12 - Chanson and Air

Summary

THE chanson flourished in a startling array of forms. From city streets to courtly chambers and from beggars’ songs to princely pastimes, chansons resounded throughout Europe in all circles of society. Squares in Paris, Antwerp, and Lyons had their mountebanks, who sang narrative verse to the accompaniment of a violin, cittern, or guitar. They stood on benches, hanging a painted sheet of paper or fabric behind them with illustrations of the story they sang, pointing to scene after scene with a long stick. In Paris, vendors at Les Halles hawked their wares in song, crying out “allumettes,” “beaux choux blanc,” or “sallade belle sallade” to the characteristic tunes immortalized by Clement Janequin in his “Cris de Paris,” while the traffickers of cheap print sang the newsy songs they sold among the book vendors’ stalls on the Pont Neuf. Town minstrels played dance songs at bourgeois weddings, and play-acting societies such as that of the law clerks in Lyons sang theatrical chansons during their morality plays and farces.

At the upper end of the social scale, part-songs satisfied a pan-European public for vernacular polyphony. Here one should remember that written polyphony marked out a set of practices and a musical culture that stood apart from urban minstrelsy. Minstrels were primarily instrumentalists who controlled their repertory and employment through a guild system based on orality and secrecy. Masters taught monophonic chansons and dance tunes to their apprentices by rote, circumventing musical literacy and thereby preserving trade secrets. In contrast, polyphonic chansons were produced by composers or, as contemporaries would have called them, “musicians”—musicians trained at cathedral schools, where they learned to read and write polyphonic songs, masses, and motets. The separation between their world of written music and the music of minstrels was noted by Noël du Fail, who in 1549 set the two terms against one another when he described a series of songs as “chansons plus menestrieres que musiciennes” (“songs more minstrel-like than musicianly”).