Even “sweetness” comes in many varieties. To us it may connote a highly nuanced sort of tone
production suitable for the subjectively expressive music of more recent centuries. The formal,
conventionalized public rhetoric of the court called for a different sort of sweetness, the sort achieved by
the “English” euphony of clear, uncomplicated, well-matched timbres, true tuning of harmonies, and
sensitivity to the flexibly shifting rhythmic groupings we have already observed. Many scholars and
performers have become convinced that the most desirable performing ensemble for a court ballade was
one of voices unaccompanied by instruments, despite the absence of text in the tenor and the contratenors.^9
The singers of these parts may have vocalized or ad-libbed textual abridgments.
Again we are reminded that music in performance is something different from music on the page, and
that even the most literately conceived music (and no music was ever more literary than the fifteenth-
century court chanson) must be mediated through oral practices and traditions in order to become sound.
That is why the study of “performance practice,” which is precisely the collection and interpretation of
evidence about the oral and unwritten, is and will always be one of the liveliest areas of “early music”
research.