500th Anniversary of Jacob Clemens (non Papa)?

Probably born in 1510 (or until 1515), here is an article posted in the Franco-Flemish School series.

Claude Le Jeune

Was a French composers born in Valenciennes, 1528–30 and died Paris, 26 September 1600. He was one of the most prolific and significant composers of the second half of the 16th century and one of the chief exponents of musique mesurée à l’antique; his application of this and other theories of musical and textual relationships had a lasting influence on French sacred and secular music.

Le Jeune probably received his early music education at or near Valenciennes, then part of the Imperial Low Countries. His name first appears in 1552 as the composer of four chansons in anthologies published at Leuven which also contain works by his older compatriots Clemens non Papa, Crecquillon and Waelrant. He was a Protestant and from about 1560 enjoyed the protection of a group of Huguenot nobles that included William of Orange, Agrippa d’Aubigné, Henri de Turenne, Duke of Bouillon and Henri of Navarre (later Henri IV). By 1564 he may have settled at Paris; his Dix pseaumes were published there, dedicated to two more Huguenot patrons, François de la Noue and Charles de Téligny. He participated in the Académie de Poésie et de Musique established by Baïf and Courville in 1570. In autumn 1581 he collaborated with Baïf, d’Aubigné and Ronsard in providing entertainments for the marriage of the Duke of Joyeuse to Marie de Lorraine, the queen’s half-sister. Like Nicolas de La Grotte he received from the king a commission, perhaps to devise a ‘Guerre’ to accompany a symbolic tournament; he also contributed an ‘Epithalame’ which was published, with the ‘Guerre’, in his posthumous Airs of 1608. By January 1582 he had succeeded the lutenist Vaumesnil as ‘maistre des enfants de musique’ at the court of François, Duke of Anjou, brother of Henri III. After the death of François in 1584 he made use of a royal privilege, granted by Henri III in January 1582, to publish his Livre de meslanges with Plantin at Antwerp; another edition appeared at Paris in 1586.

Claude Le Jeune: engraving from his ‘Dodecacorde’ (La Rochelle, 1598)According to Mersenne Le Jeune wrote a ‘confession de foi’ hostile to the Catholic League and tried to flee Paris during the siege of 1590. His Dodecacorde and other manuscripts were saved from burning at the hands of the guards at the St Denis gate only by the intercession of his Catholic friend jacques Mauduit. He probably took refuge at La Rochelle, a Protestant stronghold, where the Dodecacorde was published in April 1598. According to a privilege granted by Henri IV in September 1596 he held the position of maistre compositeur ordinaire de la musique de nostre chambre. He was buried in the Protestant cemetery of La Trinité, Paris. Except for the printed collections mentioned above and a number of pieces in anthologies, his works remained in manuscript at the time of his death; eight collections were published posthumously between 1601 and 1612 by Pierre Ballard. The dedications are mostly by his sister Cécile or his niece Judith Mardo and are mostly addressed to his former Protestant friends, pupils and patrons.

Le Jeune’s surviving output includes 348 psalms, 133 airs (several were reprinted in revised versions), 65 secular chansons, 42 sacred chansons, 43 Italian canzonettas, 11 motets, one mass (or possibly two), a Magnificat and three instrumental fantasias. His work shows the influences of both the school of Flemish composers following Josquin and the Parisian school which cultivated the harmonic air de cour with its lightly accompanied prosodic recitation embellished with melismas. Willaert’s influence is particularly evident in the formal aspects of Le Jeune’s Magnificat and motets. His three instrumental fantasias also demonstrate his contrapuntal skill and are similar in style to the sonatas, sinfonias and ricercares of his Venetian contemporaries; two are in four parts, and a third in five parts is based on Josquin’s motet Benedicta es coelorum regina. Although the influence of Willaert and Zarlino is marked, there is no proof that Le Jeune visited Italy; the chromatic madrigalisms that occur in some of his chansons and airs are of the type found in the works of his French contemporaries Bertrand, Boni, Costeley, La Grotte, Du Caurroy and others. However, his 43 Italian pieces for four and five voices are masterly elaborations of three-voice villanellas by Nola, Moro, Celano, Mazzone and various anonymous composers of the 1550s and 60s, which may indicate contact with models emanating from Venice rather than from Naples.

