Codes of Expression in French Lute Song (1608–1643)
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2017
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Melbourne Authors
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School of Languages and Linguistics
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PhD thesis
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Open Access
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This thesis examines the expressive dimensions and courtly codes of the seventeenth century French lute air de cour through an examination of the patterns and resources within its texts and music. A review of primary and secondary literature shows that composers often sought to move listeners to the passions, a pleasing aesthetic experience or both. Musical variety is a core aesthetic ideal in achieving these ends. Yet in a genre characterised by simplicity and brevity, the mechanisms through which composers can deploy variety are limited. Moreover these mechanisms are sufficiently subtle to be difficult to identify without a methodology tailored to the idioms of the lute air. Across chapters on text, rhythm, harmony and surface features, a quantitative approach to the lute air permits the identification of formalised patterns against which the degree, form and nature of musical contrast can be measured. An assessment of the structural characteristics of the poetic texts shows that few different lengths of lines are used. This facilitates and makes more useful the systematic comparison of lines of equal length. A highly codified vocabulary in the poetic texts helps to delineate the central themes of the poetry in imitation of common courtly contexts. The poetic texts are then juxtaposed with the rhythm, harmony and melody of the air to reveal whether the music contrasts or conforms to the poetry. The structural dimensions of the prosody are found to be more entwined with the generation of musical meaning than its semantic dimensions. It is argued that listeners had musical expectations that differed across the length of the poetic line, with the affective or aesthetic salience of many musical features largely a function of their placement. Quantitative analysis of syllabic musical structures is interleaved with evaluation of primary literature to explain how composers were able to generate meaning and move listeners within the rigid stylistic confines of the lute air de cour. Across this interleaving of primary literature it is found that the moral dimensions of the texts, harmonies and the sound of the lute played important roles in shaping listener expectations and experiences. The thesis is supported by a complete set of transcriptions of the collection Airs de différents auteurs, mis en tablature de luth (1608–1643), which forms the foundation of the analysis.