By Paul Walker

“Hey Paul, could you come into my office for a moment? I’ve got something I’d like you to take a look at.”

When I heard the Music Librarian at the University of Virginia, Rya Martin, call to me from behind her desk, I stepped into her office and watched as she pulled a slender, small volume off the shelf. (You can see it for yourself online here.) I recognized immediately, based on cleffing, the first page’s elaborate T, and the language, that what she had was the tenor part to a print of twenty-three French chansons, bound in an elaborate nineteenth-century binding. Tipped into the volume, presumably by the person who had had it bound, was a page from a manuscript chansonnier of the time, showing on one side an attractive full-page painting of a shawm player outside a walled city. But what was it, exactly, that we had? Most of the pieces were anonymous, although Willaert, Sermisy, and Lhéritier were named as the composers of a few, and there was no title page or colophon, since those would presumably be in the first and last partbooks respectively. The book had come to UVA Special Collections as the only musical item in an important collection of early modern French books, and the Special Collections folks, who, understandably, had no idea what to make of it, had shipped it over to Music.

Little did I know just how important this small partbook would turn out to be, much less how much effort would be necessary to unlock its secrets. Fortunately, the collector had retained with the partbook a typed evaluation by François Lesure, head of the Music Division at the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, requested in 1959 by a London book dealer in preparation for its sale. Lesure was at that very moment heading up the first stages of the RISM project to catalog all known volumes printed before 1800, and he recognized immediately that our tenor partbook belonged together with two partbooks, labeled Alto and Bass, held by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich. The necessary publication information was in the Bass partbook, so now we at least knew that the Venetian printer Ottaviano Scotto had published the collection in 1535, but there was no evidence of the Soprano part anywhere, and this Tenor book had itself gone underground after its purchase around 1960.

My initial research led me to discover that a copy of the Soprano partbook, unknown to Lesure, had in fact survived in the private collection of a Chicago-based organist and amateur collector named W. N. H. Harding. But he was no longer living, and his collection had ended up, amazingly, in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. Now, with all four partbooks recovered (spread over three different countries on two continents), it was finally possible to offer to the world in complete form seven chansons that are unique to this source—including two by Adrian Willaert.

Once I knew what we had and that all four parts were available, I faced the task of figuring out what the pieces were, why there were so few composers’ names, and what a Venetian was doing issuing a volume of French-language pieces in 1535. Obviously, some reading on the topic of the sixteenth-century chanson was called for.

Chansons of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance took as their structural basis three different patterns of textual and musical repetition known collectively as forms fixes (fixed forms). These forms could be quite intricate and clever, but by the late fifteenth century composers were ready to free themselves from such complex mind games and to explore compositional strategies that gave them free expressive rein. Two different approaches grew up side by side. One was the adoption of the new methods of motet writing into chanson composition, to the extent that in the absence of text one could scarcely distinguish a sacred work in Latin from a secular one in French. These we refer to today as Franco-Flemish chansons, after the composers who cultivated them. A second approach involved the search for a new style that was deemed more suitable for secular music—namely, one less exalted and less complex. This type, known today as the Parisian chanson, developed over the course of the early sixteenth century until it found its maturity in the 1530s and ’40s. Scotto’s chansonnier falls toward the end of this type’s early development and, as it turns out, offers a valuable snapshot of it.

The Parisian chanson gets its name from its eventual geographic home, where the printer Pierre Attaingnant issued volume after volume from the late 1520s to the early 1550s. Over time, the French came to prefer a four-voice texture that was predominantly or exclusively homophonic, exemplified by such famous examples as Pierre Passereau’s “Il est bel et bon,” Pierre Certon’s “La, la, la, je ne l’ose dire,” or Guillaume Costeley’s “Allons, gay, gay, gay bergères.” But earlier, less well-known French composers working primarily in Italy had pioneered a very different type, with much use of contrapuntal and even imitative textures, although handled, as one might expect, considerably more freely than is the case for their Franco-Flemish counterparts. These often took as their texts vignettes of a humorous or even bawdy nature, as a result of which the eminent musicologist Howard Mayer Brown dubbed them “narrative chansons”—in contrast to the more homophonic types preferred by those composers working in the north and generally employing more traditional texts focused on love, which he called “lyrical chansons.”[1] To achieve the desired vernacular feel, composers frequently turned to contemporary popular song for both lyrics and tunes, in marked contrast to contemporary church music’s reliance on Gregorian chant with its liturgical texts and ancient melodic patterns.

Ultimately the narrative type faded as composers in and around Paris preferred to focus their attention on the lyrical type, but it was very much alive in 1535. It turns out, then, that Scotto did not need to rely on Attaingnant’s publications to acquire his repertory, since much of it was created (and most of it appears to have circulated) on Scotto’s side of the Alps. Still, the number of anonymous pieces is noteworthy.

Willaert’s five chansons are undoubtedly the most intricately crafted in the collection, including his single contribution to the narrative type, “Quand j’étais à marier.”  Here the narrators, first the husband and then the wife, bemoan their beggarly state of mud and rags brought on first by marriage, then by a cooling of the original ardor and the arrival of several children. The parts weave in and out in myriad contrapuntal combinations of two, three, and four voices, passing the presumably borrowed melody back and forth in an imitative texture. The contemporary lutenist Francesco da Milano published an arrangement of this piece one year after Scotto’s print, but because Willaert’s original is unique to Scotto’s collection, the vocal setting has remained unavailable in complete form until now.

Also among the unique offerings is “Vous me faites tant rire,” with my favorite vignette: Robin goes to a wedding wearing his clogs and tall hat and dances like a fool until his friends laugh so hard they pee their pants. Another chanson found nowhere else is “Et la fan fan,” featuring rollicking triple meter, nonsense syllables, and women traveling to southern France for purposes that go unmentioned in polite society. These sit cheek-by-jowl with more elevated, lyrical works such as the perennial favorite “Tant que vivray,” a homophonic setting by Claudin de Sermisy of a poem by Clément Marot. In all, Scotto offers us a true potpourri of the early Parisian chanson’s styles and types, all a joy to sing. Discover this lesser-known repertory for yourself!


Paul WalkerPaul Walker is Professor Emeritus of Music at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, where he continues to teach organ lessons. His most recent editions include, in addition to this one, vols. 12 and 13 of the Collected Works of Dieterich Buxtehude (Broude Brothers, 2018). He is also spearheading the ten-volume Collected Works edition of Sebastian Knüpfer, to be published by the American Institute of Musicology in the series Corpus mensurabilis musicae. His latest book, Fugue in the Sixteenth Century, was recently published by Oxford University Press.



[1] Howard Mayer Brown, “The Genesis of a Style: The Parisian Chanson 1500-1530,” in Chanson and Madrigal 1480-1530: Studies in Comparison and Contrast, ed. James Haar (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964), 21–25.