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Gossiping to music in sixteenth‐century France
Author(s) -
Brooks Jeanice
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
renaissance studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.117
H-Index - 16
eISSN - 1477-4658
pISSN - 0269-1213
DOI - 10.1111/rest.12200
Subject(s) - gossip , narrative , orality , storytelling , musical , nonsense , literature , aesthetics , history , psychology , sociology , visual arts , art , literacy , social psychology , pedagogy , biochemistry , chemistry , gene
Amid the wide range of programmatic and narrative songs that characterize the sixteenth‐century French chanson repertory, a significant subset deals with images of gossip. Some pieces offer juicy stories told by the narrative voice as if sharing gossip with listeners, while others stages episodes of overhearing, where listeners are imagined as eavesdropping on gossiping women. These pieces share several salient features, including their salacious subject matter, the gender and social status of the gossipers, and the prominent use of nonsense syllables, which act as non‐semantic carriers of sonorous imagery and function to represent animal noises as well as inarticulate cries and exclamations. Composers of gossip songs deploy musical conventions drawn from the arsenal of chanson techniques to comment on the nature of gossip as sound and as sense. This study explores songs of gossip at the borderline of literacy and orality, interrogating not only features of textual and musical construction but also considering the role of such pieces in performance, and asking what purposes were served by these representations of women, lower social groups, and illicit or excessive vocality in these pieces conceived for consumption by educated male elites.