Power and proportion

Writing in the Middle Ages expressed power.² Music writing for reasons other than the public dissemination of musical pieces may sound unusual by the standards of printed and digital books, but it was not so in the ancient and medieval world. In antiquity as in the Middle Ages, the supernatural potency of written artefacts was important enough that liturgical books were sometimes used in magic healing rituals.³ Few in medieval times could read and write. Writing and books more often than not articulated the gap between the educated elite and those to whom books were literally closed. One historian has called medieval Christianity ‘religions of the book’.⁴ The luxurious Gospel book that the celebrant held high during the procession at Mass, for example, embodied his power and that of the church he represented. This was also true for later vernacular literature; collections of secular songs commissioned by wealthy patrons reflected their prestige and individual interests.⁵ The single most important instance of this bookish power play in the history of music notation is that of the Carolingians, whose music books were used to lay imperial claims by means of the Christian liturgy and its music, a blatant case of ‘music as political programme’, in Susan Rankin’s words.⁶

In all of these instances, power lay in the possession of rare books and in the ability to decipher their writing. Key to the maintenance of this power was secrecy, a favourite medieval notion.⁷ Techniques of writing music were passed on from master to student and were not usually made public, as discussed below. Nowhere is this secrecy clearer in medieval music notation than in the complex codes of the ars subtilior. Late medieval books such as the Chantilly Codex (Château de Chantilly, Musée Condé, MS 564) present us with stunning specimens of music as a distinctly graphic phenomenon. Only the initiate could decipher these codes, and an even smaller number write them out capably. To a lesser extent the same applies to most other medieval notations. Although written out to make some information public in the modern ‘published’ sense, they were also designed to withhold a great deal of other information, to save it for those few with the power to read.

Symbolism has always played an important part in the high art of music writing.⁸ In the largely non-literate culture of the Middle Ages, symbols were potent and pervasive. For medieval scribes, even their tools possessed a symbolic and spiritual dimension. The quill, for example, could represent the writer’s tongue or the Holy Spirit.⁹ Two examples of fundamental and universal symbols relevant to this chapter are the circle and the square.¹⁰ The circle, symbol of divine perfection, can be found in the Wheel of Fortune or the sacrament of the Host. The square, symbol of the material world, is the basis for Gothic architecture drawn ‘on the square’ (ad quadratum). The unlearned medieval majority could grasp the basic message of such symbols without needing to understand the intricacies of their specific contexts. For example, it was not necessary to know the multiple Christian legends embedded in the colourful mosaic of a round Gothic stained-glass window in order to grasp the fundamental message: divine perfection embedded in a material world, symbolised by a circle within a square-shaped edifice.

Let us review the notational developments mentioned in Chapters 1 and 2 with an eye to symbolism.¹¹ As seen in Chapter 1, France was home to some of the earliest surviving notation in the West, and this begins with the Palaeofrankish script. The fundamental grapheme in music notation is called a punctus or point, the universal symbol for a creative source, which symbolism is closely related to that of the circle.¹² The punctus is the first musical note or neuma, a word attested in the earliest description of musical notes from the tenth century and commonly used thereafter.¹³ The word neuma or pneuma, meaning ‘spirit’ or ‘Holy Spirit’, is an unsubtle allusion to the divine status of notation, whose most famous icon is that of the Holy Spirit whispering the sacred chants into Pope Gregory’s ear.¹⁴ If the punctus is the elemental neuma of music (‘primum igitur, scilicet genus, tempus est’), it is also the first and most basic shape of geometry (‘ut est in geometricis punctum’), as the music writer Remy of Auxerre reminds his reader.¹⁵ The eleventh-century composer Odorannus of Sens goes further than this and writes that the geometrical punctus is ‘a centre around which a larger circle revolves’.¹⁶ Odorannus is here referring to the combined symbolism of the dot in the circle, the universal symbol for perfection within perfection.¹⁷ This very sign is picked up three centuries later in the ars nova graph for perfect time and perfect prolation, a dot within a circle. In the words of the treatise Ars nova, ‘the round shape is perfect’ and is thus perfectly fitted to perfect time.¹⁸ To sum up, the symbolism of the point, circle and spirit are pertinent to the elemental note of liturgical chant, the punctus.

From the foundational punctus flows a certain curviness characteristic of early French neumes. Not all shapes are round, of course, the single-stroke virga being a case in point, so to speak. But many compound neumes exhibit especial roundedness. Such is the case for the liquescent Palaeofrankish podatus with its upward swoop (Figure 14.1, far left), and the Norman clivis in the shape of a curved crook (Figure 14.1, second from left). The most striking case is the three-note torculus, whose sensuous S-shape comes out clearly in the script from Nevers (Figure 14.1, middle), whereas it forms hardly more than a half-circle in the Palaeofrankish rendering (Figure 41.1, second from right). Curviness turns decidedly exultant in such compounds as the playful Messine clivis-cum-pressus singled out by Marie-Noëlle Colette (Figure 14.1, far right).¹⁹

Figure 14.1 Early neumes: podatus (far left), clivis (second from left), S-shape torculus (middle), half-circle torculus (second from right), clivis-pressus (far right)

The major graphic development in the seven centuries that span medieval French notation is a move away from the roundedness just described to an angularity or squareness. Progressive monastic orders such as the Carthusians and Dominicans, the intellectual moderns (moderni) of their day, are largely responsible for the shift in medieval music calligraphy from circular shapes to square ones. It is important to stress that this change takes place gradually. Indeed, square shapes are found in several of the earliest regional neume styles, such as several versions of the punctus that tend more towards a tiny square or rectangle than a small circle; Figure 14.2, left, shows the Breton climacus, three somewhat angular punctus stacked together. Certain early compound neumes exhibit a more angular character, such as the pes from Chartres (Figure 14.2, middle).

Figure 14.2 Square notes: Breton climacus (left), two pedes from Chartres (middle and right)

It is only in the thirteenth century that such occasional quadrilateral features spread to the entire graphic gamut, at which point one finds a full-fledged square note with angular compounds. By the middle of the century, both Dominicans and Franciscans decree the nota quadrata as the standard for their music books; an unequivocal square punctus can be seen in the Dominican master book from around 1260 (Figure 14.2, right).²⁰ The choice of square notation coincides with broader late medieval trends, such as Gothic script and a renewed interest in the natural world thanks to the newly published works of Aristotle.²¹ When music writers first start using the expression nota quadrata in the second half of the thirteenth century, it seems to be with the understanding that the square represents the material world. Franco of Cologne writes that the perfect long, a ‘square shape’, is considered the ‘first and principal’ note of mensural notation since it ‘contains all things and all things can be reduced to it’.²² With the shift from point to square note the musical neuma can be said to have come down to earth.

The key graphic element in this move away from curvature to angularity is the concept of tying together notes in shapes called ‘ligatures’, from the notes being tied together (ligata). Just as the general curviness of neumes had flowed from the punctus, so do the ligatures of the new musica mensurata emanate from the foundational square note. The old compound neumes are revamped as connected squares. In his description of the ligatures in French sources of his day, Anonymous IV sees the pes, for example, as a ‘quadrangle [or square] lying upright above a quadrangle’ (see Figure 14.3, left).²³Anonymous IV emphasises the geometrical aspect of these new notes by calling rhomboid shapes elmuahim and elmuarifa, which is Euclidean jargon from newly translated Arabic sources. The old climacus, for example, is now a square followed by ‘two, three or four elmuahim’ (Figure 14.3, right).²⁴ That thirteenth-century music writers speak often of the ‘properties’ (proprietates) of these ligatures is yet one more nod to their double origin in the esoteric ‘properties’ of music and in a new Aristotelian emphasis on the material world.²⁵ These new notes are ‘material’ points, puncta materialia, in Anonymous IV’s expression.²⁶

Figure 14.3 Square ligatures: pes (left), climacus (right)

These important graphic developments in French medieval notation probably would not have occurred without important alterations to page layout in the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Guido d’Arezzo’s proposal for the stave in the eleventh century did impact on book production, as is frequently stated; but it was only one phase in a larger development. In the following centuries, certain French monastic orders made equally important changes to how liturgical music was laid out on the page.²⁷ The impact on book culture of these groups – some of the most innovative and powerful orders emerging in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries – reflects their aspirations for literary control and, in the case of the Dominicans, political domination.

In the twelfth century the Carthusians were responsible for an impressive production of books.²⁸ Key to their signature layout for music books was a pricking and ruling pattern that produced a special harmony between music and text; the text line received a double prick and extra space, as seen in Figure 14.4. The Carthusians also adopted the Aquitanian punctus, which was more angular than that found in other regions.

Figure 14.4 Pricking and ruling pattern in a Carthusian gradual

These innovations in page layout were furthered in the following century by the powerful Dominicans. Their music-book regulations included not only the nota quadrata, as mentioned earlier, but also a stave with four lines spaced ‘a little apart’ (debito modo).²⁹ A page from a copy of the Dominican master book of around 1260 makes clear their achievement (Figure 14.5). As in the intricately lined architectural plan of a Gothic cathedral, lines and grids criss-cross the Dominican page, deftly confining and defining areas of text and music in an elegant proportion – a supreme achievement considering the small size of this particular book (26.2 × 17.6 cm).³⁰ Into this Gothic grid sits the new nota quadrata, the square that ‘contains all things and [to which] all things can be reduced’, in the words of Franco of Cologne cited earlier.

Figure 14.5 Dominican master book from c. 1260

Extant and lost sources

Unfortunately, little has come down to us of the impressive music-writing activity just described, in France as elsewhere in the Middle Ages. In the case of the Cistercians, only one twelfth-century source survives, in the Bibliothèque Municipale de Dijon (MS 114). This sizable liturgical master book (48 × 32 cm) has lost its main musical sections, with only a few scraps of music notation found on fols 102v, 114v, 133–4 and 151r.³¹ In fact, these few pages from the Cîteaux liturgical master book are, to my knowledge, the only trace of Cistercian music writing in all of twelfth-century Europe that remains today. Another group from the same century, the Carthusians, have fared considerably better. Yet even for the Carthusians’ main library at the Grande Chartreuse, praised in the twelfth century as having ‘an ocean of books’, only a handful of music sources survive from the 1100s.³² Extant medieval manuscripts, then, represent only a fraction of the complete number of books produced in the Middle Ages.

Adding to this loss of presentation-copy parchment books is the near-total absence of the many modest or impermanent sources of which the extant manuscripts are the final and most expensive products. Ancient and medieval writing was a process that was typically divided into stages. The Romans distinguished between taking notes (notare), making an outline and draft (formare) and correcting the draft to produce the final version (emendare).³³ General medieval book production was similar. The mostly high-grade manuscripts that have survived were often copied from exemplars ranging from wax tablets to parchment booklets (libelli).³⁴ Almost no specimens survive for the first stage of music writing, note-taking, because notes were usually written on perishable surfaces, the most common of which was the tablet. The ‘Middle Ages … was a wax-tablet culture’, write Richard and Mary Rouse; Bernhard Bischoff states that medieval ‘daily life cannot be imagined without them [i.e. wax tablets]’.³⁵ Recent research has made clear that the perishable medium of wax tablets was common in writing music, even though no medieval wax with musical notes survives.³⁶ The most famous proof of this is a tenth-century depiction of a scribe, presumably Peter the Deacon, writing neumes on a large wax tablet as St Gregory dictates.³⁷ This image evokes a scenario that was ubiquitous with that most common ancient and medieval shorthand system, the Tironian notes: a scribe rapidly taking dictation on wax as an official speaks.³⁸

Concerning the second and third stages of writing (formare and emendare), the extant sources leave us some clues that increase in number as the Middle Ages progress. By far the most abundant type of medieval music book is that associated with the Christian church. The history of these liturgical manuscripts can be succinctly described as a move towards large, heterogeneous collections of previously separate libelli. The earliest full books with music present selective chants, such as the tenth-century southern French collection of tropes Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, lat. 1118, and the twelfth-century Norman cantatorium-troper-tonary Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, lat. 10508.³⁹ By the late Middle Ages, such selective volumes had been subsumed into larger and more compact collections, such as the gradual, antiphoner and breviary. A late medieval missal, for example, typically contains the Kalendar, a small libellus opening the book, followed by chants, prayers and readings for the entire liturgical year, as well as various tropes and miscellaneous musical pieces.⁴⁰ There is every reason to believe that the page layout of these complex hybrid sources often required a draft or two before the final parchment version, as Andrew Hughes once suggested.⁴¹ We should not forget certain books on the fringe of the French liturgy, such as the two early thirteenth-century exemplars of the Feast of Fools, one from Sens (Bibliothèque Municipale 46) and the other from Beauvais (London, British Library, Egerton 2615). Both contain the same proper items for the feast, but the Beauvais book adds four gatherings for polyphony and a liturgical play (gatherings 11–14).⁴² Here as in the preceding cases, the medieval process of collation and copying is clear, with each individual liturgical source presenting a mixture of standard and unique elements.

The earliest complete sources of French polyphony are liturgical manuscripts. The famous thirteenth-century Parisian collection of organa complements such comprehensive liturgical books as the missal, for it presents polyphonic music performed at certain points during selected feasts. The precious report of Anonymous IV makes clear that a ‘great book of organum’ was compiled over time from a variety of sources, from parchment exemplars (pergameno exempla) to various ‘volumes’ and ‘books’ of organum that would eventually make up the famous ‘great book’.⁴³ He gives the contents of the great book in a list that reads like a series of volumes. In the extant sources, pieces are ranked by number of voices, opening with prestigious four-voice pieces, moving on to pieces in three, then two voices, and ending with monophonic works. Extant sources such as manuscript F (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut. 29.1), copied in Paris in the middle of the thirteenth century, confirm that the great book was made of smaller libelli. The parts of the ‘great book of organum’ identified by Anonymous IV correspond to individual groupings of gatherings (see Table 14.1).

Table 14.1 Sources of Notre-Dame polyphony: Anonymous IV’s description and corresponding contents in F

Sources: Edward H. Roesner (ed.), Le Magnus Liber organi de Notre-Dame de Paris, vol. III: Les organa à deux voix pour la Messe (de Noël à la fête de Saint-Pierre et Saint-Paul) du manuscrit de Florence, Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana, Plut. 29.1, ed. Mark Everist (Monaco: Éditions de l’Oiseau-Lyre, 2001), xxiii; and Roesner (ed.), Le Magnus Liber organi de Notre-Dame de Paris, vol. I: Les quadrupla et tripla de Paris (Monaco: Éditions de l’Oiseau-Lyre, 1993).

The process of copying and collating becomes even clearer with authorial collections that first appear around the same time as the extant Notre-Dame sources.⁴⁴Gautier de Coinci is the first known author and editor of a major work to include music, Les miracles de Nostre Dame, and it is telling that this new kind of author-centred work is in Old French rather than Latin.⁴⁵ Gautier composed his lengthy two-volume Miracles over nearly two decades.⁴⁶ The eighty-plus extant manuscripts of the Miracles attest to a work written down in stages; only twelve have music notation and only one of these has the full set of twenty-two songs with music notation (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, nouv. acqu. fr. 24541). Another of the manuscripts of Gautier’s Miracles offers us a rare glimpse into the copying process, for it shows Gautier sight-reading on the vielle from an open bifolium of music, suggesting that smaller exemplars with just music were among those used to compile the monumental Miracles (Figure 14.6).⁴⁷

Figure 14.6 Gautier de Coinci sight-reading music for the vielle

Gautier’s is the first of several authorial collections produced in the thirteenth century. A few decades after Gautier, the noble trouvère Thibaut de Champagne evidently supervised a book of his own songs called Les chansons au roy de Navarre; it was written up around 1250 ‘in his hall at Provins’, just south of where Gautier had copied his Miracles near Soissons.⁴⁸ This collection and slightly later libelli of songs by the troubadour Guiraut Riquier (who dated his compositions, sometimes down to the day⁴⁹) and the trouvère Adam de la Halle were eventually integrated into larger song anthologies, and it is as booklets in these larger anthologies that the libelli of Thibaut, Guiraut and Adam have survived. The chansonniers of the trouvères are the result of an intense collating and copying activity of vernacular songs during the period around 1300. One chansonnier features several images of scribes writing on parchment rolls (Figure 14.7). One roll of trouvère songs does survive, although regrettably without music.⁵⁰ A handful of the chansonniers (sigla KNPX) are so similar as to leave no doubt that common exemplars of some sort were used. Others attest to a collating process in that they present unique combinations such as troubadour and trouvère songs with motets, or discrete libelli of songs by genre such as pastourelle, lai or jeu-parti. Contemporary with the chansonniers and related to Gautier’s Miracles are vernacular romances and other literary works containing notated music.⁵¹ The most imposing of these is Renart le nouvel (c. 1300) with its seventy-plus refrains, many of which were either copied from or used to copy motet sources.⁵² The endpoint of this tradition of romances with insertions is the famous manuscript of the Roman de Fauvel copied in Paris by Chaillou de Pesstain around 1316 (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, fr. 146), a heterogeneous collection par excellence and something of a medieval musical summa with its stunning specimens of chant, vernacular song and polyphony.⁵³

Figure 14.7 Scribe of trouvère songs writing on a parchment roll

The second half of the fourteenth century presents us with a composer who combines the vernacular chansonnier and ‘great book of organum’ traditions. Guillaume de Machaut compiled his musical and poetic works over several decades from around 1350 to his death in 1377. During this process, Machaut’s works circulated in a variety of forms, from booklets to small parchment swatches.⁵⁴ One of Machaut’s lais, the Lay mortel, even survives with its music on a parchment roll.⁵⁵ And indeed, Machaut is depicted more than once as writing on a parchment roll, a practice going back to the trouvère seen earlier (Figure 14.8; cf. Figure 14.7).⁵⁶ The extant manuscripts of Machaut’s complete works testify to such an intricate compilation, one involving ‘a small army of messengers and copyists’, in Sarah Jane Williams’s words.⁵⁷ A study of the extant manuscripts shows that Machaut’s complete works were compiled even as he continued producing new pieces. Manuscript C from the 1350s, for example, opens with literary works such as the Remede de Fortune and ends with musical pieces ranging from virelais to motets (see Table 14.2). Literary works are prominent in this book; the Remede, for example, is a self-contained booklet (gatherings 4–8), with four folios fleshing out the final quaternion and making an independent libellus. The musical works are more like an afterthought, beginning as they do in the middle of the nineteenth gathering near the end of the book. Dating from two decades later, manuscript A has added several more literary works such as the Prologue, as well as a significant amount of music, here standing independently as a libellus within a larger codex. Machaut’s music opens with gathering 47 as a separate section and takes up fully a quarter of his complete works. It includes recently composed independent pieces such as the Mass, as well as music inserted in the Remede, none of which is found in manuscript C of two decades earlier. Machaut’s manuscripts may well foreshadow the later printed authorial collected works, as is sometimes pointed out, but more significantly they arise out of a long-standing medieval tradition of book production and music writing.

