Dear all,
in fact we don't know whether smoking sth. was involved.
Also the editor of the Chantilly* codex in the series "Polyphonic Music
in the Fourteenth Century (vols. 18 & 19, ) (1981) wasn't really sure, as
he wrote in his comment to "puis que je suis fumeux" that there is
another song connected to "fuming" in the Ms. ("Fumeux fume par fumee").
* Yes! It's the time of the famous Duc de Berry and his Tres Riches Heures,
also kept in Chantilly.
http://humanities.uchicago.edu/images/heures/heures.html
One would have liked to know what Mr. Greene thought that "fuming" is :-)
What is the difference between "fuming" and fuming? ;-)
But we know that there was an eccentrical club of writers and
composers in Paris, called "Les Fumeux". As it were, they derived
the name from a certain Jean Fumeux - but is this name perhaps
an allusion??
Eugene Deschamps (one of them, as it seems) said in his "Charte des fumeux"
(1368):
Ilz parlent variablement
Ilz se demainent sotement
..Pour ce que dame Outrecuidance
Maine chascun d'eulx a sa dance
Folie par la main les tient
Orgueil les gouverne et soutient
Et le vest de riches joyaulx
Et Jeunesse, qui est si beaux
Leur prie, amonneste et ennorte
Que chascuns folement se porte.
I find it very fascinating to see, how "modern" those composers and
writers were, how they wrote "manifestos" of their new art and how
quickly the ars subtilior style spread over Europe: we can say roughly that
it developed after Machaut's death in 1377 and lasted only until the first
years of the 15th century. But we find sources from Britain to Cyprus.
And the composers were well aware of the complexity of their new works,
a certain Guido lets a Rondeau start with the "blessing":
Dieux gart qui bien le chantera
May God guard him , who sings this well... :-)
There is also a nice parallele to miniature painting: there are virelais with
onomatopoetical settings of birds' voices and for the first time we find
depiction of
nature in book miniature painting.
I remember how we played a good deal of the Chantilly and Modena mss. on
saxophones. There was a lot of smoking and drinking, but only afterwards, the
stuff is too complicated :-)
Best wishes
Bernd
(Does somebody really wants the texts? I could type them from the edition.)
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