3 | 2021 – Languages and Music in Medieval and Renaissance Songs

Latin between Real Scripturality and Virtual Orality: Elements of «in vivo» Reconstruction of Three Documents within Their Linguistic (Occitan, French, Italian) Context, 8th-11th Centuries
By Michel Banniard
Contemporary musical reconstitutions of the medieval Latin songs tend to apply an artificial pronunciation, quite often close to the spelling of “the Italian way”, presumably alike to the catholic liturgy of the Late Antiquity, or, less often, to the “ciceronian” mouthing, presumably illustrative of the Classical Antiquity spelling. The truth is that the in vivo oral spelling stood deeply dependent on the day-to-day mouthing of languages and dialects as being spoken on the space and in the time where the reported works happened to be played. Some examples try to put under hearing this specific oral process which, oppositely to an enduring topos, used to open paths for any kind of exchanges with the Romance songs by the sheer virtue of symbiotic hearing.

Singing in German in the 14th Century
By Christelle Chaillou and Delphine Pasques

O felix Germania: a Cistercian Liturgical Office in the Honour of the Maidens of Cologne. Analysis of the Interrelations between the Texts and the Melodies
by Kristin Hoefener
The cult of the relics of saints not only played a major role in the Christianization of Europe, but also significantly shaped the evolution of religious communities, monastic or urban, throughout the Middle Ages. The translation of the relics of the saint virgins of Cologne through the network of Cistercian monasteries and the resulting boom of the cult, in particular through the creation of a specific office cycle in honour of these holy women, is the subject of this article. The office cycle O felix Germania as transmitted in a 13th century antiphoner of the Cistercian abbey of Morimondo particularly illustrates how cults evolved when transmitted from one place to another, and how they somehow culminated in the composition or compilation of an office cycle. Crossing musicological and philological methods, texts and melodies from this cycle as well as their interrelationships are presented.

«¿Quién ha de responder a hombres que no se mueven sino al son de los consonantes?» : the Adoption of Italian Metrics in Renaissance Spain
By Séverine Delahaye-Grélois and Sebastián León
During the first half of the 16th century, numerous poems were composed in Castilian according to metric forms that were until then exclusive to Italian poetry such as sonnets. It is striking to observe that the reception of such an innovation was based on sound: what was at stake wasn’t so much how many syllables there were in a line, as how they were sung. In other words, rather than a metric form what was being imported was a musical form. Hence the strong differences in rhythm and treatment of the end of lines between vernacular and Italianate forms.

The Edition of ms. Torino, Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria, T.III.2: Remarks on the Methodological Criteria for a Comparative Analysis of Text and Music
By Lucia Marchi and Angelica Vomera
In the study of the secular repertory of the late Trecento and early Quattrocento, a collaboration between textual and musical philology is paramount. Our goal here is not to constrain the source study to the limits of these two disciplines, but to take advantage of different kinds of expertise for its better understanding. Using an interdisciplinary edition of the manuscript Torino, Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria, T.III.2 (Codex Boverio), this essay suggests a number of methodological criteria that can provide rules for text-music relationships in the Ars subtilior repertory, and can help the critical evaluation of the two components.

«Todesca» and «Tudesque»: Musical Figuration of the German in the Renaissance
By Isabelle His
Rooted in the carnival song of the 15th century, the Italian todesca mocking the figure of the German has several polyphonic illustrations in the second half of the 16th and early 17th centuries. Linked to the world of theatre, it uses a hybrid language enameled with barbarisms. This article compares the words and music of successive todesche by different composers (Azzaiolo, Bottegari, Lassus, Tessier) and their more complex derivatives (compositions in various languages by Eccard, Marenzio, Vecchi, Banchieri, Fasolo). It also focuses on their rare French equivalent, a “tudesque” by Claude Le Jeune on measured verses highlighting the staggering walk of the drunk soldier.

Musication in Henry Fresneau’s Songs. Associational Grammar, Paraphonology and Polyphonic Form in the 16th Century
By Sophie Chouvion, Timothée Premat and Axelle Verner
This paper is about groups and prominences matching between music and text in Henry Fresneau’s 16th century polyphonic songs. By employing a generative text-setting framework, we aim to specify some of the major parameters of the grammar constraining the matching between text and music. We treat the derivation of the text’s underlying form to its surface form, the phonological consequences of this derivation, and the matching constraint between textual and musical prominences. We propose that these grammar’s specificities are linked to the non-stanzaic form of the music and to the question of text intelligibility in these songs.