Figure 14.8 Machaut reading a parchment roll

Table 14.2 Comparison of the contents of Machaut manuscripts C and A

Source: Based on Lawrence Earp, Guillaume de Machaut: A Guide to Research (New York: Garland, 1995), 77–9, 87–9; Lawrence Earp, ‘Scribal practice, manuscript production and the transmission of music in late medieval France: the manuscripts of Guillaume de Machaut’ (PhD thesis, Princeton University, 1983), 88–9, 133.

The calligraphy of medieval music

If only a small portion of the total music writing from medieval France has survived, even less has come down to us concerning technical aspects of music writing. There is no testimony prior to the twelfth century, despite the fact that music scribes were often highly trained calligraphers. The few statements found so far on their craft do not necessarily occur in literature primarily devoted to music.⁵⁸ This is partly because most medieval writers on music were typically concerned with theory rather than practice. When Boethius discusses the writing-out (scriptio) of musical notes (notulas), for example, he makes an exhaustive list of the names for the Greek and Latin letters used for music, but devotes not a word to the tools or techniques used to draw these letters.⁵⁹ The lack of first-hand information on music-writing technique is also due to a general silence on most trades prior to the late Middle Ages.⁶⁰ This is probably because craft-making techniques were usually passed on orally, being secrets of the trade jealously guarded by competing practitioners. The eleventh-century music scribe Adémar de Chabannes apparently has nothing to say about his skill, for example, even though hundreds of folios with notation in his hand survive.⁶¹Anonymous IV breaks this silence for music writing in the thirteenth century, discussing various writing surfaces, stave types and notational traditions and teachers; he goes on to describe with exactitude how seventeen note shapes should be drawn out.⁶²

Beyond this, what can be known about the music-writing trade must be extrapolated from general scribal culture in the Middle Ages. It is important to stress that France was a major production centre of medieval books. The shift from round to square notes described at the beginning of this chapter coincides with a transition from monastic to secular writing centres.⁶³ Before 1100, most manuscripts were copied in monasteries, usually in a room within the monastery reserved for this purpose, the scriptorium. In larger scriptoria, the making of a manuscript was divided into tasks, with one person ruling the parchment, another writing the text and yet another, the notator, writing the music. In some cases, a certain hierarchy obtained, with a head notator supervising less skilled notatores.⁶⁴ With the Carthusians, each monk was a professional scribe, with his own cell a private scriptorium equipped with all the necessary tools for writing.⁶⁵ The monopoly of monastic scriptoria disappeared in the late Middle Ages with the rise of secular writing ateliers for profit. The result was a dramatic increase in the number and types of books produced, including some of the vernacular manuscripts discussed earlier in this chapter. The picture for the city of Paris in the thirteenth century is of ‘countless scribes’ – in the words of Roger Bacon – competing for a clientele ranging from university students to wealthy private patrons; many of them lived in their own neighbourhoods, such as the Rue des Écrivains.⁶⁶ Scribal advertisement sheets featuring musical notation have survived, showing that the skill of writing music was vital in the late medieval book-selling industry.⁶⁷ We get a glimpse of scribal competitiveness from the same fourteenth-century writer cited at the beginning of this chapter, who complains that ‘scribes leave too much space between syllables, and notators fill up the space, caring only to make money’.⁶⁸

Anonymous IV’s description of how thirteenth-century notes are drawn provides us with a small window into the calligraphic art of medieval scribes. The order of pen strokes he relates is not always the most straightforward one from a modern point of view. For example, he describes a three-note ligature as a series of four separate pen strokes that incorporates the longa; ‘it should look like an oblong shield’, he adds (see Figure 14.9, left).⁶⁹ From a modern point of view, it would be quicker to draw this ligature without lifting the pen by inverting steps 3 and 4 and making one single, smooth motion. Nevertheless, manuscript evidence matches Anonymous IV’s descriptions. A close-up look at the Dominican master book discussed earlier (Figure 14.5) shows the porrectus drawn Anonymous IV’s way, with protruding and slightly separated strokes betraying where the pen has lifted (Figure 14.9, centre). If this way of doing things does not seem the most logical by modern standards, we should remember that even in today’s calligraphic practices, virtues such as tradition trump that of speed. The Arabic letter kaaf (initial position), for example, is drawn in two strokes even though it would be quicker, though less elegant, to draw it in one step (Figure 14.9, right).

Figure 14.9 Two versions of the porrectus (left, middle), and the Arabic letter kaaf (right)

Anonymous IV’s report of thirteenth-century Parisian musical calligraphy does have the ring of traditional authenticity. Several of his descriptions can be shown to originate in a much older calligraphic practice. For example, implicit in his description of the longa – or virga as it was called in earlier times – is a drawing in two strokes: ‘[a] square with a line descending from its right side’ (Figure 14.10, far left).⁷⁰ This way of drawing the virga in a distinctive two-stroke sequence (punctus plus tail) can be found in some of the earliest French musical calligraphy (Figure 14.10, second from left).⁷¹ The virga appears to have been drawn in the order implied by Anonymous IV, first the punctus and then the line crossing through it. In another instance, Anonymous IV says the pes should be drawn as ‘a square lying above a square … joined with one line on their right side’ (Figure 14.10, centre). The two-stroke sequency implied in this description is clear in certain earlier French renditions of the pes, such as that from Fécamp in Normandy (Figure 14.10, second from right) or Saint-Maur near Paris (Figure 14.10, far right).⁷² In both cases, the protrusion of the vertical stroke shows that the pen was lifted rather than held in one continuous motion. It seems, therefore, that certain French calligraphic conventions for music had a long life, originating in the earliest phase and enduring well into the square notation period.

Figure 14.10 Two versions of the virga (left) and three of the pes (right)

The reason why the craft of medieval writing matters to music history is that its media and tools at times played an important role in shaping the graphic vocabulary of music. The musical stave, for example, was nothing more than an elaboration of the basic dry ruling patterns found in the earliest medieval books. It was common practice from early on to rule the page with dry, horizontal lines first. It is easy to see how the sight common to medieval scribes of a rectangular grid with horizontally ruled lines on which sat black graphemes almost inevitably led to the musical stave as we know it.⁷³ As for the notes themselves, they bear features specific to the tools that produced them. For example, the sinewy shaded lines so characteristic of the early curvy neumes shown in Figure 14.1 are the natural calligraphic product of a quill charged with black ink. The quill’s flexible beak makes possible a subtly varied thickness of line that is used to special effect in such neumes as the Norman clivis or the Messine elaborated clivis.

The above are observations based on the extant books. But as suggested throughout this chapter, lost musical graphic evidence should be taken into account too, even if this involves a certain amount of hypothesising. In conclusion, we may look briefly at the most common writing tools of medieval daily life, the wax tablet and stylus. More so than with parchment or paper, the wax surface requires an economy of movement; fewer strokes are better. The stylus moves like a plough through the resistant wax, creating a furrow bounded on either side with tiny mounds of excess wax (see Figure 14.11). The ancient and medieval scribes of the famous Tironian notes knew this first-hand and consequently developed an abbreviation code requiring minimal motion over the wax surface. For example, the Tironian abbreviation for absens is a point followed by a slanted stroke; that for essem, a horizontal stroke over a point (Figure 14.11).⁷⁴ These markings are easy to make and to erase.

Figure 14.11 Tironian notes and neumes in wax

Such is also the case for the basic code of the earliest musical notes. As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the basic building blocks of music calligraphy are a point (punctus) and a stroke (virga). Like the Tironian notes, these shapes are conveniently traced in wax and result in a minimum of wax build-up around each mark (Figure 14.12, left). It is significant that a compound neume such as the clivis, when drawn in wax, bears an uncanny resemblance to the Tironian signs just mentioned (Figure 14.12, right). It is not clear whether there existed a specific connection between the earliest neumes and Tironian notation.⁷⁵ But it is certainly possible, given that scribes such as Adémar de Chabannes were equally versed in music and Tironian notation.⁷⁶ Indeed, for most bookish persons in the Middle Ages, the word notae would have first conjured up Tironian rather than musical notes.⁷⁷ On this subject, as on many others only briefly touched upon in this chapter, more research remains to be done.

Figure 14.12 Neumes in wax

If, as I have suggested here, continuities from one scribal tradition to the next can be observed throughout the high tradition of music writing in the Middle Ages, such continuities are even more evident during the transition from manuscript to print in the Renaissance. Little was to change: the layout of the page, from the basic writing block to the look of the musical stave; the shapes and colours of the stave and its notes; and the rhythmic interpretation of these notes – all these aspects were carried over from medieval music books to early printed ones in the late 1400s and the 1500s. Even today, over five centuries after the first French printed books with music, the influence of medieval music scribes and book producers is still felt. When we write musical notes or input them on our computers, either single (simplices, in the words of late medieval writers) or ‘ligated’, we continue a tradition that can be traced back to the earliest extant medieval manuscripts with music, and even further back yet, to their lost ancestors.

Introduction

The relationship of church and state in early France and the dynamic exchanges within the early church involve areas of contention: urban versus suburban, episcopal versus monastic, dictatorial versus conciliar and local bishop versus Roman pope. Within these spheres, civilised and orthodox Christian confronts rural pagan, cathedral practice encounters monastic observance, the cathedral clergy conflict with collegiate chapters, and the legitimacy of the appointed clashes with the rights of the elected; furthermore, a wide array of local concerns chafe against what is touted as a universal, Catholic heritage. In reality this period reveals an indisputable liturgical dynamism, rather than an irrefutable, definitive Urliturgie or precise repetition of a daily – or even annual – ceremony. Anyone who has periodically attended recurring religious or secular ceremonies recognises this implicitly. For those who have not, Lizette Larson-Miller’s prudent statement generally applies: ‘adjustments to the liturgy occur in every generation’.¹

Roman Gaul

Within about a century of its defeat at the hands of Julius Caesar (58–50 BC), all of Gaul was integrated into the Roman governmental system and remained so for five hundred years. The region was divided into two major cultural areas and four imperial provinces under Augustus: Narbonensis (called Provincia nostra or simply Provincia), which had been part of the empire since the second century BC, and Gallia Comata (‘Long-Haired Gaul’), comprising Aquitania (in the west, south of the Loire), Celtica or Lugdunensis (between the Loire and the Seine) and Belgica (between the Seine and the Rhine). The ancient town of Lugdunum (Lyons) was the centrally located administrative capital and trading hub and was largely inhabited by people from Italy and further east. It had been a place for religious assemblies from pre-Roman times, and by the early second century ad the theologian St Irenaeus (d. c. 200) from Asia Minor was leading its persecuted, Greek-speaking Christians. Although the indigenous peoples adhered to paganism, Christianity was solidly entrenched in Lyons and its environs well before the arrival of the first Frankish tribes.²

The primary institution providing structure for the formation of Christian tradition was episcopal: the urban diocese with its attendant clerics subordinate to a bishop. The bishops were selected from a patrician class, particularly from the southern parts of Gaul, whose members had been schooled in the classical tradition. By the mid-third century, the major organisational divisions of the church had been mapped out over late imperial provinces and dioceses.³ Subsequent to the issuing of the Imperial Edicts of the early fourth century, these urban sees functioned not only as salvific bastions of Nicene Christianity but also as points of civic stability, especially through the turbulent centuries to follow. Public prayer and ritual were in large part under the supervision of a Gallo-Roman episcopate that drew to the cities the intrinsic spiritual power of the collected bones of the earliest saints.

The secondary institutions that held sway over the spiritual lives of the faithful were monastic. In contrast to the urbane and aristocratic municipal overseers stood the more-or-less ascetic and reformatory suburban communities, of both men and women.⁴ At times, cathedral and convent were at cross-purposes, as the former necessarily dealt with lives lived ‘in the world’ and thus was often ‘of the world’. Nevertheless, a permeable wall existed between the institutions, with monks being elected bishop, and bishops often in full support of monasteries. Under the patronage of Bishop Hilary of Poitiers (d. c. 368), the hermit Martin (d. 397) established his monastery of Ligugé and began preaching locally. After becoming bishop of Tours in 371 or 372, Martin set up the monastery of Marmoutier to be independent of episcopal control. The strength of Martin’s regional influence is evidenced in the two thousand monks and consecrated virgins said to have been present at his funeral, by which time the area was already filled with Christian organisations. One can only speculate about the earliest communal practices, though it is definitively known that the holy places of the East and cities where the Church Fathers walked offered liturgical inspiration. In the Rhône valley, Egyptian-influenced monasticism was instituted by both Honoratus of Arles (d. 429), who founded the abbey at Lérins (c. 410), and by John Cassian (d. c. 430), who established Saint-Victor at Marseilles, which mimicked the East with camel-hair shirts, Eastern herbs and desert practices.⁵ The rule at Lérins, which required the monks to meet periodically for prayer at dawn and sunset as well as in the course of the day, may have been an amalgam of several Eastern usages.⁶ Cassian’sInstitutiones, for example, sets out a model at Marseilles for the antiphonal chanting of the Office, limiting the number of Vespers and Nocturns (Matins) psalms to twelve by appealing to the usage in Alexandria from the generation of St Mark, despite maintaining that the chanting of Prime was a contemporary practice specifically translated from his personal monastic experience in the environs of Bethlehem. The monasteries of Condat (at Saint-Claude, Jura) and Lauconne (founded c. 435) were likewise initially modelled on hermetic Egyptian communities.

During the fifth century, bishops subdivided their dioceses into parishes, the better to serve the faithful and to convert the arriving waves of Germanic tribes. The immigrant peoples adopted the Latin language, without always accepting the prevailing creed or engaging in one style of observance. Instead, Germanic practices as well as indigenous Celtic beliefs tended to persist haphazardly throughout the rural pagi.⁷ Amid these times of invasion and public calamity, the actions of Gallo-Roman bishops, often as judges and courageous civic guardians, were prompted by the prelates’ firmly held belief in their rights as regional magnates and ecclesiastical landowners.⁸ This exercise of temporal supremacy was made spiritually manifest in the bishops’ directing the liturgical structure and forms of public prayer. To help ward off catastrophe, the aristocratic Bishop Mamertus (d. c. 475) inaugurated the Rogations, or processional litanies, around 460 in Vienne, which seem to have incorporated psalmody. This is according to Sidonius Apollinaris (d. c. 480), who imported them to Clermont. Gregory of Tours notes that the Rogations were introduced to Clermont by the bishop St Gallus (d. c. 551), stating, ‘in the middle of Lent he led a procession, singing psalms, on foot to the church of St Julian the Martyr’. These apparently rival statements may indicate that each procession served a different function.⁹ His brother, theologian and phonascus Claudianus laboured to put together readings appropriate to the season, and he directed psalm singing in his brother’s church.¹⁰ In Marseilles, Bishop Venerius (d. 452) requested that the priest Musaeus (d. c. 460) compile readings and entire psalms to be sung responsorially, probably Mass Propers, and at the bidding of the successor Bishop Eustachius, Musaeus assembled a sacramentarium egregium et non parvum volumen, which contained a series of chants and psalms.¹¹ Whereas daily Mass seems to have been a sporadic possibility everywhere in Gaul, the public celebration of daily Offices was ordered by Caesarius of Arles (d. 542), who had been schooled at the abbey of Lérins. To this end, he added Terce, Sext and Nones to Matins and Vespers.¹² Caesarius memorised scripture and encouraged Bible reading by the literate and suggested that peasants commit to memory texts heard in church, including selected antiphon and psalm texts, reasoning that they found it easy enough to memorise and sing ‘shameful and diabolic love songs’.¹³ He formulised some of the earliest rituals surrounding death and recommended that the musical conventions of the church be mimicked by the faithful, who ‘should chant in a high and modulated voice, like clerics, some in Greek, some in Latin’.¹⁴ The rather disparate and chaotic nature of liturgy in general and extant sources in particular dictates that no assumptions be made about diocesan rites reflecting Eastern monastic custom, notwithstanding the extent to which personnel and practice at convents might have overlapped with those in nearby sees. Anecdotes provide interesting snapshots of the historical landscape rather than detailed topographical maps.¹⁵

The Merovingians

When Germanic tribes moved westward into this largely Romanised Gaul, local bishops sometimes shared control with the invaders, Christian or otherwise. The Visigoths and Burgundians had already adopted Arianism before their relocation, though the Alemanni and Franks remained pagan. During the first part of the fifth century, the group of Salian Franks who had been settled along the Meuse advanced to the Somme. Their chief Childeric (d. c. 481–2), son of the legendary Merovech, became the earliest known king of Tournai. After his death, his son Clovis (Chlodovech, d. 511) achieved dominion over some Frankish bishoprics and began to move westward out of Austrasia into the newly conquered area roughly between Soissons and the Loire. At the beginning of the sixth century, he made Paris the capital of his kingdom and continued south into Aquitania to unify all except south-east Gaul and Septimania (the more-or-less coastal region between the Rhone and the Pyrenees), which was in Visigothic hands. St Gregory of Tours (d. 594) alleges that Clovis, under the influence of his wife Clotilda (d. 545) and St Remigius (d. 533), bishop of Reims, converted to Catholic (Nicene) Christianity and, as late as 508, was baptised at Reims in fulfilment of a vow taken before a military campaign.¹⁶ The baptism gave Clovis the backing of the Catholic Gallo-Roman hierarchy in manoeuvres against his heretical Burgundian and Visigothic neighbours, thereby ensuring the triumph of a legitimate Roman episcopate. After he became Theodoric the Great’s brother-in-law, Clovis was sent a citharist, selected by the Ostrogothic monarch in consultation with Boethius. Clovis seems to have first heard one while dining with the king.¹⁷

Practical Christianity in its various forms, however, always remained a haphazard affair. Residual idolatry was rampant throughout the countryside, and the cult of the saints thrived as a form of syncretic polytheism. Nonetheless, the bishops moved towards the promotion of a uniform creed and liturgical discipline in the sixth century by means of an evolving conciliar process.¹⁸ Whereas the Council of Agde, in which Iberian prelates met with the bishops of south-west France in 506, permitted certain local usages in Christian worship, the council held at Orleans in 511, supposedly convened by Clovis, declared that newly erected parishes fall under the juridical authority of bishops. Local practices were permitted only insofar as the bishops allowed. For example, the Second Council of Vaison in 529 formally introduced the Kyrie and the Sanctus to the Gallican Rite.¹⁹ Thirty years later, clerics appointed to serve in the private oratories of the emerging landed gentry were likewise subjected to episcopal governance. Baptisms were normally held at the cathedral complex, but waivers were sometimes granted for the sacrament to be administered in these personal sanctuaries. Upon Clovis’s death, his realm was partitioned and distributed among his four male heirs, but Catholicisation continued: his son, Childebert, King of Paris, banned paganism in 533 as part of a growing trend probably prescribed in the other locales as well.²⁰ Theuderic of Austrasia, the son charged with the lands stretching north-west from Reims to beyond the Rhine, arranged for trained singers to be brought into his realm, most notably Gallus from Clermont, who was conscripted from a monastery to serve the church of Trier.²¹ Early Merovingian bishops and abbots, because of their wealth and power, had always been socially important figures, and this fact was especially evident during the sixth and seventh centuries. Strong personalities like the bishops Avitus of Vienne (d. 523), Remigius of Reims and Gregory of Tours or monastic leaders like Irish missionary to the Franks St Columbanus (d. 615) effectively set themselves up as independent of the monarchy and helped to found a strong Franco-Roman church.

