Antoni: So it seems. It’s up to you then, Rombout!^7
If a piece began with a rest in all parts, the answer to the preliminary question, “Who begins?” would
be a chorus similar to that elicited by the Little Red Hen (not I... not I... not I). To avoid confusion and
wasted time, then, all the parts began at the beginning. Everyone could “be first.” Even pieces that began
with points of imitation had to be similarly adjusted if published in part books. In Ex. 17-8b, the opening
point from a motet by Clemens non Papa (published in part books by Susato of Antwerp in 1553) is laid
out in score. The motif on which the point is based is a syncopated idea. The first voice in, however,
begins at the beginning, the first note being extended back, as it were, to remove the rest (and with it, the
syncopation) just so that there would be someone to answer the question, “Who begins?”
EX. 17-8A Hypothetical beginning for Tant que vivrayMUSIC AS DESCRIPTION
A new sort of “literary music”—or rather a possibly unwitting revival of an old sort—came into being
when Attaingnant, still in his first year of publishing activity, brought out a slim volume devoted to the
works of a single composer. The title page read Chansons de maistre Clement Janequin, and it contained
only five items. Those five, however, took up as much space as fifteen had occupied in Attaingnant’s first
collection. Four of them became famous and vastly influential all over Europe, and (most amazingly of
all) remained in print for almost a century.
The composer, Clément Janequin (ca. 1485–1558), was a provincial priest from Bordeaux in the
south of France, who never held a major appointment either at a large cathedral or at court. Despite his
clerical calling, he was almost exclusively a chanson specialist: he wrote two Masses (both of them
based parody-fashion on chansons of his that had become popular) and a single book of motets, but more
than 250 chansons, many of them broadly humorous or racy or downright lewd. When thinking of Janequin
it is hard not to recall his near-exact contemporary, François Rabelais, the novel-writing monk whose
name became synonymous with gross drollery. It was Janequin who gave the “Rabelaisian” mood its
musical embodiment.
EX. 17-8B Clemens non Papa, beginning of motet Musica dei donum