Since the last blog post focused mainly on my compositional aims, this one will be about the directions I'm taking research-wise- or at least, when dipping my toes into the field of research. I had briefly mentioned in my Research page that I have an upcoming directed study about 15th century chansons and the relation between text and music, but it's worth digging a little deeper into what exactly I mean to cover with these statements.
When it comes to 15th century chansons, what interests me primarily is how the relation between text and music are negotiated between different composers. (The question 'does the text serve the music, or does the music serve the text' is an excellent starting point, but not necessarily the only options available.) Don Randel, in his article Dufay the Reader, posited a thorough relation of poetic structure to musical building blocks in at least 5 of Dufay's chansons, arguing that the importance of the poetic structure to the musical structure was more important than previously thought. A source whose name I forgot mentioned an Ockeghem chanson that favoured musical clarity to convey the text. The list goes on. With such a variety of compositional approaches to relating text and music (and as much variety in how these scholars percieve them), I find that condensing them into a small 10 to 15 page paper simply would not do justice to discussing this topic in its full scope. But it would be informative to present an overview of the most common approaches before narrowing the scope down to certain composers, provided someone else hasn't already done so.
Then comes the question: if I only have 10-15 pages, to whom should I focus most of my attention? There are only so many composers I can cover. My instinctual reply would likely be Binchois and Dufay- for now. They are my first choice for many reasons, not least because I already have a pre-existing love for some of their chansons. And personal love for their songs aside, these two appear at a juncture between the Medieval and Renaissance periods, bringing with them some interesting questions on what had changed (and/or what had established a precedent) in terms of how music and text were related. Comparing the chansons of Machaut, Lescurel, Solage and others to Dufay's and Binchois's could open up some discussion on that front- using the former composers to contextualize the changes of how the later composers related text and music would be an interesting take on the topic. There are other fronts that I feel like could be worth exploring- one idea being composing songs using their techniques in order to see what it's like from a practical point of view, sort of like experimental archaeology but for music- and I will keep searching for other interesting approaches to studying how they mediated the relation between text and music.
There is, admittedly, one big problem with this entire scheme- I haven't learnt French. Which means, I have more than a slight disadvantage when it comes to discussing the textual side of this topic. (If you've noticed that most of this post is about the musical side of things, now you know why.) There at least exists the Dictionnaire du Moyen Français which I can hastily consult for vocabulary, though...