Initially, Frankish sovereigns called on the classical nobility to labour in their administration but, by the beginning of the seventh century, a new elite class had arisen whose members possessed land and served the king. Within civil jurisdictions, the Roman idea of the civitas continued to develop as the principal administrative division of a province, with a count installed to administer and sometimes a duke to preside over a number of counts (comites) in a military fashion. Parallel to this arrangement, which had been passed down from Roman times essentially unchanged, the dioceses with cities at their centres comprised the ecclesiastical province. Within the spiritual realm, an episcopal aristocracy concomitantly developed, and both the possession of land and the execution of quasi-secular offices formed a significant part of its domain as well. A bishop administered a diocese, and what came to be the archbishop in the metropolitan provincial capital presided over a number of suffragan bishops.²² The bishop lived in the domus ecclesia (or domus episcopalis), sometimes with his clerical entourage, at the centre of the city, surrounded by a baptistery and an agglomeration of churches. In times of crisis or invasion, the city became the refuge of the folk. The organisation of the court and the structure of taxation had been delivered to the bishops from classical Rome, and the conquering Merovingians, appointing their comites as their judicial and military officials in urban centres, inherited this administrative system in turn from the bishops. As kings had the right to appoint bishops and these prelates likewise had access to forms of power, that is, to ‘liquid, landed, and spiritual resources’, bishops inevitably came into occasional conflict with these counts.²³

Although early bishops accrued influence by gathering the relics of the martyrs to the cities, Roman law prior to the sixth century prohibited the burial of the dead among the living. Consequently the early veneration of the saints and their relics conjointly developed around tombs in the suburban cemeteries. The resultant houses of worship constructed outside the city gates naturally fell within the extended episcopal purview. These places became secondary hubs of settlement, as the suburban cults’ emphasis on death, burial and saintly ancestors was integrated both formally and informally into the devotional lives of its adjacent city.Bishop Perpetuus (d. 490) arranged the ritual year at Tours in the latter part of the fifth century into a calendar. The cycle, described by his successor Gregory, included vigils for six feasts associated with Jesus, which were to be celebrated in the cathedral, plus four to honour the apostles, two for St Martin, two for St Symphorian of Autun (d. 178) and Hilary of Poitiers and two for bishops Brice (d. 344) and Litorius (d. 371–2) of Tours.²⁴ However, at least four suburban churches were enlisted for other celebrations. Late sixth-century Auxerre similarly housed solemnities in eight different urban and suburban churches. Moreover, the physical spaces between these structures were always the domain of the church, and hence processions invoking God’s protection took place outside the walls of cities.²⁵

Monastic spiritual sovereignty was intensely upheld, yet monasteries concurrently relied on clerical sacramentaries to guide custom. As religious communities began to grow in size and number by the end of the sixth century, the learned Columbanus superimposed a rule that insisted on the celebration of the Office over earlier Gallic regulations. He bypassed the prelates who maintained supremacy over the communities, and he appealed directly to the papacy for his reformational authority. This exacerbated a situation present from earliest times in which the Gallo-Roman diocesan community was at odds with the private, individualised practices of the monks. While bishops continued training urban clergy and encouraged lavish liturgies, rural monastic centres rose in importance not only by continuing the traditions of classical education but also by encouraging scriptorial activity.²⁶

Over the next century, Francia, the kingdom of the Franks, underwent various geographic expansions, contractions and divisions. As in much of history, the players operated in two distinctly dissimilar, often contradictory spheres: one of ruthlessness and political practicality and one based on a sincere spirituality and devotion to the church, insofar as the latter did nothing to obstruct the former. Foreign psalmists, perhaps through both diplomatic delegations and political marriages, were brought to Metz around 560 to sing at an important Frankish see where the office of cantor was already part of the clerical establishment. Impressive performance of the Gallican liturgy was in the interest of the Merovingian kings and their bishops.²⁷ Chlothar I (d. 561) killed the sons of his brother Chlodomer in his accession to and preservation of the throne, yet he and other early Merovingians actively founded monastic houses. His second wife, St Radegunde (d. 586), established the convent of aristocratic nuns of Notre-Dame de Poitiers and employed the poet Venantius Fortunatus (d. c. 600) as her chaplain.²⁸ Chlothar’s life of Radegunde relates a tale of one of her nuns admitting to being a composer of worldly tunes, to which the local folk boisterously carolled, accompanied by citharas. Chlothar’s son Chilperic I (d. 584) composed ‘several hymns and masses’.²⁹ The fame of Chlothar II (d. 629), King of Neustria, who reunited the Frankish kingdom in 613, continued to reverberate in the veiled, oral secular tradition. The ninth-century bishop of Meux, Hildergar, notes that women danced a rustic circle, a dance publicly extolling this leader’s political and martial victories with the acclamation, ‘Let’s sing about Chlothar, the King of the Franks.’³⁰Chlothar’s son Dagobert I (d. 639) contributed generously to the nearby church of St Denis, which was dedicated to a saint to whom he was especially devoted and where both saint and king were buried.³¹ Meanwhile, Pope Martin I (d. 653) sought to reinforce Western Christianity by requesting that Frankish bishops be sent to accompany the papal envoys to Constantinople.³²

The Carolingians

During the seventh century, aristocratic leaders, called mayors of the palace, held the real power in the kingdom, with the Merovingians degenerating into ceremonial rulers. One of these mayors, Charles Martel (d. 741), the illegitimate son of Pépin II (d. 714), made his authority known from one end of Gaul to the other: he stopped the forces of the Umayyad caliphate between Tours and Poitiers (732), waged a campaign against them a second time in Septimania, subjugated the duchy of Aquitania and pressed eastward into Germany. Charles merely entitled himself maior domus and princeps et dux Francorum, sustaining a Merovingian figurehead to the extent that he left the throne vacant upon the death of Theodoric IV (d. 737).³³ However, he secured firm political alliances not only by giving church lands to his circle of followers but also by erecting dioceses in German territory through St Boniface (d. 754), an apostle of unrelenting orthodoxy who was commissioned by Pope Gregory II (d. 731). Charles simultaneously emerged as a champion of the papacy. There is slim evidence of a diplomatic connection between Charles and the Holy See until Gregory III (d. 741) reached out to the Frankish leader for protection against the menacing Lombards. The fact remains that the prestige of the pope in relation to the Eastern Emperor had been waning over several centuries. However, the period from the late seventh century to this early Carolingian era was a time of prodigious invention, and it witnessed a flowering of the Roman schola cantorum and an expansion of liturgical control through the formalisation of the Mass temporale into the earliest Frankish booklets (libelli) – texts of chants that would become Gregorian.³⁴

Charles Martel’s two sons inherited his supremacy upon his passing, but when one abdicated in 747, the other, Pépin III the Short (d. 768), was elected King of the Franks. At the moment he re-established kingship, Pépin directly requested the endorsement of Pope Zacharias (d. 752) and subsequently effected his consecration at Soissons by Boniface. The new king’s alliance with and obedience to Rome was unmistakable. An age of reforms and Frankish synods commenced with the bishops of Francia, led by Boniface, submitting to the absolute prerogative of Rome in ecclesiastical matters. Pépin, concerned about aspects of liturgical orthodoxy, posed questions relating to the musical participation of nuns of Zacharias.³⁵ In January 754, the new king had himself re-consecrated by Pope Stephen II (r. 752–7) south-east of Reims at Ponthion, where the two swore mutual oaths of fidelity. It is generally assumed that out of personal liturgical necessity, the pontiff must have travelled in the company of at least some of his schola cantorum. In July at Saint-Denis, the pope anointed both Pépin and his two sons, Charles (Charlemagne, d. 814) and the toddler Carloman (d. 771), endowed upon each of them the title patricius Romanorum (‘noble of the Romans’) and gave official sanction to the deposition of the Merovingian figurehead Childeric III (d. c. 754). As if installing an apostolic cenotaph as a permanent guarantee of this reciprocal bond of romanitas, Stephen dedicated an altar to St Peter and St Paul in front of the tomb of St Denis.³⁶

Merovingian kingship was hereditary and sacred, with the old Frankish kings traditionally presented to their magnates for acclamation. Heretofore, neither a biblically inspired unction nor quasi-religious sanctification of a Frankish chief had arisen, even though Visigoths had already adopted this.³⁷ A formal Christian rite of consecration now supported, from a spiritual standpoint, both the moral legitimacy and the hallowed character of the monarchy. At this moment, Pépin’s right to rule emanated from a God whose grace had exalted him above all others, and any allegiance owed him became, in effect, an expression of submission to divine will.

Pépin began deliberately copying Roman liturgy and, as a reflection of the unity of God and crown, desired that the two be bound together in both a single faith and ‘single chant’. Later attestation by Charlemagne supports Pépin’s role in initiating this musico-liturgical connection. Influence clearly flowed both ways, with Frankish musical additions and adjustments applied to the Roman core.³⁸ Pépin asked Stephen for clerics to be directed to his court for this purpose, and Paul I (d. 767) sent him an antiphoner and book of responsories around the year 760. Likewise, Pépin’s half-brother Remigius, archbishop of Rouen from 755 to 762, introduced Simeon, the secundus of the papal schola cantorum, into his diocese in 760. Musicologists diffidently if not tacitly assume that these books of antiphons and responsories and all liturgical texts were transmitted without neumes, but some scholars have proposed this generation as creators of a primitive musical notation.³⁹ Pépin’s queen, Bertrada, housed scholares, including the young Benedict of Aniane (d. 821), who was involved in liturgical reform, and a chaplain, Gervoldus, who was focused on ‘the art of chanting’ and on teaching ‘the best melodies of chant’.⁴⁰ At approximately the same time, Chrodegang (d. 766), bishop of Metz and court functionary to both Charles Martel and Pépin, brought to his diocese instruction in legitimate, decorous and sacred Roman rituals. The meridian in the old kingdom of Austrasia, from Aachen down through the metropolitan of Trier to Metz, seems to have been the axis of liturgical and musical rectitude, a correctness that extended eastwards. The singers of the cathedral of Metz, musically important from the time of Chlothar I, were the first outside Rome to be organised into a schola cantorum. The town itself was symbolically connected to the city on the Tiber and was replete with churches dedicated to St Peter and other Roman saints; it was a capital of the Merovingians in Austrasia and hence a bishopric of great historical significance to the Franks, perhaps even considering itself a liturgical reflection of Rome.⁴¹ However, the ebb and flow of liturgical ideas between Gaul and Rome persisted. Older Frankish customs such as the recitation of the names of the dead during the canon were practised in Gaul before being introduced to Rome, and the Office of the Dead (ordo defunctorum) appeared in southern Gaul before it was adopted by Rome in the sixth or seventh century. Conversely, in the seventh and early eighth centuries Roman liturgy migrated throughout Francia, Germania and even Italy, though it was no doubt randomly combined with local material before the mid-eighth century.⁴² During the Carolingian era this back and forth included the importation of liturgical text and chant that, having undergone a metamorphosis, reveals Gallic style superseding Roman style.⁴³ Analogous to these exchanges, St Petronilla (St Peter’s reputed daughter) became a venerated patron of the French royal house at the Vatican basilica and a self-evident allegory of this familial relationship between papa and ‘the eldest daughter of the church’. In return, Pope Paul received an ‘altar-mensa’ donated by Pépin, which was transported into St Peter’s aula and placed before the tomb of St Peter in the Confessio, as Rudolf Schieffer put it, ‘to the singing of the litaniae laudes – probably Frankish royal Laudes that praise the military and imperial Christ triumphant and his anointed on earth, which may then have been heard in Rome for the first time’.⁴⁴

All actions reinforced the clear and unmistakable links between the Carolingians and the Holy See. Pépin donated certain tribal lands to the pope and sent armies to suppress the Lombards, securing Rome’s supremacy. Paul’s diplomatic manoeuvres to free the pope from imperial hegemony included cautioning Pépin about the Greeks as both doctrinal deviants and papal rivals. Pépin yet again secured this complex Franco-Roman political alliance by promulgating missionary work to the north and east, and by securing southern territories against the Muslims. For these acts, the pope bestowed on Pépin the title of ‘orthodox king’ and defender of the Catholic faith, appellations previously reserved for the emperor in Constantinople.⁴⁵

After Pépin’s death and the untimely passing of Carloman in 771, Charlemagne reunited the Frankish kingdom and moved his political centre to Aachen, where he commenced the construction of a Roman-style private chapel near his palace.⁴⁶ Over the years, he strengthened the communion with Rome, consolidated his sovereignty beyond the borders of Gaul, took possession of Pavia, where he was crowned King of the Lombards, and acted in defence of Pope Hadrian I (d. 795), bolstering the ever-evolving concept of the Papal States.⁴⁷ By the end of his first decade of rule, Charlemagne had initiated a revision in both learning and religious custom unprecedented in the West. His renown attracted minds from beyond Frankish territories, individuals from Ireland, Italy and England, where robust traditions of classical antiquity were more persistent. Charlemagne brought a group of scholars together in each diocese, gathering them into schools located near churches and cloisters. At Aachen, educators like Alcuin (d. 804) revived a pedagogy, handwriting and scribal technique in imitation of classical Roman systems. Besides the fact that an emphasis on a greater exactitude in the learning of chant emerged, a practice that was becoming the norm, a renewed desire to align rituals with those of Rome arose at that time. Charlemagne demanded that clerics of every monastery and cathedral learn the psalms, the alphabet and chant. He placed two of his own singers in the papal schola cantorum.⁴⁸ These attitudes made his court the lynchpin for the production of written histories, the collection of books in libraries and the development of Romanesque architecture in both ecclesiastic and secular spheres. About this time, the forging of the Donation of Constantine reflected this robust Frankish-Roman interest both in the restoration of a Western empire and also in making visual representation of incorporeal concepts, manufacturing tactile evidence of things not seen (writing was becoming important).⁴⁹ Over the course of Hadrian’s reign, the pontiff came to be the analogue of St Peter, and his spiritual domain regarded as equivalent to ancient imperial Rome.⁵⁰ Hadrian’s black marble tomb slab at the Vatican indicates by its Carolingian lettering that the object was produced in Francia, metaphorically not only representing a daughter’s duty to her deceased father but also embodying the mutual ideological and political aspirations of a renovatio imperii.⁵¹ Charlemagne made four trips to Rome, with the Liber pontificalis providing the protocol for the royal reception in 774; it again probably furnished the essentials in 781 and 787 when the reigning pope saluted him on the steps of St Peter’s. When Leo III (d. 816) met Charlemagne in 800, the pope further alienated the West from Constantinople: he greeted the Frankish king with great honour at the twelfth milestone outside the city, twice as far away as the location stipulated for meeting the Greek emperor.⁵² Charlemagne’s final stay in Rome lasted five months over 800–1, during which time he was crowned emperor on Christmas Day. This conferral of a semi-sacerdotal honour in effect deputised the sovereign to act as an agent of the church in the protection of God’s people throughout his domain.

In pre-Carolingian times, church discipline was established via the conciliar method, which had evolved in the sixth century. By the time of the Carolingians, synods were in decline. Whereas Merovingian abbots and bishops grew to become governors of a sort, both subject to and yet immune from secular supervision, the Carolingians maintained the right to nominate bishops, despite the participation of chapters of clergy. When Frankish bishops asserted their rights to control clerics in their dioceses, they did so over the objections of local nobility. However, the bishops as Charlemagne’s surrogates were granted sufficient power to resist the supremacy of the counts, which thereby created bastions of centralised imperial influence independent of lesser temporal authorities. As a result, Carolingian magnates were sometimes nominally supportive of ecclesiastical independence, but in practice, church lands and the income they generated were always subject to secular appropriation.⁵³ During this time, bonds between Frankish bishops and Roman pontiff naturally reinforced and paralleled connections between the crown and the papacy.

Many abbots named their successors for political, economic and familial reasons. Whereas the heads of the prevailing monastic houses wielded a power that simultaneously buttressed and was subject to both ecclesiastical and feudal political structure, Fulrad (d. 784), the abbot of Saint-Denis from around 750, was quite another creature still. A priest, not a monk, and a member of this Carolingian administrative aristocracy, Fulrad either collected under his protection or founded small monastic houses in eastern Francia and beyond as his personal patrimony, bequeathing to his abbey the property and income of his house.⁵⁴ As Frankish ambassador, he was also responsible in large part for arranging the relationship between the papacy and the crown that led to the anointing of the royal lineage, a lineage that had long ago placed itself under the protection of St Denis.⁵⁵ Moreover, Fulrad reaffirmed from Pope Stephen II a sustained independence from episcopal control for his own community. His design for a new abbey church was based on his personal knowledge of Old St Peter’s on the Vatican Hill, and he intended this edifice to be a symbol of papal influence and Petrine supremacy, and a mirror of Rome, the point of embarkation for St Denis and his companions.⁵⁶

Charlemagne’s efforts to regularise liturgical practice within Francia were at the same time successful yet thwarted by the weight of its diversity. Fundamental liturgical reform must have arrived in the cities from imperially sanctioned centres in an instantaneous way as clerics were sent eastwards into new territory but also south and west to venerable and established sees. Thus Lyons received its tradition by hand from a singer from Metz.⁵⁷ Monastic custom maintained dissimilar purposes and contexts; hence it generally developed independently of cathedral usage.⁵⁸ So the models of a centralised rule and liturgy were antithetical to its very being. However, Chrodegang of Metz instituted a Roman-influenced, Benedictine-style practice for his canons and is given a great deal of credit for the flourishing of Roman liturgy in the Frankish dominion of Pépin. The apostolic work of St Boniface strengthened this Benedictine standard. Throughout the Carolingian period, members of this order were critical to the effective expansion of Catholic Christianity to the tribes in the east and north. Additionally, the emperor and his only surviving son Louis I the Pious (d. 840) further endeavoured to institute a uniformity of education and ritual that had far-reaching effects among the populace. Benedict of Aniane, now working under the protection of Louis in a monastic reform that began in 814, combined Columban into what was generally a Benedictine model.⁵⁹ At the Synod of Aachen of 817, monastic discipline was reinforced, and monks were compelled to keep close to their abbeys, where the chanting of an expanded Office was imposed, as Benedictine rule was ordained throughout Francia, though with varying success.⁶⁰ But any repertorial reform would be monastic and have little or no correspondence in diocesan plainchant. Decades before, Pope Hadrian had sent Charlemagne a sacramentary (the Hadrianum) designed for the use of the pope himself on feast days and other solemnities. The Hadrianum was then adapted to more common, local usage by Benedict around 810–15. The programme of Pépin and Charlemagne was to embrace the contemporary Roman convention, incorporating various traditions and usages insofar as that liturgy was already Romano-Frankish.⁶¹ This synthesis serves as only the latest example of medieval liturgy, being both ‘an indicator of ecclesiastical romanitas’ and a testament to ‘the strength of local innovation and originality’.⁶² Strabo, writing around 840, felt that any adoption of what was believed to be Roman usage was logically sound, since practice disseminated ‘from the apostolic head’ was as close as one could get to being ‘free from every heretical taint’.⁶³ Certainly this is what Amalarius was seeking when, in search of a Roman antiphoner for Louis, he went first to Rome and then to Corbie, where he found ‘a responsoriale bearing an attribution to Hadrian’.⁶⁴

The 816 coronation of the Louis the Pious as emperor – a secular ceremony – was complemented by his anointing in Reims – a religious ceremony – at which Stephen IV (d. 817) presided. Louis formally introduced the act of consecration, which therefore made the pope an official part of the ceremony. Emperors were henceforth compelled to act in the interests of the papacy. The entire concept of the emanation of power derived from religious principles set forth in the Donation of Constantine. Louis saw the empire as a religious ideal to the extent that when the Northmen threatened attack, Louis proposed the conversion of Scandinavia as a solution. Even so, whatever Pépin’s desired ‘single chant’ had degenerated into at the end of the ninth century, the music of Rome and the emperor had diverged as an older Roman repertoire was fed back to the Eternal City through a Frankish filter.⁶⁵

Francia occidentalis

The problem of imperial succession and division of the empire among Louis’s three sons seemed to have been solved by the creation of separate kingdoms within his domain. However, when Louis died in 840, chaos reigned in light of the competing interests of his heirs. The Treaty of Verdun (843) divided the disputed territories into three separate but equal kingdoms: the east (Francia orientalis) went to Louis the German; the west (Francia occidentalis) went to Charles the Bald; the central portion (Francia media, or Lotharingia) was conferred upon Lothair (d. 855), who kept a greatly diluted imperial title along with Aachen, Trier and Metz. Until 861, the clergy attempted to maintain a kind of peace of brotherhood among the three, but their efforts failed.