The four chansons attributed to Le Jeune in Phalèse’s anthologies of 1552 are settings of archaic texts in the outmoded polyphonic style of Crecquillon’s generation. They may be student works or may have been misattributed to Le Jeune by the publishers; for example, Bonjour m’amye cannot be his since it had appeared anonymously as early as 1531. By the 1560s he had gained repute and the name ‘Claudin’ (maybe de Sermisy) appears with those of Clemens non Papa and Lassus among the ‘musici praecipii et excellentissimi’ listed in the manuscript of Lassus’s Penitential Psalms. The ten four-voice psalms (1564) are free settings of Bèze’s translations in the polyphonic motet style of Goudimel. A seven-voice dialogue Mais qui es tu? at the end of this collection shows Le Jeune’s mastery of the larger ensemble, as does his later seven-voice canonic setting, using Lupi Second’s melody, of Guéroult’s Susanne ung jour. The seven-voice dialogue Amour quand fus tu né? (published posthumously in 1603) is only a slightly ornamented and structurally adapted version of Willaert’s 1559 setting of Sasso’s sonnet Quando nascest’ amor translated into French verse by Desportes.

In comparison with the northern chanson, in which a craftsmanlike exploitation of polyphonic techniques was more highly prized than subtleties of verbal expression, the Parisian chanson of the 1560s was lighter and freer, aiming at an intimate unity of text and music by characterizing the spirit of the poem. This approach to word-setting undoubtedly contributed to Baïf’s experiments, though it was subordinated to his new syllabic prosody, the rapid pace of which often disguised a lack of tunefulness. From the time that he joined Baïf’s movement Le Jeune wholeheartedly embraced its ideals, to the extent that a certain esotericism cultivated by the group affected his work. Some delay in the publication of his ‘measured’ pieces may have been due to the restrictions on copying and circulating any works performed in the Académie. The Académie’s principal aim was the revival of the humanist ideal, based on Greek music, of a setting subjected to its text, expressing its sense and avoiding any textural complexity (e.g. canon and imitation) that might obscure the words or the metre. The introduction into poetry of a metrical scheme based on values doubled or halved was neither altogether new nor confined to the French language, since it had preoccupied first the troubadours and trouvères and later the humanist or didactic composers who had set Latin poems of Horace and Virgil in the early 16th century, as well as the more recent composers of Protestant psalms, hymns and chansons spirituelles. Le Jeune’s largely homophonic settings of Vers mesurés strictly reflect the quantitative metres prescribed by the Académie by equating the long syllables with minims and the short with crotchets, although both values are often varied by melismatic subdivision. The predetermined, extra-musical metres (elegiacs, sapphics and so on) revolutionized the traditional rhythms of polyphony, often producing lilting patterns of great freedom and charm, while the simple vertical textures resulting from the strict alternation of two basic note values focussed attention on the harmonic structure and encouraged experiment. Though originally unrhymed, the texts of Le Jeune’s Airs of 1608 and Pseaumes en vers mesurez (1606) have rhymes added, perhaps posthumously.

In 1583 the hitherto elitist art of musique mesurée a l’antique developed by the Académie was made public by the printing of airs by Le Jeune to ‘measured’ poems by Baïf. The novel rhythmic vitality and variety of these pieces are matched in the 43 Italian pieces, published in the two books of Meslanges (1585 and 1612); these are formally canzonette alla napolitana, mostly based on structural and melodic models by Italian masters of the villanella. Another facet of the Académie’s work was the attempted revival of the Greek genera; Le Jeune experimented in particular with the chromatic tetrachord approximately reproduced by two semitones and a minor 3rd. The tetrachord formula, found in Quelle eau (1585), gave rise to Le Jeune’s most remarkable chromaticisms, notably in his settings of Durand’s elegy Qu’est devenu ce bel oeil? (from the second book of Airs, 1608) and the chanson spirituelle by Guéroult Hellas, mon Dieu (from Second livre des meslanges, 1612). According to his friend Artus Thomas and the organist Jehan Titelouze, Le Jeune excelled his predecessors in his understanding of the modes, as illustrated by the alternate rousing and calming effects on a gentleman of two airs performed during the wedding festivities of the Duke of Joyeuse in 1581.

