Secular Songs of Love and Life
March 11 & 12, 2000

by Audrey Wong

Baroque Choral Guild presents "A Bouquet of Chansons," a cappella works, hand-picked by chorus music director Mitchell Covington, which display the varying colors and contrasts of human love and life. All secular and all in French, the selections range from tender to lusty, ridiculous to sublime, reverent to naughty, subtle to raucous.

The chanson bloomed in the 16th century, at a time when French was overtaking Latin as the predominant language of Europe. Thanks also to the invention of the printing press, thousands of chansons were made available to the public and became the most popular type of secular music sung or played by musicians--professional and amateur alike--in courts, theaters, homes, schools, and in the streets. Sung throughout most of Europe, they were frequently arranged for instrumental solo or ensemble.

During the reign of King Francis I (r. 1515-1547) Paris was an important musical center of Europe. The French royal chapel employed some of the greatest musicians of the century and publisher Pierre Attaingnant turned out vast quantities of music written by Parisian composers. "Parisian chansons" flourished--settings of poems that followed no fixed rhyme schemes, with patterned repetitions, sometimes narrative and often humorous, witty and/or titillating.

Sixteenth-century Paris

Clement Janequin (c. 1485-1558) was one Paris's foremost chanson composers. Since not much is known about his birth or musical training, speculation about his life is based on information found in documents. He was a clerc and later a priest in Bordeaux. In 1530 he wrote a chanson for Francis I's entry into Bordeaux, and was named chantre du roi. During that decade Attaingnant published four volumes of Janequin's works.

Janequin settled permanently in Paris in 1549 and although he never held an important regular position in cathedral or court, his music remained popular. He composed short, pithy chansons and also immense programmatic ones that imitated natural sounds. The Guild performs Janequin's Au joly jeu, a rollicking song of wooing and winning; and Le chant des oyseaux, a long onomotopoeic piece that imitates the calls of thrushes, robins, nightingales and cuckoos.

From that same period, the Guild also performs Pierre Passereau's (fl. 1509-47) ever-popular Il est bel et bon, a song that imitates hens clucking in double-entendre. Passereau's (the surname means "sparrow") output consisted almost entirely of chansons and although he was considered a "minor" master, he was published extensively by Attaingnant.

Nineteenth-century Paris

Three centuries later Claude Debussy (1862-1918) was born near Paris. His aunt, Clémentine de Bussy, was responsible for his upbringing. He did not experience much formal schooling but did receive piano lessons from age eight, and in 1873 he entered the Paris Conservatoire. He composed orchestral pieces, chamber music, piano and choral works, opera, and songs. Considered an impressionist because of his identity with the Art Nouveau movement, he set out to be in the center of contemporary aesthetics.

The Trois chansons, which the Guild performs, is from a 1908 collection, although two of the three works were written in 1898 when Debussy conducted an amateur choir at the home of Lucien de Fontaine, a patron of the arts. The works connect the styles of the past with the harmonic techniques of the time. Moreover, the texts of these chansons are poems written by Charles d'Orleáns, grandfather of Francis I under whose reign French chansons bloomed in Paris three centuries earlier. The works are not thematically related. Dieu! qu'il la fait bon regarder! is a shimmering love song; Quant j'ai ouy le tabourin's lazy tune wanders above quick percussive-like vocal accompaniment; and Yver, vous n'estes qu'un villain scolds winter for its cruelty.

Outside the Conservatory
A few years younger than Debussy and later considered his foremost successor, Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) also entered the Paris Conservatoire but did most of his composing outside of academia. From around 1900 he was a member of a group of self-professed "outcast" artists who called themselves the Apaches. Regular meetings with this progressive community expanded his intellectual horizons and provided Ravel with lifelong friends and collaborators. During 1914-1918 he served as an ambulance driver on the front and afterwards returned to composing in a post-war Paris where contemporary music flourished.

The Guild performs Trois chansons, written in 1914-15, during Ravel's prolific pre-war period. Like Debussy's Trois chansons, these songs harken back to the French Renaissance chansons. Trois beaux oiseaux revives the traditional chanson, with treble voice basically "accompanied" by supporting lines. Nicolette and Ronde recall the programmatic chansons of Janequin: Nicolette tells a "Little Red Riding Hood" story--with a twist, while Ronde is a don't-wander-into-the-woods warning that features a catalog of folktale monsters.

Contemporary chansons

Representing our own times, Morten Lauridsen's (b. 1943) Les chansons des roses are thematically related, being set to Rainer Maria Rilke's poems on roses. Like the 16th century Parisian chansons composers, so Lauridsen weds his music to text. In his own words "These exquisite poems are primarily light, joyous and playful, and the musical settings are designed to enhance these characteristics and capture their delicate beauty and sensuousness."

Lauridsen, a Portland, Oregon, native is currently composition professor and chair of the composition department, USC School of Music. He has composed six major vocal cycles as well as shorter works and has established his place in the standard vocal repertoire performed regularly by choruses and vocal artists. In a review on National Public Radio, Lauridsen was described as a composer whose work "demonstrates that it IS possible for important contemporary music to speak directly to the human heart."

Also included on the programs are several chansons for small ensembles and for solo voice. Baroque Choral Guild Chorus, usually more at home with the comforts of German and Latin texts, has worked diligently on its French diction and takes great pleasure in presenting an entire program of this rich and varied genre.


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