Sung Birds: Music, Nature, and Poetry in the Later Middle Ages 9781501727573

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
List of Sigla and Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Rational Song
2. Birdsong and Human Singing
3. Birds Sung
4. Silent Birds: The Musical Chase and Gace de la Buigne's. Le Roman des Deduis
5. Feminine Birds and Immoral Song
6. Bird Debates Replayed
Appendix 1.1. Two Principal Voices in Grammar and Music
Appendix 1.2. Four Species and Two Principal Voices in Grammar and Music Superimposed
Appendix 2. Aegidus and Pliny on the Nightingale Compared
Appendix 3. 1. The Birdsong Pieces and Their Sources
Appendix 3.2. A Note on the Music Examples
Appendix 4. Love of Birds using musical authorities
Appendix 5. Arnulf's Borrowings from Alan of Lille, De planctu Naturae
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

SUNG BIRDS

SuNG

BIRDS

~J ff~J and 9~

in~~~+ ELIZABETH EvA LEACH

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

Copyright© 2007 by Cornell University

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 5I 2 East State Street, Ithaca, New York r48 50.

First published 2007 by Cornell University Press

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Leach, Elizabeth Eva. Sung birds : music, nature, and poetry in the later Middle Ages I Elizabeth Eva Leach. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-q: 978-o-8or4-449r-3 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN-ro: o-8or4-449I-8 (cloth: alk. paper) r. Music-500-I400-History and criticism. 2. Birds-Songs and music-History and criticism. 3· Nature in music. 4· Poetry, Medieval-History and criticism. I. Title. MLI90.L43 2007 780.9'02-dc22

Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu.

Cloth printing

IO

9 8 7 6 5 4 3

2

I

Acknowledgments

1x

List of Sigla and Abbreviations Introduction I. 2.

x1

I

Rational Song

I I

Birdsong and Human Singing 3· Birds Sung

55

Io8

4· Silent Birds: The Musical Chase and Gace de la Buigne's I75

Le Roman des Deduis

5. Feminine Birds and Immoral Song

6. Bird Debates Replayed

2

38

274

Appendix r.r. Two Principal Voices in Grammar and Music

297

Appendix r.2. Four Species and Two Principal Voices in Grammar and Music Superimposed Appendix

2.

299

Aegidius and Pliny on the Nightingale Compared

Appendix 3. r. The Birdsong Pieces and Their Sources Appendix 3.2. A Note on the Music Examples

302

307

Appendix 4· Love of Birds Using Musical Authorities

3I

Appendix 5. Arnulf's Borrowings from Alan of Lille,

De planctu Naturae Bibliography Index

3 14

3I 5

33 5

30I

I

were the child of a celebrity, it would be called Manhattan torerr fflectthisitsbookconception there in March Certainly, without the inspiration 2000.

that I have derived from intellectual intercourse with my modern historian husband, it would never have come into being. It was written during a period of leave from Royal Holloway, University of London, in 2003-4, funded jointly by RHUL and what was then the Arts and Humanities Research Board (now the Arts and Humanities Research Council). I am grateful to my referees, Margaret Bent and Ardis Butterfield, to my colleagues, especially Katharine Ellis and John Rink, and to all those people, unknown to me, who decided in favor of funding my project on various internal and external committees. The cost of buying images and obtaining permission for the pictures in this book was met by the Music Department Research Committee at RHUL and the Music and Letters Trust. In the making of this book I have benefited from the kindnesses of many scholars. Helpful information on a wide variety of subjects was forthcoming from Sam Barrett, Margaret Bent, Bonnie J. Blackburn, Calvin M. Bower, Mary Carruthers, Geoffrey Chew, Suzannah Clark, David Cram, Guy Dammann, Giuliano DiBacco, Mark Everist, David Fallows, Barbara Heldt, Sylvia Huot, Christian Thomas Leitmeir, Susan Rankin, Lisa Sampson, Elizabeth Sears, G. S. Smith, Christina Story, Margaret Switten, Peter Wright, Jan M. Ziolkowski, and many more people I have now absent-mindedly omitted (with apologies). Bonnie J. Blackburn, Leofranc Holford-Strevens, and Virginia Newes allowed me generous access to as yet unpublished work in progress or in press, David Fallows kindly kept me supplied with copies of materials I was unable to get elsewhere, and Percy Lovell's wedding gift of anum-

X

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

her of out-of-print scores saved me hours of library time. Leofranc HolfordStrevens also provided translations from Latin texts. Helen Swift and the anonymous readers of the initial draft of the book made helpful suggestions about translations from French. Any unattributed translations are mine. The original texts are not given in full when freely accessible online (mainly via the TML). The music examples are my own, from my own transcriptions. A note on them appears as appendix 3.2. I am grateful to]. P. E. Harper-Scott, who offered many helpful music-setting tips and assisted with other bibliotechnical matters in later stages of this book's preparation. Staff members of all the libraries whose holdings provided images for this book were helpful in my e-mail correspondence with them, but I owe a special debt to the staff of my local libraries in Oxford, particularly the Music Faculty (especially John Wagstaff) and the Music Reading Room in the New Bodleian. I am also grateful to Marion Mason in RHUL's music library. A much earlier draft of chapter 5 was read by members of the Oxford Musici, several of whom had helpful comments. Parts of this chapter have already been published in the context of broader studies (" 'The Little Pipe Sings Sweetly while the Fowler Deceives the Bird': Sirens in the Middle Ages,' Music and Letters 87 [2oo6]: r 87-2rr, and "Gendering the Semi tone, Sexing the Leading Tone: Fourteenth-Century Music Theory and the Directed Progression," Music Theory Spectrum 28, no. r [2oo6]: r-21). I am grateful to the eleven anonymous readers who commented (half negatively) on this material as it traveled round a number of other music journals before it was finally accepted for publication. The encouraging comments of the anonymous readers of the first draft of this book have been extremely helpful to me in revising it for publication; I also thank John G. Ackerman for his comments on earlier versions of the introduction. Several chapters of the revised draft were read by Stephen Lovell, who made many useful suggestions. As he is well accustomed to taking the blame for his wife's faults, he will be pleased to know that in this case he will not have to.

Sigla Manuscripts here can usually be identified in three ways: by a full RISM siglum and shelf mark, by a short siglum in common use, or by a casual short name. Some sources are too obscure to have the last of these. The sigla defined by RISM (Repertoire internationale des sources musicales) are detailed in RISM-Bibliothekssigel: Gesamtverzeichnis (Munich, I999) and specify country (in capital letters), city (uppercase after a hyphen), and holding institution (in lowercase). For example, GB-Lbl is Great Britain, London, British Library; US-Cn is the United States, Chicago, Newberry Library. This library siglum is followed by the shelf mark of the manuscript source (often abbreviated to the minimum required to differentiate it from other music manuscripts in the same library). The full expansion of RISM sigla is not given here, merely the decoding of the short sigla. For handy online decoding of RISM sigla, readers are referred to a resource such as the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music (www.diamm.ac.uk). Short sigla, like the RISM sigla, are printed in italics. Key to short sigla

B CaB Cg

B-Bc I; St Gudule fragment F-CA Ip8; Cambrai fragments US-Cn 54; Chicago theory manuscript; Newberry theory manuscript F-CH 564; Chantilly Codex DK-Kk, Fragmenter I?!ll

Xll

Em

Fa FP Gh GR GRb

Iv Lo Lu ModA MONS Ox Pa Pg PadB Pit Pic PR Ro

Sq Str WolkA WolkB

SIGLA AND ABBREVIATIONS

D-Mbs I4274; St Emmeram Codex 1-FZc II?; faenza Codex 1-Fn 26; Panciatichi Codex B-Gr 3 36o 1-GR I97 1-GR l-IVe II5; Ivrea Codex GB-Lbl 29987; 1-Las I84; Lucca Codex; Mancini Codex 1-MOe a. 5.24; Modena Codex B-MONS; Leclercq fragment GB-Lbl Douce 308; Oxford chansonnier Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Library, MS French I 5; the Pennsylvania chansonnier CS-Pu XI E 9 1-Pu III5 F-Pn 568 F-Pn 67 F-Pn 677I; Reina Codex 1-Rvat 215 (and Ostiglia, Fondazione Opera Pia don Giuseppe Greggiati, without shelf mark); Rossi Codex 1-Fl 87; Squarcialupi Codex F-Sm 222 A-Wn 2777; Oswald von Wolkenstein manuscript A A-lu without shelf mark; Oswald von Wolkenstein manuscript B

Abbreviations Ca CMM Ct

cs

GS m.,mm. MGG PL PMFC RISM

cantus (voice part) Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae (series title) contratenor (voice part) Scriptorum de musica medii aevi nova series a Gerbertina altera, ed. Charles Edmond Henri de Coussemaker, 4 vols. (Paris, 186476) Scriptores ecclesiastici de musica sacra potissimum, ed. Martin Gerbert, 3 vols. (St. Blaise, 1784; repr. Hildesheim, 1963) measure, measures Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. Ludwig Finscher. Rev. ed., I7 vols. Kassel, 1994-. Patrologia Latina, ed. J.-P. Migne (Paris, r844-64) Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century (series title) Repertoire internationale des sources musicales (series title). Most references made here refer to Series B/IV: Handschriften mit

SIGLA AND ABBREVIATIONS

RS T TNG

TML Tr

Xlll

mehrstimmiger Musik des rr.-r6. ]ahrhunderts, 5 vols., I supplement (Munich, I966-). View details at http://www.rism.org.uk/ publications.html. Raynaud-Spanke number for French lyrics from the list in Hans Spanke, G. Raynaud's Bibliographie des altfranzosische Liedes, neu beareitet und erganzt (Lei den, I 9 55) tenor (voice part) The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie and John Tyrell (London: Macmillan, 200I). Available online to subscribers from www.grovemusic.com. Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum available at www.music.indiana .edu/tml!start.html triplum (voice part)

Pitches Specific pitches are designated in italics using the Guidonian gamut (see chapter 5, p. 2 53). Pitch classes are given in roman capitals.

SUNG BIRDS

s birdsong music? The most frequent answer to this question in the Middle [ Ages was resoundingly no. Some writers recognized that there were elements of apparent musicality in the song of certain birds that were able to produce well-modulated melodies composed of distinct individual pitches, but even these writers conceded this point only to emphasize the nonmusical status of such singing. My point of departure in this book is to explain why such aurally pleasing melody was not music for medieval thinkers. From this it is possible to establish what music was in the Middle Ages, and how its definition related to its producing agents, its sonic components, and its reception or effects. The key feature that defines music in the Middle Ages is its expression of a rationality, which human beings alone of all the sublunary animals also possess. Most typically in music-theoretical and pedagogical contexts, this rationality expresses itself in the ability to understand the mathematical ratios that underlie musical sounds. For most writers of this period, even tuned soundswhose intervals exhibit such ratios-merit the status of music only when they are both produced and received by an intellectually engaged rational animal. Lest we imagine the emphasis on the personhood and rationality of singer, song, and listener to be a feature of a specifically Christian privileged status for humankind within the animal kingdom, it is worth reflecting on a passage in the first book of the pre-Christian Augustine's De musica (late fourth century). The six books of this unfinished treatise are cast in the form of a dialogue between a master and a pupil. The first part of book r defines musica as "scientia bene modulandi" and then goes on to give reasons for all three parts of that definition. Despite its song sounding most sweet and "numerate" (numerosus)-by which Augustine means ratio-based, either in the sense of having dis-

2

SUNG

BIRDS

crete pitches properly ordered within the octave or in using rational rhythmic proportions in the notes of the melody-the nightingale does not understand the liberal art of music. 1 The master in the dialogue then likens the nightingale to instrumentalists who similarly play songs that sound rational (in the sense of "numerate") even though, like the bird, these instrumentalists would be entirely at a loss to explicate the musical principles on which their songs are based: M. Tell me, then, whether the nightingale seems to mensurate its voice well in the spring of the year. For its song is both harmonious, and sweet and, unless I'm mistaken, it fits the season. D. It seems quite so. M. But it isn't trained in the liberal discipline, is it? D.No. M. You see, then, the noun "science" is indispensable to the definition. D. I see it clearly. M. Now tell me, then, don't they all seem to be a kind with the nightingale, all those which sing under the guidance of a certain sense, that is, do it harmoniously and sweetly, although if they were questioned about these numbers or intervals of high and low notes they could not reply? D. I think they are very much alike. M. And what's more, aren't those who like to listen to them without this science to be compared to beasts? For we see elephants, bears, and many other kinds of beasts are moved by singing, and birds themselves are charmed by their own voices. For, with no further proper purpose, they would not do this with such effort without some pleasure. 2

The pupil agrees that he finds the voice of the nightingale to contain musical intervals that are sweet and that fit the season, but when the master asks if the bird is trained in the liberal discipline of musica, he demurs. The master then asks the student to affirm that those who perform harmoniously and sweetly "under the guidance of a certain sense" but without understanding "the numbers or intervals of high and low notes" are of a kind with the nightingale. He then ventures, moreover, that those who like to listen to such performers without themselves understanding the science of music may be compared to elephants, bears, and other beasts that are moved by singing. Birds, he says, are themselves charmed by their own voices; why, other than for pleasure, would r. Calcidius says that musical sound is composed of modes and numbers (modis numerisque) that the musicians call intervals (systemata); see Blair Sullivan, "The Unwritable Sound of Music: The Origins and Implications of Isidore's Memorial Metaphor,'' Viator 30 (1999): 6n20, 5nr7. Most commentators on this treatise by Augustine, whose later books are mainly concerned with rhythm, understand all references to nnmber as pertaining to rhythm; see the editor's comments in Augustine, De musica (ed. and trans. Hentschel), xv-xix, xxx. 2. Augustine, On Music (ed. and trans. Taliaferro), r76-77; De musica, I4·

INTRODUCTION

3

they make such an effort? 3 Augustine thus outlines many of the concerns that extend through the later Middle Ages. 4 He demands that even if the song sounds sweet and well measured, the musician must understand what he is doing; listeners may take morally legitimate pleasure only in music by musicians who know what they are doing, or they are themselves no better than beasts. In this book I examine in turn the role of the musical sounds, the performer, and the listener. That which makes music an art is that which separates it from nature and the natural voices of birds. The performer of music is under an obligation not just to make musical sounds but to understand them as musica, that is, as proportions that are rational. The listener is also under an obligation to understand sounds in this way, whether or not their performing agent does so. Whether that performer is a bird or an unthinking human, by listening actively, the medieval hearer can avoid being reduced to such a bestial status. Highly trained performers are inclined to internalize that training so that their music making seems completely natural, certainly to the audience, and perhaps even also to themselves. As in what Diderot later termed the "paradox of the actor," the more natural performances seem, the more skillful artifice is involved in them; this paradox was deepened in the Middle Ages by the fact that the rationality supporting such artistry was itself deemed natural in humans. The highly trained singer employing his knowledge of the scientia or ars of musica was employing his natural rationality in support of his natural instrument. Although birds have the latter, they lack the former: their nature is irrational. Comparisons between medieval human singers and birds, between human music making and birdsong, are thus potentially double-edged and sometimes difficult to read. Such comparisons recognize the pleasures to be had from virtuoso, spontaneous, naturally talented vocal production but also imply that it is something subhuman and perhaps therefore morally suspect. This contradictory attitude uses the concept of nature as a "moral middle term": less good than art but better than anything unnatural. 5 The period of the later Middle Ages offers the first unequivocal written traces of birdsong being drawn into the sonic frame of reference of human musical practice because the poetic texts of a number of songs from this time have their singers imitate birdsong or voice the speech of birds. These songs form a material focus of this book; I seek to contextualize them using a variety of other texts. How can we read this musical depiction of birdsong? What does it tell us about the singers, their listeners, and the moral status of secular polyphony in this period? And why was it in the fourteenth century that a 3· Augustine, On Music, 176-77; De musica, 14· 4· Franchino Gaffurio, Theorica musice, r.6, cites Augustine's passage as proof of the greater importance of art over nature in music. Unlike Augustine's master, however, Gaffurio grants artistry to instrumentalists and differentiates them from the nightingale. 5· Hugh White, Nature, Sex, and Goodness in a Medieval Literary Tradition (Oxford, 2000), 63-67.

