Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-788cddb947-jbkpb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-10-14T22:08:08.384Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

16 - A Performance and Reception History of On parole/A Paris/FRESE NOUVELE

from III - ANALYTICAL CASE STUDIES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2019

Edward Breen
Affiliation:
The City Literary Institute, London and a regular contributor to Gramophone Magazine.
Get access

Summary

MONTPELLIER 8's motet On parole/A Paris/FRESE NOUVELE (Mo 8,319, fols 368v–369v) is an intriguing polytextual work with an equally intriguing performance history. It has caught the imagination of many musicians who have explored the various performance possibilities suggested by the text.

The written personal communication of Thurston Dart offers a unique opportunity to understand how his performance of this particular motet was planned and executed in the late 1960s. It also suggests ways in which his opinion influenced some of the first performances to be recorded. ‘Make the music sound robust now and again’ was Dart's advice to Michael Morrow and his ensemble Musica Reservata. Little did Dart know just quite how literally these young musicians would take him at his word. For Musica Reservata, On parole/A Paris/FRESE NOUVELE required an almost military approach to rhythmic drive, resulting in a highly organized market-traders’ cacophony, whereas in Dart's own conception this street scene unfolded across the newly available stereophonic soundscape of late 1960s LP technology. As Emma Dillon explains, the attraction of On parole/A Paris/FRESE NOUVELE is that it ‘offers us a rare instance where the city itself is the topic of the motet’. Through this urban prism Dart (re)constructed a vision of medieval Paris which made sense in his modern world, and subsequent performances reacted to his historical imagination.

This paper explores the first four recordings of this evocative motet, with particular emphasis on the circumstances surrounding Dart's much-delayed album, and probes the musicological climate behind each. With reference to the influential work of Yvonne Rokseth, it asks how much these performances say about the changing twentieth-century sense of the medieval and what they suggest about the changing musicological approaches to the famous Montpellier codex itself.

Central to understanding these performances is the tenor voice whose melody and words appear to preserve a street cry:

Frese nouvele! Muere france! Muere! Muere france!

Fresh strawberries! Ripe and French!

Such is the musicological temptation to seek the evanescent traces of folk practice in secular motet voices that performers have been tempted to approach this motet as an orchestrated song collected from the street: the ‘Jesus’ Blood’ of its day, if you will. Yet might this tenor voice parody, rather than preserve, a well-known cry or cries of its day by making humorous the fruit vendor whose singing is steady enough to create a motet tenor?

Type
Chapter
Information
The Montpellier Codex
The Final Fascicle. Contents, Contexts, Chronologies
, pp. 283 - 298
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2018

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×