Music and the Language of Love: Seventeenth-Century French Airs
Simple songs or airs, in which a male poetic voice either seduces or excoriates a female object, were an influential vocal genre of the French Baroque era. In this comprehensive and interdisciplinary study, Catherine Gordon-Seifert analyzes the style of airs, which was based on rhetorical devices of lyric poetry, and explores the function and meaning of airs in French society, particularly the salons. She shows how airs deployed in both text and music an encoded language that was in sensuous contrast to polite society's cultivation of chaste love, strict gender roles, and restrained discourse.

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Music and the Language of Love: Seventeenth-Century French Airs
Simple songs or airs, in which a male poetic voice either seduces or excoriates a female object, were an influential vocal genre of the French Baroque era. In this comprehensive and interdisciplinary study, Catherine Gordon-Seifert analyzes the style of airs, which was based on rhetorical devices of lyric poetry, and explores the function and meaning of airs in French society, particularly the salons. She shows how airs deployed in both text and music an encoded language that was in sensuous contrast to polite society's cultivation of chaste love, strict gender roles, and restrained discourse.

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Music and the Language of Love: Seventeenth-Century French Airs

Music and the Language of Love: Seventeenth-Century French Airs

by Catherine Gordon-Seifert
Music and the Language of Love: Seventeenth-Century French Airs

Music and the Language of Love: Seventeenth-Century French Airs

by Catherine Gordon-Seifert

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Overview

Simple songs or airs, in which a male poetic voice either seduces or excoriates a female object, were an influential vocal genre of the French Baroque era. In this comprehensive and interdisciplinary study, Catherine Gordon-Seifert analyzes the style of airs, which was based on rhetorical devices of lyric poetry, and explores the function and meaning of airs in French society, particularly the salons. She shows how airs deployed in both text and music an encoded language that was in sensuous contrast to polite society's cultivation of chaste love, strict gender roles, and restrained discourse.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780253354617
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Publication date: 04/07/2011
Series: Music and the Early Modern Imagination
Pages: 408
Product dimensions: 6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.20(d)
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

Catherine Gordon-Seifert is Professor of Music and Chair of the Music Department at Providence College.

Read an Excerpt

Music and the Language of Love

Seventeenth-Century French Airs


By Catherine Gordon-Seifert

Indiana University Press

Copyright © 2011 Catherine Gordon-Seifert
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-35461-7



CHAPTER 1

Music and Texts: An Overview of the Sources


A General Description of the Air

The French air, or solo song, was the most abundantly cultivated musical genre throughout the seventeenth century. There were airs de cour (courtly airs), airs à boire (drinking songs), airs à danser (dance airs), airs sérieux (serious airs), chansonnettes ("little" songs), and brunetes (any air with pastoral references, the actual name brunete not appearing in publications until the first decade of the eighteenth century). Airs of all kinds were sung in private settings (such as the ruelle, or salon) or were part of public productions (ballets, plays, and eventually French operas). Airs also appeared in various kinds of religious works and in French-language cantatas.

No matter what the performance venue was, by the 1650s one type of air, the serious air, would come to define the essence of French musical style. This new type of air, emerging mid-century, bore little resemblance to its predecessor, the air de cour. The change in style, exemplified in serious airs by Michel Lambert, Bénigne de Bacilly, Joseph Chabanceau de La Barre, and Sébastien Le Camus, was evidently prompted by Lambert's teacher, the aristocrat-singer Pierre de Nyert, to whom Lambert dedicated his first published collection of airs in 1660. As the story goes, Nyert traveled to Rome during the 1630s, where he heard Italian monodies. Upon his return to France in 1638, he was determined to combine French and Italian vocal styles. Thus, the application of Italian monody to French songs as demonstrated by Nyert inspired mid-seventeenth-century composers to write airs that reflected the "natural declamation of the text."

Serious airs were considered the finest musical genre for solo voice and accompaniment during the seventeenth century in France, but light airs were also quite popular. Generally speaking, serious airs are characterized by rhythmic patterns and melodic contours mimetic of natural speech, which often warrants meter changes and irregular phrasing. Another type of air, considered by contemporary sources as light (the air léger), appears occasionally amid the serious pieces. Typically, light airs are chansons à danser (particularly gavottes and minuets), vaudevilles, and airs de mouvement, and are characterized by measured rhythms, symmetrical phrases, and tuneful melodies. Most, though not all, of the light songs found in collections of serious airs are actually hybrid pieces. Later in the century, Christophe Ballard called these chansonnettes, petits airs, or petits airs sérieux. Many of these are based on more stately dance types, particularly the sarabande and gavotte, and are usually less measured and tuneful than dance airs and popular songs.

