw . dre sa e. ˙ - nel œ V- seŒœ tou œ joi˙ . ˙ - ˙. te w. V we. .. - œ dre sa roi e. ˙ - nel œ œ joi˙ . ˙ - ˙. se tou te e. .. w . V w .. V ˙œ . ˙ w. w # w . . ˙ œ œ joi˙ . w. - ˙. V se. tou - te˙ . we. .... V˙ w w #w. ˙. se tou te joi e. V ˙. w. w .. #w. ˙. V ˙. w. w .. #w. ˙. 67
Jacques Boogaart
–, –, –, –, –), octaves (bars –, –), and tritones (bars –, –) lend melodic impetus; as is often the case in Machaut’s motets, it is especially the motetus that has such unexpected turns. In the counterpoint the two voices are sometimes closely entangled, sometimes far removed from each other, just as their message is sometimes related, at other times contrasting. A number of motifs in the upper voices can be recognized as deriving from the refrain. The opening gesture, motif , is found in bar – Tr (ornamented, a fifth higher), – Mo, – Tr, – Mo, – Tr (interrupted by the rest), and, most interestingly, at the final cadence in the triplum, bars – (a fifth higher; the motetus as well has a descending third at –). On the other hand, the closing gesture, motif , is placed in the triplum in bar (the plica glides through f #). Thus, the opening and closing motifs of the triplum mirror those of the tenor. The rising third of motif is further found at pitch in bars – Tr, – Tr, – Mo, – Tr, – Tr, – Tr. Neighbor-note patterns, ascending and descending (motifs and ), are ubiquitous. The downward run of a fourth (motif ) is rhythmicized as a fixed motif of a breve plus two minims followed by a breve or a semibreve, in bars – Tr, – Tr, – Tr, – Mo, – Tr, every time beginning on g; see Example .. In all but the third instance, tenor motif follows, indicated with × in the example. In the motetus it occurs in bars – and – as an ascending run of a fourth, and in bar in parallel with the triplum but without the first pitch. It is a conspicuous motif since it breaks the overall evenness of the movement in semibreves and breves (there are two more occurrences of two minims, in bars and , but not with the same melodic motif ). In the analysis below it will be called the BMM-motif. Example .: The descending BMM-motif
Tr bars 17–21
Quant
vous
Tr bars 50–55
ve
nel
•
et
se
si
do
-
leur
ja
oir
Re
-
du
mes cuers
-
-
re
qu'il me con - ven - ra
en
-
roi
se
tou
-
trai - re
riens
ce - us
sa
Mo bars 91–94
Tr bars 95–102
la
Dame,
Tr bars 68–72
?
tenor motif 1
m'es - tes
Mais
-
tre
e.
Example . derives from ex. IV, in Boogaart b, Appendix, . See also Clark’s ex. (a, ).
To See or Not to See: Machaut’s Motet
Divisions Despite the irregularity of the phrase lengths some regular divisions are made audible. A division in two halves is marked by the lengthy emphasis on G in the middle of the motet (bars –). The octave G/g first shrinks to the unison G/G, then in bar the triplum states the BMM-motif, starting from g. In bar both upper voices have plicated breves (d and g), ascending and descending. Only after bar this G-consonance is left, at which point the triplum sings the tenor’s opening motif, but an octave higher, a'-g-f #. Below I will come back on this passage and its significance. As in M, three hockets punctuate the motet, always over tenor motif , in bars – and – over the slow variant of b and b', in bars – over the original quick rhythm of A; see the ‘hocket’ annotations in Example .. Like the phrase lengths, their spacing is not equal: they are and breves apart. The melodies in the first hocket are descending, in the second ascending, and in the last they go in both directions. The tenor phrase endings that are signaled by these hockets divide the piece into three parts whose lengths are multiples of six: -- (A + b, b + b', a' + A), so into the ratio of ::; these numbers add up to . The number seems to have a distinct importance in the motet. The BMM-motif in the triplum in bar , reinforced by its inversion in the motetus, marks a beginning after the directed progression in bar . Bar , as just mentioned, signals the midpoint of the motet, with two plicated notes in the upper voices. In bar , where the third section of the motet (a'+ A) begins, the motif even carries the initial invocation ‘Dame’. After the clear cadence in bar , both upper voices begin their two last lines of poetry with a common word-sound ‘Car’-‘Par’ and end with the common rhyme ‘saroie’-‘joie’. Together with the ending in bar , all these points are multiples of ; the motet measures × breves. The only remaining multiple number, bar , hardly seems important, although it marks the end of the first hocket. In an earlier article I have interpreted as Machaut’s symbolic number of hope in M and M. In M ‘espoir’ is only dimly perceptible, in the triplum’s hope to see the lady at his death, in bar , not a multiple of . However, the : division of the motet (:) falls at bar , and across bars – are the words ‘s’un tel espoir avoie’ (if I entertained such a hope). Music and words Below follows a survey of the counterpoint in each tenor section, with an interpretation of its relationship with the text. Hellmut Kühn claims that where identical sections follow close on each other (b, b) the counterpoint is maximally different, whereas when they are
• • •
Since there are some errors in the upper voices (for example, the triplum’s breve in bar should have been a long and the long in bar a breve), could it be that Machaut had originally intended the BMM-motif to fall in bar instead of ? See Boogaart . The numbers six and seventeen often appear to be significant in Machaut’s motets; to begin with, in the complete corpus six works are occasional and in Latin, and seventeen amorous and in French or French-Latin. This may seem a strange way of dividing M, but, for example, in M, based on the number (in taleae and colores), the : division of the whole work is essential for its interpretation; see Boogaart .
Jacques Boogaart
separated by a large distance (A…A) Machaut sought to make them recognizable. That is certainly true for the b-sections but the differences between A and its repeat are perhaps more interesting than their likenesses. A. Right at the beginning the imperfect consonance a-c #-e changes to doubly imperfect (a-c #-f #) with a (rare) sharped plica; the latter consonance resolves as expected to G-dg. As remarked earlier, this is the way a motet with final G should end, not begin. The unstable sound of the plica in the triplum – a ‘filling’ note probably with trill or vibrato – adds to the effect. No other fourteenth-century motet opens in such an abrupt manner; only Machaut’s first rondeau Dous viaire gracieus has a comparable opening but there it does not resolve to a perfect consonance. The double meaning of ‘fin’ (perfect vs end) surely inspired this contrapuntal surprise, which at the same time must be intended as an emotional gesture in addressing the forbidding lady. There is not a sense of complete closure on G, however, since the upper voices are rhythmically active and the poetry has only just begun. After the tightly-spaced sonorities of the opening, the upper voices begin to spread apart in bars – over the tenor’s long F #, the triplum a minor tenth above the tenor and an octave above the motetus; the latter holds its a for a full perfect long. The triplum touches b' in a neighbor-note gesture, probably to be lowered to b' b since the similar passage of the motetus in bars –, with the same words ‘vostre voloir’, indeed has a signed b'b; it generates a strong tension with the tenor’s F #. In the texts ‘endurer’ and ‘dous’ are contrasted whereby ‘endurer’ plays on the sense of hard, ‘dur’. In bars – the motetus rises with a tritone from its low register at the emotional words ‘on me deffent’ (I am forbidden) and sings in parallel fourths with the triplum until a first stop at the end of its line in bar where a cadence on G is reached. The upper voices continue with a remarkable succession of parallel intervals: no less than six consecutive fifths (bars –) and, combined with the tenor, three parallel ‘sixth chords’ (bars –, a very unusual sound in Machaut’s musical language) lead to a more resolute cadence on G at bar , at the words ‘sans mort avoir’ (without dying) and ‘que plus ne voie’ (to ever look again), both pointing to the menacing end of the lover’s life. Just before this ‘fauxbourdon’ passage (as Kühn called it, pointing to its rareness in this context), the motetus leaps up an octave, with a plica, at ‘que plus ne voie’, but continues its melody in the higher register in a manner that it could have
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•
Kühn , . About the differences in the way the chanson motets close in comparison to the chant-based motets, see Hartt , –. On the possible performance of the plica, see Haines . The plica often serves as an ornamental sound in emotional passages; see Boogaart a, . For the comparison with R, see Fuller , . About the preference for successions of imperfect intervals over perfect ones, see Fuller’s citation of, and comment on Johannes Boen (Fuller , –). With series of perfect intervals, according to Boen, ‘the ear might cease its attention, thinking that with the end attained, motion might have stopped’. Kühn , .
To See or Not to See: Machaut’s Motet
done an octave lower; the register change and the plica express the growing emotional emphasis. The tenor’s b in bar , unsigned in all the manuscripts (with the possible exception of G), is probably to be flatted, as suggested in all the editions. Still, in the comparable passage in the second refrain, bar , the same pitch almost certainly has to be sung as b§ (although the manuscripts disagree with each other). At bars –, the upper voices undergo voice exchange through mirrored BMMmotifs. A third cadence on G is reached at bar ; the lead-up to this cadence is reminiscent of bars –, but now with the triplum having an imperfect long c # over the tenor’s F # while the motetus hovers above it as the highest voice, on a', like the triplum in bars – with the (supposedly) flatted and again ominous-sounding neighbor note b' b (in the comparable passage at bars – the fa-sign is in all the manuscripts). Here, even clearer than before in bars –, the essential words ‘dur’ and ‘dous’ are contrasted. The cadence is not complete, however, since the triplum doesn’t resolve its c # to d and has a rest instead; only the tenor and motetus participate in the cadence with the octave G-g. b. Starting at bar the upper voices commence an interplay of imitations or near-imitations, pursuing one another in a slow-rising sequence of neighbor note patterns. The motetus starts a breve after the triplum’s neighbor note, with the BMM-motif but in ascending form, and imitates its downward fifth after the rising fifth of the tenor. The voices reach a peak at bar with the triplum’s c' over the tenor’s c, on the words ‘biauté vraie’ (preceded by ‘vraiement’ in the motetus), the ‘true beauty’ which the lover so much longs to see. The ensuing descending hocket passage with its parallel sixths sounds like a fauxbourdon again, recalling the plaintive bars –, and closes this section, but not on the tenor’s a; instead, the triplum stretches into the next section with an imperfect long g over the held e of the motetus and a rest in the tenor. b. The repeat of b starts in bar with an outer-voice G/g octave. From here the motetus dives below the tenor’s prolonged d and remains the lowest voice for the entire section while the triplum hovers in the octave above it with little melodic directedness. Both upper voices have mainly neighbor-note motifs, except for the descending fifth in the motetus in bars –. Again the tenor’s closing pitch, a, is not the cadential goal; it is the motetus that brings this section to an end, with a drawn-out arrival on G, together with the triplum but without the tenor. (The triplum’s g is only in MS G, the other sources have an improbable e; possibly a d was intended.) Both voices speak of an impending death in this dark passage that contrasts strongly with the preceding bsection: ‘einsi ay de ma mort exemplaire’ (thus I prefigure my death) and ‘que briefment morir ne doie’ (a death I must soon suffer). • • •
About this passage, see Zayaruznaya , –. See n. . Schrade’s edition is in error here: using C as the base manuscript which has three breves instead of two breves plus an imperfect long in bars – (as in the other manuscripts), Schrade altered the second of these breves, F, in bar . It was corrected in Hoppin , –. The F must surely be raised in this cadential situation.
Jacques Boogaart
b'. This section is tightly connected to the previous one. It begins in bar with the tenor’s G that joins the motetus’s held G. This results in three breves (bars –) with only the octave G-g or even the unison G-G sounding, a very unusual feature, since G is the final of the motet. Such a long stop on the final in the middle of the piece is found in no other motet. It might even seem that the work would end here, were it not for the triplum’s re-start in bar with the BMM-motif after which the motetus joins in with a plicated g. The preceding passage in which both texts speak of impending death explains this curious standstill on G: the ‘premature ending’ symbolizes premature death. It recalls both the strange beginning on the word ‘fins’ and the cadence on G in bars –, whose words ‘sans mort avoir’ (without dying) and ‘que plus ne voie’ (to ever look again) correspond with ‘de ma mort exemplaire’ (I prefigure my death) and ‘si m’en faut abstenir’ (and yet I must abstain from seeing you) in bars –. In the next bar (), the midpoint from where the lover begins to accept his fate, both upper voices have a plica; the motetus rises again to its upper register and the music resumes with fresh energy after this contemplation of death. In bar the triplum recalls the tenor’s opening motif. Bar presents a contrapuntal conundrum: all the manuscripts have a b b for the tenor but it seems an unlikely dissonant combination with the triplum’s breve f #; or is this spot an extension of the other f #-b b clashes (bars , , ) where the dissonance lasts only a semibreve? And could it then refer to the ‘doleur’ (grief ) of bar ? After this difficult moment, the second peak of the motet is reached over the tenor’s lengthy, reiterated c (lasting for four breves), with a fourth leap to c' in the triplum and a rising c-e-g triad in the motetus with two plicas. The harmony on c sounds as a moment of lightness and sweetness, contrasting strongly with the dark thoughts heard just before: both voices sing a lengthy vowel ‘-ou’ which so often has a favorable meaning in Machaut’s texts, ‘Douce’ and ‘Ou’ at bar . A difficult choice follows for the triplum in bar on the word ‘espoir’: b' or b' b? The tenor’s signed b b suggests the second option, but one can imagine that in a first run-through a singer would surely choose to sing b' to accord with the b' just sung in bar , which would cause a severe dissonance. The triplum’s hope to see the lady again conflicts with the idea in the motetus of disobeying her wishes by gazing (‘espoir’ vs ‘faus’); could that be the reason? The ensuing hocket is now ascending and concludes on the tenor’s sustained a. The upper voices, with a slow descending run of a fourth in the triplum, lead to the next section. a'. Over the tenor’s quicker downward run (motif ' transposed) the triplum again has the BMM-motif (bar ) that was already used twice before to announce the beginning of •
•
M has a breve D (the final) in the tenor along with the octave d in the triplum at bar , right in the middle of the work. Apart from the motet’s final consonance, this is the only time the work comes to rest (albeit for a short while) on a perfect consonance on D. For its significance in relation to the text, see Boogaart a, –. There are several examples; most extreme is the short dit Vez ci les biens que ma dame me fait with all its lines ending on ‘-our’ (Chichmaref , –). In the motets M is a good example, with an ostinato on ‘-our’ in the motetus. Its counterpart is the rhyme ‘-ure’; see, for example, the ostinato in M, triplum, but also the beginning of the present motet.
To See or Not to See: Machaut’s Motet
a phrase (bars and ): here it is particularly clear since the word ‘Dame’ recalls the opening of the piece, as a rhetorical gesture that the conclusion is now nearing. Meanwhile the motetus has a tritone leap c-f # (in bars – it was G-c # at the words ‘on me deffent’, I’ve been forbidden) which brings it above the triplum for a short while, at the words ‘et par vostre gré morir’ (and, by your leave, dying). The triplum rises twice to b' (bars –), probably not to be inflected here since they both sound above the tenor’s E and F #. The octave distance between ‘mes corps’ (my person) and ‘vos cuer’ (your heart) in bar might well be symbolic. The tenor’s F # leads to a rather weak cadence on G (bars –), a brief moment of relaxation before the most dramatic section, the return of the complete refrain. A. The tense contrapuntal passage that follows (bars –, over tenor motif ) is strongly reminiscent of the end of the first A-section (bars –, over tenor motif ), but with much greater intensity. The motetus rises to a signed b' b (bar ) against an unsigned b in the triplum (probably to be flatted and then causing an augmented melodic second), and contrasting with the triplum’s high b' heard just before (bar ). Over the tenor’s F# the triplum holds its c# for an imperfect long. Above it, the motetus has the highest pitch a', also for an imperfect long, but a long that is further imperfected ad partem propinquam by a semibreve, after which the ominous-sounding b' b is touched upon anew as a neighbor note. The words ‘lonteins’ (far) and ‘vostre voloir’ (your will), both pointing to the lover’s distance from his lady, have been set in this most tense part of the motet, recalling also bars – where the same words ‘vostre voloir’ were sung in a similar contrapuntal setting but with much less emphasis. This time the cadence (bar ) is completed in all three voices; the earlier tension of the triplum’s c # that was left hanging in bar is now resolved. After the sonority at bar is repeated at , new tensions follow over tenor motif ' (bars –), which is combined with the third hocket. Over the tenor’s c # the motetus now has the BMM-motif with pitches g-f-e-d, but the singer must choose between clashing with the tenor’s c # or adapting the first two pitches to g # and f # by which the integrity of the motif would be ruined. This dilemma coincides with the crucial word ‘veoir’: to see the lady’s beauty, the lover’s deepest wish and hope, is strictly forbidden as the contrapuntal imbroglio makes clear. The triplum adds to this the words ‘sans Amours’ (without Love). In bar , the tenor’s b presents a comparable problem: should it be flatted as some of the sources (Vg, B, G) indicate or be sung as b§ (as in C and A) to avoid a dissonance with the triplum’s f #? The latter, more likely option is a sign that the hard b, b-durum, must finally be accepted. The hocket ends in bar on a perfect fifth G-d but in a b § in the motetus prolongs the tension. Thus, at the end of the motet b •
•
The long is considered to contain two perfect breves of which the second is imperfected by the semibreve. Imperfectio ad partem propinquam is also found in M, an early piece (–), and in M, M, and M, which are probably later works. Karen Desmond (, –) presumes it does not occur before around the middle of the century; M almost certainly dates from well before . MS C has a fa-sign at the beginning of the staff which could only apply to this b, but in the continuation of the melody it proves to be impossible.
Jacques Boogaart
durum prevails over b-molle. Meanwhile the triplum has the BMM-motif, joined by the motetus, after which a remarkable cadence follows over the tenor’s closing motif . The motet closes with minimal cadential strength, as the minor third F #-a resolves into the unison G-G and the major third a-c # between the triplum and motetus resolves outward to the fifth G-d. As the triplum states the opening motif of the tenor, three consecutive perfect fifths, E-b (tenor-motetus), F #-c #, and G-d (both tenor-triplum) with increasing lengths (perfect breve, altered breve, perfect long), bring the work to its end. Such a succession of perfect fifths in the final cadence is extremely unusual. It is a gliding closure, a slow ‘fade-out’ so to speak, as amazing as the motet’s abrupt opening.
The words ‘Fins cuers dous’ form the materia of M. Like in all of Machaut’s motets, the subject matter appears to be complex and ambiguous. Notwithstanding the problematic transmission of the motet, its peculiar characteristics that ‘push against norms and defaults’ lead us to the richness of its meaning. The unusually close-knit counterpoint is suggestive of the lover's intense longing to be near the beloved. Sweetness versus hardness, the contrast between‘dous’ and‘dur’, is expressed by the music in its hesitation between b-molle and b-durum throughout the piece until finally b-durum prevails. The sense of ‘fin’ as ‘end’ and hence ‘death’ is musicalized in the premature cadences right at the beginning and in the heart of the work. The principal meaning of ‘fin’ (perfect, pure) appears at the ending: three perfect fifths follow each other in a slow fade-out, rhythmicized in the large note values of the tenor’s iambic rhythm. Combined with the unavoidable b-durum, the closure of the motet symbolizes the lover’s attainment of perfection by his unconditional acceptance of the lady’s outward dourness, in the hope of some day receiving the reward of joy from her ‘fins cuers dous’. Thus, in a playful train of thought typical of Machaut, the word ‘fin’ bespeaks both the opening and the closure of M, with mirrored signification: beginning as an ‘ending’, ending in ‘triple perfection’.
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•
Clark (a, ) concludes in her analysis of the ‘dous’-‘dur’ contrasts that ‘the melody, at the “heart” of the motet and describing the Lady’s heart, has harmonic implications that are anything but sweet’. Hartt (, –) concludes that ‘the progression’s resulting level of directedness is less’. It certainly is the least tense cadence of all Machaut’s motets and the only one to end on a unison and a fifth, without octave. See the Earp quotation at the head of this chapter. The ending as notated in the sources is problematic: the triplum’s breve c# must be altered (taking the breve-semibreve before it as if it were a perfect breve) and in the motetus a breve length is missing; doubling the length of the b in bars – seems the most satisfying solution (suggested by Ludwig in the commentary to his edition and applied in those of Schrade and Boogaart). It does not alter the fact that there are three consecutive perfect fifths. ‘Dour’ probably derives from Latin durus (OED).
To See or Not to See: Machaut’s Motet
A: Texts and translation triplum Dame, je sui cils qui vueil endurer Vostre voloir, tant com porray durer, Mais ne cuit pas que longuement l’endure Sans mort avoir, quant vous m’estes si dure Que vous volés qu’en sus de vous me traie, Sans plus veoir la tres grant biauté vraie De vo gent corps qui tant a de valour
Lady, I’m the one willing to endure What you will, as long as I’ll prove able to last, But I don’t think I can endure it for long Without dying, with you being so hard on me
Que vous estes des bonnes la millour. Las! einsi ay de ma mort exemplaire. Mais la doleur qu’il me convenra traire Douce seroit, se un tel espoir avoie Qu’avec ma mort par vo gré vous revoie;
That you are the best among the good. Alas! thus I prefigure my death.
But the grief I shall be forced to bear Would be sweet, if I entertained such a hope That, in death, you’d favor me with another glimpse;
Dame, et se ja mes cuers riens entreprent Dont mes corps ait honneur n’avancement,
Lady, and if my heart ever attempts something To advance or honor my person,
De vous venra, com lonteins que vous soie, Car ja sans vous que j’aim tres loiaument Ne sans Amours emprendre nel saroie.
It will come from you, no matter how far away I may be from you For without either you, whom I love so faithfully Or Love, I’d not be able to make the attempt.
motetus Fins cuers dous, on me deffent De par vous que plus ne voie Vostre dous viaire gent
Heart sweet and perfect, I’ve been forbidden On your behalf to ever look again Upon your sweet noble face,
Qui d’amer m’a mis en voie; Mais vraiement, je ne say Comment je m’en atenray
Que briefment morir ne doie, Et si m’en faut abstenir Pour faire vostre plaisir, Ou envers vous faus seroie. S’aim trop miex ma loyauté Gar-
Qu’encontre vostre voloir, Par vostre biauté veoir, Receüsse toute joie. tenor Fins cuers dous
Which has set me on the path of love; But truly, I cannot imagine How not to expect from this A death I must soon suffer, And yet I must abstain from seeing you,
-der, et par vostre gré Morir, se vos cuers l’ottroie,
•
In that you wish me to depart from you, And thus gaze no more on the very great beauty Of your noble person, which is so worthy
For such is your pleasure; Otherwise I’d play you false. So I much prefer remaining loyal, And, by your leave, Dying, if your heart so determines,
To receiving, against your will, Complete joy By gazing on your beauty. Heart sweet and perfect
Text and translation by Palmer and Boogaart, edition a, with two small revisions in the translation (triplum line and motetus lines –). The texts are here laid out to conform with the tenor sections.
Motets and Chant �
. P R D-S M* Catherine A. Bradley
As Lawrence Earp observed in his fundamental study of the development of French dance lyrics from Adam de la Halle to Guillaume de Machaut: ‘in the thirteenth century, the refrain forms, associated with popular dancing at court, live a scattered and underground existence’. Evidence of the kinds of rhythmicized refrain songs that may have been danced to in the thirteenth century is frustratingly incomplete or indirect. The early fourteenth-century manuscript Douce – a source never intended for musical notation – is the principal, and usually lone, witness to such lyrics. Douce includes collections of overwhelmingly unique song texts designated estampies and ballettes, the latter in varied, often ballade- or virelai-like forms. Douce also contains rondeaux, of which there survive several earlier and notated collections, notably the monophonic rondeaux attributed to Guillaume d’Amiens in chansonnier a and the polyphonic rondeaux by Adam de la Halle in Ha. Vernacular motets, the best-represented polyphonic genre in surviving sources from the late thirteenth century, provide further poetic and musical traces of refrain songs. Motets present individual refrain texts and/or melodies as part of their motetus, triplum, or quadruplum voices, and they occasionally adopt refrains – or even complete refrain songs – as the foundational tenor voices that more often quote liturgical plainchant melodies. In the thirteenth century, then, the act of recording rhythmicized refrains songs with musical notation seems principally to have been prompted by special circumstances: the desire to preserve the corpus of a particular author, or the absorption of (parts of ) these songs within a genre, such as the motet, with an established notated tradition. Typically, however, the formally hybrid songs that mix characteristics of rondeaux, virelais, and ballades seem to have been precisely the kind of texts and *
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This research was funded by a European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant under the European Union Horizon research and innovation program (Grant number , in the context of the project BENEDICAMUS: Musical and Poetic Creativity for a Unique Moment in the Western Christian Liturgy c. –). I thank Elizabeth Eva Leach and the editors of this volume for their valuable feedback. Earp b, . On Douce , see Leach . On estampies, see Leach . On ballettes, see Doss-Quinby, Rosenberg, and Aubrey . On chansonnier a, see Earp , –. As Earp demonstrates (pp. –), rondeaux and motets are used sporadically throughout this source to fill in gaps at the end of sections. The only dedicated collection of rondeaux in chansonnier a opens with the rubric ‘Rondel Willamme d’Amiens Paignour’ (fol. r) and contains ten monophonic songs. A pair of grands chants by Guillaume d’Amiens appears earlier in chansonnier a, opening (on fol. r) with a miniature representing a painter, that may be a self-portrait. On polyphonic rondeaux and their manuscript sources, see Everist and Bradley , –. See the discussions of motets with refrain-song upper voices in Everist , –, and Everist . On motets with vernacular song tenors, see Everist . The exception is the collection of thirty-four polyphonic rondeaux in PaB (discussed in Everist ). PaB includes rondeaux elsewhere found in the author collections of Guillaume d’Amiens and Adam de la Halle, but it does not give composer attributions nor does it group rondeaux by the same composer. The rondeaux texts are complete but, although this source was laid out to accommodate staves in three-voice score format, these staves were never ruled and no music was entered. This could indicate a scarcity of musical exemplars for polyphonic rondeaux.
Polyphony from and for Refrains in Dance-Song Motets
music that were not usually written down at all, and which had no conventional place within thirteenth-century collections of monophony or polyphony. This chapter compares and draws connections between three three-voice French motets in the Montpellier codex (hereafter Mo) that embody a profound fusion of aspects of motet and polyphonic song composition. The pieces are clearly shaped from the outset around a preexisting tenor quotation, probably the defining characteristic of the motet as a genre. At the same time, these motets have an overall refrain-song structure. This is never an entirely conventional rondeau, but key characteristics of the rondeau form (invariably a framing refrain) are mixed with those of the virelai (the introduction of internal musical material that alters that of the refrain). Shaped by repeated refrains, the upper-voices of these song-form motets exhibit a degree of textual and musical interdependence between voices and a tolerance for dissonance that is more characteristic of the surviving repertoire of three-voice polyphonic rondeaux than of motets. These compositions not only blur the genres of motet and refrain song, but they also stand to complicate understandings of what might constitute registrally ‘high’ or ‘low’ forms and styles. This productively opens up the question as to what might constitute compositional ‘sophistication’. Earp’s work has firmly established the musical intricacy of the polyphonic songs of Guillaume de Machaut, but the modest corpus of polyphonic rondeaux that survives from the thirteenth century has barely been analyzed at all. And sophistication has also seemed a doubtful description for brief thirteenth-century song-form motets, with fairly generic poetic content and musical transmissions that are – as demonstrated below – unstable and/or containing dissonances ‘corrected’ in modern editions. This study reconsiders the creative parameters at play in thirteenth-century refrain-song motets to reveal the underlying shared creative strategies by which multiple established melodies (songs, refrains, plainchant) were selected and manipulated to facilitate prolonged combination with each other and also with themselves. It demonstrates the considerable amount of pre-compositional planning at work in conceptualizing and designing – within the constraints of predetermined musical forms and quotations – an economical and thus highly memorable piece of three-part polyphony. Furthermore, such motets may offer rare examples of music and poetry, not typically recorded in writing or dependent on written records, that actually accompanied informal dancing. This is suggested by the survival of con •
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In Bradley , –, I argue that the monophonic refrain songs quoted as motet tenors in Mo (and which typically survive uniquely in this context) were well-known and largely unwritten popular melodies. The few concordances that exist for these songs are typically among the ballettes and pastourelles of Douce . Page , , suggests that the forms of ballade and virelai were ‘intertwined in the late thirteenth century and that both duly emerged from a “ballade-virelai matrix”’ (which accounts for the profoundly mixed formal profile of the ballettes of Douce ). The refrain-song motets analyzed here are also formal hybrids that might, analogously, be characterized as a part of a ‘rondeau-virelai matrix’, in which the two forms are neither entirely distinct nor yet strictly defined. See especially Earp a. The exceptions are Everist , Maw , Butterfield , –, and Everist . Butterfield seeks, somewhat problematically, to elevate certain of Adam de la Halle’s rondeaux by suggesting that they are a response to his motets (p. ). On this, see also Bradley , –.
Catherine A. Bradley
cordances for their respective refrains among rondeaux and ballettes, and – in one instance – a refrain text that is an exhortation to come and dance. Refrain-song motets thereby present an unsuspected opportunity to recover ephemeral oral compositional and performative procedures involved in making polyphonic dance lyrics in the thirteenth century. Song against songs: working out quotational combinations in S’on me regarde/ Prenes i garde/ He mi enfant Uniquely preserved in Mo’s eighth and final added fascicle, the motet S’on me regarde/ Prenes i garde/ He mi enfant has long attracted attention for its polyphonic combination of the song tenor He mi enfant with the refrain ‘Prendes i garde’, the latter also known from a rondeau attributed to Guillaume d’Amiens in chansonnier a. Mark Everist has offered a compelling analysis of this motet, demonstrating how its motetus and triplum voices depend on and complement their underlying tenor, all three voices sharing the same overall form and regular phrase-structure in a manner that is strongly reminiscent of a polyphonic song. Building on Everist’s work, Matthew P. Thomson has also underlined the economy of melodic material in the upper voices of S’on me regarde/ Prenes i garde/ He mi enfant, both of which draw heavily and consistently on the melody and text of the ‘Prendes i garde’ refrain. Although He mi enfant is known only from this Mo motet, its position in the tenor voice is a strong indication of its independent existence as a song, here quoted as a polyphonic foundation. I argue here that the creator of S’on me regarde/ Prenes i garde/ He mi enfant selected the motet’s two preexisting elements – song tenor and rondeau refrain – in conjunction, focusing (unlike Everist and Thomson) on how the melody of the original rondeau refrain was manipulated such that it could not only work in simultaneous polyphonic combination with itself, but also so that it could be fitted against its underlying tenor. The refrain ‘Prendes i garde’ had an unusually wide and stable notated transmission. The two phrases of this refrain (A and B) provide the entire musical content of a rondeau by Guillaume d’Amiens. Framed by the presentation of the complete refrain melody with its accompanying text, and featuring an internal reprise of the music and text of the refrain’s A material, Guillaume’s rondeau has the conventional overall eight-line form AB aA ab AB. The ‘Prendes i garde’ refrain appears also within the context of the romance Renart le nouvel. Presented at the same pitch level and with only minimal variations in melodic decoration, the refrain is here a stand-alone musical and textual unit that, in the narrative, is sung as an expression of welcome. This refrain is memorably repetitive (see Example .). Musically, and as • •
• • • •
Quotations of refrain texts are distinguished throughout by the use of both italics and inverted commas. Prendes i garde is the final rondeau in the collection attributed to Guillaume d’Amiens in chansonnier a and seems to have been added here as an afterthought. To be accommodated on fol. v, Prendes i garde required the ad hoc addition of an extra staff and, unlike Guillaume’s preceding nine compositions, it is absent from chansonnier a’s medieval table of contents. The rondeau refrain is no. in van den Boogaard . Everist , –. Thomson , –. See the transcription and analysis of the complete rondeau in Stevens , –. The ‘Prendes i garde’ refrains in the copies of Renart in Ha and in Renart C are closely related to each other and to
Polyphony from and for Refrains in Dance-Song Motets
is typical of a refrain, ‘Prendes i garde’ is comprised of a pair of phrases, and each phrase is here made up of two units of equal length. The two phrases open identically, with the same initial melodic unit (labeled i in Example .), which is effectively a recitation on the pitch a that invites continuation or resolution by dipping down to F. This opening recitation establishes the primary tonal area and is, in both phrases, answered by a unit that introduces a secondary tonal area, the contrasting ‘open’ sonority, G. In the refrain’s first phrase, this answering unit (ii in Example .) descends to D, but then rises to cadence on its initial ‘open’ G. By contrast, the answering unit of the refrain’s second phrase (iia) simply descends stepwise from G to a ‘closed’ cadence on D, which serves as the melody’s home or final pitch. Example .: The ‘Prendes i garde’ refrain in Guillaume d’Amiens’s rondeau, chansonnier a, fol. v
i
ii secondary tonal area
primary tonal area
j j & œ œ ‹ 1. Pren - des
recitation on a
j œ
œ
i
gar
-
G
j œ
j œ
de
2. s’on
œ œ œ œj
j j & œ œ ‹ 3. s’on mi
re -
mi
i
G
œ gar
j œ -
de
iia
primary tonal area
recitation on a
D
3
secondary tonal area
j œ
œ
re -
gar
-
j œ de
j œ G
4. di
-
j œ tes
primary tonal area
j œ le
D
Ϫ
moi
Repetitions in the refrain text ‘Prendes i garde | s’on mi regarde || s’on mi regarde | dites le moi’ (‘Be on guard | if someone looks at me || if someone looks at me | tell me’) cut across its two musical phrases, which are bridged by the internal reiteration of ‘s’on mi regarde’. The text is dominated by the ‘-arde’ rhyme, as part of a word-play between ‘i garde’ (‘on guard’) and ‘regarde’ (‘regard’ or ‘gaze’). This initial insistence on ‘-arde’ clearly connects the repeated opening unit of each phrase (i) and indeed the first three tonally more open-ended units of the refrain (i and ii), which lead to the refrain’s final, and closed cadence on D (iia) with its new ‘-oi’ rhyme. This same refrain, as it appears notated a fifth higher within the polyphonic context of the motet S’on me regard/ Prenes i garde/ He mi enfant, exhibits some notable variants from its monophonic transmissions (see Example .). In fact, within the motet itself, two alternative forms of the refrain are presented simultaneously at the outset of its motetus and triplum voices. The motetus shares its four-unit structure with the monophonic version of the refrain and it replicates almost exactly the refrain’s first unit of text and music. The continuation of the refrain, however, varies. The motetus text expunges the repetition of ‘s’on me regarde’, which is here replaced, in line , with a new text (‘trop sui gaillarde’, ‘I am chansonnier a. A third source of the Renart romance, Renart F, whose refrains are poorly notated and often added later (see Haines , ), has an unrelated melody for this refrain text. See the comparative transcription of monophonic versions of the refrain in Thomson , . See also Refrain, a website curated by Anne Ibos-Augé, Mark Everist, and Adam Field, .
Catherine A. Bradley
too daring’), though which maintains the original ‘-arde’ rhyme. Musically, only the endings of the motetus refrain’s second, third, and fourth units (marked in Example .) can be directly related to the monophonic version, and the motetus adjustments to their openings change the refrain’s overall tonal and repetitive structure (variant opening pitches between rondeau and motet versions are circled in Example .). The motetus refrain has a much stronger emphasis on the primary tonal area – here e and a – such that there is no longer a regular alternation between primary (e or a) sonorities, and the secondary, contrasting pitch d. Indeed, it is only the third unit of the motetus refrain that introduces a tonally ‘open’ contrast at its outset and, in so doing, this undermines the relationship between the third unit and the first, the two portions of the refrain that were musically identical in its rondeau and romance transmissions. It is not the third, but rather the second and fourth units that are tonally closer to the refrain opening in the motetus version: these phrases likewise begin on e, and although they do not stay on this pitch – but rather descend a fifth to the final a – they strongly inhabit the primary tonal area. Example .: Comparing rondeau and motet versions of the ‘Prendes i garde’ refrain
Mo 8 triplum opening
œ3 œ œ3 œ j œ œ œ J & ‹ 1. S’on me re - gar - de
Mo 8 motetus opening
œ & J ‹ 1. Pre e
i
œ J
2. s’on
œ œ œ œ3 œ œ œ ‰ J J J J œ
re - gar - de 3. di - tes
ii ending d
œ œ œ œ3œ œ œ œ œ œj œ œ œ J J J J 3
- nes
i gar - de
œ œ œœ œ J J & J J ‹ 1. Pren - des i gar - de e
me
e
2. s’on
3
me
d
œ J d
2. s’on
d œ œ œ œj œ œJ œJ e
3
mi
le moi
i ending e
re - gar - de
iia ending a
œ œJ œ œ œ œ3œ œ œ œ ‰ J J J e
3
re - gar - de 3. trop sui gail - lar - de
ii
i
Rondeau refrain chansonnier a (up a 5th)
œ J
4. di - tes le moi
iia
i
œ œ œ œ J J J
3. s’on mi re - gar - de
œ œ œ œ™ J J J d
a
4. di - tes le moi
The motetus alterations to the monophonic version of the ‘Prendes i garde’ refrain are highly effective: they invariably retain aspects of its melodic identity – and especially key aspects, such as the very opening and the final cadence – but they nonetheless allow the refrain to be successfully adapted to its new polyphonic context. By increasing tonal uniformity of the refrain’s first, second, and fourth units (all of which now begin on e and contain only a, c, and e as rhythmically stressed pitches) these units become interchangeable and combinable, both in their horizontal melodic order and as stacked vertically in polyphony. The potential to interchange refrain units melodically and combine them polyphonically is immediately demonstrated by the triplum’s opening and shorter (three-unit) version of the refrain, which sounds against that in the motetus. The triplum omits the opening ‘Prenes i garde’ exclamation, beginning rather by repeating the line ‘s’on me regarde’, the repetition expunged in the motetus. Musically as well as textually, the triplum starts with the motetus refrain’s second
Polyphony from and for Refrains in Dance-Song Motets
unit, which it then follows with the motetus refrain’s opening melodic unit. As such, that there is an immediate polyphonic voice exchange between the two parts (marked by arrows in Example .). The triplum initially reverses the first two melodic components of the motetus, a swap made feasible by the now shared opening pitch (e) of these two initial refrain units and their emphasis on the primary tonal area. The triplum then omits the motetus refrain’s most heavily altered third unit to cut straight to the ending of the refrain (marked by an arrow in Example .). In terms of polyphonic combinations, therefore, the motetus refrain’s first two units work against each other in simultaneous presentation, as does its third unit in combination with the fourth (though at the expense of a brief initial dissonant second, d against e, at the start of bar ). This polyphonic combination of a refrain melody against itself might seem sufficiently ingenious. But of course, there is an additional combination to be considered in the context of this three-voice motet, namely that with the quoted tenor melody. The complete motet is presented as Example ., where each of the four individual units of the upper-voice refrain are numbered, and the melodic motives that are not directly refrain-derived are shown in small note-heads. The contour of the song tenor He mi enfant and the refrain ‘Prendes i garde’ were evidently matched from the outset, the similarities of the two melodies surely inspiring, as well as making possible, their combination. In its overall form, He mi enfant has the six-part repetitive structure AB A'A' AB (labeled in Example .). On the one hand this could be categorized (as it is by Everist) as a kind of rondeau, which is missing its penultimate couplet. On the other, the internal alterations to the A material of the framing refrain – admittedly involving only their final cadences, but still technically against the rondeau convention of literal repetition – could suggest an AbbA virelai form (where the framing refrains are labeled A and the altered presentations of the refrain’s modified first half are labeled b). Whether rondeau, virelai, or a hybrid of the two, He mi enfant is a refrain song in which the first half of the refrain melody (A) predominates. And it is this part of the song melody that is most similar to, and works best in combination with, ‘Prendes i garde’. Exactly as in ‘Prendes i garde’, the A material of He mi enfant opens with an initial recitation on a single pitch (a, as in the monophonic version of the refrain), and closes with the stepwise descent of fifth.
•
•
Mo gives only the text incipit for this tenor, and so it is impossible to verify whether the refrain text accompanied any of the repetitions of its music. Although repeated pitches at the opening of the tenor were carefully preserved to fit the syllables of text, the scribe of the Mo tenor dispensed with this detail for all subsequent statements of the A material. Rather than breaking down a perfect long into its constitute long-breve parts in the second half of each of the A material’s opening two bars (and as in bars –), the scribe simply notated a perfect long (in bars –, –, and –). There was no harmonic or contrapuntal reason, in the context of the polyphonic motet, to adjust the final cadence of the internal A material (hence A') of the He mi enfant tenor. On both occasions (at the end of bars and ) the tenor cadence is accompanied by the kind of free-composed ‘filler’ material in motetus and triplum that was not refrain derived, and could easily have been tailored to the tenor’s original A material, had this been desired. Everist , .
B
A
& œ ‹
& eJ ‹ 5. pour
& œ™ ‹ HE 5 j & e ‹ 5. bien
e J
-
vous
œ
proi
j œ
‰
‰
choi
EN
e
j œ
de
-
œ3 œ
de
œ J
MI
œ
gar
e3 e e
æ œ œ
dieu
e J
l’a - per
e J
i
- nes
œ
-
œ J
œ & J ‹ 1. Pre
1
œ J
-
œ3 œ œ3 œ œj œ & ‹ 1. S’on me re - gar
2
2
6. car
œ
œ
re - gar
œ J
puis
e J
me
e
lais - sier
e J
tes
œ
re - gar
j œ œ™
m’es - gar
œ3 œ œ3 œ œj œ
6. ne 2
FANT
Ϫ
2. s’on
e J
me
œ J
œ3 œ œ3 œ œj œ
2. s’on
œ J
1
-
-
-
de
œ J
que
e e
3
j œ
de
œ J
de
œ J -
œ J
sui
œ J
tes
Ϫ
œ
moi
œ
œ J
re
-
œ
tar
œ
gard
e 3 æe e
œ
gail - lar
œ J
le
œ J
7. dont mout me
œ J
mon 1
e
Ϫ
3. trop
œ J
3
3. di
4
œ3 œ œ J
de
œ
-
3
e e
œ
de
-
œ J
s’es 3
e™
Ϫ
8. qu’il
œ
4. di
œ J m’ait
-
œ
tes
sui
œ
le
œ J
o
œ J
-
gail
-
Ϊ
soi
œ
par
e
œ
moi
œ
lar
j 3 e e e e
œ œ œ J
e J
4. trop 4 3
œ3 œ
7. ne
œæ œ
-
œ3 œ
‰
Example .: S’on me regarde/ Prenes i garde/ He mi enfant, Mo , fols v–r
œ
-
e
-
‰
‰
de
œ 3œ
de
e3 e
e 3e e
Catherine A. Bradley
��
��
2
3
3
Ϫ
- per - choi
& œ™ ‹
œ œ & J J ‹ 12. �eu d’en
1
- �er
Ϫ
l’ar
œ œ J
-
j j e e 3 & e e e e æ ‹ 12. de m’a - mour plain
& œ™ ‹
j e & e J ‹ �. �ien l’a
-
de
œ J
-
de
œ3 œ
o
e J
e e e e 3e J æ
j œ & œ œ œ œ œ ‹ 8. car tes m’es - gar
de
‰ e J
Ϫ
13. �a - lous
Ϫ
moi
de
tel
3
tel
e J
chi
‰
ci
e J
œ œ e e J J
-
13. mais
Ϫ
1�. et
e J
œ3 œ œ œ J J œ
4
troi
e
Ϫ
e™
tar
œ œ œ J J
�. dont mout me
œ J
1
Ϫ
14. mais
œ J
3
voi
e
Ϫ
voi
e
1�. qu’il
œ J
3
pour
soi
œ
li
œ
d’a
œ
14. qui
e 3 e ej
œ
11. qui
e 3 e ej
o
œ œ J J
m’ait
œ œ J J
�e
�e
e J
mer
œ œ
-
œ œ3 œ
est
e J
œ œ
est
e eJ J
œ œ3 œ
Ϫ
croi
e™
Ϫ
ne
e
croi
e™
11. qu’il
e J a
e3 e
e Ϊ
e 3 e e3 e
e3 e e3 e e3 e
Ϊ
e3 e e3 e e3 e
�oi
re - croi
e J
en
e e e3 e e J J
Polyphony from and for Refrains in Dance-Song Motets
B
A
1
d’en
œ J
-
�er
œ J
l’ar
œ
3
-
dos
j œ
le
& œ ‹
œ
noi
e3 e e
�oi
e
Ϫ
e
& ‹
j æ e & e e e J ‹18. car par ma
& œ™ ‹
œ 3 œ œ3 œ j œ œ & ‹ 15. pour n’ient m’es - gar
2
œ & J ‹ 15. �eu
-
-
j œ
‰
‰
de
œ J
de
œ3 œ
œ
1�. �ai
e J
1�. pour
3
pert
œ J sa
œ J
de
œ J
Ϫ
gar
œ
moi
œ
-
re
e J
n’ient
doi
e
j œ œ
le
e J
m’es - gar
œ œ œ3 œ j œ œ
2
Ϫ
16. bien
œ J
1
16. �a - lous
œ3 œ œ J
4
-
de
‰
j e
de
œ J
œ3 œ
‰
rai
pour
œ J
œ J
Ϫ
2�. ne
e J
œ
d’a
œ
j e
sa
œ J
œ
-
œ
-
3
œ
‰
e J
de
-
œ
de
-
Ϫ
ar
e -
e
rai
œ
mon
œ3 œ œ J
4
e
re - croi
e J
œ
-
-
e
Ϊ
de
e
‰
‰
mi
e3 e
e3 e e 3 e
re - choi
œ J
Ϫ
a
j e ej e
21. �’a
œ
e J
ne
e
18. et
œ œ 3
cou
mer
œ3 œ
j j œ œ œæ œ
plus
e
gar
œ
œ
re - choi
œ J
li
œ J
se - rai
e J
2�. bien pert
œ J
1
Ϫ
17. �’a -
œ3 œ œ J
4
17. mais
œ J
3
Catherine A. Bradley
Polyphony from and for Refrains in Dance-Song Motets
Similarities between ‘Prendes i garde’ and the A material of He mi enfant notwithstanding, certain compromises were necessary to combine the two melodies, and these compromises were apparently made principally in the refrain rather than the tenor. For a start, the ‘Prendes i garde’ refrain was sung up a fifth (now falling from e to a) to sound above, rather than sharing, the a–D ambitus of He mi enfant. It seems too that the ‘open’ G sonority at the start of bar of He mi enfant motivated the most significant alteration to the motetus refrain in its third unit. The combination of ‘Prendes i garde’ with the B material of He mi enfant proved trickier: since this section of He mi enfant opened on D, it was not possible to state initially the ‘Prendes i garde’ refrain, with its insistence on e. However, by introducing a delay of one bar, a statement of the three-unit triplum version of the refrain was possible against the end of the tenor’s B material. In selecting the He mi enfant tenor it is probable that the motet creator recognized that the opening three bars of its A material and the final three bars of its B material were largely interchangeable as a harmonic support. The tenor’s A material opens with an extended repetition of the pitch a that eventually descends a step to G. Within the same unit of musical time, the final three bars of the B material outline, a fourth lower, the same melodic contour (essentially a prolongation of E – though here including an internal descent to C – that falls a step to D), thereby offering a broadly equivalent foundation for their upper-voices. It is the initial order of melodic units established in the triplum’s opening version of the refrain (bars –) that works best in combination with the tenor’s B material and is exploited (in the motetus bars – and in the triplum bars –) on both of its appearances. By immediately descending to a, rather than remaining fixed on e, the statement of the refrain produces a fifth (in the motetus bar and the triplum bar ) against the tenor D. This avoids the dissonant ninth (D/e) that would have been sounded had the order of the first two refrain units been reversed (as in the opening motetus version). The conception of the entire motet S’on me regarde/ Prenes i garde/ He mi enfant apparently lay in the considered manipulation of the melodic building blocks of the ‘Prendes i garde’ refrain such that they could work against each other and against parts of both the A and the B material of the He mi enfant tenor. As noted above, the refrain’s first unit can sound polyphonically against both its second unit (as in bars , and ) and its fourth (as in bar ), and the refrain’s third and fourth units can also sound simultaneously (as in bars and , tolerating a brief initial d/e clash). Melodically too, the refrain’s various elements are open to multiple sequential arrangements. As well as the two melodic possibilities presented simultaneously at the outset of the motetus (units –) and triplum (units , , ), two further successive linear presentations of the refrain elements are exploited: units , , (as in the motetus, bars –) and units , , (as in the motetus, bars –). Even in creating the non-refrain derived ‘filler’ through which to delay by one bar the presentation of the refrain melody over the tenor’s B material (in bars and ), the motet composer crafted a short phrase (marked by dashed boxes) that was also reusable against the start of the tenor’s A material (as in bar ). The carefully planned interoperability of short motives in S’on me regarde/ Prenes i garde/ He mi enfant made possible the motet’s fundamental and economical compositional strategy: that of voice exchange between motetus and triplum.
Catherine A. Bradley
The motetus and triplum of S’on me regarde/ Prenes i garde/ He mi enfant employ a voiceexchange or rondellus technique throughout, and are largely derived from a single melody and text that is passed between them. As demonstrated above, the refrain ‘Prendes i garde’ is used at the outset of the motet to generate both upper voices, which here presented it simultaneously. Subsequently, however, three substantial sections of the music and text of the motetus are later repeated in the triplum (all marked by boxes in Example .). In the first instance, it is the first three units of the refrain – with a new text – that are sung first by the motetus (bars –, over the end of the tenor’s B material) and then by the triplum (bars –, over the start of the tenor’s A material). This overlaps with the beginning of the second and more extensive section of music and text to be exchanged between the upper-voices, first presented in bars – of the motetus and repeated in bars – of the triplum. Overlapping with itself and predominantly freely-composed rather than strictly refrain-derived (although taking up the refrain’s insistence on repeated e breves), this phrase appears in conjunction only with the tenor’s A material with whose repetition it is correlated, such that the two statements of the same upper-voice material occur over exactly the same tenor foundations. Refrain material within this exchanged phrase occurs – as at the motet’s opening – over the start of the tenor’s A material (bars – of the motetus, and bars – of the triplum). This location of the refrain enables a dove-tailing with the final exchange of refrain material between the upper voices, which begins in the motetus (bars –) at the start of the tenor’s final A section, and takes advantage of the same possibility for polyphonic presentation of the ‘Prendes i garde’ refrain melody as was exploited at the motet’s outset. The repetition of this melodic refrain material in the triplum (bars –) is not immediate or overlapping on this occasion: it is postponed, not only to occur at the close of the motet, but also (and as before) to fit against the end of the tenor’s B material. As a consequence of this sequence of exchanges between motetus and triplum, the overall melodic and harmonic content of the initial and closing presentations of the complete tenor refrain (AB) is largely identical. As Everist also emphasized, the roles of the upper voices are, however, swapped, such that what was first presented in the motetus is finally sung in the triplum and vice versa. This compositional matrix was intricately mapped, and – as with all rondellus-type compositions – the result was an economical, and satisfyingly ‘simple’, polyphonic creation. In • •
• •
See the analysis of two Mo fascicle motets that also employ this technique in Bradley , –. The first statement of the tenor’s B material appeared in conjunction with melodic units , , and in the motetus (bars –). In this final statement, the tenor’s B material is combined with units , , and of the refrain in the triplum (bars –), such that the motet as a whole closes with the refrain’s final cadence. This produces the brief initial dissonance of a ninth (D/e) between tenor and triplum voices in bar . This dissonance is ‘corrected’ in Tischler , : (a solution accepted in Everist , and Thomson , ) through an alternative rhythmic realization of the tenor. However, Mo clearly records the same ending as the song’s opening presentation of the B material (save the addition of a plica). Similar dissonance for the sake of the refrain presentation is also tolerated elsewhere in the motet: d/e seconds between the upper-voices (at the start of bar ) or an E/d seventh between tenor and motetus (at the end of bar ). See Everist , . Everist , , considered that the ‘close affinities of much of the musical and poetic material’ in S’on me regard/ Prenes i garde/ He mi enfant might count against the intricacy of the its composition.
Polyphony from and for Refrains in Dance-Song Motets
S’on me regarde/ Prenes i garde/ He mi enfant, various permutations of a short refrain sung above the statement of a song melody generated the music of almost an entire three-voice motet. Poetically too, the texts of the two upper-voices are highly dependent on the refrain and on each other. In addition to the verbatim exchange of texts that accompanies their direct musical exchanges, the triplum (in line ) also takes up the motetus’s addition to the conventional refrain text (‘trop sui gaillarde’). Conversely, the triplum text for the ‘filler’ material at the start of the tenor’s first B section (line , ‘bien l’aperchoi’) is later adopted by the motetus (in line ) when it reuses the same ‘filler’ to open the tenor’s following A section. Both voices confine themselves exclusively to the rhyme sounds of their opening refrain (‘-arde’ and ‘-oi’), and typically also in conjunction with the same line-lengths as in the refrain (five and four syllables, respectively). In addition, presentations of the refrain melody are usually accompanied by permutations of the word ‘garde’ (highlighted in bold: in the motetus line , repeated in the triplum line ; in the motetus lines and , repeated in the triplum lines and ). Not only does S’on me regarde/ Prenes i garde/ He mi enfant usefully complicate the simple binaries of song (monophonic and polyphonic) versus motet, or low versus high styles, but it also invites reflection on compositional processes themselves and their attendant value. I described the creation of S’on me regarde/ Prenes i garde/ He mi enfant as intricate and indeed sophisticated. I would also argue that this motet was likely the outcome, not of some kind of concrete sketch or plan of the kind that is – in a view of music shaped by nineteenth-century aesthetics – often the guarantee of compositional worth, but of a process that was fundamentally informal and performative. The potential to combine He mi enfant and ‘Prendes i garde’ was surely first recognized because of an intimate familiarity with these songs in practice. Furthermore, it seems probable that the adjustments to the quoted refrain and the various ways in which it could be combined with the preexisting song He mi enfant were tested and worked out in performance. Singers tried the refrain against a performance of He mi enfant, figured out how ‘Prendes i garde’ needed to be tweaked to work with its underlying song tenor and against itself, tested orally various combinations and placements of the refrain, and then responded to and imitated each other, exchanging both musical and textual material. The economy of music and text in this three-voice motet, as well as its profound dependence on already well-known song and refrain melodies, strongly suggest that neither its creation nor its subsequent performance(s) would have required any recourse to written records. Arguably, it was a recognition of the ingenuity and value of the solution to a performative and practice-based polyphonic puzzle achieved in S’on me regarde/ Prenes i garde/ He mi enfant that caused it to be notated and preserved in the context of Mo fascicle . To return to a question left open by Everist and to paraphrase Earp’s evaluation of Machaut’s rondeau Cinc, un, trese: S’on me regarde/ Prenes i garde/ He mi enfant ‘is the studied product of a refined and subtle ordering of elements, doubtless requiring many calculations and ad-
•
The exception is in lines – of the triplum where the typical line lengths and rhymes are disrupted, presumably to further the ‘garde’ word-play through the introduction of the noun ‘regard’.
Catherine A. Bradley
justments before the finished product was perfected’. S’on me regarde/ Prenes i garde/ He mi enfant is also – and unlike Cinc, un, trese, but like Machaut’s virelai Dame, a vous – ‘a “tune”’. A polyphonized refrain in a song-form motet: Ci m’i tient/Haro/Omnes As Everist noted, S’on me regarde/ Prenes i garde/ He mi enfant is exceptional in the degree to which it mixes characteristics of song and motet, and also more generally within the context of Mo and the motet repertoire at large. Yet it bears close comparison with another songform motet framed by a motetus refrain that is combined with and stated against itself in the triplum at the outset. Ci m’i tient/Haro/Omnes is uniquely preserved in the fifth fascicle of Mo’s earlier ‘old corpus’. Although this motet adopts as its tenor the plainchant melisma Omnes, its overall form – determined here by the motetus voice – is that of a refrain song (see Example .). The Omnes tenor is stated four times, to align with the four phrases of the motetus’s Abb'A form. This form, categorized by scholars as both a rondeau and a virelai, consists of a framing refrain that encloses two new and related internal phrases. The framing motetus refrain comprises two complementary and tonally equivalent phrases (compare bars – and – of Example .). Each half of the refrain shares the same opening motive (c-b) which is mirrored in its closing cadence (b-c). But while the refrain’s first phrase goes from c, up to f, and back down to c, its second phrase goes from c down to F and back up to c. As in S’on me regarde/ Prenes i garde/ He mi enfant, Ci m’i tient/Haro/Omnes opens with a simultaneous polyphonic presentation of two parts of a motetus refrain text and melody in its upper voices. The tonal consistency and contrary motion of the ‘Haro’ refrain’s two halves allow the triplum simply to present the refrain’s second phrase (with accompanying text) transposed up a fourth (beginning on f rather than c, boxed and marked by an arrow in Example .), at the same time as the motetus sings the refrain’s first phrase. The triplum and motetus then immediately exchange their refrain texts, but the textual exchange lacks an accompanying musical dimension in bars – of the triplum. Here there is no attempt to match the triplum’s ‘Haro’ text with a version of the motetus’s accompanying opening music, presumably because the presentation of this phrase up a fourth would – although harmonically and contrapuntally successful – have pushed the triplum uncomfortably high (up to b') in range. Instead, increasingly varied reiterations of the triplum’s opening transposed version of the second half of the refrain go on to serve as the basis of this and almost every subsequent triplum phrase in the motet (marked by open brackets in Example .).
• • • • •
See Everist , and Earp a, . Everist , and , respectively. On the dating of Mo’s various layers, see Bradley , –. See the summary and critique of the various formal taxonomizations of this piece (which also include its identification as a motet enté) in Everist , –. An opening at-pitch presentation of the refrain’s second half in the triplum would also have been successful, but presumably the creator of the motet wished to avoid too much unison movement between the upper voices, opting instead to distinguish their registral profiles.
