Mi Contra Fa

Virelai: Third draft

Of course Douce Dame Jolie would be one of the more melismatic ones.  Of course.

I picked a stress scheme based on my favorite already-written lines and on how I thought the first few lines of the Machaut went.  The results are below. 

Then I went home and consulted Mistress Linette de Gallardon's "Music for the Beginning Scadian Harper," which has a version of Douce Dame Jolie.  Because I can't speak French, but I know that the stresses come on beats 1 and 3 in 4/4 time.

dou-CE da-ME jo-LI-e?  Really?  Like I said, I don't speak French, but I do have some Spanish and a teeny bit of Italian, and usually (in those romance languages) the accent comes on the penultimate syllable.  I'd have thought DOU-ce DA-me jo-LI-e.  Or is Machaut messing with the usual pronunciation and stress? (Or is this a matter of editorial placement of the bar lines?  Mistress Linette references two works from the 1920s on Machaut... I wonder who selected the meter and mensural divisions.  I should email her.)

Anyway, I couldn't have gotten farther from the stress pattern in the extant music if I'd tried.

I'm sufficiently pleased with the poem that I'm not inclined to monkey with it any further.  Nothing says I have to use the extant music, after all.  I may see what I can adapt/steal from it - I'm still more comfortable adhering closely to an actual period example than trying my hand at composing in a period style.

Chorus:
Blind King John falls in the fray
Twelve fair knights around him lay
But he will not die today
Ich dien I carry evermore

France's king, he rides away
At Crecy                                                                 [I may just willfully mispronounce this.]
Blind King John would go fore
Twelve brave knights around him stay
Horses grey
Chivalrous, valiant corps
Bridles all in fine array
'Round each other let them lay
Make a knot so all convey
Their king to thickest of the war

Blind King John...

One good blow he would relay
Foeman slay
Dip his bright sword in gore
Forth they go, without delay
Death to pay
Mocking fear, laughter roars
Neither their blind king nor they
Any lament or dismay
In that battle did betray.
King John slew knights of England four

Blind King John...

English knights this troop waylay
Horses neigh                                                         [It's donkeys that bray, isn't it?]
John the brave fights no more
And, too, here, in Crecy's clay
Twelve men stay
Witness this, I implore
Chiv'ry's crown has died today
For this worthy foe I pray
Mem'ry his I keep alway
None like him will be, nor were before        [Eh, the line starts unstress, I can subdivide a note...]

Blind King John...

 

Virelai: Second draft

Chorus:

Blind King John falls in the fray
Twelve fair knights around him lay
"But he will not die today"
“I serve” I carry evermore.

The King of France rides away
At Crecy                                                 [It's actually "CRES-see" not "Cres-SAY", isn't it? Bah.]
But King John would go fore
His twelve knights around him stay
Horses grey                                             [Still not sure I like this line]
Chivalrous and true corps
Their bridles, in fine array
One over others they lay
Make a knot so all convey
John to the thickest of the war

Blind King John...

One good blow he would relay
A foe slay
Cover his sword with gore
Forth they go, without delay
Death to pay
Mocking fear with their roar                                 [I'm not sure I like this one either]
Their king these knights did obey
Never a word of dismay
Did they or their king betray
King John slew knights of England four

Blind King John…

English knights this troop waylay
Horses bray
And John will fight no more
And too, here, in Crecy's clay
Twelve will stay
You, witness, I implore
Chivalry’s crown died today
For this worthy foe I pray
His mem’ry I keep alway
None like him will be, nor were before             [Nine syllables but I really like it.]

After hammering on the lines I'm not sure I like, I'll need to take a gander at the meter.  There isn't one specified for the form - just the number of syllables and their rhymes.  But I suspect it'll be hard to set to music if the meter isn't regular from one stanza to the next...

Virelai: First attempt

I'm not 100% thrilled with this; besides the approximate rhymes and reuse of a few words, I never actually work in the "Ich bien" motto.  The 5th line in the first verse is awkward, too.

