During the fifteenth century, the word “chanson” connoted an international courtly style, an aristocratic
lingua franca. A French song in a fixed form might be written anywhere in Europe, by a composer of any
nationality whether at home or abroad. The French chanson was thus nearly as ecumenical or “travelable”
a style within its rarefied social domain as the Latin motet. In addition to the examples given in previous
chapters (Du Fay in Italy, Binchois in Burgundy, Isaac in Austria, Josquin everywhere), one could add the
names of two English composers, Robert Morton and Walter Frye, both of whom wrote French rondeaux
in the purest “Burgundian” style (although only Morton is known to have actually worked on the
continent).
The age of printing brought a change: a new style of French chanson that was actually and
distinctively French the way the frottola was Italian and the Hofweise setting German. Its centers were the
printing capitals: Paris to the north and Lyons to the south, with Paris (through Attaingnant) sufficiently out
in front that the genre is generally known as the “Parisian” chanson. Its great master was Claudin de
Sermisy (ca. 1490–1562), who served King Francis (François) I as music director of the Chapel Royal
and furnished the voracious presses of Attaingnant with dozens of chansons for publication as household
music.
Attaingnant’s very first songbook, the Chansons nouvelles en musique of 1528, opens with a run of
eight songs by Claudin (as his pieces were signed), plus another nine scattered later in the volume for a
total of seventeen, more than half the total contents. The second item in the collection, Claudin’s Tant que
vivray (Ex. 17-7) to a text by Francis I’s court poet Clément Marot, has always been the textbook
example of the new chanson for the sake of its memorable, very strongly harmonized tune.
EX. 17-7 Claudin de Sermisy, Tant que vivray, mm. 1–16