SUNG

4

BIRDS

practice, continued to this day, of representing birdsong in human music making began? I also compare the musical representation of birdsong with the representation of other sounds deemed nonmusical in medieval definitions: the voices of quadrupeds and the phatic shouting of humans. The principal concerns raised in the investigation of the status of birdsong in the later Middle Ages can be seen to have set the agenda for all subsequent discussion, with each generation and each century adding its own perspectives and glosses to the ever-present question that the avian voices raise: How does birdsong differ from human music making? The answers to this question show that while historical change is undoubtedly real, it is never total nor particularly sudden. The predominant cultural position on any issue at any time is one of many available, even if it is the orthodox or most widespread one. Focus on the persistence of a particular metaphor throws the twin historical forces of change and continuity into mutual relief. I therefore focus not on perceived grand historical shifts in attitudes to art and nature but rather on the human uses of birds and birdsong in particular texts in which various shifts and continuities of thought will become apparent. Most central are the texts of musical pieces that have singers voice birdsong or "birdspeak," but these are contextualized using other writings, in particular the writings of music theory. Within this methodological frame, the study of birdsong is akin to the study of instruments by Thomas Hankins and Robert Silverman. 6 By focusing on the material objects used to demonstrate truths about the natural world, Hankins and Silverman are able to show the persistent interest of natural magic in the analogical unity of the experienced world, in tandem with newer abstract, mathematical, and quantitative scientific methods. Had they started with a study focused more conceptually on a shift from the former to the latter, they would have been forced to ignore links between them. Instead, they show that what we would consider an unequivocal scientific advance was often achieved through the use of natural magic as fairground or courtly entertainment. Although it is not material in the way that instruments are, birdsong is not immaterial either. Here it functions as a conceptual instrument-a metaphor, simile, or comparand-that enables writers and musicians to situate their own human musical practices, in particular their own vocal instrument, within a specific worldview. That this view is dependent on other factors-some of which may be those large-scale historical shifts in mentality-becomes evident as we trace the metaphor over time. Other studies of metaphorical complexes-such as that of Eric Jager in The Book of the Heart, which chronicles the idea of the heart as a codex, a textual self that holds the book of memory-have similarly opted for a long view. In so doing, Jager shows the premodern roots of a particularly central metaphor 6. Thomas L. Hankins and Robert J. Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination (Princeton, 1995).

INTRODUCTION

5

of a subjectivity more frequently associated with the advent of modernity. Nevertheless, he also points out that the long history of the self as a text has undergone historical change. The imagery of the self's text has changed with the technology of the text itself: from scroll or tablet, to manuscript, to printed book. And correspondingly, "different moral, religious, or philosophical conceptions of the human being" have affected the definition of the textual self that these changing technologies symbolize. 7 These shifts in the intellectual history of the human self similarly affect definitions of the relation between mankind and nature, which are central to the present study. And just as the image of the textual self depends on the specific technological form of the text, the imagery of the discussion of birdsong's musicality is affected by the species of bird used, with each carrying moral and symbolic baggage of its own. At the same time, the study of this textual instrument (the use of birdsong as comparison or simile) offers a reflection of the musical imagination in all its diversity. Part of this diversity is to us an alterity: medieval writers conceived music's very ontology differently. In particular, the study of birds highlights music's somewhat fraught relations with "natural" human language in the light of the increased textuality of the later Middle Ages. As an art form largely bound at this period to the oral performance of human language, music was challenged by the new visual (and often silent) "performance" of poetry written in books. s In garnering an interpretative context for the musical pieces that form its material focus, this book traces metaphorical uses of birds and birdsong in a wide variety of medieval texts. Some of these texts have been treated in detail on their own, but, as Jager found with his own study of a pervasive image, our nineteenth-century disciplines parcel up the world in a way that makes little sense for the Middle Ages. Literary scholars have looked at birds in literature but rarely consider musical meanings, even for musicallyrics. 9 Art historians have looked at birds in illuminated bestiaries and in sundry marginal places. 10 Musicologists have confined themselves to birdcalls in pieces of notated music, and these studies, unlike the more contextualized works on similar pieces in the early modern period, have typically focused simply on cataloguing the

7· Eric Jager, The Book of the Heart (Chicago, 2000), xiv. 8. See Sylvia Huot, From Song to Book: The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyrical Narrative Poetry (Ithaca, 1987); and my discussion in chapter 2. 9· Jean Bichon, 'Tanimal dans Ia litterature fran)

T rhythm from Lo

(I>)

ter-ra

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(I>)

_-

_-

_-

(q)

E

_-

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no

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.

di

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-

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EE

- "'- -

:

~~ rr; ~ :::~

lo- co_ puL non tro -van - no

lo-co piu non tro - va

@]

ll.Che

di rna - gi-stro-i); ll.Che

di rna- gi-stn -ly

:~ ~ :~::~ :~;_- :~

(I>)

si e pie-na Ia

si e pie-na Ia ter - ra

~

di-

:

. .

SUNG

BIRDS

line of the emphatic tenor line that had set "Tale tal" (for "loco piu"; compare examples 2.rb and d). Philippe (de Vitry) and Marchetta (of Padua) are cited not as we best know them, that is, not as composers or as theorists but as singers. The verb used here-like its French cognate, faire-could mean "to make" in the sense of either "to compose" or "to perform." Indeed, these activities are less clearly distinguished in this period because composers are merely a subgroup of singers engaged in a literate version of an activity whose flowers might equally be onnotated. And it is in the latter sense of unnotated "composition" (what we might call improvisation) that the nightingale can function, since in terms of sound alone, as we saw, its musicality could be recognized readily. 84 Although widely separated in time, both of these songs praise the nightingale as a means of approving melodious, discretely pitched vocal performance. In both cases such birdsong is situated somewhere in a sonorous orbit at whose zenith is the texted, rationally understood song of humans, and at whose nadir are the indiscretely pitched voices of animals or unlearned human "singers." Between these extremes, birdsong and instrumental music jostle for position, much as we saw them doing in the grammatical tradition outlined in chapter r. Yet in these two songs, which emanate from the world of rationally engaged lettered singing, birdsong is placed closer to excellent human song than to mere meaningless noise; in Aurea personet lira it is explicitly ranked above instruments and on a par with a key pedagogical tool of musica, the monochord. The use of the nightingale in poetic literature bears out this emphasis on oral performance. Later thirteenth- and fourteenth-century poetic literature appears to reflect in its use of the nightingale the fact that this period saw an increase in a more textualized type of composing activity, in addition to the continued "composition" of music through the regulated improvisation of singers. Inevitably the greater descriptive power of musical notation in this period could also embody a greater prescriptive power, which to a certain extent begins to elide the creativity of singers. The devaluation of singing in the new textual economy of the later Middle Ages is problematic for nightingales of all kinds-real and metaphorical. In the final part of this chapter, therefore, more directly literary and poetic uses of the nightingale figure are explored. Rugged Rossignol, Pious Philomel In contradistinction to the music-theoretical tradition, the musicality of the nightingale and its song together with its song's value may seem clearly appreciated in literary writings. As will be seen, however, literature is rarely univo84. Improvisation should be understood in Treitler's sense as involving active putting together of material in performance in line with internalized rules; see, for example, Leo Treitler, "Medieval Improvisation," The World of Music: Journal of the International Institute for Traditional Music 33 (1991): 66-91, and the other essays collected in With Voice and Pen.

BIRDSONG AND

HUMAN SINGING

cal where the nightingale is concerned, and the creature occupies a number of sharply contrasting spaces, with starkly different avian and human opponents. The evaluation of its song in particular is far from straightforward. Positive Secular Contexts The choice of the nightingale to emphasize the talent of praiseworthy human singing is hardly casual. It is, arguably, a "natural" choice, especially if that singer performs a song whose verbal text is a short lyric in the "natural language" of the Romance vernaculars. 85 The traditional "season" topos, which opens many high-style lyrics in the related traditions of the troubadours and trouveres, frequently includes reference to birds. Foremost among them is the nightingale, to the extent that it develops a close symbolic association with the je of the courtly love poet, the singer of the song, the expresser of the communal courtly loving male subject. 86 Many such lyrics open with the lyric "I" recounting how the song of the nightingale prompted him to find the language of poetry and thereby produce the very same sung poetic performance that the audience is already hearing and that describes the birdsong which prompted it. In this positive secular context the nightingale is the bird of love, spring, the poet, his messenger, and so on, and birdsong signals beauty, poetry, natural inspiration, and the desire that precedes and generates the poetic language. This vigorous nightingale is served by a masculine noun in all the Romance languages, despite the feminine of its Latin equivalent (luscinia) and its functional synonym Philomela. Its song is symbolized by the French word "oci" (kill), which is interpreted as threatening death to love's enemies. 87 Where the sexual titillation of the birdsong's tintinnabulations occurs in early Latin verse, there may be, as here, a telling macaronic step into the vernacular for the song itself: Iuvenilis lascivia et amoris suspiria tam sunt delectabilia qu'En Rosseinos en cante

The courting of a girl and boy who love and sigh and touch and toy inflames the nightingale with joy it has to trill and coo it.

Hec est avis Cupindinis, que post ictum harundinis movet estus libidinis "oci! oci!" dum cante.

The nightingale takes Cupid's part: when he's installed the teasing dart it makes the inflammation start by wanton warblings to it. 88

8 5. As opposed to the artificial language governed by rule (Latin); see Dante, De vulgari eloquentia, 2-3. 86. See Hensel, Die Vogel; Bichon, "L'animal dans la litterature fran.;;aise au xm~me et au XIHeme siecles," chap. r3; pfeffer, The Change of Philomel, chaps. s-6. 87. As the oral nightingale and the literary nightingale fuse, the potential for this also to dignify the death of the nightingale herself, dying for love, becomes possible; see the discussion later in this chapter. 88. Adcock, The Virgin and the Nightingale, 28-29. Translation adapted because Adcock uses the feminine pronoun for this lusty male French nightingale.

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The song of the nightingale increases the libidinousness of those who hear it if they are already in love. The movement of air in this song fans the flames of desire so that a death (promised, real, metaphorical) is presaged by the words of the birdsong. The nightingale ranks as the most frequently named bird in the poetry of Marcabru (fl. ca. II29-50) and Arnaut de Mareuil (fl. ca. II70-12oo), where it is associated with other markers of the spring topos. In poems by Jaufre Rudel (fl. II20-47), Giraut de Bornelh (ca. IJ40-ca. I2oo), and Bernart de Ventadorn (lived between ca. I I 30-40 and ca. I I 90-1200 ), the birdsong embodies the joie that is central to the aesthetic of fin'amor. 89 The narrator may take birdsong as a sign of being loved or, more often, is prompted to make his own song in response to it. The consoling power of birdsong is such that it may ameliorate the narrator's long-term sorrow and end his silence. In a poem by Elias Cairel, the narrator claims to have written nothing for two years until now, when he hears the sweet song of the nightingale; a poem by Colin Muset has the nightingale move the narrator to play his flute. 90 The joyful birdsong and newly re-greened nature can serve instead as a contrast with the sorrow of the poet, or even provoke an aversion to the nightingale as it becomes associated with the pain of love. 91 In other poems the bird acts as a messenger, relaying the poet's own song to the lady, sometimes returning with a reply. 92 Bernart de Ventadorn has been called "the nightingale poet" because the nightingale accounts for nine of the fourteen bird references that he makes. 93 Most of these make brief and conventional use of the nightingale to evoke the spring topos, but he specifically emphasizes the song of the bird, which may wake him in the night to inspire joy and compel him to sing even if he has no love in his heart. Even Bernart's contemporaries identified him with the nightingale: in a tenso between Piere D'Alvernhe (fl. II49-70) and Bernart de Ventadorn, Piere asks Bernart why he is not prompted to sing now that one hears the nightingale night and day. Is it perhaps that the nightingale understands love better than the poet? Bernart answers that he would rather sleep in peace than hear the nightingale. This tenso presents a parodic reversal of fin'amor in which the famous love poet claims that he is already over such 89. Vincent Pollina posits an imitation of the nightingale's song through a musical motif in songs by Marcabru and Gaucelm Faudit. See Vincent Pollina, "Les Melodies du troubadour Marcabru: questions de style et de genre," in Atti del Secondo Congresso Internazionale della Association Internationale d'Etudes Occitanes (Torino. 31 agosto-5 settembre 1987), ed. Giuliano Gasca Queirazza (Turin, 1993), 289-306. Although Bel m'es quan son li fruich madur is more florid than Marcabru's other extant settings, and it is not impossible that the singer would have used the text as an excuse to indulge in virtuoso vocalizations, I find it difficult to accept an unequivocal mimetic, naturalistic depiction given the underprescriptive nature of this notation. 90. Hensel, Die Vogel, 16. 9r. Ibid., 13-31. 92. Pfeffer, The Change of Philomel, chap. 5· 93· Only two of the others are to specific birds at all: one lark and one swallow; see Bichon, "L'animal dans Ia litterature franc;:aise," 502.

