Structures sonores de l'humanisme en France: de Maurice Scève: 'Délie, object de la plus haulte vertu' (Lyon 1544) à Claude Le Jeune, 'Second livre des Meslanges' (Paris, 1612) (review)

The aim of this book is to formulate 'une théorie de l'incantation à l'apogée de l'humanisme musical' (p. 43). As the use of 'incantation' here illustrates, Pierre Bonniffet uses terminology which often makes life difficult for the reader. In his first chapter, he reviews the prosody and phonology of French as described by sixteenth-century commentators on, for example, long and short vowel quantities. Starting from the pronouncments of Meigret and the metrical theory of Antoine de Baïf, his argument thus relies in part on quantitative scansions:

show growing interest in the 'référent rythmique et le phonèmes du poème' (p. 217). A review of the influence of Ficino in France leads to a survey of the contemporary musical theory of rhythm and musical mode. In Janequin's treatment of text in 'Le rossignol', 'les paroles, au lieu de guider la musique, en deviennent le matériau sonore' (p. 288), words like 'ainsi' and 'tous' being used as pure sound in the imitation of birdsong. In contrast, other musical settings foreground semantic values, illustrating, through their reflecting of textual structure, themes deriving from Ficino (pp. 304–307). A possible gremlin in the form of the composer Sandrin's tendency to write melismata over atonic syllables is explained away thus: 'Il n'y a, dans une structure vocale sonore, que des phonèmes et des silences; aucune syllabe n'est muette et tous ces mélismes remplissent ici . . . une fonction de passage entre deux degrés important des lignes mélodiques' (p. 331). As the poetry–music relation becomes autonomous, 'nous n'y trouvons plus le rythme "formel" de la danse' (p. 372). More than 2500 metrical psalm-settings were published during and after the reign of Henri IV and they are marked by the ascendancy of words over music in increasingly syllabic and homophonic settings. Dissonance in the later Janequin is related to textual meaning (pp. 397–405) and Le Jeune is stimulated to musical experiment in psalm-setting and 'vers mesurés à l'antique', the latter allowing 'une rythmique musicale calquée sur la prosodie poétique' (p. 467). The tessituras of Le Jeune's settings imply the use of women's voices. The final chapter presents the poetic text as the focus of attention in secular song from 1570, the process culminating in the 'chant à voix seule' with instruments. Overall, the movement from historical overview to close reading of both verse-texts and music-texts makes for rewarding, if taxing, reading.