Fortune's demesne: the interrelation of text and music in Machaut's Il mest avis (B22), De fortune (B23) and two related anonymous balades*
Machaut's balades Il mest avis (hereafter B22) and De fortune (hereafter B23), adjacent in the music section of the Machaut manuscripts, form a diptych on the theme of Fortune. In relation to each other, their poetic texts offer complementary perspectives on the power of Fortune: B22 is static, detached in tone, a clerk commentating in a public sententious statement upon the political manifestations of Fortune; conversely, B23 is personal and dynamic, a spurned lady's personal testimony to the power of Fortune to change happiness into sorrow. Despite these contrasts, the two poems share a diction markedly different from that of the twenty-one balades that precede them in the music section.
Poetic anthologies of fifteenth-century France and their relationship to collections of the French secular polyphonic chanson
Kathleen Frances Sewright Poetic Anthologies of the Fifteenth Century and their Relationship to the French Secular Polyphonic Chanson (under the direction of John L. Nádas) This dissertation is a study of four poetry sources—three manuscripts and one early print—and their relationship to the fifteenth-century French secular polyphonic chanson. Three of the poetic sources are true anthologies, and all were compiled from smaller, internally consistent collections of poems, many of which poems survive with musical settings in notated sources of the period. This suggests that at least some of the exemplars from which this poetry was copied were themselves notated. The first chapter examines Berlin, Staatliche Museen Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Kupferstichkabinett MS 78.B.17 (the “Rohan Chansonnier”), and identifies collections from Paris and central France, as well as collections featuring poetry by Alain Chartier and members of the French royal court. Chapter 2 investigates Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS fonds français 1719, and determines that at least two, and possibly three of its constituent collections were copied from musical exemplars, including one from the French royal court of the 1470s and 80s. Chapter 3 studies Antoine Vérard’s ground-breaking print Le Jardin de plaisance et fleur de rethoricque, an extremely important repository of many fifteenthcentury chanson texts. These texts, in nineteen collections, were organized according to a carefully conceived strategy, probably by a former employee of Charles d’Orléans, the poet
New publications in Dutch on music before 1700 and a newly discovered 15th-century Dutch manuscript with songs
lishment of English as the principal language for formal exchanges, even at the expense of German, French and Italian. Education, publishing and library acquisitions have followed, and as a result, research in other languages is harder to find, let alone to read. So it is worth signalling some important new contributions in Dutch to the history of Renaissance and Baroque music, some in Musica antiqua, the new Belgian equivalent to Early music.