Chapter Eleven - Critical Notes, Texts, and Translations

Summary

Si riducesse à qualche forma & regola l’arte del ballare.

Cesare de Negri, Le gratie d’amore (1602)

For each dance treated in this chapter, the tune, as transcribed from Orchesographie, appears under its name. The two pieces of music for which Arbeau writes more than one musical line (“Jouissance vous donneray” and “Belle qui tiens ma vie”) are included with the concordances. The commentary includes variants between Arbeau’s tunes and the concordant source.

The sources for concordances are listed by their sigla, as given in Bibliography 2. Where the title of the work in the musical concordance differs from Arbeau’s title, the title is given in quotation marks following the source. The composer, if known, is given in parentheses. The abbreviations for voice ranges are: Su=superius, Qn=quintus, Al=altus, Ct=contratenor, Tn-tenor, Sx=sextus, Bass=Bass.

Orthography

For variants in spellings and pronunciations, I suggest two useful resources: a period source prefaced by a very helpful summary and a modern source that includes audio aide. Jaques Peletier du Mans wrote the first, his Dialogue de l’ortografe e prononciacion françoese [Dialogue on French orthography and pronunciation] in 1555. A modern reprint of this source includes an introduction by Lambert C. Porter that summarizes some of the important points of sixteenth-century French. The basic principles are substitution, where a letter like “y” can be used interchangeably with “i”; replacement, where an “s” can follow the letter that bears an accent mark in modern French; and addition, where a letter like “l” can follow an internal “u.” Table V summarizes these usages, with examples drawn from Arbeau concordances. The more important rules associated with the texts concordant with Arbeau's dances are as follows:

For pronunciation, Robert Taylor's chapter on historical French in Singing Early Music, edited by Timothy McGee, provides accessible instructions, with sixteenth-century French texts transcribed using the International Phonetic Alphabet. Taylor's transcriptions of texts by Pierre de la Rue and Orlande de Lassus are of particular use since they contain many of the orthographic issues charted above. Additionally, this source includes an audio CD with readings of the transcribed texts.