The four big chansons of 1528 define the Rabelaisian genre. Broad they certainly are, in more ways
than one. Where the average length of a “Parisian,” semi-courtly chanson like Tant que vivray is thirty to
forty measures (counting the breve or “tempus” as a measure), the longest item in the 1528 book, divided
into two “partes” as if it were a motet, totals a whopping 234 measures, six times the normal length. What
could be the text of such a monster chanson? Here is where things get even curiouser, because if “text” is
taken to mean something meaningful written in French words, then these colossal pieces have hardly any
text at all.
In the original publication of 1528 the contents are listed the normal way, by incipits (first lines). Nine
years later, the volume was reissued in a deluxe “quarto” edition with double-sized pages, and with each
item most unusually given a title, so popular had they become. The first (excerpted in Ex. 17-9), called La
guerre (“The war”) is the 234-measure monster. It commemorates the battle of Marignano, the Milanese
conquest of 1515, and its text, once past the opening salute (“Hear ye, gentlemen of France, of our noble
King François”) consists almost entirely of battle sounds: guns and cannon-fire, bugles, war whoops,
laments for the fallen. (It must have been written a good deal earlier than its publication date, since by
1528 Francis had been defeated, captured, ransomed, and forced to give up all his Italian territorial
claims.)
The second item, La chasse, is a hunting piece full of horn calls and barking dogs. We know (as
Janequin possibly did not) that such pieces, written in the form of canons both in France (where they were
called chace) and Italy (where they were called caccia) were a popular genre close to two centuries
before. The fourth item in the Janequin chanson book, called L’alouette (“The lark”), begins with the line
“Or sus, vous dormez trop” (“Get up, you sleepyhead”), which we encountered in another fourteenth-
century genre, the “birdsong virelai.” But there is nothing in the fourteenth century to compare for sheer
ornithological frenzy with Janequin’s third item, Le chant des oyseux (“The song of the birds”), a huge