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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 March 2017
The Chantilly manuscript, probably compiled in the 1410s, is thought to have lost an original first sestern early in its history, as the folio numbers start at 13. Because the table of contents matches the order of pieces in the manuscript and starts with the present first item and at fol. 13, it has been assumed that it post-dates the sestern's loss. But the folio numbers were added to that table not by its original hand, but by a later (Italian) one, and that same hand wrote the foliation for the manuscript; table and foliation were therefore almost certainly provided in the same operation. If the table of contents was post factum, why is its foliation in a hand different from the incipits? This article argues that the table of contents was in fact prescriptive, drawn up by a different (French) person before the contents were copied, and that the foliation was added both to the index and the body of the manuscript after copying, allowing for a new planned gathering to be added at the beginning, perhaps including the two Cordier rondeaux. This was never completed; what we have is what there was, and nothing was lost. This hypothesis raises further questions about the codicological and chronological relation of the Cordier songs to the index, to that planned gathering, and to the early history of the manuscript, questions to which provisional answers are suggested.
1 This figure includes the two later-added Cordier songs, and one duplication, Solage's Tres gentil cuer: no. 13 = no. 81.
2 Facsimile: The Chantilly Codex, Manuscript 564, ed. Yolanda Plumley and Anne Stone (Turnhout, 2007). Eadem, Introduction published separately as Codex Chantilly, Bibliothèque du Château de Chantilly, Ms. 564: Introduction, see 180–1 for the dating. See also A Late Medieval Songbook and its Context: New Perspectives on the Chantilly Codex (Bibliothèque du Château de Chantilly, Ms. 564), ed. Yolanda Plumley and Anne Stone (Turnhout, 2009); Elizabeth Randell Upton, ‘The Chantilly Codex (F-CH 564): The Manuscript, its Music, its Scholarly Reception’, Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2001); eadem, ‘Inventing the Chantilly Codex’, Studi musicali, 31 (2002), 181–231; eadem, ‘The Creation of the Chantilly Codex (Ms. 564)’, Studi musicali, NS 3 (2012), 287–352. Although the latter was published later than the work of Plumley and Stone, Upton does not engage with their differing codicological findings. In email exchanges of 2016, Stone and Plumley provided some clarifications to their Introduction in Codex Chantilly.
3 Pace Günther's dating of the motets to a range from before 1350 to the 1380s, in The Motets of the Manuscripts Chantilly, Musée Condé, 564 (olim 1047) and Modena, Biblioteca Estense, alpha M. 5, 24 (olim lat. 568), Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae 39 ([Rome], 1965).
4 Léopold Delisle's manuscript report, Chantilly, Musée Condé NA 10/187, is transcribed and evaluated by Upton, ‘The Chantilly Codex’, 320–4.
5 Reaney, Gilbert, ‘The Manuscript Chantilly, Musée Condé 1047’, Musica Disciplina, 8 (1954), 59–113 Google Scholar. In this opinion he followed a review of Apel by Gombosi drawing attention to southern features. Strohm, Reinhard, The Rise of European Music 1380–1500 (Cambridge, 1993)Google Scholar, 37, reports that in 1389 King John I of Aragon requested his ambassador in Avignon to ‘have a book made for us where there are notated between 15 and 20 motets [. . .] and where there are ballades, rondeaux and virelais of prime quality, and have it prepared by the singers of the pope, because they know the best quality of that’ (translated from Maria Carmen Muntané, Gómez, La musica en la Casa Real Catalano-Aragonesa durante los años 1336–1437 (Barcelona, 1979)Google Scholar, document 243). Ch could thus have been prepared as the result of a similarly explicit commission.
6 Strohm, Reinhard, ‘Filippotto da Caserta ovvero i Francesi in Lombardia’, in In Cantu et in Sermone: For Nino Pirrotta on his 80th Birthday, ed. Seta, Fabrizio Della and Piperno, Franco, Italian Medieval and Renaissance Studies 2 (Florence, 1989), 65–74 Google Scholar. At p. 68 he attributed this view to Günther, ‘Unusual phenomena in the transmission of late fourteenth-century polyphonic music’, Musica Disciplina, 38 (1984), 87–118 Google Scholar, although it was first proposed by Delisle and widely accepted.
