War and Peace in France
Chair(s): Kenneth Kreitner (University of Memphis)
War, as a frequent condition of life, has affected the production of music in France over the centuries both directly and indirectly. Our session devotes itself to exploring how music can react to, participate in, or reflect on the facts of war and peace. Our first paper discusses the use of two motets by Loyset Compère in the French chapelle royale of Charles VIII in his campaign against Naples in 1494–95, known as the First Italian War. It demonstrates the role of motets in a chapel at war, one in which Compère himself participated. The motets, multivalent in meaning, take on a supplicatory timbre against the backdrop of mobile altars and men mounted in chain mail. The second paper contrasts two motets on a humanist text, Quis numerare queat, one by Compère and one by Jacob Hobrecht. Whereas Compère writes a thickly textured, five-voice paean to peace, glossing over the protest inherent in the poem, Hobrecht underscores and highlights the fear and horror of war. Well in advance of Erasmus’ Against War, published in 1515, Hobrecht grapples via art with the experience of war by the people themselves, and the fragility of any peace that is achieved.
Our third paper assesses the brass instruments invented by Adolphe Sax in the 1840s and 1850s for the French army. Massed together, these new instruments became analogues, and were developed in parallel, to instruments of war. The latter included new designs for artillery and long rifles, which created their own, distinctive and terrifying sounds on the battlefield. The brass harmonies were assembled as a musical army, marching on the parade ground of the Champ de Mars in Paris. As Suzanne Cusick writes in a different context, “'music,' with all its cultural specificity, is less important than the power of sound itself.” In contrast to the restrained, vocal forces of the earlier motets, contemporary accounts were fully alive to the potential harms of such overwhelming sonic power, which entered even into the French grand opéra.
Presentations of the Symposium
Compère and the Wartime Devotion of the French Royal Chapel (1494-95)
Deanna Pellerano
Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz
In 1494, Charles VIII of France invaded Italy, bringing along with him the singers of his chapel. Among these, Loyset Compère is the only name known to have joined the Naples campaign for certain, having carried a number of musical works with him on his journey. Clues concerning the contents of this wartime “music library” arise in a letter from Ferrante d’Este in October of 1494, attesting that Compère had no new music to offer, as well as in the papal manuscript VatS 15, whose transmission of a handful of motets by Compère has been attributed to the composer’s presence in Italy. Previous studies on the motets of VatS 15 have considered the meeting between Charles VIII and Pope Alexander VI in 1495 as a potential context of origin and performance, adopting Ferrante’s letter as evidence of the novelty of the works that Compère left behind in Rome. I argue the inverse, suggesting that the motets Propter gravamen and Crux triumphans demonstrate Compère’s selection of pre-existing prayers for times of crisis in preparation for the trek into Italy.
I investigate Compère’s use of a lesser-known variation of the antiphon Propter gravamen, which I have traced to its free-standing use as a devotional prayer in the Tabula Alberti Magni by Dominican friar Luis de Valladolid, who had spent time in Paris in the early 15th century. I also explore the connection of Crux triumphans to the use of a relic of the Sainte-Chapelle known as the Crux triumphalis. The relic, believed to contain a piece of the True Cross, was used in the 15th century to pray for victory, ratify peace, and heal sickness. Both devotional contexts can be associated with the reign of Louis XI, particularly his death in 1483, allowing us to consider a much earlier date of origin for both motets. These findings demonstrate both the flexibility and longevity of prayers of crisis, and offer insights into the devotional practices of the wartime chapel, which are often overlooked in the written sources of the chapel’s involvement in the Italian wars.
Hobrecht’s Motet Against War
Robert Nosow
N/A
When Jacob Hobrecht (Obrecht) departed Bruges on 1 February 1491, he left behind a city devastated by seige and civil war. Although he and four other singers had participated in a peace conference in Sluis, the parley failed, and in the aftermath of defeat, Hobrecht was imprisoned. The brief sojourn in France that followed in 1491–92, substantiated by my recent research, is the most likely period for the motet Quis numerare queat. The poem had already been set by Loyset Compère, singer in the service of King Louis XII of France. As argued in the New Obrecht Edition, based on metrical analysis, the two composers employed exactly the same text, including the crucial phrase, “Funde preces Galle” (“Pour out prayers, O France”).
They set the poem in radically different ways, however. Compère writes in five parts, with two voices in canon singing the antiphon Da pacem Domine (“Grant us peace, O Lord”), not dissimilar to Nuper rosarum flores by Du Fay, fifty-five years before. The sonorous, homophonic conception treats the words of the poem, as opposed to the foundational melody of the chant, as a secondary element. By contrast, Hobrecht eschews cantus firmus treatment altogether, and instead highlights the structure of the poem, in elegiac couplets, as well as individual phrases. He saturates the first and third sections with strong dissonances, especially via suspension. In short, Hobrecht takes a humanist approach to a text that incorporates classical language to a high degree.
The poem quotes the opening verse of a satire by Juvenal on the supposed benefits of standing armies. Turning the theme on its head, the motet begins: “Who could count the savage deeds of the wars, / the damage replete with irreparable evils?” The motet text builds on denunciations of the effects of war dating to Christine de Pizan. I argue that the sensitive, text-centered treatment in Quis numerare queat reflects Hobrecht’s recent, personal experience during the civil conflict in Flanders; it represents an eloquent expression of horror at the misdeeds of violent men in war, and their failure to sustain peace.
Adolphe Sax’s Sonic Fusillades and the Military Politics of Timbral Homogeneity
Samuel Nemeth
Ohio Wesleyan University
The April 22, 1845 performance contest on the Champ de Mars—which Patrick Péronnet labeled a “musical war” and to which I refer as a “Battle of the Bands”—sparked comparisons between the new instruments of Belgian inventor Adolphe Sax and French military weaponry. Contemporary eyewitness accounts and satire from Le Charivari depicted players “armed” with weapons and even “slain” musical combatants. The triumph of Sax’s instruments on such a musical battlefield demonstrated the inextricability of militarism and musical instrumentation in nineteenth-century France. In this paper, I extend musicological interest in instrumentation and timbre (Dolan; Tresch; Newark) and suggest that the French military’s quest to improve its soundworld by adopting Sax’s instruments was inseparable from its goals of standardizing its artillery (Valée) and improving the lethality of its long-barreled firearms (Delvigne). Just as enhancements to conventional weaponry made the French army more lethal on open-air battlefields, Sax’s novel instruments provided audibility outdoors, high volume levels, and timbral homogeneity. A group of the instruments could deliver a massed core of sound—a tight grouping of “musical bullets”—with a high degree of accuracy.
But such a concentration of sound could also be dangerous. Reception of Sax’s instruments, including Sax trumpets and the gargantuan Bourdon Saxhorn, frequently described their destructive power. And in 1852, Sax unveiled his new Saxtubas during Halévy’s opera, Le Juif errant, and at a military ceremony on the Champ de Mars. Witnessing their massive volume and high concentration of sound, Le Ménestrel suggested that these “artillery of brass” would make the trumpets of Jericho seem miniscule and could cause listeners’ ears to bleed. Just two years later, while Europe was embroiled in the Crimean War, Sax sketched a monstrous invention: the “Saxo-Cannon,” making clear that warfare and artillery were on the Belgian’s mind. Musical bombardments went hand-in-hand with an increasingly lethal military enterprise, fulfilling a definition of “sonic warfare” more than 150 years before Steve Goodman described the concept and bringing to life the violent scene depicted in Grandville’s 1845 cartoon, “Un concert à mitraille,” a concert of gunfire.
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