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foolishness and advises others not to waste time on love. Nevertheless, the way the nightingale is used makes it explicit that the bird is a conventional representative of youthful sexual desire. The rossignol also appears in a related way in the context of narrative poetry, notably in Marie de France's Laiistic, a poem probably from the second half of the twelfth century. 94 This lai concerns a woman, conversing at her bedroom window with her lover, who tells her enquiring husband that the beauty of the nightingale's song is keeping her joyfully awake. Her husband, seeking to end her nightly vigil, kills the bird and throws its bloody carcass at his wife. She in turn sends it to her lover wrapped in samite with gold embroidery telling their story. The lover enshrines the gift in a jewel-encrusted casket. The song of the nightingale figures the wife's sexual desire for that which is "outside," specifically for sexual interaction that is outside her marriage.95 Not only does the tale continue to be copied and told in the following centuries, but also the excuse of "listening to the nightingale" for meeting with one's lover crops up in later texts, to the extent that the bird becomes a specific metaphor for the male genitals in one of the stories in Boccaccio's Decameron (ca. r3p). 96 Interestingly, the Physiologus tradition and the Latin bestiaries that rely on it do not include the nightingale; only the French bestiary by Pierre of Beauvais introduces it, possibly on the strength of its pervasiveness in the vernacular poetic tradition. 97 Encyclopedias usually follow Isidore, who just derives its name-luscinia-from the fact that it sings at dawn as if it were the lightbringer (quasi lucinia).98 Lyric poets in the later twelfth and thirteenth centuries writing in Old French, the trouveres, inherited the high-style tradition of the nightingale from their Occitan models, the troubadours. In addition, nightingales feature in more popularisant genres of trouvere song, such as the pastorelle, and their symbolism is augmented by the incorporation of natural history information, 94· See Sylvia Huot, "Troubadour Lyric and Old French Narrative," in The Troubadours: An Introduction, ed. Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay (Cambridge, 1999), 69-74. 95· Eugene Vance's analysis of this as the conflict between the husband's rigid aristocratic control using violence and the wife's mercantile exchange and interiority is cited by Jeni Williams to explain the tale's continuing popularity during the economic and social change of the long thirteenth century. Ideological conflict is neatly pictured as being "symbolically devolved onto the site of the marital debate and its relation to the external natural world." Williams, Interpreting Nightingales, 64-6 5. 96. Hensel, Die Vogel, sections 13 and 8. In Philostrato's story in Boccaccio, Decameron 5-4, Caterina asks to sleep out on the balcony to listen to the nightingale. When her father discovers her there in post-coital slumber with her lover, her mother excuses her on the grounds that she has caught her "nightingale" in a "cage." Allowed to wed, the lovers are then at liberty to pursue and capture the nightingale both night and day. 97· See MacCulloch, Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries, 144. 98. Isidore, Etymologiae 12.7.37· "Luscinia avis inde nomen sumpsit quia cantu suo significare solet diei surgentis exortum, quasi lucinia."

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as, for example, when Thibaut de Champagne tells of the nightingale dying from singing too much (in the fervor of love), a detail that probably has its ultimate source in Pliny. As, according to the exoteric aesthetic of courtly love, the poet's song is generated by love, the idea of the nightingale's dying from love-inspired song equates to the lover's own happiness to die for (love of) his lady. Richard de Fournival's literary hybrid the Bestiaire d'amours (Bestiary of Love), which combines the prose form of a bestiary with the lyric appeal to the lady, plays at the outset with the idea of the nightingale-poet love-singing himself to death. In transmuting the moralizing glosses of the bestiary format into commentaries on his state as an unrequited lover, Richard is particularly keen to emphasize that he has abandoned "song" (poetry) in favor of "speech" (prose) because he sees from the example of the nightingale and the swan that song brings death, particularly if done well. 99 The nightingale, he claims, forgets to eat and "so delights in singing that it dies in song. And I took heed of that because singing has served me so little that to trust myself to song might mean even my self-destruction and song would never rescue me; more particularly, I discovered that at the hour when I sang my best and executed my best lyrics, things were at their worst for me, as with the swan."lOO Richard's privileging of prose over poetry taps into a widespread suspicion of the veracity of poetry, a debate engaged in throughout the medieval period. His scientific bestiary exempla can be seen as a further attempt to lend truthvalue to his work. As well as having associations of trustworthiness, prose is also more textual in nature, less designed for memorization, and thus more "writerly." The inference is that in not singing, Richard is not speaking aloud, he is writing. The Bestiary of Love is thus symptomatic of a growing emphasis on writing and (silent) reading of written texts within a still largely oral vernacular reading culture. 101 Before the fourteenth century, the books of the secular nobility of France were usually read aloud to them, and possibly to a small audience, by clerical court functionaries. These same university-trained administrators, however, whose numbers increased markedly in the fourteenth 99· See Huot, From Song to Book, 140-41. In allowing him to record a text external to himself, writing is for Richard an "escape from the lyrical death of nightingale and swan, a death of self-absorption that is ultimately equivalent to the death of Narcissus" (141). The written text can exist without the author, and he need not sing himself to death to bring it into being. roo. Richard de Fournival, Bestiary of Love, s-6; Li Bestiaires d'amours, 12-13: "Car sanature si est ke li kaitis aime rant sen canter k'il se muert en cantant, tant en pert sen mangier et rant s'en laie a pourcachier. Et pour che me sui jou pris garde ke li chanters m'a si pau valu ke je m'i puisse tant fier ke j'en perdisse nis moi, si ke ja li chanters me m'i socourust nomeement a chou ke je esprovai bien ke a l'eure ke je miex cantai et ke je miex dis en cantant, adont me fu il pis. Ausi comme del chine." The nightingale given here is found in Segre's MSS C and F, where there is a rubricated space for an illumination, which was never completed, captioned "li rossinoil qui muert en chantant." IOI. See Saenger, Space between Words, esp. chap. Is; Huot, From Song to Book chap. s; Dillon, Medieval Music-Making, chap. 2.

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century, had an attitude toward reading that was influenced by the predominance of silent reading in the Latin sphere of scholastic texts. By the midfourteenth century, the silent private reading of books by the nobility became relatively widespread, although the increase of illuminations in vernacular books indicates that, on the one hand, this was the culmination of a trend that had been in train for some time, while other evidence shows that, on the other hand, reading aloud from such books continued well into the period of print. 102 Large-format illuminated vernacular anthologies from the thirteenth century probably had a dual function of providing both an oral text for the person reading aloud and a simultaneous (or subsequent) visual commentary for the listening nobles. Paul Saenger has argued that the vernacular uptake of visual copying and silent reading occurred slightly earlier in Italy than in France. 103 This would make sense of the fact that most of the earliest manuscripts of troubadour songs are Italian or Catalan. 104 As the songs of this predominantly oral, performative tradition were assembled into retrospective manuscript anthologies in the later thirteenth century, scribes individualized the poets, turning troubadours into authors in the context of author-organized codices. They also candidly extracted vidas and razos from the lyrics themselves so that the poet's work quite literally created his life. 105 Writing and the book replaced the oral circulation of individual songs. In troubadour and trouvere songs the nightingale's symbolism of the oral, singing poetic voice, its status as the bird that embodies courtly lyricism, placed it in potential conflict with such textualization. Birdsong, birds in general, and the nightingale in particular can thus represent a sympathetic figuring of the oral in the face of textualization. This confrontation between orality and textuality in a literary culture dominated by what Joyce Coleman has termed "aurality" did not suddenly arise in the later thirteenth century, however. The topos seems to stem from fairly near the beginning of the period that saw the first full flowering of the writing of French literature in the letters of the Latin alphabet. For example, it is possible to advance a reading of Marie de France's Laiistic through the lens of the challenge to song made by textuality. 106 Sylvia Huot has commented that Marie "suggests that Old French poetry might be, in part, a sort of tomb or reliquary for dying or linguistically incomprehensible oral traditions; that written narra102. See Saenger, Space between Words, 265-71; Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public, chap. 4· 103. Saenger, Space between Words, 271-72. 104. See William Burgwinkle, "The Chansonniers as Books," and Simon Gaunt, "Orality and Writing: The Text of the Troubadour Poem," both in The Troubadours: An Introduction, ed. Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay (Cambridge, 1999), 246-62 and 228-45, respectively. 105. Gregory B. Stone, introduction to The Death of the Troubadour: The Late Medieval Resistance to the Renaissance (Philadelphia, 1994). 106. Huot, "Troubadour Lyric and Old French Narrative," 270-74.

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tive is an elaborate and ornate artifice constructed to preserve the memory of lyric voices now silent and irretrievable." 107 It is possible to combine such an interpretation with readings especially attentive to class and gender issues, such as those offered by Jeni Williams. Masculine power can be viewed as threatened by the socially disruptive power of an unseen, disembodied oral song. 108 Bringing the nightingale into the domestic environment translates it from an aural to a visual phenomenon, thereby enabling its containment and control. Although the nightingale (song) is then visible, it is also dead (silent). The silent song becomes a material commodity in an exchange that signals a new love. It memorializes the song's now dead author, wrapped in a woven (texted) fabric, embroidered with the written text of the whole story of the love that the song had itself symbolized. The husband's inability to trust oral discourse-not just the song of the nightingale but also the words of his wifecauses the death of oral, temporal song and the rise of the written, eternal author figure.l09 By implication, this is a negative outcome in which love and song become permanent, enshrined, static, but ultimately dead. Tellingly, the nightingale as a symbol is interpreted differently by the husband and wife. For the wife, the nightingale is a lyric oral bird prolonging desire in an aurally based idyll; for the husband, the nightingale evokes the violence, jealousy, and death present in the Ovidian narrative of Philomela. 11 0 Narrative is typically the place where the norms of lyric are interrogated. 111 The poetic narratives of the increasingly textual centuries from the mid-twelfth to the fourteenth are no exception, and often lament the loss of a vanished golden age of a communal lyric song expressing a universal je (which does not mean, of course, that such a time existed). The recurrent way in which the individualization of song is thematized negatively in other thirteenth- and fourteenth-century narrative poems has been seen by Gregory B. Stone as a "resistance to the Renaissance," of whose unalloyed benefits only willful belief 107. Ibid., 273. 108. See note 9 5. 109. This suspicion of orality permeates lyrics of this period, particularly in respect to the

topic of the mesdisans, the gossips whose "false jangle" spreads rumor. Earlier in the Middle Ages, orally reporting could spread a good or bad reputation. With the written inscription of the good aspect of renown, oral forms of communicating reputation become specifically and exclusively negative: the mesdisans, the slanderers or gossips, who spread infamy and/or falsehood. Although the slanderers are an old topos by the fourteenth century, at this time their power becomes increasingly feminized, oral, and strongly associated with the actions of Fortune. Fortune herself becomes a figure of the faithless woman. See Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, "Fama et les preux: nom et renom ala fin du Moyen Age," Medievales 24 (I993): 35-44. IIO. Huot, "Troubadour Lyric and Old French Narrative," 273. Philomela, whose tale forms a part of the vernacular moralized Ovid believed to be by Chretien de Troyes, makes little impact on secular vernacular lyric until the end of the Middle Ages. I I I. See Simon Gaunt, Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature (Cambridge, I 99 5), chap. 3, and his "Romance and Other Genres," in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance, ed. Roberta L. Kreuger (Cambridge, woo).

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in the humanists' own propaganda has convinced us. It is not necessary to subscribe wholesale to Stone's thesis to recognize a preoccupation with textuality and the loss of song and singers throughout this period. It chimes with Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet's analysis of the later Middle Ages as "the sadness after all has been said," when contemporaries claimed that truly creative authors were no longer among them and that all that remained was copying, collecting, and glossing-that is, textualizing-pre-extant poems. 112 One of the most pertinent treatments of this theme-that the individualization of song is a bad thing-is found in another lai, the Lai de l'oiselet (Lay of the Little Bird), which uses, like Laiistic, the image of the ensnared songbird, here to interrogate "the entanglement of the lyric subject in a narrative world." 113 Oiselet dates from the late thirteenth century, but the tale it tells circulated in various forms and languages throughout the later Middle Ages.114 The story, based on the exemplum Rustico et avicula of Petrus Alfonsi's Disciplina clericalis, is simple. A villein captures a bird in his garden so that it will sing for him alone. In exchange for freedom, the bird promises to give the man knowledge he does not already have, but when freed merely offers up three commonplaces: "do not cry for what you never had," "do not believe everything you hear," and "hold on to what you've got." In answer to the villein's protest that these are all well-known maxims, the bird demonstrates that, on the contrary, in the very act of letting him go, the man has revealed his ignorance of them all. As a final taunt, the bird claims that there is a massive and valuable jewel in his body. The villein laments this further loss, wishing he had ripped the bird open rather than let it go. The bird merely repeats the maxim "you should not believe everything you hear." There is no hidden meaning to song that is worth destroying song to get at-a conclusion borne out by Marie de France's earlier treatment. liS Stone sees the human protagonist of Oiselet as a bourgeois author, whose desire precedes and authors his song, in contrast to the loving subject of troubadour poetry, in whom desire follows, and is prompted by, the song of the nightingale. The bird's language is common-in fact, proverbial-because song is the language of the already known: "Song is the originary set of meanings, prejudices, assumptions, and pre-conceptions that shapes the subject's rr2. Cerquiglini-Toulet, The Color of Melancholy, 52-84. 113. Oiselet (ed. Wolfgang). See Huot, "Troubadour Lyric and Old French Narrative," 269;

Stone, The Death of the Troubadour, chap. 4; and Glyn S. Burgess, The Old French Narrative Lay: An Analytical Bibliography (Cambridge, 1995), I00-105. 114. See the analogues listed in Oiselet, 7-23. Oiselet opens with a disclaimer that the action took place more than a hundred years ago, giving it reach right back to the time of Marie's Laiistic, with which it shares the figure of the trapped bird. I I 5. Stone comments, "Against those who, like the burgher, would readily regard song as heavy, profound, and full, the bird promotes a vision of song as light, superficial, and empty" (The Death of the Troubadour, 57). The implication is that song's "song-ness" is in the temporal and fleeting action of performance, not in any written text that might reflect what was, or should be, performed.