Serious and light airs are best differentiated according to subject matter, for the topic of the text determined to a great extent its poetic and musical features. Pierre Perrin, in the introduction to his Recueil de paroles de musique (1667), differentiated between serious and light airs by the subject of the lyrics and their affective connotations: serious airs concern "various accidents or events such as presence, absence, return, pursuit, desire, hope, fear, fury, disdain, or enjoyment, ... [which] call for tender and grave texts; ... and the Chansonnettes ... are better suited to playful or rustic words."


The Publications

The number of serious airs published between 1650 and 1700 is astounding. Robert (and later Christophe) Ballard published over one thousand anonymous airs in their Livre[s] d'airs de différents autheurs (1658-94), averaging thirty airs per year with each book. After 1694, Christophe Ballard, who had taken over the business upon the death of his father in 1673, began publishing Recueils d'airs sérieux et à boire every month well into the eighteenth century. In addition, the Mercure galant, which was published monthly beginning in 1672, included one air in each issue. Publications devoted to serious airs for treble voice and bass by a single composer appeared less frequently. In 1660, Lambert published his first book of airs, Les Airs de Monsieur Lambert(reprinted in 1666 and revised in 1669). Bacilly's first and second books of serious airs, the Nouveau livre d'airs and Second livre d'airs, were published in 1661 and 1664, respectively; both collections were revised and combined as Les Trois livres d'airs in 1668. La Barre published Airs à deux parties avec les seconds couplets en diminution in 1669; Le Camus' son published a collection of his father's airs posthumously in 1678; and Honoré d'Ambruis' Livre d'airs avec les seconds couplets en diminution was issued in 1685. Lambert issued a second publication of airs entitled Airs à une, II, III, et IV parties in 1689. In addition, many airs by Lambert, Bacilly, and others circulated in manuscripts, some even copied directly from printed sources, particularly from the Ballard collections.

Serious airs published by a single composer during the 1660s constitute the most important repertory during the period. These airs are particularly significant because they were published under the supervision of the composers themselves; thus, these represent the versions they wanted to present to the public. Several composers, in fact, complained that inaccurate renditions of their airs were circulating either in manuscripts or in print (most likely referring to the Ballard collections). Lambert addresses this issue in his first publication of airs:

Even though my inclination has never been to present any [of my works] to the public, I allowed myself after all to give in to the persuasion and reasoning of my friends, the strongest of which is that there are a considerable number of my airs either printed or circulating among people that are not according to my intention.


Thus, the airs considered in this study are those corrected and approved by the composers themselves (or in the case of Le Camus, by his son, who was also a composer). Unlike the airs that circulated in manuscripts or appeared in the Ballard collections, the airs in printed collections devoted to one composer feature corrected bass lines, figured bass, and score format (Figure 1.1a), rather than with the treble and bass placed on separate folios as practiced by Ballard until 1685 (Figure 1.2). Most single-composer editions also include doubles, or ornamented settings of second strophes, also referred to as second couplets (Figure 1.1b).


The Composers

Michel Lambert, Bénigne de Bacilly, Joseph Chabanceau de La Barre, and Sébastien Le Camus were the first and only composers to write and publish serious airs in the new style. Even though Le Camus' works were published posthumously by his son in 1678, his airs were nonetheless composed earlier than this date and thus need to be considered alongside the other airs sérieux composed by his contemporaries.

Furthermore, all but Bacilly held important posts under Louis XIV and other members of the royal family and were thus recognized to be among the most important composers of the day.

