Words and Music

Words and Music 1. [see also Popular Song]

1. Medieval

Until the late 14th c. the performance of much medieval poetry (including narrative poetry) involved music. The exact proportion is difficult to gauge since the number of surviving melodies corresponds in varying degree with the number of literary texts: e.g. at least two-thirds of the trouvère repertory survives with melodies, compared with roughly one-tenth of the 2, 600 troubadour poems. Music survives for all the major lyric genres (such as the chanson (canso), alba or aube, pastourelle, rondeau, ballade, motet, and lai) and, though the evidence is more sparse, for several narrative genres as well, such as chansons de geste and saints' lives. One reason why music was not transmitted as widely as texts is because (as now) it required specialist skills both in copying and in reading the notation: we cannot assume, then, that in all cases where music does not survive, it was not intended. Much of it must have circulated only orally. On the other hand, the fact that several manuscript collections of songs contain only texts suggests that for certain patrons the words of the songs were of independent interest.

The relations between words and music vary noticeably from genre to genre. Troubadour poetry is marked by its metrical variety: the melodies have a similarly unfixed structure which creates its own pattern separate from the texts. Many troubadour songs fit the broad structural outline aab (the first section with its repeat—aa—is approximately the same length as b), to which both text and music conform. However, within this broad strophic framework poets employed enormous metrical ingenuity (in the entire corpus, some 1, 200 metrical schemes are used only once). The melodies are also highly unpredictable: many involve a range of repetitive forms, whereas others are continuous or through-composed. More significantly, the variety of musical pattern often appears to have little connection with the rhyme-scheme and formal structure of the texts. Indeed, where several melodies exist for a single poem, their forms often differ, to the extent that one may have an aab structure and another be through-composed. This divergence has caused much controversy in attempts by modern scholars (in the absence of other evidence) to determine the musical rhythm of the songs from the poetry, since metrical irregularity in the texts makes it difficult to establish rhythmic regularity in the music.

Other lyric genres in the 12th and 13th c. have simpler, though still varied, musical structures. Trouvère poetry borrows much from the troubadours, but the general trend is towards lighter, less elaborate or intellectual melodies. Genres from Pierre Bec's ‘popularisant’ register [see Lyric Poetry, 1a] (especially refrain, rondeau, estampie, virelai, ballette) are characterized by their association with dance, and hence by short, strongly rhythmic, tuneful melodies. Narrative song, such as the pastourelle, aube, or reverdie, represents a place where the other-wise highly divergent traditions of high courtly style and lower-style dance song meet: in musical terms, this results in short repetitive patterns, tonal stability, and balanced phrases. Some pastourelles have melodies that resemble the few that survive for the chansons de geste. These consist of two or possibly three phrases that would have been repeated for each laisse. The lai, by contrast, is constructed out of a principle of progressive repetition (related to the sequence), in which each versicle may have a different metrical pattern and a different melody, but may also recapitulate on earlier material. Lai melodies have highly distinctive, short, formulaic phrases, often repeated within versicles as well as across them.

Although it is usually assumed that in any of the above genres the words were composed first and then ‘set’ to a tune, there is evidence to show that the opposite was often the case. The best example is the widespread practice of contrafactum composition, where new words are given to an existing tune. The very existence of this practice indicates that there is no necessary expressive relation between the words and the music in medieval song, since the same melodies may be used for quite unrelated texts, and often texts in different languages. 13th-c. motets are a particularly interesting case in point, since two, three, or four voice-parts, all with different texts, are sung simultaneously, and because verbal and musical composition are mutually interdependent; for just as motet texts are composite arrangements of refrains and formulaic phrases from ‘popular’ love poetry, so the music is similarly generated by refrain melodies, to the extent that it is often difficult to perceive where the compositional division between text and melody lies.

In the early- to mid-14th c., when song form enters a more stable phase with the so-called formes fixes established by poet-composers such as Jehan de Lescurel and Philippe de Vitry, words and music achieve a highly sophisticated relation in the output of Guillaume de Machaut. Both a celebrated poet and the most important composer of the century, his work is highly innovative, often employing extreme formal constraints yet also full of experimentation with retrograde form, pitch levels, polyphonic balance, and complex rhythmic architecture. No subsequent French poet, however, manages to match Machaut's facility in the two arts which, after his death, begin to diverge. Deschamps's Art de Dictier (1392) makes a distinction between ‘musique naturelle’ (poetry) and ‘musique artificielle’ (music), thus recognizing a technical gulf between them even as he insists that the conjunction between the two ‘musiques’ forms the most complete expression of the sweetness of sound. His argument does not so much represent a change in the way in which music and poetry were traditionally conceived, as an attempt to give poetry greater credence precisely by appealing to the notion that it is a form of music in its own right. From now on composers and poets tended to work separately, and much lyric poetry was not written to be sung. Text settings were common, however, and established 15th-c. composers, such as Guillaume Dufay and Gilles Binchois set numerous rondeaux, including texts by Christine de Pizan, Alain Chartier, and Charles d'Orléans. But the popularity of the formes fixes waned towards the 16th c., and new genres such as the madrigal, lute song, and the four-voice ‘Parisian chanson’ (first printed 1528) attest to a move away from complex polyphonic structures to clearer, simpler settings, in which the often highly dissonant superimposition of voices and texts gives way to a desire to imitate or present a text more directly and freely. Such was the case for the poets of the Pléiade, most of whose lyric poetry was written with a view to possible musical performance. Later in the 16th c. the Académie de Poésie et de Musique was specifically created with the aim of making an alliance on fresh terms between poetry and music.