The 12 psalms of the Dodecacorde, like the Octonaires of 1606, were conceived as a cycle according to the order of the 12 modes prescribed by Zarlino. These two collections were even used as illustrations of the system in didactic contexts in the 17th and 18th centuries. Other collections, such as the Printemps (1603) and the Airs of 1608 are also organized by mode, but were probably thus arranged at the time of publication. The French psalm texts of the Dodecacorde are by Marot and Bèze and the orthodox Genevan melodies are always present as a cantus firmus in long note values. The number of voices varies between two and seven for the different stanzas, each of which is set to different music, thus creating exceptionally extended cycles with alternating polyphony and homophony; for example, Psalms xxxv and cii incorporate 13 and 16 sections respectively. The second psalm in the collection follows a procedure typical of Le Jeune’s larger works (e.g. Le printemps, no.13); the voices accumulate in successive stanzas so that the work ends with a grand sonorous climax.

Le Jeune also twice set the Huguenot psalter, once in simple four- and five-voice harmony with the Genevan melody in the tenor or dessus (1601), and once in three-voice counterpoint with the melody either quoted in one voice or freely paraphrased (1602, 1608, 1610). The many editions of the four- and five-voice psalms printed at Paris, Geneva, Amsterdam, Leiden and London until the last quarter of the 18th century are proof of their great popularity. The Pseaumes en vers mesurez (1606) are settings of 21 French translations and three Latin paraphrases of the psalms by Baïf and d’Aubigné for two to eight voices; the collection also includes two graces set for four voices and a French translation of the Te Deum set for six voices. According to d’Aubigné, Eustache Du Caurroy was converted to musique mesurée on hearing two of Le Jeune’s psalms performed by over 100 singers at Paris, perhaps in 1605. The Octonaires de la vanité et inconstance du monde (1606) consist of the 36 eight-line strophes by the Calvinists Antoine de la Roche Chandieu, Simon Goulart and Joseph du Chesne, arranged in 12 groups of three settings in each mode (two for four voices and one for three); according to the preface by his sister, Le Jeune died before completing a further group of settings for five and six voices.

The ‘Préface sur la musique mesurée’ to Le Jeune’s settings of Baïf’s Le printemps (1603) extols the composer as the first to revise the affective and subtle rhythmic skill of the ancients and to combine it with the harmonic perfection achieved during the previous two centuries; the accompanying ode by Artus Thomas praises his sweet harmony and counterpoint, his science and mathematical secrets, his melodic artifices and his fine sense of movement. Mersenne claimed that Le Jeune used a keyboard instrument when composing, and ascribed his popularity to the variety and vivacity of his rhythms, his talent for melody and his skill in handling large ensembles of voices and viols. Occasional lapses in contrapuntal technique (dissonances resolved by leap, crossing of parts, leaps of a major 6th etc.) may have been the cause of censure by the severe contemporary masters from Flanders and Italy (reported by Mersenne). However, his music is distinguished by an instinctive choice of memorable motifs, rhythmic verve and élan and elegant forms and textures. His sonorous ensembles inspired French sacred music of the next generation and his musique mesurée provided models for the air de cour and ballet de cour.

Frank Dobbins, Isabelle His

Claudin de Sermisy

Claudin de Sermisy was a French composer born c1490 and parish in Paris, 13 October 1562. He was one of the recognized masters of the Renaissance chanson and a significant composer of religious music. Claudin, as his name appears in most contemporary publications, was associated with the royal court of France under several monarchs (particularly Anne of Brittany, François I and Henri II) as well as with the Ste Chapelle du Palais in Paris and was one of the most important contributors to the earliest French publications of polyphonic music. The numerous instrumental transcriptions and contrafacta of his compositions attest to the esteem in which he was held in his time.