Polyphony from and for Refrains in Dance-Song Motets
Example .: Ci m’i tient/ Haro/ Omnes, Mo , fols v–r
œ & ‹ 1. Ci
A
b
b'
œ œ* œ œ J J
m’i tient
li
œ œ æ & œ œJ œ ‹ 1. Ha - ro je n’i j ‰ & œ œ œ ‹ OMNES 5 œ œ œ œ œ J & J ‹ 3. Dou - ce ka - mu œ œœœ J & œ ‹ 3. Dou - ce ka - mu j ‰ & œ œ œ ‹ II 9 œ œ œ œ œ & J æ J ‹ vos - tre sans pra œ œœœ J & œ ‹ pris une a - mo j ‰ & œ œ œ ‹ III
œ* œ* œJ œ
‰ œ
d’a - mer,
maus
2. ha - ro
œ œ œ œ J
‰ œ
puis
du - rer,
Ϫ
œ
‰ œ
œ œ œ œ se
-
se
-
te
œ œ œ œ te
2. ci
j œ œ
4. por
œ
œ œ œ œ
j œ œ
vos es
j œ œ
-
œ œ J
Ϫ
œ
‰
œœ œ œ œ œ æ J
œ J
li
‰
loit
re
-
te,
6. qui
œ
‰ œ
gar
‰
ne m’i
j œ œ
d’a - mer!
maus
es
-
tre mien
œ
-
der
Ϫ
‰ œ
5. est
5. m’a
sous -
œ
œœ œ œ œ œ æ J -
do
œ œ œ œ œJ J
‰ œ
du - rer!
puis
‰
œ œ œæ œj J
tre. 6. Pra - me - tre sans
3 œ œ œ œ œ & J œ œ œ œ œ œ œJ œ œJ ‹ loi - au - ment a - mer me tie[n]g 8. se trop œ œ œ œœ œ ‰ œ j æ & œ œ œ J ‹ 7. Ha - ro je n’i puis du - rer, 8. ci j ‰ & œ œ œ œ ‰ œ œ™ ‹ IV
-
‰
œ œ œJ œ
j œ œ
-
Ϫ
n’i
m’i tient
me
œ œ œ œ
œ œ œ œ J
œ œ œ œj J
œ œ J
‰ œ
13
A
je
4. li cuers, qui san
‰ œ
Ϫ
œ œ œ œ J J
œ œ œj œ
ner
lait
re
‰
Ϫ
œ J ‰
œ J
n’est rien 7. a
-
‰
po - ser
œ
‰
œ J
œ
œ J
œ œ œ œ ‰ J
vos
aim,
ce
me
plaist bien.
m’i
tient
li
maus
d’a - mer!
œ J
j œ
œ œ œ
j œ ‰ œ œ œ œJ ‰
Ϫ
œ ‰
Beyond the context of Ci m’i tient/Haro/Omnes, the refrain ‘Haro, je n’i puis durer, ci m’i tient li maus d’amer!’ is known only from Amors me font languir, a ballette whose text is uniquely recorded in Douce and which returns to this refrain at the end of each of its
Catherine A. Bradley
three stanzas. Since no external sources of the refrain melody survive, it is impossible to assess to what extent that melody might have been manipulated in Ci m’i tient/Haro/Omnes to work against the Omnes tenor and against a transposed version of itself in the triplum. The very successful harmonic and durational correspondence between the statement of the refrain and that of the complete tenor melody may indicate that adjustments were made to the ‘Haro’ refrain. Yet it is worth noting that – unlike in S’on me regarde/ Prenes i garde/ He mi enfant, where both the melody and the rhythm of the song tenor were predetermined – the composer of Ci m’i tient/Haro/Omnes was constrained only by the sequence of pitches in the Omnes melisma, free to group and rhythmicize them as required. And the Omnes melody itself was, like He mi enfant, a good choice as an amenable polyphonic foundation, thanks to its insistence principally on a single pitch (here the final, F) and the alteration of this repeated principal pitch with a counter-sonority a step apart (here G, a step above). It is feasible, then, that the ‘Haro’ refrain was indeed a relatively or an entirely literal melodic and textual quotation in Ci m’i tient/Haro/Omnes, and that the possibility for the (transposed) second half of this refrain to sound against the first, and simultaneously in successful combination with the Omnes tenor, provided the compositional impetus for a three-voice motet. Ci m’i tient/Haro/Omnes has further aspects of the same ‘two voices from one’ procedure as the motetus and triplum of S’on me regarde/ Prenes i garde/ He mi enfant. As emphasized above, the construction of the triplum is highly economical, since it insistently sings throughout a version of its opening transposed refrain quotation. After their initial presentation of exchanged refrain texts, the first-person triplum and motetus share and together declaim an additional line of text (the endearment ‘Douce kamusete’, line , marked in bold in Example .), though they thereafter address their love-object with different words. Yet the opening of Ci m’i tient/Haro/Omnes, and indeed this motet in general, has a higher tolerance for parallel motion and dissonance than S’on me regarde/ Prenes i garde/ He mi enfant. The combined refrain presentation in bars – of Ci m’i tient/Haro/Omnes produces (as discussed further below) an uncharacteristic opening for a motet: motetus and triplum move in parallel fourths at the beginning and end of this phrase, and additionally encompass two rhythmically stressed clashes of a second (c against d, in the second half of bar and at the start of bar , marked by asterisks above the triplum in Example .). Parallel motion between the upper voices continues in the second half of the refrain phrase, with triplum and motetus in fourths throughout bar , and in fifths at the start of bar . The initial polyphonization of the ‘Haro’ refrain resulted in a motet opening that was rather less contrapuntally and harmonically conventional than that of S’on me regarde/ Prenes i garde/ He mi enfant. More generally, however, the creator of Ci m’i tient/Haro/Omnes may have had a taste for dissonance. In the motet’s internal b sections, seconds between triplum •
•
The refrain (no. in van den Boogaard ) appears at the end of each stanza of the Douce ballette (on fol. r) in the slightly variant form ‘Dieus, je n’i pux durer, ceu me font li mals d’ameir!’. See the edition and translation of Amours me font languir in Doss-Quinby, Rosenberg, and Aubrey , –. In fact, the precise number of internal repetitions of F in the Omnes tenor itself was also flexible across polyphonic elaborations. On different established melodic versions of this polyphonic tenor, see Bradley , –.
Polyphony from and for Refrains in Dance-Song Motets
and motets are, it seems, actively cultivated: the triplum twice sounds a second against the beginning and ending of a motetus phrase (marked by arrows in bars and ) with the effect of undermining the motet’s typical F/c cadence. These two cadential dissonances were removed from the published edition of Ci m’i tient/Haro/Omnes by Hans Tischler, who presumed that the triplum should sound in unison with the c in the motetus. Yet they are not entirely out of keeping with the motet’s broader harmonic palette and they may be part of an attempt to thwart the cadential expectations of the listener in the motet’s internal (b) phrases. Here too, the motetus seems deliberately to tease the listener’s formal expectations, twice giving the false impression (at the end of b, in bars –, and in the middle of b', in bar , marked by dashed boxes in Example .) that the refrain melody is about to return, before the phrase moves instead in a different direction. That the upper voices of a three-voice motet should begin in parallel motion is very unusual in the broader thirteenth-century context: only six further motets out of a total of the one-hundred-and-four compositions in the fifth fascicle of Mo open with parallel intervals between motetus and triplum (that is, less than seven percent). Upper-voice parallel movement – and especially that at the interval of a fourth – is, by contrast, common in three-voice polyphonic rondeaux, of which Adam de la Halle’s corpus of sixteen rondeaux in Ha is the principal notated witness. Four of Adam’s rondeaux (that is, twenty-five percent) begin with parallel fourths at the top of the texture. Indeed, in his Hareu li maus d’amer m’ochist the two upper voices simply shadow each other at the interval of a fourth throughout, here with the (notated) middle voice sounding above the triplum (see Example .). The refrain ‘Hareu li maus d’amer m’ochist’ is strikingly similar in its overall effect to the polyphonic presentation of the refrain ‘Haro, je n’i puis durer, ci m’i tient li maus d’amer!’ in Ci m’i tient/ Haro/Omnes. Musically, in addition to their downward upper-voice movement in parallel fourths, both refrains open with a stressed F/c/f sonority. And poetically, the rondeau and motet refrains have related and basically equivalent texts: they start with the exclamation ‘Hareu/Haro’ and describe the ‘pains of love’ (‘maus d’amer’), which kill the first-person narrator (‘m’ochist’) in Adam’s shorter version of refrain, but merely ‘grasp’ (‘m’i tient’) the je of Ci m’i tient/Haro/Omnes. • • • •
•
Tischler , : –. In addition to the seconds in bars and , discussed above, the triplum also sounds an unstressed seventh against the motetus at the end of bar . Four of these motets open with parallel fourths (Mo nos. , , , and ) and two with parallel fifths (nos. and ). There are also two Mo motets whose upper voices begin with movement in unison (nos. and ). These are Hareu li maus d’amer (Ha, no. , discussed in detail below); Dame, or sui (no. ) A jointes mains (no. ); and Tant con je vivrai (no. ). Apart from a brief moment of contrary motion on the second syllable, the upper voices of Fi, mari (no. ) also basically move in parallel fourths throughout. Similarly, for the A material cadence and all of the B material, the upper voices of Bonne amourete (no. ) shadow one another a fourth apart. See the editions in Wilkins . This rondeau is also preserved in CaB (a single surviving leaf from what seems to have been another compilation of Adam’s polyphonic rondeaux, in the same order as in Ha). Its transmission is basically identical here, save the final triplum note of bar , which is b rather than G, thus introducing a brief moment of independence and dissonance between the upper two voices.
Catherine A. Bradley
Example .: Adam de la Halle, refrain of polyphonic rondeau Hareu li maus d’amer m’ochist, Ha, fol. v
& œJ ‹ œ & J ‹ j & œ ‹ Ha
œ œ
-
œ 3œ œ œ œ œ3 œ œ
œ
j œ
reu
li
œ
maus
œæ œ æ
j œ œ J
j œ
d’a -
j œ
n œJ œ
mer
3 j œ œæ œ
œ
œ3 œ œ J
œ
œ
j œ
œ
m’o - chist
In Adam’s polyphonic rondeaux, it seems that two outer-voices were typically added and shaped around a refrain melody, presented in the middle voice. All three voices of the rondeau declaimed a single text, supplied underneath the lowest voice in the original score notation (as in Example .). Hareu li maus d’amer m’ochist is the most pronounced example of a case where added outer voices were entirely dependent on a middle-voice refrain melody throughout. The top voice simply copied it down a fourth, while the lowest voice provided an underlying scalar descent (from F to D) that shadowed the refrain’s basic melodic contour, replicating every rhythmically stressed pitch of the refrain down an octave. The survival of Hareu li maus d’amer m’ochist may be indicative of an established and straightforward practical procedure – singing a refrain up or down a fourth and down an octave – by which three-voice polyphony was produced instantly and ad hoc from a single refrain. The polyphonization of refrains, by transposing and/or combining the different phrases of their melodies against themselves, as seen in the motets Ci m’i tient/Haro/Omnes and S’on me regard/ Prenes i garde/ He mi enfant, seems to be a related technique. In these motets, it is once again a middle-voice refrain itself that – here by combination rather than transposed replication – generates the music and text of its accompanying triplum. Elizabeth Eva Leach has drawn attention to the function of refrains, especially as depicted within the Tournoi de Chauvency, as acts of communal and social singing. Presumably, these short and often quoted musical and textual phrases were not only declaimed in unison but could also (as in Adam’s rondeau Hareu li maus d’amer m’ochist) be clothed in an ‘instant’ three-voice parallel polyphony that framed a fifth within an octave. Moreover, in the context of repeated performance of and familiarity with refrain melodies, it is tempting to imagine that the voice-exchange potential of their typically paired phrases might have revealed itself, and that Ci m’i tient/Haro/ Omnes and S’on me regard/ Prenes i garde/ He mi enfant testify to an additional and parallel oral practice in which parts of refrains and their corresponding texts were combined (at pitch and/or in transposition) to sound in polytextual polyphony.
• •
On the (compositional) relationship between voices in polyphonic rondeaux, see Everist , –. See also Bradley , –. See Leach forthcoming.
Polyphony from and for Refrains in Dance-Song Motets
Marrying motet and (polyphonic) rondeau in Li jalous/Tuit cil/Veritatem A further example brings into focus these aspects of thirteenth-century polyphonic refrain songs, written and unwritten. This is another three-voice French motet recorded uniquely in fascicle of Mo, Li jalous/Tuit cil/Veritatem, but which survives also in a version with Latin contrafactum texts uniquely preserved in Mo fascicle . The French version of the motet has been much discussed because of its use of several Occitanisms in its texts and indeed its motetus refrain, which also makes explicit reference to dancing: ‘Tuit cil qui sunt enamourant | viegnent dancar, li autre non’ (‘All who are in love | may come and dance, the others not’). And an identical external concordance survives for the refrain’s music and text in the narrative poem La Court de paradis, where it is a summons to dance at a ball in paradise. This refrain melody (see Example .) opens both of its phrases (labeled A and B) with the same c-b-c-d motion (marked by boxes). This shared melodic material is, however, prefaced by different anacruses, and whereas the A phrase makes an upward melodic trajectory to f, the B phrase goes down to G and then back up to cadence on c. There are two versions of the B material’s cadence: the first – as initially stated in the motetus – simply leaps from G to c, while the second (provided above the staff in Example ., which closes the motetus and is the version of the refrain recorded in La Court de paradis) fills in this fourth leap with scalar motion. In spite of their shared openings and overall contrary motion, the two halves of ‘Tuit cil’ are not – and here unlike the ‘Haro’ refrain – so compatible in harmonic combination. In bar of the A material, the arrival on f, eventually falling to d, does not work well against the corresponding arrival on G, which rises to c, in bar of the B material (marked by asterisks in Example .). Example .: The ‘Tuit cil qui sunt enamourant’ refrain in Li jalous/ Tuit cil/ Veritatem, Mo , fols v–r
A
& œJ ‹ 1. Tuit
œ œ œ œ J cil
qui sunt
œ J en
œ a
-
œ
œ
œ J
au
-
tre non.
*
B
œ œ œ œ œ œ & æ œ œ œJ J ‹ 2. vie - gnent dan - car li
œ œ œ *œ J
*
œ
mou - rat
œ *œ J
As Elizabeth Aubrey established in her persuasive analysis of Li jalous/Tuit cil/Veritatem, this motet clearly quotes the music and text of the preexisting ‘Tuit cil’ refrain, which generates the overall form and content of the motetus voice (see Example .). Poetically, the motetus is a conventional AB aA ab AB eight-line rondeau, framed by a refrain text and with an internal recapitulation (in line ) of the first half of this refrain text. Musically however, the rondeau form is complicated by the fact that the refrain’s melody is slightly modified in lines and . Moreover, it is actually a modified version of the refrain’s B material that is presented here (although in conjunction with the A material text in line , see bars • • •
See I. Frank and the discussion in Aubrey , –. The refrain is no. in van den Boogaard . See the transcription of this refrain and its concordances at . See the discussion of La Court de paradis in Aubrey , –. Aubrey , –.
Catherine A. Bradley
–) such that the overall form of the motetus is rather AB b'B' ab AB. The modification to the B material is very slight but nonetheless significant: both lines and adopt, not its e-d up-beat, but rather the up-beat c associated with the A material (here expected according to rondeau convention, and present poetically in line ), and with the effect – and as Aubrey has emphasized – of fusing the refrain’s two elements. Example .: Li jalous/ Tuit cil/ Veritatem, Mo , fols v–r (with bars – of the contrafactum Post partum/ Ave regina/ Veritatem, Mo , fols v–r)
œ & J ‹ 1. Li
& œJ ‹ 1. Tuit A
œ œ œ œ* œ œ œ œ œ œ* J J J
ja - lous par
œ œ œ œ J cil
qui sunt
& ‰ œ™ œ ‹ VERITATEM œ J 3. que
œ
5
�
œ œ & J ‹ 3. Par tout
-
‰ œ
doi - vent
es - tre
œ œ œJ œ J
*
tent coine
en
mi
dan - car
li
au - tre non.
le front.
-
ris
-
ti
œ
œ J
œ œ œ œ œ œ œJ J
4. cui -
œœœ œ J
us
hu - at. 4. La
re
œ œ J
j œ œ
œ ‰
B'
� - li
œ œ œ œ J -
œ
-
a
fu
le
qui sunt
en
j œ œ
œ
‰ œ
-
is
œ œ œ œ œ J J
gi - ne
œ
œ œ œ
œ
-
œ ti
com - men - dat. dat
œ œ œ œœœ œ œ J J
com - men - dat. dat 4. Tuit cil
‰
‰
j œ œ ‰ œ™
‰
œ œ œ œ J J
le
-
por
2. vie - gnent
œ œ œ
œ
œ œœœ œ œ J J
œ
2. et
œœœ œœœ
œ œ œ œ œB œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ J æ J J œ J j œ œ
pe - pe
‰
fus - tat
a - mou - rat
en
li - um
œ & œJ œ œ œJ ‹ 3. La re - gi - ne œ
sunt
œ œ J
œ œ œ œ œ J J
b'
& ‹
tout
œ J
a -
œ J
œ
mor - at.
‰ œ™
œ
œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œJ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ J & J J J J J J ‹ 5. Que d’un bas - ton soi - ent fra - pat. 6. Et cha - cie hors com - me lar - ron b a œ œ œ œ œœœ œœ œ œ œ œœœ œ œæ œ œ & œJ œ œ œJ J J æ J J œ J ‹ 5. Que li d’un bas - ton. ja - lous soi - ent fus - tat 6. fors de la dan - ce ton 9
j ‰ & ‰ œ™ œ ‰ œ œ œ II ‹ 13 œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ* J J & J J J ‹ 7. si en dan - ca - de viel - lent en - trar 8. �er B A œ œ œ œ œœœ œ œ & œJ œ œ œJ J J æ ‹ 7. Tuit cil qui sunt en a - mou - rat 8. vie ‰ œ œj œ ‰ & œ ‰ œ ‹ • •
j œ œ
œ œ œ œ œ* *œ *œ œ œ J J le
du pie
gnent
a - vant
com - me
‰ œ™ œ œ ‰ J gar - con.
œ œ œ œœœ œ œ œ œ œ ‰ J J J œ
j œ œ
li
au - tre non.
‰ œ
j œ œ ‰
On the motetus’s classification as a rondeau, see Everist , . The motetus has also been considered to be in virelai form (see, most recently, Peraino , ). Aubrey , –. Aubrey (following I. Frank ) does not take full account of the basic similarity (save their anacruses) between the opening of the A and B phrases of the motetus refrain, such that she overstates the prevalence of the refrain’s A music in bars –.
Polyphony from and for Refrains in Dance-Song Motets
The motetus’s refrain-song form is achieved in conjunction with two statements of the plainchant tenor Veritatem. Veritatem is a serviceable polyphonic foundation, strikingly similar to that provided by the Omnes tenor in Ci m’i tient/Haro. Like Omnes, Veritatem is dominated by its final pitch (also F) and occupies the narrow range of a fifth (D–a). As in Omnes, Veritatem opens with the progression F-G-F, and here too G is the principal counter-tone to the F final throughout. The only significant difference between the two melismas is the number of pitches they contain: Veritatem is twice as long as Omnes. In Ci m’i tient/Haro/ Omnes each statement of the four-bar motetus refrain was accompanied by a single (tennote) tenor statement. In Li jalous/Tuit cil/Veritatem, by contrast, each four-bar motetus refrain or rondeau couplet is structurally aligned with half of the twenty-note tenor melisma. Thus, as in S’on me regarde/ Prenes i garde/He mi enfant (where motetus refrains had to be fitted against both the A and the B material of the tenor song), the creator of Li jalous/Tuit cil/Veritatem had to make the motetus refrain material work against two alternative tenor units: the sequence of pitches in both the first and the second half of the Veritatem melisma. Unlike in S’on me regarde/Prenes i garde/He mi enfant, the combination of plainchant and rondeau melodies in Li jalous/Tuit cil/Veritatem was aided by the fact that the rhythmicization of the plainchant tenor was at the motet creator’s discretion, and furthermore that no strict rhythmic pattern was enforced here (as it was in Ci m’i tient/Haro/Omnes). Nonetheless, and as Aubrey also argued, certain compromises were required to marry the quoted melodies in Li jalous/Tuit cil/Veritatem, and it was evidently the predetermined sequence of tenor pitches that demanded the unconventional appearance of the refrain’s (modified) B material in bars – of the motetus, the rondeau’s second couplet. The refrain’s B cadence allowed motetus and tenor to sound a unison G in bars and , avoiding the dissonant seventh (G/f) that would have been produced by the A material here. At the equivalent juncture in the tenor’s second statement, however, a different accommodation was made. The final presentation of the motetus refrain’s A material was here prioritized and the rhythmicization of the tenor in bars – was adjusted (vis-à-vis bars –: compare these sections of the tenor in dashed boxes in Example .) to accommodate it. A breve rest was inserted at the end of bar and the tenor pitch that it replaced, F, was delayed to sound an octave beneath the motetus on the downbeat of bar , displacing what would have been a dissonant tenor G to the subsequent unstressed breve. One wonders why this tenor rhythmicization in bars – was not also adopted at the same juncture in the first statement of the Veritatem melisma. This could conceivably have supported, in bars –, the motetus’s unaltered A material, thereby facilitating the presentation of a conventional rondeau melody. Perhaps the motet creator wished to create variety in the rondeau form; to introduce alternative musical material in bars – that played on the similarity of the refrain’s two phrases and thus with the listener’s expectations. Decisions • •
Aubrey , . Variety is additionally cultivated the motetus’s b'B' phrases in Li jalous/Tuit cil/Veritatem through the degree of their decoration (compare the second half of bar with the second half of bar ) and in the successive use of both conjunct and disjunct versions of the B cadence (compare bars and ).
Catherine A. Bradley
at this juncture in the two tenor statements may also have been motivated by the triplum, and with a view more generally to the motet’s overall balance between the competing priorities of formal repetition and consonance. Unlike in S’on me regarde/ Prenes i garde/ He mi enfant or Ci m’i tient/Haro/Omnes, the motetus’s refrain material in Li jalous/Tuit cil/Veritatem was not exchanged with the triplum. Instead, the triplum provided an initial polyphonic accompaniment to the opening refrain that simply returned alongside its A and B material throughout the motet. The disturbance to the motetus’s rondeau form in its second (b'B') couplet was matched in the triplum by modified musical material in bars – (also combining the anacrusis of its own A material opening with a decorated version of its B cadence). In bars –, however, with the return of the refrain’s opening text in the motetus but an altered (B') version of its melody that was better suited to the tenor, the triplum nonetheless insisted on the reiteration of its original A material accompaniment. This was at the expense of two stressed ninths against the tenor (at the start of bar and at the end of bar , marked by boxes in Example .). Tellingly – and as Aubrey also observed – the triplum of the Latin contrafactum Post partum/Ave regina/Veritatem (presented above the staff in Example .) offered a more consonant version of this phrase in bars – (substituted by Tischler in his edition of Li jalous/Tuit cil/Veritatem). In Post partum/Ave regina/Veritatem the triplum simply repeated in bars – its new and more suitable accompaniment to the preceding b' statement in bars –, thereby avoiding a cadential ninth against the tenor F in the second half of bar . Nevertheless, even the Latin motet triplum made the same initial nod to the structural importance of the motetus refrain text in bar : here, and in contrast to bar (compare the dashed boxes), the Post partum triplum reiterated at the start of its B' accompaniment the f-f-e incipit associated with the refrain. As in Li jalous/Tuit cil/Veritatem, a ninth with the underlying tenor E – avoided in favor of an octave in bar – was tolerated in bar , in apparent deference to the return of the opening text of the motetus’s rondeau refrain. This tolerance of triplum dissonance in the service of quotation is evident too in the final statement of the refrain in both French and Latin versions of the motet. Compared to its very first appearance, the literal reiteration of the triplum’s opening phrase in bars – introduces – in its new tenor context – two new stressed ninths against the second half of the Veritatem melisma (marked by boxes in Example .: indeed the same two stressed ninths as in the different tenor context of bars and ). But the triplum also introduces, unprovoked, two new seconds against the motetus (at the end of bars and , marked by asterisks) absent from the opening statement of the refrain. The substantial increase of • •
Aubrey , –, Tischler , : . The stressed d/e dissonances in the second half of bar produced by decorative figures that sound seconds against one another in motetus and triplum are already present also in the statement of the refrain’s A material in the second half of bar . The unstressed e/f second at the end of bar is, however, present only in the refrain’s final statement. While the dissonance in bar is found also in Post partum/Ave regina/Veritatem (and is in both motets ‘corrected’ to e in Tischler , : and ), the dissonant triplum decoration is absent from bar of this Latin contrafactum (although it is present in bar ).
Polyphony from and for Refrains in Dance-Song Motets
dissonance in the rondeau’s final couplet seems therefore to have been not just tolerated but (as argued above in the case of Ci m’i tient/Haro/Omnes) cultivated, perhaps used here to draw attention to the final refrain quotation and/or to signal closure. The conception of the triplum itself – which does not appear to be determined by quotation, imitation, or voice exchange – is, however, curious. If the creator of Li jalous/Tuit cil/Veritatem was at liberty to tailor the refrain’s triplum accompaniment to the particular polyphonic context in question, then why not fashion a top voice that could be more straightforwardly accommodated to its various tenor contexts? The motetus’s opening on c was compatible with both of its accompanying tenor pitches: F (as in bars and ) and E (as in bars , , and ). Yet f as the starting pitch for the triplum – rather than c or a/a' – was a problematic choice given the tenor Es (as the substitution of a triplum e in bar confirms). Similarly, the close of the triplum’s A phrase on g works against the motetus (its initial dissonance on f, resolving satisfactorily to d) and against the tenor Gs (in the second half of bars and ), but it is less compatible with the tenor F in bar than, for instance, d or even c would have been. The characteristics of this triplum, therefore, seem indicative of fundamentally different contrapuntal and harmonic priorities than are typical in a motet. Indeed, the motetus and triplum of Li jalous/Tuit cil/Veritatem outline exactly the same (uncharacteristic) opening parallel fourths (c/f-b/e-c/f, over an F in the tenor) as in Ci m’i tient/Haro/Omnes and their initial presentation of the refrain also features three brief, but relatively gratuitous, clashes of a second (marked by asterisks above the triplum in Example .). While the upper voices of Li jalous/Tuit cil/Veritatem move in contrary motion in bar , the triplum largely shadows the direction of the motetus in the second half of the refrain (bars –). In the penultimate and final statements of the B material of the motetus refrain, where the refrain’s final leap of a fourth is filled in with a scalar ascent (bars and ), the motetus and triplum also close in parallel fourths. Although the motetus refrain text is not directly or immediately exchanged with the triplum (as it is in Ci m’i tient/Haro/Omnes and S’on me regarde/ Prenes i garde/ He mi enfant), the upper-voices of Li jalous/Tuit cil/Veritatem share a significant amount of their poetic content (marked in bold in Example .). This ranges from the complete and literal adoption of poetic lines (compare, respectively, triplum line and motetus line ), to paraphrased lines (lines and ), and shared vocabulary (both mention a ‘baston’ or ‘stick’ in lines and , and the triplum takes up in line the motetus reference to dancing in line ). More generally, the triplum of Li jalous/Tuit cil/Veritatem shows a degree of dependence on its motetus that surpasses that in previous examples: it matches the motetus formally throughout, and these two voices not only share the same musical phrase structure, but both present •
Two of Adam’s polyphonic rondeau feature pre-cadential clashes of a second between their upper-voices, comparable to those in Li jalous/Tuit cil/Veritatem and Ci m’i tiens/Haro/Omnes. In Dame, or sui (no. ), the upper-voice d-e approach to an f cadence at the end of the A material sounds against e-d in the middle voice’s approach to c. The F/c cadence of the B material is also prefaced by a brief E/d clash. In A jointes mains (no. ), at the end of the B material, the final upper-voice f-e-f cadence sounds against e-d-c in the middle voice.
Catherine A. Bradley
an entirely regular eight-syllable poetic text, sounding the same end rhymes at the same time (‘-at’ for the A sections of the rondeau poem, ‘-on’ for the B sections). This persistent homogeneity is at odds with the independence typical of triplum and motetus voices in a polytextual motet, and indeed even in other refrain-song motets. It recalls, rather, the musical and poetic dependence of voices in a polyphonic rondeau. In its use of an anacrusis (which is rare, though not – as Aubrey suggested – unique in the motet repertoire) and in its opening perfect fourths, Li jalous/Tuit cil/Veritatem is reminiscent of Adam’s three-voice rondeau Hareu li maus d’amer m’ochist (compare Example . above). Possibly, the two upper-voices of Li jalous/Tuit cil/Veritatem did not merely thematize the polyphonic rondeau idiom, but rather they actually existed already as a polyphonic entity (perhaps as the top voices of a three-voice rondeau) that predated their combination with the Veritatem tenor. That the motet creator attempted to accommodate not only a motetus rondeau but also its associated upper voice would account – both stylistically and in terms of the triplum’s otherwise curious compositional choices – for the unusually high degree of dissonance in the three-voice motet, which was adjusted, tolerated, and/or cultivated to different degrees at different formal junctures within the motet itself as well as between the its two surviving French- and Latin-texted versions. Aubrey draws attention to the ingenuity of the marriage between the motetus refrain and the preexisting tenor in Li jalous/Tuit cil/Veritatem, underlining – as I have done also for the motets discussed above – its ‘intricate structural and thematic counterpoint of text and melody’ and ‘complicated compositional procedure’. If this compositional procedure involved fitting not only one but two upper-voices of a preexisting rondeau against the two halves of the Veritatem tenor the motet would be even more intricate still. I have demonstrated elsewhere that Adam de la Halle’s motet Aucun se sont loe/ A Dieu commant/ Super te involved a polyphonic quotation of his three-voice rondeau refrain A Dieu commant, achieved by the substitution of the tenor melody Super te for the lowest-voice of his rondeau A Dieu commant. Like Veritatem and Omnes, the chant melisma Super te has an F final and is predominantly comprised of the pitches F, G, and a. Adam apparently recognized and exploited the similarity of this chant melody to the foundation of a polyphonic rondeau, taking advantage of the specific interchangeability of Super te with the lowest voice of A Dieu commant. It is plausible, therefore, that the Veritatem tenor could have been selected for similar reasons in Li jalous/Tuit cil/Veritatem. Either Veritatem replicated a particular preexisting rondeau foundation, or it simply offered the kind of underlying step-wise movement and alternation • •
• •
The single exception is line of the triplum, where the expected ‘-at’ rhyme is actually ‘-ar’. Aubrey , . In Mo , motet no. also opens with a (‘Haro!’) refrain that begins on an anacrusis, as does the W refrain-song motet En ce chant/ Roissoles ai/ Domino discussed below. In addition to Hareu li maus d’amer (no. ), Adam’s polyphonic rondeau A jointes mains (no. ) also opens on an anacrusis and with parallel fourths between the upper voices. An anacrusis at the start of the B material is more common in Adam’s polyphonic rondeaux. This occurs in both nos. and , as well as in nos. and . In no. there is an internal anacrusis between the two phrases of the A material (and in nos. and the anacruses are plicated – as in the ‘Tuit cil’ refrain – in more than one voice). Aubrey , . Bradley , –.
Polyphony from and for Refrains in Dance-Song Motets
between two tonal poles (here F and G) that was characteristic of the lowest voices of polyphonic rondeaux in general, and thus well suited to accompany the upper-voice polyphony of the ‘Tuit cil’ refrain. Despite the survival of this refrain-song motet only within Mo, it was evidently popular enough to inspire (unlike any other of the motets discussed here) a Latin and Marian-themed contrafactum. These two extant versions confirm that the motet had a fundamentally flexible musical as well as textual existence, with the potential for surface variety and different preferences regarding the priority of consonance and formal repetitions. Nevertheless, it may have been the basic combinatorial ingenuity of Li jalous/Tuit cil/Veritatem – the realization that the Veritatem plainchant could be sung against a quoted motetus refrain melody, the rondeau-like form it generated, and potentially also its associated triplum accompaniment – that ensured the commitment of this motet to written record. Motets for dancing? The fact that the text of the motetus refrain in Li jalous/Tuit cil/Veritatem is an actual invitation to come and dance, prefaced by an anticipatory anacrusis, invites speculation as to whether this rondeau-like motet could genuinely have functioned as a dance song. It is conceivable that once various refrain, song, or chant combinations had been puzzled out, known polyphonic solutions generated by familiar quotations could easily be realized spontaneously, and potentially as accompaniments to dancing. The incomplete and unique (mid thirteenthcentury) survival in W of another a refrain-song motet, En ce chant/ Roissoles ai roissoles/ Do[mino], to which Christopher Page has also drawn attention, supports such speculation (Example .). This plainchant motet tenor Domino is melodically wider-ranging than Omnes or Veritatem, although it is principally confined to the harmonically interchangeable pitches D, F and a/A). But the motetus Roissoles ai roissoles did not pose much of a problem in terms of its accompaniment, since it is almost throughout a simple and regular alternation of ‘recitation on a’, ‘open cadence on G’. The motetus refrain – prefaced by an anacrusis, as in ‘Tuit cil qui sunt enamourant’ – resembles a street cry, advertizing rissoles. This refrain generates a musically repetitive song which, in length (eight lines), looks like a conventional rondeau, but seems otherwise to be a grafted or enté melody. The two phrases of the refrain (labeled A and B in Example .) were split to open and close the motetus, whose six identical internal phrases simply repeated a modified version of the refrain’s opening (labeled a', though which simultaneously anticipated the B material’s opening F–a leap of a third). Although the ‘Roissoles ai roissoles’ refrain is known only from this motet, the fact that the statement of its B material produces a contextually uncharacteristic seventh against the Domino tenor in the second half of bar (marked by a box in Example .) may confirm its status as a genuine • • • •
As proposed in Aubrey , , the creation of Post partum/Ave regina/Veritatem may have been inspired by the sacred context of the original vernacular refrain in La Court de paradis and its resonances with the motet’s Assumption tenor. Page a, –. See also the discussion of these motet texts in Wolinski , . This was one of the most widespread thirteenth-century motet tenors, which quotes a Benedicamus Domino melody that itself borrows the Assumption responsory melisma Flos filius eius. On the street-cry quality of ‘Roissoles ai’, see Stimming , and Page a, .
Catherine A. Bradley
quotation. The situation narrated in the motetus’s refrain song could also be suggestive of its own context: it is ‘puceles foles’ (‘crazy girls’) singing (and probably also dancing) ‘queroles’ (that is, caroles or round-dances) who offer rissoles to the ‘clers d’escole’, clerks (perhaps teachers) in the (presumably ecclesiastical) schools. Example .: En ce chant/ Roissoles ai/ Domino, W, fol. v
œ œ œ ‰ J
& ‹
1. En
ce
chant
œ œœœ ‰ 2. qe
je
3. faz a - cor - der
chant
j j j & œ œ œ œ œJ œ œ Œ
j œ œ
A
1. Rois - so - les
&
rois - so - les
ai,
j ‰ œ œ œ
a'
2. de
j ‰ œ œ œ
DO[MINO]
œ œ œ œæ œ ‰ J J
du
-
œ
œ œ œj œj œ œ œ æ æ des - cor - der
4. sanz
j œ œ œj œ
res
et
de
j ‰ œ œ
j œ Œ
-
mo
les
j œ œ
œ
5 j j j j j j j & œJ œJ œ œ œJ œ ‰ œ æœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œj œj œj œj œj œ œ œ œ œ ‹ 5. ce nou - vel des - chant 6. ain - si m’en vois 7. a - lons a la dan - ce 8. a - lons i car g’i vois. a' a' j j j j j j j œ œ œj œ & œ œ œ Œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ Œ
3. fai - tes
& ‰ œ & ‹ a' & œj 5. qui
& ‰
-
sont a biaus mo
j œ œ ‰ œ
les
4. por ces
‰
j œ œ
d’e - sco - le
biaus clers
‰
œ
j œ œ
œ
j œ œ
6. a
ces
pu - ce - les
‰
œ
j œ œ
j œ œ
œ
9
œ
j œ œ
di - ent
œ
II
j œ
j œ Œ
œ
a'
pa - ro - les
les
j œ œ
‰
j œ œ
œ
j œ
j œ
‰
œ
j œ Œ
fo - les
œ
j œ œ
13
& ‹ a' & œj œ 7. qui
& ‰
•
j œ œ
chan - tant as
œ
j œ œ
j œ œ
j œ Œ
que - ro - les
‰
œ
j œ œ
j œ œ
B
j œ œ
8. rois - so - les
‰
œ
ai,
j œ œ
j œ œ œ œ œ œ
‰
‰
‰
rois - so
œ
-
les!
j œ œ
The only comparable dissonance between motetus and tenor is at the outset of bars and , resulting from the single stressed tenor G at the start of a motetus phrase.
Polyphony from and for Refrains in Dance-Song Motets
For a clerk well versed in plainchant it would not have taken much to realize that the repetitive eight-line song generated from the ‘Roissoles ai roissoles’ refrain (with its relentless a-G alternation and final descent from a to D) could easily be accommodated to two statements of the very well-known Domino melisma (with its melodic ascent from D to a, then down to A, and back to D). The triplum of En ce chant/ Roissoles ai/ Domino also underlines the potential for a danced and indeed ad hoc polyphonic performance. This triplum narrates its own creation: ‘In this song | that I sing | make accord | without discord | this new discant | thus I send out’. The triplum’s song concludes with a refrain (again, outlining an a to D descent, and probably a refrain quotation given the atypical dissonance – marked by a box – with the motetus in bar ) that is an invitation to dance: ‘let’s go to the dance | let’s go, because I’m going there’. The state in which this triplum is preserved in its only extant source confirms its spontaneity. The voice simply breaks off after providing music and text for only the first half of the motetus song and the first statement of the Domino tenor. What happened in the second half of the motet? Perhaps the triplum melody, and indeed its text, was simply repeated, like its tenor and motetus foundation. Alternatively, the polyphony could conceivably have continued in only two parts, maybe because the singer(s) of the triplum did indeed go off to dance, such that they ceased to sing or chose instead to join in with the simpler and more repetitive motetus. In conclusion, the scenario depicted in this motet in particular, as well as the circumstances of its incomplete survival, lend credence to the hypothesis that it was not only songs in lower-register or popular genres that were used for dancing in the thirteenth century. This chapter has shown how stereotypical elements of ‘high’ and ‘low’ styles could be married and blended in motets that combined the convention of tenor quotations with a refrain-song upper voice or voices. The motetus and triplum voices of such refrain-song motets were still polytextual, but more textually and musically dependent on each other than was usual for a motet, and they employed voice-exchange techniques or harmonic and contrapuntal idioms reminiscent of rondelli and polyphonic rondeaux. Arguably, the absorption or evocation of lower-register or informal polyphonic forms, stylistic idioms, and indeed performative creative practices within the context of these motets did not, somehow, downgrade their status as a sophisticated genre. Rather, the integration of refrain-song forms and idioms was central to the compositional craft and sophistication of the motets in question, which are often defined by a simple polyphonic solution to a riddle of melodic combinations. The ‘simplicity’ of the polyphonic solution to fit together well-known melodies made the mo •
•
The only comparable dissonance between triplum and motetus is created by the triplum b in second half of bar (which Page a, , tentatively suggests should be c). It is possible that the triplum b was made to concord with what should – according to the chant quotation – have been the tenor pitch E, but which is actually given as F in both statements of the Domino melisma. Alternatively, the triplum could have been making a joke by contrasting its text (‘faz accorder’) with the resulting lack of ‘accordance’ or consonance produced by its music. The triplum refrain (no. in van den Boogaard ) has a (partial) text-only concordance (‘Alons a la donnce’) in the sacred Livre d’amouretes, which contains textual refrain insertions without any musical notation. See . This is the solution offered in Tischler , : –.
Catherine A. Bradley
tet not less, but more, ingenious, as well as more practical, memorable, and replicable. The hybrid polyphonic compositions analyzed here probably owe their survival to connections with the motet, a genre that – unlike refrain songs – had an established notated manuscript tradition. This chapter has uncovered various compositional techniques involved in putting together refrain-song motets, arguing that we might profitably extrapolate from these scarce and unusual extant examples the kinds of informal and now lost creative practices by which song forms and polyphonic accompaniments were once created from and for refrain melodies, perhaps in the service of dancing.
. A L V/G Richard Dudas
With a swift and steady turn of her wheel, Fortune, herself, seems to have been responsible for crossing Lawrence Earp’s and my paths in life, following my serendipitous discovery in early of an early fourteenth-century musical manuscript fragment preserved in Pn containing significant portions of four anonymous early ars nova motets. As providence would have it, I did not remain in Fortune’s capricious hands for too long; soon after my discovery of this fragment, Margaret Bent was instrumental in putting Larry and myself in touch and so we began a lengthy email correspondence focusing on uncovering some of this new source’s mysteries. Our continued email exchange has been both invigorating and eye-opening (and indeed also ‘ear-opening’!) for me – a veritable musical adventure from my perspective. In our correspondence, we have discussed not only the four incomplete motets in Pn , but also a variety of tangential subjects related to them, including a discussion of the motet Vos quid admiramini/ Gratissima virginis species/ Gaude gloriosa, the subject of this chapter. It was via these many and varied email discussions about this and other compositions that I became aware of just how extremely tight the links between text, music, and concept are in the ars nova repertory. Thus, it is in a venturesome spirit of discovering those connections that this present essay is being written in Larry’s honor. One of the four fragmentary motets in Pn , preserved on fol. r of that volume, is an anonymous Marian motet which appears to have been a precursor to – as well as an apparent model for – both Vos/Gratissima, attributed to Philippe de Vitry, and Quant vraie Amour/ O series summe rata/ Super omnes speciosa (M), by all accounts one of Guillaume de Machaut’s earlier motets. All three of these motets share a common chant excerpt taken from the Marian antiphon Ave, regina celorum in the color of their tenor voice. The earlier anonymous motet (the beginning of whose upper-voice parts, along with their texts, •
• •
•
• •
Some of what we unearthed was presented at an All Souls Seminar in Medieval and Renaissance Music on October . A more thorough discussion of this new source will appear in a forthcoming publication coauthored by myself and Earp. I thank Margaret Bent for eliciting my observations on this motet, and encouraging me to refine and publish them. Daniel Leech-Wilkinson’s analysis of Vos/Gratissima in Leech-Wilkinson , : – discusses many details of the structural links between its text and music. He additionally acknowledges Heinrich Besseler and Georg Reichert for their analytical contributions in examining the close relationship between textual and musical form in the fourteenth century motet corpus; see Besseler and Reichert . This motet, together with the motet Cum statua/ Hugo, was attributed to Vitry by John of Tewkesbury in his Quatuor principalia of , making it one of the few motets attributed to Vitry by name in fourteenth-century sources. See Oxford, Bodleian Library, Digby , fol. r. For an English translation and critical commentary of the Quatuor principalia see Aluas . See Boogaart , , and Boogaart a, . Clark , , and Clark c, . There is an additional motet, Pura, placens, pulcra, pia/ Parfundement plure Absolon, preserved in Ob , whose unlabeled tenor on Super omnes speciosa – a concordance identified by Michael Cuthbert – uses a nearly identical chant excerpt to those mentioned here. Although its tenor was likely borrowed, with some small modifications, from the relevant section of the Vos/Gratissima tenor, rather than directly from the chant itself, it does not appear to have a direct musical connection to the anonymous motet in Pn , as the others do.
Another Look at Vos/Gratissima
is sadly missing) and the Machaut motet share an identical tenor color which spans the pitches corresponding to the line Super omnes speciosa of this antiphon, though the color is rhythmicized differently in each of these motets. Vos/Gratissima uses a larger excerpt from the antiphon, starting with the previous line, Gaude gloriosa, and continuing to encompass the entirety of the subsequent line used by the other two motets. The part of the tenor color common to all three motets is identical in its pitch content, though the larger chant excerpt used in Vos/Gratissima is transposed down a fifth from the natural hexachord on c to the soft hexachord on F in its entirety. Vos/Gratissima, the entirety of which is presented in score format in Example ., is a four-voice motet having an overall formal structure which is bipartite – something not uncommon in the ars nova motet repertory, and an aspect of the composition which is perhaps most immediately apparent when looking at the melodic profile of the motet’s lower voices in one of its fourteenth-century sources, where these voices are compact. The musical material of the tenor-contratenor pair is comprised of two statements of their respective colores, albeit with each color divided into rhythmic taleae of different lengths. This twofold formal structure is not just a feature of the lower voice pair: it permeates the music and text of the motet on multiple levels. The bipartite formal structure actually extends to the very core of the motet: the chant excerpt chosen for the tenor. This, as Egidius de Murino would likely instruct us, is our starting point for taking another look at Vos/Gratissima. The chant excerpt used for the tenor color of the motet encompasses the melody for two consecutive rhyming poetic lines from the Marian antiphon Ave, regina celorum, whose text itself – shown in Table . in a version prior to the Council of Trent common to multiple French sources from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries – is composed of four rhyming couplets with lines of unequal syllabic length (with the two excerpted lines marked in bold).
•
•
•
•
It should be noted that the tenor pitches common to all three motets have identical positions on the staff; the tenor of Vos/Gratissima, as notated in its various extant sources, differs only in a change of C-clef – from C to C – along with the addition of a fa-sign on B. The most easily accessible source in which the tenor and contratenor voices of Vos/Gratissima are clearly legible is DRc , digital images of which can be accessed on DIAMM. The motet appears on fols v–r of this source, with the lower voices occupying the bottom two staves of fol. v. The motet also survives complete on fols v–r of Iv, and largely complete (though not entirely legible) on fol. v of CaB. Three additional sources transmit the motet incompletely: fol. r of Aachen (motetus and lower-voices); fol. bisv of Br (triplum and beginning of motetus); and fol. v of Esc (incomplete tenor as marginalia). The motet is also recorded in the index of Trém, where it originally occupied the now lost fols v–r. Though the extant sources are largely concordant, Example . (my transcription) is based primarily on a reading of DRc with the following emendations: at breve , c in motetus follows Iv; at , b of first semibreve in motetus follows Iv, Br , and Aachen; at , triplum rhythm follows that in both Iv and Br ; at , awkward e of first semibreve in motetus editorially adjusted to d; at –, triplum follows Iv; at , g of second semibreve in triplum follows Iv and CaB. Egidius de Murino’s oft-cited fourteenth-century treatise Modo componendi tenores motetorum appears alongside an English translation in Leech-Wilkinson , : – and Zayaruznaya b, –. Margaret Bent has recently proposed that this treatise should revert to anonymous status, since its attribution in extant sources has been cast into doubt; see Bent forthcoming, chap. .
Richard Dudas
Table .: Ave, regina celorum, text and translation
Text
Translation
Ave, regina celorum, Ave, domina angelorum: Salve, radix sancta Ex qua mundo lux est orta:
a a b b
Hail, queen of heaven; Hail, lady of angels; Hail, holy root From which the world’s light has arisen.
Gaude, gloriosa, Super omnes speciosa, Vale, valde decora, Et pro nobis semper Christum exora.
c c d d
Rejoice, glorious one, Beautiful above all; Fare thee well, most beautiful one And pray to Christ for us always.
The modern text of this antiphon, often cited when this motet is discussed, has a more regular syllabic structure (largely octosyllabic) and, accordingly, includes additional words to fill out the shorter poetic lines (as well as the deletion of the word semper to shorten the longer final line). One of these later insertions is the word virgo between Gaude and gloriosa. Although Alice V. Clark points out that there is quite a bit of local variation in the melody of this particular chant, this does not seem to be the case where the older, original version of its text is concerned. Although the texts of the various sources which Clark has located for Ave, regina celorum do contain a small degree of word substitution, namely the use of ave or salve in lieu of gaude in some sources, none of the numerous versions in her comprehensive chant comparisons for this motet’s tenor includes the word virgo in the fifth line of the antiphon, and an inspection of the entire antiphon in those sources which are available online or in print reveals that all share the same irregular metrical structure (provided in Table .). Even though no exact musical match for the tenor chant excerpt as used in Vos/Gratissima has been located to date (the same naturally goes for the two motets on the segment Super omnes speciosa), the chant source from which it was taken doubtless also had the shorter six-syllable first line common to contemporaneous French sources, something which is corroborated by the tenor incipit for the chant as transmitted in Iv and Aachen (the only extant sources to include it): Gaude gloriosa (not Gaude virgo gloriosa). This is an important detail. The text of the chant excerpt chosen for the tenor therefore is comprised of one line of six syllables followed by one line of eight syllables, yielding a proportion of : between its two halves. The number of pitches to which the text of each of the excerpted lines is set •
• • •
A few French sources from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries share the exact text presented here: BnF lat. (antiphoner for the use of Saint-Maur-des-Fossés, Île-de-France, early twelfth century), BnF n.a.lat. (antiphoner for the use of the church of Sens, early thirteenth century), and Solesmes, Bibliothèque de l’abbaye Saint-Pierre, (breviary for the use of Cluny, fourteenth century). The English translation is mine. Clark , . Clark , , , and an expanded version in Clark c, . I am using the word ‘proportion’ here in terms of its general dictionary definition: the relationship between two things in terms of some shared parameter such as length, number, or size. This is largely interchangeable with the word ‘ratio’. Note that in mathematics the term ‘proportion’ has a different, more specific, meaning; it is defined as an expression which balances two equivalent ratios, such as ‘: = :’, more commonly written with both sides of the equation expressed as fractions: ‘⁶∕₈ = ³⁄₄ ’.
F
Gra
-
cra
V
F
- lans
F
lux,
F F
61
III
F
- trum
F
pul
vos
F F
-
tis
F F
F
Vos, quid ad
-
-
-
F
si
-
e, |
-
-
la, |
ma
F
-
F
a
-
37
mo
-
ci
40
F F
-
ris
spi
F F F F F F
a - qui - la, |
Vos
-
-
F F
67
F F
in
ti
70
F
ri
-
tum |
F F F
co - lu - bres gra - di - en - tes; |
-
43
Quam
Me
-
73
Ne
-
-
rat
car
F
-
F
sta su - per
cor - dis
sci
F F F
-
en - tem
-
76
pe
F
-
IV
F
e
F
VI
F
cto - ris
-
ga dul - cis
e - the - ra |
F
pla
F F
F
ves - trum al - te - ra, |
46
II
F
nis mun - di
F
F
I
i
co
Tur -pis
-
16
Dig - na - ti fu - e - ri - mus |
-
F F F F
F
F F
de
F
F
li - gen - de |
vir - tu - o - sa; |
ma |
F F F
pe - re
es |
F F F
e
13
o -
-
I - sta ve - lox
F
Ac
-
F F
F F
spe
Hu - mi - lis ma - ne - ri - e |
sti
F
Pre ce - te - ris
10
F
vir - gi - ni |
F F F
vir - gi - nis
7
Vir - gi - nes, si
F
64
ga
F
F
nu - bi
F
pla
-
spe - ci
34
F
ra - mi - ni, |
mi
4
C1, I Gaude gloriosa, super omnes speciosa
31
T.
CT.
Mo.
Tr.
-
xi
-
ma, |
F
F
52
F
Gra
F F F F
Val - le
lan
F
-
-
tis
-
-
si
-
-
-
me
F F F
o
li - gen
-
I
-
sa. |
-
-
si
F F F
F sta vir - go
88
F
stil
F
-
-
-
a|
mi
li
F
F
re - gi
I - sta
F
58
F F
cen
I - sta
de. |
attr. Philippe de Vitry
F
28
ex
di
F F gue tis e - gen - tes. |
85
F
tra
F F
-
tes
F
55
que
F F F
F F F
82
In
de
F F
-
-
val
25
- quam
Nec - non vir - tu
F
F F F F F
as - pe - ra |
mi - se - ra |
Au - su ni - mis
tum. |
Us
F F F F F
Reg - nat, vos in
79
49
es |
F
si
F
F
-
-
F
ci
Tan
22
F F
Nu - be - re, dum nu - psi - mus |
19
Vos quid admiramini / Gratissima virginis species / Gaude gloriosa
Example .: Vos/Gratissima, complete score
Another Look at Vos/Gratissima
vii
F
la
145
v
F
o
127
iii
F
-
-
-
-
-
bi
-
F
a, |
F
F
lo |
F
F
re |
F
F
re |
F
cu
- ple - cte
109
C2, i
F
vul - ne
91
no
la
Il - lam non vi - de
148
130
Qui - a tem - pus
112
a - ma
Nos qui cun - cta
Dul - cis est
94
-
-
-
-
bi
bi
vi
si
-
-
-
-
-
-
a
gnam
pre
pe
F F F
spon
-
-
-
e - le
ri
F F F
sa - que
115
97
Di
-
F
Me
Quo
F F F
tis |
F
F
F
Et
tur |
F
F F
A
vos
re
F
Glo - ri
-
-
-
F
o
F F F
-
F F
pto
ce
-
gi
-
pi
-
fi
-
se - qui
gen
F F F
am quam cu - pi - tis. |
per
-
F F
151
F
os
F F
mors
133
F F
strin
Et
-
mus |
F
Pe
F F F
a|
F
-
-
-
-
118
Huic
vi
F
e
jun -
154
viii
ca
F F
at
ut
F
F
-
ge
ÿ
-
-
F
ro
F
a
F
ser - vi
me
sum,
pro
-
pro
te,
cum
ro - sam
iv
F
136
Et
pe - ctus
Vos
ri
F
tur. |
F
do
e - go
ii
F
Rex
mun - dum
100
mus |
F
sti
F
a. |
F
pre
121
di
F
pe
-
ra
o - scu - lo |
-
O
-
a.
F F
te!
F
157
Ac
F
F F
in - spi
F
Quod
F F
-
-
na,
-
ra
re - gum,
rex
vo - ca - te, |
139
O
Sur
F
re - gi
F F
Quid
F
spi - na. |
hanc
u - be - re. |
-
re - gi - na. |
hanc
le - de - re. |
hec
103
-
ta
-
-
te
-
-
-
-
xe
F
lum
F F
i
am
F F F
fe
re
ver
-
F
bum
F
in
F F F
ne - cle
F
142
F F
cu
si
o
vos
F
124
um
F F F
gi
tu
tan
106
-
-
-
ri
gi
ri
-
-
-
tis, |
F
tur, |
-
F
F
mus? |
Richard Dudas
Another Look at Vos/Gratissima
also differs: the first line, composed of two words, is set to twelve pitches, the second, composed of three words, to eighteen pitches, embracing a proportion of :. These are shown in Example ., which presents the relevant section of the chant in a hypothetical exact match for the color of this motet (pitched in the natural hexachord on c, as are the majority of the contemporaneous sources for this antiphon). Taken together, the two lines of the chosen chant excerpt encompass two of the most basic proportions in music – corresponding to the ratios that define the intervals of a perfect fourth (:) and a perfect fifth (:). Furthermore, both of these proportions include a perfect component (one that is divisible by three) juxtaposed against an imperfect component (which is divisible by only by two). These numerical relationships inherent in the chant excerpt chosen for the motet certainly cannot have gone unnoticed by the composer. Example .: Hypothetical source for the Gaude gloriosa chant excerpt, modeled on the pitches of the tenor color of Vos/Gratissima, showing its irregular bipartite structure and proportions 2:3 proportion 3 words, 18 pitches
2 words, 12 pitches
Gau - de
glo
-
ri
-
o
-
sa
Su - per
6 syllables
om - nes
spe - ci
-
o
-
sa
8 syllables 3:4 proportion
Looking at the chant excerpt in terms of its melodic contour, the first of the two excerpted lines ascends from c to g and back, spanning the interval of a perfect fifth – a : ratio in terms of their positions in the harmonic series. The second line descends from c to G and back and thereafter ascends from c to f and back, spanning a perfect fourth – a : ratio – in each direction. Note that the intervals of a fifth and a fourth, embodied in the two halves of the chant excerpt, are inversions of each other. Furthermore, the entire second line spans a minor seventh from G to f – a : ratio. The inversion of this, a Pythagorean major second – a : ratio – is the difference between the fourth and the fifth. These proportions and the triple/duple dichotomy embedded in the two lines of the selected chant excerpt permeate the form and verse structure of the motet’s upper-voice texts, as well as the general structure of its music on a larger formal level. For example, there is a direct relationship between the six- and eight-syllable structure of the two parts of the chant excerpt and the number of poetic lines of which the stanzas in each of the two parts of the upper-voice texts are composed (the motetus text comprises one stanza of six lines followed by one stanza of eight lines, whereas the triplum text consists of three stanzas of six lines followed by two stanzas of eight). These parallels, which we will explore in more detail, certainly cannot be chalked up to coincidence. •
•
They are inversions of each other not just musically-speaking (the interval of a fourth superimposed upon the interval of a fifth yields an octave), but also mathematically in terms of their ratios: a ³⁄₂ ratio inverted is ²⁄₃ , which, when multiplied by the ²⁄₁ octave ratio becomes ⁴⁄₃. One additional proportion can be located in the chant excerpt: the entire span of the chant melody, ranging from G to g, represents the : proportion of the octave.
Richard Dudas
I would thus like to put forward the idea that the extended chant excerpt used in Vos/ Gratissima may have been chosen by Vitry not simply out of a desire to put his own compositional stamp upon a tenor color which he otherwise borrowed from the earlier motet in Pn (as opposed to appropriating it verbatim as Machaut did), nor as a means of attempting to conceal his borrowing – though these certainly may have been secondary considerations – but rather primarily because the rhyming pair of lines from the antiphon, with their unequal syllable counts and melodic lengths, suggested an asymmetrical bipartite form, possibly fitting into a preexisting compositional decision to use such a form for the motet. The syllabic structure and formal proportions of the two lines, once chosen, could then serve as a kernel of inspiration for the formal details of various textual and musical aspects of the motet as a whole, with the six syllables of the chant excerpt’s first line suggesting a ‘perfect’ or triple structure for the motet’s first part, and the eight syllables of its second line similarly suggesting an ‘imperfect’ or duple structure for its second part. Indeed, the thirty pitches of the color are divided into six taleae in the first part of the motet and into eight taleae in the second, though the eighth talea is curtailed since thirty is not evenly divisible by eight. It is worth noting that even though the first part of the motet is largely structured around perfect numbers and divisions and its second part imperfect ones, neither part is exclusively perfect nor imperfect, since both parts of the motet mix perfect and imperfect to varying degrees. Even the two prominent numbers emanating from the chant excerpt, six and eight, are themselves both a combination of perfect and imperfect, since six is equal to three times two, and eight is equal to two to the power of three. Vitry is often deliberately ambiguous in his mixing perfect and imperfect throughout this motet – perhaps one of the reasons that this composition is particularly rich where analytical viewpoints are concerned. The formal structure of the motetus text (presented in Table .), as seen from the perspective of the chosen chant excerpt – the radix sancta (to borrow a term from the antiphon) – is a direct expansion of the : proportion of the chant excerpt’s text. The two lines of six and eight syllables of the chant excerpt are paralleled in the motetus text’s two stanzas of six and eight decasyllabic lines, with the beginning of each stanza plainly set off with a superlative form of the word gratus (pleasing, gracious): the inflected adjective Gratissima for the first stanza, and the adverb Gratissime for the second. The two stanzas of six and eight lines are structured in groups of three and four rhyming couplets, respectively, echoing the couplet • •
•
•
For a discussion of Machaut’s apparent disguising of tenors which were borrowed from preexisting motets, on the few occasions when he does this, see Clark c, . The shortened final talea, having half the number of pitches and two-thirds the length in breves as the other seven taleae, and seemingly a consequence of the uneven division of the thirty notes of the color by eight, might possibly have been a catalyst that helped to provide inspiration for the final line of the triplum, and its indication to hurry: ‘Vos, eÿa properate!’ Texts and translations for Tables . and . by David Howlett, as prepared for the CD recording by the Orlando Consort, Philippe de Vitry and the Ars Nova; see Howlett , . A lightly modified translation of the motetus text has been published in Desmond a, . See also Dronke , – for an alternate translation of both upper-voice texts with critical commentary. Gratissima is the superlative feminine vocative form; the ‘most gracious figure of a virgin’ being addressed here is the ‘you’ subject of the verb plagasti in the third line.
