Most days I find that I feel like talking about my main projects less and less (moreso out of wanting to work and think through them privately first rather than any waning of interest), so here's a completely different topic that has been catching my eye as of late.
(The link leads to a digitized version of the mansucript, it's well worth a look.)
In short, it's a manuscript containing mostly chansons, and some motets and Mass movements (the latter of which can be counted on one hand). The chansons vastly outnumber the rest of the genres represented by the manuscript, which is why it piqued my interest- as mentioned in some previous posts, I'm fond of the secular songs of Dufay and Binchois. Admittedly, it was partly good fortune that led me to find out about this, but the fact that it's a pretty well-known source for most of their songs means that I practically can't go anywhere in publications about 15th-century song without seeing it mentioned. So it was basically a matter of when, not if...
Onto the main thing that interests me, however- ever since an adjunct friend of mine pointed out the ambiguities of text underlay in this and similar manuscripts, I've been flipping through this (both online and in facsimile form) to look at examples of weird text-setting phenomena, of which there are a good number. For context: usually, there are three (and maybe 4, sometimes) voices in most of these chansons. One of these voices, the cantus, is always texted, while the other two voices, the tenor and contratenor, usually have only the beginning of the text written in and nothing else. Or at least, that's for most cases. On occasion, the tenor may be texted, and sometimes- and this is what I'm really interested in- the contratenor is texted as well. In the time spent poring over the copies of the manuscript, my friend pointed out something interesting: out of the random examples we looked at where the contratenor was texted1, most of these contratenors either had imitative material to match the cantus and tenor lines, or at least was doing something more melodic than jumping around half the time. This got me curious, so now I feel like a survey of texted parts in the Misc. 213 is in order. Potentially, it could say something about performance practice (what with my friend being a staunch defender of instrumental contratenors), but I'm more interested in the compositional implications of these as well. If text exists for some contratenor (and tenor) parts, it is likely that the composers (or the scribes who copied the music, if noone else) wouldn't have left elements of texting up to performers, at least for those specific songs. That could contribute to rebutting the view that songs like this were composed formulaically, especially in the case of rondeaux, but I'll have to chew on that a little more before making definitive statements.
1. Unfortunately, I remember none of the exact examples we looked at, but some songs with texted contratenors include A ma damme playsant et belle (H. Lantins, 35), Per amour de costey (H. Lantins, 22) and Mon cuer me fait tous dis penser (Dufay, 19v-20). Were it not for the last one and another Dufay song I remember being surprised by, I would have suspected it was a composer-specific practice, but apparently that's not the case.↩