Michel Lambert (1610-96) was the most famous and influential composer of airs in his day. Born in Champigny, he moved to Paris as a boy to work for Louis XIII's younger brother, Gaston d'Orléans. Lambert was recognized as a talented singer and singing master as early as 1636 and held several court appointments before becoming maître de musique de la chambre du roi in 1661, one year after the publication of his first collection of airs, Les Airs de Monsieur Lambert. Many of his contemporaries praised his abilities: Pierre Perrin, for example, called him the "Amphion of our days," and Tallemant des Réaux referred to him as the "French Orpheus." Writing several years after Lambert's death, Lecerf de la Viéville judged Lambert to be the greatest master of the composition and performance of airs during the seventeenth century. Lecerf claimed that Lambert's style was to be emulated because it was "natural, clear, graceful, and immediately charming."

Bénigne de Bacilly (ca. 1625-90) was a distinguished composer, singing teacher, and perhaps even a priest. Although he apparently held no official position under Louis XIV, many of his works, both sacred and secular, were printed by the king's official publisher, the Ballard family. All of the dance and drinking airs in Ballard's Livres de chansons à danser et à boire (editions of 1663-68) are by Bacilly, and at least one scholar credits Bacilly with having improved the quality of the melody in dance airs during the 1660s. He is known today primarily for his treatise, Remarques curieuses sur l'art de bien chanter (1668), a study of seventeenth-century ornamentation, pronunciation, and syllabic quantity as it pertains to singing in French, published seven years after Bacilly's first collection of serious airs, Nouveau livre d'airs, was printed (Richer, 1661). He not only published an extraordinary number of airs of all kinds throughout the second half of the seventeenth century, he was also an entrepreneur who sold his works from his own residence on the Rue des Petits-Champs. Strangely enough, Bacilly rarely acknowledged himself as the composer of the songs he published, even attributing to Lambert his own airs used as examples in his treatise on singing. Bacilly's publications, however, can be attributed to him on the basis of his initials (B. D. B. or D. B., or just B.). The works for which he did claim authorship were publications with no contemporary counterparts: his treatise on singing and his two volumes of spiritual airs.

Joseph Chabanceau de La Barre (1633-78) was praised for "his capacity in the composition of music" and "his dexterity in [playing] the organ." At the age of nineteen he accompanied his older sister, Anne, one of the leading singers at the French court, to Sweden, where she had been summoned by Queen Christine. La Barre remained there for two years. After the death of his father, Pierre de La Barre, he was appointed organiste ordinaire de la chapelle du roi in 1656. His first and only complete publication of airs, Airs à deux parties, appeared in 1669. Other vocal works in French and Italian are scattered throughout various additional publications. He also composed several keyboard works that appear in manuscripts, including the Bauyn and Parville. In 1674, four years before La Barre's death, Louis XIV gave him the benefice of the Benedictine Abbey of Saint-Hilaire in the Diocese of Carcassonne. He was thereafter referred to as L'Abbé de La Barre.

Sébastien Le Camus (ca. 1610-ca. 77) first entered into the service of Louis XIII in 1640 and was appointed as intendant de la musique to Gaston d'Orléans in 1648. In 1660, he became surintendant de la musique to Louis XIV's bride, Marie-Thérèse, sharing the post with Jean-Baptiste Boësset. Upon the death of Louis Couperin in 1661, Le Camus became ordinaire de la musique de la chambre along with Nicolas Hotman. Jean Rousseau claimed that when Le Camus played the treble viol, he "imitated all that a beautiful and accomplished voice can do ... to the point that even the memory of the beauty and tenderness of his execution erases all that has been heard up to the present on this instrument." Madame de Sévigné described him as "made of the gods," and fellow composer La Barre claimed that Le Camus was "the first to compose airs which express the words." Evidently this opinion was confirmed by Jean-Baptiste Boësset, Honoré D'Ambruis, and Michel Lambert.


Publications by Lambert, Bacilly, La Barre, and Le Camus: A Description

The airs in Lambert's Airs de Monsieur Lambert (1660/1666/1669), Bacilly's Trois livres d'airs (1668), La Barre's Airs à deux parties(1669), and Le Camus' Airs à deux et trois parties (1678), which constitute the focus of this study, are presented in score format and include melody and figured bass. Of the sixteen pieces in La Barre's edition, eleven include a bass line with text; only a few of these eleven airs include figures (Figure 1.3). The other five consist of a melody line accompanied by an untexted figured bass.