Another Look at Vos/Gratissima
based rhyme scheme of the antiphon from which the chant excerpt was taken. Thus, there is a direct formal parallel between the syllable-to-line relationship of the excerpted chant text, and line-to-verse relationship of the motetus text, something which can be seen clearly in the motetus text structure presented in Table .. Overall, the proportions of the two parts of the motetus text echo the : proportion central to the chant excerpt on three larger formal levels simultaneously: its two stanzas of six and eight lines, composed of three and four couplets, contain and syllables, respectively. Its bipartite structure, like that of the chant excerpt, therefore has a nominally perfect first part and a nominally imperfect second part. Table .: Gratissima virginis species, text and translation
Text
Translation
Gratissima virginis species quam decorat carnis mundicies usque centrum plagasti intima mei cordis plaga dulcissima, intra stillans amoris spiritum nescientem pectoris exitum.
a a b b c c
Most gracious figure of a virgin, whom beauty of flesh adorns, you have wounded to the center the inmost parts of my heart with a very sweet wound, pouring within a spirit of love that knows no exit from my breast.
Gratissime simili vulnere peperisti mundum me ledere. O regina, tuum amplectere astringendo pectus cum ubere. O rex regum, oculum oculo et os ori junge pro osculo ac inspira verbum in labia, quo recepto fiat caro dia.
d d d d e e f f
Most graciously you have brought forth a pure one to injure me with a similar wound. O queen, embrace your own one, binding bosom with breast. O king of kings, join eye to eye and mouth to mouth for a kiss, and breathe the word on my lips, which, once received, may make the flesh divine.
Just as the form of the motetus text can be seen as an expansion of that of the chant excerpt, the form of the triplum text (see Table .) can also be seen as an expansion of that of the motetus. This elaboration of form is achieved by tripling the number of stanzas in the motetus text’s first (‘perfect’) part, and doubling those of its second (‘imperfect’) part, resulting in three stanzas of six lines followed by two stanzas of eight lines. This effectively combines the chant source’s : proportion with its : proportion. The resulting eighteen and sixteen lines represent a : proportion – a ratio which, as mentioned, is also obliquely present in the intervallic span of the pitches in the second verse of the chant excerpt. This is elucidated by an overview of the triplum text structure, shown in Table .. •
•
•
Peter Dronke posited that the asymmetrical structure may have been due to a couplet having been excised from the motetus text for reasons of musical balance and structure. Dronke , . This possibility now seems somewhat remote in view of the marked structural parallels between chant excerpt and motetus text outlined here. The reversal of the : proportion in this instance was probably done to combine perfect with perfect in the first part and imperfect with imperfect in the second. If the proportion had not been reversed from : to : it would have created two verses of six lines and three verses of eight, which would have resulted in a much less interesting : proportion for the formal structure of the triplum text. Leech-Wilkinson notes that the combination of heptasyllabic and octosyllabic verse creates a ‘clear but unusual’ poetic structure. Leech-Wilkinson , : . Similarly to the way the word Gratissima/e was used in the motetus text to clearly delineate its two stanzas, the pairs of rhyming eight-syllable lines seem to have been used as a structural device to delimit the formal structure of the triplum text in an unambiguous manner.
Richard Dudas
Table .: Vos quid admiramini, text and translation
Text
Translation
Vos quid admiramini, virgines, si virgini pre ceteris eligende dignati fuerimus nubere, dum nupsimus tanquam valde diligende.
a a b c c b
You virgins, why are you astonished if in preference to the others we have deigned to wed the chosen virgin, since we have wed, so specially to be loved.
Ista pulcra specie, humilis manerie ac opere virtuosa; turpis vestrum altera, ausu nimis aspera necnon virtutes exosa.
d d e f f e
She beautiful in appearance, humble in manner, and virtuous in work; the other of you filthy, too harsh in daring, and also hating virtues.
Ista lux, vos nubila, ista velox aquila, vos colubres gradientes; ista super ethera regnat, vos in misera valle languetis egentes.
g g h f f h
She light, you cloudy; she a swift eagle, you slithering snakes; she reigns above the heavens, you languish needy in the miserable vale.
Ista virgo regia dulcis est amasia mea sponsaque pia. Rex ego sum, hec regina. Quid tanta referimus? Nos qui cuncta novimus dignam preelegimus et ut rosam hanc pre spina.
i i i j c c c j
She a royal virgin, is a sweet mistress and my holy spouse. I am the king, she the queen. Why do we say such things? We who know all things have forechosen her as worthy, and as this rose in preference to the thorn.
Surgite vos igitur, quia tempus labitur et mors vos persequitur. Huic servite, hanc vocate, quod si neclexeritis, illam non videbitis gloriam quam cupitis. Vos eÿa properate!
k k k l m m m l
Arise, therefore, because time is passing and death pursues you. Serve her, call upon her, because if you neglect her you will not see the glory which you desire. Oh hurry!
Just as the six poetic lines of the first stanza of the motetus text can be subdivided into three rhyming couplets, each of the three stanzas of six lines in the triplum’s first part can be subdivided into two groups of three lines, with a regular rhyme scheme on lines three and six. This is a clever reversal, as the two upper voices together thus exhaust both possible subdivisions of the six-line stanzas in terms of perfect and imperfect: three groups of two in one text, contrasting with two groups of three in the other. Similarly, each of the eight-line stanzas in the triplum text’s second part can be subdivided into two four-line groups, analogously having rhymes on lines four and eight. Each stanza in the first part has forty-four syllables, and each in the second part has fifty-eight. On the syllabic level, the two parts of the triplum text therefore have and syllables, respectively, yielding a : proportion
Another Look at Vos/Gratissima
– one that is more complex numerically, but not very far from the : 9:8 proportion in its verse A comparison of the proportions of the upper-voice and chant excerpt texts is structure.24 shown in Figure 21.1. .. 9:8 proportion in terms of lines triplum text
6 lines : 44 syllables 6 lines : 44 syllables 6 lines : 44 syllables
8 lines : 58 syllables
first part : 3 stanzas
8 lines : 58 syllables
second part : 2 stanzas
3:4 proportion in terms of lines and syllables motetus text
6 lines : 60 syllables
8 lines : 80 syllables
first part : 1 stanza
second part : 1 stanza
3:4 proportion in terms of syllables chant excerpt
2 words: 6 syllables
3 words: 8 syllables
first part : 1 line
second part : 1 line
Figure 21.1: .: A comparison of the structure structure and proportions of the motet texts
The 3:4 : proportion which pervades the text is also echoed in the formal structure of the music. The pair of lower voices is constructed as a series of six rhythmic taleae for the first part and eight for the second (seven complete and one partial talea). Upon this foundation are superimposed three upper-voice periods in the first part of the motet and four in the second – resulting in upper-voice periods which span two lower-voice taleae in both parts of the motet.25 However, the different lengths of the rhythmic taleae in the lower voices for the first and second parts of the motet (fifteen breves in the first part and nine breves in the second) result in a longer first part (90 ( breves) and a shorter second part (69 ( breves); this is very close to a 4:3 : proportion, effectively reversing the short-long 3:4 : proportion inherent in the chant excerpt.26 • 24 •
• 25 •
• 26 •
The proximity of these two ratios – 9:8 : and 33:29 : – can be most easily seen by expressing the latter in terms of either the numerator or denominator of the former. The equivalent ratio of 33:29 : in terms of the numerator 9 is approximately :., and in terms of the denominator , 9:7.9, 8, approximately .:. 9.1:8. The minute distance between the two ratios can also be compared easily when converting them to decimal numbers: ⁹⁄₈ = 1.125 . and ³³⁄₂₉ = 1.138. .. The musical fabric of upper voices in fourteenth-century motets is very often organized into formal sections containing rhythmic patterns that repeat in a periodic or semi-periodic fashion. The upper-voices’ shared periodicity links them together as a unit and can be either synchronized to the lower-voice rhythmic taleae or pitted against them in counterpoint. I am using the term ‘upper-voice period’ (or simply ‘period’ when the context is clear) as the label for this kind of overarching upper-voice formal structure for the sake of clarity. Various terms such as Großtalea or supertalea have been used to describe periodic upper-voice structures since Heinrich Besseler categorized ars nova motet forms in the early part of the twentieth century; Besseler’s initial term for this was simply Oberstimmenperiode – upper-voice period; see Besseler , 1927, . 210. More recently, Anna Zayaruznaya has labeled these structures ‘blocks’. This is a nice, concise term which eliminates any possible confusion with the term talea as applied to lower-voice rhythmic patterns, though it conflicts with Margaret Bent’s prior use of ‘blocks’ as sections of literally repeated musical material placed periodically within larger formal structures; see Zayaruznaya b, 2018b, , 11, and Bent , 1997, . 92. The smallest equivalent whole number ratio of : 90:69 is :. 30:23. An equivalent ratio expressed in terms of the numerator 4 would be :., 4:3.06, or in terms of the denominator , 3, .:. 3.91:3. As before, the proximity between the two ratios can be compared easily as decimal numbers: ⁴⁄₃ = . 1.333 and ³⁰/₂₃ = .. 1.304.
450
Richard Dudas
The two parts of each of the upper-voice texts can be seen as corresponding generally to the two formal parts of the motet delineated by the two iterations of the lower-voice colores, though the text setting is actually somewhat more subtle. The first three stanzas of the triplum text and the three couplets that make up the single stanza of the motetus text all roughly coincide with the three upper-voice periods in the musical structure of the first part of the motet. Thus each line of the motetus text and each three-line group in the triplum – pairs of which are rhymed – roughly coincide with the length of the lower-voice taleae. And analogously, at first glance, the final two stanzas of the triplum text and the four couplets that make up the second stanza of the motetus text also appear to roughly correspond to the eight lower-voice taleae (seven full taleae and a partial eighth talea) of the second part of the motet (generally two lines per talea). A closer look at the text setting, however, reveals that the first couplet of the motetus text and first stanza of triplum text are set to less than the thirty-breve length of the upper-voice periods – twenty-one breves and twenty-nine breves, respectively, to be precise. This creates an initial offset for reasons of counterpoint between the upper-voice texts. Subsequently, the pace of text declamation is accelerated in the third upper-voice period so that the first part of each upper voice text ends some distance before the start of the second statement of the lower-voice colores, indicated in Figure 21.2 . by a red dotted vertical line. The consequence of this is that the second part of the motetus text begins being set to music nine breves earlier than the start of the second statement of the colores in the lower voices, and the second part of the triplum text, similarly, begins five breves early. A diagram of this text setting structure, measured in breves, and shown alongside the musical structure of both the lower voice taleae and upper-voice periods, is shown in Figure .. 21.2. second part : 2 stanzas (8 lines, 58 syllables) = 116 syllables / 74B
musical structure
motetus
text setting
triplum
first part : 3 stanzas (6 lines, 44 syllables) = 132 syllables / 85B
stanzas rhymed line groups
29B 3l : 13B
30B
3l : 16B
3l : 14B
26B
3l : 16B
3l : 12B
36B
3l : 14B
4l : 18B 5B
first part : 1 stanza (3 couplets) = 60 syllables / 81B
couplets rhymed lines
21B 11B
30B
10B
20B
30B 10B
20B
4l : 18B
13B
4l : 18B
4l : 20B
second part : 1 stanza (4 couplets) = 80 syllables / 78B
21B 10B
38B
18B 8B
10B
18B 8B
10B
21B 8B
10B
11B
9B
upper-voice periods lower-voice taleae
30B 15B
30B 15B
15B
30B 15B
first part : 6 taleae : 90B
15B
18B 15B
9B
18B
9B
9B
9B
18B 9B
9B
15B 9B
6B
second part : 8 taleae* : 69B * 7 full taleae and one partial talea
Figure 21.2: .: Musical and text-setting structure structure of Vos/Gratissima
The motet therefore has some built-in ambiguity as to where its second part actually begins, since the proportions of the two parts of the upper-voice texts, whether viewed in
451
Another Look at Vos/Gratissima
terms of their syllables or in terms of the length in breves of the music to which the text is set, are different from one another, and these are additionally distinct from the proportions of the purely musical structure as delineated by the lower-voice taleae and upper-voice periods. The fact that the start of the second part of each of the upper-voice texts does not coincide with the other, and that neither coincides with the start of the second color in the lower voices, is a musical feature which is in stark contrast with a number of fourteenth-century motets whose text and musical structure is highly regular and coincident. A good example of this would be Machaut’s Quant en moy/ Amour et biauté/ Amara valde (M), a motet also having a bipartite formal structure, and whose stanzas of text in both the upper-voices align very neatly with the musical structure delineated by the tenor taleae. There is, however, one important and unique point of upper-voice text structure alignment in Vos/Gratissima, indicated in Figure . with a red vertical double-arrow. At breve , the final line of the third couplet of the motetus text and the start of the final three-line group of the third stanza of the triplum text begin simultaneously on an aurally conspicuous minim-minim-minimsemibreve-minim rhythm in both upper voices. This rhythm is used only twice in the piece as a kind of cadential figure: here at breve , and once again eighty-one breves later at breve , just before the end of the motet. In both instances, it is placed exactly seventy-two breves after the start of each stanza of the motetus text; this is equal to four times the length of the eighteen-breve upper-voice periods in the motet’s second part. The pattern and logic behind this motive’s placement in the first part of the motet – where at first glance it appears to be awkwardly located in the middle of an upper-voice period instead of at a presumed hypothetical cadential point near the end of the period – thus only becomes clear when viewing the music from the perspective of the motetus text. This may indicate a need to look beyond the musical structures to the texts themselves in order to have the key to understand the logic behind the motet’s seemingly ill-aligned two parts. To make some sense of the offset between the voices at the juncture between the first and second parts of the motet, we need to look in a little more detail at both the tenorcontratenor pair – whose rhythms govern the perceived musical ‘beat’ at the modus level – and the periodic musical material of the upper-voices. The contratenor is a ‘grammatically essential’ part of the musical texture of Vos/Gratissima. Both tenor and contratenor function in tandem with one another as a single unit, and, as noted earlier, their musical material is comprised of two statements of their colores, albeit with each color being rhythmicized by a different talea. These two rhythmic taleae, in spite of their difference in both length and •
•
•
It is worth briefly mentioning that a prominent feature of the extant part of the anonymous motet on Super omnes speciosa in Pn is an upper-voice periodic structure which is not neatly coincidental with the form outlined by its tenor’s color statements – an unusual but intentional feature motivated by the subject matter of the motet’s triplum text. The desynchronization of the upper-voice text setting with respect to the lower-voice colores at this central point in Vos/Gratissima is undoubtedly an allusion to this similar formal aspect in the earlier Marian motet. Bent (forthcoming, chap. ) has pointed out that the calculated, sparing use of this striking rhythm – appearing in both voices simultaneously at these two moments in the motet – is a musical device employed to emphasize key words in the texts (especially that of the triplum). Bent , .
Richard Dudas
rhythmic profile, share a structural similarity: both can be generalized in terms of a ‘head’ consisting of a note and a rest in one of the lower voices sounding against a rest and a note in the other, thereby briefly offsetting the tenor and contratenor rhythmically from one another, which is followed by a ‘tail’ consisting of a series of notes in rhythmic unison. The first talea of color is shown alongside the first talea of color in Example . in order to spotlight this shared structural trait. Example .: The talea structure for the two lower-voice colores in Vos/Gratissima, analyzed in terms of their ‘head’ and ‘tail’ components and underlying rhythmic structure color 1: general talea structure (15 breves) ‘head’: 5 breves (voices offset)
CT.
T.
F
F
‘tail’ (voices in unison)
F F
F F F F
3 imperfect longs
F F
3 perfect longs
color 2: general talea structure (9 breves) ‘head’: 4 breves (offset)
CT.
T.
F
F
4 breves
F F
‘tail’: (in unison)
F F F F
3 breves
2 breves
For the first color – see the top system of Example . – the ‘head’ of each talea contains a perfect long and an imperfect long rest in the tenor against an imperfect long rest and perfect long in the contratenor, altogether totaling five breves in length. This is followed by a ‘tail’ totaling ten breves, consisting of a breve to complete the modus-level perfection and then three longs, each on the first breve of a modus-level perfection. This results in taleae that are fifteen breves in length, spanning five modus-level perfections, but having a rhythmically ambiguous modus beat – caused by the imperfect long rest offset – for the first two of these perfections, so that the first six breves of each talea tend to feel more like they are divided into three imperfect modus beats rather than two perfect ones. The music of the upper-voices plays into this ambiguity, often accentuating the imperfect modus feel. This is most evident at the start of the third upper-voice period (the fifth lower-voice talea) at breves –, shown in context in Example ., where both upper voices (and especially the motetus) are audibly in imperfect modus before slipping back into the unambiguous perfect modus delineated by the unison lower voices at breves –. In other corresponding places the modus beat is not necessarily so clearly defined by the upper-voices, but more often than not their rhythms suggest imperfect modus over the first six breves of each lower-voice talea. The overarching • •
Leech-Wilkinson refers to these as ‘diagonal’ and ‘vertical’ coincidences of pitches, respectively. Leech-Wilkinson , : –. The final long of the tenor is actually imperfected by a breve rest for the first five taleae and in the sixth talea it is the contratenor which is imperfected, in order to set up the reversal of their respective roles in the ‘head’ of the taleae in the second color.
Another Look at Vos/Gratissima
modus-level rhythmic scheme for the first part of the motet can thus be interpreted as being organized in patterns of three imperfect longs followed by three perfect longs. Example .: Vos/Gratissima, breves – 3 imperfect longs 2 breves
2 breves
61
Tr.
FF lux,
Mo.
vos
T.
nu - bi
2 breves
-
F
la, |
F
F
F
-
mo
-
ris
imperfect modus suggested
co - lu - bres gra - di - en - tes; |
3 breves
F F F F F F
spi
F
Vos
2 breves
73
a - qui - la, |
3 breves
70
F F
I - sta ve - lox
2 breves
a
67
F
3 perfect longs 3 breves
3 breves
2 breves
- lans
C T.
64
-
I
F
-
3 breves
ri
-
F F F
e - the -
3 breves
tum |
sta su - per
Ne
F F F
-
sci
perfect modus
F
en - tem pec -
-
For the second color – shown in the bottom system of Example . – the ‘head’ is comprised of a perfect long and a breve rest in the contratenor against a breve rest and perfect long in the tenor, together totaling four breves in length. This is followed by a ‘tail’ totaling five breves, consisting of an imperfect long in unison to complete the modus-level perfection and a breve-long in the tenor against a breve-breve and breve rest in the contratenor, again with the notes sounding in unison. This results in taleae that are nine breves in length, spanning three modus-level perfections. However, the predominant ‘beat’ pattern is not three groups of three, but rather a pattern of four, three, and two breves in series, with the four breves at the ‘head’ of alternate taleae coinciding with four-breve hockets in the upper voices, shown in Example .. This gives the motet’s second part a strong feeling of imperfect modus, albeit with a slight ‘hiccup’ of perfect modus at the start of the pattern’s ‘tail’. Example .: Vos/Gratissima, breves –
Tr.
100 Rex
Mo.
e - go
CT.
T.
F
3 breves 103
hec
me
re - gi - na. |
le - de - re. |
F
‘head’: 4 breves
F
Quid
O
2 breves
106
sum,
mun - dum
hocket: 4 breves
tan
re - gi - na,
-
tu
-
ta
re
-
F
um
F F
F F ‘tail’: 5 breves
fe
F F F
-
ri
-
F
mus? |
am
-
Karen Desmond has pointed out both the prevalence of all four voices attacking a sustained sonority and strong directed progressions resolving on modus beat two in the second part of the motet (whereas in the first part these were nearly always on modus beat one). •
Desmond a, –.
Richard Dudas
This strong ‘downbeat’ on modus beat two always neatly coincides with the start of the ‘tail’ portion of the talea, something which is also clearly visible in Example 21.5 . at breve 104. . For the moment, then, let us consider that the roles of ‘head’ and ‘tail’ have been reversed in the second color, just as the roles of the tenor and contratenor correspondingly have been reversed, via the swapping of their rhythmic offsets in the ‘head’. This, at the very least, helps tidy up the partial talea at the end of the motet, since the lone four-breve ‘head’ at the end of the motet now pairs-up with the preceding ‘tail’. (Of course, the downside is that we now have an unattached ‘head’ dangling at the start of the second color of the motet, but we will deal with this in due course.) The main advantage of effectuating this role reversal, shown in Figure 21.3, ., is that the divisions of our taleae, though no longer coinciding with the start of the second color, now suggest an overarching rhythmic scheme of three breves followed by three imperfect longs, which makes a direct analogy to the pattern of three imperfect longs followed by three perfect longs in the first color (indicated with red dashed boxes in the figure). It also represents a type of ‘faux-diminution’, whereby all note values in the first pattern, instead of being scaled mensurally, are simply reduced in length by one breve to create the note values of the second pattern. Furthermore, this overarching rhythmic pattern is reinforced by the upper voices’ periodic musical material, and comfortably embraces not only the imperfect-modus feel of the hockets but also the pattern of unison attacks on sustained sonorities and positioning of directed cadences throughout this part of the motet. What was once seemingly a ‘hiccup’ of perfect modus can now be seen as the starting point of an overarching rhythmic pattern which makes a direct analogy to the six breves of imperfect modus which started each talea in the first color. CT.
T.
CT.
T.
F
‘head’
F
‘head’
F
F
‘tail’
FF F F
F F
F F
FF F F
3 imperfect L
‘tail’
F F
F F
3 perfect L
CT.
T.
CT.
T.
F
‘head’
F
F F F F F F
‘tail’
‘tail’
‘head’
F FF F F F F F 3B
3 imperfect L
Figure 21.3: .: The reversed roles of the ‘head’ and ‘tail’ components of the taleae in the second color, as compared with those of the first first
Although at first glance the unattached ‘head’ at the start of the second color seems to be missing its preceding five-breve ‘tail’ which should mark the start of our overarching threebreve, three-imperfect-long rhythmic pattern, five breves before the start of the second color in the lower voices, at breve , 86, is precisely the point where the triplum text begins its second part. Furthermore, the rhythms of these five breves of music in the triplum are virtually iden-
455
Another Look at Vos/Gratissima
tical to the recurring rhythmic patterns at analogous places in its periodic structure. This is made clear in Example ., which shows excerpts from analogous locations in the triplum periodic structure: breves – in the triplum (corresponding to the last five breves of the first part of the motet as viewed from its lower-voice structure) are rhythmically identical or nearly identical to breves –, breves – and breves –. So it seems, at least where the triplum voice is concerned, the motet’s second part is composed of four complete upper-voice periods – not three and a partial one – but that the motet’s two parts dovetail across the final five breves of the first color. Example .: Vos/Gratissima, triplum, a comparison of breves – alongside breves –, –, and – lower-voice taleae i, iii, v and vii of part 2 start here
last 5 breves of part 1 86
88
F I
-
91
sta
vir
-
104
F go
re
- gi
-
F
F
Quid
tan
-
ta
122
re
-
fe
-
ri
-
F
F
Sur
-
gi
140
-
te
F
vos
i
-
gi
-
F
tur, |
142
F
Quod
si
F
ne - cle
xe
- ri
-
F
tis, |
-
F
a |
112
no - vi
mus |
130
Qui - a tem - pus 145
-
-
F
a - ma - si
Nos qui cun - cta 127
mus? |
124
Dul - cis est 109
a |
106
94
la - bi
-
F
tur |
148
Il - lam non
vi - de - bi
-
F
tis |
Anna Zayaruznaya has shown that rearranging the layout of motets to privilege uppervoice structures instead of lower-voice taleae can not only highlight rhythmic similarities in the upper-voices, but also provide a supplementary viewpoint that works in tandem with lower-voice-centric score layouts (such as Example .) to help clarify larger formal structures. If we apply a similar approach to Vos/Gratissima, taking into consideration the start of the triplum text setting, to show the dovetailed formal structure in addition to highlighting the above-mentioned overarching modus-level rhythmic patterns, as presented in Figure ., many of the apparent discrepancies in the motet’s formal structure and text setting, which we observed earlier in Figure ., disappear.
• •
Zayaruznaya b, –. The two parts of the motet are indicated with dashed boxes, predominant rhythmic structures with solid boxes (groups of three perfect longs are highlighted in purple, three imperfect longs are highlighted in blue, and three breves are highlighted in green). The start of the second section of the motetus text is indicated with a dotted box (highlighted in yellow), as is an analogous motive, also in the motetus voice, at the end of the motet. Hockets are shaded in gray.
T.
CT.
Mo.
Tr.
ad
F
-
pul
F
lux,
F
457
V
F
- lans
F
61
III
F
- trum
F
31
4
ra - mi
-
mi
-
ni, | ni, |
F
-
tis
F
-
si
F
34
e, e, ||
-
64
-
la, la, ||
F
ga
F
F
-
F F
37
F
spe
F
I - sta ve - lox
F
sti
-
spi
la, la, ||
F
67
-
mo
F
-
ris
F F
F
a - qui
F
in
F
-
-
-
Vos
F
-
ee ||
F
-
ni ni ||
F
-
-
40
o
70
F
ma | ma |
F F
ri
-
de | de |
F
13
-
pe - re
de
F F
F
-
-
-
tes; tes; ||
F
-
-
sta
73
F
i
F F
I
Me
F
43
o - sa; sa; ||
-
su
-
-
F
F F
tum tum ||
Ne
-
F
sci
F F
rat
- ri
-
-
16
en - tem
per
F
cor - dis
pe
F
-
e - the
pla
F -
-
VI
F
-
di
F
-
-
F
Nu - be - re, dum nu - psi - mus | mus |
F
19
e
F
cis
F
-
-
-
xi
si
F
F
-
49
-
as - pe
mi - se
ma, | ma, |
F
Reg - nat, vos in
79
Au - su ni - mis
es es ||
-
ra ra ||
F
F
ra | ra |
F
-
F F
F
tum. tum. ||
F
F
3 imp. L
dul
ci
F
3 imp. L
mun
cto - ris
ra ra ||
F
76
IV
F
ga
F
ves - trum al - te - ra, ra, ||
46
II
F
nis
F
mus mus ||
car
F
-
Tur - pis
co
fu - e
Dig - na - ti
3 perf. L
F
vir - tu
Quam
li - gen
es es ||
F F F
co - lu - bres gra - di - en
-
e
3 perf. L
Ac
ci
F
ti
F
10
ce - te - ris
Pre
simile…
F
F
a
F
Hu - mi - lis ma - ne - ri
F
nis
-
vir - gi
-
nu - bi
pla
F
spe - ci
ma
F
F F
vos
F
cra
F
vir - gi
3 imp. L
-
-
7
Vir - gi - nes, si
3 imp. L
quid
Gaude gloriosa, super omnes speciosa gloriosa, super omnes speciosa C1, I Gaude
F
Gra
F
Vos,
part 1
Gra
F F
-
-
Val - le
F
82
F
In
F F
Nec
F
52
F
Us
F F
Tan
F
22
-
tis
F
lan
F
non
-
-
vir
-
-
-
-
de
F
25
di
F
-
-
gen
de. | de. |
tu
-
tes
F
-
o
-
I
F
-
vir
-
88
go
F
stil
F
sta
sa. | sa. |
F
58
cen
F F
ex
-
I
-
sta
-
-
-
-
aa ||
F
I - sta
re - gi
91
-
re re ||
F
94
Dul - cis est
-
aa ||
F
Me - a
part 2 97
spon
-
sa - que
pi
-
-
a. a. ||
F
100
Rex
sum,
hec
103
si
F
-
F
me
F F
gue tis e - gen - tes. tes. ||
-
F
F
-
ta
-
-
te
vos
F
124
um
-
142
F
cu
F
o
re
-
F F
fe - ri
-
F
li
mus? mus? ||
F
109
C2, C2, ii
vul - ne
F
-
re re ||
F
F
F
-
gi
xe - ri
F
lum
F F
ne - cle
-
i -
F
am
-
-
tis, | tis, |
F
tur, tur, ||
F
-
F
la
v
145
-
-
bi
-
a, | a, |
F
F
lo | lo |
F
F
o - cu
F
127
iii
ple - cte
F
Il - lam non vi - de
-
bi
la - bi
148
130
Qui - a tem - pus
no - vi
112
Nos qui cun - cta
simile… F F
F
gi
tu
si
tan
106
mi
a - ma - si
-
-
-
-
gnam pre
115
F
pe
F
F
ver
-
F
F
bum
F
in
F F
vii
F
-
-
tis | tis |
F
F
Et
F
tur tur ||
F
A
F F
re
F
-
Glo - ri
-
151
F
Quo
F F
per
-
F
F
ce
-
-
F
F
o
F F
-
F F
pto
fi
-
-
-
118
at
Vos
ri
F
tur. tur. ||
F
do
ii
154
viii
ca
e
F F
vi
-
jun - ge
Huic
ÿ
-
-
F
ro
F
a
F
pro
-
di
F
pe
-
o - scu - lo | lo |
pro
ra
-
O
rex
in -
157
-
re -
te!
a.
F F
F
Ac
vo - ca - te, te, ||
139
pre
O
spi - na. na. ||
hanc
u - be - re. re. ||
hanc
121
F
cum
le - de - re. | re. |
ro - sam
me
ser - vi - te,
ut
F
136
iv
pe - ctus
F
Et
F
mun - dum
F
F
mus | mus |
sti
F
re - gi - na. na. ||
3 imp. L
-
se - qui
F
gen
F F
am quam cu - pi - tis. | tis. |
F
os
F F
mors vos
133
strin
F F
Et
-
e - le - gi
ri
F
F F
Di
-
F
F
mus mus ||
F
Pe
F F
3 B 3 imp. L 3 B
- spi - ra
Quod
F
F
F
re - gum,
Sur
F
F
F
- gi - na,
Quid
F
F
si
F F
F
e - go
hocket
3 B 3 imp. L 3 B 3 imp. L 3 perf. L
85
F
tra
F F
F
55
F
que
F F
F
28
li
3 perf. L
val
quam
Figure 21.4: .: The entirety of Vos/Gratissima in score with a layout that gives preference to text structure structure and periodic musical material in the upper voices
F
Richard Dudas
Another Look at Vos/Gratissima
Viewed this way, the first part of the motet consists of three clear upper-voice periods (the third of which is slightly condensed) over six full lower-voice taleae, and the second part consists of four complete upper-voice periods over approximately seven-and-a-half lowervoice taleae – its first one being incomplete due to the rupture where the two parts of the motet overlap. The upper-voice texts now fit more logically with the musical phrase structure, and there is a nice parallel between the analogous positions of the four notes in the motetus at the end of its role in the first part of the motet, setting the word Gratissime (the first word of its second stanza), and the final four notes of the entire motetus voice at the end of the piece, setting its final words caro dia (these are highlighted in yellow in Figure .). What is most clear, however, is that the musical structure of the entire motet, with its two parts dovetailed at the center, not only (once again) echoes the : proportion of the chant excerpt, but also exemplifies the two similar wounds inflicted on the heart of the speaker of the motetus text: one by the Virgin (symbolized by the largely ‘perfect’ first part of the motet) and one by the ‘pure one’ brought forth to him by the Virgin (symbolized by the nominally ‘imperfect’ second part). Both parts of the motet structure are similarly wounded at the very heart of the composition by their mutual intrusion into each other: the upper voices are wounded in the first part of the motet since they are cut short by the premature start of the second part, whereas the lower voices are wounded in the second part of the motet, starting late and beginning with one incomplete talea. Where semantics of the upper-voice texts are concerned, Margaret Bent has pointed out the strong dichotomy between two frequently used words in the triplum text, vos (you) and ista (she). This is especially evident in the triplum’s third stanza; see Table .. There is, however, an important third salient element which is threaded into the triplum text: nos (we). Like a specter hovering over the text, however, its presence is veiled. It is nonetheless present in the form of verb endings, such as fuerimus (‘we were’) and nupsimus (‘we married’) in the first stanza, via the first-person singular surrogates mea (my) and ego (I) in the first part of the fourth stanza and again as a verb ending in the rhetorical question ‘Quid tanta referimus?’ (‘Why do we recount such things?’) in the middle of the fourth stanza. The actual word nos itself is finally stated explicitly and prominently as the first word after this question, in the confident context of stating ‘We who know all things’. The triplum text therefore includes all three grammatical persons, and uses the plural forms nos and vos for the first and second persons (except for the solitary use of ego in place of nos at the crux of the text). This fits into the overall narrative of the poem: an admonition from the speaker of the poem (I/we) to you, the reader (ostensibly addressed to a group of virgins, but actually, in practice, it becomes addressed to all those reading the poem), to serve Her (the Virgin Mary). The motetus text, on the other hand, focuses only on the first and second persons via • •
In terms of the number of notes per talea, it is exactly seven-and-a-half taleae. In terms of talea length in breves, it is seven and four-ninths. Bent forthcoming, chap. . Note that the demonstrative pronoun iste/ista is more literally translated as ‘that one’ but serves as a third-person personal pronoun (in this case: she). The same goes for the demonstrative pronoun hic (literally ‘this one’) and its inflected forms, used in the fourth and fifth stanzas of the triplum text: hec (she), huic (‘to her’), hanc (her).
Richard Dudas
inflected singular forms of ego and tu throughout. The third person appears only obliquely in the more intimate dialogue of the motetus text, such as in the second line’s relative clause quam decorat carnis mundicies. (The Gratissima virginis species to whom the text is being familiarly and intimately addressed in the very first line is in fact the subject tu of the verb plagasti in the third line of the stanza.) Focusing on the triplum text, it combines (and contrasts) pairs of the three grammatical persons in its five stanzas, exhausting all possible combinations. In the first stanza, the vosnos pair is explored. This pair sets up an initial contrast between the first and second persons in the context of you, virgins, being astonished that I/we have chosen to wed the virgin. The pronoun nos is not explicitly stated in the stanza, but present implicitly in verb conjugations. In the second and third stanzas, the ista-vos pair is explored. Here, the pair of words is used to make a series of contrasts of her virtues with your lack of virtue, enumerating three pairs of examples, roughly line by line, in the third stanza. The sole remaining combinatorial pair of the three grammatical persons, ista-nos, is explored in the fourth stanza. Here, the context is a showcasing of our wedded relationship to the Her – the royal virgin – something which harks back to imagery in the first stanza and culminates with the climactic statement Rex ego sum, hec Regina – ‘I am the king, she the queen’. The fifth and final stanza returns to the vos-ista pairing which appeared initially in the second and third stanzas. This time, however, the focus in now on vos, which is positioned in a different context. The you being addressed in the text is now no longer the negative side of the contrasting ‘Her vs. you’ confrontation that was explored in the second and third stanzas, but rather a kind of ‘conditional’ vos: that if you serve Her, then you will also be included as part of nos, too, since it has been expressed that we already serve her. This takes us, conceptually, full-circle to the vos-nos pairing of the first stanza, but now the pair is presented as being conditionally together instead of being placed in contrast or conflict with one another. Where the music is concerned, Bent has pointed out that there are two distinct rhythmic motives prevalent throughout the motet which she sees as representing vos (Example .a) and gratissima (Example .b). She points out that these motives, stated simultaneously at the outset of the motet in the upper voices, are composed of different juxtapositions of three basic rhythmic units, shown in Example .c. In between the unit level and the motive level is what I will refer to as a ‘cell’ – something not quite as long as the vos and gratissima motives but that is clearly audible in the context of the music and consists of more than a one-breve-in-length rhythmic unit. The predominant rhythmic cell audible throughout the motet, shown in Example .d, is the semibreve-semibreve-breve (SSB) cell (also replaced on occasion by the aurally equivalent semibreve-semibreve-long). This cell is first •
•
Note that this crowning line in the text coincides with the first appearance of hocket in the second part of the motet at breve . This must have been a carefully planned moment in the relationship between text and music, analogous to the details of the text designed for the hocket sections themselves, something which Bent (forthcoming, chap. ) discusses in depth. The breve-length rhythms which Bent labels ‘units’ are referred to as ‘cells’ by Leech-Wilkinson. Leech-Wilkinson , : . I am retaining Bent’s terminology for ‘unit’ and ‘motive’ and redefining ‘cell’ as something in between.
Another Look at Vos/Gratissima
stated prominently in the triplum at the very start of the motet and additionally serves as its cadential figure at the very end of the composition. This prevalent cell appears clearly and audibly no less than forty-three times throughout the upper voices of the motet (thirty-two times in the triplum and eleven in the motetus). Like the combinatorial pairs of grammatical persons in the triplum text, this two-breve cell straddles different pairs of the three modus beats within the composition’s perfect modus. Example .: The prominent rhythmic material used in Vos/Gratissima
aa F aYaY aa F
Vos, quid
F
ad
-
mi
-
F
ra - mi - ni, |
a. vos rhythmic motive
F F aYaY F aa F
F
Gra
-
F
tis
-
si
-
F
ma
F
vir - gi - nis
b. gratissima rhythmic motive
aYaY aa F
aa F
c. constituent rhythmic units
d. prominent rhythmic ‘cell’
This cell is stated three times in succession on modus beats one and two in the triplum at the outset of the piece; see the solid orange boxes in Figure ., the first thirty breves of the motet in score, corresponding to the first of three upper-voice periods in the first part of the motet. Then, at breve , the cell moves to modus beats three and one (dashed purple box), and is stated twice. Finally, at breve , it moves to the final remaining possible beat pair: beats two and three (dotted green box), and is stated once. (Note that the cells are additionally stated in a regular pattern: three statements of the first placement, followed by two of the second, and one of the third.) The motetus also similarly exhausts all three possible placements within perfect modus of the rhythmic cell in the first upper-voice period, though having only one statement of each. The ordering of these three statements of the cell, with respect to their modus beat placement, in the motetus is actually the same ordering as used in the triplum, but rotated to start on beats two and three, instead of one and two – something readily noticeable in the order of the colored boxes shown in Figure .. Moreover, the expansion of the number of statements of this cell from the motetus voice (where each possible placement of the cell appears once) to the triplum (where the number of instances of the placements is multiplied by three and two) recalls the similar technique of formal expansion from motetus to triplum of the number of stanzas that comprise the two parts of the upper-voice texts, discussed earlier. •
Discussing the placement of these cells throughout both parts of the motet necessitates looking at and listening to the entire composition in terms of its steady and regular underlying perfect modus.
I - sta
-
que
F F F -
F F F F F
Us
- quam Tan
F F
Nu - be - re, dum nu - psi - mus | mus |
22
beats 3 and 1
F
beats 1 and 2
II
F
car
F
rat
co
F F
de
F
es es ||
F F F ci
Gaude gloriosa, super omnes speciosa gloriosa, super omnes speciosa C1, I Gaude
F F
-
F
si
mi -
tis
T.
F
Gra
Mo.
CT.
Vos, quid ad
F
Tr.
beats 2 and 3
F F
spe
F F F
ma -
-
4
F
ra - mi - ni, ni, ||
F
vir - gi - nis
Vir - gi - nes, si
7
F
vir - gi - ni ni ||
10
Pre ce - te - ris
F
e
-
Quam
13
F
li - gen - de de ||
-
16
F
Dig - na - ti fu - e - ri - mus mus ||
nis mun - di
F
-
ci
-
F
es | es |
19
modus beats 2 and 3 modus beats 3 and 1
modus beats 1 and 2
Figure 21.5: .: Vos/Gratissima, breves 1–30, –, with instances instances of the prominent SSB rhythmic cell highlighted
val
-
25
de
di
F F
-
li - gen
28
F F
de. | de. |
cen
F
(beats 3 and 1)
Richard Dudas
This calculated use of all possible beat locations where this SSB cell can occur on the modus level suggests a direct analogy to the three possible subject pairings of nos, vos, and ista which are exhausted in the triplum text. Could there be therefore a one-to-one correspondence between cell placement within the modus beat in the music and the three grammatical persons in the texts? After all, Bent has convincingly pointed out how the vos and gratissima motives appear in various guises at calculated points throughout the motet.40 For the sake of the argument, let us consider that vos is represented by the SSB cell when it occurs on beats one and two, as it does at the beginning of the motet in the triplum, coinciding with its first word: vos. Let us also consider that ista is represented by the SSB cell when it occurs on beats three and one, as it does in the triplum at the start of the second and third upper-voice periods (breves – 30–31 and –), 60–61), again prominently set to the word ista both times. Finally, we can consider nos to be represented by the SSB cell placed on modus beats two and three, and indeed, its first appearance in the triplum on these beats falls on the word nupsimus (breves –). 21–22). At the very least these associations will provide us with a clear and convenient means of labeling the cells as they appear in the context of the motet. The SSB cell is used sparingly in the second upper-voice period, which corresponds to the third and fourth taleae in the lower voices. This was likely a choice made for purely musical reasons: to provide contrast to its frequent appearance in the first and third upper-voice periods. The cell appears a total of four times here: twice on modus beats three and one (the ista placement), and twice on beats one and two (the vos placement). This actually roughly parallels the semantic content of the stanza of triplum text which it sets: that stanza’s • 40 •
Bent forthcoming, chap. 8. .
461
Another Look at Vos/Gratissima
first three lines focus on ista and remaining three on vos. In the text, this precedes the rapidfire sequence of ista and vos contrasts which make up the third stanza. In the music, a similar acceleration is achieved through a series of rapid-fire statements of the SSB cell throughout the third upper-voice period. The placement of the statements of the SSB cell in the third upper-voice period is a reiteration and expansion of that heard in the first. A comparison of the first and third periods highlighting this similarity is shown in Figure .. In the third period, however, the pattern of cell statements that appeared in the triplum in the first upper-voice period is altered so that the cells with the vos placement are shifted one breve early, and those with the ista placement are shifted two breves early, effectively swapping them, so that where a cell occurred on breves one and two in the first period (the vos placement), it now falls on beats three and one (the ista placement) in the third, and vice-versa. This transformation is shown in Figure . with red arrows. The black arrow indicates the cell whose placement is invariant. In the motetus voice the placement of one cell is shifted three modus beats later, so all three cells follow each other in succession; see the dashed gray arrows. One additional ista cell is added to the motetus, and three additional cells (one of each type) are added to the triplum. This echoes the triple expansion from motetus to triplum of the poetic structure of the text for the first part of the motet, discussed earlier. Note that the tightly compressed succession of cell statements in both upper voices at breves – coincides with the final line of the first stanza of the motetus text, as well as the final three lines of the third stanza of the triplum text, with its succession of multiple ista-vos juxtapositions. In the second part of the motet, the occurrences of the SSB cell suddenly become much more evenly and regularly spaced within the musical texture, as can be seen in Figure .. In the triplum voice, the cell appears in a highly regular periodic pattern that steadily alternates between modus beats one and two (the vos placement), and beats two and three (the nos placement), with respect to the underlying perfect modus beat. In the motetus it appears once at the start of each upper-voice period (on modus beats one and two – the vos placement), with the exception of the third period, where it does not appear at all. The ista placement of the cell (on modus beats three and one), conspicuous by its absence through •
•
•
Instances of the SSB cell are highlighted as in the previous figure, with the addition of the nos, vos, and ista labels. Arrows indicate the pattern of cells which is repeated in each of the voices; cells added in the third period are indicated with a +. I am considering the three minims at breve to be an ornamentation of the semibreve which should logically be in this position, but which has been ‘clouded’ for the purposes of word painting, as it sets the word nubila. This semibreveminim-minim-minim pattern only appears in one other place in this motet: at breve setting the word turpis, in a somewhat ‘filthy’ manner. (Note that, out of the four sources which preserve the triplum voice of this motet in whole or in part, this pattern appears in DRc and CaB but not in Iv nor Br where it is set to semibreve-minimsemibreve-minim.) Due in part to this apparent word painting, I suspect that there originally may have been a SSB cell on the notes c-c-a at breve at some early point in the compositional process. Bent points out a similar instance of word painting later in the motet with a literal visual repetition of musical material on the words oculum oculo – ‘eye to eye’ – at breve in the motetus. Here too, the word painting briefly disrupts the expected regular periodic rhythmic pattern established by previous upper-voice periods. Bent forthcoming, chap. . See n. regarding text painting at the words oculum oculo.
T.
CT.
Mo.
Tr.
F
-
tis
-
-
-
F
si
-
ma
F
463
lux,
V
F
- lans
F
61
vos
ista F F
-
la, la, ||
F
a
-
F F F
mo
F
-
I - sta ve - lox
spi
F F F F F F
a - qui - la, la, ||
67 67
F F
spe
Vos
-
-
ista F F
ris
Pre ce - te - ris
F
10
ci
es es ||
F F F
700
-
ri
-
F F
tum | tum |
ista F
co - lu - bres gra - di - en - tes; tes; ||
-
Ne
-
-
F F
de
F
73 7
-
rat
car
F -
vosF vos
sci
F F F -
en - tem
pe
-
VI
F
cto - ris
e - tthe he - rra | raa |
76
II
F
nis mun - di
e
-
-
-
F
xi
ci
-
79
es | es |
Tan
F
F
tum. | tum. |
Reg - nat, vos in
lan lan
Gra
-
tis
-
-
-
-
de
di
si
F
-
-
I
F F me
F F F
gue tis e - gen - tes. | tes. |
85
que
F F F
val
F F
25
- quam
V Va Val al - le le
F F F F
mi - se - ra | ra |
882
Us
F F F F F
Nu - be - re, dum nu - psi - mus | mus |
22 22
nosF F
ista F
19
nos vos F F F ista F vos ista vos nos F F F F
sta su - per
co
16 16
ista F
Dig - na - ti fu - e - ri - mus | mus |
I
Quam
li - gen - de | de |
vos F
e
133
istaF
-
vir - gi - ni | ni |
vos F
vir - gi - nis
nu - bi
644
ista F
nos
Vir - gi - nes, si
7
ra - mi - ni, | ni, |
vos F
mi
4
Gaude gloriosa, super omnes speciosa gloriosa, super omnes speciosa C1, I Gaude
Gra
F F
Vos, quid ad
F
vos
Figure 21.6: .: Vos/Gratissima, breves 1–30 – (top system) system) compared to breves 61–90 – (bottom system) system)
-
F F
cen
si
F F F
sta vir - go
-
mi
-
-
a | a|
li
F
re re - gi gi
-
I - sta
ista
F nos F 88
de. | de. |
li - gen
F
28
Richard Dudas
464
vii
F
la
145
v
F
o
127
iii
F
-
-
-
bi
-
F
a, a, ||
vos F
F
lo lo ||
F
F
re re ||
F
cu
-
F
re | re |
vos
-
vos F
- ple - cte
109
C2, i C2, i
F
vul - ne
91
no
la l
Il - lam non vi - de
148 48
130 30
Qui - a tem - pus
112 12
a - ma
Nos qui cun - cta
Dul - cis est
944
-
-
-
-
bi
bbi
-
F
F
Et
tur tur ||
F F
A
Quo
F F F
tis | tis |
vos F -
-
-
a
vos
re
F
Glo - ri
-
-
-
-
-
e - le l
ri
F F F
sa - que
per
-
-
F
o
F F
-
F F
pto
F
am quam cu - pi - tis. tis. ||
ce
-
-
-
-
-
fi
-
-
ri
118 118
ut
F
F
vi
F
e
jun -
154
viii
ca
F F
-
ge
ÿ
-
-
a
pro
-
F
ro
pre
1211
di
F
pe
-
ra
o - scu - lo lo ||
O
-
te!
Ac
a.
F F
157 15577
F
F F
in - spi
Quod
vos F
F F
-
-
na,
-
ra
re - gum,
rex
S Sur
vos F
vo - ca - te, | te, |
1399
O
ista F -
F F
re - gi
Quid d
vosF
spi - na. na. ||
hanc
u - be - re. re. ||
-
re - gi - na. | na. |
hanc
le - de - re. | re. |
hec
103 03
pro
te,
cum
F
F
ser - vi
me
sum,
ro - sam
iv
Huic
pe - ctus
F
136 136
Et
at
e - go
ii
F
Vos
F
tur. | tur. |
Rex
mun - dum
100 100
do
nos F
-
mus mus ||
sti
F
a. | a. |
nos F gi
pi
nos F
se - qui
gen
F F F
F F
151
F
os
F F
mors
133
F F
strin
Et
-
gnam
pre
pe
F F F
spon
115
97
Di
-
F
Me
mus | mus |
vos F
-
Pe
F F F
a | a|
vos F
vi
-
vos F
si
Figure 21.7: .: Vos/Gratissima, breves 91–159, –, showing the regular placement of the SSB cell with respect to the modus beat
-
ta
-
-
te
vos
-
-
-
-
xe
F
lum
F F
i
am
F F F
fe
re
ver
-
F
F
bum
in
F F F
ne - cle
F
142
F F
cu
si
o
F
124
um
F F F
gi
tu
tan
106
-
-
-
-
-
-
tis, | tis, |
nos F ri
tur, tur, ||
mus? | mus? |
nos F
gi
-
nos F ri
Another Look at Vos/Gratissima
Richard Dudas
out most of the second part of the motet, is saved for a sudden reappearance in the triplum at the very end of the piece. Taking into consideration the labels I have attached to the various modus beat placements of our principal rhythmic cell, the parallels between the motet’s music and the triplum text are striking. The motet begins with a juxtaposition of the vos and nos cells, just as the first stanza of the triplum text contrasts the associated grammatical persons. The entire first part of the motet musically concentrates on the ista-vos dichotomy, beginning slowly in the second upper-voice period and culminating in a rapid succession of rhythmic cells largely made up of ista and vos cells. This follows a similar trajectory to the second and third stanzas of the triplum text. The second part of the motet concentrates on an alternation between the vos and nos cells. The parallel in the triplum text is its concentration on nos in the last half of the fourth stanza, followed by the focus on vos in the fifth stanza. The final appearance of ista at the end of the piece can be viewed as a musical depiction of an optimistic result of the ‘if ’ in the final stanza – as if the addressees of the triplum text’s admonition have indeed hurried and made the choice to serve Her by the end of the motet.
Looking at the texts of Vos/Gratissima in terms of their magnification and expansion of the structure and proportions of the motet’s borrowed chant excerpt and, moreover, looking at the motet’s larger musical form as both an expression of the structure and realization of the substance of its texts, sheds additional light on the composition as a whole. As Lawrence Earp has insightfully pointed out about the budding ars nova motet: ‘The replication of a single concept on as many levels as possible is fundamental to the new style of motet’. Analogously, when we delve into a multifaceted motet such as this one, taking a similar multi-level approach allows us to understand its artistic ambiguities and complexities more profoundly.
•
Earp a, .
. D : C V S P M Alice V. Clark
I first heard of Lawrence Earp in a Machaut seminar Rebecca Baltzer gave at the University of Texas at Austin, where I was working on a master’s degree. This was before the publication of the ‘Machaut Bible’, but his name (which, we were carefully told, was to be pronounced ‘arp’, not ‘erp’, like Wyatt), was already uttered with some awe. At Princeton a few years later, he became a kind of kin through the lineage of graduate students, but that made him no less legendary. I no longer remember when I met the actual person – probably at Kalamazoo – but I eventually discovered that, rather like Superman, he was quiet and unassuming, brilliant but also generous. Over the years, I lost some of the intimidation (but not all!), and I have come to value Larry’s quiet support, which helped sustain me through the dark stages of the dissertation and job market. Writing this during yet another surge of the pandemic, during which like many others I have been wholly consumed with teaching and related tasks, I can thank Larry yet again for this opportunity to return to scholarship necessarily put aside. It will not be as earthshaking as much of his work has been, but it attests to his steady influence, and I offer it with tremendous gratitude to the giant on whose shoulders this dwarf sits.
Many scholars have sought to show connections between specific groups of motets, focusing on aspects of structure, stylistic features, manuscript ordering, or other considerations. These studies have often focused on the motets of Guillaume de Machaut and those that can reasonably be connected to Philippe de Vitry, though Daniel Leech-Wilkinson has posited a ‘Master of the Royal Motets’ as author of some of the otherwise anonymous motets that remain. Along these lines, I have argued that the three motets of Machaut’s that borrow tenors from other motets create a kind of modeling through opposition, foregrounding not (only) similarities but also differences between the source motet and Machaut’s later one. Here I turn to a pair of tenor-related motets that does not involve Machaut: Fortune, mere à dolour/ Ma doulour ne cesse pas/ Dolor meus and Amer Amours est la choison pourquoy/ Durement au cuer me blece/ Dolor meus. Though the direction of influence in this pair cannot be demonstrated, and indeed it may not go in only one direction, such comparisons can shed useful light on each motet.
• • • •
Earp a. Leech-Wilkinson . Clark ; Clark ; Clark c. Fortune/Ma doulour is edited as no. and Amer/Durement as no. in PMFC V.
Dolor meus: Competing Visions of Suffering in a Pair of Motets
These two motets are transmitted anonymously, but Amer/Durement has been linked to Philippe de Vitry by modern scholars. Both are found in the sixth fascicle of Iv, which Karl Kügle argues ‘stands slightly apart’ from the rest of that manuscript. He sees these two motets as coming from different stages of copying, with Amer Amours/Durement coming earlier in the copying process and possibly intended to begin ‘a potential secondary collection of French motets’ that might have ended with Fortune/Ma doulour. Both motets also appear on the Pic rotulus, and both are listed in the index to Trém, but in none of these sources are the two motets copied sequentially. Fortune/Ma doulour is also in CaB (fol. r), while the majority of Amer Amours/Durement appears in DRc (fol. r). The tenor common to both motets comes from a responsory for Vigils (Matins) on Good Friday:
•
•
•
• •
Zayaruznaya , , notes simply that the motet is ‘sometimes attributed to Vitry on stylistic grounds’, but she later seems to lean toward accepting the attribution, which ‘would be an instance of Vitry reacting to Machaut’ (p. n. ) if the attribution is accepted, along with her argument linking the motet to Helas! pour quoy/ Corde mesto/ Libera me (M). Kügle , –, considers this motet worth ‘further consideration […] as another candidate for Vitry authorship’. Leech-Wilkinson –, , says Vitrian authorship this motet is ‘possible’, given stylistic features that link it to Almifonis/Rosa/Tenor and Tuba/In arboris/Virgo sum. (Desmond a, , says that Leech-Wilkinson rejects a Vitry attribution, but the passage she cites refers to Fortune/Ma doulour – an easy mistake to make given that LeechWilkinson refers to motets by a numbering system not generally used today.) Kügle , –, describes the complicated development of this fascicle and his theory of its origin as a separate collection later modified and incorporated into its current manuscript home. The rethinking of this fascicle appears to account for the fact that Fortune/Ma doulour currently appears upside down as the first item in this gathering, though Zayaruznaya , – n. , provides an alternative suggestion that the copying of this motet upside-down may have been deliberate, coming from the notion of ‘Fortune as a goddess who causes reversal and inversion’. Amer Amours/Durement is the first item on the rotulus that is fol. r of the present source, but the top is cut off: the triplum begins at what corresponds to bar in a modern edition, the third long of the first talea, while the motetus begins at bar , at the end of talea . Since each line of the notation in the two-column format provides about eight to ten bars of triplum, there are probably two lines of triplum missing; the motetus lines contain seventeen to nineteen bars, so probably three lines would be needed to provide the missing fifty-three bars of music. (The motetus does not participate in the opening twelve-bar introitus.) In all likelihood, then, there was at least one piece of music on the rotulus before this one; that is, the previous composition would have concluded in the left-hand column, allowing for the motetus of Amer Amours/Durement to begin in the right-hand column. Fortune/Ma doulour is the third piece on this same recto, but only the first line of its motetus, without text, appears. The alignment of that opening motetus line in the right-hand column with the last line of the triplum of the intervening motet, Garrit gallus/ In nova fert/ [Neuma quinti toni], in the left-hand column would seem to be the same situation as what likely obtained at the beginning of Amer Amours/Durement, all but confirming that the latter is not the first motet on the original rotulus. For all information regarding the sources of these motets and their inventories, I rely on DIAMM; Pic is digitized on Gallica. Amer Amours/Durement is listed in the Trém index as appearing on fol. vii of the largely lost manuscript, while Fortune/Ma doulour is listed as appearing on fol. xxxiii. I rely here on the Cantus Database, . The last time I ran the search, on September , there were records, all assigned to Matins for Feria in Parasceve save three: BnF lat. (late-twelfth-century antiphoner from Marseille Cathedral; assigned to Sabbato Sancto); Lucca, Biblioteca Capitolare, (early-twelfthcentury antiphoner from the Camaldolese monastery of San Pietro di Pozzeveri, published in facsimile in Mocquereau ; chant assigned to Sabbato Sancto); and Rome, Vatican Library, San Pietro B. (an Old Roman antiphoner of San Pietro; assigned to the Historia de Job).
Alice V. Clark
Caligaverunt oculi mei a fletu meo quia elongabitur a me qui consolabatur me videte omnes populi si est dolor similis sicut dolor meus. [V.] O vos omnes qui transitis per viam attendite et videte. Si est dolor […]. My eyes are dimmed by my weeping, for the one who consoled me is removed from me. See, all you people, if there is sorrow like my sorrow. [V.] O you all who pass by the way, behold and see. If there is sorrow […].
