Part-Songs, Madrigals, Chansons
Clément Jenequin
Also spelled: Jannequin
Born: c. 1485, Châtellerault, France
Died: 1558, Paris, France
Clément Janequin (born c. 1485, Châtellerault, Fr.—died 1558, Paris) was a leading 16th-century French composer of chansons, famous for his program chansons, part-songs in which sounds of nature, of battles, and of the streets are imitated.
He worked in Bordeaux in the service of Lancelot du Fau, who became bishop of Luçon, and later for the bishop of Bordeaux. He entered the priesthood and in 1525 became canon of St. Emilion. Variously employed after 1529, when the bishop died, he was at times a student and settled in Paris in 1549. From about 1555 he was singer, and later composer, to Henry II, although not a full-time servant of the King.
Although he set psalms and composed two masses and a motet, Clément’s fame lies in his 286 chansons (Below). His program chansons include “La Bataille de Marignan” (“La Guerre”), imitating sounds of battle; “Voulez ouir les cris de Paris,” with Paris street cries; and “Le Chant des oiseaux,” with the sounds of birds. His style shows fine formal balance and subtle handling of texts. He is rare among great composers in that he never held an important and regular position as musician or composer to a nobleman or a bishop or archbishop. (Britannica)
Clément Janequin's spectacular entertainment chansons jump-started French music printing, spread his fame across sixteenth-century Europe, and earned him lasting success with vocal ensembles and audiences around the world.
Clément Janequin was the musical poster boy for the Valois kings of France, a bestseller for the fledgling sixteenth-century music-printing industry and, notwithstanding his status as an ordained priest, a major supplier of hymn-style harmonizations of Huguenot melodies. Ever since the sixteenth century, vocal ensembles have embraced his barking dogs, chirping birds, and thundering horse hoofs, and then moved beyond the bird and battle songs to a repertory rich in lyric beauty and Rabelaisian wit.
This first in-depth biography looks at Janequin's revolutionary approach to entertainment music, his pioneer status in the developing music-printing industry, and his contributions to sacred music in the turmoil that followed the Reformation (including the first known hymn-style harmonization of what became known as Old One Hundredth). It traces his early life in Bordeaux, Luçon, Auch, and Angers during the period when Pierre Attaingnant made Janequin a central name in early French music publishing, and subsequently the composer's transition to Paris, where, as the first composer to make the attempt, he put his revenues from music printing (from the firms of Nicolas Du Chemin and Le Roy & Ballard) at the core of his economic-survival strategy. Recounted with both scholarly detail and Janequinian humor, the volume includes an extensive selection of musical examples.
(Rolf Norsen, introduction for his Book Clement Janequin)
The Chanson
Chanson, (French: “song”), French art song of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The chanson before 1500 is preserved mostly in large manuscript collections called chansonniers.
Dating back to the 12th century, the monophonic chanson reached its greatest popularity with the trouvères of the 13th century, and can still be found in the mid-14th-century lais (a verse-song form) of the composer and poet Guillaume de Machaut. Only the melodies survive. The monophonic chansons show the development of intricate musico-poetic forms deriving from the songs of the slightly earlier counterparts of the trouvères, the troubadours. These forms were eventually simplified to become the formes fixes (“fixed forms”) of the accompanied chanson.
The chanson for vocal ensemble had several antecedents. A chanson designed for two or three had appeared; around 1460 the polytextual chanson was in evidence, with two or more singers singing different texts simultaneously. By the end of the 15th century composers were beginning to look to a new kind of chanson texture. The work of the Flemish composer Josquin des Prez shows the gradual change to a style of chanson with four voices singing the same text, sometimes in melodic imitation but also in a homophonic (chordal) style.
In the next century the four-voice style gave way to five and six. Although the formes fixes of the previous two centuries were no longer used, the formal control and standard patterns of the chansons separates them from the Italian madrigals of the same years. Only later, in the work of Adriaan Willaert and Jacques Arcadelt (both of whom also wrote madrigals) did the styles begin to merge as the formal design of the chanson became less strictly reliant on balanced phrases and repeated material and more determined by the melodic imitation as a basis for structure.
The later years of the 16th century saw the perfection of the polyphonic (multipart, usually with interwoven melodic lines) chanson in the work of Orlando di Lasso; and they saw the more homophonic style influenced by the attempt to match words to music in the measured verse à l’antique proposed by the members of La Pléiade (a French society seeking a return to classical poetry and music) exemplified in the work of Claude Le Jeune. After 1600 the chanson yielded to a new kind of song: the air de cour for solo voice with lute accompaniment.