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knowledge of the world." 116 But who is meant to agree that the loss of oral performance (song) to the textual, unnatural, mercantile economy of the later Middle Ages is worthy of lament? Helen Barr has read the English version of this story, The Churl and the Bird by John Lydgate, as a socially conservative attempt to bolster aristocratic natural (bloodline) relations in the face of ascendant rationally based mercantile power. 117 Degree, implies the bird, is ordained by nature, God-given. When the bird taunts the churl about the jewel in her belly and starts to explain its nature, she breaks off. She is wasting her time, she claims, teaching the lapidary to a churl who is unable to tell a falcon from a kite or an owl from a popinjay, that is, who does not understand natural order and distinctions. 118 Barr reads this as ironic considering that the bird herself (newly feminine in the English version) does not give away her own species. Barr interprets the courtly nightingale-especially now that she is female-as a problematic upholder of the naturalness of aristocracy, undermined by her gender and her overanxious and inappropriate appropriation of clerkly discourse. 119 In several versions of this story, however, the bird is identified, often as a nightingale. Such explicitness is barely warranted. The fact that she is small, eats worms, and sings "amerously" toward evening and before dawn makes her undoubtedly a nightingale, although it implies a reader less familiar with the courtly norms of the vernacular lyric nightingale (which is usually male) than with the clerkly norms of Latin devotional, bestiary, or natural history texts, in which the nightingale is female. The preface to Lydgate's version draws much more explicitly on the bestiary tradition in using the lordship of eagle and lion-animals that tend to head their sections in the aviary and bestiary for this reason-to stress the naturalness of social order. Although the bird seems to uphold the oral and aristocratic, her teaching is "clerkly" (axiomatic and propositional), which associates her with the very material culture that she is trying to denigrate in her ridiculing of the churl. This very popular story is rich and varied enough to sustain many interpretations. Stone sees the commonality of vernacular song under threat from an ascendant template of authorship as individualized and written. If this is the case, this ascendancy is more of a constant flipside to a period several centuries long; it has been argued that even the troubadours employed writing from the outset, and they certainly sought to individualize their poems. Barr instead sees a court poet wanting to bolster a threatened social status quo against social II6. Ibid., 54· 117. John Lydgate, Secular Poems (ed. MacCracken), 468-85. See also Barr, Socioliterary Practice, r88; and Lenora D. Wolfgang, "'Out of the Frenssch': Lydgate's Source of The Churl and the Bird," English Language Notes 32 (1995): ro-22. II8. Both Barr (Socioliterary Practice, 192) and Wolfgang(" 'Out of the Frenssch,'" r8) misread these lines as if the churl cannot tell falcon and kite (good) from owl and popinjay (bad). The implication is rather that the churl cannot differentiate a more noble bird (a kite) from a less noble one (a falcon), or a more skilled vocal performer (the popinjay) from a less skilled one (the owl). r 19. Barr, Socioliterary Practice, r 96.

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forces beyond his control. But I prefer to read it as a poet's admonition to his audience to remain teachable, to listen and read, maintaining a nobility of spirit that allows for mental change and respects the poet's right to free speech. The aspect that makes this most clear is an example that echoes Guido of Arezzo's pairing of the nightingale and the ass. Lydgate seems to have known his source for this story in a version called the Trois Savoirs (although he probably also knew that version's self-confessed source, Petrus Anfonsi's Disciplina clericalis). 120 Lydgate's Churl, the Trois Savoirs, and another Anglo-French version of the tale contained in Le donnei des amants all share a passage that clarifies the churl's inability to learn from the bird's teaching by comparing him to an ass being taught to play the harp. 121 The Trois Savoirs elaborates further, with the bird comparing the churl to a cuckoo: E si despent mout enke e peel Qe livre escrit au cocuel; Kar, quant !'avera tot apris, Grant peine e grant travaille mis Por faire le bien organer, Chaunter desouz e deschaunter, Si le cocuel ai bien conu, Jane dirra plus de "cocku." And he who writes a book for a little cuckoo expends so much ink and skin, because, when he has taught him everything, having taken great pain and effort to teach him how to do organum well, how to sing below [the chant] and [how to] discant, if I know the cuckoo well, he will still never sing more than "cuckoo." 122

The bird of the poem is a performance poet-a singer-whose patrons are churlish if they do not give him freedom to sing as he wishes. This reads like a plea not to censor court poets, who can teach those noble enough to learn from them rather than restrain them. But the little bird's refusal to sing in captivity for the churl implies that intransigence in the face of changing social contexts will silence song. As neither protagonist has a straightforwardly happy ending-the bird flies off, the "world" of the garden desiccates and decays, and the churl is left with nothing-the poem also invites its audience to find a golden mean between these two extreme positions. As I will argue in chapter 3, 120. Wolfgang," 'Out of the Frenssch,'" 19. r2r. Trois Savoirs, II. 215-66: "Son travaille piert saunz recoverir I Qe aprent asne a harper" (He loses his labor without reward, I Who teaches an ass to harp); cf. Donnei, ll. r 149-50. "I hold hym mad that bryngith foorth an harpe, I Ther-on to teche a rude, for-dullis asse" (ll. 3 29-40; see also ll. 274-75). Wolfgang," 'Out of the Frenssch,'" 14. 122. Cited in Wolfgang," 'Out of the Frenssch,'" 17; my translation is based on hers but reflects my understanding of the musical training denoted. The complete text of Trois Savoirs is split between the editions of Meyer and Wolfgang.

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songs that imitate birdsong perhaps offer just such an alternative, and more sonorous, response to the new textuality of singing. Devotional Nightingales The vernacular lyric nightingale is a type that has been called the oral nightingale, as opposed to the literary nightingale more readily deriving from the classical myth of Philomela. 123 The literary nightingale, however, is often female, and in Christianized medieval contexts becomes a cognate of the soul, singing the Hours, praising God in song, and ultimately dying for Divine Love. 124 The devotional context for this is the popular piety of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, in which a more direct personal access to God became, progressively, and often on the margins of orthodoxy, acceptable. The new place of solitary silent reading within lay contemplative life led to the writing of meditative works in the vernacular. As with the "oral nightingale," the written nightingale may exemplify the communal subject, the singer, and the devoted self. Within this silent context, far from symbolizing the orality of song, however, Philomela sings voicelessly directly from the heart. 125 Some modern critics have detected a convergence of the vernacular oral lovebird and the Christian Latin tradition after the twelfth century. 126 Certainly this is the case by the late thirteenth century, which sees two Philomela poems, one by John of Howden (d. 1278) and the other by the Franciscan John Peckham (d. 1292), in which the nightingale is used "primarily as a metaphor for the devout poet or meditative soul, a parallel to the poet himself." 127 Peckham's poem was particularly popular. As with the troubadour nightingale, the bird and the poet share performative subjectivity, although the content of their performances is different. Rather than the vengeful cry of the vernacular male r 2 3. Sylvia Huot's interpretation of these two nightingales-which she sees instead as lyric and narrative-animates her discussion of Laustic. See Huot, "Troubadour Lyric and Old French Narrative." 124. This may seem paradoxical given that the Ovide moralise (6.2217-3840) interprets Philomela as signifying the world and its pleasures that tempted Tereus (the body) and Procne as the soul. The original Greek tradition for this story, however, has Philomela become a swallow, who, analogously to her tongueless human state, cannot even articulate discrete pitches but can make only chirps; Procne becomes the nightingale with her highly articulate song, a lament for her son Itys. 12 5. Saenger, Space between Words, 2 7 5-76. 126. Williams, Interpreting Nightingales, 66-70. 127. rfeffer, The Change of Philomel, 39· John Peckham's poem was originally written in Latin but translated into Anglo-Norman for Henry III's wife as Rossignol (see Baird's introduction to the edition). The gender issue here is interesting as the nightingale in Peckham's Latin poem is clearly the feminine soul meditating on man's creation and redemption represented by the liturgical Hours. In the French translation it becomes much more associated with the male poet, thus partaking of the positive associations of male poethood from the vernacular lyric repertory. Lydgate wrote two adaptations of Peckham's poem, both of which have a female bird. See Lydgate's Two Nightingale Poems (ed. Glauning).

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lovebird, the female nightingale of Philomela cries an agonized "oci" that articulates a wish to be killed by her own desire for God.128 In one of Lydgate's English adaptations of this theme, the narrator's first interpretation of "occy" as a cry to Venus to send death to false lovers is "corrected" to this Christian devotional context by an angel in a dream vision. 129 Peckham's Philomela occupies a world structured by private, spiritual obligations rather than public, social relations. 130 Williams sees this reflected also in the contrast between the intimate "tu" of Peckham's Philomela and the second-person plural address used to the audience in Oiselet. I would add that this probably also reflects a difference in the performance of the two poems. The aristocratic audience for Oiselet and its cognates would have been several people hearing the poem spoken aloud; "vous" is thus grammatically correct, although it also helps to foster a group commitment to the living orality of song (poetry) whose loss the poem arguably laments. By contrast, the passionate devotional nature of Philomela is private and personal, manifesting an individual identification with a bodily Christ, his passion, and Mary's passion as it "articulates a fascinated mystification of the material world." 131 Its first person's use of "tu" suggests an intimate address to a single, silent lay reader. Negative Nightingales Within the devotional context, the other nightingale-the oral, lyric, Romance rossignol-was sometimes used as a paradigm of worldly seductions. As a negatively sexual bird, this bird too was often presented as female. The negative female nightingale symbolized the same world of courtly loving that the vigorous male bird did, but her change of gender can be seen as indicative of a negative moral judgment on this kind of behavior. 132 In addition, her song may be considered inappropriately self-preening singing that is elaborate or stagy in performance. Although never appearing together in the same text, the two female nightingales of the devotional context-the positive and negative-offer the polarized perspectives on femininity common in pre-feminist Christianity. The seasonal song of the nightingale makes it an Easter bird, a feature exploited positively in earlier Latin writers such as Venantius Fortunatus (d. ca. 6ro) and Alcuin (ca. 73 s-804), who see it as representative of nature praising the resurrected God through its own seasonal rebirth. At the same time, spring can be associated negatively with the increased sexual activity of animals, at a period when human animals ought to differentiate themselves through a focus 128. On the musicality of the suffering body of Christ as depicted in this poem, see Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire, 225-40. 129. See "A Sayenge of the Nyghtyngale," in Lydgate, Two Nightingale Poems, 16-rS. 130. Williams, Interpreting Nightingales, 73· 131. Ibid., 75· 13 2. See chapter 5 for further discussion of the role of gender in bird moralizations.

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on the celebration of central truths of the Christian faith. The long and challenging poem Ecbasis captivi ( 104 3-46) takes place during the Easter Eve vigil and then Easter itself, and includes the competitive vocal performance of a number of liturgical items by birds. 133 These birds include the nightingale, parrot, and blackbird, which seem to stand symbolically for the human enactors of the liturgy; any kind of negative reading is difficult to sustain. This poem, however, may have provided the model for later examples of avian liturgies that are more obviously critical or satirical. In Jean de Conde's Messe des oiseaux (before 1345) the devotion is pseudo-liturgical, with Venus presiding over a Mass celebrated by the birds. 134 At the moment for the Elevation of the Host, the nightingale lifts up a rose, whose secular and sexual symbolism is instantly recognizable. In praising the birds' Mass, the narrator comments on its sensual pleasures-the aural beauty of the birds' song, the scent and visual appearance of the rose, and the refined movement by which the nightingale places it on the altar of Venus-ignoring any doctrinal content. This morally dubious account brings into question the narrator's final summary, in which he compares the canonesses and nuns (who, during the course of the poem, petition Venus) unfavorably with the birds' service to the goddess. The narrator's "admiration for the preening and pirouetting singing of the nightingale" destabilizes the symbolic association of the nightingale with good singing. 135 The moral unreliability of the narrator of the Messe drives a wedge between musical and moral good, suggesting strongly that where the aurally pleasurable sounds of birdsong are concerned, the two may indeed be antithetical. This technique is used even more explicitly in debate poems in which one of the protagonists is the nightingale. Debatable Nightingales As we have seen, the relative merits of the song of nightingale and poet were the subject of the debate in a parodic tenso between the troubadours Piere D'Alvernhe and Bernart de Ventadorn. In other debate poems the nightingale figures as a protagonist, or even as a judge, particularly in a series of thirteenth-century French poems in which birds debate the relative merits of types of men, typically the clerk and the knight. 136 Of more direct relevance here, however, are cases in which the subject of their contention is the birds' own singing; such poems effectively depict a singing competition. With classi133. Ziolkowski, Talking Animals, chap. 6. Ziolkowski's account of this poem, which includes lines quoted and adapted from Horace, Prudentius, Vergil, Juvencus, Sedulius, and Venantius Fortunatus, plus a few from Ovid, points out the difficulty of tracing any evidence for how widely known it was. 134. Jean de Conde, La messe des oiseaux (ed. Ribard). See further discussion of this work in chapter 5. I35· Barr, Socioliterary Practice, 178. 136. On Florence et Blancheflor, see Bichon, "L'animal dans Ia litterature fran.;:aise," 519·

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cal precedents in human singing competitiOns, notably a number in Ovid's Metamorphoses and Vergil's Eclogues, the metaphorical inference that these avian debates are about the qualities of song per se-including human songis plain. 137 Given that the nightingale figures poetic subjectivity, the idea of a song contest-the artistic equivalent of armed combat-readily figures poetic rivalries. The description of nightingales participating in singing competitions is already found in Pliny's Natural History (see the previously cited quotation from Aegidius). The early-tenth-century poem Species cornice depicts a competition between the nightingale's brood and all the other birds, some of which burst in their unsuccessful effort to surpass the nightingales' song. 138 Myrto sedens lusciola, "vos cara," dicens, "pignora, audite matris famina dum lustrat aether sidera.

