oa Ariere tost: A New Attribution to Cesaris

The anonymous ballade Ariere tost is one of the most chromatic songs from the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, featuring a variety of accidentals matched only by the more widely-known Fumeux fume and Le mont Aon. In an attempt to arrive at a composer attribution, the song was examined using a variety of different methods, the main findings of which are as follows. Firstly, the results consistently indicate an origin for the song at the court of Jean de Berry and Johannes Cesaris as its composer, an attribution supported by musical material it shares with his A l’aventure va Gauvain and Je ris, je chante. Secondly, the results strongly suggest that Ariere tost is a self-reflexive satire of songs written for the 1389 wedding of Jean de Berry and Jeanne de Boulogne that incorporates multiple stylistic elements associated with these songs, both textual and musical, in order to illustrate and comment on the techniques of musical flattery. Thirdly, statistical, textual, and shared musical characteristics, along with poetic and documentary evidence, suggest that Cesaris’s Ariere tost, Bonté bialté, Je ris, je chante, and possibly A l’aventure va Gauvain, are contemporaneous with composition dates c. 1390. Finally, the fact that the majority of these chromatic works were written by composers associated with the court of Jean de Berry strongly suggests that this was a stylistic trait cultivated and favoured there.