Chanson

A French-language secular song, especially the polyphonic repertory cultivated by composers of the Renaissance. Its forms and styles changed across centuries of French music.

Polyphony: Music in which two or more independent melodic lines sound together. Renaissance chansons often set several independent vocal lines against one another.
Text setting: The musical shaping of words through rhythm, pitch, phrasing, and emphasis. Composers used syllable placement and declamation to make French texts intelligible and expressive.
Trouvères: Medieval northern French poet-composers who wrote songs in Old French, often about love and courtly life. Their monophonic songs form part of the medieval French background to later chanson traditions.
Mille regretz: A four-voice chanson attributed to Josquin des Prez, known for its restrained setting of a poem of sorrowful parting. Its expressive restraint offers a counterpoint to more animated Renaissance chanson styles.
French poetry: Poetry composed in the French language across a range of historical forms and traditions. Chanson composers shaped musical phrases around French verse and its patterns of stress.
Text painting: The use of musical gestures to evoke or illustrate words and images in a text. Renaissance chanson composers sometimes matched musical motion to vivid poetic images.
Burgundian School: A group of fifteenth-century composers associated with the court of the dukes of Burgundy. Its composers helped establish the polyphonic French-language song repertory before the chanson's sixteenth-century heyday.
La guerre: A chanson by Clément Janequin that evokes the sounds and excitement of battle through vocal effects. It is a celebrated example of the chanson's imitative, scene-painting style.
Imitative counterpoint: A compositional technique in which melodic lines enter successively with related material. Many Renaissance chansons use successive entrances to bind their vocal parts together.
Voice exchange: A technique in which musical material passes between voices, often with altered or exchanged parts. Interweaving vocal lines can make a chanson's phrases feel conversational.

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