Like many of La Barre's airs, the first strophe of Bacilly's pieces includes a bass line with text and figures. While none of the bass lines in Le Camus' publication include text, all the airs in Lambert's publication include two separate bass lines, one with a text to be sung and one with the addition of figures to be played (Figures 1.1a and 1.1b).The two bass lines presented in the Lambert pieces are almost identical, except for the addition of notes to the version with text to accommodate syllables. There is also an occasional difference in pitch.

The publication format used for these four editions differs significantly from that used by Robert Ballard in his collections of anonymous airs published between 1658 and 1694. Until 1685, Ballard printed the melody on one folio and the bass line on the other, almost always added a text to the bass line, and did not include figures until 1669 (Figure 1.2). The indication basse continue does not appear in the publications until 1674. There is also an absence of bar lines until later in the century. This arrangement not only suggests a former practice carried over from the contrapuntal orientation of the Renaissance but also indicates the manner in which the Ballard family printed music, using movable type instead of engraving.

It was not until the 1670s that Christophe Ballard began omitting texts to bass lines, adding figures to the bass more regularly, and specifying lute accompaniment under the opening measures of the part. As mentioned above, he did not begin printing pieces in score format with the addition of bar lines until 1685.

Pieces by Lambert, Bacilly, La Barre, and Le Camus reflect the transition in compositional style from a contrapuntal orientation to a more progressive homophonic texture. The inclusion of a figured bass accommodated "modern" practice wherein a treble melody was sung with instrumental accompaniment. Yet the addition of the song's text to the bass in airs by Lambert, Bacilly, and La Barre allowed for other performance options besides that of solo singer with instrumental accompaniment: the melody and bass line could have been sung as a duet, with or without accompaniment, or both treble and bass could have been played by instruments. It was also possible that the melody could have been sung alone without any accompaniment, though this is not an option that Bacilly recommends. Performers of pieces from the Ballard collections could have also exercised all three options. The least desirable choice would have been to sing the bass line with a treble instrument playing the melody, for as Bacilly notes, "The bass voice is suitable for almost nothing but the emotion of anger, which appears rarely in French airs. As a result, this voice range must be content with part singing." Even though Robert Cambert was referring to drinking songs in two and three parts in the l'avis au lecteur to his Airs à boire a deux, et a trois parties, he provides some useful options for performing airs, including playing instruments instead of singing, demonstrating a great flexibility in the approach to performing airs of all kinds:

You will also observe that most of the Airs in three parts can
be sung by the Bass and Treble voices without the third Part,
and played in Ensemble with the Bass, or on the Treble Viol,
as I have done in several Concerts.


All airs, with the exception of those in the Le Camus publication, differ from pieces in the Ballard publications by the inclusion of doubles (second verses or couplets) set to the melody of the first strophe and ornamented with diminutions, or passages (Figure 1.1b). The doubles in publications by Lambert and La Barre are set with a figured bass line, while Bacilly's doubles include the ornamented melody alone without bass. When singing Bacilly's doubles, one would have to use the bass line of the first verse of the air as accompaniment, presumably as is or with minor adjustments. By contrast, in many of the Ballard pieces, two strophes of the text are given, but only the first appears with music. According to Bacilly, a singer was expected to improvise diminutions in order to accommodate the changes in syllable length and the different character or affect of the second verse. In performing the pieces from the Ballard collections, then, singers were most likely expected to add ornamentation to the melody of the second strophe even though the diminutions were not written out.


(Continues...)

Excerpted from Music and the Language of Love by Catherine Gordon-Seifert. Copyright © 2011 Catherine Gordon-Seifert. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments xi

Note on Quotations, Translations, and Musical Examples xiii

Introduction 10

Chapter 1 Music and Texts: An Overview of the Sources 11

A General Description of the Air 11

The Publications 12

The Composers 13

Publications by Lambert, Bacilly, La Barre, and Le Camus: A Description 17

The Song Texts 22

Poetic Structure 32

Style or Elocution: Figurative Language and Poetic Syntax 35

Poetry and Rhetoric 40

Chapter 2 Rhetoric and Meaning in the Seventeenth-Century French Air 41

Seventeenth-Century French Sources on Rhetoric and Music 41

Persuading the Passions 52

Chapter 3 Musical Representations of the Primary Passions 58

The Primary Passions 60

The Agitated Passions 64

The Modest Passions 78

The Neutral Passion: Le Contentement 87

Summary 89

Chapter 4 Setting the Texts 96

Painful Love 98

Bittersweet Love 126

Enticing Love 129

Joyous Love 132

Summary 133

Chapter 5 Form and Style: The Organization and Function of Expressions, Syntax, and Rhetorical Figures 138