7 French Secular Music of the Late Fourteenth Century, ed. Willi Apel, Medieval Academy of America Publication 55 (Cambridge, MA, 1950). See also his editions of French Secular Compositions of the Late Fourteenth Century, 3 vols., Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae 53 (no place, 1970–2). Notable for the Avignon connection is Tomasello, Andrew, Music and Ritual at Papal Avignon 1309–1403 (Ann Arbor, 1983)Google Scholar.
8 Plumley, Yolanda, ‘An “Episode in the South”? Ars subtilior and the Patronage of French Princes’, Early Music History, 22 (2003), 103–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 Nádas, John and Ziino, Agostino, The Lucca Codex (Codice Mancini): Lucca, Archivio di Stato, MS 184; Perugia, Biblioteca Comunale “Augusta”, MS 3065: Introductory Study and Facsimile Edition, Ars Nova 1 (Lucca, 1989), 38–45 Google Scholar; Strohm, ‘Filippotto da Caserta ovvero i Francesi in Lombardia’, 65–74; idem, The Rise of European Music, 59–60. Plumley and Stone, Codex Chantilly, 115, report a possible origin of Ch at this court, this from a paper read by Strohm at the Chantilly conference in Tours 2001, and as a suggestion I had earlier made in ‘Early Papal Motets’, in Papal Music and Papal Musicians in Late Medieval and Renaissance Rome, ed. Richard Sherr (Oxford, 1998), 5–43, at 20. This would render unnecessary the hypothesis of an Italian copy of a French original.
10 Plumley and Stone, Codex Chantilly, 181. In suggesting that ‘the manuscript was completed not much before 1408–9’, they evidently mean that repertorial dates extend that late, because they go on to suggest a copying date between then and 1418–20, and imply that after association with Filargo (who died in 1410) the compilation could have continued in Florence. However, if the index is prescriptive and implies that all that music was available in one place for copying, it seems unlikely that the operation would have moved wholesale to another city.
11 Plumley and Stone, Codex Chantilly, 126.
12 An anonymous reader, accepting the likelihood that the two foliations were done at the same time, raised ‘the possibility that both foliations were made before the loss of the first gathering – and after the copying of the music pages’. This would assume that a gathering with other or non-musical content was indeed lost, but likewise fails to account for why the index foliations were entered at a later stage than the incipits, which would not have been necessary if the table of contents was being compiled from the completed manuscript. Such a gathering could have contained non-itemised music, or something other than music, such as a treatise; though a music treatise in such a large format would be unprecedented.
13 Plumley and Stone, Codex Chantilly, 125 and note 69.
14 Other manuscripts go to great lengths to revise foliations when the composition of a volume is changed. The foliation of Ox was revised to accommodate the new gatherings added at the beginning of the manuscript. Q15 is an extreme example of multiple layers of erasures and adaptations of cumbersome roman numerals; see Bent, Margaret, Bologna Q15: The Making and Remaking of a Musical Manuscript. Introductory Study and Facsimile Edition (Lucca, 2008), 1: 68–76 Google Scholar.
15 Plumley and Stone do raise the possibility that the foliator began with the no. 13 because he was waiting for a first gathering that never materialised (‘Picture-Songs’, 306), but they do not follow up the possible implications. What I propose here is a differently timed version of that scenario.
16 Indeed, a well- or predictably organised manuscript would not necessarily need foliation as a system of reference, except to key it to an index or table of contents. Manuscripts with original indexes, such as Ox, Pit, PR, ModB, often also have original foliation. The partial indexer of Q15, Gulielmus Musart, supplied additional foliation only for the previously unfoliated parts of the manuscript that he indexed. See Bent, Bologna Q15, 1: 89–95.
17 This is confirmed by Sean Curran (email of 26 July 2016), who observes that ‘the index numbers [and manuscript foliation] are written with a narrower nib than the incipits, and one which produced strokes whose width varies remarkably little with the direction of the pen's trace. This contrasts with the incipits, whose broader nib produces a quite different profile for letters. (For example, compare the three consecutive minims in the numeral, fol. 9v, line 1, xiii, with those of mest in the corresponding incipit.) The two hands are clearly distinguished by their different means of tracing x. In the numerals, the lower left branch of x consistently finishes with a pronounced anticlockwise curve to the right (e.g. fol. 9v, col. a, all lines) whereas the incipit scribe finishes either with no decoration (e.g. fol. 9v, col. b, line 45, Plusieux), or with a small hook (e.g. fol. 9v, col. b, line 47, Fumeux)’. Jason Stoessel attributes the writing of the index entries to the same hand as the foliator: ‘The Captive Scribe: The Context and Culture of Scribal and Notational Process in the Music of the Ars subtilior’, 2 vols., Ph.D. dissertation, University of New England (2002), 33 and 65.