Both biographical information found in beneficial records and the existence of present-day place names of which ‘Sermisy’ might have been an old form suggest that the composer came from the area around Noyon in Picardy, though the Ile-de-France and Burgundy have also been proposed as possible areas of origin. The earliest document to mention Sermisy (dated 19 July 1508) describes him as one of the lower clergy at the Ste Chapelle. Apparently he left the palace chapel choir in the late autumn of 1508, when King Louis XII, Queen Anne of Brittany and the Duke of Bourbon plundered the choir by taking its best singers for their private retinues. Papal records dated 4 February and 8 June 1510 identify Sermisy as a singer in the queen’s private chapel and a cleric of the diocese of Noyon. His name does not recur in the records of the palace chapel until 20 September 1533, when he was received as one of its 13 canons. Sermisy probably entered the king’s chapel after the queen’s death on 9 January 1514, at which time the queen’s chapel was dissolved and the number of singers in the Chapelle du roi more than doubled. He was one of 23 royal chapel musicians who performed for the funeral and obsequies of Louis XII in January 1515, at least eight of whom previously had been in Anne’s employ.

Sermisy remained in the royal chapel under King François I and almost certainly accompanied the new monarch to Italy in the summer of 1515. He was probably present when the royal chapel sang Mass with the papal choir during the meeting between François and Pope Leo X held in Bologna from 11 to 15 December 1515. After the meeting (which resulted in the Concordat of Bologna), Leo demonstrated his graciousness by rewarding several members of the king’s entourage. On 17 December he granted the position of apostolic notary to both the royal maître de chapelle Antoine de Longueval and the court’s chief composer, Jean Mouton, and on 30 January 1516 he granted dispensations to Sermisy (‘Claudio de Sermysy canonico Noviomensis’) and four other royal singers (Jean Richafort, Guillaume Cousin, Noel Galoys and Johannes Durand dit Le Fourbisseur) that allowed them to hold incompatible benefices. On 31 March the pope also gave the royal singer and organist Pierre Mouton a priory. Sermisy’s name follows immediately after that of Jean Mouton in a list of 34 royal chapel singers employed by François from 1 October 1517 to 31 September 1518. He probably participated in the festive masses performed jointly by the English and French royal chapels when François and King Henry VIII of England met at the Field of the Cloth of Gold from 7 June to 10 July 1520 and at Boulogne between 21 and 29 October 1532. At the latter meeting the French royal chapel apparently also sang Sermisy’s ceremonial motet Da pacem Domine.

By 1533 Sermisy had become sous-maître over the musicians of the royal chapel under the administrative headship of Cardinal François de Tournon, a diplomat, humanist, author of a text set by Sermisy and close friend of the king. The sous-maître directed the performances of the approximately 40 adult singers and six choirboys comprising the musical contingent of the king’s chapel during the 1530s and 40s (the sizable group of chapel clerics listed in the account books of the Maison du roi was independently administered), and he also was responsible for the care of the boys and the upkeep of the chapel liturgical and music books. As sous-maître Sermisy earned wages and living expenses totalling 400 livres tournois in 1533, 600 livres from 1543 to 1545 and 700 livres in 1547. He held this position to at least 1555, sharing it with Jean-Loys Hérault from 1543 to 1547 and with both Guillaume Belin and Hilaire Rousseau from 1547 to 1553.

Thanks to the exemption from local residency requirements enjoyed by all members of the private chapels of the French kings and queens, Sermisy was able to augment his salary throughout his career with numerous ecclesiastical benefices. In 1510 he obtained the Augustinian priory of St Jean de Bougeuennes in the diocese of Nantes and requested papal permission in the same year to hold three incompatible benefices. In 1516 he held a canonicate in Noyon, as noted above, and at some time he also obtained a canonicate at Notre-Dame-de-la-Ronde in Rouen, which he resigned before 10 December 1524 in favour of a chapel in the parish church of Camberon near Abbeville. At about the same time as his appointment as royal chapel sous-maître Sermisy was nominated to the eleventh canonry of the Ste Chapelle, a post that he kept until his death. This position offered both substantial revenue and a house in Paris, which he used in 1559 to shelter the canons of Saint Quentin after their city was invaded by Spanish troops. In December 1554 he added to this a prebend for the chapel of Ste Catherine in the cathedral of Troyes. Upon his death he was buried in the lower chapel of the Ste Chapelle.