Paradoxically, the final work of Amalarius is closer to the books at Lyons than to the books of Metz, and this takes us full circle back to the origins of ecclesio-political history in Gaul. Perhaps Amalarius recognised a deeper romanitas or an older, more authentic tradition in his experience. But whereas scholarship has eschewed the broad generalisations and perhaps oversimplified assertions of the chroniclers and early authors, it remains true that the complexity and diversity of practice is a kind of chaos theory of liturgical and stylistic fractals currently impenetrable to a straightforward and comprehensible formulaic rendering. Though a musico-graphic technique may have begun over a hundred years earlier, by around 900 Frankish-Roman chant began to appear in neumes that in broad gestures are relatively precise or must have been so at least to experienced singers of the time. The increasing exactitude in graphic representation was a consequence of Carolingian literacy, and it ultimately emerged from conscientious education impelled by an idealistic imperial fervour.⁶⁶ A developing literacy perforce cultivates an evolving sense of exactitude in both word and music.

Yet is ‘liturgical and musical stability’ an equivalent concept in the ninth and the twenty-first centuries? The proper ordering of the cycle of texts serves a didactic if not downright kerygmatic purpose for newly evangelised congregations. The appropriateness of the scripture verse proclaimed should take precedence over how that verse is proclaimed. At least this seems true in a pre-Carolingian environment. Most telling in this regard perhaps is the story of King Guntram of Burgundy (d. 592), grandson of Clovis, who, after a banquet during a church council, demanded that the best singer chosen by each bishop present his interpretation of the (or a) responsorium. This challenge was surely not a call for stylistic judging on a nuanced twenty-first-century level but rather an opportunity for singers to exhibit their melodic and rhythmic inventiveness and creativity. Whether inspired by the Holy Spirit or by an unnamed muse in modern-day terms, Guntram’s experiment seems more akin to comparing versions of ‘Cross Road Blues’ than to juxtaposing renderings of a Debussy prelude.⁶⁷ Furthermore, if in our own time a carefully educated child of immigrants can lose all knowledge of parental language and culture, then a properly placed singer arriving from Metz or from Rome with imperial or ecclesiastical endorsement, a cantorial pedigree and a few books could radically transform the education of young men in a monastery, cathedral chapter or patrician chapel. The force of tradition is powerful; the force of literacy is as powerful.

The court of France

The core of the royal court was the monarch’s personal household, the hôtel du roi, which was organised into divisions according to function, such as the preparation of food and drink, the maintenance of clothing, the organisation of hunting excursions and so on.¹ Its basic structure was established by the end of the thirteenth century, and in the succeeding centuries different divisions were progressively reconfigured, added or cut to accommodate changes in broader social practice or to reflect an individual monarch’s needs and tastes. A separate military household employed the guards and archers who assured the monarch’s security. This combined entourage, the maison du roi, followed the king’s movements between various royal residences in Paris, the Île-de-France and the Loire valley, and on the lengthier trips aimed at maintaining a presence throughout his domain. All divisions of the king’s household followed the court wherever it went, but not all of its members were present at once; household service was organised in three-month periods (quartiers), with most office holders required to serve for one or two quarters in any given year. While it is clear that many musicians followed the court year-round whether or not they were en quartier, or officially in service, others returned to look after lands or businesses in their home regions during off-duty periods.

While Paris was notionally the capital and housed much of the royal administrative machinery, the court rarely stayed in the city for long, even after the medieval baronial entourage began to transform into the early modern court. During the sixteenth century, the Valois kings still moved on average once every ten days, and could be away from the capital for months or even years at a time. When the court travelled, its arrival in major towns was marked by lavish celebrations and royal entries, allowing the monarch to reinforce ties with local and regional powers and providing the towns with the means to demonstrate their wealth and importance to the crown. Although François I (r. 1515–47) usually aimed to visit Paris once each year, he did not always manage; his grandson Charles IX (r. 1560–74) began his reign with a tour of the country that lasted for over two years, from January 1564 to May 1566.² Later in the century, Henri III (r. 1574–89) made longer sojourns in Paris, a pattern continued by his Bourbon successors. But despite the emergence of more stable habits by the turn of the seventeenth century, the French maintained the peripatetic tradition longer than any comparable European court. Even under Louis XIV (r. 1643–1715), the court made major voyages for important treaties and events, and it was not until the completion of the royal palace of Versailles in 1682 that it definitively settled down.³ This means that for most of the ancien régime, the court was defined less by location and physical surroundings than by its personnel and social practices. Music, as a portable art, was one essential tool in establishing its presence wherever the court happened to be.

Surviving records demonstrate that the central services of the hôtel du roi underwent significant expansion in the sixteenth century. Between 1495 and 1535 it nearly doubled in size, from 366 to 622 members.⁴ Louis XII’s marriage to Anne de Bretagne, a sovereign in her own right, was one factor in the expansion of the royal household, and the combination of their respective entourages also resulted in a new prominence for women at court. While earlier queens had maintained relatively small groups of personal attendants, Anne de Bretagne counted a large group of noble ladies-in-waiting among her servants. From this period onwards the queen’s household supplied a framework for mixed-gender activities, such as conversation and dancing, which were crucial to contemporary ideals of courtliness. The court experienced a second major wave of growth after 1550, and by 1584 the maison du roi numbered approximately 4,000.⁵ This pattern of expansion was mirrored in the satellite households maintained for other members of the royal family, such as those of the king’s siblings and royal children. Household size varied according to the age, wealth and status of the individual, and those who could draw on income from their own lands could expand their retinues beyond what the king or his treasurers might be willing to support. The queen mother, Catherine de Médicis, for example, twice regent of France during the second half of the sixteenth century, maintained an entourage of around 800 members by 1585; François d’Anjou, her youngest son and heir presumptive during most of the reign of his brother Henri III, employed over 1,000 by 1578.⁶ Wealthy nobles maintained households on the royal pattern, often rivalling those of royal family members in size and creating a competitive market for the most valuable servants. Members of the great households maintained smaller households of their own whenever income allowed.

The court as a whole was thus a combination of interlocking households with the ruler’s entourage at its centre. Its numbers fluctuated according to how many were present at one time, swelling during peacetime and diminishing at times of epidemic, war and factional strife. According to even the most conservative estimates, by the second half of the sixteenth century the court could assemble over 10,000 members when at its height, and was thus bigger than the vast majority of French towns.⁷ Like a city, the court brought together people from all social groups, from the lowliest kitchen boy or washerwoman to the highest reaches of the court nobility; it was not just the home of elites and elite social practice, even if it is these individuals and their activities that tend to be the focus of scholarly accounts. Musicians might begin a career in a subsidiary household, or in the entourage of a noble who was regularly or occasionally at court, before ability or connections allowed them to obtain a better post. Musicians frequently held several positions at once, though this could be a dangerous game. There were few better ways to alienate an important patron than to fail in duties to one employer while off serving his rival. And although they often maintained ties to multiple patrons, most musicians aspired to obtain a place (or even better, more than one place) in the king’s household, and not only because these posts were the most secure or best remunerated. Salaries often went unpaid in times of financial stress, and were often inadequate to cover the considerable expense of following the court in any case. More valuable was the proximity to power and to the range of benefits that the monarch, his family members and influential advisors had at their command. Among the most profitable of these were offices – positions in the central or regional royal administration, which could be bought and sold for profit – and ecclesiastical prebends, many of which were under crown control in France. Other rewards available to musicians were horses, clothes, jewellery and even lands and properties, as well as special payments such as pensions and new year’s gifts.⁸

Most royal musicians were attached to one of three divisions of the maison du roi: the chapel, which celebrated religious ceremonial; the chamber, consisting of the king’s personal attendants; and the stables (écurie), which grouped various services relating to horses, transportation and the training of royal pages. Other musicians, mainly trumpeters and drummers, were attached to the military household, and often had duties well beyond the provision of musical services (trumpeters were regularly used as royal messengers, for example). There were differences in social level between the different groups. Instrumentalists of the stable were considered humble servants, and were paid relatively little, wore livery and (somewhat paradoxically) mainly travelled on foot. Chapel musicians, in contrast, were normally well educated, often came from reasonably affluent families, earned higher wages and employed servants of their own. Some musicians who were particularly favoured, or courtiers from more elevated backgrounds who possessed musical skills, could occupy higher positions in the hierarchy, as the king’s valets de chambre (intimate personal attendants, often of non-noble background) or gentilshommes servants (noblemen attached to the king’s chamber, who were his closest companions). Boys employed as singers in royal chapels and chambers were normally educated at crown expense when their voices changed, and often then returned to employment within the maison du roi as adults (usually as musicians, but sometimes in other capacities). Although the hôtel du roi and subsidiary households for royal princes were staffed almost exclusively by men, the households of the queens and princesses employed not only male performers, music teachers and dancing masters, but also female musicians – often wives or daughters of male musicians in the king’s household – as well as noble ladies-in-waiting chosen for their musical abilities. Kinship was an influential factor in the appointment of musicians, as it was to the structure of the court as a whole. Families maintained a grip on certain divisions of the royal household for generations, and musical services were no exception. The Dugué–Edinton dynasty of keyboard players and lutenists in the sixteenth century and the Danican–Philidor family of wind players in the seventeenth are good examples. Such families intermarried, acted as godparents for each other’s children and collaborated on all manner of business and property transactions.⁹

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the chapel was the only formally organised, discrete musical group within the royal household.Although its adult members were clerics or priests, the musical chapel was distinct from the ‘ecclesiastical’ or ‘domestic’ chapel formed by the almoners, confessors and clerks of the monarch’s household religious establishment. The musical chapel’s origins dated back to the reign of Charles VII at the latest, and by the Renaissance it had a well-established structure and set of functions. The chapel’s size was substantially increased in the late fifteenth century and again on the death of Anne de Bretagne in 1514, when her personal chapel was merged with the Chapelle Royale. François I inherited this expanded group, and early in his reign introduced major organisational changes.¹⁰ The musical chapel was reshaped into two separate ensembles: a chapelle de musique specialising in the performance of polyphonic sacred music, and a plainchant chapel (chapelle de plainchant) for use in less elaborate situations. A high-ranking ecclesiastical figure was placed in overall charge of the polyphony chapel, while musical direction was assured by a sous-maître. By the end of François’s reign, there were two sous-maîtres, each in post for half of the year. Although numbers fluctuated, his chapel normally employed around twenty-four adult musicians, with six assigned to each part except for the top voice. Upper lines were sung by four to six choirboys, assisted by one or two adult singers; these may sometimes have been falsettists, although after 1550 they are often identified in court records as castratos. The quarter system meant that between sixteen and twenty singers normally performed together at any one time.

Sous-maîtres were often significant composers of sacred music – such as Claudin de Sermisy (c. 1490–1562) under François I, Eustache Du Caurroy (1549–1609) under the later Valois, and Michel-Richard de Lalande (1657–1726) under Louis XIV – but from François’s reign onwards there was often also a special post of compositeur de chapelle, which involved extra payment and seems to have been awarded on a personal basis to specific musicians. The chapelle de musique also employed a copyist, one or more organists, a grammar master for the choirboys and several clerks as well as servants in charge of the books and ornaments used for religious ritual. The chapel’s basic structures and duties as established during the reign of François I continued through subsequent reigns with relatively minor tinkering, despite some expansion in numbers. Accounts prepared in 1578 for Henri III include cornettists in the soprano group along with the four castratos who sang with the boys, and the number of adult singers had increased to thirty.¹¹ The chapel’s size remained constant from the reign of Henri III to the end of that of Louis XIII (r. 1610–43), and although there was further augmentation under Louis XIV (r. 1643–1715) – four sous-maîtres instead of two, for example – the basic structure was retained.¹² Henri III’s reign also saw attempts to codify the regular duties of Chapelle Royale members: the 1578 chapel accounts specify that in addition to singing a High Mass each day at the hour specified by the ruler, they were to perform Matins and other canonical hours on special feasts such as Christmas and Easter, and Vespers and Compline every Saturday and Sunday as well as on the vigils of important feasts. (They were also admonished to wear robes and surplices ‘in the manner of churchmen, as properly as can be’, which suggests that their attire and demeanour was not always as decorous as it might have been.) These documents probably do not represent new practices, but rather the formalisation of current practice; and similar rules were regularly restated through the seventeenth century.¹³

A second major development of the Renaissance was the formation of a discrete group of musicians within the royal chamber.¹⁴ At the beginning of the period, only a contingent of fifes and tabors appeared among the king’s household servants. A few chapel singers were also included among the valets de chambre but were not identified as musicians. By 1533, individuals specifically identified as singers appear in the records, and by 1540, a separate heading for chantres was created in the chamber accounts. At the same time, the fifes and tabors gradually disappeared, being replaced by viols moved over from the écurie and by other soft consort instruments, particularly those such as lute, keyboard and harp, which were useful for accompanying the voice. At least two cornettists regularly appear, often players identified as doubling on the transverse flute or recorder. The players were grouped under a new heading of joueurs d’instruments (‘instrumental players’) in the chamber records. These changes were accompanied by an increase in numbers. At the beginning of the reign of François I, only sixteen musicians appear on the household accounts. A big jump occurred under Henri II (r. 1547–59) – a monarch not usually noted in historical literature as a lover of the arts – who nearly doubled the number of chamber musicians in his household in the first full year of his reign. Numbers reached a peak of over forty in 1580, midway through the reign of Henri III. Henri III’s accounts also show a concern for balance in the appointment of chamber musicians, with roughly equal numbers of keyboard and plucked string instruments, soft winds and bowed strings. From this period onwards, a division of chamber players became a permanent part of the maison du roi, with specialisms changing in line with developments in instrument technology. And while early in the period chamber singers were often drawn from the chapel, by the end of the century chamber posts were increasingly held by men such as Girard de Beaulieu and Pierre Guédron (after 1564–c. 1620), who specialised in solo performance of secular repertoire, making the royal chamber music a significant site for experiments in vocal practice that would characterise solo singing after 1600.

A final major development of the Renaissance was the formation of royal violin bands, whose main purpose was to furnish music for the balls that were a regular feature of French court life from the mid-sixteenth century, as well as for entertainments such as cartels (staged battles, with poetry and dance), ballets and masque-like divertissements. While some violinists had become attached to the écurie by 1529, it was not until mid-century that entire bands of violin-family instruments began to appear regularly in French court accounts. Catherine de Médicis seems to have been particularly influential, maintaining a group of Italian violin players in her service from 1556 at the latest; subsequently violin bands were regularly paid from the queen’s accounts, although a separate band was also maintained for the king. Individual violinists also frequently appear in the household accounts of queens and princesses, for whom they served as dancing masters. The association of violinists with female members of the royal family stems from the necessary presence of the queen and her entourage for court balls; the increasing number of players testifies to the growing importance of dance as a courtly activity, particularly in France. Several generations of dance-mad kings – Henri III, Louis XIII and most famously Louis XIV – ensured the continued growth of this part of the court musical establishment.¹⁵ In the Renaissance, the violin groups generally included six to eight players – often from the same families, who were usually from the northern Italian regions where violins were produced – and they were sometimes paid on the budget of the écurie, and sometimes on household accounts. In 1614, early in Louis XIII’s reign, the king’s violins were officially attached to the chamber; by 1626, the ensemble had expanded to twenty-four players, known as the Vingt-Quatre Violons du Roi or the Grande Bande, which survived in this form until 1761. By the end of the sixteenth century most of the players were French rather than Italian. Wind players from the écurie were organised into a similar group of twelve players, the Grands Hautbois, which could be combined with the violins when necessary. This group is generally considered to have been the first regular orchestra in Europe. The string group was made up of five parts (the upper line or dessus, three inner parts – the haute-contre, taille and quinte – and bass). From 1656, it existed along with another more select group of sixteen string players, formed by Lully, called the Petits Violons or the Petite Bande.

