Les oiseaux

Clément Janequin (ca. 1485-1558) was perhaps the most successful and influential French composer of his day. His contemporaneous and posthumous reputations owe a great debt to new printing techniques that emerged in the Franco Flemish region in the early 1500s, the very time that Janequin was reaching his peak. Following a rather gradual improvement in his provincial jobs, Janequin settled in Paris in 1548 and became a singer in the Royal Chapel and, subsequently, court composer. Le Chant des Oiseaux typifies the Parisian chanson tradition that he helped to invent. Such works were incredibly popular, featuring vibrant a cappella vocal writing, rhythmic verve, and all manner of programmatic and onomatopoetic sound effects. The basic texture of Le Chant is four-part polyphony. Successive points of imitation are quite close, about two or three beats apart, and cadences help to articulate the text’s strophic structure. Delightful pictorial effects begin in strophe 2, and birdcalls in particular were a recurrent trope in this repertoire. But beyond the facile evocation of birdcalls, this chanson succeeds by using the opening theme as a recurring refrain, thus unifying the entire work and keeping the avian “flights of fancy” grounded within familiar bounds.

(c) Jason Stell