I went with the form of Machaut's Douce Dame Jolie, on the theory that if I run out of time to write my own tune, I can use his.  If I counted the French syllables correctly, the form is:

A₇A₇A₇B₈    a₇a₃b₆    a₇a₃b₆       a₇a₇a₇b₈

Chorus:
Blind King John falls in the fray
Twelve fair knights around him lay
"But he will not die today"
For Edward will take up his shield.

The King of France rides away
At Crecy
But King John will not yield
His twelve knights around him stay
[On] Horses bay  [Or grey.  But does it make sense without the "On"?]
Lead him on to the field

Blind King John...

...whoops.  I forgot the "a" section of each verse.  Um... well, okay then.  So, er... well, this is what I've got:

One good blow he will relay
A foe slay
With the sword that he wields
Forth they go, without delay
Death to pay
Although their fates are sealed [urgh, sealed fates, how cliche!]

Blind King John...

English knights this troop waylay
Horses bray
King John falls on the field
Edward hears the news and prays
Let none say
He did not stop, and kneeled

Blind King John...

Other Notes:

I use "Edward" rather than "Black Prince" or any version thereof, since that epithet was not applied to Prince Edward until the 1500s (saieth Wikipedia, but they give a source.)

Since the lyric virelais are all first person (written from a woman's point of view in at least one!) I have a vague idea for an alternate composition from Edward's point of view, with " 'I serve' I carry evermore " being the B₈ line.

Virelai: Subject matter

Prince of Wales's website attests that the feathers on the badge come from the Black Prince's mother (Phillipa of Hainault) and the motto from the king of Bohemia.

How the king of Bohemia died at Crecy (1346), according to Froissart (in his Chronicles c. 1361 - 1369).

Legend with the king of Bohemia's helmet lined with feathers - unsourced but oft-repeated on the Internet.  Since the feathers can be shown to come from his mother's arms, I think this is a latter-day effort to shoehorn in both symbols into one dramatic story.  Honestly, just the motto will do.

"The crown of chivalry has fallen to-day."  Only citation I can find for it, but the 19th century scholar of Bohemia fails to include where he got it from.  (Looks like he read his Froissart, though.)

(That old lecture is cited here and lo, see how the details have changed?  Rather than just go where the battle is thickest, now King John is a-hunting the Black Prince.)

"But he shall not die."  Can't find any other mention of this reply, except on the classics mailing list cited by the article. 

So we can say for relatively sure that the Prince Edward and John of Bohemia fought at Crecy, and John died there. John's motto was subsequently adopted by the Prince of Wales, and possibly by Edward IV himself - honestly, I've seen no documentation that dates the final form of the badge.  The rest - the battlefield tableau and elegies for the foe - are pure undated romance, but some sort of story seems necessary to explain how the Prince of Wales came to carry the motto of the King of Bohemia.  They also feel right - the story has the same chivalric glow to it that's present in Froissart's account of the blind king and his twelve loyal retainers, yoking themselves together for certain death.

I've read over a good dozen or more virelais on the La Trobe University website; they're all very lyric and timeless and not at all about current events.  More about how much he loves her, how wonderful she is, and so on.  Even a love song reporting back to his lady the deeds he's done for her doesn't quite fit.  (But then, I'm not really finding any 14th century examples of narrative song, so....)  I'm debating on whether or not to try for the hybrid narrative/love song, playing up the motto "I serve," or else just doing a straight narrative.

Virelai: Form and style research

All from Hoppin, Medieval Music:

"French remained the language of the English court throughout the thirteenth century and much of the fourteenth as well.  Only scattered examples of vernacular poetry and prose survive from the period preceding the first flowering of English literature in the second half of the fourteenth century... We need not be surprised, therefore, to find that the Middle Ages produced only a handful of songs with English texts."  (p. 322)  The examples of songs given that are 13th c.: Worldes blis, Man mei longe him lives wene, Mirie it is while sumer ilast (all of the ubi sunt variety) and Byrd one brere, a love lyric (p. 323).  (No mention of Sumer is Ycomen In, strangely.)  Nothing at all narrative.

