The Art of Grafted Song

Abstract

Fourteenth-century France witnessed the emergence of a new school of lyric, as the so-called formes fixes crystallized and the Ars nova revolutionized musical practice. Charting the emergence of this new lyric order from ca. 1300 to ca. 1380, The Art of Grafted Song demonstrates that despite these new departures, the long-established principle of borrowing within French lyric continued to inspire poets and composers. Cutting across disciplinary boundaries, this study traces citation, quotation, allusion, and other kinds of appropriations in fourteenth-century lyrics with and without music to build a more intimate understanding of song at this time and of the shared experience of poetry and music. It argues that citational practice was integral to experiments in form, genre, and style that gave rise to the new tradition. Exploring textual and musical reminiscences enhances our understanding of how poets and composers devised their works and engaged one another and their audiences in formal contests or puys and in informal lyric displays, and casts light on the reception and circulation of individual works. It also provides valuable clues about when, where, and in which milieus the polyphonic chanson and its sister lyric forms emerged and flourished. It reveals that older works often persisted longer in the shared imagination than we tend to suppose; we learn, too, about attitudes to authorship and the importance of memory in this age of literacy. All this enables us to better contextualize the contribution of Guillaume de Machaut, who is traditionally viewed as the great pioneer of lyric composition in this period, shedding light on his compositional process, on what he learned from his predecessors, and how he honed his art in response to his contemporaries.

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