No version of the melody that I have seen matches the tenor exactly, but several come close; see Example .. The closest match is that of Arras, Bibliothèque municipale, , a fourteenth-century notated breviary from St-Vaast, Arras; the same melody appears in a notated breviary from Bourges, the Lucca Antiphoner, and the Franciscan antiphoner used by Frank Ll. Harrison in his editions of the two motets in PMFC V. The tenor’s only variant from this version is the missing doubled penultimate note. The three-note cadential pattern, with the repeated step above the final (here G-G-F), is common in chant and present in all versions of the chant melody I have seen. It would be easy to imagine (but difficult to demonstrate) a motet composer removing this doubled pitch to make a nineteen-note fragment into an eighteen-note motet tenor, more suitable for division into taleae, and until and unless a version of the chant is found that modifies this common cadential pattern, we must hypothesize such compositional alteration. If a version like that of the Notre-Dame breviary or the Cambrai antiphoner was the tenor source (both are provided in Example .), a note would also have had to be added to fill in a third leap; this is conceivable but perhaps less likely. Example .: Tenor Dolor meus compared with selected chant readings Tenor Dolor meus
Bb œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ
œ
r
Arras, Bibliothèque municipale, 893, fol. 153
Bb œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ do - lor
me
-
-
us
BnF, lat. 15181, fols 288v-289r
Bb œ œ œ œ œ do - lor
œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ me
-
-
us
Cambrai, Le Labo, 38, fol. 113r
Bb œ œ œ do - lor
•
•
•
œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ me
-
-
us
These are BnF lat. , fol. r (a notated breviary from Bourges, thirteenth or fourteenth century); Lucca, Biblioteca Capitolare, (see n. ), and Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale, /, fol. v (a Franciscan antiphoner used in Appendix I of PMFC V). Those melodies appear in Clark , ; Arras, Bibliothèque municipale, is digitized at . This doubled note, incidentally, does appear in the tenor of Machaut’s motet, De bon espoir/ Puis que la douce/ Speravi (M), which Kügle , n. , citing a Facebook group post by Michael Scott Cuthbert, says uses the same melody. Aside from that difference, the Dolor meus tenor opens with a striking fifth descent that is not present in either Machaut’s tenor or its chant source. Given that the final seven or eight notes of both are a common cadential pattern, and the rest of the common material is stepwise movement within the confines of the perfect fourth between F and bb, I am reluctant to push the commonality further, though it is admittedly substantial enough to be significant. It may also be worth noting that every version of M’s chant source I have seen (with one exception) also has that cadential pattern, as well as a third leap that is filled in Machaut’s tenor melody. I allowed for the possibility of compositional alteration, especially on a small scale, in Clark , and in Clark I argue that Machaut alters the borrowed tenor of Tant doucement m’ont attrait / Eins que ma dame d’onnour / Ruina.
Dolor meus: Competing Visions of Suffering in a Pair of Motets
For now, given the lack of an exact match, it is not possible to identify a specific regional tradition from which the tenor fragment was drawn. It remains possible that an exact match remains to be located or that two different composers chose to suppress the repeated pitch that is the only difference between the tenors and the closest known chant source. On the other hand, the fact that both tenors are identical, while neither matches any observed chant version, would suggest that the composer of the second motet (whichever came second) borrowed the tenor of the first, or even that the two motet creators modified the tenor together before beginning their individual motets. The chant usually appears as the final responsory of Vigils on Good Friday, but French sources sometimes vary in this placement, as can be seen in the three sources used in Example .: Arras, Bibliothèque municipale, , fol. r (St-Vaast, Arras, fourteenth century): . BnF, lat. , fols v–r (Notre-Dame, Paris, c. ): . Cambrai, Le Labo, , fol. r (Cambrai Cathedral, c. –): .
Because none of these sources, nor any other found so far, provides an exact match with the tenor melody, we cannot assume that any of these specific liturgical placements was in the mind of the creator of either motet. We cannot, for instance, posit a connection between the motet tenor and a specific reading that might precede the responsory in the use of a particular institution. Even the association with Good Friday, to which the chant is consistently assigned, may not have been an overriding factor here, though other motets do more or less explicitly compare the narrator’s suffering with the Passion of Christ by the use of a tenor taken from a chant for Lent or Holy Week. Here, however, the words of the tenor may resonate more with the general biblical context of the Book of Lamentations. The main biblical source for the chant, including the part used in the tenor, is Lamentations :, though there may be hints of other biblical references. The tenor fragment comes from the repetendum of the respond, which means that when it returns following the verse, it completes the quote: O vos omnes qui transitis per viam, attendite, et videte si est dolor sicut dolor meus! O all ye that pass by the way, attend, and see if there be any sorrow like to my sorrow!
Gilbert the Universal’s Glossa ordinaria, based largely on the ninth-century commentator Paschasius Radbertus, compares the Book of Lamentations to the Song of Songs: the laments reflect the misery caused by ‘the bridegroom’s absence from the bride’. The lamenting figure here is not identified as a type or prefiguration of Christ, which is the way the passage is used within the context of the Good Friday liturgy. Rather, Gilbert describes the figure as embodying Jerusalem (in the historical sense), the Church (in the allegorical sense), and •
• •
Here I am using abbreviations for liturgical placement from the Cantus Database, (): . refers to the third responsory of the second nocturn of Matins (Vigils), . to the first responsory of the third nocturn, and so on. Biblical readings here are from the Bible Gateway App, associated with ; Latin from the Biblia Sacra Vulgata, English from the Douay-Rheims American Edition. ‘[…] in quibus sponsi a sponsa absentia multimodis fletibus deploratur’. Andrée , (Latin), (English).
Alice V. Clark
the soul (in the tropological sense). She is ultimately responsible for the spouse’s desertion because of ‘the ugliness of her nefarious actions’, but the implication is that she does not accept that responsibility and repent. The historical interpretation of verse notes that ‘it is characteristic of the unfortunate to estimate by so much more their own suffering, as they so much less care to comprehend a foreign one’. Gilbert links his commentary to rhetorical topics drawn from Cicero’s De inventione, and for Lamentations :, he refers to the twelfth topic of indignation: ‘one by means of which we express our indignation that we should be the first people to whom this has happened, and that it has never occurred in any other instance’. This notion that one’s own suffering is unprecedented and by implication undeserved may be echoed in the narrators of both motets, who blame their suffering entirely on others (mostly Fortune and Amours, but also other enemies). Here the tenor may serve to suggest that the narrators should accept responsibility rather than complain. Fortune/Ma doulour brings the tenor text into the upper voices more explicitly than Amer/Durement (Tables . and . provide the texts and translations for both motets): the word ‘dolour’ appears in the first line of both motetus and triplum, where it forms one of the rhyming sounds of the triplum’s first and last stanzas. As Example . shows, the motet opens with a striking unison breve on c that further links Dolor meus (tenor) / Ma douleur (motetus) to Fortune in the triplum. The first half of the triplum continues the focus on the figure of Fortune rather than on the love object herself, a focus that Anna Zayaruznaya has shown to be musically reflected through voice crossings. The ‘innocent and pure one’ (nete et pure; line of the triplum), whom the narrator claims to love, only appears at the midpoint, leading into the second statement of the tenor melody. While dolour is used twice in the triplum of Amer Amours/Durement (lines and of Table .), it is not foregrounded in either text or music. Arguably more important in this text is doçour (line ), and the comparison it sets up between forms of douz (sweet) and dur (hard) or amer (bitter), which in turn can be contrasted with amer as ‘to love’. The motetus also uses durement, though without any contrasting reference to sweetness. (The words doucement and dure are also prominent in the second stanza of the triplum of Fortune/Ma doulour.) These comparisons remain fundamentally on the textual level rather than the musical one: while dur and doulz are used in Machaut’s motet Dame je sui cils qui vueil endurer/ Fins cuers dous, on me deffent/ Fins cuers dous (M) to create a musical play between the hard and soft hexachords, that kind of punning does not happen here. • • •
• • •
‘[…] pro feditate turpitudinis a sponso derelicta’. Andrée , (Latin), (English). ‘Proprium est miserorum tanto maiorem estimare dolorem suum, quanto alienum minus intelligere studuerunt et, quo magis dolorem suum sentiunt, alienum sibi equari non consentiunt’. Andrée , (Latin), (English). This is discussed in the introduction of Andrée , . The translation of Cicero’s De inventione, by Charles Duke Yonge, comes from ; the twelfth topic of indignation appears in Book I chapter . The texts and translations in Tables . and . come from Zayaruznaya , –; Zayaruznaya’s Latin texts are based on, and slightly modified from, PMFC V. Zayaruznaya . I discuss the hexachordal punning in this motet in Clark a, –. See Jacques Boogaart’s chapter in this volume for an in-depth discussion of M.
Dolor meus: Competing Visions of Suffering in a Pair of Motets
Table .: Fortune/Ma doulour, texts and translations
Triplum Fortune, mere à dolour et norrice de tristour, prenant norriture en continuel labour entre bon chance d’onnour et muance de valour. La fausse perjure
a a b' a a a b'
Fortune, mother of sorrow, nurse of sadness, taking her nourishment from the unending conflict between the good luck of honor and the instability of virtue. The false perjurer
qui foy ne tient longuement ne ne set arrestement n’onques n’aseure, mout me traita doucement quant j’amay premierement; mais or est soudaynement vers moy si tres dure
c c b' c c c b'
who does not long keep her word, does not know rest, nor is ever steady, treated me very gently when I first loved; but now suddenly she is so harsh towards me
que tout mon bien en pourpris Jalousie a rendu pris. C’est la nete et pure, qui de biauté a le pris, en qui tout bien est compris, qui m’a si tres fort espris qu’à moy n’a mesure.
d d b' d d d b'
that she has taken all my good things captive [and] given them to Jealousy as tribute. It is the innocent and pure one gifted with beauty, in whom all goodness resides, who has so powerfully enflamed me that for me she is beyond measure.
Helas, elle emporte ou soy mon cuer dolent loing de moy; mes se m’aseüre qu’elle a, par sa bone foy, autant come j’ay d’enoy et de mal, si con ge croy, de ceste aventure.
e e b' e e e b'
Alas, she carries with her my sorrowing heart, far from me; but she assures me that she, through her good faith – as I believe it – , endures as much torment and sadness [as I do] as a result of this calamity.
Et si say que ferme amour pour la cheance du tour de Fortune obscure corrumpue m’ert nul jour.
a a b' a
And so I know that constant love, because of the disposition of obscure Fortune, will be forever corrupted for me.
a b' a b' b' a a b' b' a
My sorrow is unending, rather it has a new strength, for I have lost the comfort of the sweet glance of the fair one in whom goodness is a handmaiden; and I get nothing in return, alas, except for memory, the wretched one, where joy reveals itself little. Death, I call you, come to me; I prefer you to living so defeated.
Motetus Ma doulour ne cesse pas, ains est en virtu novelle, quar j’ay perdu le soulas du douz regart de la belle en qui bonté est ancelle; si ne m’est remés, helas, riens, fors souvenir, le las, où joie poi se revele. Mort, vien à moy ge t’apele; miex t’ain que vivre si mat.
Alice V. Clark
Table .: Amer Amours/Durement, texts and translation
Triplum Amer Amours est la choison pourquoy elle a volu mon cuer oster de moy pour l’ensarrer en un lieu où je croy c’om l’ocirra,
a a a b
Hostile Love is the reason why she has desired to take my heart away to imprison it in a place where I believe it will be killed,
quar de celle qui contre son gré l’a mort ou amés parfaitement sera, et je le vueil ayns qu’il emparte ja pour retorner.
b b b c
for by her who holds it against its will, it will be killed or loved perfectly, and I want it before it sets out to return.
Quar la doçour de son douz regarder, quant moy li plaist doucement regarder, croire me fait qu’elle me vueille amer et enardir
c c c d
For the sweetness of her gentle gaze, when it pleases her to look upon me tenderly, makes me believe that she wishes to love and encourage me
de ma dolour humblement descovrir; mais quant se vient à merci requirir et je le voy sa response garnir d’aspre Dangier
d d d e
to humbly divest myself of my sadness; but when it comes time to ask for mercy and I see her garrison her answer with harsh Danger
et de Refus, que je tiens pour bouchier de cher d’ami, lors ne say que jugier lequel des trois ge doy mains avoir cher, le traïtour
e e e f
and with Denial, whom I hold to be the butcher of lovers’ flesh, then I don’t know how to judge which of the three I should hold least dear: the traitor
qui me conduit desarmés en sejour mon anemi, ou li, quant à dolour m’i fait languir, ou moy qui par folour partir n’en say.
f f f g
who leads me unarmed into the dwelling of my enemy, or her, who makes me sorrowfully languish there, or myself who foolishly knows not [how] to leave.
Quar grant biauté est sovent sens bonté, cuer dur en cors paré d’umilité, n’en douz regart n’a point de seürté.
g g g
For great beauty is often without goodness, a hard heart [can be] in a body embellished with humility, nor is there any guarantee in a sweet glance.
Motetus Durement au cuer me blece ce que dient li plusour, qu’Amours est de tel noblece que faire ne puet faus tour;
a' b a' b
It wounds me grievously in the heart, what many say: that Love is of such noble birth that she cannot make a false move;
mais en moy sens le contraire, quar puis qu’à Amours donna mes cors mon cuers sens retraire, elle tantost le livra
c' d c' d
but in me I feel the opposite, for since my body gave my heart to Love without hesitation, she immediately handed it over
à son mortel ennemi qui droit faire ne merci ne veut; diex! si n’ay ge mie pour amer mor deservie!
e e f ' f '
to her mortal enemy, who does not desire justice or mercy. By God! I have not earned death through loving!
Dolor meus: Competing Visions of Suffering in a Pair of Motets
Example .: Fortune/Ma doulour, bars –
&
˙™
For
& ?b
˙™ tu
-
-
˙™
˙™
Ma
œ
ne,
mere
˙™
˙™
-
-
œ™ à
˙™
dou
˙™
j œ
Ϫ
Ϫ
do
˙™
˙™
˙™
lour
ne
˙™
-
˙™
lour
-
˙™
˙™
˙™
˙™
Ó™
˙™
˙™
Dolour meus Tenor Talea 1 7
& ˙™
œ
et
nor
& ˙™ ces
? b ˙™
j œ
j œ œ -
-
˙™ -
-
de
-
se
ri - ce
-
Ó™
Ϫ
Ϫ
˙™ -
˙™
Ϫ
˙™ Ó™
Ϫ
tris
-
tour,
pas,
Ó™
˙™
Both motets have triplum texts that mix longer and shorter lines, ending with short final stanzas, and their structures can be seen as distorted mirror images: Amer Amours has seven stanzas of four lines (but the last stanza has only three lines), while Fortune, mere à doulour can be read as four stanzas of seven lines (but with an extra stanza of four lines). Amer Amours’s stanzas mix three ten-syllable lines that have a common rhyme with one of four syllables that introduces the rhyme of the next syllable’s long lines. Neither ten nor four is present in the talea structure, but six, the difference between them, is: the tenor has six taleae of six pitches each, and the opening introitus is twelve breves (×). Fortune can also be interpreted as consisting of five stanzas, the fifth of which has only four lines. Each full-length stanza mixes five seven-syllable lines with two five-syllable lines. This aligns with the use of five taleae of seven tenor pitches. (The extra tenor pitch squeezed in at the end of the final talea in a sense mirrors the shortened fifth stanza of text.) While each stanza has a different stressed rhyme for the seven-syllable lines, the five-syllable lines of each stanza share a single unstressed ‘silent e’ rhyme (-ure), in its constancy perhaps creating an ironic commentary on the mutability of Fortune. The short final stanza breaks the pattern by bringing back the ‘-our’ rhyme of the first stanza; it does not use the word dolour from the opening (drawn, of course, from the tenor), but its first line does end with the word amour, which may further provide a link with Amer Amours. For each iteration of the tenor talea, a stanza of the Fortune triplum is set, with the break coming not at the end of the stanza but a line (plus one syllable) before. That gives both the •
The mixture of short lines into stanzas of longer lines is not unique to these motets: Kügle , –, for instance, uses that and other aspects of textual structure to link Amer Amours/Durement to three other motets, though interestingly not to Fortune/Ma doulour.
Alice V. Clark
first and the final talea each six lines of text (minus one syllable for the former, plus one syllable for the latter), more or less balancing them. This shifting of the short seventh line of each stanza to the talea that sets the next stanza reflects the semantic division at the end of the first stanza of text (et muance de valour. | La fausse perjure), perhaps enacting the inability of ‘the false perjurer’ to keep her word by staying within her stanza. In Amer Amours/Durement, each of the triplum’s seven stanzas consists of three tensyllable lines with a common rhyme and one four-syllable line whose rhyme becomes the rhyme of the next stanza’s ten-syllable lines; the final stanza lacks that four-syllable line. The talea structure reinforces the linking nature of the four-syllable line by beginning each talea (save the first one) on the final syllable of the preceding stanza. The introitus sets the first three lines of text, and the fourth line of the stanza is merged into the first talea. The final stanza, which does not contain the four-syllable line, ends with the words ‘point de seüreté’ (no guarantee), which may subtly allude to this departure from expectation. Both motetus texts use seven-syllable lines and alternate stressed and unstressed rhymes; each also sets roughly two lines of text for each talea. The three stanzas of Durement au cuer are therefore spread over its six taleae. The shift of rhyme structure for the third stanza becomes a key moment in the musical setting, as we will see below. It may be worth noting that the word doulour does not appear in this text, though the rhyming sound ‘-our’ does appear in the first stanza. Ma doulour ne cesse pas has ten lines with an unusual rhyme scheme: the text begins with a regular ab'ab' quatrain, then the pattern is reversed to b'a, again to ab', and again to b'a. Though this motetus text does not refer to Fortune the way its triplum does, the continual reversal of expectations in its rhyme scheme may allude to Fortune’s wheel. The motetus Durement au cuer me blece has three quatrains; the first two alternate unstressed and stressed rhymes (a'ba'b c'dc'd), while the third moves to pairs of stressed and unstressed rhymes (e'e'ff ). The shift marks the moment the narrator’s heart is handed to Love’s ‘mortal enemy’. This poetic rupture is underlined by a musical one (see Example .): in taleae –, longs – of each triplum talea and longs – of each motetus talea had identical rhythms, but in talea the triplum breaks the pattern after three longs (see bar ), moving in parallel fifths with the motetus as the motetus briefly moves below the tenor. This final stanza also leads to a shift in the distribution of text in the motetus: for taleae –, each new talea began on the final syllable of an even-numbered line (so that, following that note and a rest, each odd line would begin a new phrase). In talea , the first two lines of the third quatrain are compressed (at least in the version given in Iv) so that the shift to talea occurs not at the end of line but after the first syllable, ‘ne’, of line . This shift serves to align and call attention to the word ‘enemy’ (anemi / ennemi) in both upper voices (bars –). •
•
The motetus lies below the tenor for most of the first color of this motet, but the tenor takes its normal position as lower voice for most of the second half. The use of voice crossing in these motets, especially Fortune/Ma doulour, is discussed more fully in Zayaruznaya , –. This source is also missing a word in line . Desmond a, n. , notes that it would be possible to text this line differently, as other sources do, but this creates other problems. She accepts the reading in Iv, in part because it gives a perfect long to the exclamation diex! in the final talea.
Dolor meus: Competing Visions of Suffering in a Pair of Motets
Example .: Amer Amours/Durement, bars – 85
Ó™
& ˙™
Ϫ
tour
qui
& b ˙™ ra
? b ˙™
˙™
j œ œ
œ
me
Ó™
˙™
Ó™
Ϫ
j œ
Ϫ
con - duit de - sar - més
˙™ à
˙™
˙™
˙™
˙™
Ó™
Ó™
Ϫ
en
Talea 5 91
j & œ œj œ œ ˙ ™ se
&b
-
jour
j j œ œ œ œ ˙™ son
?b ˙™
˙™
j œ™ œ œj œ j œ œj œ œ™ œ œ ˙ ™
mon a - ne - mi,
ou
li,
§
˙™
mor - tel
˙™
Ϫ Ϫ
˙™
œ™ œ™ œ ™ n œ ™
en - ne - mi
˙™
˙™
§
quant à do - lour §
j œ œ œ œ œ ˙™ ˙™
qui
˙™
§
j j œ œœ œ
droit fai -
˙™
Both motets double the eighteen-pitch borrowed melody to make a thirty-six-pitch tenor, but each treats it in a different way. The composer of Amer Amours/Durement divides it into six taleae of eighteen breves (nine imperfect longs) each; with an opening introitus of twelve breves (six longs), the motet has a total of breves (sixty longs). Fortune/Ma doulour also has breves, but it gets to that total differently, with five taleae of twenty-four breves or twelve longs. To make five taleae work with a thirty-six-pitch tenor, the final talea is modified to accommodate the extra tenor pitch. (As we will see, the motetus of that final talea also has an anomaly at the final cadence.) The first color (only) of Amer Amours/Durement is transposed up a fifth, which makes the tenor the highest-sounding voice when it enters after the opening introitus (this is shown in Example . below). It continues to function mostly as a medial voice, above the motetus, for most of the first color, as Zayaruznaya has observed. The first moment the motetus •
• •
According to the table in Leech-Wilkinson –, , twenty-four-breve taleae are fairly common, though the only other motet with five twenty-four-breve taleae (divided into eight perfect longs) is Mon chant/ Qui doloreus/ Tristis est anima mea, edited as no. in PMFC V. That motet has a seventeen-pitch color stated three times for fifty-one total pitches; the final talea has eleven pitches, stating the two penultimate pitches (both on d) in the space of the altered breve of earlier taleae. The sonic effect of two unaltered breves on the same pitch is equivalent to that of an altered breve, so the listener would likely be unaware of the alteration. Leech-Wilkinson gives a number of motets with breves, but the only other one that adds a twelve-breve introitus for total breves is Tuba/ In arboris/ Virgo sum; he links that motet as well to Almifonis/ Rosa/ Tenor (edited as no. in PMFC V), which combines an introitus of eight perfect breves to a body of perfect breves. Kügle , , confirms that this transposition is ‘unique among the surviving motets of the Ars Nova’. See Zayaruznaya , , where she links it not only to Fortune/Ma doulour, but also to Machaut’s Helas/Corde mesto (M), in which the upper voices are crossed for the first half of the motet. She extends this comparison in Zayaruznaya , –, where she suggests that the use of voice crossing here reflects not Fortune (whom she acknowledges is not present in this motet) but the Lady as ‘psychologically split […] between her outward actions and her inward disposition’ (p. ).
Alice V. Clark
sounds above the tenor occurs during the motetus’s word contraire (see bar in Example .); the last syllable of that word marks the midpoint of the motet as a whole (that is, including its introitus), but is still within the tenor’s first color and third talea. The motetus then descends below the tenor again, or touches on unisons with it, until bars –, on the first pitch of the tenor’s second color, when it leaps a ninth from F (a fifth below the tenor) to g (a fifth above the tenor). At this moment the motetus moves from the lowest position to the highest, briefly going even above the triplum before moving to a unison with it, after which the triplum leaps a fifth from f to c' (balancing the tenor’s leap from c to F), restoring their normal relationship. The uncrossing therefore works across both the midpoint of the tenor’s talea structure (the beginning of the second color and fourth talea) and the midpoint of the motet as a whole (including the introitus). The motetus briefly crosses below the tenor again in bars – (Example .). As mentioned, at this point the rhythmic repetition that occurred in the triplum in longs – of taleae – is cut off, in the process bringing into alignment the triplum’s words mon anemi with the motetus’s word ennemi. The result places the tenor in the middle of the narrator’s two enemies. Aside from the common tenor and the total number of breves, the basic structures of these motets have little in common. Amer Amours/Durement has an introitus, while Fortune/Ma doulour does not. They have different numbers and lengths of taleae, and different numbers and forms of text stanzas. So far, it is difficult to see a connection between these two motets beyond their common tenor and the voice crossing discussed by Zayaruznaya – unless it is the number five, the interval of transposition in Amer Amours/Durement and the number of taleae in Fortune/Ma doulour. Fives are also present in the texts of Fortune/ Ma doulour (but not Amer Amours/Durement): the triplum has five stanzas (if you include the short final stanza, like the tornada of troubadour song), which make regular use of fivesyllable lines with the same rhyme (-ure). The opening fifth of the tenor is also echoed in the opening of the upper voices of both motets. As shown in Example ., the triplum introitus of Amer Amours/Durement traces the opening g-c movement of its tenor, moving from g to c throughout its first line, eventually returning to g to close, then dropping back down to c as the tenor takes over the g, momentarily the highest voice in the musical texture. Similarly, the falling fifth c-F that opens the second color in the tenor (Example .) is reversed by a rising fifth f-c' in the triplum in bars –. Fortune/Ma doulour begins with a striking unison c in all voices, but the triplum then jumps up a fifth (Example .). The motetus makes a more leisurely move from c to e to g, after which it moves above the triplum for most of the first half of the first talea, perhaps to make more audible its use of perfect modus (as we will see later), as well as to foreshadow the more extensive crossing that will take place later in the motet. • •
Zayaruznaya , , characterizes this as representing a ‘split […] within the lady’s contradictory nature’, which she sees as comparable to the two halves of Fortune’s nature. The f-a motion in the motetus at this point might echo the opening of Fortune/Ma doulour. There are other moments in this motet of rising or falling fifths, either leaps or filled in; there are also other cases of unisons between two or three parts, such as the three-part unison at bar that also resembles the opening of Fortune/Ma doulour.
57
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Dolor meus: Competing Visions of Suffering in a Pair of Motets
Alice V. Clark
The tenor’s talea structure is reflected to a degree in the upper voices of both motets, but in Amer Amours/Durement that reflection is largely limited to the first part of the talea (except for the first talea), specifically longs – of the triplum and longs – of the motetus. As shown in the passage in Example ., the motetus has an imperfect long, a breve rest, and a perfect long, a rhythm that evokes the perfect modus of Fortune/Ma doulour, though Amer Amours/Durement does not in fact use perfect modus, as is elsewhere made clear. The rhythmic repetition in the upper voices of Fortune/Ma doulour, on the other hand, goes much further, especially in the motetus, which has only small variations in rhythm, especially in the tenth and sixteenth breve of each talea. The triplum uses similar rhythms in three parts of the talea (again with adjustments for first and last taleae), most notably in breves – and –, which set the short lines of the poetic stanzas with identical rhythms over long notes and/or rests in motetus and tenor. These passages are further highlighted by the use of similar melodic contours. As is illustrated in Example ., the descending line in breves –, which echoes the opening of the motet (as well as the introitus of Amer Amours/Durement), recurs in taleae and (beginning on a') and taleae and (beginning on g). Both motets use imperfect tempus and major prolation, common in many motets. The two tenor taleae both begin with maximas and move in imperfect modus, as the patterns of rests make clear, but the motetus of Fortune/Ma doulour uses perfect modus. (This can be seen in Example ..) The mixture of modus between the tenor and upper voices is one of many forms of mensural experimentation present in fourteenth-century motets. The op •
•
• • •
•
Zayaruznaya , , suggests that the early crossing ‘probably serves to highlight the unusual smoothness of this voice’, which I believe again exists here mostly to underline the contradictory modus. I agree with her that the long notes and phrases characteristic of this voice and particularly present here ‘confirm that there is no respite’, underlining the motetus’s words ‘My sorrow is unending’ (Ma dolour ne cesse pas). There are fleeting moments when the motetus is above the triplum before the extended crossing (bars –), most notably at the midpoint, just before the beginning of the second color (bars –). The end of the triplum talea (breves –) also uses similar rhythms in taleae –, and there are some similarities of melodic contour here and there as well, such as the use of semibreves on the same pitch rising to a breve one step higher in breves –. The rhythmic pattern is altered slightly at the end of talea , a ‘last-time exception’ similar to those I discuss in Clark . I discuss such examples of melodic repetition, which are more common in Machaut’s motets than elsewhere, in Clark . Desmond a, , actually argues that Amer Amours/Durement may have been ‘originally conceived in an ars antiqua style of notation like that found in Fauv’. In n. she calls Fortune/Ma doulour another possible candidate. Desmond a, n. , notes that the edition in PMFC V does not reflect these motetus units. Desmond further observes that the perfect modus units dominate on the level of harmony, with ‘a significantly higher proportion [of perfect and mixed sonorities] occur on the first breves of the perfect modus units, and a higher percentage of purely imperfect sonorities occur on the imperfect modus first breves’ (p. ). She says that the distribution of text also supports perfect modus, though her examples seem to focus on those moments when perfect and imperfect modus units meet. Still, her concluding suggestion that we pay more attention to the role of the motetus in driving mensuration, among other things, is worth considering. Desmond a, , asserts that ‘Many ars nova motets exploit these kinds of juxtapositions of perfect and imperfect modus between voices’. The main example she discusses is Colla jugo subdere/ Bona condit cetera/ Libera me, which the ‘Vitry, Philippe de’ Grove article by Bent and Wathey lists as ‘widely accepted’ as being by Vitry; it too has imperfect modus in the tenor, perfect modus in the motetus. Zayaruznaya a examines four-voice motets that mix modus in
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Dolor meus: Competing Visions of Suffering in a Pair of Motets
Alice V. Clark
Example .: Amer Amours/Durement, bars – 31
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Dolor meus: Competing Visions of Suffering in a Pair of Motets
• •
•
• •
Table , on p. : in each of the motets listed there, the upper voices either lack modus organization or share the modus of the tenor; where the tenor’s modus shifts, the upper voices carry the second tenor modus. The only exception on that table is Trop ay dure/ Par sauvage/ Tenor, edited as no. in PMFC V, which uses imperfect modus in the upper voices and perfect modus in both lower voices; this motet is a unicum in Iv and appears in the same fascicle as our two motets, following Amer Amours/Doucement. Kügle , and n. , notes that the tenor and contratenor of Trop ay/Par sauvage are incomplete, possibly because of the red notation that was never copied. The motet that was copied after that one in Iv fascicle (in the space after the chace Umblemens vos pri), L’amoureuse flour d’esté/ En l’estat d’amere tristour/ [Sicut fenum arui], seems also to mix perfect modus in the tenor with imperfect modus in the upper voices. Hoppin notes several motets by Machaut where the upper voices move more flexibly than the tenor’s modus units would suggest, as well as two motets (M and M) where the upper voices move in a different modus from the tenor. He does not mention this anomaly in the commentary to PMFC V, but at the time it was standard practice to modify editions so that all voices would end together. This is not the only motet whose voices do not end together. See for instance Machaut’s Amours, qui a le pooir/ Faus Samblant m’a deceu/ Vidi Dominum (M), where the triplum moves to its final note a breve after the other parts. This cadence is discussed and correctly rendered in Jacques Boogaart’s edition; see Boogaart a, and . ‘The motetus’s modus divisions become more ambiguous as the talea progresses, and by the talea’s end this voice seems to articulate an imperfect modus, only to reassert perfect modus again as the next tenor talea and textual couplet of the motetus commence’ (Desmond a, ). As she says, this imperfect long falls on the first syllable of lines and of each of the motetus’s three stanzas, with the exception of the first and last taleae. She acknowledges that the final talea could be made to fit the pattern by setting syllables to minims, which has not been done so far. Either solution fits the ‘last-time exception’ that I suggest in Clark . Desmond a, . Zayaruznaya , n. , argues that Fortune/Ma dolour responds to Machaut’s Helas/Corde mesto (M), and Amer Amours/Durement follows both.
Talea 5
position of perfect and imperfect modus here creates something of a problem at the final cadence (Example .). Each talea until the last ends with a perfect long in the motetus, followed by a breve that imperfects the final long. The final talea breaks the imperfect long, but more importantly the breve-imperfect long conclusion would have the motetus move to its final note a breve before the other voices. Harrison’s edition therefore reads the motetus’s final breve as effectively altered, counting as two breves in length, so all three parts resolve together. This may be the correct solution, but it may also be the case that the premature cadence might be intentional, embodying either the corrupted love (amour […] corrumpue) of the triplum or the motetus’s own call for death as preferable to ‘living so defeated’ (vivre si mat). Amer Amours/Durement does not mix modus in the way Fortune/Ma doulour does, but the pattern of rests and long notes at the beginning of the motetus starting in the second talea (Example .) hints at perfect modus. Karen Desmond goes so far as to call the modus of the motetus Durement initially perfect but ‘destabilised’ over the course of the talea, supporting a reading of ‘duplicity perhaps foreshadowing that of the lady revealed at the motet’s close’. The use of either a hint at perfect modus or a fully destabilized version might suggest that the creator of this motet is nodding to that of Fortune/Ma doulour, which could confirm the common view that it was written before Amer Amours/Durement. These two motets, then, make a number of subtle references to each other. They share a tenor melody that does not match exactly any identified version of the chant, and one that by lacking one note of a common cadential pattern suggests compositional alteration. The symbolic value of the chant in both motets seems less related to the liturgical context
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of Good Friday than to the biblical one of Lamentations, where it may echo the Glossa ordinaria to critique the upper-voice narrators’ complaints. Those complaints go in rather different directions – against Fortune in one triplum, against Love in the other – but both speak of outside enemies. Similarly, both motetus texts end by evoking death, but while Fortune/Ma doulour calls on death as a welcome release, Amer Amours/Durement calls such death unearned. A number of other subtle interconnections further link the texts of the two motets. The tenor melody moves completely by step, except for a striking opening descending fifth, an interval that becomes part of the musical material of both motets in the form of prominent fifth leaps. The number five becomes a significant element in other ways as well: Fortune/ Ma douleur divides the thirty-six pitches of its tenor by five – a seemingly strange choice – while Amer Amours/Durement transposes its first color up a fifth. Most of these features do not make clear the direction of influence: either could serve as a model for the other, or they could have been created more or less simultaneously, with each responding to and competing with each other. The strongest clue for priority might be the mixed modus of Fortune/ Ma doulour, with Amer Amours/Durement making a subtle nod to the other motet through the use of perfect longs in its motetus. In the end, though, while it seems clear the two motets ‘knew each other’, the point may be that each seeks to retain its own identity, even while their narrators seem to compete for who truly suffers most. Perhaps that image of a community of independent creators at play is a heartening one for our time, and one that Larry Earp’s work has helped foster.
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Alice V. Clark
The interval of the perfect fifth is, of course, normally called a diapente in medieval theory, but the term ‘quinta’ (fifth) was at least available, and it is used in at least one treatise alongside the traditional term: ‘Diapente est species perfecta et vocatur quinta’, quoted in Fuller , n. , citing Di Bacco , –.
. T ‘T’ E C I C* Michael Scott Asato Cuthbert
The Ivrea Codex (Iv) is one of the most important sources of polyphonic sacred music of the fourteenth century. Long thought to be a French source, possibly from Avignon or Foix, more recent work by Karl Kügle has argued (convincingly to me) that a local origin for the source in Ivrea (Piedmont) is more likely, and that scribes from Savoy may have brought the French and French-influenced repertory to northwest Italy, giving a date to the manuscript in the late s, s, or s. With the long-awaited facsimile of the manuscript now available, new observations and discoveries on this important source can now be made. Those images together with the entry of many of the neglected Iv items into the Electronic Medieval Music Score Archive Project (EMMSAP) shed important new insights into some of the compositions from the manuscript that hitherto had gone undiscerned. The two pieces with which this small contribution is mainly concerned are textless compositions added to the bottom of fol. r, the page containing the end of the Sanctus Sanans fragilia, and the final folio of the manuscript, placed at the end of Gathering VI. Each composition to be discussed is in two voices, with an undesignated upper part in C-clef that I will call ‘cantus’, and a lower part with an F-clef that I will call ‘tenor’. The second piece begins around the middle of the second staff from the bottom; a facsimile of these passages appears as Figure .. Their connection with the larger manuscript has long been a minor mystery in fourteenth-century music studies, but a closer examination of the notation, the tenors, and their connections with other pieces reveals much about scribal interests in the borderlands among Italy, France, and Switzerland in the late Trecento. *
• •
•
Among humanists, I have always been a data sort of person: diagrams and lists sing to me as much as witty words and flowery prose. Tables contain their own arguments along with their evidence. As an undergraduate when I discovered a heavy tome called Guillaume de Machaut: A Guide to Research, my eyes opened wide. Here was a sort of musicology that spoke my language; one whose codes begged to be deciphered, and whose insights still inspire me today. I immediately wanted to have as deep an understanding of my own field of Trecento polyphony as that writer had on Machaut. Later, when I met the charming, humble, and witty author of the volume – one who could also speak about Webern as passionately as on Vitry – I was even more convinced that musicology can be advanced in myriad ways, both technical and musical. I offer to that remarkable person, Larry Earp, this small token of my appreciation about a manuscript that intersects our related fields. I am grateful to Mons. Giovannino Giovanni Battista, director of the Archivio Diocesano of Ivrea for permission to reproduce images of the source in this paper, and to Margaret Bent, Karl Kügle, Jan Koláček, and Ján Janovčík for comments and encouragement on earlier versions of the text. Kügle , –; Kügle , –; Kügle , . Some of the observations in this paper were originally made from access to poor scans of an nth-generation microfilm prior to the publication of the facsimile and were shared with Kügle before it was released. Thus a prior, unpublished version of this essay is referred to in Kügle as ‘Cuthbert a’. This substantially revised version has been improved from insights from the higher quality images now available. The EMMSAP project is an attempt to encode all mensural or polyphonic music originally from at least (now extending back to ) to ; Michael Scott Asato Cuthbert, Principal Investigator, Anna Kathryn Grau, managing director, along with many other contributors (–present). Corwyn Wyatt was the encoding consultant for the Iv works that yielded new discoveries.
Two ‘Textless’ Elaborations of Chant from the Ivrea Codex
Figure 23.1: .: Detail from Iv, fol. 64 r, including textless works (Archivio Diocesano, Ivrea)
Prior transcriptions The textless pieces have been transcribed twice, first by Walter Kurt Kreyszig and then independently by Gordon K. Greene.4 Greene did not seem to have been aware of Kreyszig’s earlier work as it is not cited in his PMFC volumes. The independence of their editions allowed them to make starkly different choices in transcription. Kreyszig interpreted the opening of the cantus of each piece in imperfect tempus and transcribed their tenors as written in mensural notation, finding the lower voices to be approximately twice as long as the cantus. He supposed that a sign of repetition had faded from the manuscript and thus . shows the openrepeated the same cantus melody over different tenor notes.5 Example 23.1 ing of his transcription of the first textless piece, including the first twelve tenor notes. Example 23.1: .: Iv, fol. 64 r, opening of the first first textless piece as transcribed by Kreyszig
4 • • • 5 •
Kreyszig 1984, , 282–87 – (edition), 146–60 – (commentary). PMFC XXII, 142–43 – (edition), 184 (commentary). Kreyszig 1984, , 153. .
486
Michael Scott Asato Cuthbert
Greene, on the other hand, transcribed the cantus largely in perfect tempus and – in order to account for the differences in length between the two parts – placed the tenor in : diminution. Two notes at the end of the tenor could not be made to fit into Greene’s transcription and were removed. His version appears as Example . (and also includes the first twelve tenor notes). Example .: Iv, fol. r, opening of the first textless piece as transcribed by Greene
For the second work, Kreyszig used minor prolation with perfect and imperfect tempus, or a simultaneous combination of 42 and 43 , with the same interpretation of the tenor as above, but here needing no repeats (Example .). Example .: Iv, fol. r, opening of the second textless piece as transcribed by Kreyszig
Greene’s interpretation, in contrast, placed both voices in perfect tempus and minor prolation, with the tenor not in diminution (Example .). By amending the initial breve to a long, his transcription made the majority of the notes of the cantus sound against a different tenor note from that of Kreyszig’s edition (that is, one note later). This emendation necessitated changing the third tenor note from G to a. Both editions have the cantus largely in eighth notes for the first half of the edition, switching to an alternation between slower (half and quarter) and faster (triplet-eighth and sixteenth) notes in the second half. The continuation of Kreyszig’s edition from Example . is given as Example .; Greene’s transcriptions are similar.
• •
Kreyszig , . Indications of the continuation of the F# are omitted. PMFC XXII, . Indications of the continuation of the same F# are again omitted.
Two ‘Textless’ Elaborations of Chant from the Ivrea Codex
Example .: Iv, fol. r, opening of the second textless piece as transcribed by Greene
Example .: Rhythmic variety of the cantus in Kreyszig’s edition of the second untexted piece
Despite many editorially supplied emendations in both editions, the transcribed tenor notes often create intervals of seconds, fourths, and sevenths with the cantus. Further, the rhythmic lurching of both parts seems both atypical and unmusical, hardly fitting the collecting patterns of a scribe who otherwise put his or her skill towards the copying of some of the most beautiful motets and masses of the period. As the reader has certainly guessed by now, I plan to offer new transcriptions in this chapter, ones that I hope are more musically satisfying. The liturgical basis for the works The EMMSAP project, mentioned above, uses computational algorithms and a large database (currently comprising about of all known polyphonic works from the period –) to find previously unknown quotations, concordances, and stylistic similarities between compositions. To date, the project has found new direct connections between almost forty pairs of ‘works’. (I use scare quotes since some of these independent transcriptions can now be shown to be different sections of the same work.) I will dispel any suspense by stating that no concordances or quotations were found for either of these works. However, the EMMSAP algorithm found three stylistically similar passages for the cantus of the second piece, all of which were from Italian secular works. The connection of style to Italian pieces spurred me to consider these pieces anew, considering styles of composing known only through native Italian works as possible solutions in transcription. The notation of the tenor voice of both pieces seemed quite different from typical French ars nova motet tenors. It is far more similar to the notation of plainchant, with rhomboid notes indicating currentes rather than semibreves (see the end of the second full staff and the •
The similar works were Nicolò da Perugia’s madrigal Qual perseguita, the anonymous madrigal Avendo me falcon, and Andrea da Firenze’s ballata Sia quel ch’esser pò.
Michael Scott Asato Cuthbert
beginning of the third in Figure .). A search through Jan Koláček’s Global Chant Database (now affiliated with the Cantus Database) found a nearly perfect match for the first tenor, ‘Universi qui te exspectant’, the gradual from the Mass for the first Sunday in Advent (Psalm :). See Figure .. The entire gradual, minus the verse, is present in the tenor.
Figure .: Gradual ‘Universi qui te exspectant’ from Graduale Romanum (), p.
The second tenor did not yield as convincing a match. However, all but the final two notes are the same as those on the word ‘jejunasset’ in the Matins responsory, ‘Cum jejunasset dominus’. Those last two notes are the first and last notes of the immediately following melisma on ‘do-’ of ‘dominus’. A transcription based on the version found in the Cantus Database is Example .. Other matches to the same music are ‘Beata vere mater ecclesia quem’ from All Saints and ‘Gregorius ortus Romae ex senatorum’ from the feast of St Gregory, but neither of them place the quoted music in such a prominent position. Nonetheless, this identification should be considered provisional; a perfect match may yet be found. Example .: Transcription of the opening of ‘Cum jejunasset dominus’
The text of the responsory comes from Matthew :, ‘Et cum ieiunasset quadraginta diebus et quadraginta noctibus postea esuriit’ (Vulgate), or ‘After fasting forty days and forty nights, [ Jesus] was hungry’ (New International Version). Though the differences between Mass and Office, gradual and responsory, and Psalm and New Testament sources may seem to argue against a connection between these two Iv pieces, their parallel liturgical positions on the first Sunday in Advent and the first Sunday in Lent, respectively, unites them. These are pieces for the beginning of penitential seasons and their existence argues against the still pervasive notion that polyphony was not used during such solemn times of the year. They join the mainly monophonic mensural piece for John the Baptist, Basis prebens, as the only works in Iv that set Proper chants. • • •
See . A recording of the work with score can be found at . See . See also the version of the chant in BnF lat. , fol. r–v on Gallica. Interpretations of Basis prebens’s significance are found in Anderson , –.
Two ‘Textless’ Elaborations of Chant from the Ivrea Codex
The identification of each of these pieces as built on plainchant opens up the possibility that the notation of the tenors should not be interpreted mensurally. Instead of treating the note shapes like Franconian neumes, each note should be read as equal in length. This notational interpretation is known most famously in the tenor of Paolo ‘Tenorista’ da Firenze’s Benedicamus Domino in the manuscript Pit. Such pieces are common in Italian polyphony of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries (which I hope to soon argue might be considered a continuous period of ars mutandi or changing style, where stylistic change between closely copied pieces was admired). The pieces also form the basis for many instrumental settings such those of Fa. Until now, however, Paolo’s composition in Pit was the only known composition in which the plainchant was not renotated so that, if read as mensural notation, all the notes would become even in length. I have called such pieces ‘compositions on equal-note tenors’, though recently I have been informed that Reinhard Strohm had previously called such tenors ‘monorhythmic cantus firm[i]’. Since I last wrote about these tenors, I have also come to believe that they are a representation of the practice of cantare super librum. These works are presumably the few written survivors of the unwritten traditions taught in counterpoint treatises to create what Anna Maria Busse Berger terms a ‘memorial archive’ of standardized diminution formulas. In all but one previously known example of ‘monorhythm’, each note of the chant is to be sung as a breve. In that exceptional example, the Benedicamus Domino from a Paduan manuscript (Ob ), the chant is written in longs. By contrast, Iv’s Universi qui te exspectant (which I will now start calling the first textless work) requires the chant to be sung entirely in semibreves. Cum jejunasset (the second textless work) likewise begins with the chant in major prolation semibreves, but, for reasons to be explained below, switches to breves in perfect tempus halfway through. It is unclear to me which of the possible but conflicting insights to take away from the differences in notation of the chant lines among the various sources. If the Iv pieces are to be considered earlier than Paolo’s and the anonymous Paduan’s Benedicamus settings – which I think they should be – it may seem contradictory that shorter-named note values would have been the original norm that was later supplanted by longer note values, since throughout medieval music history the pace of notation moved from longer to shorter •
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Pit, fol. r. About this work, Willi Apel writes, ‘This [tenor] part contains, in addition to ordinary ligatures and single [longs], certain conjunctura-like characters which are very unusual in the polyphonic music of the fourteenth century, and which actually have no place in the Franconian system of ligatures. The explanation lies in the fact that the entire tenor is […written] in the characters of plainsong notation […]. In such tenors […] each note always has the value of a B, regardless of its shape’ (Apel , , ). Cuthbert , chap. . Strohm , . As the term primarily appears in a chapter on music after , I was not aware of this term when I fashioned my own. Earlier in the book (for example, p. ), Strohm uses the term ‘equal note-values’ to describe such pieces. An entire article could be written about the ambiguity of this term; literally ‘singing over a book’, it might be thought of as a form of unwritten, probably polyphonic, embellishment. Busse Berger , –. This work is also the only example of two-voice cantare super librum I can remember which is both integral to its surrounding manuscript, like Iv, and (unlike Iv) is also at a place of prominence at the top of the folio.
Michael Scott Asato Cuthbert
note values. On the other hand, since longer tenor notes allow for more notes to be placed against a single note of chant, perhaps this direction is less surprising. For as a tradition becomes more developed and codified and the practitioners (tenoristas?) become more professionalized, they are more able to conceive of and perform a greater number of notes against a tenor. The notation of Iv, Gathering VI, and new transcriptions A new basis for the notation of the tenors of Universi qui te exspectant and Cum jejunasset was not the only change needed to make accurate transcriptions of the pieces. Both works begin in imperfect tempus and major prolation. An unusual feature found in Gathering VI is the use of a minim with a stem (cauda) slanted to the right, indicating a four-in-the-placeof-three proportional relationship. This note form appears in both Iv pieces and its proper transcription is crucial to obtaining a correct alignment with the tenor. Transcribing these notes as normal minims, as in both previous transcriptions, moves the cantus line’s notes further and further away from their corresponding tenor pitches. Taking the alignment of text to neume from the Graduale Romanum, a new transcription of Universi qui te exspectant is given in Example .. Some of the details of minim stems, puncti, and accidentals are extremely difficult to see even in the most recent facsimile. On the whole, however, the alignment seems secure. Nevertheless, in the bar before the final long there is one discrepancy not easily dismissed. In bar of the transcription, the tenor is missing a semibreve (at the point marked [*]). I have repeated the G as it is the most likely scribal error, is found in some sources, and is the best contrapuntal solution. Other sources that transmit the chant with variations similar to the Iv version, such as Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm (a Gradual from Polling), fol. r, insert an E in this place, which is an acceptable if less convincing solution. An unusual moment in this piece occurs in bar , where the F/c fifth becomes an E/c# sixth before moving (after a ‘Landini cadence’ decoration) to a D/d octave. Such chromatic alterations of fifth to sixth before an octave are common in Italian compositional styles (sometimes called Marchettian sixths) and appear in Italian theory treatises (for instance, the ‘Nota has figuras’ examples), but they are less common (or even unknown?) in French sources. I do not want to make too much of this moment (indeed, there appears to be a g to g # motion in bar which makes little sense except perhaps as an evaded cadence), but it may point to this piece being a more local, northern Italian composition than much of the rest of the manuscript. The second piece – the setting of the ‘jejunasset’ neumes from Cum jejunasset dominus – begins similarly. It has a major prolation cantus that frequently uses : slanted minims, dragmae, and flagged minims. The notation here draws primarily on Italian principles of • •
Kügle , –. Other sources, such as Verdun, Bibliothéque municipale, , have many more differences. I have not yet consulted a representative sample of southern French, Savoyard, and Piedmont Graduales from the period. No source I have seen yet has this chant’s variation of omitting the second a-G repetition normally found on ‘exspectant’.
Two ‘Textless’ Elaborations of Chant from the Ivrea Codex
Example .: Iv, fol. r, Universi qui te exspectant
𝇈𝇈 𝇌𝇌
intrinsic notational signs. At the beginning of the last staff on the folio (Figure .), howand appear ever, the notation changes dramatically. Here the extrinsic mensural signs in alternation to show changes in proportion and mensuration, though dragmae continue to be employed in as a sort of added precaution. Setting the tenor in semibreves works well against the first line of the cantus, but, even considering the extensive damage to the end of the tenor, it is obvious that there are not enough tenor notes to fit the entire piece. Indeed, the music on the first three quarters or so of the second (bottom) staff lasts exactly twice as long as the music on the second half of the staff directly above.
𝇌𝇌
•
On the differences between intrinsic and extrinsic notational signs and their early use in Iv, see Stoessel , –.
Michael Scott Asato Cuthbert
What neither Kreyszig nor Greene noticed about the work is that this music on the second staff is nearly an exact restatement of the music of the first staff. It is a demonstration (by the scribe?) that the same work could be written in either the Italian or the French (that is, international) notational systems, so long as the tempus becomes the modus and the prolation becomes the tempus. Previous transcriptions I made from microfilms suggested that there might be slight differences between the Italian and French settings. Upon closer examination of the new facsimile, only the most minor changes remain: a minim rest in bar replaced by a dot in bar , a sharp in bar missing in bar , and an augmentation dot absent (but necessary) in bar . Example . transcribes this remarkable example of notational transformation. Example .: Iv, fol. r, second untexted piece (Cum jejunasset dominus?)
With these new transcriptions, the two pieces added to the last folio of Iv argue that the manuscript’s stylistic diversity and probably its connection to wider trends in Italy exceeded what was previously thought. In addition to these two works, there is one possible additional new polyphonic composition in Iv that might be reconstructed with new notational readings. The Kyrie on fols v–r, which consists of the cantus of Kyrie I and the whole of the tenor, might not be incomplete at all. With several emendations, it is possible to perform the same cantus on
Two ‘Textless’ Elaborations of Chant from the Ivrea Codex
top of the tenor’s Kyrie I, Christe, and Kyrie II. I had intended to announce this as a nearly confirmed discovery here, but alas, the new facsimile giveth and also taketh away: several ligature stems that seemed ambiguous before can now be read clearly as the exact opposite of what I needed them to be for this reading to be confirmed. Nonetheless, having multiple incompatible cantus voices fitted to the same tenor is common throughout the written cantare super librum tradition and is probably a hint as to their unwritten origins. Multiple tenor parts that fit the same cantus are far rarer, but they are not unheard of. The work La dur […] mi fa […] desir in a Seville manuscript is one such example. Other examples can be found in the cantus reused between the Gloria Qui sonitu melodie and the parallel Credo in London, British Library, Add. . Creation of a longer Mass movement by repurposing existing material, even where the notation gives no indication of a repetition, can also be seen in two polyphonic movements in the oft-studied Tournai manuscript, neither of which is part of the source’s celebrated Mass. The Kyrie’s polyphonic structure was known to Friedrich Ludwig and Hanna Stäblein-Harder, but that the entire Sanctus (not just the ‘in excelsis’ sections) could be performed polyphonically was not previously known until I posted about it on a Facebook group in , and indeed both works that are not part of the Mass can be performed as canons. Thus the other monophonic works in Iv should continue to be examined for polyphonic or canonic possibilities.
Long-known and well-studied manuscripts continue to reveal new discoveries and new music, requiring the field to continue to reevaluate the systems of classification and constructed narratives of the period. This chapter shows that two pieces that had been filed under the (PMFC) label, ‘French secular music’, are in fact sacred compositions with strong connec-
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Seville, Institución Colombina, Biblioteca, --. Discussed and transcribed in Cuthbert a, –. I believe that the interchangeable tenor hypothesis is still most plausible, though a missing contratenor also remains an alternative explanation. The connections between these works, presented first at the Medieval and Renaissance Music Conference in , will be part of my forthcoming book. Tournai, Bibliothèque capitulaire, A (olim ), fols v–r. New identifications of works in this source by Dominique Gatté and Richard Dudas are forthcoming. Ludwig , n. ; Stäblein-Harder a, ; Stäblein-Harder b, . When I first posted my notes, I was not aware that Stäblein-Harder had figured out the structure of the Kyrie, as it was not noted as polyphonic (nor was the earlier edition cited) in PMFC XXIIIB, . As I was posting parts of my work about the canonic structure of the Kyrie, Ján Janovčík and Jason Stoessel nearly simultaneously posted that the Sanctus was also canonic. Janovčík has since recorded this piece with permission. Although I had intended to share my work for commentary and sharing purposes only (and noted it as such), and hoped to publish it soon after, Stoessel’s enthusiasm was unbounded and he quickly submitted his contribution for publication, emerging as Stoessel and Collins . The textless cantus on fol. r, transcribed by Kügle , , seemed ripe for the analysis as a work of cantare super librum, especially since an equal-length tenor treatment of the Kyrie ‘Orbis Factor’, on which the Kyrie rex angelorum is based, had been discovered by Pedro Memelsdorff (, –). However, the number of emendations to make the cantus fit the chant tenor were too numerous to warrant consideration as a solution.
Michael Scott Asato Cuthbert
tions to Italian traditions. That there are no concordances for these or any other of the cantare super librum sacred pieces is no surprise. The works are among the few written examples of the types of composition that were generally unwritten or even improvised on the spot. The primarily written repertory of the fourteenth century was not large, and much of it survives. The unwritten (or seldom written) tradition, represented by these pieces, may have been far vaster. Among the late additions, textless entries, and chicken scratches of the late Middle Ages lie musical gems whose sound and importance still await unearthing.
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Cuthbert b.
Music in Medieval England �
. T, T, I S* Karen Desmond
Semibreves. Of all the species of late medieval note shapes, perhaps the most difficult to grasp, define, nail down. The quest to capture the essence of the semibreve – that lozengeshaped note-head executed with a fleeting oblique penstroke, initially unnamed and sighted only within groups of ‘running’ notes (currentes) – preoccupied medieval theorists, scribes, and singers for more than a century. From c. to c. music theory treatises abound with definitions, contradictions, and fudges – it’s half a short note, yet also a third of one, except when it’s worth even less than that. Music manuscripts are witness to scribal invention and ingenuity – lengthen (or shorten) them with tails; control and circumscribe them with dots. And hints of singers’ performance practices peek through the theorists’ authoritative rules – if you are singing in a fast or lively manner, never sing more than two for a breve, on the other hand, if you’re singing in the moderate manner, sing up to five for a breve. Musicologists have been similarly obsessive in their desire to specify the medieval semibreve with exactitude. ‘Correctly’ realizing the relative durations of semibreves was essential to the twentieth-century project of producing editions of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century music in modern western music notation, since modern notation requires exact relative durations of note values. Properly understanding semibreve usage is also significant in historical understandings of style since differences in the breve’s subdivision into semibreves marked the divergence (in notation and style) of French, Italian, and insular polyphony in the first half of the fourteenth century. One area of sustained focus has been the so-called ‘Petronian’ repertoire. In addition to careful readings of late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century medieval theory on breve subdivision, scholars have analyzed music compositions that feature four or more semibreves per breve, some of which were cited by medieval theorists, and attributed to the singer Petrus de Cruce (hence, ‘Petronian’). Examinations of the repertoire, for the most part, have concentrated on continental sources: the seventh and eighth fascicles of Mo; Tu; *
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I have learned a great deal from Larry over the years, as an authority on the ars nova, yes, but also as a scholastic interlocutor, since we so very often end up on the same panels at workshops and conferences. For my friend and gracious mentor, I am very happy to submit this piece on semibreves, a topic on which we have already had many engaging discussions. Discussions of the semibreve include Wolf ; Apel , ; Frobenius a; Frobenius b; Gallo , –; Lefferts , –; Ristory ; Roesner , –; Ristory ; Catalunya ; Desmond a, –; Desmond b, –; Desmond c; Earp b, –. Many studies of the medieval semibreve focus on the passages from medieval theory that provide definitions of the breve and semibreve and examples of how the breve can be subdivided. In studies of the ars antiqua, these are descriptions of the divisions of the breve into four or more semibreves, and the notated music examples that accompany these passages. In studies of the ars nova, the focus has been on the passages that describe the semibreve patterns outlined in a number of the manuscript witnesses to the Vitriacan Ars nova. I am grateful for the comments of Peter Lefferts and David Maw on a draft of this chapter. Bent . On the Petronian repertoire and ‘Petronian’ notation see Apel ; Crocker ; Bent , –; Maw ; Catalunya ; and the Grove entry ‘Petrus de Cruce’ by Sanders and Lefferts. On stems in Fauv see Roesner , ; Desmond a, –; Desmond c, –.