18 ‘A Note on the Dating of the Trémoïlle Manuscript’, in Beyond the Moon: Festschrift Luther Dittmer, ed. Bryan Gillingham and Paul Merkley, Musicological Studies 53 (Ottawa, 1990), 217–42; ‘Indexes in Late Medieval Polyphonic Music Manuscripts: A Brief Tour’, in The Medieval Book: Glosses from Friends and Colleagues of Christopher de Hamel, ed. James H. Marrow, Richard A. Linenthal and William Noel (Houten, 2010), 196–207; ‘The Trent 92 and Aosta indexes in context’, in I codici musicali trentini del quattrocento: Nuove scoperte, nuove edizioni e nuovi strumenti informatici, ed. Danilo Curti-Feininger and Marco Gozzi (Lucca, 2013), 63–81.
The Chantilly numbers are indeed folio numbers (not piece numbers) for the songs, up to fol. 60 recto; pieces entirely contained on versos are listed with the number of the leaf on whose verso they appear. But for the motets, which occupy an opening each, the numbers refer to recto folios of openings, and hence to the whole opening, as is often the case in music manuscripts. This switch applies also to the final single-page motet on fol. 72v, which is numbered for its facing recto, the non-existent fol. 73. The motets are listed by triplum text only, in the fifteenth-century manner, another detail which points to a late dating. Ch may be the first manuscript to do so; MachautA and Trém list by motetus. Ox in the 1430s indexes its motets by triplum, as does ModB c.1440. The motet Portio nature/Ida capillorum is anomalous; Ida capillorum is both listed and presented as a triplum in Ch (see Günther, The Motets of the Manuscripts Chantilly, p. LIX, not LXI as cited in my Trém article). Trém lists Ida capillorum as the motetus and, rightly, had Portio nature as the triplum, that is, on a verso, and Günther transcribes it thus.
19 Did the indexer assume that all the first (unheaded) category were ‘balades a iii chans’? The inclusion of some rondeaux and virelais amongst the balades is a small untidiness, though ‘balades’ may have been intended inclusively for songs in general. Maybe the compiler of the list, in advance, thought that some of the pieces listed under ‘balades a iiij chans’ were going to be a4, perhaps with added triplum or contratenor parts, though in fact many of the versions copied are only in three parts. It could be that four-part versions of these were known to exist but not yet available. The discrepancies in the classification are discussed by Upton (‘The Chantilly Codex’, 293).
20 This is another prescriptive table of contents, but in that case the execution of the manuscript departed from it in some details. See Lawrence M. Earp, ‘Scribal Practice, Manuscript Production and the Transmission of Music in Late Medieval France: The Manuscripts of Guillaume de Machaut’, Ph.D. diss., Princeton University (1983), 52–83. See also The Ferrell-Vogüé Machaut manuscript. Introductory study by Lawrence Earp et al. (Oxford, 2014), 2, note 8, which gives further recent bibliography; Leach, Elizabeth Eva, Guillaume de Machaut: Secretary, Poet, Musician (Ithaca, NY, and London, 2014), 10–12 Google Scholar.
21 John Dickinson Haines, ‘The Musicography of the “Manuscrit du Roi”’, Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto (1998), 48f.; idem, ‘The Songbook for William of Villehardouin, Prince of Morea (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds français 844): A Crucial Case in the History of Vernacular Song Collections’, in Viewing the Morea: Land and People in the Late Medieval Peloponnese, ed. Sharon Gerstel (Cambridge, MA, 2013), 57–109.
22 Sean Curran has suggested to me that this could possibly apply to the Harley index, a list of thirteenth-century polyphony in London, British Library, MS Harley 978 (see, most recently, Gillingham, Bryan, Music in the Cluniac Ecclesia: A Pilot Project (Ottawa, 2006)Google Scholar, chs. 4 and 5), and an early index, listing fifty-seven motets from a lost manuscript, in Besançon, Bibliothèque municipale, MS I, 716. See Gennrich, Friedrich, Bibliographie der ältesten französischen und lateinischen Motetten (Darmstadt, 1957)Google Scholar, xxv–xxvi.
