By praising rulers, whose magnificence formed a crucial part of the world order, Pierre de Ronsard and his French colleagues in the second half of the sixteenth century often depicted the world not as it was but as it ought to be. This idea informs Margaret McGowan's book on ideal forms in the age of Ronsard, in which she explores the ways poets and painters extolled the virtues and the theatrical magnificence of perfect princes following the Horatian dictum ut pictura poesis: as is painting so is poetry. McGowan demonstrates the virtuosity of the painters and poets of the sixteenth century in shaping their hymns of praise from the subject matter and ideals of ancient Greece and Rome by following Horace's advice to regard paintings as mute poems and poems as speaking pictures. McGowan shows how artists and intellectuals pursued their goals by creating four kinds of ideal form: iconic forms, sacred images derived from classical literary sources offering princes some guarantee of immortality; triumphal forms that evoke the heroic imperial past; ideal forms of beauty to be found in contemplating the beloved; and dancing forms that mirror rituals of celebration. McGowan claims that such ideal forms were intended to enlighten the ruler himself as much as they celebrated his grandeur in the eyes of others.

Music was an important metaphor for Ronsard, and references to music and musical instruments are frequently found in his poetry. His writings about music are few, however. In his article ‘Ut musica poesis: Music and Poetry in France in the Late Sixteenth Century’ Howard Brown has referred to two of the most explicit examples of such writing: the preface to Le Roy and Ballard's Livre de meslanges (1560) and the passage from Ronsard's Abbregé de l'art poëtique françois (1565) on the desirability of union between poetry and music. Such passages are important in illuminating poets' attitudes towards music and in demonstrating ways in which the relationship between text and music could be conceptualised in the sixteenth century. They are frustratingly vague, however, about how the poets' ideals should be achieved, and they leave many practical questions unanswered. Did poets have any influence on composers' choices of texts? Did movements in poetic circles ever affect the pitches or rhythms of musical settings – that is, could poets influence the way music sounded?

In his first major published monograph, Music in the French Secular Theater, 1400–1550 (Cambridge, MA, 1963), Howard Mayer Brown skilfully plotted the development of musical practices in the traditions of farces, sotties, moralities and monologues until the middle of the sixteenth century, by which time the ‘influence of works from the ancient world and from Italy’ had turned the ‘current of educated opinion … against the older French forms’. Thus he chose to terminate his study just as the new forms of neo-classical comedy, tragedy, tragicomedy and pastorale were emerging, although he did allude fleetingly to the Protestant dramas of Louis des Masures in citing one of three cantiques from the Bergerie spirituelle (Geneva, 1566) as one of his two examples of ‘new music for the stage’. Des Masures's play is only one of a number of dramatic or quasi-dramatic pieces published with music as well as spoken text during the period 1550–1600, reflecting a fashion for new music specifically composed for the theatre. In the present paper I propose to examine this considerable repertory, which has largely escaped the attention of modern scholars.

In calling for a new history of French music and musical life of the second half of the sixteenth century, Howard Mayer Brown's paper has presented scholars with a number of formidable challenges. It admonishes us to re-examine nearly every facet of what remains largely an enigma of music history. Simultaneously exacting and encyclopedic, it considers in turn each of four themes: the relation of words and music; the means and character of print culture; musical styles and genres; and (perhaps most important of all) the social context of the chanson itself – what Brown called ‘the anthropology of the French chanson’. His essay concerns the problems and perspectives of Renaissance musicology: how we hear and how we explain the music of the past in relation to those who first made and heard it. It thus requires us to reconsider our assumptions about the nature and workings of historical change, the status of canonical styles and those who promoted them, and the very place of music in culture.

In section iii of his paper ‘Ut musica poesis’, Howard Mayer Brown remarked upon Italian musical presence in France in three main areas: music theory, techniques of composition and interpretation, and poetry. The works of Claude Le Jeune (c. 1530–1600) seem to me to illustrate his comments in a particularly striking fashion, and although my study of Italian influence on Le Jeune's work is incomplete, I think it is possible to make some preliminary observations.

The conditions of artistic production in late sixteenth-century France required musicians and poets, composers and painters, choreographers and performers to work together. They shared the same objectives and they worked from the same aesthetic principles. Their common experience suggests that, as historians and analysts, we can enlighten the study of one art form – music or the dance, for example – by placing it within the context of others, assessing their interaction and their shared purpose. If this assumption is accepted we must consider issues of production, that is those practical matters concerning technique and the varied conditions of performance; we must examine the audience's expectations of those events which drew together the arts into a single spectacle or in a sequence of festivals and which relied for their inspiration on intellectual currents nourished through renewed acquaintance with ancient sources; and we need to assess the nature of the works themselves, their impact on the status of the artist (broadly defined), and on the social and political benefit for the patrons. There is inevitably much overlap across these three areas of production, expectation and outcomes, yet, in the discussion which follows, attempts will be made to keep them separate.

Howard Mayer Brown's stimulating paper pays greatest attention to the centrality of Ronsard as the fons et origo for musical settings. One often has the impression, reading the paper, that there was no substantial problem of imitation in these settings: the composers simply took the words supplied by Ronsard and set them to music. In the comments which follow, I want to suggest a different approach to this question of imitation within Renaissance poetry and to ask what effect the issue of imitation itself had in the dialogue between poetry and music in mid sixteenth-century France. The focus I shall be using is the Anacreon of 1554.

Howard Mayer Brown was correct in his understanding that a complete knowledge of the French chanson from the second half of the sixteenth century must take in the provincial activity in this genre and its rapports with Paris, for it is essential to study the ties that connected the centre with its periphery. During the 1570s in Toulouse, the Auvergne-born Anthoine de Bertrand and his ‘friends’ formed one such provincial school, which was strongly attached to the personality of Pierre de Ronsard and to the poetic ideals of the Pléiade. Complementing the praise given to the composer by Henry Expert, who believed as early as 1926 that his works merited a complete edition, Howard Brown considered Bertrand ‘one of the very best composers’ of this music.

It may not always seem obvious to begin a study of French music in the Renaissance with a reference from the theoretical field. By entitling his study ‘Ut musica poesis’ Howard Mayer Brown attempted to remedy this shortcoming. However, without in any way disparaging his work, this results in a series of paradoxes and uncertainties about the links which in France during the Renaissance period unite musical practice and musical thought, whether this be philosophical or theoretical. It is true that expressions like ‘musical renaissance’ or ‘musical humanism’, easy and pernicious terms, have a hard time in the French field. And it is precisely because these terms are easy and pernicious that they can be used in this way. For while there has never been any question of doubting the role of French composers in constructing the musical landscape of the Renaissance, it has never, on the other hand, been imaginable to write a history of humanism in French musical thinking of the Renaissance. It is rather as if, causing a sudden break in the course of history, French writers and theorists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had abandoned the art of sound to the practitioners, composers and performers alone. But no Western culture exists which can have a musical life without thought, and without the will to discover in it a pretext, a paradigmatic function or even an experimental field.