Songs that Know Each Other in the Leuven Chansonnier

Establishing authorship of anonymous fifteenth-century chansons presents numerous difficulties. Some chansons nonetheless share enough traits to raise the possibility of citation, paraphrase, intertextual relationships, and shared authorship. I call such related chansons ‘songs that know each other’. This study traces such shared traits between the anonymous unica of the Leuven Chansonnier (LC) and other chansons, both anonymous and by known composers. The unica of the LC include polyphonic paraphrases of chansons by Ockeghem, shared subjects with famous anonymous chansons, and works with shared approaches to textual content and traditions. Of special interest is a group of chansons that reveal a remarkable degree of palindromic and invertible motivic play. In all of these anonymous chansons, their motivic vocabulary is as crucial as identifying the composers who crafted them, inviting more detailed methods for future analyses.

Publication year:2020

Keywords:Leuven, chansonnier, polyphony, manuscript

Accessibility:Open