Musique mesurée

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The Musique mesurée ( French " metrical music", also Musique mesurée à l'antique "music in ancient meter") was a compositional model of vocal music of the late 16th century in France . Based on the quantity of syllables in weighted languages such as ancient Greek , the syllables of French were set in long and short note values depending on their length . They appeared in the homophonic setting and in a metric order, based on the example of the music of ancient Greece , as it was understood in the 16th century.

Although this method of composition did not find widespread use at first, some of the most famous composers of their time have studied it. Their desire to revive the artistic ethos of antiquity, particularly through text declamation , had strong parallels to Italian trends, e.g. B. to the Florentine Camerata , which created opera as a new art form and thus ushered in baroque music .

history

The works composed using the Musique mesurée method were based on the verse mesurés . Since the late 1560s, the Pléiade group of poets, led by Jean-Antoine de Baïf , began to recreate the metrics of ancient Greek and Latin poetry in the French language. To do this, they used the syllable quantization of ancient languages. This attempt was of a more theoretical nature; In the age of the Huguenot Wars, Baïf and his poet colleagues wanted to improve people through the use of antiquated language, as they expected it to have a positive ethical effect on the listeners. With the approval of the French King Charles IX. they met in secret to found the Académie de musique et de poésie in 1570 . In addition to Baïf, he was a friend of his composer Joachim Thibault de Courville and the poet Pierre de Ronsard .

Although the original Académie had disbanded after a few years, some composers found the idea of ​​the Musique Mesurée so well suited that they used it as their main compositional technique. The most famous among them were Claude Le Jeune , Jacques Mauduit , Eustache du Caurroy , Nicolas de la Grotte and Guillaume Costeley .

Compositional style

Musique mesurée first appeared in French secular chansons . They were mostly five-part and a cappella , although vocal music for this already knew the instrumental accompaniment, and was written in verse - chorus form. The musique mesurée was then used for other musical genres, including sacred settings such as psalm settings . The wording was predominantly homophonic .

The arrangement of lengths and abbreviations, which followed the meter of the poem, was irregular and resulted in an auditory impression that appears like irregular time changes in modern music. Short melisms appeared in the voice guidance especially with Claude Le Jeune. Long and short syllables were reproduced with note values ​​in a fixed ratio of 2: 1, e.g. B. quarters for the long syllables, eighth notes for the short syllables. In modern music notation, this would result in irregularly long bars, which is why the musique mesurée is set here without bar boundaries or only with bar lines at the end of phrasing.

Although the musique mesurée was initially only known to a small group of musicians and composers and was practiced in a small sphere of activity, it had an impact on French music in the following century. The secular Air de Cour , popular since the 1580s, used the metrical technique with rhyming verse. The influence of the musique mesurée in the French recitative of operas and sacred works was still noticeable in the late 17th century .

literature

  • Daniel P. Walker, François Lesure: Claude Le Jeune and “Musique Mesurée”. In: Musica Disciplina 3 (1949), No. 2-4, pp. 151-170 ( access from JSTOR ).
  • Frances A. Yates : The French Academies of the Sixteenth Century. The Warburg Institute, London 1947.
  • Horst Leuchtmann : 15th and 16th centuries. In: Karl H. Wörner (Ed.): History of Music. A study and reference book. 8th edition, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1993, ISBN 3-525-27812-8 , pp. 124-183, here p. 167 with references.
  • Kate van Orden: Music, Discipline, and Arms in Early Modern France. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2005, ISBN 0-226-84976-7 , pp. 32-35 and more frequently.
  • Isabelle His: Air mesuré et air de cour. Pour un décloisonnement of the genre. In: Georgie Durosoir (Ed.): Poésie, musique et société. L'air de cour en France au XVIIe siècle. Mardaga, Sprimont 2006, ISBN 2-87009-909-6 , pp. 155-167 (preview on Google Books).