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- Title
‘Corps contre corps’, voix contre voix: conflicting codes of discourse in the combinative chanson.
- Authors
Zazulia, Emily
- Abstract
Lurking among the lavish leaves of 15th-century chansonniers are words designed to make one blush. Vulgar language of this kind occurs in combinative chansons: pieces that combine popular and courtly songs. These pieces are distinguished by their polytextuality, with courtly formes fixes poems sharing the stage with strophic texts in a coarser style that feature off-colour puns, sexual overtones and lewd imagery. But unlike other polytextual genres, these songs are also polystylistic: the top voice sings flowing, melismatic lines replete with syncopation while the lower voices, syllabically set in straightforward rhythms, evoke the chanson rustique. The stark stylistic stratification of both music and text is a witness to mid-15th-century views of registrally determined expression — in particular, the notion that a text’s social register defines and limits the viewpoints it can express. Their forced coexistence renders this genre rich with dialogical potential. Firminus Caron (fl.1460–75) realizes this potential in particularly unusual and provocative ways in his combinative chanson Corps contre corps / Ramboure luy / Cinq solz. This piece deploys popular, even obscene, musical and poetic discourses to articulate that which the courtly cannot. The stratified musical styles authorize the mixing of the courtly and the popular, allowing them to inhabit the same space despite contradictory literary messages. Because semantics are so closely tied up with rhetorical conventions, the song must resort to popular discursive modes in order to present views that the courtly can not, indeed may not, articulate on its own; it is only through contact with the bawdy, popular chanson that the sexually charged side of the courtly discantus can be brought to light.
- Subjects
CHANSONS (Renaissance music); 15TH century music; BAWDY songs; VOCAL music; CARON, Firminus; MUSICAL composition; POPULAR music &; classical music; MUSICAL aesthetics; MUSIC history
- Publication
Early Music, 2010, Vol 38, Issue 3, p347
- ISSN
0306-1078
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1093/em/caq051