composition in which another refrain about lovers awakening alternates with five different birdsong
collages.
These orgies of onomatopoeia, sheer imaginative play on a par with Rabelais’s hilarious lists, amount
at times to long stretches of what might best be described as pure texture. The beginning of the second part
of La guerre (quaintly listed in 1528 by its incipit, “Fan Frere le le lan fan”), which depicts the height of
battle, holds a single chord for a veritable eternity (Ex. 17-9). The singers have nothing resembling a tune
to sing, and nothing resembling words to say, just a concatenation of lingual sound effects—a virtuoso turn
for performer and composer alike. As befits such a stunning tour de force, it inspired emulation on a grand
scale, beginning with Philippe Verdelot, a Flemish composer active in Italy, who at the request of the
publisher Susato skillfully added a fifth voice to the piece to augment its already loaded textures and, no
doubt, promote sales. Janequin liked Verdelot’s added voice well enough to include it in his own revised
edition of the work, and that is how it is presented in Ex. 17-9.
EX. 17-9 Clément Janequin, La guerre, a 5, with Verdelot’s extra voice (secunda pars, mm. 1–6)To call a piece like Janequin’s La guerre “literary” is to interpret the word a little loosely. It would
make no sense to say that such a work “expresses” its text. (How do you express “fan frere le le lan
fan”?) Rather, the text and the music work together to evoke the sounds (and not only the sounds) of the
world at large, and in so doing point outside the work in a way that the music of Tant que vivray had no
business or interest in doing. But construing the word more strictly, in terms of the relationship between
the music and the text, Janequin’s onomatopoetic chansons are not literary. The music is still basically a
medium for the recitation of the text; the two components still touch mainly on the phonological (or
declamational) level, not the semantic one. Onomatopoeia is presentation, not representation. It has no
semantics.