Tempus, Tempo, and Insular Semibreves
and the interpolated Roman de Fauvel (Fauv), which also features descending semibreves within some semibreve groups in some compositions. Similar breve subdivisions into four or more semibreves per breve, however, appear in a far greater number of insular sources (copied in Britain and Ireland): by my count in at least fifteen manuscripts dating from the late thirteenth to the mid-fourteenth century, and this is in spite of the fragmentary source survival of this region. Apart from the foundational editorial and analytical work of Frank Ll. Harrison, Ernest Sanders, and Peter Lefferts, the deployment of semibreves in these manuscripts and compositions has not been incorporated into the broader understandings of semibreve usage at the close of the thirteenth and beginning of the fourteenth centuries. Fortuitously, the most extensive discussion of how breve subdivision relates to performance practice is also recorded in an insular source: the English music theorist Robertus de Handlo, who completed his music treatise, Regule (The Rules), the Friday before Pentecost, , wrote extensively on three styles or manners of performance of polyphony. Handlo uses the Latin word mos, which is frequently translated in English as ‘manner’ or ‘fashion’, and he relates the term to a work’s notation. For Handlo the mos includes consideration of the breve’s subdivision into semibreves, and thus to how fast the breve can be performed, that is, to the speed or tempo of the composition. While Handlo offers the most extensive discussion of tempo, related passages are found in Jacobus’s Speculum musicae and the Vitriacan Ars nova. In this chapter I consider semibreves in the insular repertoire in light of these theorists’ discussions of performance manners and tempo. I align Handlo’s descriptions of performance practice with the extant insular sources and compositions, shedding light on how these semibreves might have been realized in performance, and offering choices for their realization to performers today that are informed by the convergence of theoretical testimony, notation in the manuscripts, and musical style. Tempus and tempo in theory Lawrence Earp has written that the stylistic diversity of works produced around the turn of the fourteenth century encouraged a reactive approach (at first) to the theorization of the breve’s subdivision and its possible duration in performance. In the thirteenth century, the breve is positioned as a note value central to the ars antiqua’s measurement of musical time, and indeed specified and named by ars antiqua theorists as a single unit of time: for them, a breve is a tempus. By the first decades of the fourteenth century, several medieval theorists hint at how performers ascertained the breve tempus (that is, how much time a breve oc • •
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Two continental fragments also transmit motets with four-semibreve melismatic decorations, Stockholm, Riksarkivet, Fragment and Leuven, Collection Gilbert Huybens, D; see Bradley , . Harrison ; Sanders ; Sanders ; Harrison ; Harrison, Sanders, and Lefferts ; Lefferts ; Harrison, Sanders, and Lefferts ; Lefferts . The transcriptions of the incompletely surviving motets that Lefferts provides in the appendix to his dissertation () were an invaluable resource for this study. Handlo’s treatise is edited in Lefferts . Discussions of Handlo’s ‘manners’ include Sanders , –; Lefferts , ; Roesner , –; Lefferts , –; Bent , –. Earp b, –; subsequently, as Earp goes on to state, ars nova theorists tackled the subdivision of the breve through a unified theory applicable to all compositional styles.
Karen Desmond
cupies) according to the style of the composition. These theorists list and describe what seem to be speeds of the sung breve (essentially tempos) – fast, medium, and slow – that were chosen through assessing some or all of the following criteria: () the complete range of rhythmic values; () the number of semibreves per breve and the relative durations of those semibreves to one another; and () whether each individual semibreve within a breve grouping is set to a separate syllable of text, or whether the breve groupings of semibreves were sung melismatically to a single syllable of text. Three fourteenth-century music treatises transmit lengthy passages describing three manners or measurements of the breve tempus, each citing or documenting the teachings of at least one other theorist (see Table . for a synoptic presentation of these passages). These are: () Regule () by Robertus de Handlo, who attributes these theories to an otherwise unknown theorist, Petrus le Viser; () the Speculum musicae by Jacobus, probably written in the s by a theorist acquainted with the musical scene in Paris and Liège, and who describes both older practice (of the antiqui) and contemporaneous practice (of the moderni); and () the Vitriacan Ars nova, a text with a complicated manuscript transmission that is attributed in some manuscript witnesses to the French composer Philippe de Vitry, and which predates book VII of Jacobus’s Speculum musicae, since Jacobus cites from it. In addition to citing contemporaneous teachings or practices on the speed of the breve, all three theorists, either obliquely or directly, also refer to the teachings of the older theorist Franco of Cologne. Handlo cites the doctrine of an otherwise unknown man, Petrus le Viser, who taught that the note shapes of mensural notation are ‘performed in the voice’ (proferuntur in voce) in three ways. Petrus le Viser’s mos longus (the lengthy manner) has a large range of rhythmic values: longs (perfect longs), semilongs (imperfect longs), recta and altera breves, and semibreves; in the mos longus breves may be subdivided into up to nine semibreves. In the mos mediocris (the moderate manner), the note values range from semilong to semibreve, with • •
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Lefferts writes: ‘These fashions, or ways of singing, apparently have to do with tempo (slow, medium, fast), available note values, and perhaps style of delivery’ (, ). A fourth theoretical witness, the so-called Barcelona treatise, has a brief reference to the two ways of singing and performing (‘modi cantandi, sive prolationis’) described as the modus prolixior (the more prolix or drawn-out way) and the modus brevior (the shorter way). For an edition and translation of this passage, see most recently Catalunya , –. The dating of Speculum musicae is uncertain, since we know only in the broadest strokes in which order Jacobus wrote its seven books, and the identity of the theorist, and thus the date of his death and the terminus ante quam for Speculum musicae, remains murky. I have proposed Jacobus de Montibus, canon of St Paul of Liège, who died between and as a likely candidate, given several links between the Jacobus who authored Speculum musicae and the city of Liège, and the evidence of the Berkeley treatise (Desmond ). Recently Anna Zayaruznaya () proposed that book VII could date from as late as the s. On the Vitriacan Ars nova see Desmond . See Maxims – of Rubric IV of Regule, ed. Lefferts , –. Handlo refers to perfect longs as longs and imperfect longs as semilongs. In the initial definitions of tempo according to Petrus le Viser, Handlo does not mention how the breve may be divided into up to nine semibreves. Towards the end of Rubric IV, the placement of music examples and Handlo’s discussion of them implies that the divisions of Petrus de Cruce into seven semibreves, and of Johannes de Garlandia into nine semibreves, may be understood for the mos longus (Lefferts , –).
Tempus, Tempo, and Insular Semibreves
Table .: Handlo, Jacobus, and the Vitriacan Ars nova on the three manners or measurements of the breve tempus
Handlo, Regule (Petrus le Viser)
Jacobus, Speculum musicae, on the antiqui
Vitriacan Ars nova
mos longus
mensuratio morosa
tempus perfectum maius
6 (long, semilong) Q (recta, altera breve) S (major, minor semibreve) Q=SSSSSSSSS
Breve subdivided into up to texted semibreves (Petrus de Cruce) or up to texted semibreves ( Johannes de Garlandia)
Q=SSSSSSSSS
Breve subdivided into semibreves
Q=S S S = S S S S S S SSS (C C C C C C C C C)
Two semibreves are unequal, three equal, four, five, six, seven, eight, and nine SS ( : ratio)
Breve subdivided into three equal semibreves, which each can be further subdivided into three of the least semibreves (semibreves minimae)
mensuratio media
tempus imperfectum maius
Two semibreves are unequal S S ( : ratio) mos mediocris (a) 6 (semilong) Q=SSSSS Breve subdivided into – syllabic semibreves
‘Once in a while they [the antiqui] went beyond that to the slow and moderate, albeit rarely, in which they notated more than three semibreves for a perfect tempus’
Two semibreves are equal S S ( : ratio)
Q=SS = SSS SSS (C C C C C C)
Breve subdivided into two equal semibreves, which each can be further subdivided into three
6 (long) Q = S S S (syllabic)
tempus perfectum medium
Breve can be subdivided into up to syllabic semibreves, or more than melismatic semibreves
Q=S S S = S S S S SS (C C C C C C )
Two semibreves are equal S S ( : ratio)
Breve subdivided into three equal semibreves, which each can be further subdivided into two
(b)
mos lascivus (a) 66 (duplex long) 6 (long, semilong) 6 (recta breves only) S (semibreve) 6 subdivided into semibreves, never Two semibreves are unequal S S ( : ratio)
6 (recta, altera breve) S (major, minor semibreve) 6 subdivided into or semibreves (b)
Two semibreves are unequal S S ( : ratio)
mensuratio cita
6 (long) 6 (breve) S (semibreve) 6 subdivided into or semibreves Two semibreves are unequal S S ( : ratio) mensuratio citissima
tempus imperfectum minimum
Q=S S = SS SS (C C C C)
Breve subdivided into two equal semibreves, which each can be further subdivided into two tempus perfectum minimum
6 (long) 6 (breve) S (semibreve)
Breve subdivided into three equal semibreves, which cannot be further subdivided
The perfect breve can have such a fast measure that ‘three semibreves cannot be uttered well or easily for it’
S S ( : ratio)
Q=S S S
Two semibreves are unequal, according to the old art (secundum artem veterem)
Karen Desmond
the breve divisible into up to five semibreves. In the mos lascivus (the lively manner), there are duplex longs (occasionally), longs, semilongs, recta breves (but not altera breves) and pairs of semibreves; but if longs and semilongs are not present – option (b) for the mos lascivus in Table . – then either two or three semibreves may be placed for a breve. In addition to the criteria concerning the range of note values and the possible number of semibreves into which a breve can be subdivided, Handlo also takes into account the relative duration of these semibreves within the groupings that comprise a breve’s duration. Pairs of semibreves in the mos longus are performed according to Franco’s rules, where the breve is ternary (divisible into three equal semibreves), and semibreves within a grouping of two semibreves are described as being of unequal duration with the second twice as long as the first (minor semibreve followed by major semibreve). The relative durations of semibreve within groups of four or more semibreves per breve in the mos longus is not specified. Handlo gives music examples from Petrus de Cruce (with up to seven separate texted semibreves per breve) and Johannes de Garlandia (with up to nine separate texted semibreves per breve). Similarly, in the mos lascivus, the breve is also ternary, and divisible into either two unequal or three equal semibreves. Handlo observes that semibreves in mos lascivus can be texted or melismatic within the context of discussing pairs of semibreves (option (a) in Table .), but does not specify whether each individual semibreve in a group of three semibreves can receive a text syllable (option (b) in Table .). By contrast, in the mos mediocris, the breve is binary (Handlo says two semibreves are equal; three unequal; four equal; five unequal). A further distinction is made in the mos mediocris in terms of text declamation, where Handlo describes two flavors: (a) when the note values range from semilong to semibreve, groups of up to five syllabic semibreves per breve are found; and (b) when the note values range from long to semibreve, there can be no more than three syllabic semibreves per breve, and larger groupings of semibreves are melismatic. Handlo gives the most expansive description of these three manners of performance, and addresses all three of the criteria listed above, from the range of rhythmic values, the number and nature of the breve’s subdivision, and aspects of text declamation. Jacobus, writing perhaps a decade later than Handlo and citing the practice of the older generation of musicians (his antiqui), also lists three categories that roughly map onto Handlo’s three manners, but Jacobus terms them ‘mensurations’: morosa, media, and cita (slow, moderate, and fast). These are listed in the middle column of Table .. The layout of Table . is not intended to show exact equivalence between the description of the three manners or measurements • • • • •
Handlo assigns this rule (Rule VII) to Petrus de Cruce, and then immediately follows with a description of Petrus le Viser’s mos longus in Maxim (Lefferts , –). Lefferts , –. Lefferts translates the adjective ‘divisa’ that describes the semibreve as ‘separate’ (as opposed to semibreves that are joined in ligatures and sung melismatically). Lefferts , –. Petrus le Viser’s distinction regarding the presence or absence of perfect longs in mos mediocris is somewhat unclear, but perhaps it is intended to encompass binary breves used within imperfect modus versus perfect modus. Speculum musicae (SM), book VII, chap. ; see Bragard –, : .
Tempus, Tempo, and Insular Semibreves
of the breve tempus described by each theorist; it is organized to highlight the differentiation in each of the theorist’s statements from a more drawn-out speed (longus, morosa, maius) to a rapid speed (lascivus, cita, minimum). In the case of Handlo and Jacobus, however, the mensurations of Jacobus’s antiqui are roughly parallel to the ‘manners’ of Petrus le Viser that Handlo describes, notwithstanding their slight differences. Jacobus devotes the most substantial discussion to the slow mensuration (mensuratio morosa) of the antiqui, a mensuration he says they used ‘once in while’, and which seems equivalent to Handlo’s mos longus. The fast mensuration (cita), Jacobus says, is used for most motets, and its breve is subdivided into no more than three semibreves. Handlo writes that in the mos lascivus the breve is only divisible into three semibreves if the range of rhythmic values does not include longs, whereas Jacobus does not make this distinction. However, Jacobus also describes a tempo he calls the ‘fastest’ (citissima), which is used in ‘duplex and contraduplex hockets and certain other measured songs’ where the breve is so fast that, according to the antiqui, ‘three semibreves cannot be uttered well or easily for it’. This citissima mensuration of Jacobus’s antiqui is closest then to Handlo’s first flavor of the mos lascivus (option (a) in Table .). Perhaps most interestingly, while Jacobus includes a ‘moderate’ mensuration in his threefold list of mensurations – morosa, media, and cita – he includes no definition or detailed discussion of the mensuratio media of either the antiqui or the moderni. One could speculate that if Jacobus did indeed know of the performance manner of the antiqui similar to the mos mediocris, describing its details would undermine one of the major arguments of Speculum musicae Book : that is, that the ancients did not use binary or ‘imperfect’ mensurations. And so he left it out. Jacobus also reports on the moderns’ listing of three performance speeds, and cites two different authorities that each list three speeds. His first authority names the three speeds: tractim (drawn-out), medie (moderate), and velociter (fast), and states that these are manners of performance, and that however a piece is performed ‘the manner of notating is not to be changed’. This statement seems to observe that it is appropriate, for example, to notate a piece sung at a rapid speed (velociter) simply using longs and breves, and it is not necessary •
•
•
‘Quamvis autem Antiqui cita mensuratione brevium in motetis communiter vel citissima in hoketis duplicibis usi sint, quandoque tamen ad morose et mediam se extenderunt, etsi raro, in qua plures semibreves quam tres pro perfecto posuerunt tempore’ (So although the ancients had generally used a fast mensuration of breves in motets or the fastest possible in duplex hockets, once in a while however they went beyond that to the slow and moderate, albeit rarely, in which they notated more than three semibreves for perfect tempus), SM book VII, chap. ; Bragard –, : ; trans. Wegman , . ‘Dixi “in motetis” quia, si de hoketis loquimur duplicibus et contraduplicibus et alias quibusdam mensuratis cantibus, brevis perfecta ita citam, secundum Antiquos, habet mensuram ut non bene vel leviter pro ea tres semibreves dici possunt’. SM book VII, chap. ; Bragard –, : ; trans. Wegman , . ‘Dicit enim unus sic: Tripliciter modulamur: aut tractim, aut velociter, aut medie, et quocumque modo fiat, non est mutanda maneries notandi’ (For one of them says: Our singing is threefold, either drawn-out, or fast, or moderate, and in whatever way it may be done, the manner of notating is not to be changed). SM book VII, chap. ; Bragard –, : ; trans. Wegman , .
Karen Desmond
to change how you notate the piece (by instead using semibreves and minims in place of the longs and breves) in order to reflect how fast it ought to be sung. Conversely, the predominance of longs and breves in a notated composition does not imply that it is a ‘slow’ piece. The source of Jacobus’s first modern authority is unnamed and unknown. Jacobus quotes a passage from a second unnamed modern source that is concordant with the three central manuscript witnesses to the Vitriacan Ars nova tradition. In his chapter, Jacobus focuses on the Vitriacan Ars nova’s threefold mensuration of the perfect tempus – he directly quotes the Vitriacan phrase ‘the perfect tempus is threefold, minimum, medium, maius’ – although in the Vitriacan witnesses, a twofold mensuration of the imperfect tempus is also described (maius and minimum). In Table ., these five mensurations are listed in the third column, with the most drawn-out of the mensurations, tempus perfectum maius (a mensuration with a ternary breve), in the uppermost row, the two moderate mensurations, tempus imperfectum maius (a mensuration with a binary breve), and tempus perfectum medium (a mensuration with a ternary breve) in the middle row, and the two fastest mensurations, tempus imperfectum minimum (a mensuration with a binary breve), and tempus perfectum minimum (a mensuration with a ternary breve and equivalent to Franco’s cita mensuration) in the bottom row. Note that the three rows in Table . are organized according to my interpretation of the speed of the breve in performance, and not according to whether the breve is ternary or binary. The most succinct description of these five possible mensurations of the tempus is in the Pn A Ars nova witness. Four of these mensurations of tempus can be understood as mapping onto the moderns’ four prolations (that is, the four possible combinations of perfect and imperfect tempus and major and minor prolation), and the fifth mensuration, ‘tempus perfectum minimum’ is held by the moderns to be equivalent to Franco’s fast (cita) mensuration, and Jacobus concurs with this. It appears that the moderns also associated the concept of tempo or speed with these mensurations in performance, given the frequent use of the verb pronuntiare in these passages, and the description of the semibreves in tempus perfectum minimum – the fastest of the five – being ‘tight’ (strictae). • •
• •
•
Also see the discussion of the equivalence of different levels of notation by Jacobus in Zayaruznaya , –. SM book VII, chap. ; Bragard –, : . A concordant passage is found in Rvat witness of the Vitriacan Ars nova (Reaney, Gilles, and Maillard , ), and, without mentioning Franco, also in Pn A witness (Reaney, Gilles, and Maillard , ). Reaney, Gilles, and Maillard , . ‘Mininum tempus posuit Franco. Unde notandum est secundum Magistrum Franconem, et sicut visum est superius, [quod] minimum tempus non est nisi tres continens semibreves, quae quidem adeo sunt strictae quod amplius dividi non possunt, nisi per semiminimas dividantur’ Reaney, Gilles, and Maillard , (from the Rvat witness). The reference to semiminims here is somewhat perplexing, and is probably a reference to note values smaller than the least semibreve (semibreve minima), possibly sung as melismatic elaborations. It is likely a later addition to the original text, but the sense here is that there can be no further subdivision of the breve than three, because these semibreves are so quickly performed (‘sunt strictae’). Described in chapters – of the Rvat Ars nova, where the minim patterns are also described within the context of each mensuration. In the passage from Pn , several titles of compositions are given as examples of each of the mensurations.
Tempus, Tempo, and Insular Semibreves
The labeling of one of the mensurations in the Vitriacan Ars nova tradition as ‘tempus imperfectum minimum’ is intriguing. The label appears to indicate a duality between the Vitriacan tempus imperfectum minimum and the tempus perfectum minimum (the Franconian fast (cita) mensuration), with both moving at the ‘least’ or fastest breve tempus. One might have expected the tempus imperfectum minimum to perhaps have a name that linked it more closely to the tempus perfectum medium, because both these mensurations have semibreves that subdivide into two semibreves minimae. The ternary subdivision of the semibreve seems to be why the adjective maius was appended to the tempus imperfectum maius, and it demonstrates its affinity to the tempus perfectum maius, both of which have semibreves that subdivide into three semibreves minimae. On the other hand, if the tempus imperfectum maius had instead been named tempus imperfectum medium that would have emphasized the duality this mensuration holds with the tempus perfectum medium (similar to the duality between the tempus imperfectum minimum and the tempus perfectum minimum). The inconsistencies in the naming of these mensurations suggests that the adjectives maius, medium, and minimum were applied originally in a less than systematic way (that is, these terms for performance tempo may have emerged within practical contexts), and possibly that one or more of these categorizations included older terms already in use. The maius, medium, and minimum schema witnessed in the Vitriacan Ars nova (and by Jacobus) was subsequently superseded by the more systematic organization of the four tempus/prolatio combinations. Here, maius, medium, and minimum appear to have been used to indicate something about the speed of the breve, and do not map logically onto how semibreves were subdivided into three or two semibreves minimae. And perhaps the tempus imperfectum minimum – a mensuration with subdivisions of the breve first into two semibreves, then each of these into two semibreves minimae (for a total of four semibreves minimae per breve) – rather than simply mapping onto the imperfect tempus/minor prolation (the most modern of the four prolations, and one that is only rarely used by Vitry or Machaut, for example), is instead a manner of measuring the breve that relates to an older musical style, such as those sorts of motets in Fauv that frequently feature groups of two, three, and four semibreves, and where semibreve pairs are equal. In other words, mapping across Table ., the Vitriacan tempus imperfectum minimum is in fact most similar to Handlo/Viser’s mos mediocris. Handlo, Jacobus, and one of the Vitriacan Ars nova witnesses (Pn ) all cite music examples within their descriptions of performance tempos: in Handlo’s and Jacobus’s cases these are actual notated examples, and the names of specific musical genres are listed; the Ars nova treatise simply gives motet titles. These examples would have allowed medieval readers of these treatises to better understand and reproduce these speeds, based upon familiarity with the cited compositions and genres. In the following examination of the insular semibreve and how the use and interpretation of the semibreve relates to conceptions of tempo in specific compositions, and, in particular, how the mos longus and the mos mediocris might •
While the maius mensurations have semibreves that are divisible into three semibreves minimae, both medium and minimum mensurations have semibreves divisible into two semibreves minimae.
Karen Desmond
be distinguished in practice, I focus on the repertoire of insular motets that are copied in a notation that I describe as ‘extended Franconian’ (that is, Franconian notation with some modifications, including the subdivision of the breve into four or more semibreves, and/or the use of descending stems) that most closely matches the notation described in Handlo’s treatise, and a repertoire roughly contemporaneous with his writing of the Regule in . Insular semibreves and manners of performance The difficulty of recognizing such distinctions [that is, with the tempos], which can radically affect the valuation of unsigned semibreves in the surviving fragmentary remains of English music, remains a serious problem for scholars and performers alike. (Earp b, –)
Perhaps the first thing that comes to mind when considering the medieval insular polyphonic repertoire is its fragmentary survival. But the next best-known aspect is its heterogeneity: the variety of manuscript formats and other aspects of their production, the variety and distribution of genres within these manuscripts, and the range of notational dialects that can be found together in a single manuscript, from modal, pre-mensural, Franconian, Franconian with ‘insular’ characteristics, and French ars nova notations. With my graduate research assistant, Daniel Shapiro, we first identified sixty-seven works in the insular motet repertoire that are notated in Franconian notation with a proliferation of syllabic semibreves, that is, with extended passages of groups of two or three semibreves separated by dots of division, and set to individual syllables of text. Of these sixty-seven, eight are found with a concordance in another insular source, and a further two have continental concordances; the remaining fifty-seven motets are unica. These sixty •
•
•
•
In her study of the motet citations of Petrus de Cruce in music theory treatises, Margaret Bent has suggested the use of the more neutral term ‘post-Franconian’ to describe the range of practices described therein, not all of which are actually attributed to Petrus de Cruce; Bent , . I intend ‘extended Franconian’ as a similarly broad term, however with it, I want to emphasize the links and extensions to Franco’s system, where ‘post-Franconian’ could suggest a sharper break with Franconian practice. On insular notation of this period Earp writes that the ‘general impression, gathered from a theory and practice that is replete with contradictions and inconsistencies, is one of a vibrant and variegated musical landscape’. Earp b, . On the heterogeneity of the insular repertoire, see especially and most recently, Williamson . Compiling this list of sources and motets was not an insignificant task, due to the uncontrolled vocabulary used in the current RISM source descriptions, which is carried over in the metadata descriptions of the DIAMM database. The initial list was compiled using DIAMM, doing keyword and free text searches on a variety of fields searching for terms such as ‘Petronian’, ‘unstemmed’, ‘dots of division’, ‘descending stem’. In addition, we surveyed all available images for these manuscripts (on DIAMM, in published facsimile editions, and my own collection of manuscript images) for motets that featured extensive use of syllabic semibreves, dots of division and/or descending stems. My graduate research assistant, Daniel Shapiro, helped with the rigorous compilation of this data. Directly examining the images allowed the culling and expansion the original list made from my keyword searches, since often the descriptions of a source’s notation in the DIAMM database are either inaccurate or incomplete. The eight motets that have a concordance in another insular source are Frondentibus florentibus, Labem lavat, O stella marina, O virga Iesse, Princeps apostolice, Reor nescia, Rota versatilis, Triumphat hodie; the motets with continental con-
Tempus, Tempo, and Insular Semibreves
seven motets are found across twenty-four fragmentary sources copied in Britain and Ireland. Just over thirty of these sixty-seven motets survive in a complete or easily completable state and are mostly edited in the English volumes of PMFC, and many of the others that are incomplete are edited by Lefferts in the appendix to his dissertation. A subset of these sixty-seven works is notated in ‘extended Franconian’ notation: their Franconian notation is interspersed with groupings of four or more semibreves per breve, and/or with other modifications to the semibreves, such as added descending or oblique stems. Essentially, though, the notation is Franconian, incorporating what I am terming ‘extensions’ of that system rather than completely overhauling it. This subset of motets numbers twenty-five works that are copied in fifteen manuscript sources. These motets are listed, ordered by source, in Table .. Four (Princeps apostolice, Congaudens super te, Virga iesse, Frondentibus florentibus) have a concordance in one other insular source, and one (O livor) has a continental concordance in Fauv. Given that the English theorist Handlo in the year reports on Petrus le Viser’s distinctions of tempo and how they are notated, to what extent are Handlo’s descriptions of the three notational ‘manners’ consistent with the notation of the extant insular music repertoire that was copied or composed during roughly the same time period, in the first decades of the fourteenth century? While this particular group of twenty-five motets is relatively homogeneous to the extent that they were selected through a process that identified notational characteristics they had in common, nonetheless they do demonstrate a range of approaches in their rhythmic profiles and textural combinations. They are written for three or four voices, although for many motets only a single voice is extant today. Most motets have some differentiation in terms of the range of note values sung by each voice. In three-voice motets, the lowest usually has a narrow range of note values – combinations of duplex longs and longs, or all longs, or longs and breves – while the uppermost voices use shorter note values. In four-voice motets, the fourth voice is either another active upper voice, or a lower voice that pairs with the tenor with a similar range of note values to it. Motet voices differ in terms of text setting too, with tenor voices often untexted, middle voices texted but with frequent use of melismas, and upper voices the most syllabic. In this analysis of the ‘manner’
• •
• • •
cordances are two Fauv motets: Super cathedram/Presidentes in thronis and the triplum and tenor of O livor. I refer to these motets with the first two words of the motetus voice, if present; otherwise the incipit is from the triplum. PMFC XV and XVI; Lefferts . Four manuscripts transmitting cantilenas notated in score that are in extended Franconian notation are not included in Table . (Gloucestershire Country Record Office, D. ; Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College, Ms. /; Oxford, Bodleian Library, Arch Selden B; and the volume of the Worcester Fragments known as Worcester Reconstruction III). The date ranges of the manuscripts given in Table . are taken directly from the catalog in RISM, DIAMM, and EECM . As noted below (n. ), these dates are very approximate. The text (but not the music) of Iam novum is concordant with a motet in the Montpellier Codex (Mo , ). O livor is also copied in Tr , and is listed in the index of Trém. Lefferts writes that ‘It is not easy to understand this Petrus or to associate his teaching with any surviving repertoire’ (, ).
Karen Desmond
(mos) of measuring the breve in these insular motets, first every voice was assessed individually, and its mos classified according to the descriptions set forth by Handlo, but also taking into account aspects of the mensurations/tempos of the antiqui described by Jacobus and in the Vitriacan Ars nova theoretical tradition (see the rightmost columns of Table .). This classification entailed looking at the criteria summarized in the previous section: () the complete range of rhythmic values in each voice; () the number of semibreves per breve and how the breve is subdivided, that is, whether it is a ternary or binary breve; and () whether or not each semibreve is set to a separate syllable of text, or whether groups of semibreves were sung melismatically to a single syllable of text. Considering each voice one-by-one allowed for a clearer determination of the applicability of Handlo’s observations on mos: considering all the voice parts in a motet simultaneously would have been less helpful, since one could potentially see a composer deploying all of the ranges of rhythmic values and text setting within a single motet. After classifying the individual voices, however, then the implications of combining the voices were considered: as set forth below, this combination may change the realization of semibreves in one voice part, when one of the other voice parts is in the mos mediocris or the mos longus. In other words, as notated on the page, each voice gives a particular impression of its mos, and Handlo and the other theorists give us a starting point for assessing that mos, but the essential defining characteristic of the polyphonic motet – the combination of different or diverging voices in performance – may change that assessment. The ‘mos lascivus’ or the lively manner Since the mos longus and mos mediocris are defined by their use of groups of semibreves larger than three (syllabic and melismatic groups), and their syllabic texting of semibreves in groups of three or more, motet voices that do not have these features can be assigned to the mos lascivus. The tenors of these insular motets have rhythmic values that include longs and breves, and two- or three-semibreve melismas: two-semibreve melismas or threesemibreve melismas are notated (as per thirteenth-century conventions) as c.o.p. ligatures or three-note conjuncturae, respectively. The presence of c.o.p. ligatures and three-note conjuncturae are noted in the ‘Other S groups’ column in Table .: the majority of the tenors in Table . have one or both of these notational features, common in motets in Franconian notation. Two columns in Table . specifically mark ‘extended Franconian’ features: the column labeled ‘D S S’ indicates three-semibreve groups with a descending stem on the first semibreve; and the column labeled ‘≧ S S S S’ indicates the subdivision of the breve into four or more semibreves. The most common semibreve group across Table . is the four-semibreve group, but groups of five and six are also relatively common. Both of these columns
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Other tabulations of the insular motet repertoire according to notational characteristics include Lefferts’ table of ‘Notation, Mensuration, and Declamation in the Motet’ (, –) and Harrison’s ‘Division of the Brevis’ table in his introduction to PMFC XV. Note that above I distinguished between Handlo’s and Franco’s descriptions of the fast mensuration. In Table ., I opted to include breves subdivided into three melismatic semibreves within the mos lascivus.
Tempus, Tempo, and Insular Semibreves
Table .: Motets in insular manuscripts notated in extended Franconian notations
Short title (Edition) (Concordances) Bologna (turn of the fourteenth century) Candet sine (Pieragostini )
Cgc / (early fourteenth century) Multum viget (PMFC XV, no. )
No. of voices
Voice incipits
Voice part
DSS
Candor vestis
triplum
–
Candet sine spina
motetus
–
Tenor
tenor
–
Mulier magna meriti
triplum
syll
Multum viget virtus
motetus
syll
[T.]
tenor
–
Princeps apostolice (Lefferts , –) (DRc )
Princeps apostolice
triplum
syll
Congaudens super te (PMFC XVI, no. ) (Olc LC/A/R/)
Virga iesse (PMFC XV, no. ) (DRc )
Tu civium O cuius vita Congaudens super te Tu celestium Orto solo serene
quadruplum triplum motetus tenor triplum
– – – – –
Virga iesse [T.]
motetus tenor
– –
Laus honor vendito
triplum
–
Laus honor Christo
tenor
–
Princeps apostolice
triplum
syll mel
Cpc (early fourteenth century) Laus honor (Lefferts , –)
DRc (mid fourteenth century) Princeps apostolice (Lefferts , –) (Cgc /)
Dei preco (Lefferts , –)
Dei preco
motetus
mel
Virga iesse (PMFC XV, no. ) (Cgc /)
Orto solo serene Origo viri Virga iesse Tenor
quadruplum triplum motetus tenor
syll syll syll –
Lbl (first half of the fourteenth century) Rosa mundi (Lefferts , –)
Rosa mundi purissima
triplum
–
Surgere iam (Lefferts , –)
Surgere iam
motetus?
–
[T.]
tenor
–
Karen Desmond
≥S
SSS
mel
Other S groups
DS
mos longus mos mediocris (a)
mos mediocris (b)
mos lascivus
×?
c.o.p. –
–
DS
mel SSS c.o.p. mel SSS
×?
×
×?
c.o.p.
syll
–
syll –
mel SSS c.o.p. c.o.p.
syll mel
mel SSS c.o.p.
mel mel – – syll
c.o.p. c.o.p. c.o.p. c.o.p. c.o.p.
– –
c.o.p. –
syll (s)
SSSSD SSDS
–
–
syll mel
c.o.p.
mel
c.o.p.
syll syll – –
c.o.p. c.o.p. c.o.p. –
mel/syll (s) syll (s, s) mel
mel SSS c.o.p. c.o.p.
–
–
× × × × × × × × × × × ×
× × × × × × × × × ×
Tempus, Tempo, and Insular Semibreves
Short title (Edition) (Concordances) Lwa (turn of the fourteenth century) ... -tem hominum a maligno (not edited) Lwa (fourteenth century) Hostem vicita) (Lefferts , –)
Salvator mundi (Hartt’s chapter in this volume, Example .)
Ob (mid fourteenth century) Lux refulget (Lefferts , –)
Duodeno sydere (Lefferts , –) Frondentibus (Lefferts and Bent , –) (Ob )
Deus tuorum (PMFC XV, no. )
Templum eya (Lefferts , –)
Ob * (first half of the fourteenth century) S... regina (not edited) Ob (first half of the fourteenth century) Frondentibus (Lefferts and Bent , –) (Ob )
No. of voices
DSS
Voice incipits
Voice part
... -tem hominum a maligno
triplum, motetus (score)
mel
Hac a valle lacrimosa
triplum
–
Hostem vicit
motetus
–
A solis ortus
triplum
–
Salvator mundi
motetus
–
Lux refulget
triplum
–
[T.]
tenor
–
Duodeno sydere
triplum
syll
Frondentibus
motetus
–
Floret
tenor
De flore martinum
triplum
–
Deus tuorum
motetus
–
?
Ave rex gentis Templum eya
tenor triplum?
– –
?
S... reginab)
mostly illegible
–
– Frondentibus
triplum motetus
–
Floret
tenor
Tu civiumb) O cuius vitab) Congaudens super teb) Tu celestiumb)
quadruplum triplum motetus tenor
Olc LC/A/R/ (fourteenth century) Congaudens super te (PMFC XVI, no. ) (Cgc /)
– – – –
Karen Desmond ≥S
SSS
mel
Other S groups
mos longus mos mediocris (a)
mel SSS c.o.p.
mos lascivus
×
syll (up to )
DS
×
syll () mel (up to )
mel SSS
×
–
mel SSS c.o.p. mel SSS
×
mel
mos mediocris (b)
×
c.o.p. mel –
mel SSS c.o.p. –
× (final section)
× ×
syll
mel SSS
mel
C*
×
C*
×
×
mel SSS c.o.p.
c.o.p. mel (s, s, s)
– – –
C*
×
mel SSS c.o.p. mel SSS
×
c.o.p. c.o.p.
× ×
SD
mel SSS c.o.p. mel
–
mel mel
–
– – – –
× ×
mel SSS c.o.p. c.o.p.
×
c.o.p. c.o.p. c.o.p. c.o.p.
Tempus, Tempo, and Insular Semibreves
Short title (Edition) (Concordances)
Voice incipits
Voice part
DSS
Caligo terre scinditur
triplum
–
Virgo mater
motetus
–
Tenor De spineto rosa
tenor triplum
– –
Virgo sancta Katerina
motetus
–
Agmina Iam nubes dissolvitur
tenor triplum
– –
Iam novum sidus oritur
motetus
–
Rosa delectabilis
triplum
–
Regalis exoritur
motetus
–
[T.]
tenor
–
Alleluya confessoris
triplum
syll
Ecce vir- …disrupta surge Petre
motetus?
–
[T.]
tenor
–
Inter amenitatis tripudia
triplum
–
No. of voices
Onc (fourteenth century) Virgo mater (PMFC XV, no. )
Virgo sancta Katerina (PMFC XV, no. )
Iam novum (PMFC XV, no. )
Regalis exoritur (PMFC XV, no. )
W (turn of the fourteenth century) Alleluya confessoris (not edited)
Wisbech (beginning of the fourteenth century) Ecce vir(not edited)
Ym (beginning of the fourteenth century) O livor (PMFC I, no. ; triplum and tenor) (Fauv, Trém, Tr ) a) b) C*
Only piece notated in Handlo’s Garlandian notation (use of dots and circles to indicate breve and semibreve subdivisions respectively). Too fragmentary to classify. Indicates presence of minims with ascending stems (but which may be later additions).
Karen Desmond ≥S
SSS
mel (s, s) – – mel (s) – – mel (s, s) mel
Other S groups
mel SSS c.o.p. c.o.p.
mos longus mos mediocris (a)
mos mediocris (b)
mos lascivus
× × × ×
mel SSS c.o.p. mel SSS
×
c.o.p. c.o.p. mel SSS
× ×
c.o.p. mel SSS
×
c.o.p.
mel syll
DS DS S D SSDD
×
mel SSS c.o.p. mel (s, s) syll
DS DS S D SSDD
×
SSSSD SSDSS mel SSS c.o.p. –
×
syll
c.o.p.
–
SD
–
×
×
mel SSS c.o.p. mel SSS
×
c.o.p.
syll (s, s)
mel SSS
×
ely).
Tempus, Tempo, and Insular Semibreves
note whether these groups set a single syllable of text (‘mel’) or separate syllables (‘syll’). No tenor voice in any of these motets has either of these features of extended Franconian notation. So, perhaps unsurprisingly, every extant tenor part can be classified in Table . as mos lascivus, and in this respect they look no different from any other thirteenth-century Franconian-notated tenor. Sung on their own, they could have gone at quite a lively clip. Having dispensed with the classifications of the tenors rather quickly, I then considered whether any other motets might also be considered as mos lascivus and performed at a lively speed, even if they do feature an occasional ‘extended Franconian’ feature. This entailed first looking at the voices individually, then as they are combined polyphonically within the sounding motet. For example, consider a motet copied in the Onc fragmentary codex. The motetus (‘Virgo sancta Katerina’) of the three-voice motet Virgo sancta Katerina moves in mostly trochaic patterns of longs and breves, with occasional syllabic pairs of semibreves, which proliferate more in the final phrase of the motet. The motetus, then, looks like a typical late-thirteenth-century Franconian-notated voice, and fits the definition of Handlo’s mos lascivus. Similarly, its triplum, (‘De spineto rosa’), has essentially the same rate of declamation, but with a single exceptional notational feature, a fluttering decorative five-semibreve melismatic grouping on the last syllable of ‘puritatis’ (Example .). Is this enough to change the interpretation of the performance speed of the breve in this motet as a whole, and to classify this voice, and thus this motet, as being measured by a moderate breve tempo? All of the three-semibreve groups in this voice are melismatic, and Handlo specifically notes the presence of groups of three syllabic semibreves in the mos mediocris. Thus I lean towards classifying the triplum as mos lascivus. But let us consider another example. The Onc motet Iam novum has equally active upper voices that declaim the text in mostly longs, breves, and occasionally semibreve pairs set syllabically. Each of the two upper voices has a handful of four-semibreve melismatic decorations. The triplum (‘Iam nubes dissolvitur’) again, like Virgo sancta Katerina, has one exceptional five-semibreve melisma on the first syllable of ‘lumen’ (see Example .). These decorative melismas (three, four, and five semibreves) are most frequently found on the third breve of a perfection. Again, like Virgo sancta Katerina, there are no groups of three semibreves set syllabically in either of these voices, and I have thus classified both the triplum and motetus as mos lascivus.
• • •
•
•
If no number is indicated after these abbreviations, the groups are understood to be four-semibreve groupings; if other groupings are present, the number is added in parentheses. In the Ob transmission of Frondentibus a later hand added stems to this tenor voice. In PMFC XV, the ‘De spineto rosa’ voice is labeled as the motetus, and ‘Virgo sancta Katerina’ as the triplum. Given the layout of the manuscript, I understand the ‘De spineto’ voice on the verso of the opening to be the triplum, and the ‘Virgo sancta Katerina’ voice on the recto as the motetus. In the music examples that follow for the mos longus and mos lascivus I have followed the directions in Handlo (citing Petrus de Cruce) and rendered semibreve pairs as iambs (that is minor followed by major semibreve). While there is evidence that trochaic rhythms were favored by insular composers, Lefferts suggests that within a Franconian context that ‘problem remains open for the moment’ (Lefferts , ). The tenor part is not extant for this motet, although Harrison provides a proposed reconstruction of it in PMFC XV.
m otetu s
trip lu m
∫
sss
iam
¢& ˙
¬
Œ
na ru m - p i
-
3
sss ¬
œ
- de -
˙
i
¥
Œ œ œ
¥∫∫
ca - tho
œ œ œ
∫ -
œ ˙™
li - ce
¬
œ ˙
∫
scu - to pu - ri - ta
¬
œ œ œj3 #œ ˙ œ
∫ . ∫ s s ∫
tec - ta
˙
œœœ ˙
Œ
¬
Œ
- tis
s s ∫
œ ˙
‘
vi
˙
¬ -
cit
˙
re
ca
¬
sss ∫ 3
-
-
†
¬
ta
˙
œ
sti
¬
∫
- tho
Œ
-
-
per-
¬
-
ri
Πsss
o - ri
-
tu r
ma
-
ssss
-
†¨
¬
o - ri - tu r
a
Œ
ma
iam
˙
¬
ri
-
Œ
3 3 œ3 œ œ œ œ œ œ œJ œ œ œ J
s s ∫
œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ 3œ œ ˙
˙
3
∫ ssss . sss 3
iam
˙
tu r
Œ
¬
∫
Œ œ œ œ œ J
Œ
3
sss
¬
di
-
tu r
Œ
v e - ru m lu
∫ sss s s
-
-
†
∫
ssss
iam
˙
¬
Œ
m en cer - ni -
œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ3 œ œ œ œ3œ œ J
∫
œ œ œœœ ˙
˙
iam
˙
¬
no - bis ce - lu m p an -
3
s s ∫
a
˙
¬
3
˙™
sa
¬
œ
∫
sa - lu -
j œ œ ˙™
3
†
tis
¬
j3 œnœ ˙
†
œ œ œ
‘∫
res
3 œ œ œ œ œ œj œ ˙
∫
en - se cin - cta
∫
œ œ œ œ œ œ œj3 œ ˙ œ
3
sssss
Example .: Iam novum, perfections – (Onc , fol. r), with the original mensural note shapes (apart from rests) added above each staff
¢& ˙
‘
fi
& ˙
¬
tur
° œ œ 3œ œ ˙ & œ
∫
tenor
motetus
triplum
¬
° & ˙
Example .: Virgo sancta Katerina, perfections – (Onc , fols v–r), with the original mensural note shapes (apart from rests) added above each staff
Karen Desmond
Tempus, Tempo, and Insular Semibreves
For similar reasons, I have classified several other upper voices of the motets in Table . as mos lascivus; all have the same primarily long-breve declamation, but with occasional syllabic pairs of semibreves, and a small number of melismatic larger semibreve groupings. Such decorative figures could be viewed as documentation of an ornamentation performance practice. Visually these groupings of melismatic semibreves even look pleasingly decorative, creating carefully placed moments of geometrically patterned interest on the page, with closely spaced patterns of rhomboid shapes. The stock vocabulary of vocal ornamentation, which in older sources is notated as a three-note (usually descending) conjunctura, in these pieces receives one or two additional semibreves added to that conjunctura. Some of these ornaments might highlight aspects of the metrical organization (such as their placement on the third breve of the perfection, as noted above for Iam nubes) or may draw attention to the text, such as on the word puritatis (purity) as a descriptor of the Virgin Mary in the triplum of Virgo sancta Katarina. Similarly, the frequency of decorative four-semibreve melismas of Frondentibus may be related to the floral-centered text (and tenor). David Maw has pointed to these sorts of modifications in a continental example that compares versions of a composition copied in the Mo and Tu codices, where the three-semibreve melismas in Mo become four-semibreve melismas in Tu version of the motet. Consistency within a single source might support this hypothesis: in Onc , for example, three of the four motets that have large groupings of semibreves only use them as occasional melismas. The remaining voice parts in Table . have much more extensive syllabic semibreve motion that precludes characterizing them as mos lascivus. These voices also feature the extended Franconian features of syllabic or melismatic groupings marked with descending stems and/ or groups of semibreves larger than three semibreves per breve. The question with these remaining voices then becomes how one might differentiate between the mos longus and the mos mediocris, and within the mos mediocris, how to distinguish between the two flavors of this manner that Handlo describes, labeled in Tables . and Table . as (a) and (b)? The ‘mos longus’ or the lengthy manner The triplum Rosa mundi (Lbl ), which is the sole surviving voice of this motet, can be straightforwardly classified as mos longus, with its groups of four, five, and six syllabic semibreves per breve that are traditionally associated with the so-called ‘Petronian’ style (for instance, the notated music examples associated with Petrus de Cruce by both Handlo and Jacobus within their discussions of the mos longus/mensuratio morosa). The melismatic three-note descending conjunctura, which was often encountered in the ‘Franconian’ mos lascivus voices described above, is also a frequent feature in this triplum (see Example .). In order to accommodate up to six syllabic semibreves per breve, this voice would had to have been measured by a lengthy breve tempus. •
•
The motetus of another Onc motet, Virgo mater; the triplum of Salvator mundi, Lwa ; Templum eya and the motetus of Deus quorum in Ob ; and the triplum and motetus of Frondentibus (Ob and Ob ). The first section of the triplum of Lux refulget is also mos lascivus, however, it switches to mos mediocris (b) in its second section. Maw , , and his ex. .a on p. . On four-semibreve melismatic decorations, also see Bradley , –.
Karen Desmond
Example .: Rosa mundi, longs – (Lbl , fol. v), with the original mensural note shapes (apart from rests) added above the staff
s s ∫z∫
∫z∫
s s . s ss. s s s s s s ¬ 3 j œ j œ j3œ œ3 œ œ 3 & œ œ œ œœœ œœ œ œœ ˙ J 3
triplum
3
ro - sa flo -rum
¬
& ˙ ra
Œ
ss ∫ ∫
j3 œœ œ œ
j3 œœ œ œ
sa-po - ris dul - ce-di - ne
j3 œœ œ
Œ
sa-lu - ti - fe -ra vi -ne -a fruc -ti -fe - ra
ss ∫ ∫
s s ∫ ∫
œ
œ
de qua ma-num
s s . s s . s s sss
j3 j3 œœ œ
p
fe - li - ci mo-de - ra-mi -
ne
hec
s s sss ∫
3 j3 œœ œœœœ
s s s.s s . s s s p
ssss
3 j3 œ 3œ œ j3 j œ œ œœœ œ œœ œ œœ œ œ 3
3
œœœ œœ
me -de -la lan-go - ri
3
vis-ce-ra que cul - pe sa-nat ul -
s s .ss . s ss ¬
3 j3 j3 œ œ œ œ œœœ ˙
ce -
Œ
cun-cta pel -lens pe - ri - cu - la
Let us consider now the triplum (‘Caligo terre scinditur’) of the Onc motet Virgo mater, in combination with its two other voices (Example .). This motet’s two lower voices can be classified as mos lascivus, equivalent to the fast (cita) measure that Jacobus informs us is generally used in motets, with their long-breve rate of declamation, and decorative c.o.p. ligatures in the motetus. Straightforwardly Franconian, I interpret the breve in these two lower voices as ternary, since this is how all three theoretical traditions outlined in Table . describe voices like these, and measured in the mos lascivus/mensuratio cita/ tempus perfectum minimum, with the breve subdivided into no more than three semibreves (all equal). Thus, it is likely that the triplum of Virgo mater would also have been measured in ternary breves, so that its semibreves would align with those of the lower voices. But the triplum has a different rate of textual declamation and range of note values in comparison to the two lower voices, moving mostly in breves and either two or three syllabic semibreves, and with decorative melismas of up to five semibreves per breve. Like Rosa mundi, it also frequently features the three-note melismatic descending conjunctura: perhaps this is a feature that characterizes motets with ternary breves (the mos longus and mos lascivus), and, as will be seen presently, it is not a noted feature of the binary-breve mos mediocris voices described below. Even though this voice does not have groups of syllabic semibreves larger than three, I nonetheless lean towards classifying this voice as mos longus, since in order to declaim potentially up to nine texted syllables within every long would require a significantly more drawn-out tempo (a ‘lengthy manner’) than that needed for the occasional paired semibreve motion on perhaps the first or last breve of every perfection in the mos lascivus. Sung on its own as a single voice, the notational language and textual declamation of the motetus of Virgo mater is mos lascivus; however, once this motetus and tenor are combined with the triplum, the experiential tempo of the motet as a whole is mos longus (and the longs sung by the motetus and tenor in reality would certainly be lengthy, perhaps held almost three times as long as the longs in Example .), despite the appearance of their notation. •
• •
‘Also, when the ancients said that the perfect breve is divisible into three semibreves and not in more, they had in mind that which happened more generally and more regularly, especially in motets’ (Wegman , ) and then later Jacobus writes that in motets (or perhaps motetus voices?), ‘the ancients had generally used a fast mensuration of breves’ (Wegman , ). The highest number of syllables declaimed within a perfection in the triplum of this motet is actually eight and not nine. The Ob motet Deus tuorum has a similar rhythmic profile, with breve-semibreve declamation in the triplum, many groups of three syllabic semibreves, and several melismatic groupings of four or more semibreves, that I again have
Tempus, Tempo, and Insular Semibreves
Example .: Virgo mater, perfections – (Onc , fol. v), with the original mensural note shapes (apart from rests) added above each staff
triplum
∫ ∫ sss . s s . s s s . sss ∫ s s s . s s ¬ 3 3 3 3 3 ° j3 & œ œ œ#œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œj œ ˙ qua -rum de
motetus
-
co -rem pol -lu -it pec - ca-tum a-de ve-te - ris
∫ ∫ ∫
¬
fa - ci - le
sic
& œ #œ œ
‘∫
œ œ œ tenor ¢& ‹
∫
˙
œ
˙
+ œ
il
¬ -
˙
la
˙
∫ -
œ
bi
Œ
¬ -
˙
Œ
∫ ∫ s s ∫ s s ∫ s s s.s s . s s ¬ 3 3 3 j3 j3 œ œ œ œ œ œj œ œ œ œ œ œj œ œ œ ˙
in par - tu pu - re virgi - nis nox ni -tet in- star lumi - nis.
∫ ∫ ∫ œ œ œ Œ
tur
ad fri - vo
˙
œ œ œ œ
¥+ ∫∫
Œ
-
¬ ˙
∫ ¥ œ œ
la
la - ben
˙
‘∫
Œ œ
œ -
œ
∫
¬ ˙
œ ci
œ
-
Œ
a
˙
±
œ
Certain notational modifications to the semibreves in other motet voices within Table . also seem to indicate ternary breves, and thus that the voices are either mos longus or mos lascivus. In three motets in three different manuscript sources, rather than using dots to separate breve groupings, the scribes indicate these groupings by regularly adding a descending stem to one of the semibreves in the group. In all three of these pieces, the rate of textual declamation is primarily strings of semibreve pairs. In the triplum and motetus of Candet sine spina (Bologna), descending stems are added on the first semibreve of each pair (see Example .), but in the triplum Templum eya (Ob ), the descending stems mark the second semibreve of each pair (see Example .). In addition to circumscribing the breve groupings, several theorists remark that descending stems indicate a lengthening of the semibreve; that is, the stems mark the semibreve pairs in Candet sine spina as trochaic, and those of Templum eya iambic. In the fragmentary texted voice of Ecce vir (Wisbech), the descending stems are also found on the second semibreve of the pairs; these stems, however, may have been added later. This voice moves predominantly in longs and breves, with only occasional semibreve pairs, and no larger groupings of semibreves, leading me to classify it as mos lascivus, despite the ‘extended Franconian’ feature of downward stems (which may in any case be later additions). I classified the lone extant voice of Templum eya as mos lascivus for the same reasons. Candet sine spina, on the other hand, is in imperfect modus, and does not neatly fit into any of Petrus le Viser’s categories since it does not quite seem like a mos
•
• •
•
classified as mos longus, but with the two lower voices clearly in mos lascivus. The ascending stems in triplum appear to be later additions. A motet with an almost identical rhythmic profile, but which does not have any descending stems, is the motetus voice Salvator mundi (Lwa ), whose two surviving voices have declamation in paired semibreves, and mostly melismatic three-semibreve conjunctura, and a single melismatic four-semibreve group in the motetus. Candet sine spina is edited in Pieragostini , which also has black-and-white images of the (now lost) Bologna music fragment. Within Rubric IV, Maxim , Handlo attributes the teaching on the addition of descending stems to distinguish the major from the minor semibreve to Johannes de Garlandia (Lefferts , –). Jacobus also describes the addition of descending stems to denote the longer semibreve (SM book VII, chap. ; Bragard –, : ). In their source description of Wisbech, William Summers and Peter Lefferts note that downward stems were added later to the semibreves (EECM , ).
Karen Desmond
longus piece because its longs are binary, and thus ‘un-Franconian’, yet its seemingly trochaic breves also exclude it from mos mediocris. Example .: Candet sine spina, triplum, longs – (Bologna, fol. v), with the original mensural note shapes (apart from rests) added above the staff
Â
triplum
& œ
s Â
j œ œ
3
3
s
j œ
Can - dor ves - tis
Â
œ
in
3
s Â
j œ œ
3
s
j œ
his fes - tis
s ss
.Â
œ œ œ œ 3
la
-
3
-
s
j œ
Â
œ
tu - it
3
s
Â
j œ œ
3
s
j œ
¬
∑
˙
sub fim - bri - a
Example .: Templum eya, longs – (Ob , p. xii), with the original mensural note shapes (apart from rests) added above the staff
∫ ¬
triplum
& œ ˙
Tem -plum
∫ ∫ s  ∫ ¬ 3
œ œ œj œ œ ˙
e - ya sa - lo - mo - nis
s  s  s  ∫ ¬
3 j j j œœ œ œ œœ œ ˙ 3
3
in su- per-ne re gi - o - nis
∫ ∫ss
∫ ¬
j œ #œ œ œ œ ˙
po - lo
3
re - no
-
±
∫
œ ˙
œ
va
-
Ó
tur
The upper voice of the motet Laus honor has occasional descending stems that also appear to signal a ternary breve. This triplum, which survives in the fragmentary source Cpc along with a tenor from what originally was a four-voice motet, has a rate of declamation moving in groups of two or three semibreves, and features several groups of five syllabic semibreves, and two groups of four semibreves. The patterns with descending stems are given in Example ., and both suggest a ternary breve; this is because there is no sensible realization of both groupings within a binary breve that could lengthen these particular notes within a group. Thus Laus honor’s ternary breve indicates classification of this voice as mos longus.
ssssÂ
dffgy
Example .: The descending stem patterns in Laus honor and their possible realization within a ternary breve
ssss ssÂs
dffgy dgty
sEventually sÂs dgty the demarcation of semibreve rhythmic patterns with descending stems with-
in a ternary mensuration becomes a ubiquitous feature of insular mensural notation. This style of notation is frequently used in later fourteenth-century sources to notate insular cantilenas. An example of this notation in an earlier fourteenth-century source is the Onc motet Regalis exoritur, which has a variety of patterns of stemmed and unstemmed semibreves (see the ‘Other S groups’ column for this motet in Table .). This motet is a palimpsest addition to Onc , however, overwritten on an erased page by a different and later hand to that which copied the original motet codex.
• •
Roesner , , notes that stems ‘may have been employed as an aid to declamation, or for some other purpose related to performance’. Lefferts terms this notation ternary breve-semibreve notation, and discusses this repertory of motets and cantilenas and its notation in detail (, –).
Tempus, Tempo, and Insular Semibreves
The voice parts classified in Table . as mos longus and described thus far have the following shared characteristics: () rhythmic motion and text declamation primarily in semibreves, with occasional groups of four or more semibreves per breve; () groups of five or six syllabic semibreves are found to be more common than groups of four; () the melismatic three-semibreve descending conjunctura is commonly found; and () sometimes descending stems are used to indicate rhythmic patterns that reinforce a ternary breve interpretation. Insular mos longus motet voices then, seem to range from those more conventionally recognized as ‘Petronian’ – for example, a voice like Rosa mundi – to those that do not have many (or any) larger groups of semibreves, yet which move in a primarily syllabic semibreve style, and are measured by a ternary breve – such as the triplum of Virgo mater. The ‘mos mediocris’ or moderate manner Can all of the remaining voices in Table . be characterized as mos mediocris? Most of them do share a number of characteristics. Single extant voices, all probably tripla, such as Alleluya confessoris, Duodeno sydere, and Princeps apostolice, are typical of the first sort of mos mediocris (a) that Handlo describes, where the textual declamation is mostly at the semibreve level, interspersed with occasional breves, and with frequent large groups of four and/ or five syllabic semibreves per breve (see Example . for Duodeno sydere). With very few exceptions, almost all feature frequent use of the three-semibreve group with a descending stem on the first semibreve, which would seem to indicate the binary division of the breve. These voices rarely use any c.o.p. ligatures or melismatic conjuncturae. Example .: Duodeno sydere, longs – (Ob , p. ix), with the original mensural note shapes (apart from rests) added above each staff
∫
s s
in
e - qua - li
 œ
s s
œ œ œ
do
pa - tu - le
& œ
triplum
∫
& œ
den
-
∫
œ œ œ ∫
∫
s s s s. s s
or -
di - ne di - vi - no
œ œ œ œ œ œ
œ
 œ
∫
œ
do - cens
s s . s s s
s . s
œ œ œ œ œ œ œ
in - ti - me
re - ge - re
ve - lit
s s s s.s s
po - pu - lo cu - rat
s . ∫
œ
nos
œ
et
s s . s s s s
∫
œ œ œ œ œ œ
œ
bi - du
∫
œ e
-
œ œ œ œ œ œ o
∫ -
#œ xi
pro - po - ne - re pen-
¬ -
˙™
me.
Let us now consider some mos mediocris voices from motets where all the voice parts are extant, and how the classification of the measurement of the breve tempus can change when voices are combined together in their sounding reality. The triplum of Multum viget is similar to the mos mediocris (a) voices just described: it has breve-semibreve declamation, frequent groups of four syllabic semibreves, and no c.o.p. ligatures or melismatic conjuncturae (see Example .). The motetus voice, however, conforms to the description Handlo outlined for the second flavor of mos mediocris (option (b) in Table .), since it has frequent c.o.p. liga •
Classifying the triplum of O livor, a motet copied in the insular source Ym (with a concordance in Fauv), is somewhat trickier. It has no groups of semibreves larger than five, so it is possibly either mos longus or mos mediocris, although possibly the frequency of the melismatic descending three-semibreve conjuncturae might indicate mos longus.
