Stylistic Differences Between the Parisian Chansons of Claudin De Sermisy and Clément Janequin

In the late 1520's 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 Clément 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 Petrucci's three great anthologies from the opening years of the century - the Odhecaton (1501), Canti B (1502), and Canti C (1504) - and Attaingnant's publications of the 1530's and 1540's, 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 Petit's 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 1

Many of Sermisy's 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 Sermisy's 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 2

Figure 2 (cont.)

Although Sermisy's 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