LOVE SONGS
These effects of whimsical, humanized religion seem to suggest the influence of the secular, vernacular
genres of literate music—the official “low” style, according to Tinctoris. The vernacular genres, too,
were undergoing significant change in the later fifteenth century, in stylistic terms aiming both higher and
lower than before, and making many new points of contact across the generic and stylistic boundaries.
There was a new genre on the horizon, called the bergerette. Although its name (“shepherdess”)
suggests a pastoral style, it originated in French court circles, and so it is not surprising that Ockeghem
was its first eminent practitioner. It was a sort of high-toned synthesis of two earlier “fixed forms,” the
rondeau and virelai. Its stanzaic structure was similar to the latter: a refrain enclosing a pair of shorter
verses and a turnaround sung, when the poem was set to music, to the same music as the refrain, thus: A b
b a A. Unlike the virelai, however, which could go on forever, the bergerette was a self-contained single
strophe, in which the refrain and turnaround (the “A” sections) were ample five-line stanzas in their own
right, comparable to rondeaux cinquaines.
An early classic of the genre was Ockeghem’s Ma bouche rit et ma pensée pleure (“My mouth laughs
but my thoughts weep,” Ex. 13-10)—a classic by virtue of its wide dissemination (seventeen extant
sources, a veritable record, indicating an original distribution in the hundreds) and its later emulation by
younger composers, in one case as the tenor of a cantus-firmus Mass. The dates of its earliest sources
suggest that Ockeghem’s chanson was composed by the beginning of the 1460s.
EX. 13-10 Johannes Ockeghem, Ma bouche rit