Sermisy had two nephews. One, Jean, was an artist in stained glass; the other, Gilles de Sermisy, a priest and canon at Vivier-en-Brie and curé of St Samson in the diocese of Le Mans, wrote a laudatory poetic epistle as a preface to Pierre de Manchicourt’s Liber decimus quartus XIX musicas cantiones continet (Paris, 1539).

Sermisy was highly regarded by contemporaries. In one of his noëls, Jean Daniel placed him in a group of famous musicians that included Prioris, Josquin, La Rue, Févin and Janequin. Pierre Certon, a colleague of Sermisy’s at the Ste Chapelle, dedicated his second book of motets (1542) to him, as did Maximilian Guilliaud his Rudiments de musique practique (1554). In his Discours de la court (1543), a lengthy rhymed panegyric to François and the royal court, Claude Chappuys referred to the composer as the father of musicians, whose motets were sung at the king’s daily Mass. Barthélemy Aneau, in his Quintil Horatian, listed him with Certon, Sandrin and Villiers as ‘renowned musicians’, and in the prologue to the fourth book of Rabelais’s Pantagruel, Sermisy and other French musicians are pictured seated in a garden singing an indelicate song. In a déploration on his death by Certon, Sermisy is called ‘grand maistre, expert et magnificque compositeur’ and ‘le thresor de musique’.

Nor was his reputation confined to France. In a letter the Duke of Ferrara asked Sermisy to recruit singers for him; unable to do so, the composer apologized and sent him a copy of his motet Esto mihi. At least four of his masses circulated in Italy (the Missa ‘Domini est terra’, Missa ‘Philomena’, Missa plurium motetorum and the Requiem Mass), and his motets were widely disseminated throughout Europe. Instrumental versions of his vocal music circulated in over 60 printed collections from the 16th century, and his compositions were often drawn upon by composers as polyphonic models for masses. Si bona suscepimus, for example, was the model for Phinot’s mass of the same name, as well as for an anonymous keyboard piece and one for lute by Giovanni Maria da Crema.

In spite of his renown during his lifetime, he was rather quickly forgotten after his death. A new edition in 1572 of a collection of chansons omitted the only piece by Sermisy that was included in its first printing by Le Roy & Ballard in 1560. Some of his chansons reprinted in the 1560s and later are ascribed to other composers or to no-one in particular. Historians and editors of music have at times mistaken him for Claude Goudimel or Claude Le Jeune. More recently, however, he has been recognized as ‘a veritable dean of French musical life during the second quarter of the [16th] century’.

Sacred works

Both the shared aesthetic and the similar melodic and rhythmic vocabularies employed in Sermisy’s chansons and sacred music have tended to colour assessments of the latter until very recently. The euphonious harmonies, formal lucidity and relatively high degree of tunefulness characteristic of his motets, in particular, have suggested to some scholars that when composing sacred music he was unduly influenced by the burgeoning popularity of the homophonic chanson in Paris during the second quarter of the 16th century. Comparison of his sacred compositions with those of Févin, Mathieu Gascongne and especially Jean Mouton, however, strongly suggests that the translucent style of his masses and motets resulted primarily from his exploration and codification of tendencies already present in numerous sacred works composed by the preceding generation of royal chapel composers, rather than from any direct influence of the homophonic chanson. The relatively high degree of stylistic homogeneity distinguishing Sermisy’s sacred oeuvre from the works of his immediate predecessors arose from his strong tendency to favour the lucid and unambiguous presentation of text over contrapuntal elaboration, and not because he pioneered a new compositional method. In his text-sensitive approach to sacred composition, Sermisy was adhering to the official position on religious music in the Gallican Church during François’s reign, a position that adumbrated musical reforms enacted by the Council of Trent more than a quarter of a century later.

Sermisy composed sacred music throughout his long professional career and, after Mouton, was the most prolific French royal court composer of sacred polyphony from the first half of the 16th century. 13 complete Mass Ordinary settings, 78 motets and more than 20 pieces of liturgical polyphony (most of which were published by the first royal printer of music, Pierre Attaingnant) can be securely attributed to him. The earliest sacred works are two motets, Vox in Rama and Aspice Domine de sede, composed by 1518 and 1523 respectively. About half of his mass settings, motets and smaller liturgical settings were written before 1535. Anthologies devoted to his motets were published in 1542 and 1555 by Attaingnant and Le Roy & Ballard respectively. In 1548 and 1549 Attaingnant released volumes containing eleven polyphonic Magnificats by Sermisy (most of which were republished posthumously by Le Roy & Ballard in 1564), as well as falsobordone settings for alternate Magnificat verses and several other pieces of liturgical polyphony for the Mass and Offices. With the exception of a now-missing volume of Magnificats published in 1559, the remainder of Sermisy’s sacred output appeared piecemeal between 1535 and 1558.