Then sitting on a myrtle branch the nightingale instructs her young: "Now while the stars are bright, my dears, take lessons in your mother-tongue:

Cantans mei similia, canora prolis germina, cantu Deo dignissima tractim refrange guttura.

copy my song; I want to hear the younger generation's notes in seemly hymns of praise to God emerging from your little throats.

Tu namque plebs laetissima, tantum Dei tu psaltria divina cantans cantica per blanda cordis viscera.

We are a joyful tribe of birds, the Lord's musicians and his choir. So let him hear your instruments: make every tiny chest a lyre.

Materna iam nunc formula ut rostra vincas plumea, futura vocis organa contempera citissima."

Tune up your growing vocal chords for instant use; adopt my skills and we'll outdo what pass for songs from other birds' inferior bills."

Hoc dixit et mox iubila secuntur subtilissima; melum fit voce tinnula soporans mentis intima.

The youngsters do as they are told; and soon their sweetly piping art is mingled with their mother's tune in melodies to stun the heart. 139

I37· The singing competition between the Pierides and the Muses ends with the transformation of the Pierides into magpies in Ovid, Metamorphoses 5; see chapter r. The singing competitions are explicit in Vergil, Eclogues 3 and 7· An eighth-century Vergilian debate between the personified Spring and Winter, sometimes ascribed to Alcuin, revolves about the merits of the cuckoo's song; see Peter Godman, ed., Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance (London, I985), I44-49· 13 8. Ziolkowski, Talking Animals, I I 3. 139· Adcock, The Virgin and the Nightingale, Io-q. Ziolkowski, Talking Animals, 246, translates the nightingale's words more literally: "Singing the same notes I sing, sweet-sounding scions of our progeny, gradually rein back for God your throats, most worthy of song. For you are

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It is possible to imagine this poem, like Aurea personet lira, as one in which the

master instructs the children in grammar and cantus by teaching them a song that dramatizes that learning situation and their respective roles. 140 The Owl and the Nightingale (probably after 1272) uses these two birds to debate a number of issues, chief among them the role of song in love, both human love and love of God. The nightingale calls the owl's cry howling and yelling that is horrible to listen to and conveys nothing but woe. The owl claims that, on the contrary, she sings smoothly, with resonance, in a song that consoles those in sorrow. The merry piping of the nightingale's song is the feeble whistle of an unripe weed according to the owl, who objects, moreover, to its content and effect: it is an incitement to lechery, terminating abruptly when the deed is done. The nightingale stresses that it is quite the reverse; her singing reflects the perpetually joyful song of heaven and serves as a reminder to clerks of what awaits them, inspiring them to a godly life. The poem therefore presents both perspectives on the nightingale: Does her beautiful song relate to caritas or cupiditas? She claims the former, the owl the latter. Even her female sex maintains the ambiguity: while women were thought more naturally disposed to cupidity, both Cistercian traditions and, later, popular piety stress the femininity of the soul's proper human relationship with God, using nuptial and maternal imagery from the Song of Songs. 141 We have already seen that both negative and positive nightingales in devotional contexts tend to be presented as female. John of Salisbury restates a worry originating in Augustine's Confessions that becomes a Cistercian commonplace when he stresses that those singers who corrupt their hearers with songs more melodious than those of the nightingale and parrot are more apt to move hearts to carnal pleasure than to devotion. He quickly adds, however, that "when such songs are measured in the proper old mode and decent form, without exceeding the bounds of what is good through their lightness, they redeem the heart, deliver it from anxious cares and remove the immoderate ardor of temporal things, and by a manner of participation of happiness and of repose and friendly joy, they attract the human heart to God." 142 The owl and the nightingale essentially represent two sides of the same devotional coin: one a theology of joy, which to its detractors the happiest people, only you are the psaltery of God, singing divine songs in the inmost parts of your heart." I 40. The feminine role of the mother nightingale might suggest nuns and girls but probably refers to men and boys. In much later periods in England, the books that taught language to children were known as feminae; see Cerquiglini-Toulet, The Color of Melancholy, 6. I4I. Martha G. Newman, "Real Men and Imaginary Women: Engelhard of Langheim Considers a Woman in Disguise," Speculum 78 (2003): 1203 and references in n88. 142. Denis Foulechat, Le Policratique de Jean de Salisbury (ed. Brucker), II6: "Mais, quant telz chans sont amesurez par droite et meure maniere et honeste fourme sanz passer bonne et mete par legierete, il rachent le cuer et delibrent de cures angoisseuses et ostent desmesuree ardeur des chases temporelles, et, par une maniere de participacion de leesce et de repos et d'amiable joie, actraient le cuer humain a Dieu et meuvent avec les angelz." The French "translation" expands here on the Latin considerably; the italicized passage "translates" "moderationis formula."

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lasciviously refuses to prepare for death by repenting of its sins; the other a theology of repentance, which to its detractors morbidly refuses to celebrate the gift of life and the wonders of God's creation. There is no clear moral resolution in favor of one over the other within the terms of the debate. Like the nightingale, the owl has a multivalent symbolism: bestiaries stress its filthy personal habits and equate its love of darkness with pagans, Jews, and heretics; yet it sings the Hours and looks like a priest. In fact, both birds sing at night, and both have foul habits; there is little to choose between them. The owl's attitude toward singing accords with the sentiments found in several thirteenth-century writings, all extracted from a dictum of Jerome's that a monk's duty is weeping, not teaching. 143 Comments on singing close in date to The Owl and the Nightingale can also be adduced in support. David of Augsburg (ca. I 2 3 5) specifically asks that singers avoid singing in a courtly way (vocem curaliter), and the Statuta antiqua of the Carthusian order (before I 2 59) asks monks to use their voices to promote not delight in song but delight in the lamentation that is more proper to monks than singing. 144 The nightingale stresses a joyful creationist theology; the owl, by contrast, represents a redemptive theology, more somber and focused on death, woe for a sinful world, and desire for heaven. The nightingale is thus part of an Eriugenan picture of the relation between ecclesiastical chant and the song of the natural world, both embodiments in sound of an eternal heavenly harmony. Such music may properly be joyful, complex, even polyphonic, praising the cyclical renewal of life in a seasonal song. But these praises of all creation may be seen as the praise of unbounded procreation by an owl whose redemptive theology focuses instead on the omnipresence of death. The irresolution of the debate implies that these opposed theological strands have the same possibilities for abuse and success. The Owl and the Nightingale thus recognizes the musicality of birdsong, together with its potential for bringing joy (if high-pitched and with a profusion of quick notes) or solemnity (if slow, sustained, and less varied melodically). The latter may be criticized as musically boring and its solemnity seen as inappropriate; the former merits both approval and opprobrium depending on the ends to which the joy produced is directed. Not at issue is the basic power of song and its deeply ethical character. Singers as Birds Although owls do not feature in the musical pieces that are the focus of the next chapter, the nightingale is central. The complexity of its symbolism makes available more subversive meanings while leaving an audience at liberty 143. On "monachus non docentis sed plangentis habet officium," see The Owl and the Nightingale, 69. 144. "Nee vocem curialiter frangas in cantando." See William Dalglish, "The Origin of the Hocket," Journal of the American Musicological Society 3 r ( 1 978), 8; and McGee, The Sound of Medieval Song, 25. See also chapter 4·

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to understand only those that are more straightforward. The orthodox is not obscured, but the pleasure of the heterodox is also accessible. Ultimately, the nightingale as a representative of secular singing can be heard and enjoyed, its skill appreciated even if its song is not strictly considered part of musica and/or its meaning is ultimately rejected as immoral. Nevertheless, as a representative of an oral performative tradition in which songs formed part of essential communication, the nightingale's position becomes problematic in the context of increasingly textualized vernacular musicalized songs in the fourteenth century. To this extent, the nightingale's song mirrors the plight of sung performances by human singers. The nightingale was arguably utilized by human composer-singers as a symbolic means of promoting the dignity of orality, of shoring up the value of oral and aural musical practice within a textual culture. If fine singing can be, for some at least, birdlike in a positive sense, later medieval composers' and singers' adoption of bird pseudonyms or nicknames might be expected, particularly that of the nightingale, much in the same way that, for example, Jenny Lind was known as "the Swedish nightingale." Although affective nicknames (Hasprois, Solage, Grimace) from the later Middle Ages are the kind that appears most widely, there is also evidence for singers styling themselves as birds. 145 Perhaps we should exclude the composer and music theorist Johannes Ciconia (ca. r 3 70-1412 ), since his seems to have been a genuine family name. The choir school for the boys of St.-Jean in Ciconia's birthplace, Liege, however, was under the sign of the stork (Latin: ciconia); the young singers trained there were often referred to as "pueri de Cyconia" or "duodeni in Cyconia." This bird would arguably have been just as fitting as any songbird as a sign for a choir school. The stork was said to have received its name from the sound that it made (in Latin the verb is ciconizare) by clacking its beak together, which perhaps gives a humorous image of young boys singing. In addition, the stork was held as a paragon of intergenerational nurture-with the young taking great care of the old in repayment for the care they themselves received as children-a moral message to send to the young duodeni, taught by older choir members, probably at the monetary expense of their parents. 146 145. Yolanda Plumley, "An 'Episode in the South'? Ars Subtilior and the Patronage of French Princes," Early Music History 22 (2003): I28-3o, notes that many Jean Soulages can be found in archival records of this period. No further evidence (indication of first name in the musical sources or indication of profession in the archival sources), however, links any of these to the composer so called in Ch. The possibility remains, therefore, that Solage is a sobriquet. For the composer Jean Carmen (fl. ca. J400-1420), the surname is not a sobriquet but may derive descriptively from his work as a notator (music scribe), singer, and composer. 146. Philippe Vendrix, "Johannes Ciconia, cantus et musicus," in johannes Ciconia: musicien de Ia transition, ed. Philippe Vendrix (Turnhout, 2003), 9n8; MacCulloch, Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries, r 7 4· The voces animantium tradition contains the phrase "ciconias crocolare vel ciconizare." See, for example, Johannes Aegidius Zamorensis, Historia natura/is, 1482.

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One of the papal chaplains in the second half of the fourteenth century is called Alanus Avis dictus Vogel, although this may relate to this individual's fondness for birding occupations rather than metaphorically to singing.I47 The forty-second piece in the now destroyed Strasbourg manuscript (Str) was labeled "Exultet mea vena I quodlibet de Phylomena" according to Johannes Wolf, and is designated "Motetus Philomena" in Edmond de Coussemaker's numerical index. 148 This cryptic labeling has been linked to a composer cited in the most famous of the so-called musician motets that exist from fourteenth-century France and England. B. de Cluni's Apollinis eclipsatur I Zodiacum signis I In omnem terram (also copied in Str) praises groups of contemporary musicians (musicorum collegia), among them "the eternal nightingale" (jugis philomela). Although Charles van den Borren admits that "philomela" could be a piece rather than a man, a more recent editor of the motet text considers it a sobriquet for one Arnaldus Martini. 149 Regardless of whether the person referenced is Arnaldus Martini, the motet text demonstrates that a fourteenth-century singer's praises could be sung (here, quite literally by the singers of the motet text) by calling him a nightingale. The label in the Strasbourg source may simply be a descriptive title, or may refer to any other singer famous for singing, improvising, or composing this piece and known by this nickname. Its context in a list of musical worthies suggests that being a human nightingale is a positive quality. The heterodoxy of context that we have explored in music-theoretical writings and in the broader medieval cultural realm offers a diverse and problematic but promising counterweight to the orthodox grammatical definitions of vox in the interpretation of birdsongs and "birdwords" in the notated music of the later Middle Ages. In the next chapter, the myriad winding paths through the forest of bird symbolism will be traversed in a way that does not merely marvel at or taxonomically catalogue the existence and use of the calls but offers an analysis of their possible meanings.

147. Andrew Tomasello, Music and Ritual at Papal Avignon, IJ09-I403 (Ann Arbor, 1983), 220. Also listed as Alain Oiseau, this singer from Liege had his illegitimacy dispensed and was awarded a parsonage in 1354. He died on October 2, 1397. 148. Str 29b (42). See notes in Charles van den Barren, Le manuscrit musical M. 222 C. 22 de Ia bibliotheque de Strasbourg (XVe siecle) brule en r 870, et reconstitue d'apres une copie partie lie d'Edmond de Coussemaker (Antwerp, 1924), 75· 149. See Two Fourteenth-Century Motets in Praise of Music (ed. Bent), which uses the texts and translations of A. G. Rigg. Johannes de Muris is praised for "color," Philippe de Vitry for many deeds, Henry Helene for tenors of motets, and Denis le Grant is praised with Henry. Regaudus de Tiramonte and Robertus Palatio are merely listed. Guillaume de Machaut is cited for music and poetry, Egidius de Murino mentioned, and Garinus noted for his baritone voice; the names P. de Bruges and Geoffrey of Barillium follow.

