Miracles of Notre-Dame / The Harp Consort
Gautier de COINCY

medieval.org
muziekweb.nl
Harmonia Mundi USA 907317
2003


recording: June 11-18, 1999
L'Abbaye de Saint-Michel-en-Thiérache, Aisne, France

AMOURS

1 - Cui donrai je mes amours   [0:21]
2 - Amours, qui bien ses enchanter (instrumental)   [2:18]
3 - Hui matin a l'ajournee   [8:19]


MA VIELE

4 - Douce dame (instrumental)   [3:18]
5 - Ma viele   [3:32]
6 - Efforcier m'estuet ma voiz (instrumental)   [1:49]


CHANÇONETES

7 - Cui donrai je mes amours   [0:15]
8 - Quant ces flouretes florir voi (instrumental)   [1:58]
9 - Puisque voi la fleur novele   [0:39]
10 - D'une amour quoie et serie (instrumental)   [1:46]
11 - Conductus De la sainte Leocade   [1:15]
12 - Talenz m'est pris orendroit (instrumental)   [1:29]
13 - Pour Dieu traiez vous en la (instrumental)   [0:51]


CONDUCTUS

14 - Conductus Hyer matin a l'enjornee   [0:55]
15 - Motet Hyer matin / Benedicamus Domino   [1:02]
16 - Ja pour yver   [13:29]


ROYNE CELESTRE

17 - Amours dont sui espris (instrumental)   [2:16]
18 - Royne celestre   [9:25]
19 - Conductus S'amours dont sui espris   [1:13]
20 - Entendez tuit ensemble   [13:32]






The Harp Consort
Andrew Lawrence-King

Voices:

Jennie Cassidy (#5, 16, 18, 20)
Caitríona O'Leary (#3, 5, 7, 9, 16, 18, 20)
Clara Sanabras (#3, 16, 18, 20)
Virginie Landré (#3, 5, 16, 18, 20)
Stephen Harrold (#1, 3, 5, 14, 15, 16, 18, 20)
Ian Honeyman (#3, 5, 11, 15, 16, 18, 19)
Julian Podger (#3, 5, 11, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20)
Ian Harrison (#3, 5, 16, 18, 20)
Paul Willenbrock (#16, 18, 20)
Michael Metzler (#3, 16, 18, 20)


Jane Achtman • vielles (#2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 13, 16, 18, 20)
Hille Perl • vielles (#2, 3, 4, 6, 10, 12, 13, 16, 20)
Ian Harrison • bagpipes (#13), shawm (#6, 17, 20), cornetto muto (#4)
Steven Player • citole (#2, 3, 4, 6, 10, 12, 13, 16, 20)
Gian Luca Lastraioli • medieval lute (#2, 3, 4, 6, 10, 12, 13, 16, 20)
Michael Metzler • percussion (#3, 6, 13, 20)
Andrew Lawrence-King • medieval harp (#2, 3, 6), psaltery (#4, 12, 13, 16, 20), organetto (#8, 10)






Jean Miélot: Miracles de Nostre Dame, c. 1456
Douce 374, folio 84v, Bodleian Library Oxford





Miracles of Our Lady

Instruments of all kinds were there, and the musicians sang with full voices. And they knew how to do all kinds of popular songs well. And with excellent vocal skills, they sang motets and conductus.

–Panthere d’Amors, Nicole de Margival, 13th century*

Why should the Devil have all the good music?

–Popular song, Larry Norman, 1977**

If troubadours sowed the wind in southern France, around the year 1200 the trouvères, their northern cousins, reaped the whirlwind. The high-flown nobility of Provençal lyrics and the academic sophistication of university-educated poets was brought down to earth by the impish naughtiness of cathedral choristers and the notorious decadence of Parisian students, by the vigorous energy of working-class musicians and the pagan excesses of peasant celebrations.