Changes in court records are helpful as an indication of shifting priorities, but were essentially administrative gestures. In practice, many musicians followed the court without a paid position; when they did obtain one, it was often in recompense for services rendered over previous years. Others could occupy multiple posts. It was particularly common for singers to have appointments in both chapel and chamber, for example. Chamber musicians often performed sacred music; for example, chamber singers performed table blessings and motets when the king dined in public, from the reign of Henri III onwards. Court records frequently separate groups of musicians who in practice regularly worked together, frequently in ways that led to innovations in compositional practice. The combination of the chapel with the smaller chamber vocal ensemble, for example, was a significant factor in the genesis of the grand motet of the 1660s, whose main features include scoring for two choirs.¹⁶

The court musical establishment was a framework for assembling people with a wide range of skills, and with increases in numbers from the early sixteenth century onwards it became possible to stage lavish multimedia events that brought together musicians from different branches. For example, the famous Balet comique de la royne (1581), performed during wedding festivities for the marriage of the queen’s sister, employed virtually all the musicians from both the king’s and the queen’s households. The event was organised by the Italian violinist Balthasar de Beaujoyeux (or Beaujoyeulx), a valet de chambre in the household of Catherine de Médicis and a chamber player in the king’s household. The royal chamber singers Girard de Beaulieu and Jacques Salmon (fl. 1571–86) composed the music, and vocal soloists also included several singers from the chapel (such as the celebrated castrato Étienne Le Roy) as well as from the queen’s household (such as Violante Doria, a virtuoso soprano who was married to Beaulieu). While players from the chamber and the écurie performed the instrumental dances and accompanied the vocal ensemble sections of the piece, court poets wrote the texts, and court painters designed scenery and costumes.¹⁷ Like earlier French court fêtes – including those at Fontainebleau in 1564 and at the Louvre for the arrival of the Polish ambassadors in 1573 – the Balet comique had much in common with intermedi and later court operas in Italy, especially Florence, where Medici festivities provided one important model for French events. But in France this pattern continued long after the commercialisation of Italian opera from the 1630s onwards. Lully was essentially a court employee like Beaujoyeux (and their career trajectories were remarkably similar), and the large performing forces used in his tragédies lyriques reflected the availability of the various contingents of royal musicians and the continuing connection with courtly magnificence and display. As in the case of theatrical divertissements, outdoor processions and festivals – from royal entries into Paris or provincial cities to diplomatic meetings such as the Field of the Cloth of Gold (1520) and to jousts and tourneys of various kinds – brought court musicians together with other branches of the ruler’s establishment to serve royal representational needs.

The careers of Beaujoyeux and Lully bring up the question of the Frenchness of the royal court of France, for both musicians were Italian by birth. It is clear that the court was the principal place for cultivation of foreign music in France; there were more significant imports of all kinds there than in the country at large, at least outside the major cities. Foreign ambassadors, who began to be regularly established at the French court in the sixteenth century, maintained large retinues brought from their home countries, and French ambassadors sent home reports from abroad. Ambassadors acted as the eyes and ears of their employers, encouraging competition played out on cultural grounds between European courts (and also rendering ambassadorial accounts some of the most important historical sources for the period, since they are generally aimed at accurate description rather than propaganda). Foreign brides brought their own servants, including musicians; Elizabeth of Austria, for example, brought Maddalena Casulana (c. 1544–after 1583) with her to France when she married Charles IX in 1570, and also maintained ties with musicians at the imperial and Bavarian courts, such as Philippe de Monte (1521–1603) and Orlande de Lassus (c. 1532–94), whom she knew before becoming queen.

The Italian influence at the French court was particularly strong, beginning with the failed military campaigns of early sixteenth-century French kings in Italy itself, through the huge influence of Catherine de Médicis and her Italian-speaking sons (François II, Charles IX and Henri III), to Henri IV’s second marriage to Marie de Médicis and her subsequent regency, and continuing through the period of Cardinal Mazarin’s greatest influence during the minority of Louis XIV. These political connections had major musical consequences. Italian cornettists, violinists, dancing masters and singers were prominent members of the permanent court musical establishment, and Italian musical virtuosos – such as Alessandro Striggio in 1567 and Giulio Caccini with his daughters in 1604 – were richly rewarded as temporary visitors to the French court. Lovers of Italian music attempted to import not only individual performers and composers but also entire genres, as was most famously illustrated by Mazarin’s attempts to establish Italian opera in France in the 1640s. These efforts were often resisted, however; and the existence of strong pro- and anti-Italian factions at the French court from the 1550s onwards brought music into a larger debate about French and Italian national character, which often played out in highly polemic terms. The court was thus not only a site for the importation of ideas and practices from abroad; it was also the locus where comparisons became possible, allowing for an increased examination of what it meant to be French. The musings of Marin Mersenne (1588–1648) about the differences between French and Italian singing styles, for example, were based on his hearings of French court singers such as Henry Le Bailly (d. 1637), Antoine Boësset (1586–1643) and Étienne Moulinié (c. 1600–after 1669), and also reflect his knowledge of contemporary practices at the Medici court in Florence that Caccini and others had demonstrated for French listeners.¹⁸

Mersenne also knew about Italian singing practices through print, for not only had Caccini visited the French court, but also his song collection Le nuove musiche had made its way into the Frenchman’s hands. This underlines how print could serve as a mode of spreading courtly repertoires and practices. Here we come to one of the most distinctively French aspects of early modern musical culture: the relationship of the principal music printers to the maison du roi. The printing pioneer Pierre Attaingnant was granted the newly created post of royal printer for music by François I on 18 June 1531, and his successors in the post – the firm of Adrian Le Roy and Robert Ballard until 1598, followed by the later members of the Ballard dynasty for nearly two centuries – enjoyed unparalleled access to the royal musical establishment, and benefited from royal privileges restricting the activities of potential competitors.¹⁹ The symbiotic relationship between the royal music printers and the royal household made France very different from other European music publishing centres such as Venice. For although all these printers were physically located in Paris, their firms obtained most of their repertoire from the court, used royal imagery and references on all their products (from the fleur-de-lis, the corporate logo of early modern France, to the statements of royal licence and identification of musicians as members of the court establishment that regularly accompanied music prints), and more generally had to maintain good relationships at court to retain the charge of imprimeur du roi with its lucrative advantages. Printed music, then, became one means by which the court and the symbolic purposes it served, as a projection of French monarchy, could be both reinforced at home and distributed far and wide.

Music and courtly ideologies: power, devotion and taste

The expansion of musical activity at the French royal court was partly because of the increasing economic and symbolic centrality of the court as a whole, but there was more to it than that. Music also had a distinctive role in concepts of civility that became increasingly widely established from the late fifteenth century onwards. These ideals were most famously outlined in Baldassare Castiglione’s influential Il libro del cortegiano (‘The book of the courtier’, 1528), a set of fictional conversations about the attributes of the perfect courtier set at the tiny northern Italian court of Urbino.²⁰ The book enjoyed a Europe-wide dissemination; it was particularly enthusiastically received in France, and not only because Castiglione provided a glowing portrait of the future monarch François I in its pages. Many leading French courtiers owned copies in Italian, and three separate translations of the book were published in twenty-three editions between 1537 and 1592.²¹ French descendants of Il libro del cortegiano included Nicolas Faret’s L’honneste home, ou L’art de plaire à la cour (‘The gentleman, or the art of pleasing at court’), first published in 1630, which brought together material from Castiglione with further precepts drawn from later sixteenth-century treatises on manners and conversation.

Castiglione adopted a dialogue form, which allowed him to place contrasting points of view in the mouths of his interlocutors, and to stage the kind of sophisticated conversational game that he considered a principal aspect of courtly life. Music is discussed at several points, allowing the participants to evoke a range of classical tropes characteristic of courtly neo-Platonism (for example, about the harmony of the spheres, the ability of music to arouse or calm the passions and the individual’s response to music as a gauge of personal worth), before offering more practically orientated remarks on how music should figure in the lives of male and female courtiers. When one speaker characterises music as an ignoble activity, the others all pile in to assert that music – practised in the right way and under the correct circumstances – is, on the contrary, an essential attribute for the perfect courtier. He should be careful to sing and play only among companions of his own rank, and to do so with sprezzatura, the studied nonchalance by which difficult things may be tossed off with seemingly effortless grace. He should play only instruments such as the lute or viol, not those that distort the face or mouth during performance or those associated with low-class minstrels. The best kind of music for the courtier-performer is self-accompanied solo vocal music, which places his accomplishments in the most flattering light. While playing and singing in company is encouraged for young men, especially in mixed-gender gatherings, older men should not make themselves ridiculous by performing love songs and other music inappropriate to their age, though they may continue to play and sing for private amusement and should always be able to judge musical performances with sureness and taste. Recommendations for the female courtier are similar, although she is admonished to exercise her musical skill with even more circumspection and discretion.

The importance of such notions helps to contextualise the major changes to the secular arm of the royal musical establishment in the Renaissance. The absorption of courtly views on music into the structure and routine of the court meant that by the end of the sixteenth century, the chamber performers had formal duties roughly analogous to those of the chapel musicians, whose activities were structured by the liturgy. The chamber, in contrast, derived its ‘rules’ from concepts of civility that informed courtly ideology. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the highest-paid rank-and-file musicians were attached to the Chapelle Royale; by the end, chamber musicians could rival chapel polyphonists in wealth and prestige. Their activities formed a crucial field in which courtiers could demonstrate knowledge and connoisseurship, showing that they had received education commensurate with elite status and demonstrating the inner personal worth that a love of music was thought to demonstrate. The picture of ‘court society’ that has emerged from much research in history and the social sciences, following the influential work of Norbert Elias, has generally emphasised notions of psychological constraint; in Elias’s view, the emergence of modern civilisation is linked to increasing restraint of the passions and control of natural urges and impulses, as advocated in courtesy books from the sixteenth century onwards with regard to table manners and bodily functions.²² However, the ever-increasing value accorded to secular music in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries tends to support a picture in which cultivation of the passions through courtly expressive culture becomes an equally significant element of modernity.²³

Another consequence of the importance of musical ability or knowledge in elite social identity is the participation of aristocratic performers side by side with professional musicians, and the often considerable involvement of rulers in the minutiae of their musical establishments. While professional musicians – musicians by métier – provided the necessary nucleus of expertise, French monarchs and their courtiers contributed directly to courtly musical culture as well as paying the bills. Henri II and Charles IX both reputedly sang with their professional chapel musicians, leaving their private oratories to take tenor parts in polyphonic sacred music. Charles IX was also heavily involved in the recruitment of musicians, making particularly energetic attempts in the early 1570s to lure his favourite composer, Orlande de Lassus, away from his post at the court of Bavaria. A famous 1574 letter to Lassus from the royal music printer Adrian Le Roy describes Charles’s passion for music, and tells the composer about a session when royal chamber musicians performed chromatic pieces by Lassus and the Italian composer Nicola Vicentino for the king to compare.²⁴ Castiglione’s exhortations for noble men to play and sing were tempered in later treatises, with more emphasis on this type of connoisseurship than on active participation, beyond rudimentary musical instruction as part of early education. Yet many men continued to exercise musical skills, and music continued to figure as essential training for a court career: lute playing and dance were taught at military academies and by music and dancing masters employed in noble households.²⁵ Details of Louis XIII’s childhood musical education are well known, thanks to the daily entries kept by his doctor Jean Hérouard between 1601 and 1628, and as an adult he was active as a composer of both songs and sacred music.²⁶ Louis XIV had instruction in the lute, harpsichord and guitar in childhood, and judged competitions for organist posts in his establishment.²⁷ The need to supply music for aristocratic performers helps to explain the prominence in print culture of certain forms, such as the court song or air de cour, that were especially appropriate for their use.

New notions of civility joined other attributes, such as liberality and magnanimity, which had been important signs of elite status for centuries in feudal France. The ability of a monarch to support large numbers of retainers, and to stage impressive displays of wealth and power, remained a crucial aspect of successful rule. And as the court became larger, access to the king had to be more strictly controlled and his appearances more carefully choreographed. Whereas the court of François I was known for its relative familiarity and the ease with which courtiers might gain the king’s ear, by the time of his grandsons, contact with the ruler started to become highly ritualised. Henri III’s reign was marked in particular by royal attempts to formalise his personal routine and his interaction with courtiers and administrators, manifested in the promulgation of regulations (in 1578, 1582 and 1585) specifying the schedule of court activities. The regulations not only formalised the duties of the Chapelle Royale and specified who should be present to listen to royal Masses and Vespers; they also specified that the chamber musicians were to present themselves in the royal antechambers each morning, waiting to be called into the chamber for instructions once the rituals of the king’s official lever were complete; they were also required to come to the chamber between 7.00 and 8.00 each evening, when they could be asked to provide music for several hours. Performing forces for table blessings and dinner music were specified, and royal musicians were admonished to place themselves so that the monarch could hear them clearly and to ensure that his favourite pieces were regularly performed. Balls were scheduled on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, and the queen’s household and all the king’s gentlemen were required to attend whether or not they participated in the dancing. Descriptions of these events by foreign visitors show that the balls themselves unfurled according to a specific order: fifes and tabors from the écurie sounded a pavane followed by an allemande as the king and queen opened the dancing; the violin band then led more general participation in a branle, a courante and a volta (Henri III’s favourite, apparently), before concluding the sequence with a galliard.²⁸

Portions of Henri III’s regulations were printed for distribution throughout France and abroad, underlining the degree to which accounts of courtly ritual and the ritual itself operated as representation of an idealised order, often starkly at odds with reality on the ground. It is no coincidence that Henri III’s repeated efforts to formalise court routine happened when his authority was most severely challenged during the religious wars by both Protestant and ultra-Catholic factions, and by powerful court dynasties such as the Guises and Bourbons. In practice there were often problems with the smooth implementation of royal aspirations, but the importance of court ritual as a symbolic tool continued to grow. By the reign of Louis XIV, it had reached its zenith.

Conclusion

The French court’s multiple functions as social group and political entity created unparalleled opportunities for musical performance and composition throughout the early modern period. When the court travelled through France, it provided a crucial point of exchange for the spread of musical repertoire and practices between and within the regions. The constant presence of foreigners at court provided another mode of exchange, and was also a way in which French concepts of court life and the role of music in it could travel abroad. Courtly rituals were measured out in music, which participated quite literally in the choreography of early modern monarchy in France. Although musical language and performance styles continued to change and develop, the place of music in courtly ideals and ideologies as well as many elements of structural organisation remained largely the same from the early sixteenth century to the early eighteenth century. By this time, urban centres – and particularly Paris – were beginning successfully to challenge the court’s supremacy as a practical and representational powerhouse. The court was increasingly seen as hidebound, conservative and strangled by ceremony, and its lavishness was attacked as a source of unjustifiable expense; attempts to limit royal authority became increasingly common in the half-century before the Revolution.²⁹ However, nineteenth-century Restoration and imperial courts often attempted to revive elements of earlier practice – including musical aspects – in recognition of the symbolic weight these traditions could still wield. And many courtly attitudes about the elite cultivation of music remained almost completely intact, contributing to French musical discourse and musical practice for the subsequent centuries even after the court itself had disappeared.

Introduction

The term ‘aesthetics’ was derived from the Greek aesthetikos, sensation or perception through the senses. It entered the sphere of philosophical enquiry with Alexander Baumgarten’s treatise Aesthetica (1750), which defined the term as the ability to perceive and judge beauty by means of the senses, rather than through the intellect or reason. This formulation, unthinkable a century earlier, owed its existence to a series of eighteenth-century French debates over reason, the senses, taste and authority. These were connected to changing epistemologies, most notably the challenge of empirical experience, growing out of Newtonian science, to René Descartes’s notion of a priori reason. The Enlightenment enterprise is characterised by attempts to reconcile reason and the senses, to balance the tensions between them and to find a synthesis that could encompass both. During this period a multifaceted, overarching dialectic between rationalist and empiricist thought embraced a series of subsidiary querelles, including debates over imitation versus expression, ancient authority versus modern, and universal versus individual taste. All of these held profound importance for the field of music, which was simultaneously being rocked by its own internal conflicts. Over the course of the century, writers argued the relative merits of ancient versus modern music, tragedy versus opera, French versus Italian music, melody versus harmony, and the music of Lully versus Rameau, Pergolesi versus Rameau, and Gluck versus Piccinni. The body of musical thought resulting from these debates constitutes one of the most impressive accomplishments of the Siècle des Lumières, and indeed of any historical period.

In the eighteenth century, French writers began to explain the aesthetic response to music in subjective terms that could account for discrepancies in individual taste. An intensely subjective musical style had emerged in the madrigal, monody and opera in the early seventeenth century, and moving the passions or affections constituted a primary aim of music in early opera. Theorists, however, viewed the compositional process primarily as a rational endeavour, based on the rules of composition and principles of rhetoric, by means of which a composer or musical performer could manipulate the emotions of an audience.¹ Around the turn of the century writers began to account for the effects of music in more subjective terms that allowed for an interior, personal and individualised response. There is some truth to the over-generalisation that musical aesthetics moved from the Aristotelian and Cartesian reason of the seventeenth century to an intense, emotional subjectivity bordering on the Romantic with Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78). More valid, however, is an assessment of eighteenth-century musical aesthetics as a series of attempts to balance reason and sense (in its two meanings as physical sensation and later subjective emotion or sensibility).

Music, reason and the senses

The conservatives in the quarrels over sense and reason turned to two principal authorities: Aristotle and Descartes. According to Aristotle, art and music represented a direct imitation of nature, specifically human nature. A central tenet of Aristotelian thought, seized upon by advocates of rationalism, was ratio, the innate ability of human beings to reason. Another was katharsis, the purging of emotions by the direct experience of those emotions, mainly pity and fear, through tragedy. These, along with Aristotle’s treatise on rhetoric, brought a new dimension to the performing arts: the possibility of catharsis through a direct imitation (mimesis) of the emotions through speech, or through the sung speech of vocal music. In seventeenth-century France, the Aristotelian doctrines of mimesis and ratio took root and thrived in the local soil of Cartesian rationalism. Descartes’s Discours de la méthode, based on an epistemology of innate ideas and a priori knowledge, provided a method of deductive reasoning by which one could arrive, through the act of thinking, at clear and self-evident truths. His widely influential Traité des passions de l’âme provided a rational, physiological and descriptive basis for understanding and portraying the passions or affections. Descartes’s distrust of the senses caused him to dismiss the idea of beauty, musical or otherwise, from his philosophical system. Following Descartes, seventeenth-century thinkers criticised music for addressing only the physical sense of hearing, and consequently for failing to create a profound experience in the listener.²

Musical quarrels over sense and reason reach back to ancient times, when the followers of Pythagoras and Aristoxenus vehemently debated whether mathematics or the ear was the ultimate determinant of musical temperament. Through the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the ear tended to be generally distrusted in favour of the mind. This distrust was reinforced by seventeenth-century rationalism. Beginning in the eighteenth century, however, French writers began to look to England, where John Locke and Thomas Hobbes had developed epistemologies based on perception. According to these writers, the mind can know only what it perceives through the senses. In France, this belief found expression in theories of sentiment or impression of the senses. Throughout the eighteenth century, French writers used various means of incorporatingsentiment into a rational, imitation-based model.