Karen Desmond
tures and melismatic conjuncturae, and the majority of its syllabic groups of semibreves are in groups of two semibreves per breve, but it does have occasional groups of three semibreves marked with a descending stem that indicate binary breves, precluding its classification as mos lascivus. The tenor, a straightforward Franconian voice, taken on its own, conforms to the description of mos lascivus. Notationally then, Multum viget is fully stratified in terms of its range of rhythmic values and textual declamation with the triplum, motetus, and tenor conforming to the mos mediocris (a), mos mediocris (b), and mos lascivus respectively. However, in practice, as a sounding polyphonic motet, the binary breves of the triplum and motetus imply that the breves in the tenor be sung as binary breves too, with equal pairs of semibreves (see how the tenor voice is realized in modern notation in Example .). Example .: Multum viget, longs – (Cgc /, fols v–r), with the original mensural note shapes (apart from rests) added above each staff ∫ s s s .s s s .s s s s . s s . s s ∫ ¬ ∫ s s s s . s s ∫ ¬ ¬ triplum
motetus
° & ˙
vir
-
go
∫
∫
∫
& œ œ œ ‹ sci - en - ti ¬
tenor
œ
¢& ˙ ‹
±
œ
nœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ
can - d i -d a fu l - g i -d a g ra - ci - o - sa
¬
˙ -
Œ
œ œ œ œ œ
˙
∫
¬
lin - qu e hu nc er - ro - rem
Œ
Œ
∫
º¬
a
b˙ ™
œ
œ
œ
˙
dum
ro
œ œ œ
˙™
et
∫
-
œœœ œ œ
œœœ
˙
Œ
d e - o no - stro p re - be fa - v o - rem
∫z∫
œ
œ
tas
fre
s s s
œ
œœœ
œ
¬
-
g it
quas-
-
∑
∫
˙
∫
œ que
¬
˙™
The other fully stratified motet in Table . featuring mos mediocris voice parts is Virga iesse: it survives as a three-voice motet in Cgc /, with an additional fourth voice in the DRc version. The classification of the voice parts, and the interpretation of the overall performance tempo of this motet is more ambiguous, however, since the scribe of the Cgc / version did not mark any of the syllabic three-semibreve groups in the triplum or motetus with descending stems, whereas in the DRc version all groups of three semibreves in all three of the upper voices have a descending stem on the first semibreve. Example . shows this in a passage taken from the beginning of the ‘Orto sole’ voice in the second section of Virga iesse where these larger groupings of semibreves are located (from both Cgc / and DRc ). Despite the absence of stemmed three-semibreve groups in the Cgc / version, the lack of larger groupings of semibreves and melismatic threesemibreve conjuncturae that characterized the mos longus voices examined above persuades me to classify the triplum and motetus voices as mos mediocris, and thus to interpret the breve as binary for the motet as a whole in its sounding realization. The absence of descending stems in the Cgc / version cannot be adequately explained, however, especially •
•
There are three groups of semibreves in the triplum that are syllabic but which do not have stems: two of these are shown in the second measure of Example ., interpreted as if the longer note occurs on the third semibreve. The three-semibreve group in the penultimate measure of this example has the descending stem on the first semibreve of the group. This section is in pseudo-diminution, where the second part of the piece moves at a faster rate of declamation. One other motet in Table . has a pseudo-diminution section, Lux refulget (see above, n. ). Lefferts (, ) lists insular motets that have shifts in mensuration, including these two motets.
Tempus, Tempo, and Insular Semibreves
since this same scribe frequently uses descending stems in other motets in this same manuscript. Stylistically, the semibreve patterns in this second section are regular and repetitive: a four-semibreve group is always followed by a three-semibreve group followed by a breve. Perhaps Virga iesse was a well-known piece, and the binary realization of the absolutely regular patterning of the semibreves was so obvious to the Cgc / scribe that he did not expend the extra effort to add the multiple descending stems. Example .: Virga iesse, triplum (‘Orto sole’), beginning of second section with note shapes of Cgc / (fol. v) and DRc (fol. r) shown above modern transcription. Descending stems on the first of every three-semibreve group in DRc
∫ ∫
Cgc 512/543 DRc 20
& œ
iam
Cgc 512/543 DRc 20
∫ ∫
& œ
nam
s s s s .s s s s s s s . s s
∫ ∫
œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ ca - ri - tas in ex - i - li - o
s s s s. s s s s s s s. Â s s
s s
#œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ e - qui - tas in
iu - di - ci - o
s s s s .s s s s s .Â
s s s s
∫ ∫
œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ
ve - ri - tas in con - si - li - o
s s s s .s s s ∫ s s s s . s s ∫
#œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ pu - ri - tas in
e - lo - qui - o
s s s s .s s s s s s s . s s
∫ ∫
œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ
cum si - len - ci - o
Œ
Œ
Œ
que - ri - tur
s s s s .s s s s s s s . s s
∫ ∫
œ œ #œ œ œ œ œ œ
cum tris - ti - ci - a
Œ
pri - mi - tur
It is possible Virga iesse was not originally conceived or notated with descending stems on these semibreve groups, despite their presence in the DRc version, since the DRc scribe seems to have had a tendency to add stems to semibreve groupings in order to force a binary interpretation of the breve in other motets in this same manuscript. For example, Dei preco is an upper voice part (probably a motetus) extant in DRc that, in terms of its rhythmic profile, looks almost exactly like the Onc mos lascivus voices described earlier: it features primarily long-breve declamation, c.o.p. ligatures, and occasional four-semibreve melismatic groups (see Example .). However, the DRc scribe has placed stems (one ascending, and two descending) on the three three-semibreve melismatic groupings in this piece (note that stems on the first semibreve of the three-semibreve group are almost always a feature of syllabic three-semibreve groups). Even though this voice, when originally composed, was very likely measured in mos lascivus, nonetheless the DRc scribe understood Dei preco’s breves to be binary. Since this is the only extant source of this motet voice, I have classified this voice as mos mediocris (b). Handlo does note that mos mediocris (b) mixes more longs and breves into its declamation than mos mediocris (a), and has melismatic groups of more than three semibreves, which is what is seen here. It can be difficult, then, to precisely distinguish between mos mediocris (b) and mos lascivus if you have only one voice surviving, no concordant sources, and a scribe with a predilection for binary breves. However, when all voices of a motet survive, classifying individual voices is easier. A particular rhythmic profile for motets with mos mediocris voices is frequently observed in Table ., where triplum voices can be (relatively) straightforwardly assigned to the first sort of mos mediocris (a), and the motetus voices, which potentially could be difficult to classify if they were the only voice parts to survive, when considered as sung in combination with the triplum voice, can be assigned to mos mediocris (b).
Karen Desmond
Example .: Dei preco, motetus, longs – (DRc , fol. r), in mos mediocris (b)
˙
& œ
œ
qui
∫ ∫z∫
& œ œ œ sal
¬
œ œ
˙
pu
-
ta
-
-
∫
¥
œ œ œ œ œ œ œ
œ
œ
tur
he
ab
∫
¬
∫
œ
˙
œ
ta
-
∫ ∫z∫
ssss
†
tri
-
ci
-
ro
 s s.  s s †
∫
œ
œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ sic
ca
-
pud
-
œ
de
∫ . ¬
¥
œ
œ
œ
de
-
col
∫∫
˙
id
œ
-
∫
˙
la
∫ ∫z∫
œ
tur
∫
œ œ œ da
-
-
œ
tur
Conclusion This close examination of the insular repertoire through the lens of Handlo’s description of Petrus le Viser’s mos, Jacobus’s mensuratio, and the Franconian/Vitriacan concept of tempus, demonstrates that the rules and observations provided by these theorists genuinely do refer to the actual speed of the breve, and reflect practical considerations on how to choose a performance speed based upon how many syllables can be sensibly uttered in the time of a breve. This holds equally true whether one considers a composition of Petrus de Cruce with seven syllables per breve and understood to be in the mos longus (or mensuratio morosa Jacobus’s antiqui), or an ars nova composition like Qui doloreux, given by the scribe of Pn as an example of Vitry’s tempus perfectum maius, and whose breves are similarly as long as the breves in a Petronian motet. The most productive way to study and understand these concepts here was to consider individual motet voices separately at first, and then the voices in combination. A lone example or even a few instances of a particular notational feature that might be considered to ‘mark’ the mos of an individual voice can be interpreted differently when the notation of an entire voice part, and then of an entire motet, is considered holistically. The mos lascivus of the tenor and motetus voices of Virgo sancta Katerina prompted classification of the triplum (and thus the entire motet) as mos lascivus (Example .), despite the five-semibreve syllabic group in the triplum; similarly, the decorative four- and five-semibreve melismatic groups in Iam novum do not appear to preclude its interpretation as a mos lascivus motet (Example .). In these motets, it was proposed that these melismatic elaborations reflect both scribal habit and performance practice, and highlight certain words of the text or aspects of the metrical organization. By contrast, although Virgo mater also has a mos lascivus tenor and motetus, and does not contain any large groupings of syllabically texted semibreves, its predominantly semibreve text declamation (in groups of two and three syllabic semibreves) prompts classification of the sounding realization of the motet as a whole as mos longus (Example .). Thinking about the notational profile and performance ‘manner’ of each motet voice separately, and how these profiles combine to generate a polyphonic motet, is also helpful when editing and performing these motets since it can guide decisions about whether the breve might be interpreted as ternary or binary. For example, in the above analysis, the proposed overall mos, when the voices are combined, for the motet Virgo mater is mos longus, implying
Tempus, Tempo, and Insular Semibreves
the breve subdivisions in the motetus and tenor voices are to be interpreted as ternary (Example .), whereas with Multum viget, the notational profile of the two upper voices nicely matches Viser’s mos mediocris (a) and (b), implying a binary breve for this motet, including for its tenor (Example .). Furthermore, the classification of motet voices according to mos also allows for the observation of other features not specifically noted by the theorists, but which appear to cluster in motet voices in a particular mos. The decorative melismatic three-note conjunctura seems to be characteristic of ternary mensurations: in the mos lascivus this is a decorative figuration performed rapidly and is a common feature of the Franconian style. In the mos longus these melismatic conjuncturae would have been performed more slowly, but are still frequently used, as seen in Rosa mundi (Example .) and the triplum of Virgo mater (Example .). By contrast, neither these conjuncturae nor c.o.p. ligatures are common in mos mediocris (a) voices. Mos longus voices tend not to have many four-semibreve groupings (in contrast to mos mediocris voices), and groups of five and six texted semibreves are more common. And, the use of descending stems can be a helpful marker for distinguishing the mos, for example the patterns found in Laus honor indicating mos longus (Example .), and the ubiquitous texted three-semibreve grouping with a descending stem on the first semibreve that marks mos mediocris (Table .). Finally, this analysis of the concept of mos, which examined both the theory and insular repertoire, could profitably be extended to analyses of the continental repertoire: do the notational profiles of continental motets reflect similar sorts of classifications, and what are the chronological implications for interpreting breve divisions through the concept of mos? These styles of motet writing in the mos longus (mensuratio morosa) and mos mediocris (mensuratio media) described by Handlo and Jacobus, and attested to in these insular compositions – of which Petrus de Cruce’s examples represent just one avenue of possibility – could helpfully be employed to study all motets that extensively use the semibreve to set syllables of text. In a previous study I offered a typology to describe the rhythmic language and texture for the motets of the eighth fascicle of Mo. Many of these motets had triplum and sometimes also motetus voices with a high proportion of syllabic semibreves: strings of two, three, or more semibreves set to separate text syllables, similar to the insular motet Virgo mater, for example, and classified here as a mos longus composition (Example .). An examination of these Mo motets from the perspective of mos that would also incorporate the large group of insular motets (the sixty-seven motets mentioned earlier) and any other ars antiqua motets with extended passages of groups of two or three semibreves separated by dots of division set to individual syllables of text may help clarify understandings of the ternary and binary breve tempus in the first decades of the fourteenth century. These works with extensive declamation at the semibreve level must be understood as either mos mediocris or mos longus. Jacobus tells us that the mos lascivus is generally used for motets, and this is indeed true for the large proportion of the ars antiqua motet repertoire, •
Desmond d.
Karen Desmond
but sometimes, he says, motets were written in mos mediocris or mos longus. A motet voice that mostly declaims the text with pairs of syllabic semibreves, and that allowed for fewer decorative flourishes than the elaborate style of mos longus voices (that is, fewer groups of melismatic semibreves, including fewer groups of three-semibreve conjuncturae), could have moved along at more moderate (rather than drawn-out) pace. Singing such a motet voice could perhaps eventually morph into a delivery that had two equal semibreves per breve, and which then becomes solidified in the teachings of Petrus le Viser as the mos mediocris, and, potentially, also in the tempus imperfectum minimum described in the Vitriacan Ars nova that features four syllabic semibreves minimae per breve. As I proposed above, the Vitriacan tempus imperfectum minimum may reflect a relatively fast mensuration that holds a duality with the Franconian tempus perfectum minimum, rather than being equivalent to the later perfect tempus/minor prolatio mensuration. In the mos mediocris and the tempus imperfectum minimum, patterns of four semibreves minimae are common, and in groups of three, the longer semibreve is usually marked with a descending stem. Consider Tribum/Quoniam from Fauv interpreted as a mos mediocris (or tempus imperfectum minimum) composition (Example .), with its triplum in mos mediocris (a), its motetus in mos mediocris (b), and its tenor in mos lascivus, exactly the same profile as the insular mos mediocris motet Multum viget given as Example . above. Other examples of mos mediocris/tempus imperfectum minimum pieces in Fauv could include Firmissime/Adesto and Nulla/Plange. Mos longus-style pieces are also found in Fauv, where their more leisurely pace would have allowed for the unequal delivery of semibreve pairs. Example .: Tribum/Quoniam, longs – (transcribed from Fauv, fols v–r), with the original mensural note shapes (apart from rests) added above each staff
° & œ œ
∫ ∫
triplum
Tri - bum
motetus
tenor
&
∑
¢&
∑
ssss
.s s . s s ∫ ¬ œœœœœ œ œ œ œ ˙ que
non ab - ho - ru - it
∑
∑
ssss
∫
œ
in
-
∫ ∫
œ œ
de
-
.s s .s s ¬ œœœœ œ œ œ œ ˙
cen
ss s . s s
œ œ œ œ bœ
Quo - ni - am sec -ta
∑
∑
-
∑
∑
la -
∑
∑
ter as -cen-de - re
¥
œ
tro
œ
-
∑
¬
fu
∫ ∫z∫
˙
œœœ
num
spe
¬
µ
˙
Merito
¬
˙
˙
hec
-
s s .s s ¬
œ œ œ bœ ˙
lun-ca vis - pi - li
˙
patimur
¬
˙
If Handlo’s mos mediocris is directly comparable to the mensuratio media of the antiqui that Jacobus lists (but refrains from describing in any detail) and to the Vitriacan tempus •
•
See the eight motets with binary breve division in Table of Desmond c, , that have multiple instances of texted three-semibreve groups with a descending stem on the first semibreve, and also multiple four-semibreve breve groupings (and few three-semibreve groups without stems). At some point, the delivery of these groupings becomes more drawn out, and interpreted according to the ‘modal’ semibreve patterns outlined in detail in many witnesses to the Vitriacan Ars nova (Desmond a, –). For example, the motet Se cuers/Rex beatus.
Tempus, Tempo, and Insular Semibreves
imperfectum minimum (also presumably known to Jacobus but unmentioned by him), that would allow for interpretation of these binary-breve Fauv motets within concepts of mensurations that precede the systematic formulations of modus-tempus-prolatio of the ars nova. That is to say, the concept of mos enabled the interpretation of motets that included such binary breves, prior to the notational and theoretical overhauls of the ars nova that made the distinction between ternary and binary mensurations more systematic. This makes sense in light of recent scholarship that emphasizes the temporal proximity of the copying of Mo fascicle and Fauv (in the s), just a few years before Robertus de Handlo reports Petrus le Viser’s theories in his Regule. Unfortunately the dating and geographic localization of the majority of insular sources of late medieval polyphony, including those listed in Table ., remains approximate and circumstantial. Yet it seems likely that at roughly the same time insular and continental composers, singers, scribes, and the theorists discussed herein were grappling with the issues the new stylistic diversity of polyphony presented (both between different compositions, but also within compositions that now combined voices each with their own characteristic performance manner). In these early decades of the fourteenth century, overlaps in the solutions they devised may be gleaned through these readings of theory and the careful analysis of scribal notational practices, some of which have been outlined here. Eventually, as Earp notes, a new system was created, ‘truly an Ars Nova’, that would ‘resolve the nagging theoretical problems of triple and duple meter, as well as variable tempos, once and for all’, but which was ‘less tied to contemporary practice’, and which was not used to actually notate polyphony until the late s. An integrated analysis of both insular and continental motets that fit descriptions of both ‘drawn-out’ (mos longus) and ‘moderate’ (mos mediocris) performance styles (that is, the complete set of motets that deploy syllabic semibreves) that looks at the practices of notation, harmony, and text declamation should provide a fuller picture of the repertorial landscape that preceded the dramatic revolution of the ars nova.
• •
•
•
Baltzer ; Stones . Most of the date ranges given in RISM, DIAMM, and EECM are no more precise than placing the source within a quarter-century range, and the evidence by which a source is placed in that range not clearly defined. The introduction to the facsimile edition of thirteenth-century insular sources of polyphony by Summers and Lefferts has no discussion of how date ranges were assigned. As to the geographic localization, Summers and Lefferts note that for ‘only about half of the total is there any information concerning provenance. As a rule, that information pertains to the host manuscript rather than to its musical binding material and may on occasion signal local ownership, rather than a point of origin. Thus, at best what we know about provenance is mainly circumstantial’ (EECM , ). Of course, many open questions remain – for instance, whether pairs of semibreves in the mos longus/mensuratio morosa would have been sung as iambs or trochees, the precise delivery of the melismatic flourishes, and the degree to which the proposed rhythmic realizations reflect the accent and rhyme in the texts that are set – all of which are outside the scope of the current essay. Earp b, –.
. W, L C, M. .C C: A N E F* Margaret Bent
The manuscript Washington, Library of Congress, M. .C Case – hereafter Wa – consists of a full leaf and a half leaf containing incomplete copies of four compositions from the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, three of them unique; they will be discussed in detail below. They are as follows: r Alleluia ⁄ V Virga Jesse (Figure .) v Credo, cantus and tenor (Figure .) r motetus of Rex Karole/Leticie pacis (Figure .) v Deus compaignouns de Cleremunde: triplum of a motet (Figure .) The fragment has long intrigued students of the period, but has been little investigated. Both it and the manuscript from whose binding the fragments were removed have suffered misreporting in RISM (where the call number is wrongly given as M ..C a. ) and elsewhere. It is not surprising that it has resisted description, because it presents a number of conundra, both with respect to the relationship of the fragments to the host volume and their respective dates, and to the French or English origins of the compositions. My ancient faded photocopies are now superseded by the excellent online images which, together with generous cooperation from colleagues, have made the following report possible without my having been able to consult the manuscript in person.
*
• •
It was a privilege to witness Larry’s dissertation work at close quarters in the s, as it has been since then to admire and benefit from his critical acumen and the fruits of his encyclopedic grip on everything to do with Machaut and the long fourteenth century. Long may his ground-breaking research flourish. I am particularly grateful to Nicholas Pickwoad for his authoritative analysis of the binding of the host manuscript and its relation to the music fragments; to Susan Clermont of the Library of Congress Music Division for her generous responsiveness to my questions; to Library of Congress staff Shelly Smith, Head, Book Conservation Section, conservator John Bertonaschi for his observations and photography, also to Nathan Dorn of the Law Library. In addition to this precious expertise, Library of Congress staff generously hosted an online consultation with Nicholas Pickwoad and myself, the music and law librarians and members of their conservation team, which resolved some of the outstanding technical questions which had not been clear from photographs which they also generously provided. I am most grateful to them all for a remarkable and rare level of interest and cooperation. I also thank Peter Lefferts and Michael Scott Cuthbert for helpful exchanges during the early stages of preparation of this chapter. They both generously allowed me to proceed with this study, forgoing any intentions they may have had to do likewise. Timothy Symons beautifully set the music examples, and Jared Hartt has been a wonderfully vigilant editor, suggesting several improvements. Images of the fragments may also be viewed at . In-text references to the Library of Congress (LC) catalog description of Wa refer to this link. RISM B/IV, : –. Subsequent references to RISM refer to this entry.
Washington, Library of Congress, M.. M2.1. C C6 1400 Case: A Neglected English Fragment
Figure 25.1: .: Wa, fol. 1r, Alleluia ⁄ V Virga Jesse (Library of Congress Music Division)
530
Margaret Bent
Figure 25.2: .: Wa, fol. 1v, Credo, cantus 1 and tenor (Library of Congress Music Division)
531
M.. C6 C 1400 Case: A Neglected English Fragment Washington, Library of Congress, M2.1.
Figure 25.3: .: Wa, fol. 2r, Rex Karole/Leticie pacis,, motetus (Library of Congress Music Division)
Figure 25.4: .: Wa, fol. 2v, Deus compaignouns de Cleremunde, triplum (Library of Congress Music Division)
532
Margaret Bent
The host manuscript for the binding fragments was De legibus Angliae, in Law French, formerly (and still in the LC catalog) attributed to Johannes Britton ( John le Breton, bishop of Hereford, d. ), though it is now thought to have been the work of an unknown author writing after , and to have derived its name from a supposed connection with the much longer Latin treatise on English law ascribed to Henry of Bratton (Bracton). The LC classification is currently given as ‘Law Ms. Br: XIV’; the catalog record is under review. It is housed in the Law Library in a box labeled ‘De Ricci ’ and (on a separate label) ‘Baker ’. Seymour de Ricci reported it thus: . (Law Ms. : Br, XIV). Johannes Britton, De legibus Angliae, in Law-French. Vel. (XIVth C.), ff. ( × cm). Orig. wooden boards and doeskin, lined with ms. ff. of mensural music, sacred and secular, Latin and French.
The manuscript indeed has folios, not as reported in RISM. The text block measures × mm, which is close to RISM’s c. × mm, and to de Ricci’s approximation. The binding at × mm is slightly taller, these being the dimensions of the book reported in the LC catalog. The Quaritch catalog from which the law manuscript was purchased dated it – , the LC catalog – (now revised to – in response to the current findings), both suspiciously precise in the absence of a date within the colophon. It is immediately clear from fol. v (Figure .) and other pages that the LC dating is too late for the script of the main text. Daniel Wakelin confirmed this, suggesting that it fell within ‘the first or years of the s. So unlikely is the later dating that I wondered whether “” in the LC catalogue […] were a typo for “–”; libraries often simply date by century’. The binding, in poor condition, has been variously described: as ‘an original English binding of the fourteenth century’, ‘in a contemporary English binding of white leather over wooden boards; clasps are missing’ (RISM), ‘in the original thick wooden boards covered with doeskin’. In response to my questions about the binding, its date, and how the musical flyleaves related to it, Nicholas Pickwoad has prepared a full technical report for the Library of Congress. All citations here relevant to the music fragments are from this report and • •
• • • •
• •
. I thank Paul Brand for confirming the current consensus on authorship, and for the following information. ‘Baker ’ derives not from a LC designation but from its position as no. in the listing by John H. Baker (, ). In a running list of manuscripts in American libraries, items – are in the Library of Congress Law Library. Baker lists it as MS (formerly MS Br). Nichols lists about twenty manuscripts of the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; Baker lists six in the USA. Ricci , . Quaritch , – (no. ). I am indebted to Peter Lefferts for this reference. Email of December . Peter Lefferts has a typed letter from Robert L. Nay, Assistant Chief, American-British Law Division, Law Library, Library of Congress (date-stamped September ) that verifies that the manuscript has an original English binding of the fourteenth century, referencing Mr. Thomas Albro, Head of the Rare Book Restoration Section of the Library’s Restoration Office. Quaritch , . His report, dated January , is accessible via the catalog link (see n. ).
M.. C6 C 1400 Case: A Neglected English Fragment Washington, Library of Congress, M2.1.
Figure 25.5: .: De legibus Angliae, fol. 188 v (Library of Congress, Law Library), Photo: © John Bertonaschi, Library of Congress
534
Margaret Bent
associated conversations (here credited NP). He judges that the skin most probably ‘came from a hair sheep, an unsurprising choice for a late medieval binding (the use of the term ‘doeskin’ in the catalogue description is more likely to be the result of romantic imagination than forensic investigation)’. The music leaves are parchment, with red staff lines and some informally drawn red initials. RISM gives the dimensions of the whole leaf as × mm and the half leaf as × mm. In both cases the width dimension ( mm, mm) is compatible with (that is, a little less than) the height of the host volume ( mm). Folded in half, the full leaf would measure c. mm, which would sit nicely inside the volume width of mm. The extra few millimeters of the half leaf ( mm as opposed to mm) are accounted for by the stub formed along its spine edge to create a spine-fold with its line of sewing holes (its original placement is explained below). The original overall dimensions of the leaves with margins can be estimated at approximately × mm, now cut down to c. × mm, with written space c. × – mm for nine to eleven red five-line staves. All four sides have five staves above the sixth, which was sewn into the spine. The Credo has nine staves, as probably did Deus compaignouns and Leticie pacis. The Alleluia has eleven staves: the last one was squeezed in and had to be extended into the right-hand margin in order to accommodate the complete piece on this one page. The arrangement on both sides of the full leaf suggest that the number of staves was tailored to what was needed, and perhaps not fully drawn up in advance. All the staves are rastrum-ruled, as is evident from ‘waves’ and ink re-takes of the nibs. De Ricci’s description says that the boards were ‘lined with ms. ff. of mensural music’ (counting the folded whole leaf as two folios), which could imply that one leaf was associated with each board. However, the earlier Quaritch catalog reports that ‘the last three flyleaves of the binding consist of contemporary Music’, suggesting they were all at the end. This was indeed the case. The front pastedown, now lifted, is a blank leaf at the front of the volume. There is no offset on the front board, and there was no place here for the half leaf. Both music leaves have holes which show they had been stitched to the five sewing supports of the binding. The full leaf was originally folded and sewn, with the top half of the Alleluia pasted to the back board, on which the ink has left musical offset (partly visible in Figure ., and see Figure . for its original position); this is also corroborated by worm damage on the adjacent board: ‘the sewing holes indicate that the bifolium was sewn •
• •
RISM B/IV, : – reported: ‘The pages of music are now protected by transparent plastic covers and housed in a handsome red cloth folder of box type’, but they are now kept in a plain gray cardboard box. The ‘a’ in RISM’s shelf mark (M . C a. ) refers to photographic negatives. The online LC catalog gives a former call number M. XIV M. Variants of the correct number are widely used. Anomalies of the RISM and other descriptions are reported throughout this chapter. It is not recorded when the music leaves were removed from the law manuscript, but the RISM description antedates , and Susan Clermont informs me that they were already in the Music Division by . Quaritch , . This ‘single leaf of blank parchment […] was at some stage quite clearly adhered to the inside of the left board and must therefore have constituted the outermost leaf on the left side of the bookblock. The sharpness of the impression of the grain of the wooden board and the details of the channels cut for the sewing supports slips indicate beyond doubt that it was pasted directly to the surface of the board’ (NP).
Washington, Library of Congress, M.. C Case: A Neglected English Fragment
with the rest of the bookblock for this binding and without evidence of any other sewing. The pastedown was eaten by woodworm moving along the lacing channels of the sewingsupport slips, creating angled tracks in the manuscript leaf. The lower pair of these angled tracks is also visible in the conjugate free endleaf [the lower half of the full leaf ], though reduced in size. There is also a large hole just above centre in the spine fold. This hole and the angled tracks (much reduced in size) are also present in the single [half ] leaf; the angled tracks show that the leaf was in direct contact with the inner leaf of the bifolium (the free endleaf ) when the woodworm damage took place’. The leaves have ‘also been flattened, removing some evidence of how they were originally incorporated into the binding’ (NP). The half leaf, also originally folded and sewn, was wrapped around the thin final gathering of the manuscript. Its lost lower half was cut off beyond what is now the spine fold, creating a stub which was adhered to the single leaf fol. , forming a composite bifolio (see the second diagram in Figure .). It thus formed an additional free endleaf between fol. and the folded full music leaf, to which it was adjacent, as attested by the damage reported above. The stub conjugate of fol. can be seen in Figure .; it is now partly covered by the new white parchment guard that was sewn around the final gathering when the music was removed (fols –: see the first diagram in Figure .). The stub shows the offset of a vertical red staff-line from the music leaf that was adjacent to it; the offset ‘lines up with the loss of color from the stub and the tapering shape of the stub matches that of the impression’ (NP). A similar impression of red pigment has been left on fol. r, to which the cut-off musical half-leaf was adhered, confirming that it was originally swung around the final gathering of the text block and not around the bifolio formed by the full music leaf. The transfer of color from staff lines to fol. r and to the stub conjugate of fol. visible on fol. v (Figure .) was in both cases facilitated by the pressure put onto the inner margins when the binding was in place. 188 Rear board 188
185 185
Figure .: Diagrams of the final quire of the Britton MS. First, as now, after removal of the music leaves; second, showing the original position of the music leaves, © John Bertonaschi New parchment guard
Music half-leaf
Music full leaf
The music was apparently composed between the late s and the early fifteenth century, and therefore copied probably after , by two different scribes, all in full black no-
Margaret Bent
tation, considerably later than what now appears to be the early-fourteenth-century date of the law manuscript. The binding is described as contemporary, or fourteenth-century, which left unexplained why music leaves that might be later than the binding could have been obsolete, discarded, and used as its pastedowns. Indeed, Nicholas Pickwoad observes that ‘everything about the binding suggests that it dates from the th century and not earlier, and is most probably English, though a northern French provenance cannot be entirely discounted’. Although a more precise dating is not possible, he inclines to a mid-fifteenthcentury date, and observes (email of December ) that ‘the patterns of lacing can be found right up to the end of the fifteenth century’. The endleaves (only by then ‘old’ discarded music) would have been sewn in at that time; binder’s waste is usually a generation or more earlier than the date of the binding which, from the musical point of view, would in this case make a binding date in the third quarter of the century likelier than the second quarter. It was not uncommon for manuscripts to remain stored together as separate fascicles for a long period before their first binding. Most of the music is incomplete and therefore not usable, so its presence and contents cannot be considered purposeful, or indeed purposefully related to the law manuscript. It was waste parchment. RISM however reports that ‘it is clear that the music was with the principal manuscript from the beginning, since the Latin colophon on the final verso includes the words “Qui scripsit carmen sit benedictus” on fol. v [recte v], with a hand pointing to where the flyleaves were’. Not so. In assuming they were integral to the manuscript, the RISM entry misunderstood the function of the musical leaves as endleaves, and wrongly dated the ‘Ars nova notation […] from c. ’. The colophon must have been written at least a century before the binding and its flyleaves were in place, so the ‘hand’ cannot be pointing to them. As shown in Figure ., the pointer is in fact not a hand but a fantastical face, part human, part monster, with an eye on the extended curve from ‘benedictus’, an open mouth and stubbly chin, possibly an added digit above the head, and an extended proboscis from which is suspended what could be a pomander. The face appears to have been doodled by the scribe himself. ‘Amen’ had to be added after the doodle and, from the little evidence that four letters give, seems to be the scribe’s usual hand. Daniel Wakelin notes the way that the stem on the right-hand side of ‘a’ protrudes lower than the rest of the letter, as in wordinitial examples in the main text. Moreover, he informs me that the formulation ‘Qui scripsit carmen sit benedictus’ appears on works of all kinds (for example, patristics) that are not musically related. Anglicana formata script is used for both the treatise and colophon, the latter with an enlarged module and a few more calligraphic strokes, such as ‘horns’ on the shoulder •
•
NP continues: ‘The direction of clasping (from left to right) make a Germanic or Flemish origin most unlikely. The fullcushion shaping of the boards is also a late medieval (and northern European) phenomenon. The coloured, reversed alum tawed skin is typical of the period, and use of catchplates on the fore-edge rather than side pins also points to a mid-th century date. A binding of the early th century would be more likely to reflect Romanesque techniques with a flat spine, flat boards and side-pin fastenings’. Suggestion by Julian Gardner, perhaps a visual witticism. Did the scribe’s name have an olfactory or odorous connotation?
Washington, Library of Congress, M.. C Case: A Neglected English Fragment
height of long ‘s’, and curling tails. This is followed by a Latin prayer for an indulgence at the foot of the page, added much later by a different scribe in a darker ink, probably in the last quarter of the fourteenth century. The compositions, origin, and provenance The first listed piece on the recto is not ‘Ille suy’, as reported in RISM, but a setting of Alleluia V / Virga Jesse. The verso status of the Credo is established by its presentation of cantus and tenor voices. These are not from the Credo by Perrinet (as formerly reported on DIAMM and elsewhere), but apparently an anonymous unicum (see below). RISM wrongly reverses the recto-verso status of the half leaf. The recto of the half leaf contains the beginning of the motetus of Rex Karole/Leticie pacis, the verso the triplum of an incomplete motet with macaronic text, Deus compaignouns de Cleremunde. The two leaves were not adjacent. Treating the whole leaf (arbitrarily) as fol. , the half leaf as fol. , the correct order of pieces on each leaf is as given at the beginning of this chapter. One conundrum posed by the music fragments is whether their provenance and contents are French or English. Both have been implied. RISM indeed declares that ‘there is no indication that the music is English like the Law ms; indeed, it would seem to be French, and the bilingual motet no. [recte no. ] suggests North-Eastern French origin’. The host manuscript is English, in an English hand. The binding is almost certainly English, which makes it very likely that any pastedowns were too. The scripts of the music fragments are also English. The vernacular language of the macaronic piece, reported by RISM as in French and Latin, and by LC as Provençal, is in fact Anglo-Norman; I am most grateful to Daron Burrows for his expert help with this text, and to Leofranc Holford-Strevens for the Latin. The two companions from Clermont are ‘foreigners’. There is thus every prima facie reason to regard this as an English fragment, copied by English scribes, with at least the Alleluia and Deus compaignouns, and probably the Credo, as English compositions. Arguments and any counter-evidence will emerge in what follows. Alleluia V / Virga Jesse This is the one apparently complete piece. A setting of Alleluia V / Virga Jesse is more likely to be English than French; there is such a setting in Lbl Add. (PMFC XVI, no. ), another in the English fragment Worcester, Worcestershire Archive and Archaeology Service, b.: BA . PMFC XVI includes settings of similar liturgical texts, which are virtually absent from French sources. This one, unusually, appears to be mensural monophony, a free and florid elaboration of the chant (Figure .), at pitch, more wide-ranging (c-f ') •
• •
Again, I am grateful to Daniel Wakelin for the script description of this page of the law manuscript. He also confirmed that the script of fol. r is certainly English, textualis shifting to anglicana, and that the textualis on the other pages is almost certainly so. The spelling of ‘Gwillelmum’ with ‘w’ on fol. v is also probably an anglicism; this fits with the discussion below of the Anglo-Norman text. The chant is printed in PMFC XVI, plainsong no. , likewise from the noted Sarum Missal (c. ) Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS , fol. v (Figure .) but omitting the first note.
Margaret Bent
than the d-d' octave of the chant, with C5, C, C4, C, and C C3 clefs. Chant notes are marked with crosses in Example 25.1. .. There are no direct stylistic comparands for such a monophonic setting. As in other Alleluia settings, the opening Alleluia is set without its (short) jubilus, and would then have been repeated in chant by the chorus with the final melisma. The verse Virga Jesse is set; the final ‘yma summis’ is left to be performed in chant, and the opening Alleluia repeated. Discounting that repeat, and discounting the chant sections, the setting is enormously long, notated at 194 or 195 breves of differing lengths in successive mensurations (the long opening section is here barred in longs). The chant is mostly allocated at the rate of one long per chant note in the long opening section in unsigned , usually on the first beat of a long, but with some variation. There are changes of mensuration; shorter sections in and follow, here with the chant note consistently on the first beat of each breve. Despite the mainly low range, it has rising discant cadences and is clearly a dominant melodic part, whether or not it was accompanied. As noted above, the ensuing Credo must have been a verso. The presence of the Alleluia on the preceding self-contained recto argues against the likelihood of a tenor or other supporting voice preceding it on the left-hand verso.
𝇋𝇋
𝇊𝇊
Figure 25.7: .: Alleluia / Alleluia V / Virga Jesse chant, Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, , 135, fol. 208v (BnF)
539
𝇈𝇈
Washington, Library of Congress, M.. C Case: A Neglected English Fragment
Example .: Alleluia V / Virga Jesse, mensural monophonic setting
8
Al-
le-
5
8
lu-
10
8
14
8
18
8
ia
Vir-
23
8
28
8
ga
Jes-
se
33
8
38
8
flo-
ru-
43
8
it,
vir-
48
8
go
53
8
De-
Margaret Bent
58
8
62
8
67
8
um
o Et
ho-
73
8
mi-
nem
79
8
ge-
nu-
84
8
90
8
it,
ç Pa-
cem
De-
96
8
us
red-
di-
con-
ci-
102
8
dit,
108
8
[in
se
re-
115
8
li-
121
8
ans].
Washington, Library of Congress, M.. C Case: A Neglected English Fragment
𝇋𝇋
The first section in , unlike the ensuing Credo, falls so regularly into groups of two breves that apparent deviations may invite emendation – bars and have only three semibreve beats, not four. The section includes red imperfection coloration of semibreve groups. There are plentiful ornamental flagged semiminims in all three mensurations. The only dot of addition is on a minim in the section at bar . These notational features suggest a date in the early fifteenth century rather than before , as do the characteristically English shapes of lozenge note-heads with a more marked angle at the left-hand side. Such note-heads are also found, even more noticeably, sometimes almost triangular, in the three other pieces, copied by the main scribe. At two places in the section (bars –, –), notational propriety would demand observance of the similis ante similem rule; the last semibreves of and each precede another semibreve and therefore ought to be perfect. To enforce the rule would result in irregular bar lengths, and altered minims which lie awkwardly outside the idiom of this setting. It would also here interrupt the pattern by which chant notes fall consistently on first beats. Although the scribe was familiar with imperfection coloration and could have used it to notate the values as transcribed, I believe on balance that the simpler rhythms were intended, perhaps intended to be colored. The original notation is given above the staff. Despite the lack of comparands, this Alleluia thus seems more advanced in style and notation than the other three items, and invites a dating after , perhaps even in the s. Notational features compatible with an early-fifteenth-century dating have been mentioned above. It was copied by a different scribe from the other three items, and its few custodes are not visible elsewhere. Letter forms of g, d, and h differ from the other texts. The English long r appears as a cursive anglicana element within a more formal book hand (textualis), and is not found in the other texts. Given its different script and later musical style and notational features, it was probably a later addition on a blank recto (perhaps the first of a gathering) preceding the Credo, which was presumably already in place on the next opening (fol. v). At least the eleventh staff and possibly the tenth were squeezed in order to complete the Alleluia on this recto. It must in any case have been copied well before the musical fragments were discarded and used for binding around or after the middle of the fifteenth century.
𝇊𝇊
𝇊𝇊
𝇊𝇊
Commentary to Example .: , C clef. , new line, C clef. , last three notes of the end of the chant melisma on Jesse (a a g) omitted. , chant note a omitted between b and c. , pitches and , semiminim flags uncertain. , pitches and , stems uncertain. , pitch , apparent stem is show-through. , pitch , new line, C clef. , pitch , new line, C clef. , new line, C clef. •
There is, however, an extra breve in bar . See also n. for such irregularity, both at breve and semibreve levels, as an English feature.
Margaret Bent
, new line, C clef. , pitches and , semiminim flags unclear or erased. There is a word in red ink below the bottom staff, ending in ‘h’, and followed a little higher up by what may be a repeat sign (: ìì ) or a capital ‘A’, possibly related to a repeat of the Alleluia. Text underlay follows the plainsong where this differs from the sometimes arbitrary manuscript underlay.
Credo The anonymous Credo is less securely placed. Contrary to some reports, it is not the fourvoice Credo ascribed to Bonbarde in Apt, to Prunet in Str, to Perneth in Padua , and preserved anonymously in three further sources. A Spanish instrumentalist known as Perrinet has also been proposed, but there is no firm identification. The two works have some similar interlocked sequencing and some similar minor prolation syncopations, but they are different settings. The overwhelming majority of English and French mass settings of the fourteenth century are in major prolation, which these are not. Many settings have simultaneous texting, and most English settings are in score. Apart from Machaut’s Mass, the nearest minor-prolation comparands are the Apt Credos by Taillandier and Tapissier, though those lack the Wa Credo’s fluctuation of breve groupings in twos or threes. The ‘Bonbarde’ Credo is in minor prolation with copious minim syncopation. Also like Wa, it has interlocked hockets for which, unlike Wa, it goes specifically into time. Given the rhythmic sequencing in the surviving voices of the Amen, it is likely that a cantus voice complemented those rhythms, as suggested above the staff in the transcription (Example .). At ninety-five breves for the texted section and twenty-one-and-a-half for the Amen, the Credo is exceptionally short, much too short to accommodate the entire Credo text, as the editors of an – albeit faulty – transcription point out. Starting from Patrem, the Credo text has syllables, of which only are set in the extant voice. The tenor is mislabeled Tenor de et in terra (pax is added in a later hand, not patrem as in the commentary to PMFC XXIIIB, no. ), prompting the editors to suggest that this was originally a Gloria setting clumsily re-texted as a Credo. The label curiously appears under the bottom staff of the tenor, not under its beginning. The setting of the Credo text is virtually syllabic, awkward by any standards we know how to apply. But despite claims by the PMFC editors, there are just not enough notes to set the Gloria text with its additional thirty syllables ( in total); attempts to fit them give even more awkward results and even worse declamation, and the Gloria text is not normally telescoped (that is, different portions of the text are set simulta-
𝇈𝇈
•
•
PMFC XXIIIB, no. , and CMM , no. . Reinhard Strohm (, n. ) reports ‘the Credo by Perrinet Bonbarde’ [sic] as being ‘also contained in US-Wc (no. ), a little collection possibly copied in Flanders for an Englishman, which comprises the motet Rex Karole, written in Bruges, ’. The Wa Credo is not the one by ‘Perrinet’; and we cannot be so sure that Rex Karole was written in Bruges in . Consideration of the contents leaves no reason to assume that the Washington fragments were written other than by Englishmen in England. Rex Karole will be discussed below: it is in Wa but alongside a different Credo. PMFC XXIIIB, no. , pp. –; commentary on p. .
Washington, Library of Congress, M.. C Case: A Neglected English Fragment
Example .: Credo, cantus and tenor
Pa-
trem
om-
ni-
po-ten-
tem,
fac-to- rem
ce-
li et
ter-re, vi- si-
8
11
bi- li- um
om-ni- um
et
in- vi- si- bi- li-um. Et ex
pa- tre na- tum an- te om- ni-
8
21
a
se- cu-
la.
De- um
de
De-
o
ve-
ro.
Qui
pro-
lu-
men de
lu- mi- ne.
De-
8
30
um
ve- rum de
De- o
pter nos
ho- mi-
nes
et
8
39
pro- pter
no-
stram
sa-
lu- tem
de-
scen- dit
de
ce-
8
47
lis. Cru-ci- fi- xus e- ti-
am
pro
no- bis
8
sub Pon- ti- o
Pi-
la-
to, pas- sus
Margaret Bent
57
et
se-
pul-
tus
est.
Et a-
scen-
dit
in
ce- lum,
se- det ad
dex-te-
8
67
ram
Pa-
tris.
Et
i- te- rum ven- tu- rus
est
cum
glo- ri-
a
8
76
ju-
di- ca-
re
vi-
vos
et
mor-
tu-
os.
Et vi-
tam
8
86
ven- tu-
ri
se-
cu-
li.
8
suggested cantus rhythms:
96
A-
8
106
etc.
men.
8
Washington, Library of Congress, M.. C Case: A Neglected English Fragment
neously). I therefore see no merit in positing that the Tenor label ‘Et in terra’ signals that the setting was a re-texted Gloria rather than just a mistake. Against contrafaction, and despite the unsatisfactory word setting, the Credo does have crude directional word painting for descendit, sepultus, and ascendit; see breves –, –, and – in Example .. The gapped Credo texting suggests, rather, that the text was telescoped, as is common in English Credo settings of the fifteenth century. Of the eleven complete Credos in EECM , ten have some form of textual sharing between the voices. No. alternates text and melisma between the upper voices (cursiva), and nos. – are telescoped in highly varied patterns. A similar number of Credos in Old Hall have some form of text sharing or telescoping. Telescoping is not found in earlier English Credos (which are mostly in score with the same complete text simultaneously in all parts) – there are none in the fourteenth century – nor outside England. All this points to an English origin for the Credo, probably datable c. or soon after. Table . gives the portions set in, and omitted from, the surviving cantus voice. Table .: Credo text, portions set in, and omitted from, the surviving cantus voice
Credo text set
Credo text omitted, probably telescoped
Patrem omnipotentem, factorem caeli et terrae, visibilium omnium et invisibilium
Et in unum Dominum Iesum Christum, Filium Dei unigenitum
et ex Patre natum, ante omnia saecula, Deum de Deo, lumen de Lumine, Deum verum de Deo vero,
genitum, non factum, consubstantialem Patri: per quem omnia facta sunt.
Qui propter nos homines et propter nostram salutem descendit de caelis.
Et incarnatus est de Spiritu Sancto ex Maria Virgine, et homo factus est.
Crucifixus etiam pro nobis sub Pontio Pilato; passus et sepultus est
et resurrexit tertia die, secundem Scripturas
et ascendit in caelum, sedet ad dexteram Patris Et iterum venturus est cum gloria, iudicare vivos et mortuos,
cuius regni non erit finis. Et in Spiritum Sanctum, Dominum et vivificantem: qui ex Patre Filioque procedit. Qui cum Patre et Filio simul adoratur et conglorificatur: qui locutus est per prophetas. Et unam sanctam, catholicam et apostolicam Ecclesiam. Confiteor unum baptisma in remissionem peccatorum. Et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum,
Et vitam venturi seculi.
The suggestion of telescoping is not without problems. It leaves syllables to be set in the missing cantus , more than the entire Gloria text, which was pointed out above as too lengthy for the available notes. There are syllables in the large omitted section from Et in Spiritum Sanctum to mortuorum. Some telescoped settings, including EECM nos. and and Old Hall (CMM ) nos. and , present precisely that passage in the second cantus simultaneously with the preceding text in the uppermost voice. There is no precedent for three-way telescoping, but it is just possible that this could have been such a setting, assigning the syllables of Et in Spiritum Sanctum to mortuorum to a third voice, and leaving the remaining syllables for cantus , though there was hardly room for an additional voice,
Margaret Bent
either contrapuntally, or on the facing recto. Even with some telescoping, there may still have been omissions. These suggestions are uncomfortable and unparalleled. The surviving cantus and tenor voices make good self-contained dyadic counterpoint, and could be musically complete in two voices. However, if the text was indeed wholly or partially telescoped, at least a second cantus voice on the facing recto would be needed to carry more of the text, perhaps the aforementioned syllables. Given the close distance between the surviving voices, the second cantus may have been of equal and overlapping range to cantus . A contrapuntally essential contratenor is ruled out by the fact that the tenor fully supports the top voice, so no support function needs to be shared between two lower voices. There may have been no contratenor, but if there was, it was inessential. In any case, it would be hard to make room for one between the surviving voices, given that both lie relatively high and close together, with C and C clefs. We cannot know whether some such voice, a contratenor or third cantus, carried the Et in Spiritum Sanctum text; on balance it seems likelier that that text was simply omitted. Another possibly English feature is the flexibility of breve groupings as defined by cadence points, which invites randomly alternating groupings of two and three breves in modern transcription as barred here. Commentary to Example .: The transcription in PMFC XXIIIB is faulty, with misaligned voices a bar out for most of the duration, and without observing the change of clef for the Amen. I therefore offer a revised transcription here (Example .). Numbers over the staff count breves not bars. The first tenor ligature must be SSL (not LBL; PMFC transcribes as BBL). , something on b at line end is just visible. , b emended to a. , dot after semibreve e retained to avoid parallels; consequently the following semibreve f (.) is transcribed here as a minim (=quaver/ eighth note). , pitch , followed by # on c, here suppressed. , three semibreves before the final cadence. Editorial accidentals are subject to adjustment if other voices are found.
Rex Karole/Leticie pacis Troubling for an English provenance, however, is Rex Karole/Leticie pacis, the only composition known from other sources, and the only one that is indisputably French. One of the most widely circulated motets of the fourteenth century, also cited in treatises (usually by its triplum), it is ascribed to Philippe Royllart in Str and datable in the late s. It takes an anti-English, pro-French stance in the Hundred Years War (almost as vituperative as Vitry’s incomplete Phi millies of two decades earlier, which calls for the obliteration of the name of England. Rex Karole is also as packed with learned, biblical, and classical references •
•
Such irregular breve groupings are quite common in fourteenth-century French and English Mass movements. Old Hall’s many instances include Leonel Power’s Gloria no. and the anonymous Regina celi no. , both of which have this irregularity at the semibreve level, as noted for the Alleluia, Example ., bars and . It is edited in CMM , no. and PMFC V, no. . Günther relays Riemann’s suggestion that Royllart could be the Rowlard of Old Hall; this is very unlikely, both stylistically, and because of the anti-English subject matter of the texts.
Washington, Library of Congress, M.. C Case: A Neglected English Fragment
such as we have come to expect from Vitry, though it dates from about fifteen years after his death). The motetus addresses Mary, then invokes Esther as her prototype, in pursuit of victory and peace for ‘our kingdom of France’. Esther prevailed on Ahasuerus to reverse Haman’s assault on the Jewish people; Haman was condemned to death; Mordecai could cease lamenting and the people of Israel rejoice. Rex Karole would be the only French motet of the s or s to survive in not just one but two English sources, Wa and Ltna. One must wonder why, given its message, Rex Karole would ever have been copied in England. The triplum celebrates the French King Charles V (r. –). Ursula Günther situates the motet in the context or consequences of the Treaty of Bruges of , which occasioned a temporary lull in the hostilities between England and France, and she reasons from the textual allusions why it cannot have been written earlier. The motet is known from seven sources, none of them complete. It is very long, and this led to problematic transmissions. Even the large format of Ch could not accommodate the tenor on a single opening besides the other four voices: triplum, motetus, solus tenor, and contratenor, but no tenor. Only Str (lost, known only in Coussemaker’s partial transcription), fols v–r (no. ), had the tenor (and solus tenor, but no contratenor and apparently no motetus). The other sources are all fragmentary or incomplete. Perugia Cv –Dr are quire guards in situ (strips and ) with fragments of the solus tenor and contratenor; Ltna fol. r is partly legible under ultra-violet light and has motetus, contratenor, and another unknown contratenor. SL no. , fol. Rv [v], has the incomplete triplum only: its nine staves take us to near the end of Ch’s seventh staff (of eight). There would hardly have been room for lower voices in the single-opening copies in SL or Wa, both of considerably smaller format than Ch. In Basel it occupied two manuscript openings: the surviving recto has the end of the motetus and solus tenor only for taleae IV and V to the end (though the beginning is cut off ). Wa has the incomplete motetus, which defines this side as the recto. It presents on six staves what in Ch takes a little more than four; in Ch • •
• •
• • •
The most recent work on Vitry’s motet is Zayaruznaya ; pp. – gives texts, translations, and surviving music. The English cantilena-motet Singularis laudis digna in New York, Morgan Library MS invokes Mary with reference also to Esther who swayed Ahasuerus, and Judith who overcame Holofernes. The text prays ‘Let the French war now end; may their land become that of the English’. It gives honor to Edward [III] and must therefore antedate his death in . See Bowers , and its postscript, Bowers . On references to the Haman story in the Fauvel motet Aman novi/Heu Fortuna, see Bent and Brownlee ; for that motet and for Haman in Floret/Florens, see also Bent forthcoming, chaps and . Another motet, probably from this period, Degentis vita, a widely distributed motet in French sources, is also in the Yoxford manuscript (Ipswich, Suffolk Record Office, HA: //.). Andrew Wathey (Email of December ) wonders if the anti-English text ceased to be an issue a generation after Charles V’s death. Or did they just like the music, which is distinctively different from most French motets of the period (Bent forthcoming, chap. )? CMM , pp. xxix–xxxi. See n. above. Ch fols v–r (no. ). Olim Cas. , Incunabolo inv. N.F. (‘Cas. ’ was the old location of the incunabulum, although the inventory number ( N.F.) is used by Brumana and Ciliberti (, –, –, and figs. , , .) The fragments, though detached, are now held together with the incunabulum, with the new shelf mark Inc. .
Margaret Bent
the motetus occupies six staves on the recto, followed by the solus tenor. In Wa the motetus would have needed nine staves, again leaving little room for lower voices. Wa is not the only copy of Rex Karole to appear in a puzzling context, in this case the presentation of an anti-English motet in an English source. In Basel , it immediately precedes Novum sidus, which is apparently a contrafact of Gaudeat et exultet […] Papam querentes, a motet which celebrates pope Clement VII and damns Urban VI. Charles V was a primary supporter and enabler of Clement, whose election by French cardinals in precipitated the Great Schism. If the compiler of the manuscript from which the single leaf Basel survives was happy to present a motet that was pro-Charles and therefore pro-Clement, why would he have needed to change the text of a pro-Clement motet? Italian sources might also be presumed to favor the Roman pope and therefore to be hostile to Charles. Deus compaignouns de Cleremunde Deus compaignouns de Cleremunde is a macaronic text with alternate lines in Anglo-Norman and Latin. It is thus almost certainly an English composition. Moreover, as noted already, the two musical companions (brothers) are foreigners from France: there is no convincing medieval identification of a Claremont in England until much later. ‘Cleremunde’ is probably the ancient city of Clermont, in Auvergne (Clermont-Ferrand since ). Although the triplum is incomplete, the opening words make it clear that we are not to expect more than the two companions who are named; see Table .. There are no additional reasons to attach this to the corpus of fourteenth-century musician motets that list from seven to twenty musicians in their tripla. Daron Burrows notes that by the apparent date of this source, c. , Anglo-Norman (AN) had taken on many characteristics of Continental French. He observes Continental graphies (for example, -ois instead of earlier AN -eis, Continental om in compaignouns), which are common in later AN, and have not overridden typical AN graphies: -oun and -aun are typical in later AN for Continental on and an (regiouns, compaignouns, estraunges, chauntauns). The earlier AN un for Continental on persists in Cleremunde and munde. Any musicologist approaching this text might hope that Malcharte could be made to mean Machaut, given that the Christian name is Gwillelmus. But text experts assure me that this cannot be. As Malcharte is not a first name, prenomen must here mean a nickname. In any case, the motet evidently dates from rather late in the century, well after • • • •
•
Bent forthcoming, chap. , and other works there cited. Deus is French, two, not Latin Deus, God, as most reports have punctuated it. I thank Oliver Padel for confirming that there appears to have been no medieval English ‘Clermont’ from which these ‘foreigners’ could come, thus further corroborating an English provenance for the text. See Bent forthcoming, chaps –. Chap. lists pieces, including this, that deal with musicians but lie outside the core repertory of the interrelated group. The closest comparand may be Furnos reliquisti quare?, Modena, Biblioteca Estense e Universitaria, MS a.M.. (olim lat. ), fols v–r (CMM , iii, no. ), which is laden with musical terminology, addressed to the author’s singing companion Buclare. Although in standard Latin ‘praenomen’ means forename, Malcharte cannot be a forename, so I here follow DMLBS as suggested by DB: an added title or nickname.
Washington, Library of Congress, M.. C Case: A Neglected English Fragment
Table .: Deus compaignouns de Cleremunde, text and translation Text
Translation
Comments
Deus compaignouns de Cleremunde Modum cupio referre Kar curtois sur touz rens de munde Sunt bene se sciunt ferre.
Two companions from Cleremunde I desire to mention now for courtly above all else in the world are they; they know how to conduct themselves well.
LHS: should be modo?
Large curtois companable Hii sunt et iocose vite Ben chauntauns bieus et amiable Et recipientes mite
Generous, courtly, companionable they are, and of joyous life, fine singers, handsome, and friendly and receiving kindly
DB: ben has the characteristic AN reduction of the ie diphthong/ digraph
Touz bons estraunges compaignouns Cuiuscumque nationis Il sunt neque de regiouns. Deus qui sedet in thronis
all worthy strangers no matter which nation they come from, nor from which region. May God, who is seated on his thrones,
Voile touz temps de mal garder Gwillelmum cuius prenomen Malcharte jeo oy nomer Et conferre sibi omen.
be always willing to keep from harm William, whose nickname I heard called Malcharte and confer on him an omen.
DB: Malcharte: ‘bad charter / record’?
Et Alebram qi oblier Eius frater nolo vere Qi quant de moy parti d’amer …
And Alebram his brother, …
Translation is impossible because of the missing last line. (LHS: frater should be fratrem unless it is the subject of a verb lost in the last line)
Perhaps (DB) ‘whom I truly do not wish to forget, who, when he left me, never stopped loving…’
Text corrected, translated, and commented by Daron Burrows (DB) and Leofranc Holford-Strevens (LHS). I am grateful to both colleagues for applying their learned ingenuity to this text.
Machaut’s death, and the companions addressed seem to be alive. Another suggestive connection of approximately the right date, a Frenchman with English connections, might be with the ‘Mayshuet’ of Old Hall, composer of the Deo gratias motet Are post libamina, in whose text he is described as an active distinguished Frenchman who adapted the text from French to Latin to accommodate English tastes. We have no Christian name for Mayshuet, nor can we tell if that was a nickname. He may also be the composer of the adjacent anonymous motet Post missarum sollennia. The musical setting of what was presumably a motet triplum (Example .), in unsigned , is strictly syllabic, with a few exceptions: there are two-note melismas on Touz (bar ), estraunges (), Qi (). There are also two-note melismas on the names of the two companions, perhaps for emphasis: Gwillelmum (), which also includes the highest note
𝇊𝇊
•
See Bent forthcoming, chap. , where identity of Mayshuet with Matheus de Sancto Johanne is rejected. A possible identity is tentatively suggested with Jacob Musserey, documented in the s as one of a group of five French singingmen in John of Gaunt’s chapel. That would exclude identity with Gwillelmus ‘Malcharte’.
Margaret Bent
Example .: Deus compaignouns de Cleremunde
8
9
8
fer-
17
8
Deus
re
Lar- ge
Kar
com-pai-gnouns de Cle- re-munde Mo- dum
cu-
cur- tois sur touz rens
Sunt be-ne
cur- tois com- pa- na-
de
munde
ble
pi-
o
se
Hii sunt et
io- co-
re- ci- pi- en-
tes
re-
sci- unt fer- re.
se
vi-
mi- te
Touz
26
8
te
Ben
chaun-tauns bieus et a-
bons
e-
straun-ges com- pai- gnouns
ti-
o-
33
8
41
8
49
8
58
8
66
8
75
8
84
8
93
8
102
se-
mal
det
gar-
Mal- char-
bi
er
quant
nis
o-
in
der
Il
sunt
thro-
nis
Gwil-
lel-
mi-
a-
ble
Et
Cu- ius-cum-que na-
ne-
que
de
re-
Voi-
mum
cu-
te
gi-
ouns. De-
le
touz
ius
jeo oy no- mer Et
men.
