Chansons latines du XIIe siècle

Album review

The music on this disc will be unfamiliar even to most of those who've studied some medieval music; alas, it doesn't quite fit into the grand historical march that took music from Latin church compositions to vernacular courtly love songs. These Latin songs of the twelfth century represent something of a historical dead end, and they fall into genres -- the dance-like rondellus, the conductus, the sequence, and some just designated as chansons -- that get just passing mention in the history books. They were elite pieces, written by highly educated clerics for their own amusement or for that of a lord; the motet was perhaps a more "public" genre. Yet, for all that, this music fits interestingly into what one already knows of the styles of its era. Some of the texts lie right in between sacred and secular, for one thing; they seem to condense the sacred-secular mixes of the polytextual motet into a single unified form of expression. And they fall pleasingly all over the map when it comes to subject matter. Some are long, involved, ambitious religious poems. Some point clearly to the tradition of courtly love; some meditate gloomily on death. The small French ensemble Diabolus in Musica presents sparse, quiet readings that they imagine to be in keeping with the refined nature of the music: most of the songs are accompanied by a pair of small fiddles and perhaps some light percussion. For those less interested in the specifics, the singers are pleasant to listen to, and the disc is ideal for hearing a quiet hour of medieval song. And, as usual with the Alpha label, the album artwork -- an incredible illuminated letter Q from a medieval manuscript, with two naked men trapped in a kind of iron scrollwork, being eaten by dog-like creatures that issue from the mouths of an encircling wreath made up by the bodies and long tails of some other kind of demon, with yet a different kind of dog forming the bottom cross-slash of the Q -- is worth the price of the album all by itself. This is an offbeat release even by Alpha's standards, but a fascinating and informative one.

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