The Play of Daniel, today considered to be one of the supreme achievements of medieval music-drama, was written not to stimulate festive revelry, but to control and limit traditional carousing. Subdeacons at Beauvais Cathedral used the pretext of the Feast of Fools to indulge – within the church itself – in donkey-riding; laughing, noisiness and running around; clapping, dancing and playing instruments; wild ringing of the cathedral bells; partying, dice-games and fortune-telling at the altar; violence and open disrespect towards the religious hierarchy. By incorporating all these practices into the ordered structure of a dramatised bible-story, especially one that associated such bad behaviour with the wicked Babylonians, the church could present blasphemy as religious example, using a pagan carnival to dissipate harmlessly any excess liveliness within the confines of the cloister.

In the years leading up to the codification of this Ludus Danielis, Gautier de Coincy, Prior of nearby Vic-sur-Aisne, was at work on his own magnum opus, similarly intended to re-direct profane desires to religious ends. Les Miracles de Nostre Dame recounts numerous miracles attributed to the Virgin Mary, interspersed with lyric prayers and songs, on the model of the Roman de la Rose, a contemporary secular romance. According to Jacques Chailley, who published the first complete edition of the songs in the year of the present writer's birth, Gautier began to translate Latin miracle stories into French verse around the year 1218. His work was the inspiration for many subsequent vernacular collections of Miracles, most notably Alfonso el Sabio's Cantigas de Santa Maria, which even paraphrases some of Gautier's verse with tunes that have survived to the present day as folk-songs in the Spanish oral tradition.

Gautier's masterpiece includes a verse Sermon on Chastity, addressed to the nuns of Notre-Dame de Soissons. Its theme was the superiority of the mystical marriage of these 'brides of Christ' to earthly marriage, with reference to popular refrains and songs of the malmariée (the woman unhappily married to an older man, perhaps rich, but impotent). Chailley paraphrases the Prior's message thus: "You are right to sing these refrains, but you have chosen a love which does not suit their lamenting texts. So sing of your mystical love, and instead of the profane words that we all know, sing according to the following model." And with this, he sends them a religious poem based on well-known refrain texts, and punctuates his Miracles with new moralising lyrics to the tunes of trouvère love-songs.

Gautier was born in Coincy-l'Abbaye, near Soissons, and spent most of his life within a few miles of his birthplace, though it is tempting to speculate that he studied at the University of Paris. As a youth, he entered the monastery of Saint-Médard in Soissons, whence he returned in the last years of his life, as Grand Prieur Claustral. The Soissons Manuscript, compiled some 200 years later, was eventually given – after another 200 years – to a 17th-century Abbess of Notre-Dame de Soissons. It is the most beautiful and precious of all the surviving sources of the Miracles, the only one in large format, and notable for the excellence of its calligraphy and illustrative miniatures, as well as for the quality and reliability of the scribal transcription.

Chailley notes that the Soissonnais region was "fertile ground" for trouvères to "find" their inspiration. (Provençal trobador and Francien trovere both mean "finder," expressing the conceit that the best songs are found, not made.) Such poets as Thierry de Soissons, Raoul de Soissons, Richard de Fournival, the Châtelain de Couci, and Gontier de Soignies hailed from this locality on the road between Champagne and Picardy, which were also important centres of trouvère activity. Gautier de Coincy was a contemporary of Thibaut de Champagne, Blondel de Nesles, Gace Brulé, Gautier de Dargies, and the working-class poet-performer Colin Muset (the name muset means "bagpipe"). It is therefore most appropriate that this recording should have been made in a medieval abbey already well-established by the 12th century, and situated within the modern department named for Soissons' river, the Aisne.