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iven the complex network of discourses within which birds are employed, how can we interpret medieval songs that make birdcalls central to their performance? Are songs that compel their singers to voice the calls of nightingales, cuckoos, or larks merely examples of comic and mimetic artifice, designed to raise a smile from the audience? Or might there be some kind of literary key that will reveal a more meaningful depth to these entertaining but seemingly frivolous pieces? Do these pieces allow the drawing of inferences about the musical culture of which they are a part? According to the musical definitions discussed in chapter r, birdsong is literate but inarticulate vox, that is, it is made up of discrete, music-like sounds but is meaningless and thus not music because of the nonrational nature of its performer. Might it be the case that the conscious act of a rational human singer representing that semantic emptiness fills it with some kind of commentary on musical performance? In order to approach answers to such questions, it is necessary to gather the available information about the history of these songs, inferring their likely audience both from their transmission and from reading the pieces themselves as musico-poetic wholes. Appendix 3 collates information about sources and texting. All of these songs have been considered in earlier musicological studies, usually grouped with other virelais that include imitation of further sounds, including other animal noises, human calls to arms or to the hunt, and the imitation of musical instruments. Labeled "realistic" or "mimetic," the birdsong pieces have been classified among those early examples of composed music's imitation of the sounds of the natural

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world. 1 The appendix also shows the sources for these songs. Around three hundred French-texted polyphonic songs from the fourteenth century have been transmitted in mixed-author manuscript anthologies; a substantial number of these are unica. 2 Not only are the songs voicing birds a sizable part of the extant repertory, but also, if the number of sources and large variety of configurations (regarding number and type of voice parts, instrumental arrangements, and contrafacts) are anything to go by, they are among its most popular and widely diffused examples. These are adaptable, enjoyable songs, but what sorts of meanings did they hold? The present chapter and the next both treat songs that effectively "musicalize" strictly nonmusical sounds by having human singers voice them. The broad separation of these songs into two chapters is according to the kinds of nonmusical sound they represent, defined according to the grammatical subdivisions of vox outlined in chapter r. Vox illiterata-inc!uding the indiscretely pitched noises of quadrupeds (inarticulata) and non-sung or nonlinguistic human shouts (articulata; often of encouragement to animals)-will be the focus in chapter 4· Although these noises are not birdsong, they often occur in the context of an activity in which birds are integrally involved, if usually silent: the hunt. The focus here is on two other sounds that are, for different reasons, not singing, and that are often compared by music theorists: the voices of songbirds and the sounds of tuned musical instruments. Effectively these are the two kinds of sound that upset the grammarians' classifications discussed in chapter r by falling uncomfortably between meaningful human utterance and mere noise. Here I begin by subdividing the songs listed in appendix 3 to reflect the manner in which the voices of birds are notated. Some songs have such a wide range of rhythmic subdivisions in those parts that imitate birdcalls that they use unorthodox notations for small notes. Strictly speaking, these notes cannot be written within the notation's rhythmic system because they are shorter than its basic, theoretically indivisible unit-the minim. The birdsong pieces are therefore subdivided into those that employ varied heuristic, provisional, nonstandard figures to notate sub-minim values and those that do not. I argue that birdsong pieces with sub-minim note values form (or perhaps merely thematize) a special category of songs whose oral performance tradition significantly preceded their notation. Birdsong pieces that do not use sub-minim values to imitate birdsong instead use imitation as a musical technique, in which one voice literally repeats the music of another voice after a time lag. Short passages of imitation are used also in those pieces that have sub-minim values, but r. "Realistic" was a term proposed in the introduction to French Secular Music of the Late Fourteenth Century (ed. Ape!), 3· Newes, "The Cuckoo and the Nightingale," prefers "mimetic." 2. To this total can be added the seventy-five polyphonic songs of Guillaume de Machaut, whose works are collected into single-author codices. See Wulf Arlt, "Machaut," in TNG.

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in those that do not, it is often far more extensive, suggesting that the song's genesis is much more closely bound up with a notational form (whether written by a composer or imagined by singers). Used in its most thoroughgoing way, the musical technique of imitation gives a musical genre of its own, the chace, caccia, or "catch," in which one notated voice may be realized in two or three parts, all singing the same music a certain temporal distance apart. Many songs of this kind are discussed in the next chapter, because their nonmusical noises are not birdsong; but one example of this form, the chace Talent m'a pris de chanter, in which all three parts sing the same melody imitating the cuckoo at a temporal distance of seven breve units, will be treated here (see no. 7 in appendix 3 ). 3 In the songs with sub-minim values, singers tend to use beautiful birdsong to show off their skills in a way that represents the communal, oral nature of their own performances as an artistic and natural good. In the songs that involve musical imitation, especially if it is thoroughgoing and canonic, any performative virtuosity is exceeded by the virtuosity of compositional design, usually reflected in the written aspect of the song. A song in the former group arguably celebrates singers as singers; one in the latter points to a smger as composer. Dividing the musical pieces discussed here and in the next chapter on grammatical and musical grounds cuts across other groupings that might be offered by the poetic genres that these pieces exemplify and the nature of their lyric personas. Although most of the songs are formally virelais, their poetry relies on varying literary genres. Some of these songs are associated with amorous May festivities, refined loving, and dancing, but others have literary precedents in more clerkly debate poetry. These two different kinds of court entertainment generate different kinds of lyric. Songs that include a female love object tend to be voiced by a je narrator who is a participatory amant, as in He tres dous rossignol I Roussignolet, Onques ne fu, Or tost, and Or sus. By contrast, the three songs that draw on a widespread French and English tradition of avian debate poetry, pitting the cuckoo against some other bird, have a more detached clerkly je narrator, who effectively witnesses and reports the debate. In Le cornailhe, the cuckoo's opponent is a crow; in two other songs, a nightingale. Of these latter two, Senleches's En ce gracieux temps joli has the narrator comparing and relaying the songs of the two birds; in the other, Vaillant's Par maintes fays, the narrator depicts a nightingale marshalling a parliament of fowls to kill the cuckoo.

3· We might call this a round (like the children's nursery rhyme "London's Burning") or, more technically, a canon. The latter term originated in the supply of a written rule (the canon), which instructed the singers in the correct manner of resolving the notation of a single part into more than one.

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Promoting Performance Willi Apel clearly thought that the use of birdsong figures in some of the pieces in appendix 3 linked them, although his label "realistic virelai" suggests that the similarity itself is caused by the calls' realism and not by the direct influence of one piece on another. 4 Virginia Newes, who has presented the most thorough comparison of the musical representation of the calls of individual species from one song to another, wonders instead if their broad similarities are a result of the use of "stock figures" imitative of birds. 5 I would broadly concur with the idea that they are stock figures, but not ones imitative of birds' calls per se. In most cases the birdcalls do not attempt mimetic verisimilitude. Even the cuckoo's call occurs in varied rhythms, at different pitch levels, using different intervals in different pieces. The voicing of the nightingale and lark shows even greater musical variation and figuration, which can be understood instead as typifying the natural instrument of voice rather than the sounds of these bird species specifically. These figures depict the singer as a technician of his instrument, especially in those passages whose clear musico-linguistic profile causes them to stand out from the general texture. These passages have elements of varied repetition and often have rather static harmony in the lowest part to enable the voice of the human "nightingale" to perform melodic and rhythmic subdivisions of the texture, thereby foregrounding the singer's vocal prowess. At these points such pieces tend to use note values smaller than the smallest minim value that could be written in the fourteenth-century French notational system. I have argued that one of the central meanings that the representation of birdsong could hold for singers in the later Middle Ages was to picture song as a naturally pleasing medium, comprising beautiful, well-modulated melodic sounds that give pleasure. Beyond the features of the sound, however, a songbird might represent (for better or worse) an artless natural performer effortlessly producing such a song with a God-given vocal instrument. At the levels of production and reception, respectively, therefore, the nightingale could figure song (i.e., sung poetry) as an oral rather than a textual practice, and an aural rather than a visual entertainment. On its own, this kind of singing would represent Arnulf's cantores, who love sweetness and belong in Music's kingdom but do not merit the honor of being regarded as musici. If it is the4· The relatedness of the depiction of birdsong in different pieces has been overstated. Ape! comments that the "oci" and "fi" figures of Onques ne fu "recur with the same musical patterns" in Par maintes foys and, for "oci," also in Ma tredol rosignol I Aluette IRosignolin, when the rhythms and text are similar but the exact figuration differs; see CMM 53 (ed. Apel), 3:xxiii. He also claims that these three pieces form a "closely related group" with Or sus and Recoes. 5· Newes, "The Cuckoo and the Nightingale."

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matized within the context of artful literate polyphonic song, however, what better way to foreground the quality and skill of one's own natural talent than to dignify through human artistry the voices of the untutored songsters of nature? Arguably there were particular reasons why singers felt the need to promote the natural and performative qualities of their singing at this point in the fourteenth century. Vernacular Silent Reading and Fourteenth-Century Music Making The elite culture of the later Middle Ages was considerably more textualized than that of earlier Christian periods, a textualization driven in part by the economic revolution and monetarization of the so-called long thirteenth century (ca. II60-r33o). Payment in money rather than in kind increased the need to maintain written accounts, in turn leading to a larger clerical class and a more scribal culture. 6 The scholastic texts of the universities in this period, especially the University of Paris, were visually standardized, often copied mechanically by eye. Their systematic use of full word separation allowed quick visual perusal of the complex logical arguments that made up the New Aristotelian and mathematical traditions? As university clerics entered court administrations in ever larger numbers, this newly standard manner of copying passed over into vernacular culture; by the mid-fourteenth century, vernacular books regularly addressed readers rather than listeners and were designed to carry additional, visual meanings. Of course, vernacular reading did not entirely lose its age-old performative aspect; reading aloud to a group was still common, especially at court. 8 The more visual mode of vernacular book production did not preclude the use of books as repositories of texts to be read from aloud, but rather reflected their new, additional, and growing use as reference resources for a lone silent reader. In this basic shift from aural to visual delivery of text, the previous performance of the text becomes represented to some extent within the codex itself; the book becomes a visual kind of "performance." That the effects of this change were felt even when that textual performance was musical might seem surprising given the centrality of actual sounding performance-the specifically aural sensual medium-to song. Yet as value became increasingly invested and attested in written forms, musical sounds too became increasingly textualized, not least because of significant overlap between those clerics who were a court's scribes and those who were its singers. Several important musical documents of the fourteenth century are distinguished by the attention they pay to the mise-en-page, making music more textual and more visual as a way 6. SeeM. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England, ro66-1307, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1993); and Peter Spufford, Money and Its Use in Medieval Europe (Cambridge, 1988). 7· Saenger, Space between Words, 265-76. 8. See Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public.

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to represent the verbal orality of singing. The famous version of the satirical Roman de Fauvel contained in F-Pn fr. 146, whose large format enables visually striking assemblages of interpolated lyrics, music, and illuminations, was probably produced by clerks in the French royal chancery, a group that perhaps included the composer-poet (and future bishop} Philippe de Vitry.9 Of a piece with these trends, the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries saw advancements in the technology for the graphic recording of musical performance: notations were developed that depicted relative pitch and duration with greater differentiation than ever before. There is no doubt that performed music benefited significantly from an increasing cultural attention to bookmaking and notation, even less that contemporary knowledge of medieval music has so benefited. The increased use of, and precision in, musical notation, the growing number of books, larger clerical-scribal class, and larger courtly retinues, including larger court-based choirs containing singers who were poets, composers, and notators in the fourteenth century, all mean that we have a far greater documentation of singing and song-especially polyphonic song-from this period than from any earlier one. The mechanical, visually based copying, which became standard first for Latin and then for vernacular texts, seems also to have become standard for notating music. The same kinds of complaints about text copyists being nothing more than "painters" (pictores)-implying that they work entirely by eye, without passing texts through aural or cognitive media-is, by I3 p, also leveled at those copying the texts of music books. 10 Certain musical documents (the interpolated Fauvel, the Machaut manuscripts} attest to a scribal interest in the book as a whole and reflect authorial initiatives in contemporaneous literary culture (single-author collections by Jehan Froissart, Christine de Pizan, and Eustache Deschamps}. In certain individual songs, which are typically copied into anthologies, writing-musical notation-can be seen as the generating force behind a composition. Visual appearance becomes integral to its meaning. Notation is thus not just a way to record performances but also a means to create them-a tool of composition as well as transmission. This kind of "prescriptive," intellectual notation can 9· Malcolm Vale, "The World of the Courts: Content and Context of the Fauvel Manuscript," in Fauvel Studies: Allegory, Chronicle, Music, and Image in Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, MS franfais 146, ed. Margaret Bent and Andrew Wathey (Oxford, 1998), 592. On Fauvel more generally, see the other essays in the same volume and Dillon, Medieval MusicMaking. On Machaut, see Huot, From Song to Book, chaps. 7-8; and, for more on late medieval music specifically, Butterfield, Poetry and Music in Medieval France. ro. Petrarch and Gerson use the term about text copyists; see Saenger, Space between Words, 2 52· John of Tewkesbury, Quatuor principalia (64 7, 3 67), lamenting the lack of proper coordination between text syllables and musical notes, excuses this vice because "all the notatores are not singers nor scribes: they are clerks, in truth they are painters" (omnes notatores non sunt cantores, nee scriptores sunt clerici, vere, pictores enim sunt).

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be seen in elaborate rhythms, especially those incorporating proportional rhythmic change cued by graphic signs or Arabic numbers. It is also visible (quite literally, and often not at all audible) in the use of verbal canons, which provide a necessary written key to the decoding of the notation (and thereby to the performance).1 1 In some pieces songs perform poetic texts which themselves describe the playing and singing of the piece being played and sung, emphasizing the song's textuality, even to the extent of voicing the first-person speech of the notated song, as if it were a textual person. 12 These notational features have formed the principal focus of much of the musicological work on later-fourteenth-century music, the so-called Ars subtilior. The use of musical canons or extended passages of musical imitation to "fix" the work is analogous to the much earlier use of end rhymes and authorial anagrams in vernacular poetry. Four famous picture songs that have survived-pieces of "visual music"epitomize the incorporation of the visual as a meaningful element of musical composition. 13 Baude Cordier's Belle, bonne, sage is a literary heart offered most visually to the lady as it is sung to her (figure 3.1). 14 The notation of La harpe de me/odie by Jacob Senleches depicts a harp whose strings represent the pitches to be sung (figure 3.2). The canon by which the third voice may be realized from the first is wrapped in a red-texted rondeau around the harp's soundpost. 15 That the two texted voices derive from the same notation makes this a chace of a kind, although as it is formally a virelai, modern writers tend to call it a canonic virelai. Thoroughgoing musical imitation animates three of these four picture songs, further adding to their intellectual "writerliness." The canonic songs Tout par compas (a rondeau by Baude Cordier; see figure 3. 3) and En Ia maison (an anonymous balade; see figure 3 .4), whose amorous texts make punning reference respectively to a pair of compasses and Daedalus' labyrinth, are both drawn descriptively into a circle, which En Ia maison wraps into a maze. 16 En Ia maison has a highly selfconsciously referential text, borrowing lines from a musical balade in

r r. See Ursula Gunther, "Fourteenth-Century Music with Texts Revealing Performance Practice," in Studies in the Performance of Late Medieval Music, ed. Stanley Boorman (Cambridge, 1982), 253-70. I2. As in Machaut's Ma fin (Rq); see Anne Stone, "Music Writing and Poetic Voice in Machaut: Some Remarks on BI2 and BI4," in Leach, Machaut's Music, 137. I}. The two by Baude Cordier have been bound into Ch since the nineteenth century. See Elizabeth Randell Upton, "The Chantilly Codex (F-Ch 564): The Manuscript, Its Music, Its Scholarly Reception," Ph.D., diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, woi, chap. 2. 14· See the discussion in Jager, The Book of the Heart, 82-86. I 5. For a commentary, see Reinhard Strohm, "'La harpe de melodie' oder Das Kunstwerk als Akt der Zueignung," in Das musikalische Kunstwerk: Festschrift Carl Dahlhaus zum 6o. Geburtstag, ed. H. Danuser eta!. (Laaber, I988), 305-I6. I6. On the maze symbolism in this piece, see Craig Wright, The Maze and the Warrior: Symbols in Architecture, Theology, and Music (Cambridge, Mass., 2oor ), 239-42.