23 Plumley and Stone, Codex Chantilly, 124. Upton, ‘The Chantilly Codex’, 88, detects more discrepancies, resulting from her shaky distinction between majuscules ‘L’ and ‘I’. I suggest that it was the scribe of the manuscript who followed the index incipits and not vice versa.
24 There are only seventeen prick marks on fol. 10 recto, just two more than the fifteen entries require for vertical spacing. The index recto must therefore have been purpose-pricked, and it is this line of prickings that can be detected on both Cordier leaves.
25 The word ‘Carte’ seems to be considerably later than the numbers.
26 Upton, ‘The Chantilly Codex’, 78, points out two places where ‘Gregory's rule’ (of hair facing hair, flesh facing flesh) is broken: in gathering 1, for fols. 16 and 21, and in gathering 2, for the central fols. 30 and 31. If an explanation is needed (which may not be the case), it could be that in these cases the scribe at first copied one of the songs on the wrong recto and had to reverse the fold of the bifolio in order to match the prescribed order of the table of contents. An examination of the ruling and pricking should determine whether the gathering was folded from the start in its present order, but that does not affect the present argument.
27 Fallows, David, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS. Canon. Misc. 213, Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Music in Facsimile 1 (Chicago and London, 1995), 18–19 Google Scholar.
28 Plumley and Stone, Codex Chantilly, 179–81; eadem, ‘Picture-Songs’, 309–10.
29 Plumley and Stone, ‘Picture-Songs’, 303.
30 Wright, Craig, ‘Tapissier and Cordier: New Documents and Conjectures’, The Musical Quarterly, 59 (1973), 177–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For links between the Ch songs and French princely courts, see most recently Yolanda Plumley, ‘An “Episode in the South”?’.
31 French Secular Music: The Chantilly Manuscript, Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century 18–19, ed. Gordon K. Greene (Paris and Monaco, 1981–2).
32 Plumley and Stone, Codex Chantilly, 113; Yolanda Plumley and Anne Stone, ‘Picture-Songs’, 306–9; Bent, Margaret, ‘The Early Use of the Sign ø’, Early Music, 24 (1996), 199–225 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, where I agree with Plumley and Stone's dating of the notational use of proportional numbers after 1400. They offer a detailed comparison of notational usage between Cordier's Ch songs and those in Ox and a survey of the composer biographies of comparable pieces. I would now row back from the claim they cite on p. 309 where I proposed a date in the late 1410s or early 20s for the Cordier songs, and would now settle with them for a dating of Cordier's songs and others in Ox with cut signs for diminution in the second decade of the fifteenth century, that is, nearly coeval with the main compilation of Ch.
33 Strohm, ‘Filippotto da Caserta ovvero i Francesi in Lombardia’, 72–3, and The Rise of European Music, 58 and 141.
34 See Plumley and Stone, ‘Picture-Songs’, 306. Delisle first proposed autograph status, without supporting evidence, and the notion was taken up by Reaney (‘The Manuscript Chantilly’, 61), but is strongly rejected by Upton as wishful thinking: ‘The Chantilly Codex’, 38, 105 and elsewhere.
35 Reaney, ‘The Manuscript Chantilly’, was the first to give a thorough description and inventory of the manuscript.
36 Plumley and Stone, Codex Chantilly, 122–6. Neither of these bifolios has original foliation. For the Senleches attribution in the ‘Cordier’ hand, Upton wrongly cites fol. 42v, not fol. 43v in ‘The Creation of the Chantilly Codex (Ms. 564)’, 311.
37 Strohm, The Rise of European Music, 58, also suggests that the Cordier songs may emulate La harpe, but considers that this strengthens the identification of Cordier with the harper Baude Fresnel. A fourth instance of graphic presentation is the anonymous balade En la maison Dedalus in the Berkeley theory manuscript (US-BEm 744, fol. 31v), written appropriately in the form of a circular labyrinth.