Et
A-
E-
ius
de moy par- ti
fra-
d’a-
le-
ter
no-
mer
8
112
8
bram
lo-
[
temps
pre-
con-
qi
ve-
us
fer-
qui
de
no-
men
re
si-
o-
bli-
re
Qi
Washington, Library of Congress, M.. C Case: A Neglected English Fragment
of the surviving voice, and Alebram (–). Eight-syllable lines are consistent; the final -e can be disregarded in lines and . Oy () in line should be two syllables, but there is only one note for it. Neque (–) in line should also be two syllables; the placement of notes above the previously-written text clearly treats it as monosyllabic, continuing the consequential texting to the end of the staff, where there is a spare note. I conclude that the overlay of the notes was an error of the scribe and have moved the syllables along so that all syllables and notes are accounted for in a syllabic treatment. In line , amiable (bar ) should be three syllables, a-mi-able, but an extra note is provided, making four: a-mi-a-ble. The text of the final sixth staff was cut off, and the music is damaged from being sewn into the binding and its stub pasted to fol. r (as explained above); the transcription of that last staff (starting at bar ) is tentative. At bars and the manuscript has a semibreve; both are emended here to breves. Given the extremely simple rhythmic style (in ), a correct (syncopated) reading of bars – seems out of place, as well as requiring an extra half bar. The original notation is given above the staff. I have considered it preferable here (as above in the section of the Alleluia) to disregard the similis ante similem rule which would require the semibreve on the second syllable of mite to be perfect, and treated the dots on the first and last semibreves as simply confirming their perfection. The music is not isorhythmic, though after the first twenty breves it falls into periods of sixteen breves bounded by long rests (–, –, –, –), rests which, together with the musical style, argue against monophony. These periods seem to be shortened in the imperfectly legible final staff on Wa. There are recurrent rhythms at –, –, –; the latter two occupy the same positions in their respective sixteen-breve periods. The surviving voice has straightforward trochaic major prolation rhythms and a limited rhythmic vocabulary.
𝇊𝇊
𝇊𝇊
Conclusion I hope that the foregoing has established the English origin and context of Wa, despite the unexplained presence of an anti-English motet. The three unica all have unprecedented qualities: the ornamented monophonic Alleluia, the problematic texting of an exceptionally short Credo, and a macaronic motet text in Anglo-Norman and Latin. Nothing in the script, the orthography, or the musical style argues against a dating of all the music in the very late fourteenth or early fifteenth century, and of these copies (and perhaps the added Alleluia) a date perhaps as late as the second decade of the fifteenth century.
•
Had this investigation been carried out a year earlier, establishing the English origin and early fifteenth-century date of these fragments, they should have been included in EECM .
. A M M-V M: R T A /S D* Jared C. Hartt
Several years ago, as I was brainstorming a topic for a chapter to contribute to A Critical Companion to Medieval Motets, I wrote to Lawrence Earp seeking his advice: I explained that I wanted to introduce the reader to the motet in England through an analytical case study, but I was uncertain about which tack I might take. In true Larry fashion, he responded within hours with a list of several motets from PMFC XV that he thought would suit the purpose. I noticed that two of the suggested motets, Jesu/Jhesu/Jesu and Rosa/Regali/ Regalis, exhibit the conspicuous feature of having their tenor voices occupy the middle range of the texture – below the triplum but above the motetus. Having just finished writing an article that included an analysis of Tribum/Merito/Quoniam, a three-voice motet in the interpolated Roman de Fauvel (Fauv) with a similar disposition of voices, these two English compositions in particular piqued my interest, so I opted to use them as a lens through which to elucidate for the Companion reader several of the salient characteristics of the motet in fourteenth-century England. As I continued to prepare that chapter, two additional English motets caught my eye: in both cases, their triplum and motetus voices were fully extant, but their middle-voice tenors were missing. So, in the last section of that chapter I tried my hand at reconstructing the tenor of one of these motets (Majori/Majorem, more on this below), and in turn was able to find a plausible matching source melody. But that still leaves us with one more motet with a missing tenor, A Solis/Salvator. Since the publication of the Companion, and thanks to Larry’s feedback, I have continued to explore this type of motet, with two goals in mind: first, to get a clearer picture of the subgenre as a whole – that is, through careful study of all of the extant examples of motets with middle-voice tenors – and second, to provide a reconstruction of A solis/Salvator. Accordingly, to give an idea of how such motets operate, the first half of this chapter inspects two examples that survive side-by-side on a fragment of an English source, and then summarizes the general characteristics of all of the surviving motets with middle-voice tenors. The second half outlines the steps involved in reconstructing the missing tenor of A solis/ Salvator, discusses the process of identifying a plausible match for it in the chant repertoire, and offers a performable transcription of the three-voice composition. * • • • • •
I thank Margaret Bent, Elizabeth Eva Leach, and Peter Lefferts for their helpful comments and suggestions as this chapter neared its final stages. Hartt . Full titles of the English motets discussed in this chapter are provided in Tables . and . below. Tribum que/ Merito hec patimur/ Quoniam secta is usually attributed to Philippe de Vitry, but I put forth a case in Hartt that the motet – or at the very least its music – was not composed by Vitry (pp. –). While a rarity on the continent, numerous examples of motets with middle-voice tenors are extant in fourteenth-century English sources, as we shall see. Hartt (chap. ).
A Missing Middle-Voice Melody: Reconstructing the Tenor of A solis ortus/Salvator mundi Domine
Characteristics of English motets with medius cantus Two fully extant examples of a three-voice motet with a middle-voice tenor appear on fols v–r of DRc (Figure .). On the verso, the large blue F initial at the top left begins the triplum, ‘Fusa cum silencio’, part way down the page the L initial begins the motetus, ‘Labem lavat criminis’, and on the final notated staff is the familiar tenor melody, Manere, labeled about a third of the way across in red ink. Just before Manere are the words medius cantus; medius cantus presumably indicates for the singer or reader that the tenor actually sounds as the middle voice of the motet, between the triplum and motetus, rather than in its more typical lowest-voice position. This is the only such instance of a medius cantus indication in any extant manuscript. On the recto of the same opening, there is a triplum that begins ‘Jesu’, a motetus that likewise begins with ‘Jesu’ (on the seventh staff, but without a decorated initial), and at the bottom its tenor, labeled as ‘Jhesu fili virginis, rex celestis agminis’, again in red ink; a look at the register of each voice reveals that this is another such motet with medius cantus. In neither case does the mise-en-page indicate that the cantus prius factus lies in between the two texted voices; instead, the tradition of notating the tenor at the bottom of the page holds. Example . provides a transcription in modern notation of the opening of Jesu/Jhesu/ Jesu. The tenor is organized into a simple pattern of three longs plus a long rest; the rhythm of this L period repeats for the duration of the entire motet. (A period concludes with a rest.) The triplum’s initial period consists of five longs, but then unfolds in several periods of four longs, until its last phrase of six longs. The motetus does the opposite: it begins with a period of six longs, then iterates numerous periods of four longs until its final phrase of five longs. Consequently, the motet unfolds with the basic unit of the L period, but the incremental period lengths at the motet’s outset ensures that no two voices will rest at the same time; the tenor will always conclude its period, followed in the next long by the conclusion of the triplum period, followed in the next long by the conclusion of the motetus period. This pattern repeats over and over. The motet is therefore isoperiodic – that is, isoperiodic in the sense discussed by Ernest Sanders in many of his writings to describe early fourteenthcentury English motets in which the triplum and motetus unfold in equal-length periods after their initial staggered lengths. As we shall see, the majority of the extant motets with medius cantus operate along such parameters. •
• •
•
DRc contains over folios, the bulk of which are taken up by Huguitio’s Summa and Isidore’s Etymologies. Only the four flyleaves at each of its beginning and ending contain music; images appear on DIAMM and in EECM . Frank Harrison first discovered the flyleaves; see Harrison , – and –, for a description and inventory of the compositions on the flyleaves. Those in the front flyleaves are of English origin. Those in the rear flyleaves, however, are mostly of continental origin; see Lefferts , –. (Because Lefferts [dissertation] contains commentary and numerous transcriptions, some of which are cited here but that are omitted in Lefferts [book], the former is cited throughout this chapter. Further, his dissertation is readily available on DIAMM.) On medius cantus, see Lefferts , n. . Because of this one occurrence in DRc , Lefferts (, –) has dubbed such motets ‘duet motets with medius cantus’; see also Bent, Hartt, and Lefferts , n. . I adopt the term in Hartt , and do so here, too, albeit without ‘duet’. See, for example, Sanders , Sanders , and an explanation in Earp a, .
Jared C. Hartt
Further, the composer of Jesu/Jhesu/Jesu has set up the declamation patterns of the triplum and motetus voices in such a way that they always accelerate into breves and semibreves when the tenor rests; thus, at regular intervals of every four longs, the outer voices homorhythmically intone their texts in faster note values. We can call these bits parlando passages. The parlando passages are set almost exclusively with imperfect intervals; see, for example, the parallel sixths in bars and ; parallel tenths and thirds are used as well later in the motet. On the other hand, the three longs before and after each parlando passage are composed almost exclusively with perfect sonorities; that is, almost always with an octave and a fifth, thus sonorities. The parlando passages are very easily heard in performance, as are the perfect sonorities that occur at the beginning of each long before reaching the accelerated motion set with imperfect intervals. The reader may have noticed the parallel fifths between the motetus and tenor across bars and . These are not ungrammatical in this context. Although certainly not as frequently employed as parallel imperfect intervals (thirds, sixths, and tenths), parallel perfect intervals (fifths, octaves, and even sometimes unisons) are part of the contrapuntal grammar of fourteenth-century polyphony in England, as is attested in numerous contemporaneous motets. A few other things to note about Jesu/Jhesu/Jesu: the triplum, tenor incipit, and motetus have alliterative openings – a feature of many motets of English provenance, not just those with a middle-voice tenor – and the poems of the outer voices are exactly of the same length: each contains syllables. And, just as the motet begins on an F sonority, with the motetus counterpointed a fifth below the tenor, so, too, does it end on that same concord. In his ground-breaking work in the s on the motet in England, Peter Lefferts writes that Jesu/Jhesu/Jesu shows ‘a strong impress of a common archetype’. Indeed, several of the extant examples of this type of motet share the features just elucidated: the tenor often a fifth above the motetus, isoperiodicity, alliterative openings, regularly recurring parlando passages, poems of equal lengths, and identical sonorities to begin and conclude. But, as Lefferts’s work has also shown, there are of course anomalies in some of the extant examples, and some, in fact, differ in several respects. Fusa/Manere/Labem, on the verso of the opening of DRc discussed above (Figure .), is one such motet; its beginning appears in •
• •
• •
On ‘parlando’ see Lefferts , –. Lefferts adapted the term from Harrison , in which Harrison called the technique ‘protofaburden-parlando’; Harrison (, – and ) originally described the ‘manner of writing’ of the complete outer voices of Civitas/Cibus/Cives (see Table .) as ‘protofaburden’. I use ‘parlando’ here to denote passages of homorhythmic declamation in semibreves and breves. The only recording of the motet was first released in by Gothic Voices, Masters of the Rolls: Music by English Composers of the Fourteenth Century. Hyperion, CDA; reissued , CDH. See Bent, Hartt, and Lefferts , chaps. , , and for a discussion and for several instances transcribed in modern notation. Although many of the motets examined there have a four-voice texture, ‘the parallel perfect voice leading was not a necessary consequence of writing for four voices, but was instead an intentional compositional feature’ (pp. –). In one intriguing case, the composer of a newly-discovered motet, Naufragantes/Navigatrix/Aptatur, uses parallel perfect unisons and octaves to highlight important features of the motet, such as the beginning of a restatement of the Aptatur melody, a recurring upper-voice melodic refrain, and the naming of the subject of the motet, St Nicholas (chap. ). See Hartt , – for an analytical discussion of the complete motet. Lefferts , .
A Missing Middle-Voice Melody: Reconstructing the Tenor of A solis ortus/Salvator mundi Domine
Figure 26.1: .: Fusa/Manere/Labem and Jesu/Jhesu/Jesu, DRc 20, , fols 1v–2 –r (Durham Cathedral Library)
556
Jared C. Hartt
557
A Missing Middle-Voice Melody: Reconstructing the Tenor of A solis ortus/Salvator mundi Domine
Example .: Jesu/Jhesu/Jesu, opening
5L
& œ™ e ™ œ™ Je
˙™
su
-
�
˙™
Ϫ li
-
De
. & ˙™ ‹ Jhesu �li virginis, rex celestis agminis
& ˙™ ‹ Je
b
su
-
lu
ve
6
& ˙™ na
-
˙.™
& ˙™ ‹ tam
Ϫ
Ϫ
te
vir - gi - nis
et
˙™.
∑
- ta - tis tu - is vir - tu - te cru - cis,
∑
∑
cum
si
Manere
1L
& &‹ œ™
6
& an ‹ & œ™ ‹
& œ™ ‹ in CU8
-
∑ œ™ œ te ∑ Do Œ™ Œ™
Ϫ con -
[La] - bem 10
G5
-
œ œ œ œ™ spe
-
ctu
œ™ ∑ ˙™
∑2L œ™
Œ ∑™ Œ ™
Ϫ
œ™ œ ™
la -
∑
∑ j ™ œ œ mi - num ∑ œ™
7L ∑ œ œj œ™∑ œ ™ gra - ta �t
œ œ œ™ œ œ J J
œ ™ œ™ e ™
CU5∑
Œ™ ˙™
∑ ∑
Ϊ
vat
∑
-
-
F 105
G8%
&
∑
& ‹
∑
& ‹
4L
cri -
G8%
∑
∑
-
∑
∑
œ∑ œj œ ™ œ∑ œ J
-
Qui �et
œ™∑
2L ˙™ ∑
Ϫ
Ϊ Ϊ
8 ∑CU 98
∑
9 ∑ j ∑œ™ 8 œ ˙™ ta ∑de - 9spi - ∑ 8 œ ™ ˙™
œ œJ œ œ œ œ ™
mi
4L
ma
nis
-
et
Ϊ
de - vo - ci - o.
mi
∑ ∑ œ™ œ œJ œ cla ∑ - mo - sa∑ vo 2L œ™ Œ ™ Œ™
4L œ œ œ ej œ™ J
nu
∑
œ œ∑j ˙ ™
len - ci - o
-
œ ™ Œ ™ Œ∑™
& œ™ Œ ™ Œ ™ ‹ 19 La CeU8j ‰ Œ Ó &
∑
j œ œ
j œ œ ˙™
for -
A+6 G8%
∑œ ™ ˙™ ∑ 2L∑
˙.™
4L
Jhesu �li virginis, rex celestis agminis
& œ™ ∑˙™ & ‹ Fu - sa & œ™ ∑˙™ & ‹‹
˙™ tu
œ œJ œ œ œ œ œ œj ˙ ™ J J J J J
THE EXAMPLE ENDS AT MEASURE 10.
&
Ϊ
˙.™
A8%
11
vi -
4L
ma - tris, vir - gi - num mun - di - si - me,
pre - bens sa - ni
Ϫ
ta - tis, can - dor e - ter - ne lu - cis,
G+6 F8%
4L
Example .: Fusa/Manere/Labem, opening ∑ ∑
10
-
j j # œ œ œ œ œj œ œj œj ˙ ™ J J
j j œ œ œ e œ™
D 128
ri
-
j j œ œJ œ œ œj œ œj œj ˙™ J
6L
4L
j œ œ œ™
Ϊ
˙™.
∑
A8%
G8%
F8%
& ‹
men
-
Ϊ
pa - tris, ju - di - cum e - quis - si - me,
4L
œ™ e ™ œ™
œ™ e™ œ™
Ϫ
i
-
˙™.
˙.™
j j œ œ œ œj œj œj œj œj ˙™
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Jared C. Hartt
Example .. It begins with a C U sonority; that is, the tenor is in unison with the motetus, instead of beginning a fifth above the motetus as in the F sonority that starts Jesu/Jhesu/ Jesu. It does not have alliterative openings, nor does it have recurring parlando passages. Further, it is the only extant motet of the subgenre to feature periods of different lengths in all three of its voices: the middle-voice tenor unfolds in L periods; after the initial L period, the motetus unfolds in L periods; and after the initial L period, the triplum in L periods. Perusal of the remainder of the motet reveals additional differences: the motetus text is significantly shorter than that of the triplum, and the motet concludes on a different sonority (G ) than that on which it began (C U ). As mentioned, this is the lone motet with the medius cantus label. Lefferts has suggested that, because of the texts of unequal lengths, Fusa/ Manere/Labem is an early example of a motet with a middle-voice tenor; when coupled with all the other differences I just mentioned, perhaps he is right, and the archetype developed over time. Another feature of Fusa/Manere/Labem merits mention since it also occurs in other examples of the subgenre: the tenor sometimes sounds below the motetus – that is, it does not remain exclusively in the middle (just as in a motet with the more typical disposition of having the tenor as the lowest-sounding voice, sometimes the motetus assumes the role of the lowest-sounding voice). For instance, in both bars and of Example ., the tenor’s G yields a fifth below the motetus’s d. Taking into account the work of Lefferts and Renata Pieragostini, I count twelve early fourteenth-century motets of English provenance in which the tenor occupies the middle position of the texture and for which at least two voices survive. Four of these are incomplete: in addition to A Solis/Salvator that is missing its tenor, three are missing their triplum voices. Tables . and . present details of the twelve. •
• • •
•
The motet also survives in Hatton . The two readings generally accord, though there are a few minor differences: for instance, instead of the triplum’s g long in bar of Example . (on the ‘o’ of ‘silencio’), in Hatton there are instead two breves, g and a', in ligature. And in bar of the motetus, instead of the trio of semibreves e-d-c, Hatton provides a pair of semibreves, e-c. The medius cantus designation, present in DRc , is lacking in Hatton . Lefferts , . See Pieragostini , in which she discusses two newly-discovered motets with a middle-voice tenor; these are listed below in Tables . and .. There were certainly more – perhaps many more – examples of these types of motets composed in the first decades of the fourteenth century in England. Firstly, since every single extant source of fourteenth-century polyphony of English provenance is fragmentary, it is very probable that some were simply lost or destroyed throughout the past several centuries. Secondly, as suggested by Lefferts (, –, –, –), some surviving single motet voices look remarkably like a bottom voice of this motet subgenre due to register, isoperiodicity, and final cadential motion. The periods of the extant voice Vas exstas (Cpc ), for instance, unfold as L + (L) + L, and the melody concludes G-F; moreover, a string of semibreves begins every seventh long, suggesting that it engages in parlando with the missing triplum voice. And the periods of the extant voice Dei preco (in DRc along with Jesu/Jhesu/Jesu and Fusa/Manere/ Labem) unfold as L + (L) + L, with its melody also concluding G-F. Frank Harrison (, ) identifies Dei preco as an ‘isolated upper voice’, but this is doubtful due to its register and concluding descending whole step, G-F. Despite these two possible additions, in my total of twelve discussed throughout this essay, I am counting only the eight that survive with all three voices as well as the four that survive with two voices. Color images of all of the motet sources in Tables . and . except the Bologna fragments appear on DIAMM; Pieragostini provides black and white images of Bologna.
A Missing Middle-Voice Melody: Reconstructing the Tenor of A solis ortus/Salvator mundi Domine
Eight of these motets (Table .) are isoperiodic: again, the outer voices, the triplum and motetus, unfold in periods of the same length; see the boldface in the third column. Although Fusa/Manere/Labem is not technically isoperiodic, I have still included it in this group since the triplum unfolds in L periods, a multiple of the motetus’s L periods. For the first seven motets listed, the tenor also operates either in periods of the same length as the outer voices, or in periods half the length of the outer voices (or one of the outer voices, as in Fusa/Manere/Labem); further, all three voices partake in the initial staggered period lengths, thereby Table .: Extant (iso)periodic motets with medius cantus
Motet (the tenor is the second text listed)
Source
(Iso)periodicity
tenor statements
Jesu fili Jhesu fili virginis Jesu lumen veritatis
DRc fol. r
L + (L) + L (L) L + (L) + L
+ /
Rosa delectabilis Regali ex progenie Regalis exoritur
Onc fols v–r
L + (L) + L (L) L + (L) +L
Quare fremuerunt gentes Quare fremuerunt gentes Quare fremuerunt gentes
Lbl fols v–r
L + (L) + L (L) L + L + (L) + L
(nd and th in retrograde)
Majori vi leticie Majorem caritatem Majorem intelligere
Bologna flyleaves
L + (L) +L (L) L + (L) + L
Zelo tui langueo Tenor Reor nescia
Lbl fols v–r Ym fol. v (tr and tenor only)
(L) + L Lr + (L) Lr + (L) + L
Jhesu redemptor omnium Jhesu redemptor omnium Jhesu labentes respice
Cfm - fol. r
Lr + (L) + L (L) L + (L) + L
Fusa cum silencio Manere Labem lavat criminis
DRc fol. v (tenor labeled medius cantus) Hatton fol. v
L + (L) + L (L) L + (L) + L
+ /
A solis ortus cardine [Missing tenor] Salvator mundi Domine
Lwa fol. v
L + (L) ? L + (L) + L
?
Jared C. Hartt
ensuring non-coincident phrase endings. In addition to the anomalous Fusa/Manere/Labem, Quare/Quare/Quare stands out in the group: while it has an alliterative opening and features parlando passages, it is monotextual, and the second and fourth statements of its tenor melody must be sung in retrograde. And Zelo/Tenor/Reor begins with a solo triplum line; after two longs the tenor enters, and after another two longs the motetus enters. The other four motets (Table .) have tenors that feature some sort of rhythmic repetition, but the outer voice or voices unfold in much less predictable or not-at-all predictable
Initial sonority
Final sonority
Edition/Transcription
Notes
f c F
f c F
PMFC XV, –
alliterative parlando
PMFC XV, –
alliterative parlando
PMFC XV, –
alliterative parlando monotextual
Pieragostini , – (tr and mo only) Hartt , – (complete)
alliterative parlando
PMFC XV, – Page , –
parlando (but irregularly spaced) rests (r) begin tenor and mo
PMFC XVII, –
alliterative rest begins tr
PMFC XV, –
mo much shorter than tr begins/ends on different sonorities
Lefferts , – (tr and mo only)
‘alliterative’? (S-tenor?) parlando while tenor rests?
f c F c G C d a D g r r r c C c' c c g ? G
F
F
C
D
g
C
CU
G ?
f c F c G C d a D f c F f c F g d G g ? G
F
F
C
D
F
F
G
G ?
A Missing Middle-Voice Melody: Reconstructing the Tenor of A solis ortus/Salvator mundi Domine
Table .: Other extant motets with medius cantus
Motet (the tenor is the second text listed)
Source
Phrase lengths
Civitas nusquam Cibus esurientum Cives celestis
Onc fols L + L + L + L + L + L + L + L + L + L v–r (L + L + L + L) + L + (L + L + L + L) L + L + L + L + L
[Missing triplum] Benedicamus Domino Beatus vir
Lwa fol. r
? (B + B + B + B + B + B + B) B + (B) + B + (B) + B + B
[Missing triplum] In seculum Jhesu fili virginis
Bologna flyleaves
? (L) L + L + L + L + L
[Missing triplum] Regina celi letare Regina celestium
Ob fols iv–iir
? (L) [L missing] +L + L + L + L + L + L + L + L + L + L + L + L + L + L + L
period lengths. For example, although Civitas/Cibus/Cives features alliterative openings as well as parlando passages, these passages are irregularly spaced due to the periods of varying lengths. Also different about this motet is that the motetus poem is shorter than the triplum’s; again, the majority of motets with a medius cantus have outer-voice poems of equal length (of those in Table ., only Fusa/Manere/Labem does not). Because the other three motets in Table . are missing their triplum voices, at this point it is impossible to know for certain the length of those poems, but at least the extant voices with alliterative openings do suggest the first letter of each missing text. It would be difficult indeed to reconstruct these triplum voices without the poetry at hand. An inspection of the tenors of motets with medius cantus indicate a strong preference for the setting of lengthy melodies, most often derived from areas of the liturgy different from those in contemporaneous continental motets. Just two of the motets set chant melodies that we have become accustomed to seeing and hearing in continental motets of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Manere and In seculum, yet both are lengthy at thirty-six and forty-three pitches, respectively. In contrast, Rosa/Regali/Regalis, for example, presents as its tenor a single statement of an entire antiphon for the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, coming in at fifty-nine pitches, and Jesu/Jhesu/Jesu cycles through a devotional sequence for Jesus not just once, but also through twenty-one of its twenty-seven pitches a second time. Also noteworthy is that three of these motets conclude with incomplete statements of their lengthy tenor melodies; in addition to Jesu/Jhesu/Jesu, see also Fusa/Manere/ Labem and Civitas/Cibus/Cives in the tables.
Jared C. Hartt
tenor statements
Initial sonority
Final sonority
Edition/Transcription Notes
+ /
d a D
d a D
PMFC XV –
alliterative parlando (irregularly spaced) mo shorter than tr
Lefferts , – (tenor and mo only)
alliterative? (B-triplum?) parlando (irregularly spaced)
Pieragostini , (tenor and mo only)
alliterative? (I/J-triplum?) longs and breves only (no SB) mo here is tenor of Jesu/Jhesu/Jesu
Lefferts , – (tenor and incomplete mo only)
first L of mo music missing alliterative? (R-triplum?) *last pitch of tenor statement elides with first pitch of next statement (happens twice)
? G G
? c F
* + two extra pitches at end for final cadence
? c ?
D
GU ?
F?
? G C ? c F ? c F
D
C ?
F?
F?
On the whole, then, eight of the twelve extant motets are isoperiodic – seven of which have outer-voice poems of the same length – and it is plausible that ten of the twelve feature alliterative openings, that eight of the twelve have parlando passages declaimed homorhythmically while the tenor rests, that nine of the twelve begin and end on the same sonorities, and that all twelve conclude on an sonority. Majori/Majorem/Majorem (Table .), as mentioned in the introductory paragraphs to this chapter, was incomplete until only recently: it was missing its tenor. But thanks in large part to its recurring outer-voice parlando passages, the tendency for these motets to feature perfect sonorities at the beginnings of longs with a fifth between the motetus and tenor, and the fact that the slower-moving tenor is presented in a repeated rhythmic pattern and must be consonant with the outer voices, I was able to reconstruct a possible tenor, and in turn identified its probable source melody (edition/transcription information for all of these motets is provided in the tables). Now we turn to the one motet still missing its tenor, A solis/Salvator mundi. A solis ortus cardine/ [Missing tenor]/ Salvator mundi Domine The two extant voices of this motet survive on fol. v of a single bifolio, Lwa (Figure .). The bifolio was used as a wrapper for an account book of over folios of the household of Lord Henry Stafford and Margaret, Countess of Richmond. The triplum •
See DIAMM or EECM for images of the bifolio. Also on the bifolio are substantial fragments of four other motets, including another with medius cantus, Beatus vir/Benedicamus Domino (see Table .), and two voices of Ascendenti
A Missing Middle-Voice Melody: Reconstructing the Tenor of A solis ortus/Salvator mundi Domine
occupies the first five staves, the motetus the next five; the bottom two staves, labeled ‘Tenor secondus’, are not part of this motet. Table . shows that both poems are regular in structure and contain only eight-syllable proparoxytonic (pp) lines. And, as in the majority of motets with medius cantus, the poems are exactly of the same length, here at syllables each. Since the outer voices unfold mostly in periods of L, the poems are laid out in the table to highlight the isoperiodicity: the first eight-syllable line of the triplum is set with a L period (see the left column), then pairs of eight-syllable lines are set with L periods. The motetus starts with a L period in order to offset the periods, and then L periods ensue with pairs of eight-syllable lines before concluding with a final L period. Both texts are for Christmas: the triplum, ‘A solis ortus cardine’, is the text from a hymn for Lauds of Christmas morning; the motetus, ‘Salvator mundi Domine’, is the text from a Compline hymn for the Christmas season and other times. Translations of the texts, kindly offered by Peter Lefferts, appear in Table .. The odd numbered lines of each poem quote the well-known hymns, while the even numbered lines (italicized in Tables . and .) have been inserted by the poet-composer to trope the texts. ‘A solis ortus cardine’ was written in the fifth century by the Christian poet Sedulius; the entire poem contains twentythree quatrains, each of which begins with a consecutive letter of the Latin alphabet. This motet uses only the first three quatrains – A, B, and C are bolded in the table – but with the added troped lines. Example . provides the two extant voices transcribed in modern notation. How might the tenor periods fit? Since all of the isoperiodic motets set up the initial period lengths in order to stagger phrase endings, and a consequence of this is that no two voices rest at the same time, because here the triplum ends its first period after two longs, and the motetus after three longs, then the tenor could plausibly start with a L period. The entire motet, however, is L, so if the tenor does operate in L periods, it is likely that it consists of either twelve L periods with a final L period or perhaps eleven L periods with a final L period. The latter may be the better option since, if the former, then the tenor would be at rest for the penultimate sonority of the motet (the second and third breves of bar ), which would be followed by a single tenor pitch.
• • • •
sonet geminacio/ Viri Galilei, a four-voice voice-exchange motet also found on a recently discovered rotulus, Dor; on Ascendenti/Viri, see Bent, Hartt, and Lefferts , esp. chap. . Lefferts , . A proparoxytonic line ends with an accent on the antepenultimate syllable; for example, the first line of the triplum ends with cardine. See Frere , xix, (digitized online) for a complete list of occasions when the melody was sung. Given that two texted voices survive, a first question might be: how do we even know that this is a motet with medius cantus? In addition to the motet’s poems of exactly the same length, its opening bars alone strongly suggest the answer: the motet begins with a G/g octave followed on the second breve by a D/a' twelfth. It would be hard to imagine a tenor line operating below such an opening. And inspection of the outer voices for the remainder of the motet confirms that the tenor would most plausibly and most often lie in the middle register. Further, at the end of the motet, the motetus concludes with a typical lowest-voice melodic progression of a descending whole step (a-G), and the motet concludes with the same G/g octave with which it started, and thus begins and ends emphasizing the same sonority, as in the majority of the other extant motets with medius cantus.
Jared C. Hartt
Figure 26.2: .: A solis ortus cardine/ [Missing tenor]/ Salvator mundi Domine, Lwa 12185, , fol. 2v (© Dean and Chapter of Westminster, Westminster, London)
565
A Missing Middle-Voice Melody: Reconstructing the Tenor of A solis ortus/Salvator mundi Domine
Table .: Texts of A solis ortus cardine/ [Missing tenor]/ Salvator mundi Domine
Longs
Text Triplum (L)
pp lines
A solis ortus cardine insigne lumen splendidit | et usque terre limitem lucem calorem prebuit | Christum canamus principem ecclesie catholice | natum Maria virgine turbe collaudant celice | Beatus auctor seculi mestus misertus populi | servile corpus induit mortalis et aperuit | nec carne carem liberans a serpentinis faucibus | ne perderet quos condidit mortis obedit nexibus | Caste parentis viscera replevit sanctus alitus | celestis intrat gracia mundum musa divinitus | venter puelle baiulat quod dictum est oraculo | secreta que non noverat homo patent in stabulo.
+ + + + + + + + + + +
Motetus (L) Salvator mundi Domine nacens de pura virgine | qui nos salvasti hodie ab hostibus perfidie | in hac nocte nos protege tu deviantes corrige | et salva omni tempore tuo redemtos funere | adesto nunc propicius Christe redemtor Israel | et parce suplicantibus qui diceris Emanuel | tu dele nostra crimina a virtute tui numinis | tu tenebras illumina splendore tui luminus | ne mentem sompnus oprimat fac nos in bono vigiles | nec hostis nos suripiat tui qui sumus pugiles | nec ullis caro petimus hosti causante perdita | cum maculetur sordibus in via mundi lubrica.
+ + + + + + + + + + +
Looking at the opening of the motet (laid out in Example . to highlight the proposed L tenor periods), if we imagine rests on the last two breves of each fourth bar (enclosed in square brackets), then the outer voices at the end of the first period would homorhythmically declaim unstable parallel sixths (as in Jesu/Jhesu/Jesu in Example .). Notice though that the breve-semibreve (B-S) declamation here is not reserved exclusively for the passages when the tenor rests; in fact, the motet features B-S declamation throughout, starting on the very first long. The motet, however, does feature parlando passages at a regular interval of every four longs, moving along predominantly in unstable imperfect intervals. After the sixths in bar , there are tenths in bar ; thirds in bars and ; tenths in bars and ; and so on. •
Note also the outer-voice parallel fifths a/e to F/c to G/d from bar to bar . As mentioned above in relation to Jesu/ Jhesu/Jesu, these – as well as some ensuing instances, including when the tenor is reconstructed – are part of fourteenth-century contrapuntal grammar in England.
Jared C. Hartt
Table .: Translations of A solis ortus cardine and Salvator mundi Domine
Triplum
Motetus
From the point where the sun rises, Your brightness has shown forth remarkably, And to the far end of the earth, it has held forth warmth and light.
Lord, savior of the world, Born of a pure virgin, who has saved us this day from the treachery of our enemies.
Let us sing of Christ, The Lord of the universal church, Born of the Virgin Mary, With the heavenly host offering highest praise.
Protect us also in this night Correct those who deviate and save the redeemed for all time through your death.
The blessed creator of the world, Sorrowful one, compassionate to the people, He adopted man’s lowly form, Making himself known as mortal.
Be present to us now in your kindness O Christ, redeemer of Israel, and be merciful to your supplicants, who call you Emanuel.
Freeing our flesh by his flesh From the serpent’s jaws; that what he had established might not be lost, he suffered the fetters of death.
May you erase our sins By the virtue of your godliness, and brighten the darkness with the splendor of your brilliance.
That chaste parent’s innermost parts are filled with Holy nourishment Celestial grace has entered, Divinely cleansed of the fruit of Adam.
Lest sleep shut down the mind, Make us vigilant in goodness, And let not the enemy deceive us, we who are your champions.
The maiden’s womb is burdened, As the prophecy foretold, Mysteries she had not known Become evident in the man child in the stable.a)
We beseech you, dear one, on behalf of all, Lest we fall to the enemy, stained with sin, Make smooth the path of life.b)
Translations and commentary by Peter Lefferts. a) Starting with a morning hymn (at Lauds) and its image of Christ as the sun shedding his light across the world, the triplum text moves to a Christmas theme of Christ becoming man. In the final line I take the liberty of ‘man child’ rather than ‘man’, which I hope captures the sense of what is being aimed for there. b) The motetus hymn text is for evening (at Compline) and its additions play with the notion of Christ, having protected us by day (in the triplum text), now also protecting us by night, shining light in the darkness and keeping awake and vigilant his pugiles, his ‘champions’ (line ). The added lines (nascens de pura virgine) and (qui diceris Emanuel) make clear the Christmas connection.
A crucial step in the reconstruction is figuring out the tenor’s rhythmic pattern. While the majority of bars necessitate a change of tenor pitch from the first to the second breve of each long, in no bar is it compulsory to change the tenor pitch from the second of the third breve. Thus, the outer-voice activity suggests a short-long mode- pattern in each bar of the medius cantus, with each L period concluding with an imperfect long rest (notated as two dotted quarter-note rests in Example .).
A Missing Middle-Voice Melody: Reconstructing the Tenor of A solis ortus/Salvator mundi Domine
Example .: Two extant voices of A solis ortus cardine/ [Missing tenor]/ Salvator mundi Domine
j & œ œ œ œ œ œ j œ™ œ
Ϊ
j j j œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ ™ #œ œ œ œ œ
Ϊ
A so - lis or - tus car - di - ne/
& ‹ ? œ™
in - sig - ne lu -
œ œ œJ œ œ œ œ™ œ œJ œ œJ œ œ
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va - tor mun - di
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5
ter - re
li
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mi
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qui nos sal - va
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cens de pu - ra
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Jared C. Hartt
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A Missing Middle-Voice Melody: Reconstructing the Tenor of A solis ortus/Salvator mundi Domine
What now about pitch? If we assume that the beginning of each breve must be consonant, and that the outer-voice melodic skips within each breve ought to be consonant with the tenor, then we can fill in possible tenor pitches according to the proposed rhythmic and isoperiodic schemes. We can start with those instances where intervals between the triplum and motetus make perfectly clear what the tenor pitches ought to be. For instance, the medius cantus must take over the lowest register on several occasions: in bar there is a d/g unsupported fourth, so the tenor voice likely falls down to G there – as in Fusa/Manere/Labem where we saw earlier that the tenor occasionally dropped below the motetus – and in bar , there is another unsupported fourth c/f, so the tenor would reach down to F. A lengthy span of clues occurs in bars –, where we find three successive longs with unsupported d/g fourths; thus, it is likely that the medius cantus states G at the beginning of all three of these longs. In contrast, a tricky passage comes right before, in bar , at the conclusion of a tenor period, on an e/e unison. Where does the medius cantus voice fit here? Above? Below? At the unison? Here we also find what is probably the lone scribal error in the motet: the semibreves c and b are dissonant; depending on the tenor pitch, one of the voices ought to be corrected, either the triplum emended to d or the motetus to a in order to begin the string of parallel thirds. Note the G/g octave that both begins and ends the motet. Because the information in Tables . and . suggests that all twelve of the extant motets conclude with sonorities – even those with a missing voice – and because all but two of those with all three voices extant begin and end on the same sonority, then not only does the missing tenor probably conclude on d, but it also could plausibly begin on d, yielding sonorities as bookends; see Example .a where a d has been provided to begin the motet’s first tenor period. Looking at the second and third breves of the first long, the only options consonant with the pitches and skips in the outer voices are a' or a; thus, should the tenor skip up a fifth to a' or down a fourth to a? If the former (which is what is provided in Example .a), then a step down to g at the beginning of the second long would yield another G sonority. If the latter (Example .b), then the tenor in bar might be down on G, in unison with the motetus, resulting in a G U concord. From the outset, then, there are ambiguities with the tenor register. Skipping ahead to the second and third breves of bar , a is consonant with both e and f # in the triplum. Because of this a, the previous pitch probably is not g – that is, a fourth above the triplum – as this would yield a descending leap of a seventh, an uncharacteristic move for a tenor voice; instead, it could be d (Example .a), in keeping with the preference of yielding a fifth with the motetus at the beginning of a long, or it might instead be G (Example .b), providing a stepwise connection to a. There are several possibilities for the pitch prior to that (for the second and third breves of bar ): a', g, e, c, a; I have chosen e (Example .a) •
Given that the tenor almost certainly reaches down to F in in bar , the proposed a' in bar would yield an ambitus of a tenth for that voice. This might suggest that a in bar is a better option. But, a cantus prius factus with an ambitus of a tenth, while much less common, should not be entirely ruled out as a possibility given the English predilection for setting entire antiphons, sequences, responsories, etc., as a motet tenor voice. See, Lefferts , –, for a discussion of range, with a focus on ‘overall range’, that is, taking all three voices into account at once.
Jared C. Hartt
and a (Example .b) to allow for stepwise motion in each instance. And in bar , d is a good candidate, yielding another concord. Both options for the opening tenor period are rather disjunct: Example .a has a fifth at its outset and two fourths to conclude, while Example .b both begins and ends with a fourth. These options are plausible, but perhaps unconvincing melodically. Of course, there are still other possibilities. Maybe, then, the first pitch of the tenor should be G or g. On the one hand, that would allow for a stepwise G-a-G or g-a'-g motion to start the melodic line, and its opening G or GU sonority would be akin to how the anomalous Fusa/Manere/ Labem began. But on the other, the majority of the extant motets do begin with sonorities, as highlighted above. Regardless, since all of the motets with three extant and sounding voices (except Fusa/Manere/Labem) begin and end on the same tenor pitch, then if this tenor does start on G or g, then it is probable that it will end there as well. The outer voices of the next tenor period (beginning at bar ; see Example .c) suggest a mostly conjunct tenor line around c, d, and e, which yields several fifths above the motetus at the beginning of longs, again, typical behavior for medius cantus motets. And in the next tenor period, it is plausible that the pitches likewise yield a predominantly conjunct line and remain in a similar register. By going through the remainder of the motet in a similar fashion, I believe I was able to come up with a satisfactory solution for the tenor, and this solution, I argue, would absolutely make the motet performable. After all, we have the poetry of both outer voices, and we know the general contrapuntal language where consonance rules and fifths between the lowest two voices are frequent. Of course, though, the next step is to try to find an extant tenor melody that matches. Given the subjects of the outer voices, both troped Christmas hymns, naturally the tenor should accord. A problem I faced, however, is that the opening tenor period is the phrase I was most uncertain about due to the aforementioned disjunct motion and the different possibilities for register, and, unfortunately, melodies are often most easily identified (and most easily found online) by their opening pitches. Using the network of websites at the Cantus Database, I searched for an opening with either a d-a' or d-a leap, and transpositions thereof, but nothing would fit our motet beyond the first few pitches. So, I did some backwards work. I looked up chants for Christmas, including antiphons, responsories, hymns, etc., and tried to see if something would fit. This was a needle-in-a-haystack situation, but I nonetheless started with those that began with the letter S, since, although ‘A Solis’ and ‘Salvator’ are not strictly alliterative, ‘Solis’ and ‘Salvator’ are. Again, I could find nothing with an initial leap of an ascending fifth or descending fourth that would fit.
• •
See and within that site, especially . The middle-voice tenors of Jesu/Jesu/Jesu and Rosa/Regali/Regalis, for example, are both transposed up a fifth; see Hartt , .
A Missing Middle-Voice Melody: Reconstructing the Tenor of A solis ortus/Salvator mundi Domine Example 4a is bars 1-4 (the first system); Example 4c is bars 5-12 (the second and third systems). Example .: Hypothetical reconstruction of the tenor pitches in the opening three L periods
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ExampleExample 4b is bars system; middle staff are different than in 4a) Sal4a is va(the tor first mun minotes ne/ naand desystems). pu Example -1-4 - 1-4 - di - the -in the - cens - ra bars (the firstDo system); Example 4c is bars 5-12 (the second third a. one option for the first L period
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in-sig--ne ne lulu -- men men splen--didi--dit/ dit/ et us us--que que splen lu in--sigcem ca - lo - rem pre - bu- it/ Chriet- stum
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Sal -- va va - tormun mun--didi Do Do - mi mi ne/ Sal vir - gi- ne/ - tor qui nos sal - va -- sti ho -- di - e/ne/ b. another option for the first L period
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prin - ci - pem/ - na - musprin caca Ma - - nari - mus ne/ - a vir - -gici-- pem/
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tu de - vivi--an an - tes tu tu o - re tos - de -dem- -tes
c. option for the second and third L periods
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Jared C. Hartt
I found myself needing to loosen the search criteria. Perhaps the tenor does not start on d, but instead on G or g, already suggested as an option. Beginning with G-a-G or g-a'-g opened up many more possibilities for potential tenor matches, but none of the generated results would fit beyond seven or eight pitches. It turns out, though, that the answer was literally staring me in the face all along – I needed only to look at the first three words of our motetus text: ‘Salvator mundi Domine’. A search by text (only) provided one result, but no melodies associated with the hymn had been entered in the database. A Google image search of ‘Salvator mundi Domine hymn’ yielded several results, including a few with a notated melody that indeed begins G-a-G. The hymn melody required very little adjustment to fit the motet. On the bottom staff of Example . is the ‘Salvator mundi Domine’ hymn melody and on the top staff are the proposed tenor pitches for the motet. Only two – possibly three – alterations needed to be made to accord with the extant outer voices (boxed in the example): the first involves a change of pitch down a step from c to b; the next, simply a filling in of a third. The possible third alteration involves a change of pitch down a third from c to a; this will be addressed further below. Example .: A comparison of the proposed tenor pitches with the ‘Salvator mundi Domine’ hymn melody
œ œ œ œ & œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ ‹ Proposed tenor œ œ œ œ & œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ ‹ Sal - va - tor mun - di Do - mi - ne, qui nos sal - va - sti ho - di - e, œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œœœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ & œ œ ‹ œ œ œ œ œ & œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ ‹ in hac no - cte nos pro - te - ge, et sal va o mni tem -po - re. ?
The ‘Salvator mundi Domine’ hymn shares its tune with the Pentecost hymn, ‘Veni creator spiritus’. Towards the bottom of the other side of the folio (fol. r) appears a motet voice Nos orphanos erige, Michael, under which is notated the first fourteen pitches of an unlabeled tenor (its remaining seven pitches are missing due to damage to the folio). Prior to this chapter going to press, Elizabeth Eva Leach pointed out to me that this melody has been identified in RISM and confirmed by Lefferts in his dissertation as ‘[Veni creator spiritus]’. At first glance, one might suppose that the notated melody at the bottom of fol. r served double duty, acting as the foundation of Nos orphanos and as a prompt of the tune for the singer of the middle voice of A solis/Salvator on the verso. But if that is the case, the singer • • •
See Frere , , hymn (digitized online) for the melody. As Lefferts has shown in his reconstruction of the motet (, –), each statement of the twenty-one-pitch tenor divides into three taleae. Lefferts , . I thank Elizabeth Eva Leach for bringing to my attention the appearance of the ‘Veni creator spiritus’ melody on the recto.
A Missing Middle-Voice Melody: Reconstructing the Tenor of A solis ortus/Salvator mundi Domine
of our motet’s tenor would need to make several adjustments in order to yield consonance with the outer voices: first, the ‘Veni creator spiritus’ tenor appears in Nos orphanos transposed up a fourth, beginning on c; second, the singer of the ‘Salvator mundi Domine’ tenor would need to figure out the rhythmic pattern of melody and that it unfolds in L periods; third, only approximately the first half of the melody is used in Nos orphanos, and thus the singer of the ‘Salvator mundi Domine’ hymn would need to provide the rest on their own; and finally, while the tunes of ‘Veni creator spiritus’ and ‘Salvator mundi Domine’ are nearly identical, there are a few variants that would need to be observed (for example, ‘spiritus’, coinciding with ‘Domine’, is sung syllabically instead of with the d-c melisma on its second syllable). Remarkably, the first two adjustments to the ‘Salvator mundi Domine’ tenor discussed above (boxed in Example .) also occur in another motet that uses this tune as its tenor, the roughly contemporaneous Veni creator spiritus/ [Veni creator spiritus] preserved on fol. v of Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, , and in part in Olc LC/A/R/; this motet tenor, however, features two further variants, so it is possible that various versions of the tune may have been in the minds of early fourteenth-century composers in England. Perhaps, then, the adjustments discussed above were not adjustments at all: the version of the hymn offered on the top staff of Example . may have been the one known by the composer. In the end, the appearance of (nearly) the same tune on the recto of the same folio that contains our motet would seem to strengthen the identification of its tenor as the ‘Salvator mundi Domine’ hymn. Example . offers a performable transcription of the motet. By inspecting the threevoice texture, we can see how it all fits together, using the mode pattern and L periods reasoned earlier. All breves are consonant. Singing the tenor up an octave (beginning g-a'-g) is out of the question: see, for instance, the second and third breves of bar as well as the second breve of bar (both would yield dissonant fourths). Additionally, an e' in bar , for example, would be uncharacteristically high in register, and would also combine with the motetus to create a harmonic fifteenth, yielding an extremely broad sound, one not heard in other contemporaneous motets. • • •
•
•
Additionally, ‘visita’, which corresponds to ‘hodie’ in our tenor, is likewise sung syllabically, on d-e-d, in ‘Veni creator spiritus’. In Veni/Veni’s tenor, an a is also added after the boxed b (thus, the downward leap of a fourth from c to G is filled in) and the eighth-to-last pitch is G instead of a. On Olc LC/A/R/, see Mason . Of course, it is also possible that the composers of these motets took some liberties with the ‘Salvator mundi Domine’/‘Veni creator spiritus’ melodies in working out a piece’s construction. Or perhaps it was a combination of both: making minor changes and various versions circulating. There are two additional pairs of motets of English providence in which we find a somewhat similar situation. Caligo terre scinditur (PMFC XV, no. ) and Solaris ardor Romuli (PMFC, no. ), both based on the Mariounette douche tenor, are entered consecutively in Onc . Ave miles celestis (PMFC XV, no. ) and De flore martirum (PMFC XV, no. ), both based on the Ave rex gentis tenor, are entered consecutively in Ob . The triplum pitch for ‘ca-’ (of ‘calorem’) in bar has been cut away from the top of Lwa ; this can be seen in Figure .. In all likelihood it is c', which has been provided here, as well as in Examples . and .. Otherwise, except for the emendation to the motetus in bar (discussed below), the outer voices of Example . follow Lwa exactly; as such, only the accidentals indicated in Lwa are provided in the examples here, but, doubtless in performance, more would be interpolated (for example, see the f in bar and again in bar ).
Jared C. Hartt
Recall there was an unsupported fourth in bar between the outer voices. Sure enough, the ‘Salvator mundi’ melody dips down to G to yield a fifth below the motetus, before leaping up to c, and then stepping to d, to complete the voice exchange. And then it once again leaps down to G to support the motetus’s d with a fifth below, completing another voice exchange. The third possible tenor alteration mentioned above would occur in bar . I have tentatively put an a in the middle voice in order to be consonant with the outer-voice F/a' tenth and with the triplum’s f and d semibreves; this d would clash with the original chant’s c. I wonder, though, if the d on the second syllable of ‘corpus’ is a scribal error: it does occur at a staff change (see the beginning of the fourth staff of Figure .), and, if amended, the a'-fa'-f motion in the triplum in bar would be more in line with that voice’s melodic behavior elsewhere – see, for instance, the e-c-e-c gesture in bar . Further, the second iteration of the tenor melody does not require emendation at the corresponding spot (bar ) since c is consonant with both outer voices. On the flip side, though, the unusual downward and upward fifth leaps in bar (a'-d-a') are immediately echoed a fifth lower in bar with d-G-d in the motetus, yielding an intriguing (and rare) moment of imitation that would be a shame to remove by ‘correcting’ the d to f in bar . The ‘Salvator mundi’ melody concludes at bar with the repeated G. But, of course, a lot of the motet remains. I initially thought that perhaps the final G was repeated once again, and then the tenor melody would begin a second statement at the beginning of the next L period (at bar ), at the moment discussed above where the medius cantus dips below to support the upper-voice fourths in three successive longs. However, starting a second tenor statement at bar yields considerable dissonance; for instance, an F in the tenor on the second breve of would clash with the motetus’s e. Instead, it appears that the composer has elided the end of one tenor statement with the beginning of the next, so that the second iteration of the melody actually begins on the second breve of bar . Eliding successive tenor statements also occurs in Regina/Regina (Table .). Recall, too, that tricky spot at bar with the e/e unison and the possible scribal error: the medius cantus actually dips down a fifth below the motetus to a. It is therefore plausible that the motetus’s ensuing b ought to be changed to an a to correct the dissonance and instead begin the series of parallel thirds. The correction has been indicated in Example .. For the conclusion of A solis/[Salvator]/Salvator, it turns out that the last tenor period is L, and the motet does indeed end on the same sonority on which it began, with G in the tenor, but not on an concord, like all of the other extant examples of the genre. The •
•
In the motetus of this final period, there is a group of four semibreves (on the second syllable of ‘sordibus’ in bar ); see Karen Desmond’s chapter in this volume for a discussion of English motet voices that feature four or more semibreves per breve. The process of reconstructing this missing middle voice in particular reminded me of an important – and perhaps obvious – lesson: just because several motets behave a certain way, it does not mean another of the same subgenre must. I was fixated on the tenor beginning and ending a fifth above the motetus, which in the end hindered (and greatly drew out) my search for identifying the tenor source.
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Ϊ
-
œ œ œ œ J
Ϊ
Ϊ
men
j œ
j œ
Ϊ
cens
j œ œ™
Ϫ
Ϫ
ab
tu
œ
œ
de
-
œ J
j œ
per -
œ J
vi - an - tes
œ œ J
œ œ J
tum
Ϊ
-
j œ œ Œ™
na
œ
ho - sti - bus
œ J
Œ™ œ
œ J de pu - ra
œ œ J
Ϊ
Ϊ Ϫ
j œ us - que
Chris-tum
j œ œ
-
œ
Ϊ
et
j œ œ
pre - bu - it/
Ϫ
œ
na
Ϫ
Ϫ
j œ œ
splen - di - dit/
œ
ca - tho - li - ce/
j œ #œ
Ϊ
ca - lo - rem
œ œ J
-
#œ œ œ
Example .: A solis ortus cardine/ [Salvator mundi Domine]/ Salvator mundi Domine, reconstructed
A Missing Middle-Voice Melody: Reconstructing the Tenor of A solis ortus/Salvator mundi Domine
œ œ J
˙c� ™
�s
-
œ J
j œ œ
j œ
a - des - to
œ œ J
f�
Ϫ
Ϫ
Ϫ
nunc
Ϫ
ra - el/
et
Ϫ
pro
Ϫ
˙™
Ϊ
˙™
Ϊ
-
pa -
œ œ J
Ϊ
œ J
Ϫ
Ϫ
tur
œ
pi
œ
œ J
Ϊ
-
Ϫ
œ
Ϊ
œ J
ci - us/
œ J
Ϫ
me
Ϫ
Ϫ
Ϫ
Ϫ
mor
-
-
Ϊ
˙™
œ
-
Ϊ
˙™
ta
œ
Ϊ
˙™
be
j œ œ
stus
ce sup - pli - can - ti - bus/
œ œ œ œ
Ϫ
cor - pus in - du - it/
? œ œ œ œ™
? Ϫ
le
œ
j œ
œ œ J
˙™
Ϊ
sal - va om - ni tem - po - re/
se - cu - li/
j œ #œ
auc - tor
˙™
œ
�u - ne - re/
œ
& Ϫ
21
?
? Ϫ
-tus
& Ϫ
17
et
cor - ri - ge/
œ
Ϫ
ne/
vir - gi -
a
Ϫ
-
Ϫ
j œ œ œ œ
œ œ™ J
? œ
& œ œj œ �a ri œ™ ˙™ ?
13
j œ
-
lis
Ϊ
et
j œ œ
Ϊ
mi - ser - tus
j œ œ
Ϊ
Ϫ
qui
Ϫ
Ϫ
œ
j œ œ
ste
di
œ
Ϊ
ap - pe - ru - it/
j œ
-
œ
-
œ J
-
œ J
j œ
ce - ris
œ œ J
Ϊ
� -
œ J
nec car - ne
œ œ J
re - dem - tor
œ œ J
Ϊ
Ϊ
œ œ™ J ser - vi
Ϫ
j œ œ
-
j œ
re - dem - tos
po - pu - li/
œ
tu
o
œ œ J
œ
Ϫ -
Ϊ
Ϫ
Ϊ
j œ œ
be - a
j œ œ
ce - li - ce/
œ
Chri
j œ
col - lau - dant
j œ œ
Jared C. Hartt
œ ren œ™
˙™
vi
œ œ™ J
- tis
j œ �œ
lu - mi - nis/
? œ
?
&
33
nu - mi - nis/
œ œ J
œ
?
˙™
quos
œ
? Ϫ
ret
& Ϫ
29
-
j œ
œ J
œ
Ϫ
Ϫ
ne
Ϫ
sce -
j œ œ œ œ
œ J
œ
˙™
Ϊ
-
Ϊ
-
œ J
na/
Ϫ
Ϫ
mor
œ
Ϫ
Ϫ
re
Ϫ
-
˙™
-
˙™
j œ
j œ œ
Œ™ j œ
o - be - dit
j œ œ
Ϊ
j œ
Ϊ
Ϊ
ple - vit san - ctus
œ
Ϊ
tis
Ϊ
˙™
j œ œ
ser - pen - ti - nis
œ
j œ œ
o - pri - mat/
œ œ J
Ϊ
mi
œ œ™ J
men - tem somp - nus
œ
Ϫ
ra/
Ϫ
il - lu
œ œ J
˙™
Ϊ
no - stra cri - mi - na/
Ϫ
œ J
a
Ϫ
œ œ J œ œ J
Ϊ Ϫ
Œ™ ˙™
de - le
œ
Ϫ
rans/
te - ne - bras
œ œ J
tu
-
Ϫ
con - di - dit/
œ œ J
tu
be
ma - nu - el/
-
Ϫ
li
Ϫ
œ œ™ J
? œ
? Ϫ
˙™
j œ œ™
car - nem
& œ
25
�ac
Ϫ
a
Ϫ
œ
splen
Ϫ
œ ne œ™
vir
œ
Ϫ
-
-
nos
œ
Ϊ
li - tus/
Ϊ
in
-
-
-
œ J
œ J
i
œ J
pa -
j œ
i
œ J
bo - no
�œ œ J
Ϊ
ce - le
œ œ J
tu
bœ œ J
Ϊ
cas - tis
tu
j œ œ
te
j œ
per - de -
œ œ J
ne
j œ œ
do - re
j œ œ
-
œ
Ϊ
j œ œ
tu
- �i - bus/
-
œ œ J
�in��� �
Ϊ
j œ œ
�au - ci - bus/
œ
A Missing Middle-Voice Melody: Reconstructing the Tenor of A solis ortus/Salvator mundi Domine
œ œ™ J
Ϫ
˙
Ϫ
nec
Ϫ
cre - ta que non no - ve -
Ϫ
˙™
per - di - ta/
? œ œJ
?
j œ ˙™
œ
j œ
œ J
Ϫ
Ϫ
rat/
˙™
-
-
Ϊ
œ J
Ϫ
Ϫ ho
bus/
œ J
-
Ϊ
˙™
mo
Ϫ
Ϫ
quod
œc� ™
œ
˙™
in sta
œ œ J
Ϊ
˙™
sa
j œ œ™
Ϊ
di
j œ œ™
bu
-
-
˙™
lo�
˙™
tu
œ
in vi - a mun - di lu - bri - ca�
Ϫ
o
Ϫ
Ϫ
-
ho
Ϫ
œ œ J
-
-
i
sti
œ J
se -
œ J
˙™
˙™
˙™
cau - san - te
œ œ J
œ
cu - lo/
œ œ J
Ϊ
-
œ J
pu -
j œ
su - mus
œ œ J
Ϊ
ven - ter
œ œ J
Ϊ
ra
œ
qui
œ œ J
Ϊ
vi - ni - tus/
œ
œ œ œ ˙™ J J
-
j œ #œ ™
Ϊ
dic - tum est
œ œ œ œ
pa - tet
Ϫ
Ϊ
-
œ œ œ œ
pe - ti - mus/
œ œ œ œ™
ro
œ œ J
Ϊ
Ϊ
œ œ J mun - dum mu ˙™ œ™
œ
su - ri - pi - at/
œ œ J
œ œ œ œ œ™
Ϊ
cum ma -cu - le - tur sor - di
œ œ œ œ œ J œ™
Ϫ
Ϊ
ca
œ œ J
ul - lis
œ
˙™
Ϊ
ho - stis nos
œ
œ œ J
Ϊ
Ϫ
ba - iu - lat/
œ
nec
œ
œ œ œ œ & œ œJ œ œ™ J
��
gi - les/
-
pu
le ™
œ œ™ J
-
? œ
?
el
& œ œ œ œ™
��
j œ œ
in - trat gra - ci - a/™
˙™
j œ œ
vi - gi - les/
? œ
- stis
™ ? œ
& œ
37
Jared C. Hartt
A Missing Middle-Voice Melody: Reconstructing the Tenor of A solis ortus/Salvator mundi Domine
tenor is cycled through once completely and through thirty-nine of its pitches the second time. Partial final tenor statements are not uncommon in motets with medius cantus: looking again at Tables . and ., two other isoperiodic motets – Jesu/Jhesu/Jesu and Fusa/ Manere/Labem – exhibit this behavior, as does Civitas/Cibus/Cives. In these cases, then, the tenor does not dictate the motet’s length; instead, the tenor is repeated just enough to execute the overall design. The final row of Table . can now be filled in thus: Table .: Revised last row of Table .
