structure it retained. The virelai was always the humblest, descending from the pastorela, later the
chanson baladé—the literally danced songs with refrains that accompanied the carole. As we know, even
in Machaut’s time the virelai remained a largely monophonic genre. By the last quarter of the fourteenth
century, even the lowly dance song had begun to put forth some ars subtilior plumage—but its
“subtleties” were of a sort that accorded with its content. The virelai became the site of sophisticated,
even virtuoso, parodies of rustic and “natural” music.
Just as it had been in troubadour times (and just as it would be, say, in the time of Marie Antoinette
with her little “peasant village” for rustic play-acting on the palace grounds at Versailles), we are dealing
here with the esthetic appropriation of a lifestyle. Adam de la Halle’s “Play of Robin and Marion,” we
may recall, was played neither by nor for Robin and Marion. It was played by professional minstrels for a
noble audience who enjoyed sentimentally contrasting the “simplicity” of the happy rustics on display
with the artifice and duplicity of their own privileged lives. The anonymous virelai Or sus, vous dormez
trop (“Get up, Sleepyhead”; Ex. 9-26), with characters suitably named Robin and Joliet, is another happy
exercise in unrealistic “naturalism.”
We have already noted some of its naturalistic (onomatopoetic) devices in the context of the chace,
especially the ones in the Ivrea manuscript; and sure enough, Ivrea is among this popular virelai’s
numerous sources. Everything in it seems drawn from life: the mock-carole in the inner verses (the “B”
section), where the text mentions drums (nacquaires) and bagpipes (cornemuses), and all three parts
begin imitating them, even down to the bagpipe’s drone in the contratenor; or the punning bird calls, in
actual bird-French, in the “turnaround” (volte) and refrain (the “A” section), where the lark sings “what
God is telling you” (Que-te-dit-Dieu), and the goldfinch is heard “making his song” (fay-chil-ciant).
Precisely where the birds take over, of course, we get a typical rhythmic “subtlety”—reiterated
groups of four minims in the cantus part against a beat of perfect (three-minim) semibreves. This
ornithological sesquitertia (4:3) proportion, a virtuoso turn for composer and singer alike, is a perfect
paradigm of the faux-naïf, or patrician mock-simplicity: sophisticated artlessness, high-tech innocence—
or, to quote Debussy joshing Stravinsky after seeing the latter’s Rite of Spring, “primitive music with all
modern conveniences.”
This virelai, with its vivid, somewhat hedonistic portrayal of benign nature as something to enjoy
rather than (as the contemporary motet would have it) to stand in awe of, makes a fitting close to this
chapter—not just because it signals a new or a changed esthetic outlook that will find further expression
in the music that will follow, but also because it reminds us that we need to take a closer look at the
contemporaneous vernacular music of Italy, where throughout the fourteenth century composers had been
celebrating “pleasant places” in song.
EX. 9-26 Anon., Or sus, vous dormez trop (virelai), mm. 22–30