Most of Sermisy’s mass settings are what are called ‘imitation’ or ‘parody’ masses. About half are based on motets by Sermisy himself or other composers associated with the royal court such as Févin, Gascongne, Richafort, Josquin and Jean Conseil. Three masses are based on secular models, and three derive significant portions of their melodies from plainchant, one of which, the Missa ‘Novem lectionum’, was well enough regarded to have been the subject of a foundation made to the Ste Chapelle in 1583 by Claude Rossignol. Unusually, two of Sermisy’s masses, the Missa plurium motetorum and the Missa plurium modulorum, draw from not one but multiple polyphonic sources. Although the style of Sermisy’s models affected his compositional decisions to a certain extent (most significantly in his only five-voice mass, the Missa ‘Quare fremuerunt gentes’), there is a constant tendency in the ‘imitation’ masses to return to the pellucid harmonic style typical of both his free motets and chansons. Thus, although the opening movement of the Missa ‘Philomena’ (which derives much of its melodic content from Richafort’s motet Philomena praevia) employs decidedly more angular melodies and colourful harmonies than is typical of Sermisy’s works, in later movements of the mass Sermisy departed from Richafort’s style by introducing repeated notes into motifs derived from the motet and by presenting the text in increasingly syllabic, word-generated and motivic melodies, this in turn leading to musical textures increasingly governed by consonance and euphony rather than by the demands of strict contrapuntal imitation. Sermisy’s masses are distinguished from those of Mouton by their greater conciseness and tunefulness, their greater stylistic homogeneity and their tendency to favour the creation of consonant harmony over the demands of strict counterpoint.

Perhaps the most characteristic sacred genre for Sermisy is the motet, the majority of his pieces being examples of free composition in four voices. His style in these works is marked both by great sensitivity to the rhetorical, syntactic and expressive implications of his texts and by considerable regularity of compositional technique. To project his texts clearly Sermisy employed lucid harmonies, generally varied the musical texture in accordance with natural text divisions, used uncomplicated rhythms and set the majority of syllables to slower notes at the beginning of phrases. When it was musically feasible he also consistently employed a hierarchic system of musical articulation that projected the syntax of the text at the highest level by means of formal repetitions and at middle and low levels by his use of part-writing, by choice of cadential ‘goal’ tones and by systematic placement of stereotypical ‘chansonesque’ rhythmic motifs. An important, but secondary, factor in his aesthetic was his apparent desire to create well-rounded musical form, a desire that encouraged him either to select texts that incorporated refrains (e.g. Great Responsory texts) or to devise new texts that reiterated phrases of rhetorical significance. So pervasive was this approach to composition that Sermisy employed elements of it even in several motets that paraphrase Gregorian chants (e.g. Alleluia, O filii et filiae and Veni sancte spiritus). When writing for three voices Sermisy usually worked in a more florid and contrapuntal style. His ten settings for five, six and eight voices tend to avoid strong cadential articulations and exhibit considerably less textural variety and more contrapuntal continuity than his four-voice motets.