Figure 3.1. Baude Cordier, Belle, bonne, sage, plaisant et gent, from F-CH 564, f.uv. By Permission of the Musee Conde, Chantilly. Digital imaging by DIAMM, www.diamm.ac.uk.

Figure 3.2. Jacob Senleches, La harpe de me/odie, in US-Cn 54- I, f.ror. Photo courtesy of The Newberry Library, Chicago.

Figure 3-3- Baude Cordier, Tout par compas sui composes, from F-CH 564, f.r2.r. By Permission of the Musee Conde, Chantilly. Digital imaging by DIAMM, www.diamm.ac.uk.

Figure 3+ Anon., En Ia maison Dedalus enfermee, from the Berkeley theory manuscript, Jean Gray Hargrove Music Library, University of California, Berkeley MS 0744, f.31v.

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Machaut's well-known Voir dit and another Machaut lyricY The visual aspect foregrounds the maker of the maze and thus of the composition as a "Daedalus of design," with the musical canon being to the composer what the pair of compasses is to the architect. 18 The singer of the third part must quite literally follow the singer of the tenor through the eleven-course maze formed by the notation's staves, successfully negotiating a triumphant path to the center of the maze and to the performance of the piece.19 Like Senleches's virelai, the anonymous balade is copied in a manuscript containing music theory treatises, reflecting its intellectual nature as a visual document that may be realized sonically only through the correct understanding of its notation, and thus only by a musicus. Canonic voice parts, proportional or pictorial notations, and writerly song texts are far from predominant, however. The association of musical imitation with these kinds of documents seems to mark this procedure as a selfconsciously "composed" one, emphasizing music's participation in newly textcentered, author-centered vernacular literary culture. This prescriptive procedure arguably contrasts with the group of songs in which birds are voiced by singing note values smaller than a minim. Anne Stone has proposed that some kinds of notational innovation were driven by the need to depict in writing that which was already being performed within an essentially oral improvisatory tradition of singing. She cites the author of the Tractatus figuram, a late-fourteenth- or early-fifteenthcentury treatise on advanced note shapes, who offers as a rationale for his expansion of the notational rhythmic vocabulary the comment that it would be odd ("inconveniens") not to be able to notate what can be sung. 20 Stone proposes that new note shapes like those in the Tractatus figuram were developed to do exactly this, giving rise to a kind of descriptive notation such as that seen in Zacara da Teramo's balade Sumite, karissimi. The two modern editors of this piece thought it unperformable, but Stone reasons that its notation ap-

17. The refrain of En Ia maison, "Sene la voi briefment me estuet morir," is identical in sentiment and similar in expression to that of Machaut's Lor64, "Que je en morray se briefment ne Ia voi," with which it also shares its verse form. The first line of the B section (l. 5 ), "Dont maim soupir me convient estrangler," is found exactly in the line at the repeat of the A section in the second stanza of Machaut's B33 (l. 2.3), where it also rhymes with "ne puis ... aller." The writing of B3 3 as a highly textual and imaginative process is thematized extensively within the Voir dit under the topos of not seeing the lady; see Ardis Butterfield, "The Art of Repetition: Machaut's Ballade 33, Nes qu'on porroit," Early Music 31 (2003): 347-60. r8. Wright, The Maze and the Warrior, 241. I9. Ibid., 242. 20. Anne Stone, "Glimpses of the Unwritten Tradition in Some Ars Subtilior Works," Musica Disciplina 50 ( 1996): 7 4; and Tractatus figuram (ed. Schreur), 70-73. This repeats an earlier sentiment by Johannes de Muris in Notitia 2.10.6-8 (ed. and trans. Meyer), roo.

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proximates the tiny pauses of virtuoso singing, and thus followed rather than preceded its performance. 21 As well as offering a means by which composers can prescribe singers' performances, from the outset of notated polyphony, music notation probably also reflects singers' improvisatory virtuosity. 22 The origins of the articulation called hocket-a technique that will loom large in my discussion in chapter 4 of the chace-is probably to be found in the improvisatory practices that preceded the writing down of liturgical polyphony in the twelfth century. 23 By the fourteenth century, the increased textualization of culture and the importance of visual signs may have led, paradoxically, to the notation of a practice of "virtuoso discanting" which was a parallel and somewhat antithetical response to that same cultural trend. 24 The increased sophistication of the symbolic means of written representation for relative pitches and durations facilitated their mental manipulation. 25 This is because the writing down of musical rhythms and their storage in what Anna Maria Busse Berger terms "the memorial archive" is essentially the same kind of act: binding sonic material into a visual image. The dichotomy between written and oral composition is thus diffused by the ability of advances in the representational technology of one to furnish similar advances to the other. 26 The improvisatory performance practices of singers were central to the development of polyphony throughout the Middle Ages; ornamentation was a

21. Daniel Leech-Wilkinson has argued that certain kinds of minim rests may indicate the way in which singers phrased melodies in performance; see his "Articulating Ars Subtilior ~..ong," Early Music 31 (2003 ): 6-r9. 22. Improvisation should be understood to imply a creative, rational, and regulated practice, not the spontaneous, unpremeditated performance which the term now popularly denotes. See the important comments in Margaret Bent, "Resfacta and Cantare super librum," in Counterpoint, Composition, and Musica ficta (London, 2002), 30T-19. 23. See Anna Maria Busse Berger, Medieval Music and the Art of Memory (Berkeley, 2005), chaps. 4-5. 24. The term is Stone's ("Glimpses of the Unwritten Tradition," 93 ). 25. "To sing music from written notation required knowledge of the same rules of measure and consonance that would have governed music devised in the singer's own head. In both cases he had to listen to what was going on and to use his knowledge of counterpoint in order to respond and adjust to what he heard. The singer thus neither merely sang the written notes nor departed from them, but, using them as a starting point, he applied his knowledge of counterpoint and musica ficta, familiarity with the piece gained in rehearsal, experience of the style, and aural judgement, to the end of making the music sound correctly. His role was not only vocal but mental." Bent, "Resfacta and Cantare super lib rum," 3o 5. 26. Coleman, Public Reading, notes that the qualities we find so literary about Chaucer's works (irony, self-consciousness, and so on) did not (and do not) require apperception in written form in order to be appreciated. With polyphonic music, the mutual interdependence of performance, composition, memory, and notation is more obvious because the nature of the end product is assumed to be real sound.

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fundamental part of the practice of medieval musical performance.27 Until well after the period considered here, composers of polyphony were commonly a mere subset of singers trained both in polyphonic singing practices and in notating music. Part of singers' schooling involved learning to generate polyphony-that is, to compose it, at least orally-to go with a given chant tenor. Being educated in reading musical notation meant being able to write it down. It thus seems likely that polyphonic singing practices themselves (organum, hocket, contrapunctus diminutus) were the primary conceptual compositional tools for medieval singer-composers. 2 8 From the twelfth century on, a string of complaints about singing practices deemed excessive, in combination with descriptively notated songs, especially those that exist in variant versions showing different realizations, offer a glimpse of practices through which virtuoso singers strove to differentiate themselves from their run-of-the-mill colleagues. Such differentiation most likely became a financial imperative outside the monastery, where the patronage system of the courts led to the attachment of prestige value to skilled singing and singers, as well as to books of notated songs. 29 Despite Guido's preemptive antidote in the invention of the informed singer-the musicus-his system of litterae and voces had substantially lessened the need for active deployment of the art of memory in performance, at least for pitch. Instead of memorizing large numbers of chants, students memorized keys to the notational representation, learning intervals, the gamut, solmization, and the hexachord. Guido tells his readers, however: "If you would make progress with these notes, you must learn by heart a fair number of melodies so that by the memory of these particular neumes, modes, and notes you will recognize all sounds, of whatever sort. For it is indeed quite another thing to recall something with understanding than it is to sing something by rote; only the wise can do the former while persons without foresight can often do the latter." 30 Once the rhythmic notations of Johannes de Muris and Philippe de Vitry achieved the same graphically descriptive power for rhythm in the fourteenth 27. McGee, The Sound of Medieval Song, chap.r; Berger, Medieval Music and the Art of Memory. 28. See Berger, Medieval Music and the Art of Memory, chaps. s-6. 29. For evidence of exchange of musicians between courts, see Craig Wright, Music at the Court of Burgundy, I 3 64-I4I9: A Documentary History (Ottawa, 1979 ); Andrew Wathey, "The Peace of r 3 6o-r 3 69 and Anglo-French Musical Relations," Early Music History 9 (I 989 ): I 297 4; and Malcolm Vale, The Princely Court: Medieval Courts and Culture in North- West Europe, I270-IJ80 (Oxford, 200I), chaps. s-6. John, heir to the duchy of Aragon, asks his agent to find good singers in Avignon who are young and unmarried and who play instruments, and to bring a book of notated motets, rondels, ballades, and virelays; seven such men were found by October 1379. See Tomasello, Music and Ritual at Papal Avignon, 40. 30. The Early Christian Period, 104. See also Berger, Medieval Music and the Art of Memory, chap. 3·

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century, the potential for the singer simply to follow the notational instructions increased even further. Thus, although musical literacy is central to theoretical understandings of musica in the second millennium, music theorists sometimes ridicule exclusive reliance on writing in performance as making the singer appear dumb. 31 Just reading the notation is equivalent in rhetorical terms to a reliance on rote memorization, which was similarly criticized for its foolishness. 32 Theorists instead begin to discuss a new measure of musicality that resides in the gap between the notation and the performance, one that is manifest in the performance's temporal-sounding reality. When Arnulf speaks of his nightingale-like best singers minting song anew on the anvil of their throats, he ascribes to them a creative power, one usually ascribed to poets, whose tongues supposedly coin words from the raw metal of their emotions. 33 Unsurprisingly, given the literary evidence presented in chapter 2 that the lyric nightingale was seen as the epitome of the accomplished oral courtly singerpoet, it was a simple rhetorical move to adopt the nightingale as the virtuoso human songbird. The Nightingale's Cry of Death to the Cuckoo's Plain Singing Senleches's En ce gracieux temps (figure 3.5) implies kinship between the nightingale and the human singer of a song that voices the nightingale's. In the opening refrain of this virelai, the narrator is out in the spring and off the beaten track when he hears a sweet, merry little nightingale singing happily in the wood. His representation of the bird's call, "oci, oci," is repeated outside the metrical structure of the poem, and its depiction in a melodic sequence of falling thirds is striking in its disruption of the preceding rhythmic organization of the music (example 3.ra). 34 In the two verses (sometimes collectively called the pedes or couplet) of the virelai's B section, the narrator passes another location where he hears the strident, monotonous cuckoo, singing ever louder the only song it knows. As he relays its "cucu, cucu, cucucu," a call falling entirely outside the metrical structure of the poem proper, the musical setting projects a static held tenor note, over which two pitches are literally 31. See, for example, Summa musice, 128. 3 2. See the comments on delivery in Mary Carruthers's review of Treitler, With Voice and Pen, in Plainsong and Medieval Music 14, no. 2 (2005): 225-34. 33· Arnulf, Tractatulus, 19. It should be noted that coining is this period's most common form of mechanical reproduction; in Arnulf it is calqued on the idea of the imitative eloquence of the parrot in his source, Alan of Lille's De planctu Naturae. See my discussion in chapter 5. 34· The rhythmic surface is typically offset by minim-length suspensions, but these make the basic downbeats fairly clear. For the "oci" passage, trochaic groups, three minims' worth in length (three eighth notes on the modern transcription), as if the music were suddenly in major prolation with minim equivalence from the previous minor prolation, disrupt the notional sense of a downbeat. For a note on the music examples, see appendix 3.2.

Figure 3·5· Jacob Senleches, En ce gracieux temps, from I-MOe o. M.5 .24, f.2sv. By permission of the Biblioteca Estense Universitaria, Modena. Digital imaging by DIAMM, www.diamm.ac.uk.

