Programme Ricercar : Centre d’études supérieures de la Renaissance, 59 rue Néricault-Destouches, BP 11328, 37013 Tours cedex – France

tel : + 33 (0)2 47 36 77 84     email : ricercar@univ-tours.fr

"Lost Voices:  Lessons from the “École thématique”, CESR, October, 2010" –

Richard Freedman

A. Context and Scope:

The digital environment offers much that will advance the study, teaching, and performance of early music.  Focusing on a neglected but important repertory of secular polyphonic songs from mid-sixteenth-century Paris, Les Livres de Chansons nouvelles de Nicolas Du Chemin puts an unprecedented range of modern editions, facsimiles, critical commentaries, and practical editorial tools before a diverse audience of modern musicians, amateurs and professionals.  Prepared by the successes of our initial work (supported by the CESR and a Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant (2009-2010) from the National Endowment for the Humanities we now propose two additional phases of work. 

Our first task will be to complete the critical editions of the main corpus of chansons themselves (four books of facsimiles and editions are in hand as of the end of the Start-Up Grant, leaving seven more sets of pieces to be edited—for a total of about 300 polyphonic chansons).

We will also turn to a still more ambitious continuation of our work:  reconstructions of the last five sets of Du Chemin's series, for which only two of the original four voice parts survive.  This missing repertory is of great intrinsic interest to scholars of the period, since it was issued in the late 1550's and early 1560's, a period of profound stylistic change in musical and literary tastes, and of new competition among music printers in France. 

This short report summarizes the scope of this work of reconstruction, offering an array of the kinds of resources we would like to assemble, and a sample reconstruction:  a chanson by Clément Janequin that has not been heard for over 450 years, now restored through the combined efforts of several young musicologists who gathered at the CESR in late October 2010.