AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

Abstracts Thursday afternoon 33
(actually a French refrain), offering sage advice in authoritative, proverbial language; a pastor
and a knight debate the merits of good lovers, dueling through sung refrains in the manner
of the arrageois debate poem, the jeu parti. Together, these arrageois songs evidence the use
of music to foster civic identity in Arras and provide a revealing illustration of the strategies
through which some of the earliest vernacular literary and musical traditions were forged.
“SHADOW CHANSONNIERS” IN THE VéRARD PRINT Le
JArdiN de PLAiSANCe et FLeUr de retHoriCqUe, C. 1501
Kathleen Sewright
Rollins College
When the Parisian printer and bookseller Antoine Vérard published his anthology of narrative
and lyric poetry Le Jardin de plaisance et fleur de rethoricque, he was hoping to tap into
a ready-made market of lawyers, state bureaucrats, and court functionaries who thronged the
French capital city, and who, because of their educational level and relatively high wages, had
both sufficient disposable income and an interest in literature to make his project a worthwhile
venture. In this he was successful; demand for the publication was strong enough that
he subsequently published another edition of the compilation.
The interest of this early print for musicologists today rests upon the 600-plus lyric poems
preserved within its pages, a large number of which were at one time accompanied by musical
settings in other sources. The texts and their physical disposition within the print have never
been studied to determine what they can reveal about the chansons of the time. Examination
along these lines reveals that the print’s lyric core reflects the contents of nineteen pre-existent
exemplars (“A” through “S”), each of which offers a discrete profile suggesting emanation
from a particular geographic locale and/or decade.
This paper will investigate how Vérard, with the probable assistance of Regnauld Le Queux,
acquired his exemplars and planned the volume as a homage to King Louis XII and, indirectly,
Louis’ father, Charles d’Orléans. Unrecognized until now is the fact that early in his life Le
Queux was an employee of Charles d’Orléans at the court of Blois. Next, an outline will be
sketched of the nineteen collections of lyric poetry contained within the print (some examples
of which must have included music). After setting forth the criteria by which the parameters
of the collections were determined, this paper will then take a closer look at one particular
collection, Collection “P,” which can be associated with the court of Pierre II de Bourbon at
Moulins, about which court virtually nothing is known. Collection “P” therefore becomes an
important, if shadow, witness for increasing our knowledge of the musical culture of the court
during the second half of the fifteenth century. It contains the text of Hayne van Ghizeghem’s
“Mon souvenir,” which has been thought to date from after 1472, as well as the rondeau text
for Loyset Compère’s Au travail suis. In Le Jardin, these poems are surrounded by poems dating
from the decade of the 1460s, strongly suggesting that they, too, date from the 1460s, and
not the 1470s, ’80s, or ’90s, as has previously been accepted. It has been suspected for some
time that Compère was employed at the court of Moulins, based on his settings of poems by
Pierre de Bourbon. The inclusion of “Au travail suis” within Collection “P” corroborates his
presence there, possibly as early as the 1460s.