Modern aesthetic theory arose out of the disputes over taste in the early eighteenth century. According to the rationalists, taste was the result of universal reason, which would remain forever codified by the rules of the ancients. (Since ancient music was unknown, the ‘ancient’ music of Jean-Baptiste Lully often served as an equivalent standard.) To advocates of the senses, it was a more relative phenomenon that depended on sensory impressions (sentiments) unique to each individual. In reality, most writers based their theories on varying permutations of these two positions. The association of taste and sentiment can be traced back to Antoine Gombaud, chevalier de Méré (1607–84), who defined bon goût (good taste) as ‘judging well all that presents itself, by some sentiment that acts more quickly and sometimes more directly than reflection’.³ A few years later Pierre Nicole opposed this taste to knowledge of the rules: ‘This idea and strong impression, which is called sentiment or goût, is completely different from all the rules in the world.’⁴

Like so many of the contributions to an emerging aesthetics of music, the first systematic discussion of the ‘beauties’ of music was provoked by a musical querelle. It began with François Raguenet’s Paralèle des italiens et des françois, en ce qui regarde la musique et les opéras (1702), an encomium of the merits of contemporary Italian opera in comparison to the French. The champion who rose to defend French music (primarily the tragédie en musique of Lully and his followers), Le Cerf de la Viéville, was, like Raguenet, a musical amateur. His Comparaison de la musique italienne et de la musique françoise (1704–6), however, adumbrated the aesthetic issues that would be debated over the course of the century and, in its comparative analysis, laid the basis for the beginnings of modern musical criticism. Le Cerf admits an element of sense into his rationalistic doctrine when he calls good taste ‘the most natural sentiment, corrected or confirmed by the best rules’.⁵ Following contemporary theorists of literature and the theatre, he bases his argument on the Aristotelian ideal of the imitation of nature. He insists that such imitation, the ultimate goal of all the arts, is achieved through a proper combination of word and tone, and a strict adherence to the rules of clarity, simplicity and expressiveness. In its conformity or lack of conformity to these standards, music, like literature, can be judged by the mind. But music must also be judged through the exercise of an inner aesthetic faculty based on the senses and feelings. This sentiment intérieur, as Le Cerf calls it (probably following Méré, whom he admired), can be determined by the simple process of asking if an air has flattered one’s ear or moved one’s heart. Finally, since for Le Cerf the heart can be moved only by the intellectual content of an affectively set text, the feelings of sentiment end by being circumscribed by the rules of reason.⁶

Jean-Pierre de Crousaz (1663–1750), a Swiss philosopher whose Traité du beau appeared in Amsterdam in 1715, is known for applying Cartesian principles and scientific tools (drawn chiefly from physics and geometry) to the apprehension of beauty. Qualities stemming from geometry (‘beauties of ideas’), such as unity, variety, order, proportion and regularity, are universally perceived and admired. But this universal judgement is complemented by a relative judgement more dependent on the physical senses and feelings (‘beauties of sentiment’) that vary according to the individual’s capacity. For Crousaz, the highest form of aesthetic judgement (bon goût) depends on an equal partnership of reason and sentiment. Although he assigns priority to reason, Crousaz also emphasises the relativity of musical beauty, attributing it to the differences in humours among human beings and the differences in the ways musical sounds interact with the physical senses.⁷

The Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture of Jean-Baptiste (abbé) Dubos (Paris, 1719) gives an unprecedented place to theories of sentiment within an Aristotelian doctrine of imitation. Dubos sees sentiment as an immediate sense perception akin to seeing or tasting, and assigns it a status more important than reason in the judgement of a work of art: ‘Sentiment is a far better guide to whether a work touches us, and makes the impression it is supposed to make, than all the dissertations composed by critics to explain its merits and calculate its perfections and faults.’⁸ Reason should intervene in the general judgement we make of a poem or a painting only to support a decision of sentiment, and to explain which faults prevent it from pleasing, and which are the pleasing aspects that make it attractive. For Dubos, sentiment refers not only to the five senses, but also to a ‘sixth sense’ located in the heart, an internal faculty that perceives beauty through the external senses. This sense acts immediately, unlike the intellect, which can only confirm its judgement.

Dubos discusses music and the other arts only after treating a more general philosophy of the beautiful, and these sections represent more conventional Aristotelian mimetic theories. The goal of art, according to Dubos, is to produce pleasure by imitating objects that arouse our passions. For music, the imitative principle must be focused on the imitations of feelings. He agrees with earlier rationalists that music set to a text is preferable to instrumental music, and he deplores music whose interest depends on richness of harmony, which he compares with mere colour in painting or rhyme in poetry. Nonetheless, in his theory of musical signs, Dubos introduces an opening for the eventual elevation of music as an art of feeling. As the painter imitates the forms and colours of nature, he writes, the musician imitates the tones of the voice – its accents, sighs and inflections. Dubos distinguishes these musical ‘signs’ of the passions (signes naturels), which relate directly to nature, from spoken words (signes de convention), which constitute more arbitrary ‘symbols’ of the passions. Dubos’s theory of musical signs was developed by later writers, most notably Rousseau.⁹

One of the most wide-ranging and intellectually rigorous treatments of the concept of beauty, Yves-Marie (père) André’s Essai sur le beau (1741), grew out of the second great musical querelle of the century, between the conservative followers of Lully and the progressive followers of Rameau. The quarrel erupted after the premiere of Rameau’s first opera, Hippolyte et Aricie (1733), which the Lullistes accused of being confusing, devoid of melody and generally ‘painful’. The dismay caused by this new style also occasioned the first musical application of the term ‘baroque’, a word occasionally used before this time to mean ‘bizarre’.¹⁰ It was amid this controversy that treatises on good taste and beauty began to proliferate, and the aesthetic implications of the quarrels over the new music and the old began to find clarification. Of all the eighteenth-century theorists, André displays the most thorough grasp of the aesthetic problem of reason versus the senses. Beginning with the theories of Pythagoras and Aristoxenus, he finds the most successful synthesis in the tragédie en musique of Lully. Like other conservative writers dating back to Le Cerf, André admires the domination of the text and therefore of rational meaning in Lully’s music. He speaks out against the empiricists, for whom sentiment is the only judge of harmony, the ear the only judge of beauty, and for whom no universal rules of art exist. André, while acknowledging sensual pleasure and the validity of individual taste and national styles, insists that universal reason should guide the apprehension of true artistic beauty.¹¹

The most influential theorist at mid-century, Charles Batteux (1713–80), also maintains a rationalist foundation. In Les beaux arts réduits à un même principe (1746), he argues for the imitation of nature and adherence to the rules of art. Like the other theorists discussed here, however, he makes room within his conservative system for a theory of sentiment, which he equates with sensory perception. Music, through its imitation of passionate vocal inflection, surpasses mere words in its ability to speak directly through le sentiment to the heart. What Dubos calls the ‘sixth sense’ Batteux calls taste – the ability to sense (sentir) the good, bad and mediocre in art. Batteux posits good taste as rational and universal. It is to the arts what intelligence is to the sciences: a means of discerning the good and the beautiful, as in science intelligence is a means of discerning the true. This bon goût regulates all the arts through its immutable laws, the first of which is the imitation of la belle nature. Finally, though, even Batteux (perhaps the most conservative of these writers) finds a place within his hierarchy for the concept of individual tastes, which he calls goûts en particulières. Tastes can be different, then, while still true to nature and thus good. The richness of nature and the infinite possibilities of using its materials are compared to the many different perspectives from which an artist may depict his model; each aspect will be different, and yet the model remains the same.

Gradually the term sentiment began to take on connotations of feeling, in the beginning only as it resulted from sensory impression and strong opinion. By degrees an emotional element made its way into the standard dictionaries. By the mid-eighteenth century the term was being applied to the more gentle emotions, such as love and esteem, and often figured in such phrases as sentiments tendres and sentiments délicats. Early eighteenth-century writers refer to music as expressing les sentiments et les passions; here sentiments refers to ‘feelings’ as opposed to strong emotions. Dubos, for example, uses the term in a dual manner: in the singular, it refers to the internal sense that apprehends artistic beauty; in the plural, it refers to the feelings in nature that music is supposed to imitate (l’imitation des sentiments). As sentiment continued to take on more emotional meaning, its sister-term sensibilité was becoming the focus of expanded meaning and a new vogue in French moeurs. Originally, while sentiment had signified sensory perception, sensibilité had signified the capacity of animals (in contrast to plants) to have this ability. Gradually it acquired the meaning of ‘disposed toward the sentiments of tenderness and love’.¹² This term’s vogue reached its height with the novels of Madame de Tencin, Nivelle de la Chaussée and Rousseau. Rousseau’s novel Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761) created a fashion for sensibilité that – corresponding to the sentimental novel in England and the empfindsamer Stil in Germany – dominated much late eighteenth-century literature. Not surprisingly, sensibilité would constitute a cornerstone of Rousseau’s musical aesthetics. By the end of the century, the terms sentiment and sensibilité were used interchangeably, but their meanings vary according to context. In the field of music few writers went as far as Rousseau in the direction of a proto-Romantic association with pure feeling.

In the continuing dialectic between reason and the senses, writers in the second half of the eighteenth century remained as diverse in their approach as in the first. Significantly, a few theorists began to turn from a rationalistic approach altogether. Some fell under the influence of Étienne Bonnot (abbé) de Condillac (1715–80), a follower of Locke, and the more radical acceptance of sense perception found in his Traité des sensations (1754). One of these was an author named Boyé, who wrote a treatise entitled L’expression musicale, mise au rang des chimères (1779). Dispensing with the doctrine of imitation altogether, Boyé advocates instead the physical beauty of music and harmony.

The binary opposition of reason and senses, an artificial construction at best, was complicated by a wide range of issues, especially as the century progressed. For one thing, the idea of a rationalist aesthetic or even a wholly rationalist philosophy had always been something of a contradiction in terms; as Thomas Christensen has pointed out, all rationalist theories must eventually intersect with empirical evidence. At mid-century, some thinkers began to foreground these kinds of intersections. As Christensen puts it, it was easy to reconcile Descartes’s mechanistic metaphysics with newer theories of sensation ‘simply by stripping away the former of innate ideas and God’.¹³ At the same time, the vehemently anti-rationalist Rousseau, radically progressive in his rejection of French music and in his advocacy of a feelings-based subjectivity, could still clothe his theory in the tenets of Aristotelian mimesis. Likewise, certain medical writers, addressing the role of music in healing, combined mimetic theory with ideas of sympathy and sensibility.¹⁴ These developments reflect both the ferment of the period and an increasing sophistication in the handling of aesthetic complexity. They also reflect the Enlightenment propensity for the forging of intellectual synthesis in the fire of polemical debate.

The incorporation of the senses into doctrines of reason meant that the individual as a sensing being could now make decisions on the basis of inner feelings rather than outward authority, be it church, state or academy. It also meant that music, whose primary function was formerly seen as moving the emotions according to the principles of rhetoric and oratory, was now viewed as a means of personal pleasure, and of understanding humanity and the self.¹⁵ The move away from intellectual models and a growing acceptance of a subjective approach to music, however, were balanced by a widespread belief in the universality of the musical experience. This balance, manifested in a variety of ways, distinguished the musical thought of the Enlightenment from that of the later Romantic era.

The philosophes and Rameau

Most of the major contributors to French musical thought during the late eighteenth century were self-styled philosophes – public intellectuals (not necessarily philosophers) who addressed a wide variety of topics with the mission of disseminating knowledge while critiquing and correcting error. Many also contributed to the vast Enlightenment project known as the Encyclopédie. Though the philosophes rarely saw eye to eye, they shared a common critical outlook and search for underlying principles, and these principles served as the basis for their writings on music. In 1748 the chief editor of the Encyclopédie, Denis Diderot, commissioned Rousseau to write the articles on music, which Rousseau completed over the space of only a few months in 1749. He later collected these in his Dictionnaire de musique (1768). The expanded Dictionnaire summarised a philosophy arising not only from Rousseau’s contributions to the Encyclopédie, but also from a new series of fiery debates on the relative merits of French and Italian music and on the nature of musical expression. These had begun as part of the Querelle des Bouffons (1752–4), the third great musical querelle of the century, which had been provoked by the performance of several intermezzi comici, including Giovanni Battista Pergolesi’s La serva padrona, by a comic Italian troupe (the Bouffons) from August 1752. The Querelle became a vehement debate over the relative merits of modern Italian opera versus the operas of Rameau, which the progressivists now considered outdated. As in the earlier querelles, new ways of thinking about music arose out of the polemics of the debate.¹⁶

Rousseau had himself composed an opera, Le devin du village, which intended, in its recitative at least, to emulate the Italian style.¹⁷ It was enthusiastically received in 1752. It is not surprising, then, that Rousseau entered the fray as spokesman for Italian music. His Lettre sur la musique française (1753), peremptory in its dismissal of French music, nonetheless brought a philosophical spirit to the quarrel, and a new perspective, largely linguistic-based, to earlier discussions of the nature and meaning of music. In it Rousseau sets out his theory of the primacy of language and melody, according to which the viability of a national musical style (both vocal and instrumental) is ultimately derived from the innate musicality of the language that informs it. According to Rousseau, musicality and rationality are mutually exclusive, and nations with languages that had developed as a means of rational discourse, such as France, cannot hope to have a national music. As proof of his theory, he analyses Lully’s famous monologue from Armide, showing how the defects of the French language result in the impossibility of a successful musical setting. The ideas set forth in the Lettre were considerably influenced by Rousseau’s theories on the origins of language, which he was developing at this time; these would be published in his Essai sur l’origine des langues (1781). Already in the Lettre, however, Rousseau proclaimed his central theory of ‘unity of melody’ (unité de mélodie), which denounced counterpoint in favour of a single melodic line. (As Jacqueline Waeber has shown, Rousseau’s abhorrence of musical complexity may have arisen as the result of a hearing defect.¹⁸)

Rousseau’s Lettre was answered by Rameau himself, whose Observations sur notre instinct pour la musique et sur son principe (1754) offered a bar-by-bar defence of Lully’s recitative and the French style. Rameau also used this opportunity to summarise essential elements of his musical philosophy. In contrast to Rousseau, who based his aesthetics on melody and language, Rameau bases his own system on the foundation of harmony and the corps sonore, the overtone series whose discovery had been announced by Joseph Sauveur in 1701. By the time of the Observations, Rameau had become a firm adherent of sensation in music, an epistemology grounded in and dependent on the natural phenomenon of the corps sonore. At the same time, he continued to frame these beliefs with a Cartesian adherence to universal formal principles, deductive reasoning and self-evident mathematical truths.¹⁹

In 1755, Rameau once again attacked Rousseau, especially his advocacy of melodic unity, in his Erreurs sur la musique dans l’Encyclopédie. In this exchange as in their later writings, both Rameau and Rousseau reveal a mixture of progressive and traditional views. Despite the vehemence of their debate, both adhere to the belief in the imitation and expression of the passions. Rousseau, however, dismisses Rameau’s extreme view of music as physical sensation and with it the primacy of harmony and instrumental music. Instead, he roots his theory of music (like his views on language and society more generally) in the equally radical ground of feeling (sensibilité). In Rameau’s debate with Rousseau, we see a growing divide between the advocates of sentiment as physical sensation and those of sensibilité as feeling, and a nascent split between the advocates of music as a formalist discipline rooted in mathematics and science, and as a humanistic discipline rooted in language.

With the notable exception of Rousseau, many of the philosophes were strongly attracted to, and influenced by, Newtonian experimental science. Its tenets of scientific observation and empirical evidence tended to further weaken the hold of rationalistic epistemologies, or, as in the case of Rameau, to coexist with them. Jean le Rond d’Alembert (1717–83), co-editor of the Encyclopédie, vociferously championed Newton and denounced Descartes in the ‘Discours préliminaire’ to the first volume of the Encyclopédie (1751). D’Alembert is also known for popularising Rameau’s theories and for his conciliatory role in the quarrels over French and Italian music. His De la liberté de la musique (1759), written at some years’ remove from the heat of the Querelle des Bouffons, advised composers to take what was best from both the French and Italian styles.²⁰

Denis Diderot (1713–84), like d’Alembert, sought to mediate and synthesise opposing views, though his sympathies, like those of the other philosophes, lay with Italian music. His early writings, such as the Mémoires and the article ‘Beau’ in the Encyclopédie, embraced the theories of Rameau and, like the writings of Rameau, rested on a rationalist foundation of proportional relationships. Unlike the composer, however, who believed that harmonic proportions grounded in nature assured a uniform, universal response, Diderot admitted differences based on the sensory perception of the individual. Over time Diderot grew disenchanted with Rameau, whose advocacy of the corps sonore had begun to verge on metaphysical obsession. In the late 1750s, the period of Diderot’s sentimental plays Le fils naturel and Le père de famille, he turned from the abstraction of mathematical proportions to an emotional sensibility approaching Rousseau’s. Le neveu de Rameau, a satire dating probably from 1761 or 1762, critiques Rameau through the caricature of Rameau’s actual nephew, a musician living in Paris. A multivalent and complex work, it has received widely varying interpretations. Cynthia Verba, following Otis Fellows, makes a convincing case that the novel represents an intermediary phase in Diderot’s transition from a position of sensibilité to one of reflection, restraint and conscious artistic control.²¹ The ‘Moi’ of Diderot’s narrative represents the latter position, while the Nephew (‘Lui’) represents creative furore taken to the point of madness. Yet the ravings of Lui, an early portrait of the modern ‘genius’, are not devoid of validity. The exchange between Lui and Moi may ultimately be seen as the tension between subjectivity and objectivity in the aesthetic experience, a dialectic representing the extremes that Diderot, like other Enlightenment philosophers, sought to recognise if not to reconcile.

Staging the arts of a new era

An important result of the eighteenth-century querelles was the emergence of a respect for the arts as the beacon and embodiment of a new society based on the Enlightenment ideals of love, peace and sensuous (and sensual) beauty. This assessment of the arts directly opposed the old Horatian doctrine of ‘Ut pictura (musica) poesis’, a corollary to the theory of Aristotelian mimesis, which had seen all the arts as different forms of imitation adhering to the same rules as poetry. It was natural for writers to assign mimetic values to the fine arts, for the stories, histories and allegories signified in painting could easily be ‘read’. But the Aristotelian theory that art imitates nature (more specifically, human emotions) was more difficult to apply to music because of the elusive nature of musical meaning. In the seventeenth century, the art of music had suffered in comparison to literary genres; if opera was found lacking, instrumental music tended to be dismissed or ignored. Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle’s frequently quoted bon mot, ‘Sonate, que me veux-tu?’, summarised the conservative view of instrumental music predominating until at least 1750. This view was increasingly challenged in the later part of the century. A growing emphasis on the senses, without the need for recourse to a verbal text, encouraged an unprecedented rise in prestige for music in general, and for instrumental music in particular. In 1765 François-Jean Chastellux claimed that the ‘inarticulate’ sound of instrumental music, instead of weakening its effect, actually made it the preferred language of the passions. Michel-Paul Guy de Chabanon’s Observations sur la musique (1779) uses instrumental music – along with the non-verbal response of animals, babies and savages – as the basis of his attack on reason and imitation. Like Boyé, Chabanon insists that music pleases independently of imitation, and acts immediately on the feelings. Robert Neubauer discusses these developments as an ‘emancipation’ of music from language, though as Downing A. Thomas points out the term may be a misnomer, since this development can more appropriately be viewed as a synthesis in which music is regarded as an equal partner.

