The illuminated songbook, circa 1470 for the wordly French cleric Jean de Montechu. It is rare. It is unique. It is the only known surviving manuscript that is in the shape of a single heart when closed and of two joined hearts when opened.
Image: http://marinni.livejournal.com/794662.html The capriciousness of love seems to be the subject of the first f the songbook's two miniatures. Fortune is represented by the lady on the wheel; a fair faced creature who has a monstrously evil side, symbolized by sword and batwing. The wheel suggests Dame Fortune's instability and the speed with which she can change her aspect. Above her head, a blind-folded cupid has just dispatched an arrow toward the young lady at the right. She, in turn, perhaps refusing to believe that anyone so elegant and beautiful as herself could possibly come to grief, casts her eyes down meekly and allows the arrow to fly home.
The songs in the book are light and popular, early Renaissance, written in Italian with a few in old French. The name Burgundian has been attached to the style of music in this songbook. The Dukes of Burgundy were then the greatest music patrons of all Europe, and anyone who could write a chanson tried to go to their court. Burgundian songs are usually love songs, set to music that expresses tender melancholy and sexual longing. They are written for three voices moving within a fairly narrow range, with one predominating voice carrying the melody. The three voices are supposed to be distinct and move with a certain degree of independence, so that the whole has a transparent texture.
Image:http://marinni.livejournal.com/794662.html The second miniature shows the same lady in another elegant dress, arm in arm with a handsome young man, perhaps Jean de Montchenu. The two lean gently toward one another as they stroll through a tapestried interior, absorbed, perhaps, in some tender conversation. The music is written in fifteenth-century notation, with the notes looking like modern whole and half notes, and there is a five line staff, but the notation is quite different from ours.
The charm of the melodies, the miniature proportions and the overall delicacy of the chansons find their visual equivalents in the songbook itself. These songs continued as a popular musical form long after the patronage of the dukes of Burgundy, and were often the starting points for more serious works. One of the greater Renaissance composers, Josquin des Prez, used his own and other composers’ chansons as the basis for masses.
ADDENDUM:
( see link at end )The Chansonnier de Jean de Montchenu, more commonly called the ‘Chansonnier Cordiforme’ (hereafter ) is one of the most discussed songbooks of its time. It is named after the high-ranking but unsavoury Savoyard cleric for whom it was made, who became bishop of Agen in 1477. It is unusual on any number of counts, not least its ingenious shape. The conceit of a book opening out into a heart-shape is unusual enough, but is already heart-shaped when closed; to open it is to discover two hearts joined together, but also another single, stylized heart. This refined symbolism is consonant with the decision to include no songs of an indelicate nature, none of the combinative pieces of which the generation whose music transmits (that of Ockeghem and Busnoys) was so fond. That this idealized view of love contrasts so singularly with the life of the book’s commissioner is one of the paradoxes that make such a fascinating document, so redolent of the culture that gave rise to it. Read More:http://em.oxfordjournals.org/content/37/4/679.extract
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