None of the French forms in the fourteenth century are described as being narrative.  All the Machaut examples that are not religious music are love songs.  His lais are standardized to 12 stanzas, each stanza having 16 lines, each pair of lines a couplet of varying length (trouvere lais were typically built of 7-8 syllable lines, but interpersed with 3-6 syllable lines).  (p. 289, 403-405)  That is just too long for this competition, and so we move on.

The motets, ballades, and rondeaux are all polyphonic.  Some with textless lines may have been for voice and contrapuntal instrumental accompaniment (p. 421, 423).  I don't know how to write medieval counterpoint and I'm not going to figure it out in a month (much less be able to practice it to a point where I can play it) so we pass these forms by.  That leaves the virelais, some of which were polyphonic but most of which were monophonic (p. 429)  - 25 out of 33 of Machaut's surviving work.

FYI, the composer preferred the term chanson baladée, possibly because he fixed it as a three-stanza form like the ballade (429).

The basic formula:

"A refrain of several lines begins the poem and then returns to conclude each of its three stanzas.  The stanzas themselves subdivide into three sections, of which the first two have the same form and are sung to the same melody.  The third section returns to the form and melody of the refrain... The refrains, and therefore the third sections of the stanzas, range in length from three to eight lines, but the longer forms with six or more lines occur in over half the poems.  Each of the first two sections of the stanzas is shorter and usually consists of two or three lines.  Further variety of poetic structure results from the characteristic use of lines of contrasting lengths combined with nearly complete freedom in the disposition of the rhymes." (430)

Variations on the basic formula:

Machaut took full advantage of all these oportunities for creating different poetic forms within the basic structure of the virelai.  He evidently liked the form of the example in [his work] Reméde de Fortune, for he reproduced it in every detail in Virelais 24, 28, and 29.  The common scheme of these four pieces is as follows:

Poetry: A₇A₇B₄B₇A₄A₇B₄    b₇b₇a₄    b₇b₇a₄        a₇a₇b₄b₇a₄a₇b₄b     A₇A₇B₄B₇A₄A₇B₄

Music:            A                        b                b                            a                                A

[Captial letters indicate the refrain.  All A/a's rhyme, as do all B/b's.  Musically, A and a are the same tune, but A is the refrain while a is part of the verse. The numbers denote the number of syllables in the line.]

All of the other virelais differ to a greater or lesser extent in their rhyme schemes and in the lengths and number of their lines. (430)

Machaut further often (in 20 virelais) made use of open and closed endings - so the b lines, rather than musically bb would be b(open) b(closed) - the music was the same except for a few bars at the end.  Similarly, the A/a section could be decomposed into two halves, A(open) and A(closed). (This is done in 8 of the virelais.) (431)

Melodic style:

Many virelais are like No. 10 in being almost entirely syllabic. [That is, one note per syllable of poem.]  Others introduce a few vocal ornaments of two or three notes to a syllable without losing their simple, almost folklike quality.  Longer melismas occur once or twice in a small number of pieces, but they rarely extend beyond two or three measures. (431)

No information on the melodic movement (e.g., stepwise or not).   I have two examples I can look at  (Douce dame jolie and De bonté) although I'm a little hesitant to generalize from them.

Looking at a list of his works, with a small knowledge of French derived entirely from English and Spanish cognate words, I'd say the virelai was mostly used as a love lyric. So I can either use it for a narrative anyway, or else - write a love lyric from someone on the field at Crecy to his lover. I might be able to do that.

Rather a shame, that the single example I can think of, of a narrative song of battle, actually comes out of the Hundred Years' War but much later - the Agincourt Carol.