Intertextuality in the Fourteenth‐Century Chanson

Abstract

The practice of citation and allusion in both text and music was well established in the thirteenth century. In the fourteenth century, there is plentiful evidence that the tradition continued to flourish in the context of lyric poetry. In 1972, Ursula Guinther established that musical citations, though rare among Machaut's songs, are present in several works by his immediate successors, but she proposed that the practice fell out of use in France in the Ars subtilior generation. This study provides a new survey of this phenomenon in the fourteenth-century chanson repertory, and explores its varying manifestations and considers the apparent function of such borrowings in individual works. The findings indicate that, contrary to previous suppositions, the practice remained very popular with French composers of the 1380s and 1390s, and, indeed, that it was especially favoured by Ars subtilior composers working in the mainstream of French musical culture. 66 This hypothesis is supported by my findings presented in 'An Episode in the South?'