elbows-jabbed-in-ribs rather than in cadences.) Such songs just go round and round—whence their name,
of course. (The Latin for a “round” is rota; we will encounter a famous example shortly.) What we call
canons are usually far more complex and artful—often artful to the point of tour de force—and depend on
writing both to get made and to get learned. They are fully finished works with composed endings as well
as beginnings. And sure enough, such pieces came into their own, along with so many other tour-de-force
genres, precisely in the fourteenth century. The original French name for them was chace (compare chasse
in modern French), and it was a pun. The word is a cognate of the English “chase,” which describes the
behavior of the successively entering voices in a canon, each running after the last. The primary French
meaning of la chasse, however, is “the hunt,” and it is reflected in the novel subject matter of several
chaces (and even more so, as we shall see, in the cognate Italian genre, the caccia).
There are four chaces in the Ivrea manuscript which, as we know, otherwise contains mainly Mass
ordinary settings for the use of Avignon. One of them, Se je chant mains, begins with ironic reflections on
its own departure from the customary topic of courtly song: “If I sing less of my lady than usual... it is for
love of falcons.” What follows is a three-part description of a falcon hunt, in which the middle section is
truly a tour de force, but of a wholly new and off-beat type: a riot of hockets set to “words” mixing
French, bird-language, and hound-language in an onomatopoetical mélange (Ex. 9-19). The interval of
imitation in this chace is represented in the transcription as 2½ measures; hence, the music sung by the top
voice at the beginning of Ex. 9-19 turns up in the second voice in the middle of the third bar, and in the
third voice at the beginning of the sixth bar. The use of onomatopoeia (imitation of natural sounds) in the
hocket-ridden middle section of a chace became a standard feature: one of the other chaces in Ivrea has
cuckoo calls in that place, and a third, Tres dous compains, levez vous (“Dearest companions, get up”),
has an elaborate carole or circle dance for a middle section, replete with imitations of rustic instruments.
(To a noble aesthete, one should realize, dancing peasants and the music they played were a part of
“nature”—an attitude that persisted at least until the eighteenth century.)
The chace reached a pinnacle with Machaut, who incorporated it into two of his nineteen narrative
and descriptive poems known as lais. The form of a lai, one may recall, was similar to that of the
liturgical sequence, consisting of a series of paired versets or couplets, each pair set to a new melody or
formula. In his Lai de confort (“Lay of Succor”), Machaut allowed the form of the poem to be entirely
absorbed into a continuous three-part chace texture. In the Lai de la fonteinne (“Lay of the fountain”),
only the even-numbered couplets are set as chaces, so that the use of the polyphonic genre actually serves
to articulate and highlight the poetic form.
EX. 9-19 Se je chant mains, middle section