Whilst the stories of the Miracles were translated from Latin, the model for Gautier de Coincy's songs is trouvère love-poetry. The full panoply of the tradition of courtly love is applied, not to any earthly female, however idealised, but to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Following the trouvère practice of naming the aristocratic Beloved only indirectly, he employs biblical, conventional or newly-minted poetic titles: "mystic rose," "Lady of the world," "Queen of heaven," "Mother of concord," "noble maiden," the "honey-sweet girl." Where trouvère spited their jealous anger at rivals for the hand of their chosen lady, Gautier's attacks are on those who love other – mortal – women, and his language is extreme: they are "damned," "deluded,"; earthly love is "guile and treachery," "bawdiness," "villainy"; it "stinks and reeks". The poet himself is an "orphan soul," "unclean and dirty," but his lady – "pure," "clean," "healthy," "honey-breasted," a "delightful girlfriend" – will "take him to the sweet place". "Emotive, ardent, almost unhealthy," comments Chailley.

"Others sing of little Marion, I sing of Mary. Each year, I owe Her the payment of a reverdie" is the motto of the Miracles, replacing humble Robin and Marion and the secular ballads in which they appear with a reverdie, a Spring song in elevated language, offered as payment for a feudal debt or rente. Elsewhere, Gautier refers to Mary's followers as rentier – one owing feudal allegiance to his Lord or Lady. "As long as I live, I owe Her as an annual rente, in token of noble love, a ballad-song or conductus."

Gautier seems to have been the first to use the French word conduit, for Latin conductus: literally "kept together," or to use the modern musical term, "ensemble". Conductus music had a clear rhythm to keep those walking in a procession in step with one another. Such rhythmic tunes were ideally suited for polyphonic elaboration, since the clear rhythm would keep two or more singers together, even if they were singing different melodies. Hence conductus became also a particular style of polyphonic music, frequently associated with liturgical processions. Conductus was also a literary style with a clear metrical rhythm and phrases of regular length. Such verse was ideally suited for the conductus style of musical composition or for improvised polyphony, nurtured by popular traditions and developed by the skill of trained musicians, encouraged by the strong rhythms of conductus poetry.

Medieval composers often used pre-extant melodies, perhaps a fragment of plainchant or a secular song as a tenor (the principal voice in polyphonic conductus), happily mixing sacred and secular, Latin and vernacular. The trouvère pastorale Hyer matin a l'enjornee discants melodiously over a plainchant tenor, Benedicamus Domino, in 2- and 3-voice polyphonic settings from Notre-Dame de Paris. (The motet's untexted third voice on this recording is sung to the conventional solmization syllables of the medieval hexachord ut re mi fa so la.) This Latin tenor was discarded by Gautier, to create a monophonic song with a religious text cunningly adapted from the secular chanson.

The medieval aesthetic so favoured such contrafacta (borrowings and re-arrangements), that frequently it is impossible to determine which is the original and which the subtle variation. Gautier was both a lender and a borrower: his music includes contrafacta of trouvère songs, of plainchant melodies and of conductus settings of the Notre-Dame school; whereas the Cantigas de Santa Maria and the Carmina burana contain contrafacta of tunes found in the Miracles. Some of these tunes have survived in the aural tradition as folk melodies. There is speculation that the descant voice of De la sainte Leocade may be Gautier's own work, the tenor being a contrafactum of a conductus by Perotin that also forms the monophonic melody for Entendez tuit ensemble. The exquisite melody for Royne celestre seems to imitate the form of a Latin sequence, but is found only in the Miracles.

Gautier's texts, similarly, are often religious contrafacta of secular verses, quoting incipits and refrains, or paraphrasing entire poems with great ingenuity. Arthur Långfors, who published Gautier's texts in the 1930s, characterised the poet as "possessing an individual style, a richer vocabulary than any other French poet and handling the language with extraordinary virtuosity. His penchant for clever versifying might appear naïve, but one must credit him with true mastery of the language, with ardent faith and profound poetic emotions".

Gautier shows his cleverness in exploiting the Latin anagram EVA (Eve, recalling the doctrine of original sin) – AVE (the first word of the salutation "Hail Mary, full of grace" with which the angel Gabriel announced the forthcoming birth of Christ.) The anagram therefore symbolises the mystical purification of the soul, transforming sin into redemption. Gautier finds an extra twist as he translates into the vernacular, reversing the pronunciation of the French name Eve to produce the Latin syllable VE (woe). He savours the physicality of forming sounds with the voice of a poet-singer: "Eve is bitter and full of gall, Mary is sweet and honeyed. The name of Eve often changes in my mouth to Mary."

