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This book aims to enrich our understanding of the French secular music of Orlando di Lasso, using those songs as a means of understanding a particular community of Renaissance readers and the music books they created. Lassos secular songs figured quite prominently in a number of collections of devotional songs issued by Protestant printers in the late sixteenth century. Lassos profane lyrics were changed to convey spiritual meanings. This study uses the example of such reworkings as a means of discovering how such a repertory was heard and understood by a particular community of listeners, and in so doing, it explores the history of these chansons in print, and the history of the spiritual attitudes that shaped their reception among the Huguenots. Richard Freedman is Associate Professor of Music at the Haverford College.
List of contents
Music, piety, and printing in 16th-century France; the Chansons and their listeners; courtly love and its spiritual tropes; Marot, the Carnivalesque, and the preacher's voice; songs for the spiritual self; the spiritual conversion of Ronsard's poetry; Lasso's Chansons in printed sets; authorizing the book. Appendices: texts and translations of preface; printing privileges mentioned in publications of Lassus's music issued by Le Roy et Ballard.
