The Academie de poesie et de musique & Claude le Jeune

In 1570 Jean-Antonine de Baif, a member of the Pleiade, and Thibault de Courville, an otherwise obscure French composer, founded in Paris an Academie de Poesie et de Musique, the chief aim of which was the position and performance of musique mesuree a l’antique. Claude le Jeune was closely associated with Baif from the beginning of the Academy. Le Jeune set to music a vast quantity of Baif’s vers mesures a l’antique, and their association probably continued up to Baif’s death in 1589. Although Baif obtained Letters Patent for his Academie from Charles IX, whether his Academie survived the death of the latter, is doubtful. However, Baif, Mauduit and le Jeune continued with the main work of the Academie, the production of vers & musique mesures a l’antique.

Our chief sources for a picture of the aims and nature of this Academie are the Letters Patent and its Statutes. The musical and poetic theory and practice which these documents announce are dominated by two principles: first, that music and verse are to be firmly united; secondly, that this union is to produce a revival of the ethical effects of ancient music. Anyway, the ideals on which the Academie was founded seem to be lofty. Only musique mesuree was to be performed at the meetings of the Academy. The chief purpose of doing this was to revive the ethical power of music. Their aims were revolutionary. They did not wish to improve or modify ordinary verse and music, but to substitute for them a new art, new both in its style and in its effect on the listener. The members were of two kinds: the Musiciens, professionals, who performed the musique mesuree, and the "Auditeurs," gentlemen, who listened to it. The Musiciens were bound by strict rules of the Academie and were obliged to obey only Baif and Courville in matters relating to music.

The Academy's activities were not confined to performing and rehearsing musique mesuree; it was an educational institution, such as a university, rather than an arrangement for regular intellectual argument. It was meant to be both a "nursery" of young musicians and poets, and eventually, with the help of these, an aristocratic dictator of musical and poetic style. Its object was not to popularize musique mesuree, to bring it before larger audiences, but, on the contrary, to guard it closely within a small and powerful circle, powerful both intellectually and temporally, until its style is immutably fixed, its superiority recognized by this circle, and its exponents sufficiently trained. Hence all the rules guarding against unauthorized auditeurs, the copying of music or verse and the like. When this had been accomplished, then it would be possible to impose this new music from above to the general public.

Of those activities and projects not mentioned in the Statues or Letters Patents the most ambitious was that of reviving Greek drama in its entirety, complete with music and choreography mesures a l'antique. There is little doubt that it had no practical results, but Baif, in a poem published in 1573 implied that the written material was ready. He also conceived the more feasible project of arranging ballets in which the dances were to be exactly regulated by the rhythmic principles of musique mesuree. That drama should be musical was a principle solely based on classical authority; so was the close union of dancing, gesture and music. There was, apart from the expense, no great difficulty in putting them into practice. For the music, both the drama and ballet would follow exactly the rhythmic principles of musique mesuree, and, for the dance of both, existing steps could be used and easily made to fit any metre required. There was, therefore, a reasonable chance of either a drama or a ballet mesure being performed. It appears that practical experiments were made by the Academy. Some of these dances, together with the chansons mesurees, were probably performed from time to time in some of the many ballets and masquerades about which we know no details. That Baif succeeded in turning any of these into a ballet, tragedie or comedie mesuree is extremely improbable.

As well as being a school of the drama and ballet mesure the Academy, if Mersenne is to be believed, was also intended to be a kind of miniature university. An institution was to be created which contained everything necessary for the perfect education of a man's soul and body. For this purpose teachers learned in every kind of natural science were to be engaged, also instructors of languages, music, poetry, geography, mathematics, military exercises etc. It seems strange that none of these proposed activities is mentioned in the Statutes or in any other source. The vast scheme is, however, in accordance with the renaissance ideal of an education that should produce a man complete in every respect, and Baif himself certainly believed that a poet should also be a musician and a philosopher. Mersenne states that, although all these projects were approved by royal authority, they remained unfulfilled because of the ill-will of certain persons.

Another possible aim of Baif's Academy, not mentioned in the Statutes or Letter Patent, is the revival of the chromatic and enharmonic genera. Most musical humanists laid great stress on this revival and one would expect Baif's musicians to have made some attempt to achieve it. But there is no trace of the use of these genera in any surviving musique mesuree. It is, however, likely that experiments in this genera were made in the early days of the Academy and were so unsuccessful that they were never published.

Claude le Jeune, until the age of fifty, had published only a small amount of music: a collection of ten psalms and thirty-five songs. It is possible, as has been suggested, that as far as his musique mesuree was concerned, he was obeying the rules of Baif’s Academie which forbade publication without the consent of all the members. His fame as a composer really spread during the 1580’s. He published his first collection of musique mesuree in Paris in 1594 and his Dodecacorde in 1598. During this time he had entered the services of Henri IV where he seems to have occupied a privileged position. When Le Jeune died in 1600, only a small part of his works had been published. The greater part appeared during the first decade of the 17th century. For at least four years before he died, Le Jeune had been intending to publish considerable quantities of both his ordinary music and of his musique mesuree. His sister and his niece carried out his wishes, and by 1612 the Second Livre des Meslanges had appeared. Mersenne describes Le Jeune’s music as particularly interesting and attributes his popularity to the variety and liveliness of rhythms and to his gift for melody. To the modern ear two of the most striking features of his music are the great rhythmic variety achieved within the very narrow limits imposed by musique mesuree and, in his ordinary music, the lucidity and the vivacity of rhythm that is preserved even in the most complicated polyphonic passages. It is interesting to note Mersenne’s testimony that these qualities were equally striking to early 17th century listeners.