38 Plumley and Stone, Codex Chantilly, 117 and 125–6.
39 As suggested by Upton, ‘The Chantilly Codex’, 84.
40 Plumley and Stone, ‘Picture-Songs’, 304–5, eadem, Codex Chantilly, 122–4.
41 They report on the use of compasses for the heart and circle pieces: ‘The compass point [from fol. 11v] penetrated the parchment so that it is visible on f. 10r [recte 11r], but no impression can be detected on the index bifolio; its absence does not, of course, prove the Cordier songs were copied beforehand, but merely that there was no reciprocal use of the index bifolio as a “pincushion” for the Cordier bifolio’ (Plumley and Stone, Codex Chantilly, 124).
42 Plumley and Stone, Codex Chantilly, 124; eadem, ‘Picture-Songs’, 304–5.
43 Plumley and Stone, Codex Chantilly, 118, note 58, also report a wormhole which ‘unites the index, the Cordier songs, and the beginning of the first gathering’, but since we cannot date the worm's activity, the alignment of these holes would only be telling if they did not exactly line up between fols. 11 and 12.
44 See also note 32 above for notational support for this dating.
45 John Nádas,‘The Transmission of Trecento Secular Polyphony: Manuscript Production and Scribal Practices in Italy at the End of the Middle Ages’, Ph.D. diss., New York University (1985); idem, ‘The Structure of MS Panciatichi 26 and the Transmission of Trecento Polyphony’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 34 (1981), 393–427, at 414.
46 Campagnolo, Stefano, ‘Il codice Panciatichi 26 della Biblioteca Nazionale di Firenze nella tradizione delle opere di Francesco Landini’, in Col dolce suon che da te piove, ed. Delfino, Antonio and Rosa-Barezzani, Maria Teresa (Florence, 1999), 77–120 Google Scholar; Plumley and Stone, Codex Chantilly, 171–2.
47 I have long since suggested that the motet Sub Arturo plebs must date from after 1400, a view also subscribed to by David Fallows (New Grove, s.v. ‘Alanus’), and think this very probably also true of some other notationally advanced motets in Ch. Discomfort with an early dating was expressed by Ursula Günther in The Motets (1965) and more strongly by me, despite Roger Bowers's proposal of a date in the early 1370s in ‘The Transmission of English Music 1300–1500: Some Aspects of Repertory and Presentation’, in Studien zur Tradition in der Musik: Kurt von Fischer zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht and Max Lütolf (Munich, 1973), 65–83, at 70–2; Two 14th-Century Motets in Praise of Music[ians] (Newton Abbot, 1977); ‘The earliest fifteenth-century transmission of English music to the continent’, in Essays on the History of English Music in Honour of John Caldwell, ed. Emma Hornby and David Maw (Woodbridge, 2010), 83–96.
48 Higgins, Paula, ‘Music and Musicians at the Sainte-Chapelle of the Bourges Palace 1405–1515’, in Trasmissione e recezione delle forme di cultura musicale. Atti del XIV Congresso della Società Internazionale di Musicologia, Bologna 27 agosto-10 settembre 1987, ed. Pompilio, Angelo, Restani, Donatella, Bianconi, Lorenzo and Gallo, F. Alberto, vol. 3: Free Papers (Torino 1990), 689–701 Google Scholar. Higgins points out that twenty-three of the twenty-five works by composers documented in Bourges (Legrant, Grenon, Fontaine, Cesaris, Charité and Paullet) are in the oldest four fascicles of Ox, which also contain eleven further works attributed to Cesaris and Legrant. All except Paullet and Charité are also represented in Q15 (ibid., 694).
49 Plumley and Stone, Codex Chantilly, 137 suggest that the notation of Ma douce amour by Hasprois (no. 46) is similar to a group of songs in Ox that may be connected with the Duc de Berry's Sainte-Chapelle in Bourges.
50 This would not be the only instance from this period of coeval repertories that seem chronologically anomalous. It was in the first quarter of the fifteenth century that the retrospective Italian Trecento repertory manuscripts were compiled in Tuscany and the Veneto at the same time that new composers and styles from the north, notably works by the young Du Fay, were being copied into other manuscripts like Ox and Q15. See Bent, Margaret, ‘Continuity and Transformation of Repertory and Transmission in Early 15th-Century Italy: The Two Cultures’, in Kontinuität und Transformation in der italienischen Vokalmusik zwischen Due- und Quattrocento, ed. Dieckmann, Sandra, Huck, Oliver, Rotter-Broman, Signe and Scotti, Alba, Musica mensurabilis 3 (Hildesheim 2007), 225–46Google Scholar.