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From Pop to Art: Courtly Love Song
Long before "art song" was a category, love songs were simply the pop music of the court — tunes for dancing, flirting, and passing the time, built on simple, catchy melodies anyone could pick up by ear. Over the course of the 15th and 16th centuries, French and English composers took these vernacular love songs and, piece by piece, dressed them in the full apparatus of learned polyphony: imitative counterpoint, text painting, increasingly intricate part-writing. The result is a repertoire that lets us watch, almost in real time, popular music becoming art music.
In this workshop we'll trace that transformation on both sides of the Channel, singing through chansons and love songs by:
Josquin des Prez
Pierre Certon
Pierre Passereau
Jacques Arcadelt
Orlande de Lassus
Henry VIII
from the courtly chanson tradition of early 16th-century France through to the wittier, more popular-style chanson parisienne of Certon and Passereau, the Italianate elegance of Arcadelt and Lassus, and the English love songs (including a few tunes attributed to Henry VIII himself) wrestling with that same tension between simplicity and artifice. Along the way we'll ask what gets gained, and what gets lost, when a tune grows up.
Sunday January 31, 1:00–4:00 PM | $40 | Grace Memorial Episcopal Church, 1535 NE 17th, Portland
From Pop to Art: Courtly Love Song
Long before "art song" was a category, love songs were simply the pop music of the court — tunes for dancing, flirting, and passing the time, built on simple, catchy melodies anyone could pick up by ear. Over the course of the 15th and 16th centuries, French and English composers took these vernacular love songs and, piece by piece, dressed them in the full apparatus of learned polyphony: imitative counterpoint, text painting, increasingly intricate part-writing. The result is a repertoire that lets us watch, almost in real time, popular music becoming art music.
In this workshop we'll trace that transformation on both sides of the Channel, singing through chansons and love songs by:
Josquin des Prez
Pierre Certon
Pierre Passereau
Jacques Arcadelt
Orlande de Lassus
Henry VIII
from the courtly chanson tradition of early 16th-century France through to the wittier, more popular-style chanson parisienne of Certon and Passereau, the Italianate elegance of Arcadelt and Lassus, and the English love songs (including a few tunes attributed to Henry VIII himself) wrestling with that same tension between simplicity and artifice. Along the way we'll ask what gets gained, and what gets lost, when a tune grows up.
Sunday January 31, 1:00–4:00 PM | $40 | Grace Memorial Episcopal Church, 1535 NE 17th, Portland