Since sensuous beauty was a quality more associated with women than with men, the verbal or intellectual content (in semiotic terms, the signified) of a musical work tended to be seen as masculine, its physical quality (the signifier) as feminine. An increasing emphasis on the artistic signifier alarmed those who privileged the mind over the ear. Both painters and musicians were warned against the ‘seductive’ charms of colour and musical sound, just as a young man would be warned against the charms of prostitutes. In music and literature, these charms were associated with Italy. Le Cerf characterises French music as an innocent virgin, Italian music as a brash hussy. Such language would intensify throughout the century. One writer calls Italian music a coquette who only knows three or four words, which she repeats ‘mincingly’.²² Another compares Boccherini’s sonatas for keyboard and violin, Op. 5, to a woman who, instead of maintaining a consistent affection, ‘demands and uses sweetness and reproach one after another’.²³ The language of Boyé in his L’expression musicale mise au rang des chimères, an all-out defence of musical sensation, becomes positively orgasmic:

In the ancien régime, women led a movement away from the expert and towards the amateur, and away from the intellect and towards the more delicate feelings and sensations. Trained in the less intellectual atmosphere of the salon rather than in the humanistic disciplines of the schools and academies, they were more apt to appreciate the sensuous qualities of colour and sound than intellectual content. As a strict, humanistic university training gave way to a less rigidly educated class of scholars in the eighteenth century, a common body of knowledge began to break down. The separation and rise of the artistic signifier, that is, the appreciation of music qua music and painting qua painting, parallels this disintegration of humanistic knowledge. It also seems to parallel a disintegration of political authority, for when there is a political message to be conveyed, whether within the institution of church or state, a high level of verbal or intellectual content is demanded. Louis XIV, like the Catholic church, expected from his court painters and musicians a discursive art that would propagandise the historical and allegorical symbols of his authority. In the eighteenth century, artists such as Couperin and Watteau, and later Rameau and Boucher, did not work under such rigid political constraints, and their art reflects a move away from the intellectual ‘message’ of music to its sensuous surface.²⁵

A feminine salon culture had a direct impact on eighteenth-century aesthetics through a cult of love dating back to the salons of Catherine de Vivonne, marquise de Rambouillet, and Madeleine de Scudéry. A fascination with ‘the little things’, including flirtatious games and conversation, and with utopian dreams of societies based on salon ideals, emerged as an alternative to the neoclassical ideals of tragic heroism and the arts of the absolutist state. The study of subtle emotional nuance likewise became an ideal allowing salon women an introspective understanding of the self, independent of the patriarchal domain of state and family. Concomitantly, the concept of honnêteté, given definition by the chevalier de Méré and other salon theorists, began to emphasise the pleasing rather than the edifying goals of musical rhetoric.²⁶ After Lully’s death these ideals merged with the aims of a progressive group of artists at the Paris Opéra, including André Campra, Antoine Danchet, Antoine Houdar de La Motte and Michel de La Barre. The genre of the opéra-ballet, emerging around 1700, became a manifesto for love versus militarism, sense versus reason, and libertine pleasure versus stultified academicism. With the mythological figures of Venus, Cupid and Folly (la Folie, the female fool and goddess of comic madness) as its icons, this genre emphasised a spectacular element and the voluptuous pleasures of music and dance at the expense of complex plots and heroic posturing (see Chapter 4).²⁷

Opposing the aesthetic and ideology of the tragédie en musique and court ballet, a series of opéras-ballets actually satirised a group of older court ballets with similar titles. For example, Le triomphe des arts (1700), by La Barre and La Motte, may be seen as a satire and ideological reversal of Louis XIV’s court ballet Le ballet des arts of 1663 (music by Lully, livret by Isaac de Benserade), and a self-reflexive celebration of the progressive arts of the public sphere. The court ballet, an exhibition of the liberal arts in the service of Athena, goddess of war, had celebrated the arts in the service of Louis XIV as a symbol of the peace obtained through his military victories. Le triomphe des arts updates the symbolism of the court ballet by presenting the arts as leading the way to a new, peaceful society under the direct inspiration of Venus. In the prologue, the goddess of love challenges the monarchical figure Apollo by successfully dedicating a rival temple to Cupid, and in succeeding entrées she serves as patron to a series of artists who use their art to establish the values of love and beauty in the service of humanity. In the final entry, Venus effects the transformation of Pygmalion’s statue into a living woman, symbolic of a new society based on love and sensual beauty rather than absolutist glory. The livret confirms that the living sculpture of Pygmalion’s statue can be understood as the dance itself, literally bringing to life the utopian qualities suggested in the ballet. The final dialogue of the allegorical characters Music and Dance, complementing the succession of previous entrées, points to the larger genre of the opéra-ballet as the site of the confluence of the arts of love and peace.

Serving as the climax of Le triomphe des arts, Ovid’s tale of Pygmalion later became the subject of a series of musical stage works representing successive eighteenth-century aesthetic theories.²⁸ As such they reflect the philosophical developments discussed above, including a preoccupation with the nature of the senses and subjectivity. In 1734, the dancer Marie Sallé danced her own choreography of this story (probably to music by Jean-Joseph Mouret), creating a prototype of the genre known as the ballet d’action. This genre dispensed with the stylised costumes, masks and wigs, along with the symmetrical dances of the earlier ballet. Sallé, creating a scandal of international proportions as the animated statue, was the first to trade the customary corseted costume for a flowing tunic and to incorporate pantomime, at that time known only in the popular context of the fairs and street theatre. At a climactic moment, the animation of the statue is followed by a series of dances by means of which the sculptor teaches her to dance. Like Le triomphe des arts, Sallé’s Pygmalion represents a meta-celebration of dance and of the new genre it represents.²⁹

If Sallé’s Pygmalion represents the art of dance, Rameau’s Pygmalion of 1748 claims superiority for music. Much of the livret of this work, by Ballot de Sovot, is drawn from Le triomphe des arts. As Leanne Dodge suggests, however, Rameau uses the work as a platform for his theory of music as the animating force behind all other forms of sensation and knowledge, and his advocacy for the supremacy of sound in sensory and intellectual development. Tellingly, the moment of the statue’s animation is accompanied by the diegetic presence of the corps sonore, the fundamental generative force of Rameau’s aesthetic theory, and it is the statue’s sensibility to music that leads to her transformation as a fully human self. Dodge believes that Condillac’s Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines (1746), written just two years before, had a profound influence on Rameau’s Pygmalion. Likewise, Condillac’s famous use in his Traité des sensations (1754) of an awakening statue to illustrate the awakening senses may have been influenced in turn by Rameau’sacte de ballet.³⁰

Rousseau’s Pygmalion, written in 1762 and first performed in 1770, was a staged (spoken) monologue interspersed with twenty-six musical passages, mostly by the composer Horace Coignet. It represented at once a demonstration of Rousseau’s aesthetic theory and an introduction of a new genre, the melodrama. In L’essai sur l’origine des langues (1781), Rousseau elaborated on his theory of the anthropological origins of music, according to which music, language and gesture had originally been fused, allowing a full expression of the passions of the heart. With civilisation and the passage of time that fusion had been ruptured, and the communicative nature of music lost. Given the utter failure of French opera to communicate in the language of the passions, in Pygmalion Rousseau offered a recombination of music, language and gesture (pantomime) that could once again speak to the human heart. Like earlier settings of the Pygmalion story, Rousseau’s Pygmalion represents a meta-celebration of a new musical genre, in this case the melodrama.³¹

More overtly than the other settings of the Pygmalion story, Rousseau’s represents a meditation on the relationship between the artist and his work, and on the complicated play of consciousness and subjectivity that defines that relationship. Pygmalion and his sculpture share a common self: as Galathée awakens she points to herself while uttering, ‘Moi’, then to the sculptor while uttering, ‘Encore moi’. The work ends with Pygmalion’s declaration that he has given ‘all of his being’ to the statue and exists only through her. In the end, as Shierry Weber puts it, Pygmalion is about the nature of art as the product of the self. Despite Rousseau’s lip service to imitation, then, in Pygmalion he replaces mimetic notions with an exploration of the nature and role of subjectivity in the artistic process. It is, however, important not to oversimplify this interpretation: in Weber’s analysis, the multiple subjectivities of sculptor and art work derive from Rousseau’s notion of the reflective, discontinuous nature of the self.³²

The Pygmalion story was presented as an allegory not only for different composers’ and librettists’ artistic theories, but also for the nascent field of aesthetics itself. It reflected a newly found interest in how art is created (the relationship of art and artist) and how art is perceived and received (the relationship of art and audience). Subjective and inter-subjective experience is central to both of these. Pygmalion, alone in his studio, uses his art to bring to life a part of himself, and then to witness the process and effect of that transformation. The statue also represents an audience, learning to appreciate the senses and the sensuous beauty of the arts. Pygmalion’s statue, then, represents a new manner of creating and perceiving the arts, and each of these musical settings celebrates in its own way a form of art for a society learning to know itself in a new way.

Catholic church music

Church musicians experienced agonising levels of institutional rupture between the Revolution and Napoleon I’s concordat of 1801.⁶ Moreover, their music would be fought over by competing reformist camps and according to the ideals of different governments for the next century or more. Revolutionary fervour had resulted in the burning of choirbooks, the destruction of church organs and the disbanding of a national network of (admittedly small-scale) choirs and choir schools (maîtrises). Napoleon reinstated the Chapelle Royale as a chapelle impériale in 1806, but it remained in service only until 1830, the beginning of the July Monarchy; moreover, Notre-Dame had no more musical authority than any other cathedral. In short, French church music lacked an obvious Parisian centre to act as a model for either normal daily or festive regional practice.

That said, Paris was not entirely out of the liturgical-music picture. It sporadically provided a different kind of hub for sacred music. In particular, while individual maîtrises around the country struggled to re-establish themselves in the first half of the century, educational initiatives were an obvious target for centralising zeal. We normally associate the centralisation of French music education with the Paris Conservatoire (founded as a school for military music in 1792 and as a school for civic music more generally in 1793–5), but the Conservatoire’s roots were firmly republican, and beyond its organ class it never played an institutional role in the country’s church music. But the two most important, and state-funded, schools of church music of the nineteenth century were also Parisian, and were led by musicians whose love of church music dovetailed with a love of early music. The first was opened by Alexandre-Étienne Choron in 1817 as an école primaire de chant, became formalised as a specialist church music school in 1825 under the title Institution Royale de Musique Religieuse, and closed in 1834 amid the July Monarchy’s cooling-off of support for religious institutions. Choral music – Palestrina, Victoria and Handel especially – reigned supreme here. The second, set up as the École de Musique Religieuse in 1853, was longer-lived and affectionately referred to as the École Niedermeyer in honour of its first director Louis Niedermeyer. In the anti-clerical ferment of the 1880s it was forcibly rendered a general music school. Up to that point, each of these schools was intended as a state training ground for the nation’s maîtres de chapelle. Each contributed to attempts to remove the operatic from church music in favour of a classic repertoire based on a cappella polyphonic techniques; the École Niedermeyer’s curriculum added Bach for organists and plainchant studies for all. In 1894 the privately funded Schola Cantorum was established by a Bach specialist on the organ (Alexandre Guilmant) and a maître de chapelle renowned for his ‘Sistine Chapel’ services at Saint-Gervais in Holy Week (Charles Bordes), with the young composer Vincent d’Indy in tow. When it became a school, in 1896, two-thirds of the Niedermeyer pattern was repeated. Finally, once the Schola established a relationship with Dom André Mocquereau and the monks of Saint-Pierre de Solesmes for the teaching of plainchant, the triptych was complete.

It might seem that rural and small parish churches, with their serpents accompanying plainchant and their local compositional traditions, lie a long way from such concerns; yet the centralist drive is detectable in various ways. Hard-line supporters of plainchant convened a conference in Paris in 1860 and voted to regulate all regional French church music as a way of purging secular influence and enforcing plainchant reform nationally.⁷ In addition, the three main schools for sacred music were each predicated on the notion that Paris provided either a hub or, in more decentralist mode, a model ripe for regional emulation and adaptation. The École Niedermeyer’s centralism had the most impact during the period: between 1853 and 1907 it placed at least 295 church organists and forty-one maîtres de chapelle across the country.⁸

Cathedrals had always featured local composers writing music in situ, their libraries becoming more or less living museums of local musical tradition. Such tradition could be deeply organic, via dynasties such as the Wackenthaler family in Alsace, six of whom composed and improvised their way through church careers in Strasbourg, Sélestat and Haguenau from around 1800 to well beyond German annexation. Performance in church could lay such composers open to the charge that they were not good enough to risk criticism (no applause, no reviews); but liturgical and ceremonial works undoubtedly contributed to a sense of local repertoire and culture. Nevertheless, such localism diminished especially in the second half of the century, as an international repertoire of classic and modern music progressively established itself through periodicals and specialist publishers alike.

Chant was interestingly different. Paris had its own, but it was actually less important than versions in use from Digne, Dijon, Malines (Mechelen, Belgium), Reims and Cambrai, and Rennes; finally, in the 1890s and 1900s there came an influential raft of publications from the Benedictine congregation of Solesmes. Nomenclature did not map onto geographical usage here: while the nineteenth century saw protracted attempts at Rouen and Toulouse to hold on to local traditions, the Digne, Rennes and Reims–Cambrai chant books were used all over the country, and the same would indirectly become true of Solesmes itself.⁹

Within Catholic church music a different kind of centralisation developed by which non-Parisian influences became progressively more important during the century. Where the musical aesthetics of liturgical practice were concerned, the Sistine Chapel, the Vatican more generally and the abbey of Solesmes gradually became the ‘centres’ to be reckoned with. For Romantics and for moderate Ultramontanes (French Catholics who put obedience to the authority of Rome before obedience to the French state),¹⁰ the Sistine Chapel Holy Week model, in which Allegri’s Miserere, Victoria and the Ingegneri Responsories (then attributed to Palestrina) held sway, represented both a radical and a reverent break from more or less operatic compositions, or operatic contrafacta, in liturgical choral practice. Cathedral choir schools specialising in Sistine Chapel repertoire (and new compositions emulating its style) increased to the point where, in the 1880s, the capacity to sing this repertoire with grace and ease became, alongside plainchant performance, a defining feature of a ‘model’ cathedral choir school deemed worthy of state funding even amid rampant government anti-clericalism. Interestingly, few such schools were in major metropolitan centres: Strasbourg was the largest of them; Rouen and Dijon were smallish towns; Langres, Moulins and Autun were even smaller. As for the congregation of Solesmes, the story of its increasingly dominant role in plainchant reform challenges all assumptions about Parisian or even urban power, revolving as it does around centralisation overseen by the Vatican.

None of this implies that the French state did not itself try to impose order on regional cathedrals. In particular, from 1872 it put in place inspection systems and grants to improve sacred music nationally via the maîtrise system. Archival records suggest that many high-ranking clergy, including those from Beauvais, Besançon, Montauban, Nancy, Toul, Nevers, Nîmes, Poitiers and Reims, welcomed the move as a benign, even promising, indication of support. Most requested inspections (in the hope of grants). However, by contrast, the bishop of Bayeux responded to the 1870s government initiative with suspicion; on learning that Charles Vervoitte, the government inspector, was to visit his cathedral’s maîtrise, he wrote: ‘This inspection is something new. What is the government’s intention? What authority does your inspector enjoy, and what are his rights? … I cannot imagine that the government is considering taking control of plainchant, which is only one aspect of Christian worship.’¹¹ Where maîtrises were concerned, he was right to suggest that he had detected the thin end of a wedge: by 1885 a chilly anti-clericalism had ensured that only six mâitrises retained government support; they were kept afloat as much as heritage sites for plainchant and polyphony as on account of their liturgical value.¹² Further problems for maîtrises arose in 1901, when clerics were banned from teaching the general primary school curriculum within their Christian schools. In fact the French government was already moving closer to cutting off all engagement, political and financial, with the church: the separation of church and state took place in 1905.

Secular education

In terms of its size and scope, although not always in terms of the quality of its teaching, the Paris Conservatoire dominated secular music education throughout the entire nineteenth century. Thereafter, effective opposition from d’Indy and an increasingly secularised Schola Cantorum from 1900 gave Paris a system in which, despite the reforms of Gabriel Fauré at the Conservatoire from 1905, philosophies focused on training the musical professional (at the Conservatoire) and educating the complete musician (at the Schola Cantorum) operated simultaneously. Reasonably enough given its origins, the Conservatoire’s training of musicians at state expense had always been somewhat utilitarian: it existed primarily to provide the capital with opera singers and orchestral musicians, and operated from 1795 according to the implicit recognition that the piano, taught by and to both sexes, was central to music teaching and practice. Expectations of over-supply would mean that the regions benefited too. But could a single institution serve a nation the size of France? The debate was joined early.

The idea of setting up regional music schools on a Parisian model went as far back as 1798, when the Paris Conservatoire’s first director Bernard Sarrette responded to criticisms that his institution was of purely local import, took stock of the maîtrises lost to the Revolution, and formulated a project to replace them with secular schools in three tiers.¹³ Until the Napoleonic period, when the minister of the interior, Jean-Antoine Chaptal, tried to set up six regional conservatoires as part of a new law on public education, there was no central government appetite for such provision: Paris was indeed to serve the entire nation.¹⁴ The same held during the Restoration, as strikingly illustrated by Choron’s trips across France, during which he hunted out potential students who would be whisked away by government diktat from the humblest of rural homes to begin a new life as the next generation of Parisian musicians, sacred and secular. Here was centralisation in action, ironically counterpointed by Choron’s advocating a regional network of municipal and state schools and, as he put it, ‘trying to start a musical insurrection’ to that end wherever he went.¹⁵

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the regions had similar ideas. As early as 1793, the composer Adrien Boieldieu (1775–1834) had campaigned for a conservatoire in his home town of Rouen; music education in Lille was available via its concert society, called Le Grand Concert, from 1801, and its académie, some of whose singers Choron wished to train at his Paris school, opened in 1816;¹⁶ in 1805, Toulousains began suggesting that the council open a conservatoire, succeeding after a petition of 1820;¹⁷Marseilles opened a municipal music school in 1821; Strasbourg opened one in 1827, by which time the conservatoires at Lille and Toulouse had become nationalised as official branches (succursales) of the Paris operation.

Questions of regional difference surface immediately when one considers how and why such conservatoires – all of which started life independently of Paris and none of which had the range of classes found there – were formed. Unity of purpose with Paris lies only in a predominant utilitarianism: Strasbourg needed violinists of a quality to serve the municipal theatre, and initially targeted strings; Marseilles needed male opera singers, but was also committed to the group teaching of the working classes in the name of liberalism and moral improvement; Toulouse, another town within the famed Midi catchment area for male voices, started with singing only, and was wedded to Italianate traditions of repertoire and practice. It is hardly surprising, then, to find closer regulatory contact with Paris causing tensions such that the story of the six regional conservatoires nationalised by the mid-1840s (those of Lille and Toulouse in 1826; Metz and Marseilles, 1841; Dijon, 1845; and Nantes, 1846) features iterated games of cat and mouse. Paris tried to subordinate its branches through the imposition of Paris-centric directors, inspection, target-setting and curriculum reform, together with threats to withdraw funding, ‘national’ status or both; and regional individuals and councils attempted to maintain local traditions. Most importantly, however, nationalised regional conservatoires were always preparatory schools either unfunded by the state (Metz, Marseilles to 1852) or funded only marginally. Ironically, the prize of ‘national’ status or recognised ‘feeder school’ came at the highest cost to individual town councils.

