Chanson (early music)

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In early music , the term chanson (today's pronunciation [ ʃɑ̃ˈsɔ̃ ]) describes a central form of French music of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance . An exact definition poses problems, since the word chanson in French has always been able to denote any piece of music sung in the most general sense , i.e. it is used in the same way as the German song . In order to clarify the difference to the modern genre of the chanson - which has no verifiable historical continuity with the older form - German-speaking musicology uses the feminine for medieval and early modern chansons. Analogous to the French la chanson , one speaks of Die Chanson , while the modern form in German is normally treated as a neuter, i.e. Das Chanson .

When attempting to narrow down what was subsumed under this name in the narrower sense of the term during the heyday of the old chanson - which is estimated from the second half of the 14th century to the middle of the 16th century - various clues are used in musicology :

  • It is a form of secular music, which means that religious themes are left out of all other richness of subjects in the underlying texts.
  • In connection with this, chanson texts are almost exclusively written in the vernacular, i.e. French. It must be taken into account here that the political boundaries at the time in question do not even come close to those of the present. The majority of the major chanson composers did not come from areas that were actually subject to the King of France, but rather from Burgundy or the Burgundian Netherlands .
  • The chanson in the narrower sense is a polyphonic form. The works of the Trobadors and Trouvères of the High Middle Ages, also often referred to as chansons , fall out of consideration as unanimous music.
  • The chanson is considered the secular counterpart of the motet . This most important form of polyphonic sacred music at the time had several stylistic features that cannot be found in this form in the chanson. While chansons, as mentioned, only use French texts, motets can combine vernacular and Latin texts. The isorhythm was considered a distinctive musical style element of the motet, and was therefore not used in secular music as good as.
  • Furthermore, chansons are primarily those pieces whose words are not set in the so-called formes fixes (i.e. in particular Rondeau , Virelai and Ballade ).
  • The chanson is closely related to the Italian form of the canzona / canzone , whose development it also shares insofar as both were replaced by the madrigal as the most important genre of secular polyphonic vocal music in the course of the 16th century . The characteristic rhythmic opening figure long – short – short , which is used extremely frequently in the canzona, is less present in the French variant.

Guillaume de Machaut is usually named as the first important composer of chansons in this more special sense , as there are virtually no polyphonic works that can be assigned to the genre before him, and no movements before Machaut can be reliably assigned to a musician known by name. The first generations of so-called Franco-Flemish music , including composers such as Guillaume Du Fay , Gilles Binchois , Josquin Desprez and Johannes Ockeghem, continued Machaut's tradition: In their work, the chanson functions, generally speaking, due to its relatively few formal restrictions as an "experimental field" for the stricter requirements of the spiritual forms in the canon of the old classical vowel polyphony , such as its motets and masses .

literature

  • G. Reaney, Geneviève Thibault, François Lesure: Chanson . In: Friedrich Blume (Ed.): The music in past and present . Directmedia, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-89853-460-X , Volume 2, pp. 1034 ff.
  • Nicole Schwindt: Musical Poetry in the Renaissance . In: Hermann Danuser (ed.): Musical lyric . 1 .: From antiquity to the 18th century . Laaber, Laaber 2004, ISBN 3-89007-131-7 , pp. 137-254 (= handbook of musical genres 8.1)

Web links

  • Howard Mayer Brown, David Fallows, Richard Freedman, Nigel Wilkins: Chanson . In: L. Macy (Ed.): Grove Music Online ; Retrieved April 29, 2008.