Motet
Source
A solis ortus cardine [Salvator mundi Domine] Salvator mundi Domine
Lwa fol.
v
(Iso)periodicity
tenor statements
L + (L) (L) + L L + (L) + L
+ /* (with pitch elided)
Initial sonority
Final sonority
Edition/Transcription
Notes
g G G
g G G
Lefferts , – (tr and mo only) Example here (complete)
‘alliterative’ (S-tenor) parlando while tenor rests *last pitch of tenor statement elides with first pitch of next statement
G U
GU
For at least a few decades in fourteenth-century England, motets with medius cantus were indeed an important subgenre of motet. Given that all extant sources of the period are fragmentary and, consequently, the number of surviving complete or completable fourteenthcentury English motets of all subgenres is relatively low, that there are at least twelve with a tenor in the middle is significant, and indicates that these motets are worthy of careful consideration. If – or hopefully when – more of these motets are found as additional fragments are discovered, should they perchance be missing their tenors, those missing middlevoice melodies can indeed be reconstructed and performed. Study of the contrapuntal language and behaviors of comparable works allows for plausible reconstruction. And while I contend that identifying a match is not an absolutely necessary step to create a performable transcription of the three-voice texture, locating the source melody of a motet’s tenor is undeniably satisfying.
•
•
The total is in the low s, a relatively small number in comparison with contemporaneous continental motets, most of which are preserved in fully extant codices. For a recent discussion of the numbers of motets in England, and a comparison with the number of Latin-texted continental motets, see Bent, Hartt, and Lefferts , –. See n. above.
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This index includes references from the body of the text only. Abbreviations in parentheses indicate a Machaut composition: B=ballade, Cp=complainte, L=lai, Lo=Loange des dames, M=motet, R=rondeau, RF=Remede de Fortune, V=virelai.
A
anagram, –, , , , Andray soulet (Matteo da Perugia), Anglo-Norman, , , ; Table . Annales Hannoniae, Ch. passim; Figs. .–. citations of Machaut in, –; Figs. .–. dissemination of, – organization of, translation of. See Chroniques de Hainaut annotations. See performance markings antiqui, , –, , , ; Table . Antonello da Caserta, Anxiety of Influence, The (Harold Bloom), Apt Mass, ; Table . Are post libamina (Mayshuet), Ariès, Philippe, Aris, Marc-Aeilko, , ; Table . ars antiqua, , , , , , ars mutandi, ars nova (period, style), , , , , , , , , , , , , song and word setting, Ch. passim Ars nova (Vitriacan treatise/tradition), , , , –, , ; Table . Atkinson, J. Keith, Au temps pascour. See Jugement dou roy de Behaingne Aubrey, Elizabeth, –, , , Aucun se sont loe/A Dieu commant/Super te (Adam de la Halle), augmentation, , , , , , , , of syllables, , , , , –; Fig. . Augustine, Confessions, , Aus amans (L), Ave, regina celorum (Marian antiphon), , –; Table .; Ex. . Avignon, , , , , register, Avril, François, , ,
A Dieu commant (Adam de la Halle), A solis ortus cardine (hymn), ; Ex. . A solis ortus cardine/[Salvator mundi Domine]/Salvator mundi Domine, Ch. passim; Fig. .; Tables ., ., .–.; Exx. .–., . edition (reconstructed), Ex. . periodicity, isoperiodicity in, ; Tables ., ., . process of reconstruction of, – sonority in, –, ; Table . texts and translation, Tables .–. See also A solis ortus cardine (hymn); Salvator mundi Domine (hymn) A toi, Hanri (Cp), Abbey of Longchamp, Abbey of Saint-Remi, , ; Table . Abuz (allegorical character), , Académie royale des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, Adam de la Halle, , –, . See also A Dieu commant; Aucun/A Dieu/Super te; Hareu li maus d’amer m’ochist adnominatio, Ahasuerus (biblical character), Akbari, Suzanne Conklin, al-Jazarī, Ismā’īl ibn al’Razzāz, Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices, ; Fig. . Albert I, duke of Bavaria, Alexander the Great, –, , Alfonso X, king of Castille, Léon, and Gallicia, Alleluia V / Virga Jesse (chant), –; Fig. . Alleluia V / Virga Jesse (in Wa), , –; Fig. .; Ex. . Alleluya confessoris, ; Table . alliteration, , , , , , ; Tables ., ., . alterity, , Amadeus VI, Fig. .; Table . Ambrosius, – Amer Amours est la choison pour quoy/Durement au coeur me blece/Dolor meus (attr. Philippe de Vitry), Ch. passim; Exx. .–. color in, –, modus in, –, relationship with Fortune/Ma doulour, Ch. passim talea in, –; Exx. .–. texts and translation, Table . See also Dolor meus Amors me font languir, Amour, Amours (allegorical character). See Love Amour me fait (B), ; Table . Amours qui a/Faux Samblant/Vidi Dominum (M), anachronism, ,
B
Bachelard, Gaston, ballade, , , , , –, , , ballada duplex, single-stanza subgenre, See also Cent ballades; Oton de Granson; and the works identified by B and Lo numbers See also under Jehan Acart d’Hesdin; Prologue ballette, , . See also Amors me font languir Baltzer, Rebecca, Baralipton, , ; Table . Barbitonsorus, Barcelona Mass, –, , ; Tables ., .
General Index Basis prebens, Battle of Crécy, Battle of Nicopolis, Battle of Poitiers, , , Benedicamus Domino (Paolo ‘Tenorista’ da Firenze), Benedicamus Domino/Beatus vir, Table . Benedict XVI (pope), , Benedictine Nunnery of Saint-Pierre, Avenay ; Table . Benediktinerinneabtei Sankt Hildegard, Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Roman de Troie, Bent, Margaret, , –, , , , , , , Bernard Quaritch Ltd, catalog, , Besseler, Heinrich, , – Biauté parfaite (Lo), Biaute qui toutes (B), , ; Tables ., . bibliography. See studies (bibliography of ) under Guillaume de Machaut; see under Hildegard of Bingen Bibliothek des Priesterseminars Trier, Bingen, Hildegard of. See Hildegard of Bingen Blanche of Navarre, queen of France, Blessed Virgin Mary, , , , , , , , dramatic role, , Boccaccio, Giovanni, ‘Torello and Saladin’ (Decameron .), Boethius, , , , , –, , , Consolation of Philosophy, , , , , . See also under dialogue; Dit dou vergier; illuminators See also Hope; Philosophy Bonbarde, , ; Tables ., . Bone pastor Guillerme/Bone pastor qui pastores/Bone pastor (M), , , Boniface VIII (pope), Bonne of Bourbon, Fig. .; Table . Bonne of Luxembourg, , –, , ; Figs. ., .; Table . and the Remede de Fortune, , , , as possible patron of Machaut, , , –, , as tastemaker, – prayer book of, , book history, Book of Kings. See Shahnama Book of Lamentations, boqta, Bourgeois de Paris, Bowers, Roger, , , , Brétigny, Treaty of, breve altered, , , , ; Table . subdivision of, , , , Ch. passim, See also tempus Brisebarre, Jean, Li restor du paon, Britton, Johannes ( John le Breton), De legibus Angliae, –; Figs. .–. Brownlee, Kevin, Bruges, Treaty of, Brunier, Pierre, Bryant, Lawrence M., Bubenicek, Michelle,
Bukofzer, Manfred, Burney, Charles, , –; Fig. . Burrows, Daron, , Busse Burger, Anna Maria,
C
c.o.p. ligature, , , , –, , ; Table . Caeneus (mythological character), Caligo terre scinditur/Virgo mater, ; Table .; Ex. . Cameraco, , Candor vestis/Candet sine spina, –; Table .; Ex. . canon law, cantare super librum, , Cantus Database, , cantus irregularis, carole, , Cauchon, Gerard, ; Table . children (Amelota and Gerard), ; Table . Caulier, Achille, La Cruelle femme en amours, Caylus, Anne Claude de, Count, –; Fig. . Cazelles, Raymond, , Cazerte. See Philipoctus de Caserta cedule, Cent ballades ( Jehan Le Seneschal), Cerquiglini-Toulet, Jacqueline, , –, Certes, mon oueil (R), , – passim; Fig. .; Tables ., . circulation of, ; Table . Isabelle of France as dedicatee of, , –, See also canon under Dame, qui veut (R) Chailley, Jacques, Champenoys de Passeavant, Jean, Charles, king of Navarre (the Bad; Charles II; Charles d’Evreux), , , , , , ; Fig. .; Table . as patron of Machaut, , , –, , association with Yolande of Flanders, , , –, Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor, , Charles V (Charles de Valois; the Wise), , , , , , , – passim, , ; Fig. .; Table . Charles VI, ; Fig. .; Table . Charles VII, Charles VIII, Charles de la Cerda (Charles of Spain), , Charles of Normandy, Charles of Orléans, Table . Charles the Bold, Fig. .; Table . Chartier, Alain, La Belle Dame sans Mercy, Livre de l’Esperance, Livre des quatre dames, Châtre of Cangé, Fig. . Chaucer, Geoffrey, , , Cherry, John, Chew, Geoffrey, Chichmaref, Vladimir, children (as theatrical performers), Ch. passim
General Index
D
schoolboy roles, – silent roles, , – speaking roles, , – voiced roles, , – Christe qui lux es/Veni creator spiritus/Tribulatio proxima est/ Contratenor (M), , Christine de Pizan, complete-works manuscripts, Chronicon Hanoniense, Chronique dite de Baudouin d’Avesnes, Chroniques de Hainaut, , –, , Ci m’i tient/Haro/Omnes, –, , , ; Ex. .. See also Haro, je n’i puis durer (refrain) Cicero, Marcus Tullius, De inventione, Cinc, un, trese (R), , , –, –, –; Tables ., ., . John, duke of Berry ( Jehan) as dedicatee of, –; Table . orthographic variants in, Circe (mythological character), Civitas nusquam/Cibus esurientum/Cives celestis, , ; Table . Clark, Alice V., , Clark, Robert L. A., Clement VII (pope), Clermont-Ferrand (Clermont, Cleremunde), codicology binding, description of De legibus Angliae, –, , ; Figs. .–. gathering structures anomalies in Vg and B, – gathering structure of W, Fig. . offset, , , –, , ; Fig. . stub, , , , , ; Fig. . tip-in, , See also manuscript studies under Earp, Lawrence Cohen, Gustave, Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, , – Collesson de Sommeville, Johanna, –; Table . Collesson de Sommeville, Theobald, –; Table . Confort d’ami, , , , , , , , ; Fig. ; Table . conjointure, conjunctura, , , , –, , ; Table . Conté, Nicolas-Jacques, contrafactum, , –, , , , , costume, , , , , , . See also headgear Court de paradis, courtly love, , , , . See also fin’amor Coussemaker, Edmond de, Credo (in Wa), , , , , , –; Fig. .; Table .; Ex. . Cum jejunasset dominus (responsory), ; Ex. . Cum jejunasset dominus (textless Iv composition), , –; Fig. .; Ex. . earlier transcriptions of, –; Exx. .–. Cupid (mythological character), , , , ; Fig. . currentes, , Curtis, Stephen,
DalSpace, Dame, a vous sans retollir (V/RF), Dame, de qui (B/RF), Table . Dame, je sui/Fins cuers dous/Fins cuers dous (M), Ch. passim cadences in, , – dating, – edition, Ex. . ficta in, – fin, dual meaning of, , , hocket in, , , , ; Ex. . materia of, , motives, –, , , –; Exx. ., . phrase lengths, ; Table . refrain in, –, , , ; Ex. . tenor, , –; Fig. .; Ex. . texts and translation, transmission, unusual features, – Dame, ne regardez (B), ; Table . Dame, qui veut (R), , – passim; Table . canon, , – circulation of, Isabelle of France as dedicatee of, , –, Dame, se vous m’estes (B), –, ; Figs. .–.; Table .; Exx. ., .–. Dangier (allegorical character), –, Daniel and Susanna, Dante, data visualization, Ch. passim David (dramatic role), De bon espoir/Puis que la douce/Speravi (M), , De desconfort (B), ; Table . De flore martinum/Deus tuorum/Ave rex gentis, Table . De Fortune me doy (B), ; Tables ., . De legibus Angliae. See under Britton, Johannes De Looze, Laurence, De petit po (B), , , , ; Table . circulation of, –; Table . musical variants in, –; Exx. .–. orthographic variants in, –; Table . text layout/alignment in, –; Figs .–.; Table . De spineto rosa/Virgo sancta Katerina/Agmina, , , ; Table .; Ex. . De toutes flours (B), , ; Tables ., . De triste/Quant/Certes (B), ; Tables ., . debate, , , , , , , . See also dialogue in the Jugement dou roy de Behaingne, –, , , in the Jugement dou roy de Navarre, in the Livre dou Voir dit, declamation, Ch. passim basic (defined), . See also syllabic rhythm breve-semibreve, parlando, , , , , , ; Tables .–., . decolonization, Dei preco, ; Table .; Ex. .
General Index Deschamps, Eustache, , , , Desmond, Karen, , destour, Ch. passim defined, – Deus compaignouns de Cleremunde, , , , –; Fig. .; Ex. . text and translation, Table . dialogue, , , , , . See also debate dialogic structure in Machaut’s oeuvre, –, –, – in the Consolation of Philosophy, – in the Dit dou vergier, –, , –, in the Jugement dou roy de Behaingne, , in the Prologue, , didacticism, , –, , , , , , Digital Cavendish project, digital resources, tools. See Cantus Database; Electronic Medieval Music Score Archive Project; Gephi; Global Chant Database; Google Scholar; Ngram Viewer under Google Books; Zotero sustainability of, diminution, , , , , , ; Fig. . displacement, –, , –. See also destour disputatio. See debate dit, –, , –, , –, , , , , , , , , . See also the dits listed by title immediately below, as well as Confort d’ami; Jugement dou roy de Behaingne; Jugement dou roy de Navarre; Livre dou Voir dit; Prise d’Alexandre; Remede de Fortune Dit de l’alerion, , , , ; Fig. . Dit de la cerf blanc, Dit de la fleur de lis et de la marguerite, , –, Dit de la fonteinne amoureuse, , , , , , , , , , Dit de la harpe, ; Fig. Dit de la marguerite, Dit dou lyon, , , , ; Fig. . Dit dou vergier, , Ch. passim, , , ; Fig. . and the Consolation of Philosophy, –, , , and the Prologue, Ch. passim and the Roman de la Rose, – passim, , position in the complete-works manuscripts, , , , –; Fig. . See also under dialogue Dix et sept (R), , – passim; Tables ., . Peronne as dedicatee of, , ; Table . Dolor meus (plainchant tenor), –; Ex. . melodic comparison with chant sources, –; Ex. . See also Amer Amours/Durement; Fortune/Ma doulour Donnez, signeurs (B), Table . Douce dame (R), Table . Dous amis (B), , , – passim; Fig. .; Table .; Exx. .–. refrain, text and translation, dous regart, – Dous viaire gracieus (R), , , –, , – passim, ; Fig. .; Table .; Exx. .–., .
refrain, text and translation, Duodeno sydere, ; Table .; Ex. . Durbuy, ,
E
Earp, Lawrence, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , bibliography (complete), – Guillaume de Machaut: A Guide to Research, –, , –, Ch. passim, –, , , , , , , , , , ; Figs. .–.; Table . influence, –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , manuscript studies, –, , , , –, , –, , , , , –, , , , , ; Table . photo of, summary of scholarship, –; Table Ecce vir-/[T.], ; Table . Edward III, , Eels (band), Egidius de Murino, , Electronic Medieval Music Score Archive Project (EMMSAP), , Embach, Michael, , , – En amer (B/RF), Table . En ce chant/Roissoles ai roissoles/Domino, –; Ex. .. See also Roissoles ai roissoles (refrain) Enfants-sans-souci, engin, enginëor, Entendement (allegorical character), , Hermitage of, entremets, Epiphany play, Esperance (allegorical character). See Hope Esperance qui masseüre (B), ; Table . Espoir (allegorical character), , , , – estampie, Esther (biblical character), Estoire de Griseldis, estrangeté, , Évêque des Innocents, Everist, Mark, , , , , exoticism, –, , , ,
F
Fébus, Gaston, , Felix virgo/Inviolata, genitrix/Ad te suspiramus/Contratenor (M), , ficta, musica ficta, . See also under Dame, je sui/Fins cuers dous fin’amor, , , , –, , , . See also courtly love Firmissime fidem/Adesto, sancta/Alleluia, Fleury playbook,
General Index Florimont de Lesparre, Flos ortus/Celsa cedrus/Tenor (attr. Philippe de Vitry), , , –; Table . Foix, Fons tocius superbie/O livoris feritas/Fera pessima (M), ForceAtlas algorithm, –, ; Fig. . formes fixes, , , Fortune, Lady Fortune (allegorical character), , –, , , , , , , , , ; Fig. . wheel, , , See also complainte under Remede de Fortune Fortune, mere à dolour/Ma doulour ne cesse pas/Dolor meus, Ch. passim; Exx. ., .–. color in, –, modus in, , –, relationship with Amer Amours/Durement, Ch. passim talea in, –; Exx. ., . texts and translation, Table . See also Dolor meus framing devices (in A), Franco of Cologne, , . See also Franconian under notation Frankenstein, Viktor, Fresche Memoire (allegorical character), – Froissart, Jean, Frondentibus florentibus/Floret, , ; Table . Fruchterman Reingold algorithm, ; Fig. . Fulgentius, , Fusa cum silencio/Manere/Labem lavat, , –, , , , ; Fig. .; Table .; Ex. . periodicity in, , ; Table . sonority in, ; Table . voice crossing in,
Google Books, Ngram Viewer, ; Fig. . Google Scholar, , Grace (allegorical character), Graduale Romanum, , ; Fig. . Grail tradition, Grandes Chroniques de France, graphite, graphite pencil, Great Schism, Greene, Gordon K., , , Griffin, Miranda, Grimoard, Guillaume. See Urban V guide, Ch. passim Guillaume d’Amiens, , Guillaume de Machaut and Philippe de Vitry, Ch. passim and Reims, , , , , , , , , as author of a chronicle on the counts of Rethel, Ch. passim as author of Mélusine, – as canon of Reims, , , , ; Table . as cleric, , , , –, , , , , as executor, , ; Table . as ‘monster’, – as ‘romantic’, Ch. passim benefices, , , ; Table . birth place, birth year, circulation of songs, Ch. passim citations of, in Annales Hannoniae. See under Annales Hannoniae Florence, copies/exemplars of Machaut songs in, , , , –, , Lombardy, Machaut reception in, manuscripts, lost, containing Machaut works, –, , , , , , , ; Table . opera dubia, – Pamplona, potential presence in, seal, , ; Figs. ., . self-naming, Ch. passim spellings, variant, , , , , , , ; Figs. .–.; Table . studies (bibliography of ), Ch. passim supervision of manuscript production, , , , , , , , , , See also Confort d’ami; Dit de l’alerion; Dit de la fleur de lis et de la marguerite; Dit de la fonteinne amoureuse; Dit de la harpe; Dit de la marguerite; Dit dou lyon; Dit dou vergier; Jugement dou roy de Behaingne; Jugement dou roy de Navarre; Livre dou Voir dit; Messe de Nostre Dame; Prise d’Alexandre; Prologue; Remede de Fortune; and the works identified by B, Cp, L, Lo, M, R, RF, and V numbers See also under Annales Hannoniae; Bonne of Luxembourg; Charles, king of Navarre; dialogue; Earp, Lawrence; Yolande of Flanders Guillaume de Melun (uncle of Guillaume II de Melun),
G
Gace de la Buigne, Roman des deduis, , , Gaignat, Louis-Jean, Fig. . Gais et joli (B), Tables ., . Galatea (mythological character), Gardner, Julian, Gaudeat et exultet […] Papam querentes, Genette, Gérard, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Gephi, , , , –, , Gilbert the Universal, Glossa ordinaria, –, Gilles li Muisis, Meditations, Giselbert of Mons, , Giustina of Padua, St, Glissant, Edouard, , –, –. See also destour Global Chant Database, God of Love (allegorical character), , , , –, –, , , Godfrey of Bouillon, , Godt, Irving, ; Table . Goliath (dramatic role), Gombosi, Otto,
General Index Guillaume II de Melun, archbishop of Sens, , – depiction as Sens (allegorical figure), , – statue, Guillaume de Trie, , Günther, Ursula,
Hoepffner, Ernest, , –, Hoffrichter, Leo, , Holford-Strevens, Leofranc, Holsinger, Bruce, – Holy Land, , homosociability, , –, , Honte, paour (B), , ; Tables ., . Hope (Esperance) (allegorical character), , –, , , , , –, , Hotteterre, Jacques-Martin, Ex. . Hugh of Bar, Hugh of Toul, Hugues de Châtillon, ; Table . Huizinga, Johan, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, Humbert, dauphin de Viennois, Hundred Years War, , Huot, Sylvia, , , , Hyppolite de Bertholz,
H
Hac a valle lacrimosa/Hostem vicit, Table . Hainaut, counts of, , . See also Albert I; Manasses Halperin, David, Haman (biblical character), Handlo, Robertus de, Regule (The Rules), Ch. passim; Table . Handschin, Jacques, Hareu li maus d’amer m’ochist (Adam de la Halle), –, ; Ex. . Haro, je n’i puis durer (refrain), –, Harpe de melodie ( Jacob Senleches), Harrison, Frank Ll., , , Hayles, N. Katherine, Hé Mors/Fine amour/Quare non sum mortuus, (M), , headgear feathered, Ch. passim; Figs. .–. hat, pink, turban, –, , ; Figs. ., .–. Heisig, Karl, Helas! pour quoy se demente (R), ; Table . Helas! pour quoy/Corde mesto/Libera me (M), , Helas! tant ay doleur (B), , , ; Fig. .; Table . hemiola, , , , –, ; Fig. .; Exx. .–. Henri de Ferrières, Livres du Roy Modus et de la Royne Ratio, –, Henry IV, count of Bar, Fig. .; Table . Henry VI, Henry of Bratton (Bracton), Hesdin, – hexachord, , , Hildegard of Bingen, Ch. passim as composer, bibliographies of, Ch. passim; Tables .–. canonization of, , Epistolae, , in Acta inquisitionis, in Acta Sanctorum, Liber divinorum operum, Ordo virtutum, – Pentachronon (comp. Gebeno of Eberbach), relics of, , Riesencodex, , Scivias, , , Vita, Hillebrand, Harold Newcomb, Histoire d’Outremer, Hochschul- und Landesbibliothek RheinMain, , hocket, , . See also under Dame, je sui/Fins cuers dous; Martyrum/Diligenter; Vos/Gratissima
I
I-narration, , , –, , –, –, , –, – Iam nubes dissolvitur/Iam novum sidus oritur, , , ; Table .; Ex. . Il m’est avis (B), Tables ., . Il n’est confors qui me peüst venir (Lo), illuminators Jean le Noir, Jean Pucelle, Master of the Bible of Jean de Sy (Master of Copses), , – Master of the Cité des Dames, ; Fig. . Master of the Coronation Book of Charles V, ; Table . Master of the Remede de Fortune, , , , , ; Table . of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, – Impudenter circumivi/Virtutibus laudabilis/Alma redemptoris (attr. Philippe de Vitry), –; Table . talea in, –; Figs. .–. In seculum/Jhesu fili virginis, ; Table . Innocents (dramatic role), , . See also Évêque des Innocents Inter amenitatis tripudia/O livor, ; Table . interdisciplinarity, , , , , , , International Machaut Society, newsletter, , intertextuality, , , , Isabeau of Bavaria, ; Fig. .; Table . Isabella of Portugal, Fig. . Isabelle of France, , , –; Fig. .; Table .. See also under Certes, mon oueil; Dame, qui veut; Ma fin est mon commencement isorhythm, , , , , ; Table . Ivrea, ,
J
J’aim la flour (L),
General Index J’aim miex languir (B), , ; Table . J’ay tant mon cuer/Lasse! je sui/Ego moriar pro te (M), Jackson, Roland, , – Jacobus (de Liège, de Ispania), Speculum musicae, , , –, , , , , , , –; Table . Jacquerie, Jacques de Guise, Annales Hannoniae. See Annales Hannoniae Jacques de Longuyon, Voeux du paon, Jacques Le Gros, Je ne cuit (B), ; Table . Je puis trop bien (B), Tables , ., . Je sui aussi (B), , ; Fig. .; Table .; Ex. . Jean I, duke of Brabant, Jean II de Melun, count of Tancarville, –, –, depiction as Sweet Thought, – Jean de le Mote, Li parfait du paon, Jean de Machaut, –, , –, Jean-Baptiste de Machault, Fig. . Jean-Baptiste de Sainte-Palaye, Fig. . Jeanne of Boulogne, Jeanne of Burgundy, queen of France, , Jeanne of France, , ; Fig. . Jeanne of Laval, Jeanne of Navarre, Jehan Acart d’Hesdin, La Prise d’Amours, Fins cuers dous, gente et gentieux (ballade), Fins cuers dous, quant paieront vostre oel ce qu’il m’ont pramis (ballade), Jehannot de Lescurel, Jesu fili/Jhesu fili virginis/Jesu lumen veritatis, , –, , , , ; Fig. .; Tables .–.; Ex. . periodicity, isoperiodicity in, ; Table . sonority in, ; Table . Jeu de Robin et Marion, Jeu de saint Nicholas ( Jean Bodel), Jeu des échecs moralisé, jeux-partis, Jhesu redemptor/Jhesu redemptor/Jhesu labentes, Table . Joan II, countess of Burgundy, Fig. . Joan of Rethel, ; Fig. . Joanna of Bourbon, Fig. .; Table . Joanna of Castile, Joanna of Flanders, Fig. . Job, Johannes de Garlandia, ; Table . Johannes de Muris, John, duke of Berry, , , –, , , ; Fig. .; Table . as bibliophile, , , , –, , See also under Cinc, un, trese John, duke of Normandy ( John II; the Good; king of France), , , , , , , , –, ; Figs. ., .; Table . colle le paon (peacock feast), jewels, , John I of Aragon, ; Table . John XXII (pope),
John of Luxembourg, king of Bohemia, , , , , , , , –, , , , , , , , , John of Salisbury, John the Baptist, John the Fearless, , ; Fig. . jongleurs, Judas (dramatic role), Jugement dou roy de Behaingne, , , , , , , , , , –, –, ; Fig. . opening miniature in MS A, –; Fig. . opening miniature in MS C, –; Fig. . opening miniature in MS Vg, ; Fig. . See also under debate; dialogue Jugement dou roy de Navarre, , , , , –, , . See also under debate jugement suite, , , – defined,
K
Kay, Sarah, , , , Keitel, Elizabeth A., Khubilai Khan, court of, Koláček, Jan, Konigson, Elie, Kreyszig, Walter Kurt, –, Kubiski, Joyce, Kügle, Karl, –, , , Kühn, Hellmut, , Kyrie (Iv, fols v–r),
L
La dur [...] mi fa [...] desir, Lady Bonneürté, Lady Fortune. See Fortune Lady Philosophy. See Philosophy lai, , , , , , ; Fig. . Landini cadence, Lasse comment/Se j’aim/Pour quoy me bat (M), Laus honor vendito/Laus honor Christo, , ; Table .; Ex. . Lauter, Werner, , , , , ; Table . Lay de Plour. See Malgré Fortune; Qui bien aimme Leach, Elizabeth Eva, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , lead, lead pencil, Lebeuf, Jean, , ; Fig. . Leech-Wilkinson, Daniel, , , , , –, , , , , Lefferts, Peter, , , , , , Leo, Domenic, , , Leupin, Alexandre, , Lewis, C. S., Li jalous/Tuit cil/Veritatem, –; Ex. .. See also Tuit cil qui sunt enamourant (refrain) Liber de modo bene Vivendi, ad sororem, Liber Razielis, , Livre dou Voir dit, , , , , , –, , , , , , , , –, , , ; Fig. .; Table .
General Index masculinity in, Ch. passim. See also homosociability potential patron of, sirens in, Ch. passim See also under debate Loange des dames, , , , , , miniatures in, , ; Fig. . locus amoenus, , Louis I, count of Flanders, –, , ; Fig. . Louis I (Dampierre), count of Nevers, ; Fig. . Louis I, duke of Anjou, , Louis IX, Louis XI, –, , , Louis XIV, Fig. . Louis XV, Fig. . Louis XVI, Fig. . Louis of Male (Louis II of Flanders), , –, , –; Figs. ., .; Table . Louis Petit de Julleville, Love (Amour, Amours; allegorical character), –, , , , –, , , , , , , , , , , ; Fig. .a Lowinsky, Edward, Loyauté, que (L), ; Fig. . Lucius of Tongeren, Ludwig, Friedrich, , , Lux purpurata ( Jacopo da Bologna), Lux refulget/[T.], Table .
Marie of France, , –, ; Fig. .; Table . Mars (allegorical character), –, Martyrum gemma/Diligenter inquiramus/[A] Christo honoratus (M), , –, , ; Table . hocket in, talea in, –; Figs. .–. Mary. See Blessed Virgin Mary Mass Ordinary settings, Ch. passim. See also Barcelona Mass; Messe de Nostre Dame; Sorbonne Mass; Toulouse Mass; Tournai Mass as cycle, –; Tables .–. musical unification in, –, , – preexistent material in, , – tonality in, , –, , ; Tables .–. Matteo da Perugia, – Maw, David, Maximilian of Austria, – Mbembe, Achille Joseph, McComb, Todd, , McGrady, Deborah, , Mediolano, medius cantus. See under motet melancholy, , –, , , Mellinkoff, Ruth, Mélusine (Histoire des Lusignan) ( Jean d’Arras, Couldrette), . See also under Guillaume de Machaut mensuratio, –, –, – passim; Table . mensuratio cita (defined) ; Table . mensuratio citissima (defined), ; Table . mensuratio media (defined), ; Table . mensuratio morosa (defined), ; Table . Mer Mondaine, , Merci vous pri (R), ; Table . Mes dames qu’onques ne vi (Lo), Mes esperis (B), , ; Tables ., . Messe de Nostre Dame, Ch. passim, chronological layers of, Table . color in, comparison with contemporary Mass Ordinary settings, – talea in, , tonality in, Table . transcription of Gloria by Rousseau, ; Fig. . unusual features of, – metapoesis, metatextuality, , Metekerk, Roger, Metz, ; Table . manuscript illumination in, Milet, Jacques, Forest de Tristesse, –, –, Miller, Anne-Hélène, Miracles de Notre-Dame par personnages, Miracles de sainte Geneviève, moderni, , Molinet, Jean, Oroison de St Ipolite, , , Mon cuer, m’amour, ma dame souvereinne (Cp), Mongol, – monster theory, –
M
Ma chiere dame (B), ; Table .; Ex. . Ma douce amour (Hasprois), Ma fin est mon commencement (R), , , –, , –, ; Fig. .; Tables ., .–. circulation of, ; Table . Isabelle of France as dedicatee of, , Machaut, Guillaume de. See Guillaume de Machaut Machaut, Jean de. See Jean de Machaut magi, magic, Ch. passim cantepleure, flying carpet, , Merlin, , trompe l’oeil, Maintes fois (L), Fig. . Majori vi leticie/Majorem caritatem/Majorem intelligere, , ; Table . Malcharte, Gwillelmus, ; Table . Malgré Fortune (L/), Manasses, count of Rethel, , –; Figs. .–. Marcel, Etienne, Margaret I, countess of Burgundy, –; Fig. . Margaret of Bavaria, Fig. . Margaret of Brabant, countess of Flanders, ; Fig. . Margaret of Flanders (Margaret III), –; Figs. ., .; Table . Marguerite poetry, –. See also Dit de la fleur de lis et de la marguerite; Dit de la marguerite; Mon cuer, m’amour, ma dame souvereinne
General Index Moore, Shawn, Mordecai (biblical character), Morton, Jonathan, mos, – passim; Tables .–. defined, mos lascivus (defined), ; Table . mos longus (defined), ; Table . mos mediocris (defined), –; Table . motet analysis of, –, Chs. – passim, –, Ch. passim and polyphonic song, Ch. passim color in. See under Amer Amours/Durement; Fortune/Ma doulour; Vos/Gratissima dance-song, Ch. passim diminution in, , , , , dissonance in, , , , , , –, , –, , , , , in England, Ch. passim, Ch. passim. See also Deus compaignouns de Cleremunde number symbolism in, refrain-song, Ch. passim sonority in, Tables .–. talea in. See under Amer Amours/Durement; Fortune/Ma doulour; Impudenter/Virtutibus; Martyrum/Diligenter; Vos/Gratissima with medius cantus, Ch. passim voice crossing in, , . See also under Fusa/Manere/ Labem voice exchange in, , , –, , , , Muchembled, Robert, Muir, Lynette R., Mulier magna meriti/Multum viget virtus, –, , ; Table .; Ex. . Müller, Irmgard, , Muses, Music (allegorical character), , , , Mystère de la Passion, , Mystère de saint Louis, Mystère de saint Quentin, Mystères de la procession de Lille,
network diagram, Ch. passim; Figs. .–. degree, – edge, –, ; Table . in-degree, – modularity, , node, –, , ; Table . source, , ; Table . target, ; Table . Newes, Virginia, Nolan, Robert J., Normore, Christine, Nos orphanos/[Veni creator spiritus], – notation coloration, dragma, – English, insular, Ch. passim, extended Franconian, –, , , ; Table . Franconian, , , –, , , , minim, flagged, minim stems, ascending, Table . minim stems, slanted (caudae), similis ante similem rule, stemmed semibreves, , , , , –, , , ; Table . See also Ars nova; augmentation; Handlo, Robertus de, Regule (The Rules); Jacobus (de Liège, de Ispania), Speculum musicae; Petrus le Viser Novum sidus, Nulla pestis/Plange nostra/Vergente,
O
Ó Catháin, Máirtín, Octovien de Saint-Gelais, Sejour d’honneur, Olivier de La Marche, Le Chevalier délibéré, –, ; Fig. . On ne porroit (B), , ; Fig. .; Table .; Ex. . Onques dame ne fu si belle (Lo), ; Table . ordenance, , , , Ch. passim Oresme, Nicole, orfèvre, ornamentation eighteenth-century, –; Ex. . fourteenth-century, Orpheus, , , , – orthography. See under Cinc, un, trese; De petit po Orto solo serene/Origo viri/Virga iesse, , –; Table .; Ex. . Orto solo serene/Virga iesse, , –; Table .; Ex. . Oton de Granson, Car j’ay perdu ma jeunesse, ma joye, Ovid, , , – Ovide moralisé,
N
N’en fait (B), ; Table . Narcissus, Nature (allegorical character), , , , , , , , –, , , ; Figs. ., .a Ne cuidiez pas (Lo), Ne pensez pas (B), , , – passim; Fig. .; Table .; Exx. .–. refrain, , ; Fig. .; Ex. . text and translation, Ne quier veoir/Quant Theseus (B), , –; Fig. .; Tables ., .; Exx. .–. Nectanebus, nef, , Nef d’Abus, Nes qu’on porroit (B), ; Table .
P
Page, Christopher, paleography, , , anglicana formata, cursive anglicana,
General Index English hand, scribal errors, , , textualis, palimpsest, , Palmer, R. Barton, Paris, –, , , , , Porte Saint-Denis, , University of, , parlando. See under declamation parody, , , , –, , , , ; Ex. . partimens, peacock, , ; Fig. . automata, Peacock Cycle, Pensee (allegorical character), Peraino, Judith, performance markings, Ch. passim distribution of, in MS G, ; Table . material analysis of, – performativity, , – periodicity, isoperiodicity, , , , –, ; Fig. .; Table .. See also under A solis ortus/Salvator mundi/Salvator mundi; Fusa/Manere/Labem; Jesu fili/ Jhesu fili virginis/Jesu lumen veritatis; Vos/Gratissima Perneth, ; Table . Peronne. See under Dix et sept (R) Perrinet, , ; Table . Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca), –, Petre Clemens/Lugentium siccentur (attr. Phillipe de Vitry), Petrus de Cruce, , , , , ; Table . Petrus le Viser, , , , , , –; Table . Phi millies/O creator (Philippe de Vitry), Philip II the Bold, duke of Burgundy, –, –, , ; Figs. ., .; Table . Philip III the Good, duke of Burgundy, , –; Fig. .; Table . Philip IV, king of France, Philip V, king of France, ; Fig. . Philip VI, king of France, –, , , , , , Philip of Navarre, , , , Philipoctus de Caserta, Philippe de Melun, Philippe de Mézières, Dramatic Office for the Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple, Philippe de Rouvre, , , Philippe de Vigneulles, , Philippe de Vitry, , Ch. passim, , , , , , , – and Guillaume de Machaut, Ch. passim as author of Ars nova treatise, as ‘classical’, Ch. passim seals, See also Amer Amours/Durement; Flos/Celsa; Impudenter/Virtutibus; Petre/Lugentium; Phi millies; Tribum/ Merito/Quoniam; Vos/Gratissima Philosophy, Lady Philosophy (allegorical character), , , , , , , –, ,
Phyton (B), Tables ., . Pickwoad, Nicholas, , Pieragostini, Renata, Pierre de la Forêt, Pierre de Lusignan (King Pierre I of Cyprus), , , , , – Pierre de Villiers, Pintoin, Michel, plague, , , , , , , – Pleasure (allegorical character), Plesch, Véronique, Ploures dames (B), , ; Tables ., . Plumley, Yolanda, , , , pluriversity, Polyphemus (mythological character), portrait, portraiture, , –, , , –, Post missarum sollennia, Post partum/Ave regina/Veritatem, ; Ex. . Pour ce que tous (B), ; Table . Prendes i garde (refrain), –, –; Exx. .–. Princeps apostolice, , ; Table . Princes of the East, depiction of, –; Fig. . Prise d’Alexandre, , , , , , , Ch. passim, , , Prologue (Machaut), , , Ch. passim, , , Ch. passim, , ballades in, , miniatures, Ch. passim; Figs. .–. See also under dialogue Proteus and Morpheus, Provençal, , Prunet, ; Table . Puisque je sui fumeux (attr. Hasprois and Jaquet de Noyon),
Q
Quant en moy/Amour et biauté/Amara valde (M), , , , ; Fig. . Quant j’ay l’espart (R), , , –, – passim; Fig. .; Table .; Exx. .–. refrain, , , ; Ex. . text and translation, Quant vraie Amour/O series summe rata/Super omnes speciosa (M). See under Vos/Gratissima Quare fremuerunt/Quare fremuerunt/Quare fremuerunt, ; Table . Quaritch. See Bernard Quaritch Ltd, catalog Qui bien aimme (L/), Qui doloreux, Qui es promesses/Ha! Fortune/Et non est qui adiuvat (M), , Qui sonitu melodie (Gloria), , ; Table .
R
Raginero Longi-Colli. See Reginar Longneck Raoul de Vienne, sire of Louppy, , Raphael (dramatic role), Reaney, Gilbert,
General Index Reason (allegorical character), , , reconstruction of a Kyrie movement, of a missing tenor, , –, of a Sanctus movement, of basic declamation, of W’s iconographic program, , , ; Fig. . refrain, , , , , Ch. passim. See also A Dieu commant; Haro, je n’i puis durer; Prendes i garde; Roissoles ai roissoles; Tuit cil qui sunt enamourant. See also under Dame, je sui/Fins cuers dous; Dous amis; Dous viaire gracieus; Ne pensez pas; Quant j’ay l’espart refrain song, Ch. passim Regina celi letare/Regina celestium, ; Table . Reginar Longneck, , – Règles de la seconde rhétorique, Reims, , , , –, , ; Tables .–. Cathedral, , ; Table . siege of, See also under Guillaume de Machaut relationality, , Remede de Fortune, , –, , , , –, , , , , , –, , , , , , –, –; Fig. . complainte, , miniatures, , , , –, , , ; Figs. ., .–., ., .; Table . See also under Bonne of Luxembourg; illuminators Renart le nouvel, Rethel, , , , counts of, , , –, –. See also Louis of Male; Manasses retrograde, , , Rex Karole/Leticie pacis, , , –; Fig. . Rhetoric (allegorical character), , , rhyme cross, Table . end, , leonine, oxytonic, paroxytonic, rich, silent e, Ricci, Seymour de, , Richard de Veronne, Richardis von Stade, Riches d’amour (B), ; Tables ., . Rive, Jean-Joseph, Fig. . Roberge, Pierre-F., , Robert, duke of Bar, , ; Fig. .; Table . Robert III, count of Flanders, Robert le Coq, Robertson, Anne Walters, , , , , , , Roissoles ai roissoles (refrain), , Rollo, David, Roman de la Rose, , ; Fig. . Jean de Meun, , relationship with Dit dou vergier, Ch. passim
rondeau, , –, , , Ch. passim ludic, –, –, ; Table . See also A Dieu commant; Guillaume d’Amiens; Hareu li maus d’amer m’ochist; and the works identified by R number rondel, rondellus, , Rosa delectabilis/[Regali ex progenie]/Regalis exoritur, , , ; Tables ., . Rosa mundi purissima, , , , ; Table .; Ex. . Rose, lis (R), Table . Roth, F. Wilhelm Emil, , –, , , ; Table . Rouse, Richard and Mary, Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, ; Fig. . royal entry, , , , , , Royllart, Philippe, Ruclery, Nicolas, Rudolf IV of Austria, Runnalls, Graham,
S
S’Amours ne fait (B), , ; Table . S’on me regarde/Prenes i garde/He mi enfant, –, , , , ; Ex. .. See also Prendes i garde (refrain) Sainte-Palaye, Jean-Baptiste, Fig. . Saladin, , saltcellar. See nef Salvator mundi Domine (hymn), , –; Ex. . Sanans fragilia (Sanctus), Sanders, Ernest, , Sanders, Julie, Sans cuer, dolens (R), ; Table . Sans cuer m’en/Amis/Dame (B), ; Table . Sapience (allegorical character), , , –, – Saracen, , , , Schneider, Ludwig, Schrade, Leo, , , –, , scribal error, , , Se je me plaing de Fortune (Matteo da Perugia), Se je me pleing, je n’en puis (B), ; Table . Se ma dame m’a guerpi (V), Se pour ce muir (B), Tables ., . Se quanqu’amours (B), Tables ., . Se vous n’estes (R), , , , , ; Tables ., . Sedgwick, Eve, Sedulius, semibreves, Ch. passim Sens (allegorical character), , , , –, ; Figs. .a–.b. See also under Guillaume II de Melun Sens (place), , –, Shahnama, –; Fig. . Shakespeare, William, Taming of the Shrew, shamir, Shapiro, Daniel, Shedden-Ralston, William Ralston, Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, , Shiva, Vandana,
General Index Sigebert of Gembloux, Simon de Fau, Simon de Lille, Simon de Plumetot, Sire, a vous fais ceste clamour (Cp), sirens, Ch. passim Six Degrees of Francis Bacon project, Smilansky, Uri, , , , , sociétés joyeuses, Solomon, , , –, , Song of Songs, songbird imagery, , , , , , , Sorbonne Mass, –, , –; Tables ., . Souvenir (allegorical character), St Quentin dramatic role, feast of, , place, , –, , See also Mystère de saint Quentin St Waltrude, convent of, Staab, Franz, , Stäblein-Harder, Hanna, , ; Tables .–. Stanford Digital Repository, , Stouff, Louis, Strohm, Reinhard, , Subtilité (allegorical character), Surgere iam/[T.], Table . Sus une fontayne ( Johannes de Ciconia), Susay, , ; Table . Sweet Thought (allegorical character), , , ; Figs. .a–.b. See also under Jean II de Melun Swift, Helen J., –, , syllabic rhythm, –, , , –, ; Fig. .; Exx. .–., .. See also basic under declamation defined, Symes, Carol, syncopation, –, , , , , , , displacement syncopation, , , , , , ; Fig. .; Ex. .
tenor alterations, , , , equal-note, middle-voice, Ch. passim See also Dolor meus See also under Dame, je sui/Fins cuers dous; reconstruction; Vos/Gratissima tensos, text declamation. See declamation dedicatory, –, –, ; Table . macaronic, , , painting, setting, Ch. passim. See also under De petit po Thésard, Louis, Third Crusade, Thomas de Burgo, Thomas de Paien, Thomson, Matthew P., tiraz, Tischler, Hans, , Tomaso di Saluzzo, Le Chevalier errant, ; Fig. . Torello di Strà, Torveon, Jacques, Toulmon, Auguste Bottée de, Toulouse Mass, –, , ; Tables ., . Tournai Mass, , , , ; Table . Tournoi de Chauvency ( Jacques Bretel), Toute Belle (literary character), –, , , , – Trebor, Tree of Jesse, Tres douce dame que (B), ; Table . Tribum que/Merito hec patimur/Quoniam secta (attr. Philippe de Vitry), , ; Ex. . Trop plus/Biauté paree/Je ne sui mie (M), –, , troubadours, , , trouvères, , Tu civium/O cuius vita/Congaudens super te/Tu celestium, ; Table . Tu qui gregem/Plange regni respublica/Apprehende arma/ Contratenor (M), , Tuit cil qui sunt enamourant (refrain), , ; Ex. .
T
tableau vivant (mistere), –, , Taillandier, Tant doucement (R), –, , , ; Fig. .; Tables ., . Tapissier, , telescoping, –; Table . Templum eya, ; Table .; Ex. . tempo, performance tempo, Ch. passim tempus, , , , , , , , , , –, , , , Ch. passim; Table . tempus imperfectum maius (defined), –; Table . tempus imperfectum minimum (defined), –; Table . tempus perfectum maius (defined), –; Table . tempus perfectum medium (defined), –; Table . tempus perfectum minimum (defined), –; Table .
U
Udry, Susan, Ulysses (literary character), Un noble ray, ; Table . Une vipere (B), ; Tables ., . Universi qui te exspectant (gradual), ; Fig. . Universi qui te exspectant (textless Iv composition), –; Fig. .; Ex. . earlier transcriptions of, –; Exx. .–. Urban V (pope), Urban VI (pope),
General Index
V
proportion in, , , –; Fig. .; Ex. . relationship with Quant vraie/O series/Super omnes, – talea in, , , –, ; Figs. .–.; Exx. ., . tenor of, –; Table .; Ex. . texts and translation, Tables .–.
Vaillant, Jehan, Valenciennes Passion, , Valois, , , , –, , , , , Van der Linde, Antonius, , –, , –; Table . Veni creator spiritus (hymn), – Veni creator spiritus/[Veni creator spiritus], Verdun, –; Table . Vezci les biens, Violant of Bar (Yolande of Bar), ; Fig. .; Table . virelai, , , , , , , , . See also Sus une fontayne; Un noble ray; and the works identified by V number Virgil, allegorical character (Dante), Virgin Mary. See Blessed Virgin Mary Visconti, Giangaleazzo, duke of Milan, , , , ; Fig. .; Table . Visconti, Luchino, Vitry, Philippe de. See Philippe de Vitry VLOOKUP, Vo dous regars (R), Table . voice crossing. See under motet voice exchange. See under motet voice leading. See under motet Voir dit. See Livre dou voir dit Vos quid admiramini/Gratissima virginis species/Gaude gloriosa (attr. Philippe de Vitry), Ch. passim; Figs. .–.; Exx. ., .–. color in, –, , , , –, –; Fig. .; Exx. ., . edition of, Ex. . formal structure of, , –; Figs. ., .; Ex. . hocket in, , ; Fig. .; Ex. . modus in, –, –; Fig. .; Ex. . motives, cells in, , –; Figs. .–.; Ex. . periodicity in, , , –, ; Fig. .
W
Wakelin, Daniel, , Wallner, Martina, , – water clock, Wathey, Andrew, , Wauquelin, Jean, –, Weigert, Laura, William of Rubruck, Wilson Ruffo, Kathleen, Wimsatt, James I., , – Wright, Georgia Sommers,
Y
Yifan Hu algorithm, ; Fig. . Yolande of Flanders, countess of Bar, Ch. passim, , –, –, ; Fig. .; Table . as possible patron of W, –, –, Machaut at the court of, –, –, – seal, ; Fig. . supplications, –, , –; Table .
Z
Zátonyi, Maura, , –, Zayaruznaya, Anna, , , , , , Zelo tui langueo/Tenor/Reor nescia, ; Table . Zink, Michel, Ziolkowski, Jan, Zotero, , – Zwick, Gabriel, –,
This index includes references from the body of the text only. Aachen, Öffentliche Bibliothek (Stadtbibliothek), Beis E (Aachen), Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, C (W), , , Ch. passim; Figs. .–.; Tables .–. Apt, Cathédrale Sainte-Anne, Bibliothèque du Chapitre, bis (Apt), –, –, –, ; Tables .–., . Arras, Bibliothèque municipale, , , Barcelona, Biblioteca de Catalunya (olim Biblioteca Central), c (Barc c), Tables .–. Barcelona, Biblioteca de Catalunya (olim Biblioteca Central), d (Barc d), Barcelona, Biblioteca de Catalunya (olim Biblioteca Central), (BarcA), Table . Barcelona, Biblioteca de Catalunya (olim Biblioteca Central), (BarcC), Tables ., . Basel, Öffentliche Bibliothek der Universität, N.I. Nr (olim Musikfragment II) (Basel ), – Berlin, Staatliche Museen Preussicher Kulturbesitz, Kupferstichkabinett, C (Bk), Table . Bern, Burgerbibliothek, (K), Bologna, Museo Internazionale e Biblioteca della Musica di Bologna, Q. (olim Civico Museo Bibliografico Musicale, Q.; olim Liceo Musicale ) (Q.), , Bologna, now lost leaves used as inserts in a non-musical book of the library of the monastery of San Domenico in Bologna (Bologna), ; Tables ., .–. Brescia, Biblioteca Queriniana, incunabulum C VI (Brescia ), , –; Table . Brussels, Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, (KBR ), ; Figs. .–. Brussels, Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, – (KBR –), ; Fig. . Cambrai, Le Labo (olim Médiathèque d’agglomération de Cambrai and Bibliothèque municipale/Bibliothèque communale), , Cambrai, Le Labo (olim Médiathèque d’agglomération de Cambrai and Bibliothèque municipale/Bibliothèque communale), B (CaB), , , ; Tables ., . Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, , Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum Library, - (Cfm -), Table . Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College, / (Cgc /), –; Table . Cambridge, Pembroke College, (Cpc ), ; Table . Chantilly, Bibliothèque du Château de Chantilly, (olim ) (Ch), –, ; Tables .–. Dublin, Chester Beatty Library, Pers .v, Fig. . Durham, Cathedral Library, C.I. (DRc ), , –, , ; Fig. .; Tables ., . Faenza, Biblioteca Comunale, (Fa), ; Table . Florence, Archivio del Capitolo di San Lorenzo, (SL ), –, , –, , ; Tables .–. Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Panciatichiano (FP), , –; Table . Ghent, Rijksarchief, Varia D. A, ‘Ter Haeghen’ (Gr), ; Table . Ivrea, Biblioteca Capitolare, (Iv), , –, , , , , , , , Ch. passim; Fig. .; Tables .–., ., ., . Kansas City, MO, private collection of James E. and Elizabeth J. Ferrell (Vg), , , , , , –, , , , –, , , , , –, –, –, , ; Figs. , , ., .; Tables .–., .–. Kassel, Universitätsbibliothek Kassel, ° med. (Kassel), Table . Lille, Archives Départementales du Nord, B , –; Figs. .–. Lille, Archives Départementales du Nord, B , London, British Library, Add. , ; Table . London, British Library, Add. (Lbl ), ; Table . London, British Library, Add. , London, British Library, Add. , London, British Library, Add. (Old Hall), , London, British Library, Harley , London, British Library, Sloane (Lbl ), Table . London, British Library, Yates Thompson ,
Index of Manuscripts London, The National Archives (olim Public Record Office), E./// (Ltna), London, Westminster Abbey, (Lwa ), Table . London, Westminster Abbey, (Lwa ), Table . London, Westminster Abbey, (Lwa ), ; Fig. .; Tables ., .–., . Modena, Biblioteca Estense, a.M.. (Mod), –, ; Tables .–. Montpellier, Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire, Section Médecine, H (Mo), Ch. passim, , , , Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm , Nancy, Archives Départementales de Meurthe-et-Moselle, B , no. , Fig. . New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cloisters Collection, . (Prayer book of Bonne of Luxembourg), New York, Morgan Library, M. (Roman de la Rose), ; Fig. . New York, Morgan Library, M. (Pm), Nuremberg, Stadtbibliothek, fragment lat. a (Nur), , –; Table . Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley * (Ob *), Table . Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley (Ob ), Table . Oxford, Bodleian Library, Canon. Pat. Lat (Ob ), –, ; Tables ., .–. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce (Douce ), , Oxford, Bodleian Library, E Mus (Ob ), ; Table . Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton (Hatton ), Table . Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud Misc. (Ob ), Table . Oxford, Lincoln College, LC/A/R/ (Olc LC/A/R/), ; Table . Oxford, New College, (Onc ), , , , , ; Tables ., .–. Padua, Biblioteca Universitaria, (Padua ), ; Table . Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, , Fig. . Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, (J), ; Fig. . Paris, BnF, collection de Picardie (Pic), Paris, BnF, fr. (Roman de Fauvel) (Fauv), , , , , –, ; Table . Paris, BnF, fr. (Pn ), Fig. . Paris, BnF, fr. (M), , , ; Fig. .; Table . Paris, BnF, fr. (H), Fig. . Paris, BnF, fr. (Pc), Fig. . Paris, BnF, fr. (A), , , , , –, –, –, , –, , –, –, , , , –, , , , , , , , –, , –, , , , , , , –, , ; Figs. .–., ., .–., ., .–., .; Tables ., .–., . Paris, BnF, fr. (B), , –, –, , ; Figs. ., ., .; Tables .–. Paris, BnF, fr. (C), , , , , , , , , , , , , –, –, , , –, –, –, , , –, –, , , , –, –, , –, ; Figs. ., ., .–., ., .; Tables .–., .–. Paris, BnF fr. (D), ; Fig. . Paris, BnF, fr. (E), , , –, –, –, , , ; Figs. ., .; Tables ., .–., . Paris, BnF, fr. , Fig. . Paris, BnF, fr. – (F-G), , –, , –, , –, , Ch. passim, , –, , –, –, , , ; Figs. ., .–., ., .–.; Tables ., .–., . Paris, BnF, fr. , Paris, BnF, fr. (Ha), , Paris, BnF, italien (Pit), , , –, ; Table . Paris, BnF, lat. , Figs. .–. Paris, BnF, lat. A (Pn A), Paris, BnF, lat. (Pn ), , Paris, BnF, lat. , Paris, BnF, n.a.fr. (Pn ), , Paris, BnF, n.a.fr. (I), , , ; Tables .–., . Paris, BnF, n.a.fr. (PR), , ; Table .
Index of Manuscripts Paris, BnF, n.a.fr. (Trém), , , ; Tables ., ., . Paris, BnF, RES-M-, Figs. .–. Paris, Institut de Musicologie de l’Université, no shelfmark (Pim), Tables ., . Paris, Le Jardin de Plaisance et Fleur de Rhetoricque (JP), ; Tables ., . Perugia, Biblioteca della Sala del Dottorato dell’Università degli Studi di Perugia, Inc. (Cialini Fragment) olim Cas. , Incunabolo inv. N.F. (Perugia ), Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Libraries, Fr. (Penn), Table . Prague, Národní knihovna XI.E. (Pg), ; Table . Rome, Archivio Apostolico Vaticano, Registri Avinionesi , Table . Rome, Archivio Apostolico Vaticano, Registri Avinionesi , Table . Rome, Archivio Apostolico Vaticano, Registri Avinionesi , Table . Rome, Archivio Apostolico Vaticano, Registri Avinionesi , Table . Rome, Archivio Apostolico Vaticano, Registri Avinionesi , Table . Rome, Archivio Apostolico Vaticano, Registri Avinionesi , Table . Rome, Archivio Apostolico Vaticano, Registri Avinionesi , Table . Rome, Archivio Apostolico Vaticano, Reg. Suppl. , Table . Rome, Archivio Apostolico Vaticano, Reg. Suppl. , Table . Rome, Archivio Apostolico Vaticano, Reg. Suppl. , , ; Table . Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Reg. lat. (chansonnier a), , Stockholm, Kungliga Biblioteket, V.u. (Vu ), Table . Strasbourg, Bibliothèque municipale (olim Bibliothèque de la Ville), C. (Str), –, , , ; Tables ., . Todi, Biblioteca Comunale Lorenzo Leoni, Fondo Congregazione di Carità Istituto dei Sartori (Todi), Table . Tongeren, Stadsarchief, Fonds Begijnhof (Tong ), Table . Toulouse, Bibliothèque municipale, (Tou), Table . Trent, Museo Provinciale d’Arte, Castello del Buon Consiglio, (Tr ), Table . Turin, Archivio di Stato, J.b.IX. (Ta), , , –; Tables .–. Turin, Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria, J.II. (TuB), – Turin, Biblioteca Reale, Vari (formerly part of E. X. / H. ) (Tu), , Utrecht, Universiteitsbibliotheek, E (Ut), Table . Vendôme, Bibliothèque Municipale du Parc Ronsard, (Vend), Table . Washington, Library of Congress, Law Library, De legibus Angliae, no shelfmark, ; Figs. .–. Washington, Library of Congress, M. C Case (Wa), Ch. passim; Figs. .–. Wiesbaden, Hochschul- und Landesbibliothek RheinMain, (now lost manuscript containing Scivias), Wiesbaden, Hochschul- und Landesbibliothek RheinMain, (Riesencodex), , Wisbech, Wisbech and Fenland Museum, Town Library, [pr.bk.] C. (Wisbech), ; Table . Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, Cod. Guelf. Helmst. (Heinemann no. ) (W), Table . Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, Cod. Guelf. Helmst. (Heinemann no. ) (W), Worcester, Worcestershire Archive and Archaeology Service, b.: BA , York, York Minster Library, xvi.N. (Ym), Tables ., .