However, being a ‘feeder school’ for Paris was not the only regional option. In a phenomenon that stretched well into the twentieth century, several towns, among them Lyons (1840) and Bordeaux (1843), developed private music schools out of more general music and social clubs variously entitled cercles or sociétés philharmoniques. Bordeaux extended this idea to popular forms of musical practice in 1880, when the Harmonie de Bordeaux, founded in 1860, opened a music school.¹⁸ The most extreme case evident thus far is that of Rouen, where failure to persuade the town council to support a conservatoire (excepting a short-lived singing school, 1844–9) extended over more than a century from Boieldieu’s initial call in 1793. The deadlock was broken only in 1904 when the Musique Municipale (developed from local pre-1870 military bands) set up an associated institution, and this was closely followed by a similar venture, for brass players only, under the aegis of the Harmonie de Rouen-Saint-Sever in 1911.¹⁹ Back in Paris, the determination to widen access to secular music education had already taken a striking turn with the founding in 1902 of the Conservatoire Mimi Pinson – a music school for working-class girls.

Both François Lesure and Emmanuel Hondré have reflected on the extent to which the educational ventures of the long nineteenth century represent decentralising or centralising tendencies. As Lesure notes, once the 1790s attempt at a national network failed, French central governments of whatever stripe lacked the will and authority to enforce anything more than piecemeal adherence to Parisian régimes; and not once did Paris create a regional branch as part of a national plan.²⁰ Arguably, this latter situation changed in the 1880s, when a new raft of succursales was created (Avignon, Nancy, Rennes, Le Havre: all 1884) amid increased professionalisation of the regional schools and new demands that they adhere to the Paris curriculum.²¹ But the swift annulment of national status in Avignon (1889) and Le Havre (1891) suggests continuing levels of instability. Conversely, the most decentralising effect of the far-flung conservatoires, like Marseilles, was to create secondary centres; despite struggles to retain some semblance of regional identity, subordination to and dependence on Paris remained a constant.²²

The Paris Schola Cantorum model was intentionally different. In essence it combined the cercle and conservatoire models in a liberal approach to educating the ‘whole’ musician; and crucially, where unity in the guise of uniformity was a classically republican and centralist goal at the Paris Conservatoire, the Schola became famous for celebrating a pre-Revolutionary France of contrasting regions whose cultural individuality was ripe for nurturing – especially the Latinism of the south.²³ By 1902, Avignon and Marseilles had ‘Scholae’; Lyons established one in 1902–3; Bordeaux and Nantes were to follow soon after; and what turned out to be the flagship school, at Montpellier, was opened in 1905. The Schola’s influence here and elsewhere is complex: new regional branches, such as those in Avignon and Marseilles, Lyons and Montpellier, were diverse (mostly choirs, not schools), adopting selectively from the Paris Schola’s praxis, where alongside regionalism we also find centralising and decentralising behaviours. It contributed, for example, to a growing official respect for French stage music of the Baroque and Rococo eras, but decentralised it by mounting regional performances. Otherwise its educational centralism took non-Parisian forms: instrumental composition in post-Beethovenian styles, and the study and performance of Vatican-approved sacred repertoires (Gregorian chant and Palestrinian polyphony). In addition, across France, Schola and Conservatoire philosophies were not total opposites; in the pre- and post-war periods, the personal networks of Guy Ropartz at Nancy and Strasbourg, conservatoire and Antoine Mariotte at Orleans, enabled these two institutions to reconcile otherwise antagonistic principles.²⁴

Music for the stage

It was probably in relation to stage music that the loudest pro- and anti-decentralisation voices were heard. It was also in relation to stage music that France’s greatest and most rehearsed musical crises arose. Under deregulation (the liberté des théâtres, 1791–1806), state licensing (1806–64) and deregulation again (1864 onwards), the conundrum of how to organise French theatre, and with it French opera, endured. In addition, after 1864 the rise of cheap genres, with operetta at their head, seemed unstoppable, and the vitality of café-concert traditions – occasionally in local dialects and with their own regional hierarchies – was ever-increasing.

Paris never had enough national stages to absorb all the high-genre works written by debutant and young composers. Moreover, several aspects of the bureaucratic system militated against flexibility and opportunity. Neither the Opéra (presenting grand or recitative opera in French, and ballet) nor the Opéra-Comique (staging number or dialogue opera in French until the early 1870s) nor the Théâtre-Italien (presenting opera in Italian) could easily take on a work written with one of the other theatres in mind; the Théâtre-Lyrique of 1851–70, designed as a solution to the problem, provided only temporary and partial respite.²⁵ The regions could help only in theory. For most of the period, composers intent on an international career knew that a regional premiere would gain them little national attention; Paris managers of the national theatres, which were still licensed even after 1864, were contractually obliged to provide a certain number of brand new works. They cross-subsidised them with classics; taking on the second-hand was usually wasted effort in contractual and potentially financial terms. A regional premiere, then, could bury a work for ever, and constant battles against insolvency among regional theatre managers suggested that production standards would not be high.²⁶ Increased commitment to decentralisation in the 1890s – raising the profile of selected regional stages in order to mitigate any sense of a ‘wasted’ premiere – continued in the following decade but also tended to leap-frog the regions in worrying ways.²⁷ Jules Massenet’s output was especially telling: although some of his works played in the regions before they reached the capital, those premiered outside Paris were premiered abroad: in London, Brussels, Vienna and (in the case of six of his nine premieres between 1902 and 1914) Monte Carlo. The story of the attempt to turn the Théâtre des Arts in Rouen into a regional théâtre-lyrique (i.e. a ‘debutant’s stage’) perhaps suggests why. Specialising in young unknowns with no ballast from their more established French rivals risked marginalising a regional théâtre-lyrique from the outset. It is no wonder that its first ‘national’ success, in 1890, was a work by an established composer that happened to have languished unperformed in France since its Weimar premiere in 1877: Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila (1890).

Such dilemmas represented one of the last pre-war phases of a century-old inequality between Paris and the regions, where neither a dedicated Napoleonic system (with towns hierarchically arranged in arrondissements served by a mixture of resident and touring companies) nor an ostensibly level playing field (the 1864 free market, with optional municipal subsidy) yielded stability. Setting aside the more obvious victims of Napoleonic centralisation, such as the German theatre in Strasbourg (forcibly closed in 1808), the core problem was grand opera, about which we hear the first anguished regional voices within four years of the premiere of Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable.²⁸ The central problem was not, as caricature suggests, suspicion of the new, but realism about what provincial theatres could afford. Moreover, as the salaries of star singers escalated, rendering the actors in provincial companies second-class citizens, grand opera rapidly became viewed as something of a pariah – a situation that the ‘one genre per theatre’ structure of theatrical management in Paris prevented. When bankruptcies occurred it was invariably the opera company that took down the rest of the operation. Regional debate on how (or whether) to fund grand opera via the public purse was accordingly impassioned: including it in a manager’s contract could threaten everyone’s theatrical diet and the entire company’s livelihood.

If, for the vast majority of the period, regional theatres in France depended on Paris for their core repertoires, change is apparent from the 1880s onwards. The rise of Brussels and Monte Carlo as ‘French’ operatic centres, and continuing hostility to putting Wagner on a national stage in Paris, opened up new possibilities. Paris had seen an infamous Tannhäuser at the Opéra in 1861 and a creditable thirty-eight-show run of Rienzi at the Théâtre-Lyrique in 1869; but the composer’s post-1870 diatribes meant that mounting his works on a state-funded stage was anathema in a capital where opera was still symbolic of national pride. In the wake of the riot-inducing Lohengrin at the (private) Eden-Théâtre in 1887, decentralist races to stage Wagner in French meant that Der fliegende Holländer (Lyons, 1893), Die Walküre (Nantes, 1893), Die Meistersinger (Lyons, 1896), Tristan (Aix-les-Bains, 1897) and Siegfried (Rouen, 1900) all preceded Paris. The first complete French Ring took place in Lyons in 1904.

Specifically regionalist initiative, however, was best illustrated by the phenomenon of the open-air opera arena. Here the Midi produced a new type of spectacle rooted in its regional environment such that attempts to stage it elsewhere required both recomposition and compromise. To experience the real thing, it was the Parisians who were obliged to travel – as indeed they did. In 1890s Provence, the coalescence of an established and language-based regionalism centring on the work of the writer Frédéric Mistral with his Félibrige (a celebration of Latinité that distinguished the south from the Parisian ‘north’) and the historic vestiges of Roman life all contributed to the building of a distinctive tradition that took quasi-operatic spectacle to new heights and required performing forces of a type and number (typically a double symphony orchestra or military band) that recalled the great fêtes of post-Revolutionary and Napoleonic France. It also cemented regional difference by sharing arena space with the bullfighting fraternity. In Paris, the circus rings that Jules Pasdeloup and Charles Lamoureux customarily used as concert venues could seat up to 7,000; the neo-Roman arena at Béziers could hold 10,000 more. Saint-Saëns in particular seemed to appreciate the unique environment of these arenas: after he had been commissioned to write incidental music for the spectacular Déjanire (1898), open-air presentation inspired two more of his works. Adapted for Paris where necessary, Les barbares (1901), Parysatis (1902) and Déjanire created a crucial inheritance for the more ardently regionalist Déodat de Séverac, whose Héliogabale, written for Béziers in 1910, was set to a text by the Félibrige poet Émile Sicard and scored in part for the Catalan cobla ensemble with its distinctive type of oboe.²⁹

Professionals and amateurs

A distinctive feature of the Provençal arena spectacular was its mix of amateurs and professionals – a mix that, where concert life was concerned, characterised music-making much more widely across France. Both Paris and the regions had amateur societies (who often performed for charity and whose mission tended to involve musical regeneration) and, from the 1840s especially, networks of orphéons and fanfares (which performed competitively and whose mission was rooted in thoughts of social, rather than musical, regeneration; see Chapter 13 above). Differences between Parisian and regional practice were, in this context, primarily differences of degree, affecting levels of interpenetration between the two spheres. From the time of the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire (1828–1967) and extending to the humblest theatre band, Paris orchestras were highly professionalised; by contrast, until a few ventures such as those in Lyons and Angers took off during the Third Republic, regional orchestras, including theatrical ones, were not. And while Paris audiences were used to mixed-repertoire professional programmes and the combination of a professional orchestra and an amateur choir, they would surely have rebelled at the generic mix that awaited audiences in Lille in 1849, when chamber music (a Haydn quartet and a Beethoven cello sonata) and male-voice choruses (sung by the Orphéon Lillois) shared a single concert programme.³⁰ Certainly, nothing of the sort occurred in Paris chamber circles, even during Lamoureux’s so-called Séances Populaires de Musique de Chambre, founded in 1863.

Nationally, the orphéon and fanfare movements had modest beginnings as outgrowths of post-Revolutionary musiques militaires or German Liedertafeln, with their choral branch taking wing from 1819 in Paris, when the potential of massed singing became clear as a result of the primary-school activities of Guillaume-Louis Bocquillon-Wilhem.³¹ The movement’s expansion continued to involve children but quickly shifted its emphasis to the moral improvement of working men (not women). Male-voice choirs covered the country, with the exception of small pockets including Corsica and the Lozère, by 1870.³² With a largely dedicated three- and four-voice repertoire for choirs, and operatic arrangements aplenty for bands, gargantuan competitive festivals characterised the movement from the 1850s. National and international meetings in Paris (1859) and London (1860) brought new levels of attention. Nevertheless, all attempts at creating a national federation of orphéons, with a head office in Paris, failed: the movement grew rapidly, informally (although always under police surveillance) and in line with commercial imperatives in ways belied by the bureaucratic orderliness of competition reports in the specialist press. One date, however, became an orphéon fixture nationwide: with St Cecilia as its adopted patron saint, each 22 November saw celebratory Masses, processions and concerts in towns and villages across France, often involving a wide spectrum of the local community.

Mixed amateur choral music, which was established more quickly in Protestant circles than in Catholic ones, currently offers a less distinct picture. Choral festivals emerged on the west coast (the Association Musicale de l’Ouest, 1835, centring on Niort, La Rochelle and Poitiers) under the inspiration of Désiré Martin-Beaulieu; Lille hosted a ‘Festival du Nord’ with large-scale choral repertoire in 1829, 1838 and 1851; Strasbourg, true to its Germanic-leaning traditions, mounted Haydn’s Creation in the same year as Paris (1801), and during the second half of the century (before annexation) became a centre for choral music extending from Bach to Berlioz, who conducted his L’enfance du Christ there in 1863.

Concerts

Where the state took a lively regulatory interest in both opera (until the 1864 legislation) and the orphéon, concerts were, for much of the period, the business of private individuals and groups. Beyond the national Poor Tax levy on ticket sales, whether organised as independent events by touring virtuosos or conductors, as subscription series by local chamber groups or cercles, or as part of larger concerns, even Parisian concerts attracted little state interest and, still less, state subsidy, until well into the Third Republic. Their histories are thus often difficult to unearth, which leads to the familiar risk that early historical narratives are over-determined by the shape of those records that most readily reach the public domain, either in official archives or in print. Although newspaper reviews reveal much about repertoire and taste, our institutional knowledge of the main Paris concert societies of the turn of the nineteenth century – the Haydn-centric Concert des Amateurs de la Rue de Cléry (1799–1805), for instance – is still very much a work in progress;³³ and the task of following early concert virtuosos around regional France is largely dependent on the collection of ephemera that are only now becoming valued.³⁴ Such elusive informality means that questions of centralisation and decentralisation have less regulatory purchase in concert life than in many other types of French music-making; and the patterns that are becoming increasingly perceptible as research progresses are often attributable to other causes: perceptions of aesthetic value and what we would now call cultural capital, bourgeois projects to educate and civilise, and more general ideologies of regeneration.³⁵

In Paris, professional traditions in concert activity ranged widely. Benefit concerts organised as one-offs by freelance individuals and their professional colleagues gave priority to operatic extracts and virtuoso showpieces, in a tradition closely bound up with the availability of piano-makers’ concert halls such as those of Érard and Pleyel, and with a focus on novelty. In contrast, seasonal mini-series such as the Holy Week Concerts Spirituels (revived 1805‒31) favoured the presentation of established favourites, both sacred and secular, with a focus on German and Italian music that reached back to Pergolesi’s evergreen Stabat mater and forward to Mozart, Beethoven and the Italian Ferdinando Paer (1771–1839). More homogeneous performance traditions of the sonata-based repertoire that became known as la musique sérieuse started a little later, spearheaded by the Quatuor Baillot (1814‒40), led by Pierre Baillot. They created loyal followers who prized reverent silence in the concert hall, and, once outside it, proselytised loudly for an emerging canon of ‘greats’.³⁶ The founding of the celebrated Société des Concerts du Conservatoire is best seen as an orchestral response to such developments.

This density and regularity of concert activity was impossible in regional France of the same period. Nevertheless, new research on late eighteenth-century Bordeaux reveals tantalising comparisons with Parisian tastes and practices.³⁷ In addition, traditional narratives of Parisian dominance, such as François-Antoine Habeneck’s single-handed introduction of the French to Beethoven symphonies between 1807 and 1814 (with the Société des Concerts from 1828), are at the very least nuanced by information from northern France, which witnessed the national premieres of Beethoven’s Second Symphony in Douai in 1812 and the ‘Pastoral’ in 1823; in the south, Marseilles had heard all the symphonies in concert by 1829.³⁸

In the latter part of the period, one especially prominent strand of decentralisation deserves attention: the rise of the ‘democratising’ orchestral concert. The numerous ‘promenade’-type concerts of orchestral and dance music put on by figures such as Philippe Musard had been geared towards entertainment; other potentially educational performances in informal settings, such as those by bands in parks, or even those brought by musicians from the Far East or north Africa to the later Expositions Universelles, were also sources of diversion, distraction and, in the case of the latter, curiosity.³⁹ By contrast, the democratising orchestral concert was a ‘worthy’, almost didactic, event. The trailblazer was Pasdeloup, who created the ‘Concerts Populaires’ tradition in 1861. More famous conductors such as Charles Lamoureux or Édouard Colonne followed in the 1870s, eventually crushing Pasdeloup’s venture on account of their higher performance standards, but apart from the introduction of a chorus to do large-scale choral repertoire they left the basic recipe untouched: play the orchestral classics, with a few solo items for light relief, in a hall large enough to bring a substantial number of tickets within reach of a new, lower-class, audience.⁴⁰ Across the city, circus rings were pressed into service; a later and striking example of a non-standard venue aimed at attracting new concert audiences was the 1893 Palais d’Hiver built within the Jardin Zoologique d’Acclimatation (the Paris Zoo).⁴¹ Since re-educating public taste potentially opened doors to local funding, this was a winning formula. Toulouse founded its series in the same year as Pasdeloup’s series; in 1866 Bordeaux followed (with a Sunday-afternoon offshoot of the concerts of the Société Philharmonique de Sainte-Cécile), and in 1868 Rennes; in the 1870s, Marseilles (1870), Lyons (1873) and Rouen (1875) joined the trend; and in the following decade the Nantes Société Philharmonique renamed itself the Société des Concerts Populaires and, with 6,000 francs of new subsidy, inaugurated a series focused on large-scale works with chorus.⁴² In general, Parisian filiation was at once resented and required. The orchestras of Charles Lamoureux and Édouard Colonne received a hostile reception in Lille in 1884 and 1906 respectively from knots of loyal subscribers, on grounds of unfair competition with the local orchestra;⁴³ conversely, the briefest glance at the vice-présidents d’honneur of another concerts populaires organisation, the Association Artistique d’Angers (founded in 1877), reveals dependence on those same Parisian conductors, plus Guilmant, Pasdeloup and Saint-Saëns, not to mention a host of Parisian honorary founding members, and Charles Gounod as président d’honneur.⁴⁴

Considerable research is necessary before the tentative arguments put forward here can be synthesised into anything resembling a confident analysis of inter-urban musical relationships in France during the long nineteenth century. Yet already the picture is more complex than that of a hegemonic Paris towering over a France as obscure as it is profonde. The reasons for such complexity are already beginning to emerge, with border territories, folkloric traditions, French anti-clericalism, the centralising power of the Catholic church and pre-Napoleonic inheritances among them. And while Parisian musicians and government agents were always likely to attempt centralisation (or decentralisation controlled from the centre), it is by pushing on the pressure points of their failures that we shall come to a fuller understanding of French musical self-determination. In so doing we shall perhaps rediscover for French music of the post-Revolutionary period something of what today’s Parisians scent as the annual July exodus beckons: the richness of experience, lying beyond Haussmann’s unified facades, which makes France diverse and Frenchness plural.