FIG. 9-5 Ars subtilior. Philippus de Caserta’s ballade En remirant, as notated in Modena, Biblioteca Estense, MS α.M. 5. 24,
copied in Bologna ca. 1410 (fol. 34 v). The notes that look gray were entered in red ink.That kind of showy overcomplexity is just the sort of excess—an excess of fantasy, perhaps, or maybe
just an excess of one-upsmanship—that earned the ars subtilior its reputation as a “mannered” or
“decadent” style. Many modern scholars seem to find it annoying as well as fascinating (perhaps because
overcomplexity is a vice from which scholars have not invariably been immune). Contemporary
audiences seem to have found it agreeable.
BERRY AND FOIX
But of course sobriquets like “decadent” imply judgment not only on the music, the musicians, and the
notation they employed, but also on the audiences, which is to say the society that supported such a
rarefied art. Ars subtilior composition flourished in two main centers. One was the south of France, the
territory of old Aquitaine, whose traditions of trobar clus it was in a sense upholding. This territory
included papal Avignon, as we know, as well as the duchy of Berry and the county of Foix at the foot of
the Pyrenees, where Gaston III (known as Fébus, after Phoebus Apollo, the Olympian sun god), governor
of Languedoc, maintained a court of legendary extravagance. The chronicler Jehan Froissart, one of
Gaston’s protégés, endorsed his patron’s boast, made about 1380, that during the fifty years of his lifetime
there had been more feats and marvels to relate than in the preceding 300 years of history. The ars
subtilior is best understood, perhaps, as an expression of that culture of feats and marvels.
Like Froissart, many of the poet-composers of the ars subtilior worked under Gaston’s protection and
memorialized him in their work. One such court composer—Jehan Robert, who in the riddling spirit of
the times signed his work “Trebor”—proclaimed in a grand ballade, suitably full of marvelous feats of
syncopation and polymeter, that “if Julius Caesar, Roland, and King Arthur were famous for their
conquests, and Lancelot and Tristan for their ardor, today all are surpassed in arms, renown and nobility
by the one whose watchword is ‘Phoebus, advance!”’
That ballade, like most of the grandiose dedicatory ballades that survive from its time and place, is
found in a marvelous late fourteenth-century manuscript, a real feat of calligraphy that, having once