• Keywords

Renaissance music, polyphonic chanson, tablatures, transcriptions

• Profile and skills required

master in music and/or musicology; knowledge in research and study of early music sources; good knowledge in instrumental tablature transcription.

• Project description

One of the characteristics of the musical Renaissance was the unprecedented development of new polyphonic secular musical forms thanks to the rise of the printing press. Today, 10,000 French songs and more than 25,000 Italian madrigals composed in the 16th century have survived, with these two countries accounting for the lion's share of the European repertoire. Although there is some circulation and exchange between these two 'national' musical genres on both sides of the Alps, the phenomenon remains fairly limited. Italian madrigals were non-existent in France, and French songs were increasingly rarely copied and printed in Italy after 1550. This mutual disinterest can be seen as a prefiguration of the real opposition that separated France and Italy in terms of musical style after 1600.

• References

Kate van Orden, Materialities. Books, Readers and the Chanson in Sixteenth-Century Europe (Oxford, 2015)

Christine Ballman, Le luth et Lassus (Académie royale de Belgique, 2011)

F. Heidlberger, « Canzon da sonar ». Studien zu Terminologie, Gattungproblematik und Stilwandel in der Instrumentalmusik Oberitaliens um 1600 (Tutzing, 2000)

Robert Judd: « Repeat Problems in Keyboard Settings of canzoni alla francese », Early Music 17 (1989), pp. 198–214.

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