Twenty additional sacred works were composed to serve specific liturgical functions. In 1548-49 Attaingnant published eleven polyphonic Magnificat settings, including one or more for each of the eight traditional Gregorian tones. These predominantly four-voice works set the odd verses of the canticle in falsobordone. Frequently the even verses are set as simple imitative duos or trios that employ the plainchant recitation formulae in loose paraphrase in the cantus or tenor. Half of the settings conclude by expanding to five voices, and several incorporate simple canons. Some earlier settings of Magnificat verses first published in Attaingnant’s motet series of 1534–5 employ a more animated rhythmic and contrapuntal style, in which the plainchant formulae inspire the melodic content of all parts through pervasive imitation. Most of the remainder of Sermisy’s liturgical polyphony was composed for use during Holy Week, including settings of the Tenebrae responses for the triduum sacrum, the Lamentations of Jeremiah, the Passion according to St Matthew and the Easter introit. All these works (with the possible exception of the setting of the Lamentations) require interpolated plainchants for performance and were undoubtedly composed to exploit the division of the royal chapel singers during the mid-1520s into a chapelle de musique and a smaller chapelle de plainchant. The words of Sermisy’s Passion derive solely from the Gospel according to St Matthew, as claimed in the title, unlike Longueval’s St Matthew Passion, which contains texts from all four gospels. Longueval’s is a motet Passion, whereas Sermisy’s is of the dramatic type. Sermisy composed three additional liturgical works for use at Mass, including strictly chordal settings of the responses to the Mass Preface and O salutaris Hostia (which was traditionally sung in the royal chapel at the moment of the Elevation of the Host) and a more contrapuntally complex arrangement of the Asperges me antiphon. One additional work, a Nunc dimittis, sets the Canticle for Compline in homorhythmic style. Most of the chansons spirituelles ascribed to Sermisy are contrafacta of his own earlier secular works.

Secular works

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 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. Seemingly this new approach to chanson composition was largely the work of French musicians such as Févin, Mouton, Ninot Le Petit and others from the younger generation of composers represented in Petrucci’s Odhecaton, Canti B and Canti C, who chose to write three- and four-part arrangements of popular melodies rather than to set poems expressing the rarefied sentiments of courtly love. 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.

Many of the texts set by Sermisy were by contemporary poets of the royal circle; he set 22 of Clément Marot’s texts – more than any other composer – and the initial results of their collaboration, which appear anonymously in the Chansons nouvelles, antedate by four years the first literary edition of the same poems in the Adolescence clémentine. Only exceptionally did Sermisy select 15th-century poems for his chansons. His texts are in French, except for one in Italian (Altro non) and another mostly in Gascon (Hari bouriquet). The favourite topic is unhappy love, whether courtly or profane. A few are of a popular sort, such as drinking-songs (e.g. Ceulx de Picardie), animal songs (e.g. Je ne menge point de porc) or ‘malmariée’ songs (cheerful pieces about young women who are dissatisfied with their ugly, tired old husbands – for example Pilons l’orge). Whatever the theme, the writing is usually simple and direct. Poetic types include several rondeaux, an exceptional ballade and many free, monostrophic types labelled ‘quatrain’ (e.g. Puisqu’il est tel, ‘cinquain’ (e.g. Contre raison), ‘sixain’ (e.g. Je veulx tousjours), ‘septain’ (e.g. Dont vient cela), ‘huitain’ (e.g. Pour ung plaisir), or ‘dixain’ (e.g. Orsus, Amour), depending on the number of lines they contain. In general the quality of the poems is high, except for those in a popular style.

Sermisy and other ‘Parisian’ composers published by Attaingnant favoured the Dorian and Lydian modes and the superius as the bearer of the principal melodic material. Cadential formulas and the rhythmic profiling of most phrases appear standardized. A majority of his lyrical chansons are set in what may be described as contrapuntally enlivened homophony. Some 25 pieces, however, are entirely or almost entirely homorhythmic (e.g. Je n’ay point plus d’affection), and about 50 are predominantly polyphonic, with free imitation and juxtaposition of voices, either in pairs or as one against three. A few have two voices in canon (e.g. Ton feu s’estaint), but sometimes this texture is maintained for only part of the chanson.

Most often in his four-voice settings Sermisy set decasyllabic poetic quatrains rhyming abba, observing an overall repetition scheme of ABCAA or ABCAA¹. For longer poems repetition was also used at the beginning, or at both beginning and end, for example in the patterns ABCADD, AABCDD, ABABCDEE, and so on. Regardless of the number of poetic lines, Sermisy’s melodies often observe a quadripartite structure in which the framing exterior sections are stable and the internal sections (B and C) are markedly unstable and contrasting in character. The rhyme schemes of the poetry, the repetition and phrase structure of the music and the tonal ordering of the cadences are all extremely lucid. The length of musical phrases is determined by that of the poetic line; the cadence corresponds with its end, whether or not there is an enjambement. Each decasyllabic line is usually divided musically by a caesura between the fourth and the fifth syllables, and a rhythmic pattern consisting of three anacrustic minims frequently begins the second hemistich.

