Journal of the Alamire Foundation

The anonymous virelai Si vous voullez is one of the most striking chansons of the twelve unica transmitted in the Leuven Chansonnier. Detailed analysis reveals a remarkably sophisticated melodic and formal structure. Consideration of its stylistic profile (and an observation by Adam Knight Gilbert) leads to a proposed attribution to Alexander Agricola (c. 1456-1506).

Establishing authorship of anonymous fifteenth-century chansons presents numerous difficulties. Some chansons nonetheless share enough traits to raise the possibility of citation, paraphrase, intertextual relationships, and shared authorship. I call such related chansons ‘songs that know each other’. This study traces such shared traits between the anonymous unica of the Leuven Chansonnier (LC) and other chansons, both anonymous and by known composers. The unica of the LC include polyphonic paraphrases of chansons by Ockeghem, shared subjects with famous anonymous chansons, and works with shared approaches to textual content and traditions. Of special interest is a group of chansons that reveal a remarkable degree of palindromic and invertible motivic play. In all of these anonymous chansons, their motivic vocabulary is as crucial as identifying the composers who crafted them, inviting more detailed methods for future analyses.

Most polyphonic compositions of the fifteenth century have at least one voice which begins without rests. The exceptions usually use the rests to create a musical upbeat, potentially motivated by the text. In less straightforward examples, the rests have the potential to cause confusion on the part of performers or scribes. Theorists only rarely addressed this phenomenon directly, but they did discuss rests as indicators of mensuration. As examples from the Leuven Chansonnier (Leuven, Alamire Foundation, Ms. 1) demonstrate, opening semibreve rests can be interpreted as indicating perfect or imperfect tempus, and opening breve rests as indicating imperfect minor modus. In two unusual cases, confusion over opening rests may have been directly responsible for scribal errors. Two further songs show how opening rests may have been a notational fix to issues arising during composition, thus shedding light on the compositional process. By examining the unique challenges that the original notation poses to all of its users, we can reach new insights into composition, transmission, and performance.

This article places the Leuven Chansonnier within the context of the group of the socalled Loire Valley chansonniers, paying specific attention to its materiality and making: its size; its writing space as determined by its size, and how content was then deployed within this space; production methods such as preparation and ruling; and the ways in which the book was made both ‘beautiful’ and ‘useful’ through notation and mise-enpage. While the Leuven Chansonnier is clearly not an object that had vocal performance from the page as its principal purpose, its makers nevertheless observed the notational and layout conventions typical for music books designed for singers more closely than the makers of the other Loire Valley chansonniers. This raises intriguing questions about usage, ownership, and musical literacy in polyphonic sources from the period more generally.