Form (Disposition) 138

The Organization of Expressions in Short Airs 139

The Organization of Expressions in Long Airs 144

Form in Single-Strophe Airs 151

The Rhetorical Sections of a Piece: Their Function and Expression 153

Style (Elocution): Poetic Structure, Punctuation, and Rhetorical Figures 158

Chapter 6 L'Art du Chant: Performing French Airs 185

À Haute Voix: The Importance of Orality 186

The Art of Proper Singing: Tone and Style 188

Ornamentation 192

The Pronunciation of Seventeenth-Century French 202

Syllabic Quantity 210

Tempo 216

Le Mouvement 217

Repeats 218

Basso Continuo Accompaniment 220

Chapter 7 Salon Culture and the Mid-Seventeenth-Century French Air 230

The French Air and Conversation 230

Musical Seductions 237

Galanterie and the Air: Undercurrents of Eroticism and Lessons of Morality 243

Women Singing Airs as Men 260

Chapter 8 The Late-Seventeenth-Century Air and the Rhetoric of Distraction 268

The Air after 1670 268

Songs and the Rhetoric of Distraction 271

Pleasure, Airs, and the New Rhetoric 275

The Legacy of Lambert, Bacilly, Le Camus, and La Barre 280

Appendix: Translations for Musical Examples and Emblems 289

Notes 297

Bibliography 345

Index 369

What People are Saying About This

W. Metcalfe

In this exceptionally fine, pioneering book, Gordon-Seiffert (Providence College) examines 'serious airs' (love songs) by Lambert, Bacilly, La Barre, and Le Camus written in the two decades before Jean-Baptiste Lully's first opera (1673), which marked the beginning of a paradigm shift in French baroque song. Serious interest in studying/performing this repertoire has prospered only since the 1990s, thanks in part to Gordon-Seiffert. Salon airs were considered weak musically, set to 'banal' poetry, unrewarding to sing. Their apparent artificiality and simplicity, which this book reveals to be the result of complex relationships between French literary and rhetorical theory and musical devices matched to those exemplars, made it easy for musicians to ignore them. The author argues that detailed study of these relationships, of the erotic code meanings of the 'banal' texts, of continuo matters, of the rhetorical significance of ornaments and the style of declaiming the words ('forcefully, but not too forcefully'), of the meaning 'behind' the simple notation can open a rich aesthetic world for modern singers. A hard but rewarding read, and a must for would-be performers of 'airs.' Stephan Van Dyck and Stephen Stubbs' CD of La Barre (Airs ą deux parties, 2000) will prove a valuable companion resource. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students, faculty, professionals. —Choice

Indiana University - Robert Hatten

This book will be a model for how to tease the expressive implications out of every contour, rhythm, and ornament. . . . Gordon-Seifert's approach to musical expressive meaning will prove very valuable for students of other Baroque repertories.

W. Metcalfe]]>

In this exceptionally fine, pioneering book, Gordon-Seiffert (Providence College) examines 'serious airs' (love songs) by Lambert, Bacilly, La Barre, and Le Camus written in the two decades before Jean-Baptiste Lully's first opera (1673), which marked the beginning of a paradigm shift in French baroque song. Serious interest in studying/performing this repertoire has prospered only since the 1990s, thanks in part to Gordon-Seiffert. Salon airs were considered weak musically, set to 'banal' poetry, unrewarding to sing. Their apparent artificiality and simplicity, which this book reveals to be the result of complex relationships between French literary and rhetorical theory and musical devices matched to those exemplars, made it easy for musicians to ignore them. The author argues that detailed study of these relationships, of the erotic code meanings of the 'banal' texts, of continuo matters, of the rhetorical significance of ornaments and the style of declaiming the words ('forcefully, but not too forcefully'), of the meaning 'behind' the simple notation can open a rich aesthetic world for modern singers. A hard but rewarding read, and a must for would-be performers of 'airs.' Stephan Van Dyck and Stephen Stubbs' CD of La Barre (Airs ą deux parties, 2000) will prove a valuable companion resource. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students, faculty, professionals. —Choice

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