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repeated in iambic rhythm and imitated in the third voice, which is given a text for just these calls (example 3.rb). In the tierce (the musical section that had served the initial refrain, but with new words), the narrator prefers to hear the beautiful and noble nightingale rather than endure the boring cuckoo. He flees back to the former bird just as the song returns to the music and text of its refrain. Although the song is voiced through a narrator, the singer is obliged musically to depict both birds. The narrator (presumably Senleches himself when performing his own poem) identifies with the pleasing singing of the nightingale, not least in the fact that from the very outset the singer has displacement syncopations, singing slightly ahead of or behind the underlying harmony and its rhythm, a jazz-like "swung" rendition of a notional "straight" version (example 3.rc; cf. example 3.Id). This connects the nightingale and narrator as accomplished singers who can vary a straight rhythm, in distinction to the square, repetitious monotony of the cuckoo. In this emphasizing of the loudness of the cuckoo's song as well as its dullness, the narrator's distance from the cuckoo is implicitly underscored: as in Guido's verse, only an ignorant cantor would think the song of the nightingale inferior to one that is simply louder (there the ass, here the cuckoo). The nightingale-focused A section of the music plays more with the process of performative realization than the cuckoo's B section, giving more scope for the skillful negotiation of the song. In particular, the rhythm of the musical surface, especially in the upper parts, makes it more challenging for each individual singer to realize the exact interval content of his own melody, which he must do through aural interaction with the polyphonic whole (see appendix 3.2 for further details). The cuckoo's song was proverbially monotonous. Nicole Oresme, a scientist who borrowed books from the music theorist Johannes de Muris, uses a similar comparison in a treatise on heavenly motion (written between I 342 and I 3 77): "What song would please that is frequently or oft repeated? Would not such uniformity [and repetition] produce disgust? It surely would, for novelty is more delightful. A singer who is unable to vary musical sounds, which are infinitely variable, would no longer be thought best, but [would be taken

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for] a cuckoo." 35 The bird in the Trois Savoirs version of the "churl and the bird" tale-a closet nightingale herself-also makes a reference to the boring song of the cuckoo, implying moreover that its monotony is a function of its natural inability to learn, something it shares with the churl. In her clerkly expounding of the lapidary as part of her taunt about the jewel in her gizzard, the bird complains that there is no point trying to teach a churl the finer points of natural order, just as there is "no point in teaching a cuckoo to play an instrument well; he will still end up only being able to say 'cuckoo.' "36 Senleches has taken this tediousness-the outward sign of an inability to become learned-and pictured it musically. When the cuckoo sings, the third voice, which is not texted anywhere else in the piece, imitates its call exactly, giving a comic picture of a lack of variety, not just within the song of a single cuckoo but even from one cuckoo to another-a standardization, a direct echo. The boring cuckoo-like singers are many and yet sing together, reducing two potentially virtuoso techniques-rhythmic division over a held tenor note and motivic imitation between voices-to their least interesting forms. By contrast, the nightingale is an individual bird, voiced by a single singer, defying the foursquare rhythm of this meter with artful syncopation. His virtuosity differentiates him from the common flock, just as Senleches must have been valued (and valued himself) above the common herd of averagely trained singers. Small wonder, then, that the narrator takes his listeners with him back to the nightingale's grove in the refrain. The cuckoo and nightingale pair is also found in the most famous virelai to voice birdsong, Jean Valliant's Par maintes fays. Although a written product associated with a named composer, Par maintes fays circulated widely in its own day, and can be interpreted as exemplifying a semi-improvised practice of ornamentation through a plethora of essentially descriptive notations, which place four minims in the time of three (in major prolation). The wider circulation of Par maintes fays includes four different texts, in three different languages, two-part and various three-part versions, with a large number of variants between them that appear to be "singerly" rather than scribal/compositional. 37 Did performers of its sung poetry envoice their own resistance to textuality and celebrate the natural "artistry" of untexted (per usum) music making with this song? In a piece of lyric-a genre "relentlessly concerned with staging 3 5. "Que est ista cantilena que placeret sepe aut multotiens repetita? Nonne talis uniformitas giguit fastidium? Ymo certe, et novitas plus delectat. Nee esset reputatus cantor optimus sed cuculus, qui non posset modulos musicos variare qui sunt variabilies in infinitum." Nicole Oresme, Tractatus de commensurabilitate (ed. Grant), 3 r6-r7. Cited with a slightly different translation in Tanay, Noting Music, Marking Culture, 258. 3 6. See chapter 2. 37. Although these groups overlap, my point here is that the variants seem to reflect a singer's likely practice rather than being something that would be added silently at the stage of writing down, at least if the ornaments discussed in theoretical contexts are any guide; see McGee, The Sound of Medieval Song, chaps. 3-5.

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subjectivity" -it is certainly tempting to think so. 38 It is also possible to read the birds of Par maintes fays-distinct in this regard from the lone nightingale of Senleches's virelai-as resisting the erosion of a communal "je" of traditional courtly vernacular lyric, and arguing for a poetics of natural value manifested in the excellence of group singing practices. In singing the same music over and over, the cuckoo is the epitome of the boring singer; in addition, the monotonous text he repeats is initially meaningless but self-referentially becomes his own name. For this reason, his own (clumsy) song projects a selfimportant boaster. Conservative and ascetic currents, especially within latefourteenth-century Lollard writings, typically object to the making of books and songs which are sung solely that the name and deeds of worldly men will last long after them. 39 In this respect the cuckoo might become the opponent of the nightingale in more than simply the dichotomy between varied and boring singing. The nightingale is associated with the communal "je" of vernacular song, making it the perfect figure through which performers of sung poetry might stress the natural value manifested in the excellence of an unwritten practice and celebrate natural "artistry." The cuckoo, like the churl in Gregory Stone's reading of Oiselet, would thus signal a textualized author, an untalented but prolific ("loud") writer, praising through verbal repetition his own name. Par maintes fays as Expert Communal Song The virelai Par maintes fays is the last song in the Chantilly Codex, which is the only source to attribute it to Jean Vaillant. 40 Its text as given in the modern 38. Williams, Interpreting Nightingales, 78, citing Lee Patterson. 39· "And of swych folke men maken bookes and soonges and reeden and syngen of hem for to hoolde pe mynde of here deedes pe lengere heere vpon eerth, ffor pat is a ping pat worldely men desiren greedy pat here naame myghte laste loonge after hem heere vpon I eerth." Sir John Clanvowe, The Two Ways (ed. Scattergood), 69-70. 40. Christopher Page, "Fourteenth-Century Instruments and Tunings: A Treatise by Jean Vaillant? (Berkeley, MS 744)," Galpin Society journa/33 (r98o): 20, considering Vaillant as the probable author of a treatise on tuning, identifies him with a priest of Vendrest, a sometime member of the papal chapel, who died in 136r. Yet one of the songs in the Chantilly Codex, Dame doucement I Doulz amis, is dated 1369, and references to a Vaillant in both the Regles de Ia seconde rettorique (as master of a music school in Paris) and a student's Hebrew notes (as an authority) imply that he is still active at the end of the century. I agree with Tomasello (Music and Ritual at Papal Avignon, bibliographical index), who doubts that the composer and the Avignonrecorded priest are the same man. Ursula Gunther's "Vaillant [Vayllant], Jehan [Johannes]," in TNG, is similarly circumspect. His four surviving attributed musical works other than Par maintes fays are transmitted only in Chand comprise a three-part balade, a two-part isorhythmic rondeau with a text about learning to sing, and two polytextual "dialogue" rondeaux, one with two texts and one with three. The texts of the rondeau, Dame doucement I Doulz amis, whose feminine-voiced contratenor punningly names Vaillant, are also anonymously copied in the Pennsylvania Chansonnier (Pa) (see James I. Wimsatt, Chaucer and the Poems of "Ch" in University of Pennsylvania MS French rs [Cambridge, 1982], rq), although the concordance is not noted by Wimsatt.

BIROS SUNG

129

editions is shown in table 3.rA. 41 With the exception of the cuckoo's cry, however, the birdcalls-like those of Senleches's virelai and most others that represent them onomatopoeically-are extraneous to the poetic structure. Once they are removed, the poem may be revealed as a more straightforwardly regular decasyllabic virelai (table 3.rB) with a nine-line refrain, and a couplet of two quatrain verses, rhyming:42

ABABBABBA cdcd cdcd [ababbabba ]43

ABABBABBA

refrain verse verse

tierce refrain

The text begins with the poet-narrator's clerkly voice: "On many occasions I have recalled [or heard] the sound of the nightingale's sweet melody" (example 3 .2a). The stressed penultimate syllable of the rhyme word "melodie" attracts a suitably florid melisma, which makes the musical setting of this poetic line the longest in the piece. 44 As in En ce gracieux temps, the singernarrator of Par maintes fays immediately sounds like a songbird from his melismas, turns, and descending lines, and here also from his use of the highest pitches in the medieval gamut. The narrator of Par maintes fays comments that "the cuckoo will not accord" with the melody of the nightingale "but will sing against him out of spite: 'cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo,' all his life." The verb "to accord" (acorder) is set to a musical cadence-articulating the song's primary sonority, G. The three calls of the cuckoo, reported by the narrator, are depicted mimetically in falling intervals (thirds and fourths) separated by rests (example 3.2b). The cuckoo's call thus rhythmically breaks up the flow of the long musical phrases that had depicted the narrator's memory of the nightingale's sweet melody. The refrain ends with the direct speech of the nightingale, which commands a number of other birds to kill the cuckoo. His command-"Je vous com41. See CMM 5 3/r, no. ll5, text edited by Samuel Rosenberg, lxxiv-lxxv. Variant readings noted from PMFC 19 (ed. Greene), no. roo, where the text edited by Terence Scully is underlaid to the music. 42. The four rhymes show a textbook alternation of masculine and feminine rhyme types in each of the two sections. 4 3. The text of the section in brackets-the tierce with the same rhymes to the same music as the refrain, which would usually precede the repeat of the refrain in a virelai-has not survived. Many virelais from this period perhaps never possessed a tierce, although one of the three sources for Oswald's setting (A-Wn 2777) transmits one, perhaps suggesting that the French virelai originally had one too. 44· So long in fact that Oswald's contrafact inserts an extra line of text to fill out the melisma; he also does this for the (slightly shorter) melisma after the musical phrase of line 4· Musically, this phrase is reminiscent of, and tonally "answers," the opening melisma in measures r-4. As an isolated syllable "di" punningly means "I say" or, in this context, "I sing."

130

Table 3.1. Jean Vaillant, Par maintes fays

A: Text in Published Editions Par maintes foys avoy recoillie 1 Du rosignol Ia douce melodie. Mais ne s'i vuelt le cucu acorder, Ains vuelt chanter contre ly par envie Cucu cucu cucu toute sa vie. Car il vuelt bien a son chant descourder, Et pourtant dit le reusignol et erie: "Je vos comant qu'on le tue et ocie, Tue tue tue tue oci oci Oci oci oci oci oci oci 2 Fi de li fi de li fi de li fi Oci oci oci oci oci Oci oci oci oci fi fi, Fi du cucu qui d'amors 3 vuelt parler." Si vous suppli, rna tres douce alouette, Que vous voulles 4 dire vostre chanson: "Lire lire lire lire lire! on Que dit Dien Dien, Que te dit Dieu, 5 [Que dit Dieu Dieu,] Que te dit Dieu Dieu, Que te dit Dieu Dieu,

Que te dit Dieu Dieu," II est tamps, il est [tamps] Que le roussinolet die sa chansounette. 6 "Oci oci oci oci oci oci oci oci Oci seront qui vos 7 vont guerroyant." 8 Assembles vous; prenes Ia cardinette, Faites chanter Ia calle et le sanson, Tues, bates, se cucu pile his son 9 10 11 est pris pris, II est pris pris, 11 Or so it mis mort, 12 Soit mis a mort mort, So it dist il mort mort, 13 Soit mis a mort mort. Or almos seurement An joli ver vos quer[es] cullir Ia mosette 14 Ami ami ami ami ami ami ami ami Toudis seray le dieux d'amours 15 priam

Repeat refrain

B. Basic Text Structure

Refrain 1 2 3 4 5

R

6

7 8 9

Par maintes fovs ai oi recorder Du rosignol Ia douce me/odie Mais ne si vuelt le cucu acorder Ains vuelt chanter contre ly par envie Cucu cucu cucu toute sa vie Car il vuelt bien a son chant descourder Et poutant dit le reusignol et erie Je vous comant quon le tue et ocie [ ... ] Fi du cucu qui damors vuelt parler

a G, a G D (imperfect) G

a G G [cries on G] G

Verses 1

10 Si vous suppli rna tres douce alouette 11 Que vous voulles dire vostre chanson [ ... ] 12 Que le roussinolet die sa chansounette [ ... ] 13 Oci seront qui vos vont guerroyant

a D!bb!f [cries on F then G] Dlbb!f [cries on G] a

2

Assembles vous prenes Ia cardinette Faites chanter Ia calle et le sanson

a D!bb!f [cries on F then G] D!bb!f [cries on G] G

[

... ]

An joli ver vos queres cullir Ia mosette [ ... ] Toudis seray le dieux damours priant

Repeat refrain Structure

ABABBABBA cdcd cdcd ABABBABBA a -er; b -ie; c -ette; d -on = -ant Variants in Greene 'avoy recoillie]: ay oy recorder one fewer in Greene 3 d'amors] d'amours 4 voulles] voulies 5 Que te dit Dieu] que dit Dieu, Dieu 6 chanscunette] chansonette 7 vos] nos 'open quotation marks 9 pile bis son] pilebisson; close quotation marks 10close quotation marks 11 one more line of "II est pris pris" in Greene 12 il so it mis mort] il so it mis a mort 13 This line not in Greene 14An joli ver vos quer[es] cullir Ia mosette J anjoliver nos et cullir Ia violette L 1d'amours] d'Amours 2

1}2

Contratenor

Tenor

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BIRDS

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f"

main

tes

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PI

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Example 3.2: Vaillant, Par maintes fays (extracts), based on version inCh; a: the narrator recall~ ing the melody of the nightingale; b: cuckoo calls; c: nightingale calls in the refrain; d: lark calls in the verse; e: nightingale and lark duet; f: lark "il est temps"; g: nightingale at end of verse.

mant" -is declaimed magisterially in perfect semi breves, each effectively a whole "beat" long (a dotted quarter note in the modern editions). This is then followed by the traditional representation of the call of the nightingale in Middle French, the commands to kill, "tue" and "oci," here sung above static G harmony, with the calls dissolving into note values smaller than a minim (example 3.2c). 45 It is difficult to ascertain whether the nightingale continues to speak in the virelai's verses or whether the narrator's voice resumes; the ambiguity seems part of the text's playfulness. Nightingale-like rhythmic disruption accompa4 5. The alternation of text declaimed in perfect semi breves followed by melisma in exactly this mensuration is found also in a Flemish song, Tsinghen van der Nachtega/e, in which the narrator, despite his lady's intransigence, declares her song hawking her wares of hot mussels to be sweeter than the nightingale's, singing it for us at the end of his own song in similar rhythmic declamation.

BIRDS SUNG

133

~ 1\ [Ca.] 1 "'

tu - e tu- e tu - e

tu

ey- ci o -ci o- ci o-ci o-ci o-ci o- ci

ji-de-li

1\

Ct

ji

o - ci o-ci o- ci

o - ci o-ci o-ci

o - ci o-ci o-ci ~

Ct.

Example 3.2 (continued)

nies the verses' diminutive rhyme "-ete." It would nevertheless be as possible to read most of the text of the verses as being spoken by the narrator as it would to read it as being spoken by the nightingale and reported by the narrator. This ambiguity serves to merge the voice of the poet with the song of the nightingale even further-a feature highly reminiscent of the opening of many a troubadour canso. This is not a high-style song, however; its register is far from the locus amoenus of the grand chant or balade, which the nightingale of monophonic vernacular courtly song traditionally occupies. 46 The feminine "-ete" rhyme is very rare in balades (occurring in none set to music in this period). Instead, it is associated with songs rooted in dance, such as the virelai, and with the popularisant register of the pastourelle. The "swing" of Par maintes foys, 46. Oswald's text has a large degree of internal rhyme-another feature that lowers the register.

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