Ars subtilior

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A chanson about love, Belle, bonne, sage, by Baude Cordier, is in a heart shape, with red notes indicating rhythmic alterations.
A chanson about love, Belle, bonne, sage, by Baude Cordier, is in a heart shape, with red notes indicating rhythmic alterations.

Ars subtilior (more subtle art) is a musical style characterized by rhythmic and notational complexity, centered around Paris, Avignon in southern France, also in northern Spain at the end of the fourteenth century [1]. The style also is found in the French Cypriot repertory.[2] Often the term is used in contrast with ars nova, which applies to the musical style of the preceding period from about 1310 to about 1370; though some scholars prefer to consider the ars subtilior a subcategory of the earlier style. Primary sources for the ars subtilior are the Chantilly Codex and the Modena Codex.

Contents

[edit] Overview and history

Musically the productions of the ars subtilior are highly refined, complex, difficult to sing, and probably were produced, sung and enjoyed by a small audience of specialists and connoisseurs. Hoppin suggests the superlative ars subtilissima, saying, "not until the twentieth century did music again reach the most subtle refinements and rhythmic complexities of the manneristic style."[1] They are almost exclusively secular songs, and have as their subject matter love, war, chivalry, and stories from classical antiquity; there are even some songs written in praise of public figures (for example Pope Clement VII). Daniel Albright [3] compares avant-garde and modernist music of the 20th century's "emphasis on generating music through technical experiment" to the precedent set by the ars subtilior movement's "autonomous delight in extending the kingdom of sound." He cites Baude Cordier's perpetual canon Tout par compas (All by compass am I composed), notated on a circular staff.

Albright contrasts this motivation with "expressive urgency" and "obedience to rules of craft" and, indeed, ars subtilior was coined by musicologist Ursula Günther in 1960 to avoid the negative connotations of the terms manneristic style and mannered notation. (Günther's coinage was based on references in Tractatus de diversis figuris, attributed to Philippus de Caserta, to composers moving to a style "post modum subtiliorem comparantes" and developing an "artem magis subtiliter".[4]) However, many of the devices first used by the ars subtilior composers became standard compositional techniques in the Renaissance, indicating that some of their music must have been widely known and distributed, i.e., it was not merely a dead-end artistic movement, even though subsequent music sounds nothing like it.[citation needed]

The center of activity of the style was Avignon at the end of the Babylonian Captivity of the Papacy and during the Great Schism (1378–1417), the time during which the Western Church had a pope both in Rome and in Avignon. The town on the Rhône had developed into an active cultural center, and produced the most significant surviving body of secular song of the late fourteenth century. From Avignon the style spread into northern Spain and as far as Cyprus (which was a French cultural outpost at the time); in addition, a handful of Italian composers such as Zacara da Teramo composed in a manneristic style related to the ars subtilior.[citation needed]

[edit] Notational characteristics

One of the techniques of the ars subtilior involved using red notes, or "coloration", where the red notes indicate an alteration of note values by one third.

Manuscripts of works in thears subtilior occasionally were themselves in unusual and expressive shapes, as a form of eye music. As well as Baude Cordier's circular canon and the heart-shaped score shown above, Jacob Senleches's La Harpe de melodie is written in the shape of a harp.

[edit] Composers in ars subtilior style

[edit] Examples

[edit] Legacy

Many musicologists[weasel words] today relate the avant-garde styles of the 20th and 21st century to these early composers; for instance, Baude Cordier's perpetual canon, Tout par Compas, notated in a circle, is comparable to George Crumb's Star Child.[5]

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b Hoppin 1978, 472–73
  2. ^ Josephson 2001.
  3. ^ Albright 2004, 10.
  4. ^ Josephson 2001.
  5. ^ Albright 2004,[citation needed].

[edit] Sources

  • Albright, Daniel. 2004. Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-01267-0.
  • Hoppin, Richard H. 1978. Medieval Music. New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 1978. ISBN 0-393-09090-6.
  • Josephson, Nors S. 2001. "Ars Subtilior". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. S. Sadie and J. Tyrrell. London: Macmillan.

[edit] Further reading

  • "Ars subtilior," "Ars nova" in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie. 20 vol. London, Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1980. ISBN 1-56159-174-2.
  • Harold Gleason and Warren Becker, Music in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Music Literature Outlines Series I). Bloomington, Indiana. Frangipani Press, 1986. ISBN 0-89917-034-X.