Sermisy’s melodic lines are on the whole longer than those of many of his contemporaries (though the pieces are often shorter) and usually begin syllabically, becoming slightly melismatic towards the end. The chansons display an unusual amount of symbolism, not by chromatic, onomatopoeic or other detailed means that can be found in Italian madrigals or some French chansons of a later period, but by less extreme methods, such as descending lines for sad thoughts (e.g. Las je m’y plains), melismas for significant words or repetition of words and phrases for emphasis. The close imitation of the four voices in Martin menoit, on the words ‘serre Martin’, is a particularly appropriate musical equivalent of the text.

Sermisy’s chansons were reprinted countless times in France and abroad. Clément Marot in his Dialogue de deux amoureux mentioned two of them. Some, particularly the earlier ones such as Le content est riche, were transcribed more or less freely as many as a dozen times, for various instruments: viols, organ, clavichord and other keyboard instruments, cittern and, chiefly, lute, by French, Italian, German and Polish instrumentalists. Some were arranged for voice and lute, the accompaniment being more or less a reduction of the remaining vocal parts of the original. A few were models for parody masses, such as Clemens non Papa’s Missa ‘Or combien est’. Several were transformed into basses danses or other dances (some of their titles were cited by Rabelais). Jouyssance and the doubtful Au pres de vous appear in paintings. An important portion, if not the majority, of fragments identified in the fricassées published by Attaingnant and Moderne are derived from his chansons. Given Sermisy’s lifelong service to the Roman Catholic Church, there is a certain irony in the fact that many Protestant spiritual poems, such as those by Eustorg de Beaulieu, the psalms from the souterliedekens and both Scottish and German contrafacta, were sung to the tunes of his chansons.

Isabelle Cazeaux/John T. Brobeck

Soon on Atrium Musicologicum... #8

First of all, a happy New Year to all the followers of Atrium Musicologicum. The year of 2009 was a very prosper one and very dynamic musicologically.

I have completed the first series on composers previous to the Baroque. The Franco-Flemish school is completed (some more less-known composers will be add), and I intend to start a new one, this time on French composers of the 15th and 16th centuries (the so-called Composers of chansons) which will be the main entreprise for the near future.

Unfortunately, for practical reasons, I've paused my work on the Cantigas de Santa Maria. The work is not forgotten but it will rest for some time. I've started a new poll on "What would be your favourite Renaissance composer?", with Palestrina (15)leading and with Josquin in second place (10). Two giants of the History of Music.

We have reached a total c24.500 visitors to the blog, which, in my opinion, is a great achievement for the Early Music lovers (that was the main purpose since the beginning of the blog). Thank you all and, please comment and give suggestions for further works.

Estêvão Lopes Morago (Scores)

Christus Natus Est Nobis a 4 (ed. Luís Henriques)

[Hymns]


[Motets]
Christus Factus Est a 4 (ed. Luís Henriques)
De Profundis Clamavi a 4 (ed. Luís Henriques)
Jesu Redemptor a 8 (ed. Luís Henriques)
O Bone Jesu a 4 (ed. Luís Henriques)
Oculi Mei Semper ad Dominum a 4 (ed. Luís Henriques)
Revelabitur Gloria Domini a 4 (ed. Luís Henriques)
Sepulto Domino a 4 (ed. Luís Henriques)
Versa est in Luctum (ed. Luís Henriques)


[Psalms]

Francisco Martins (Scores)

[Masses]
Missa Ferialis a 4 (ed. Luís Henriques)

[Responsories]
Caligaverunt Oculi Mei a 4
Ecce Quomodo Moritur a 4
O Vos Omnes a 4
Sepulto Domino a 4 (ed. Luís Henriques)
Tenebrae Factae Sunt a 4 (ed. Luís Henriques)
Una Hora non Potuistis a 4 (ed. Luís Henriques)
Vinea Mea Electa a 4 (ed. Luís Henriques)