Texts

About the Literary Texts of the Chansons nouvelles

Love, in all its varied forms, is the prevailing subject of the poems set to music in the early volumes of the Chansons nouvelles. Here we find a diverse literary tradition that gave voice to sentiments sometimes elevated and courtly, other times risqué and popular. Such books present a range of types and styles sharply divided along generic lines that offer sophisticated readers contrasting representations of two very different and highly stereotyped social worlds--one elite, the other popular--that appear throughout the work of writers such as Clément Marot, François Rabelais and others active during the second quarter of the sixteenth century. One part of the chanson repertory depends closely on an aesthetic of serious love, with its rhetoric of fidelity, deferred desire, and almost spiritual suffering. The long metrical patterns and elegantly balanced quatrains and huitains of such lyrics lend themselves well to the refined melodic manner that is the epitome of the mid-century chanson, with its clear alignment of rhyme, prosody, and musical line.

Alongside such serious chansons, however, are text types and musical settings that contrast strongly with the restrained lyricism and serious sentiments of the courtly songs, and dwell instead on rustic and ribald themes drawn from popular culture. They also use musical language quite different from that of the serious chansons. Avoiding the closed formal designs and long lyrical lines favored by composers like Du Tertre, Goudimel, and others represented in the Chansons nouvelles, composers who set these lighter texts instead preferred a style tending towards musical contrast and rhythmic animation to carry dialogue and descriptive narrative. Imitations of everyday speech and satirical representations of the infidelities of clerics and of peasant lovers were not part of the serious aesthetic.

The musical responses to this poetry are considered in Freedman's introductory essays for the Chansons nouvelles series.

Below we assemble various resources, links and encodings of the texts themselves.

Browse the Texts (and Text Worksheets)

• Review the contents of the Chansons nouvelles here by composer and first line.
• Read all the texts as spreadsheet according to the order in which they appear in the Chansons nouvelles (with information about rhymes).
• The text worksheets are useful as a way to chart the musical patterns heard in a particular piece. Find one for any piece here (the worksheets are bound together for each book of Du Chemin's series).

Translations

We also prepared some informal translations of the texts of the Chansons nouvelles, as an aid for analysis and reconstruction.

• Request a translation
• Submit a translation

The Texts as Literature (and as TEI)

The Literary Sources

Some of the texts of the Chansons nouvelles appear in various literary sources of the sixteenth century. A catalog of the French chanson of the sixteenth century prepared by our colleague Annie Coeurdevey (in memoriam) lists many of these sources, as excerpted here.

Further on the literary world of the French chanson of the sixteenth century, see:

• Lachevre, Frederick. Bibliographie des recueils collectifs de poèsies du XVIe siècle (du Jardin de plaisance, 1502, aux Recueils de Tousssaint du Bray, 1609). Paris: Leclerc, 1901. Digitized U of Texas library
• Frank Dobbins, “Recueils collectifs de musique et de poèsie,” in Poète et son oeuvre: De la composition à la publication, ed. Jean-Eudes Girot, pp. 147-72. Geneva: Droz 2004. WorldCatRecord

The Poetry and the Text Encoding Initiative

As part of our work with the Chansons nouvelles, Marilyn Miller prepared an edition according to the Text Encoding Initiative XML standard. She regularized orthographical variants among the voice parts as given in Du Chemin's editions, and of course removed the word repetitions occasioned by the music in order to create what are in some cases hypothetical versions of the poems as regular huitains or dizains. She also included metadata about rhyme and meter in the TEI version.

• TEI encoding of all texts
• Orthographical variants among the parts (as spreadsheet)
• Rendering of all texts as Google Document (based on TEI)

Marilyn Miller also prepared a TEI edition of all the texts in a famous literary anthology of the middle years of the sixteenth century, La fleur de poesie (Paris 1543), in which the texts of many famous chansons of the period were printed without their music.

• TEI encoding of La fleur de poesie.
• Facsimile of La fleur de poesie (Paris, Lotrian, 1543), on Gallica