The work presented in the Publications of the American Institute of Musicology, Le Jeune’s Airs of 1608, consists entirely of chansons mesurees a l’antique, or settings of French verse written in classical metres. The metre of these poems was meant to be quantitative, but the rhythmical structure of the French language made this aim unattainable. Nearly all the settings, however, reproduced exactly the quantitative metrical scheme intended by the poet – a supposed long syllable being set with a minim (or its equivalent in notes of smaller value) and a short with a crotchet. All voices sang the same syllable at the same time, so that with very few exceptions, this music was strictly homophonic.

The origin of this kind of song was in the Academie of Baif and Courville, with which Le Jeune was closely associated. The humanistic theories on which it was based can be said to rest on two main assumptions: first, that music and poetry must be closely united, as in antiquity; second, that this union, if properly carried out, would result in a revival of the ethical effects of ancient music. Since the precise nature of the latter was unknowable, the mean of attaining those ends were conjectural. Most musical humanists arrived, however, at much the same ideal of music, founded to varying degrees of their picture of Greek music: a setting entirely subjected to its text, highly expressive of it, and free from any textual complications that might obscure its metre or intelligibility. On points of detail they varied widely: the use of modes and genera, the importance of the various systems of intonation, the musical imitation of particular words of the text and the like.

Le Jeune’s opinions were not those of an extreme humanist. From the dedication of the Dodecacorde it appears that he believed that the music of a nation was not a cause, but only a symptom, of that nation’s manners and customs. He seems to have believed that immediate specific emotional effects on the listener could be achieved. As for the Modes, Le Jeune is skeptical about the possibility of discovering which Greek mode corresponds to which species of the octave. In practice, however, he followed Zarlino’s system, and composed and arranged two of his major works, of which the Airs of 1608 are one, according to the twelve modes of this system.

In general it may be supposed that Le Jeune accepted the main tenets of the Academie, since he wrote a great quantity of musique mesuree, and in it, conformed, with very few exceptions, to the principles of syllabic homophony and the rules of attaching a minim to a long syllable and a crotchet to a short one. Unlike Mauduit, he not infrequently underlines, musically, particular words of his text, a practice of which the more extreme musical humanists strongly disapproved. He also evidently has the mood of the text, an aim which can be seen from his Airs. An interest in the revival of the ancient genera is perhaps indicated by the chromatic song “Qu’est devenu ce bel oeil”.

In 1583 the hitherto elitist art of musique mesuree a l’antique developed by the Académie was made public by the printing of airs by Le Jeune to ‘measured’ poems by Baif. The novel rhythmic vitality and variety of these pieces are matched in the 43 Italian pieces, published in the two books of Meslanges (1585 and 1612). Dealing with another facet of the Academie’s work – the attempted revival of the Greek genera – Le Jeune experimented in particular with the chromatic tetrachord approximately reproduced by two semitones and a minor 3rd. The tetrachord formula, found in Quelle eau (1585), gave rise to Le Jeune’s most remarkable chromaticisms, notably in his settings of Durand’s elegy "Qu’est devenu ce bel oeil?" (from the second book of Airs, 1608) and the chanson spirituelle by Guéroult Hellas, mon Dieu (from Second livre des meslanges, 1612). According to his friend Artus Thomas and the organist Jehan Titelouze, Le Jeune excelled his predecessors in his understanding of the modes, as illustrated by the alternate rousing and calming effects on a gentleman of two airs performed during the wedding festivities of the Duke of Joyeuse in 1581.

In comparison to Le Jeune’s Northern Chanson, in which a craftsmanlike exploitation of polyphonic techniques was more highly prized than subtleties of verbal expression, the Parisian Chanson of the 1560s was lighter and freer, aiming at an intimate unity of text and music by characterizing the spirit of the poem. This approach to word-setting undoubtedly contributed to Baïf’s experiments, though it was subordinated to his new syllabic prosody, the rapid pace of which often disguised a lack of tunefulness. From the time that he joined Baïf’s movement Le Jeune wholeheartedly embraced its ideals, to the extent that a certain esotericism cultivated by the group affected his work. Some delay in the publication of his ‘measured’ pieces may have been due to the restrictions on copying and circulating any works performed in the Academie. The Academie’s principal aim was the revival of the humanist ideal, based on Greek music, of a setting subjected to its text, expressing its sense and avoiding any textural complexity (e.g. canon and imitation) that might obscure the words or the metre. The introduction into poetry of a metrical scheme based on values doubled or halved was neither altogether new nor confined to the French language, since it had preoccupied first the troubadours and trouvères and later the humanist or didactic composers who had set Latin poems of Horace and Virgil in the early 16th century, as well as the more recent composers of Protestant psalms, hymns and chansons spirituelles. Le Jeune’s largely homophonic settings of vers mesure strictly reflect the quantitative metres prescribed by the Academie by equating the long syllables with minims and the short with crotchets, although both values are often varied by melismatic subdivision. The predetermined, extra-musical metres revolutionized the traditional rhythms of polyphony, often producing lilting patterns of great freedom and charm, while the simple vertical textures resulting from the strict alternation of two basic note values focused attention on the harmonic structure and encouraged experiment. Though originally unrhymed, the texts of Le Jeune’s Airs of 1608 and Pseaumes en vers mesurez (1606) have rhymes added, perhaps posthumously.