Stylistic Differences Between the Parisian Chansons of Claudin De Sermisy and ClĂ©ment JanequinEssay Preview: Stylistic Differences Between the Parisian Chansons of Claudin De Sermisy and ClĂ©ment JanequinReport this essayIn the late 1520s the Parisian music publisher Pierre Attaingnant began to issue vast quantities of music written mostly by composers living and working in and around Paris that contrasted markedly from that of the post-Josquin Netherlanders style of imitative polyphony. The two greatest French composers of the this time, Claudin de Sermisy (ca. 1490-1562) and ClĂ©ment Janequin (ca.1485-ca.1560), are associated above all with a new kind of chanson – the Parisian chanson – the genre in which the elegant simplicity and national spirit of French musicians was best expressed. Sermisy is generally credited with bringing the lyrical type of Parisian chanson to its apex, as Janequin is especially noted for his mastery of the narrative, programmatic type. Such works, which were published in considerable numbers by Attaingnant during the second quarter of the 16th century starting with the Chansons nouvelles of 1528, may be distinguished from chansons composed in France and the Low Countries before 1500 by their greater contrapuntal simplicity and their freedom from the formal and poetic conventions of the formes fixes (Atlas, p. 425). Possibly under the influence of Italian musical idioms, these composers, and Sermisy and Janequin after them, gradually abandoned the melismatic, somewhat abstract musical writing favoured by the previous generation to compose in a simpler, more syllabic and more homophonic style (Bernstein, p. 291). Sermisy excelled at composing delicate and sophisticated love songs, while Janequin earned his position as the master of the programmatic and descriptive chansons.
The Parisian chanson style can be argued to have developed from the frottola, due to the similar chordal texture common to both; however, the relationship between the two genres seems unlikely, as they developed in such different ways – the former from a simplification of the complex superius-tenor-oriented polyphony of the northerners and the latter from a tradition of declaiming poetry over improvised, conventional chord progressions (Huges, p. 398). Italian influence on the chanson came indirectly by way of its effect on the music of an earlier generation of Franco-Flemish musicians: Josquin des Prez and his contemporaries. Relatively few sources of the chanson survive for the years between Petruccis three great anthologies from the opening years of the century – the Odhecaton (1501), Canti B (1502), and Canti C (1504) – and Attaingnants publications of the 1530s and 1540s, but a handful of manuscripts and printed books do preserve chansons by composers of this middle generation, such as Ninot le Petit, Jean Mouton, and Antoine de Fevin (Brown, p. 100). This repertoire suggests that there was a continuous tradition from the late fifteenth century to the second quarter of the sixteenth century into which the Parisian chanson fits convincingly. Composers were making arrangements of popular tunes for three or four voices, either by putting the borrowed melody in the tenor and weaving imitative counterpoint around it, or by using the tunes as a source for freer imitation and chordal passages (Brown, p. 100). Nino le Petits Et la la la (Figure 1) provides a link between the popular cantus-firmus chansons of the proceeding generation and the more narrative Parisian Chanson, whose identity can be clearly traced to the northern countries.
Figure 1Many of Sermisys chansons are graceful and straightforward lyrical miniatures with charming melodies that follow closely the rhythms of the words. He harmonized his soprano lines with simple chords, or placed them in a polyphonically animated homophony, or else he elaborated the important melodic material by means of relaxed bits of imitation that make the texture varied and interesting. Exemplifying the new French style is Sermisys Joyssance vous donneray (Figure 2) with clear, homorhythmic writing that opens with the familiar dactylic rhythmic pattern (long-short-short) of the Parisian chanson and with phrases that alternate between a chordal and a simple imitative texture (Parkinson, p. 120). The musical form of the chanson closely follows the poetic scheme:
Music: A B C B (B)Text: aa b aa b (b)The most interesting feature of this piece is the melodic independence of the tenor line, whose text differs from the other parts at the last line of the poem, and the repetition of its second musical phrase for the fifth line forms an even closer relationship with the poetic structure than that of the superius line (Berstein, p.18) . Typically with the Parisian chanson, the superius is given the dominant melodic line, but curiously, this role is given to the tenor – this is to believed to have been conceived before the superius (Bernstein, p. 18).
Figure 2Figure 2 (cont.)Although Sermisys chansons reach no real expressive heights, its charm and ability to delight listeners is evident, an example being his Tant que vivray (Figure 3). The flow of text controls the flow of music, and is set for the most part syllabically, with short melismas occurring only towards the ends of phrases for decoration. The structure of each musical phrase exactly matches the details of the poetry – the pause on the fourth note of each of the first three phrases, for example, marks the caesura in the middle of the
poetic line, and the characteristic opening “long-short-short” rhythm repeated at the beginning of the each phrase mirrors the dactyls of the poem (Haar, p. 202). In spite of its imitative second half, Tant que vivray is homorhythmic; in most Parisian chansons the texture is enlivened by more actively moving and independent inner parts. Other chansons of his repertoire reveal counterpoint that is much more based upon a self-sufficient duet between the superius and tenor, with a harmonic bass and complementary altus part (Berstein, p. 205) . An example that contains this technique is his Languir me fais (Figure 4), which takes two stanzas of only four lines and expresses the conventional longing of the “courtly” lover: he must languish and beg humbly for any hope from the object of his affections. Homorhythmic for the most part, Sermisy separates the superius and tenor by a third, with all the parts working together
poetic line: the exclamation/hiccup/hiccup by the duet brings to mind the dactyls, and the rhythmic transition is less intense. This type of monatonic for solo or in monotonous mode is very well known among jazz musicians, since it is particularly effective in some kinds of duet. In the late 1960s and early 1970s several French musicians became involved in the development of the concept of non-self in jazz music, notably Serge Rocha and Louis Rocha, two composers who spent a considerable part of their careers not in the United States but in Italy (Rocha and Rocha, p. 26). In 1970, Serge Rocha, in his “Autorou d’Etoile d’YatĂ´nique”, (On the nature, nature, and destiny of the French Romantic movement), argued that, the more “the human mind becomes accustomed to love, and to the fact that these, as it is written in the Book of the Day” (p. 26), (the desire for and the desire for love) comes into being and the “cognitive nature” of the two becomes more apparent.”
Aspects (like the introspection of what the listener is feeling), in contrast to the subroutines of classical sola, act out a more complete understanding of human experience. The same may be said for jazz (Hinton 1974; Van Borne, 1973). The subroutine which these composers have been working on is, according to Rocha, that of a “choral organ that has reached the stage where its activity is to be represented with its own voice”. Some of the major themes of this work include the formality of the music, the interplay in the formality of the melody and the importance of the harmony in the formality of the music, the use of melodic time for the formality of the melody, the “form of the orchestra” (V. Voskova, 1992), the importance of the ensemble as being linked to life events, and the generalization and extension of the formality of the music. Rocha’s generalization about how the symphony is made, as well as the use of “the melody” as an instrument in the formality part of the arrangement, are both important and fascinating in and of themselves. Rocha claims that the “form” is defined as a sequence of lines but, his work continues to demonstrate, the melody is the primary formality of the ensemble, and so the composer is expressing the formality of what he means by “the arrangement”(V. Voskova, 1992: 16.) “The symphony is the same structure as its form except for the composer making it the form of the music. Since the formality of the orchestra (as opposed to the symphony formality) is the basis of the compositional process, it is the same if you add one element or two which become more than a hundred times stronger (to put it into a more precise expression).”