obscenites renaissantes - ePrints Soton - University of Southampton

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194 JEANICE BROOKS And is not our own music, even leaving aside the foul language and disgusting themes, full of frivolousness, not to say madness? There used to be a kind of performance in which, without using words, the actors could represent whatever they wished by no more than the movements of their bodies. It is similar with today's songs: even without the words, you can still understand, from consideration of the music alone, the filthy character of the theme.^ Erasmus's exposition of musical obscenity ends with a quote: As Aristotle said, "A foul mouth will not shrink from foul deeds".' This points up how frequently the problem of the obscene involves the potential passage from representation to action. Music is especially implicated in the blurring of this border because it is already an action, so that sexually transgressive texts become animated in sound and performed in time. Composed music scripts aspects of delivery (dictating rhythms, pitches, and other musical elements, to emphasize certain words or to colour their meaning in some way) to produce and re-produce obscene images and narratives; words are transformed into enactment through imitation of voices and sounds. Such effects can be written in by composers, who may, for example, represent the speech of a female character by dropping the lower voices for the setting of her lines, or mimic sighs by the strategic placement of rests. In performance, singers could heighten these effects or introduce new ones, by manipulating tempo, dynamic, and attack, changing vocal colour to imitate cries, sighs or characters' voices, and exploiting other performance elements such as facial expression and gesture. For Erasmus, such sonic animation of the obscene in songs acts as inducement to further enactments of their illicit content outside the performance. His call for censorship is motivated by concern that the performed will become performative, bringing about what it purports to describe. Erasmus's ire was especially aroused by the idea that some of his contemporaries were making money from the production and dissemination of obscene songs. His worries over the free circulation of obscene material suggest attitudes toward print that would come to underpin the secular legal category of obscenity in the following century. But in 15x5, music printing from moveable type was still in its infancy. Most chansons were still transmitted with their music only in manuscript; those that were printed usually appeared without musical notation. Only a few years later, the situation would change dramatically when Pierre Attaingnant became the first to exploit a new single-impression system for printing music that was both faster and cheaper than the methods of his predecessors. In the decades following the appearance of his first music print in 1518, he produced a staggering number of music books - the most successful going through multiple editions - which were distributed all over Europe. His efforts Institution, p. 427. Heath's translation elides this passage with the next, which concerns instrumental dance music, but it is clear from the Latin text that Erasmus is still here concerned with songs.
SINGING THE COURTLY BODY 195 were supported from the beginning by a series of royal privileges, and further rewarded in 1537 when he was named the first imprimeur et libraire du Roy en musique by Francois I.' The bulk of his production was devoted to secular chansons; and this continued to be the case for the firm of Le Roy & Ballard, who acquired the office of royal music printers soon after Attaingnant's death in late 1551 or 155Z. The print market for music was soon flooded with the kind of song Erasmus deplored. And alongside the Neoplatonic and Petrarchan love lyrics that dominate the corpus stood a significant number of chansons setting more explicit texts in a variety of registers, ranging from corporeal fantasies in the style of the blason, to courtly texts in feminine narrative voices expressing lustful wishes, to humorous or mock-rustic sexual and scatological anecdotes. Attacks on secular song, often significantly indebted to Erasmus, feature in discussions of bringing up girls through the rest of the century, and condemnation of obscene songs - usually designated chansons lascives or impudiques - frequently marks the polemic of the Wars of Religion.'' In both pedagogical and polemic texts, Protestant writers were particularly apt to counterpose the licit singing of psalms against the pernicious performance of secular songs. But while it is clear that for many early modern writers, the notion of the chanson lascive could refer to a setting of an amorous text of any kind, Erasmus here targets songs that depict and serve to stimulate female sexual appetites. His concern with narrative and action also points toward a type of sexually transgressive song that was a speciality of French poets and musicians. Their texts consist of brief stories, often including direct speech, and the punchline generally involves a strong physical image. They may feature stock characters such as the mal-mariie, a frustrated young woman married to an old, impotent husband; rustic and pastoral characters and settings are also common, though humour is sometimes generated by imputing indecent behaviour to social elites. Settings of these texts in chanson prints use a different musical style from that employed for standard love lyrics, deploying a wide range of vivid musical effects to represent the progression of the narrative, often On Attaingnant and the early history of music printing, see Stanley Boorman, 'Printing and publishing of music', §1, 'Printing', in Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online, (accessed 6 April, 2.009) and Daniel Heartz, Pierre Attaingnant: Royal Printer of Music (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969). Jeanice Brooks, "'All you need is love": Music, Romance and Adolescent Recreation in Sixteenth-Century France", in Attending to Early Modern Women - and Men, ed. by Amy Leonard and Karen Nelson (Newark: University of Delaware Press, forthcoming). On obscenity in religious polemic, see Lise Wajeman's article below. Further on music in particular, see Richard Freedman, The Chansons of Orlando di Lasso: Music, Piety, and Print in Sixteenth-Century France (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, zooo); Craig Monson, 'The Council of Trent Revisited', Journal of the American Musicological Society, 55 (zooz), 1-37; David Crook, 'A Sixteenth-Century Catalog of Prohibited Music, Journal of the American Musicological Society, Gt (1009), 1-78.
Page 1 and 2: OBSCENITES RENAISSANTES Sous la dir
Page 3 and 4: II. L'OBSCENITE COMME JEU DE FRONTI
Page 5 and 6: no JEANICE BROOKS literally stop up
Page 7 and 8: Ill JEANICE BROOKS transgressif. P.
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Page 25: TABLE DBS MATIERES 493 Le sexe du d

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