[ARTB]

Bibliography

• J. Stevens, Words and Music in the Middle Ages (1986)

2. After 1600

[see also Opera; Lully; Chanson Française] In the 17th c. music's role in text setting was to imitate the words and intensify the poetry; Molière's music-master in Le Bourgeois gentilhomme comments on the absolute necessity of adapting the tune to the words. In the first few decades of the century airs de cour were extremely popular. Subsequently, Molière and Quinault contributed texts, but most were either based on Italian pastorals by Renaissance authors or modelled on Italian literature from an earlier period (Desportes became the most important local writer of the texts). It was not uncommon for composers of airs de cour to ignore the natural rhythms of the text. The airs de cour became more expressive in the second half of the century and were called either plain air or air sérieux in contrast to other lighter and more popular song types of a pastoral or amorous nature.

By championing Italian music, the 18th-c. Encyclopédistes implied that music should be given a more important role in the collaboration between text and music. The secular cantate française of the early 18th c. is an example of Italian influence on French music at this time, even though the French respect for the text ensures that the attempt to unite two national styles still results in a distinctively French style. The initial literary format of the cantate française text was established by J.-B. Rousseau.

The mid-18th c. saw the introduction of the romance, a simple, usually strophic song based on a sentimental text, often by Florian. J.-J. Rousseau's Le Devin du village (1752) contains one of the first examples of the romance, which became common in the emerging genre of opéra-comique. During the Revolution and the Empire the romance was extremely popular. Texts were sometimes topical while others were written in imitation of medieval troubadour verse. In the first few decades of the 19th c. the pastoral element became less important, yet the sentimental still persisted into the 1830s, appealing to its bourgeois audience with titles such as ‘La Mère du matelot’ and ‘La Bénédiction d'un père’. The best-known composers of romance in the early 19th c. were Boïeldieu, Loïsa Puget, Monpou, and Romagnesi. The majority of texts were unmemorable, although Chateaubriand contributed some of merit.

Texts of literary value, however, were used by two romance composers, Louis Niedermeyer and Hippolyte Monpou. Niedermeyer's Le Lac (n.d.), set to Lamartine's poem, was one of the most popular romances of the 19th c. Niedermeyer had some problems in wedding the text to the traditional strophic form of the romance, as did Monpou in setting the poetry of Hugo and Musset. Monpou was deliberately trying to break with tradition, yet he does not appear to have had the technical ability to carry through his ideas successfully.

The regeneration and transformation of the romance from a salon piece into a more serious art form, the mélodie, was stimulated by Romantic poetry and the introduction of the Schubertian lied into France. Translations of Schubert's lieder into French were called mélodie to distinguish them from romances, but the label mélodie was first used for a French composition by Berlioz in his Neuf mélodies (1829), based on poems by Thomas Moore. Early in his career Berlioz wrote a number of songs (including the majority of the Moore mélodies) in the simple strophic settings of traditional romance. Yet he soon began to use a freer structure in which the musical phrasing was principally determined by the rhythms and phrasing of the text. Les Nuits d'été (1840-1), based on poems from Gautier's La Comédie de la mort, is his most successful example of this freer setting.

The mélodie is distinguished first by the use of texts of high literary value; secondly, by the much freer musical setting forced upon composers by the freer style of versification of the poets; and thirdly, by the more important role given to expressive piano accompaniment with the aim, not of dominating the text, but of better expressing it. It took a while for the mélodie to divorce itself from its romance origins and for composers to adopt a freer rhythmic style that could be adapted to the texts.

The high point of mélodie composition is in the last quarter of the 19th c. and the early 20th c., with composers such as Fauré, Henri-Eugène-Marie Duparc (1848-1933), and Debussy, and the poets Baudelaire, mallarmé, and Verlaine. Verlaine was the catalyst for Fauré's most inspired settings, in particular La Bonne Chanson (1892). Fauré sought to bring out the general feeling of a poem, and despite the fact that he had no compunction in at times altering the order of lines in a poem, his mélodies follow the structure of the verse with an extraordinary sensitivity to poetic nuance. In his later songs his vocal style becomes more declamatory, although always marked by a restrained lyricism. Duparc often converted his text into prose and his musical structure was usually dictated by the words, with the piano part aiming at expressive evocation of the text. For Debussy the vocal line became intensified declamation. In his Proses lyriques (1892-3) and Chansons de Bilitis (1897-8) he set prose poetry by himself and Pierre Louÿs. Debussy also based orchestral works on poetry. He insisted that his music for Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (1892-3), based on a Mallarmé poem, was decoration not narrative.

Literature continued to be important to French composers in the 20th c. Poulenc wrote vocal works set to poetry by Jammes, Claudel, Éluard, Apollinaire, and Cocteau. Henry Barraud has based compositions on works by Hugo, Péguy, and Rimbaud, and from 1955 until his death in 1973 Jean Barraqué based all his music on a French translation of The Death of Virgil by Broch. Messiaen wrote many works to his own texts. But perhaps the most significant use of poetry in 20th-c. France has been by Pierre Boulez, particularly in his settings of Char in Le Marteau sans maître (1952-4) and Mallarmé in Pli selon pli (1957-62). Boulez has stated that he does not aim to communicate the text in his music directly (you can go to the poem itself for that), but to offer some more fundamental understanding of the way in which the poem is structured and even created. In Pli selon pli, Mallarmé's poetic structure is mirrored in the formal structure of the music, but it could also be said that Boulez's musical techniques aim to encapsulate Mallarmé's views on language.

[Kerry Murphy]

Bibliography

• F. Noske, French Song from Berlioz to Duparc, rev. edn. (1970)
• J. Anthony, French Baroque Music, rev. edn. (1978)