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Musical Forms

Chanson

A lyric composition to French words; more specifically, a French polyphonic song of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance.

The first important chanson composer was Machaut, who may have invented the treble-dominated type of song in two, three or four parts, with its rhythmically irregular, decorated melodic lines. Machaut's chansons were succeeded by those of two overlapping generations: a 'mannerist' group delighting in rhythmic and notational complexity and a younger group whose simpler songs foreshadowed those of the early 15th-century Burgundian school, represented at its best by Dufay and Binchois. In their chansons the poems are mostly about chivalric love, and the music refines the treble-dominated three-part textures of earlier generations. Later in the century the chansons of Busnois and Ockeghem weld the three voices into a more homogeneous texture. About a third of those by Busnois are in four parts, which by circa 1500 became standard.

Towards the end of the 15th century a generation of Franco-Netherlands musicians, including Josquin and Obrecht, brought to the chanson a new technique of imitative counterpoint applied to equal but independent melodic lines. Not all composers were as ready as Josquin, however, to abandon the standard types or formes fixes (ballade, rondeau, virelai) and set the popular poems that circulated widely throughout France.

The so-called Parisian chanson of the 1530s and 1540s, as represented in the publications of Attaingnant and the songs of Sermisy and Janequin, were more varied, in subject matter and in musical style, which tended more towards simple chordal textures. Sermisy excelled in sophisticated lovesongs, Janequin in expressing a vivacious French spirit and in his long, descriptive chansons. After 1550 chanson composers such as Arcadelt, Lassus and Le Jeune were increasingly influenced by the Italian madrigal, but the simpler type, strophic and with the voices predominantly in the same rhythm, flourished as the 'voix de ville' or 'vaudeville'. The chanson spirituelle, a secular piece with moralistic or sacred words, reflected the religious conflicts in late 16th-century France.