Such sensual and intellectual delight in linguistic virtuosity permeates every line of the Miracles. Frequently Gautier forms rimes dérivatives, rhyming identical sounds created by related verb forms: sert/desert (serves/deserves); by homonyms, fin/fin (meaning "noble" as an adjective, but "the end" as a noun), or monde/monde ("pure" and "the world"); even by Latin gracia (grace) and French grace i a (grace is there). Sometimes he piles up many similar sounds within the space of a few lines. This insistent repetition of significant words in constantly changing grammatical forms evokes in French verse the religious ecstasy of a Latin litany or the mystic symbolism of an Eastern mantra.

The complex web of contrafacta and allusions that underlies the Miracles (and indeed the whole trouvère repertory) is particularly densely woven around refrains. A refrain is not merely the self-referring motto of a particular song, but suggests links to other songs, connecting with a rich tradition of pastoral love, of girls in the meadow, or ladies dancing under the green olive-tree. Gautier adds several different refrains to Ja pour yver, balancing the high art and moral tone of the verses (a contrafactum of Blondel de Nesle's Li plus se plant d’Amours) with popular tunes and well-known texts that, though undisguised, take on an utterly new significance in this religious context.

High and low styles are brought into confrontation by this use of 'low' refrains next to 'high' trouvère rhapsody, and also by the whole conceit of the Miracles, setting eruditely-constructed poetry to familiar tunes. The highest style was the unaccompanied voice of the trouvère, or of religious chant, in lofty tones of literary excellence, in long poetic lines with subtle verse structure and elegantly varied metre. As the tone is lowered, instruments find a role, the vielle and harp being most noble, percussion at the far down-market extreme. Low-style poetry has short snappy lines, with insistent rhymes and driving rhythms: the language is simple and direct.

In modern times, instrumentalists have reconstructed from medieval sources a sophisticated array of improvisation techniques. Using drones, parallel motion in fourths and fifths, improvised descants, cadence formulae and heterophony (the simultaneous presentation of different versions of the same basic melody), a rich texture is created spontaneously from the single line of the monophonic tune. The Harp Consort has pioneered the extension of these techniques to the refrain singers, improvising a chorus of vocal heterophony for popular chançonetes. High-style, composed polyphony allowed a few solo singers even greater liberties in unresolved dissonances and unusual approaches to cadences, as may be heard in the conductus duos and a three-voice motet.

Popular songs and the more intellectual genres were regarded as distinct, yet could be heard on the same occasion at pastoral entertainments. The description from the Panthere d’Amors quoted above mentions instrumental and vocal excellence, chançonetes, motets and conductus, all in the context of music-making "in the wood". Many references to conductus are linked to pastoral love-songs or marriage feasts, registers employed in the Miracles as metaphors for spiritual love. Jean de Meun writes in the Roman de la Rose: "Thus inspired with joy, forever singing motets, conductus and popular songs, they find love on the green grass, amongst the flowers, under the olive-tree." In the prologue to the Miracles de Nostre Dame, Gautier de Coincy discusses good music and the devil, introducing his own "chançonetes et conduis" in an ecstatic reverie of chant and enchantment:

Some may sing you such clever chansons, glittering with laughter and folly, but I don't wish to sing such chants, which have too much weeping and mischance. The soul often weeps and is disenchanted with the chanter who chants such chants. If you want to enchant the enemy, you should sing of the great Lady, to Whom the angels sing day and night. All those who sing Her sweet chant enchant the devil and lull him to sleep. Now listen while I sing...

* Contrafactum of a line by Gautier de Coincy: "chançonetes et conduis"
** Contrafactum of a sermon by Rowland Hill, Pastor of Surrey Chapel, 1844: "The devil should not have all the good tunes"

–Andrew Lawrence-King