The Chansons of Orlando di Lasso and Their Protestant Listeners: Music, Piety, and Print in Sixteenth-Century France. (Reviews).

Richard Freedman, The Chansons of Orlando di Lasso and Their Protestant Listeners: Music, Piety, and Print in Sixteenth-Century France (Eastman Studies in Music, 15.) Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2001. xxiv + 259 pp. $75. ISBN: 1-58046-075-5.

Richard Freedman examines three published collections of contrafacta chansons by Orlando di Lasso: Thomas Vautrollier's Recueil du mellange d'Orlande (London, 1570), Jean Pasquier's Mellange d'Orlande de Lassus (La Rochelle, 1575 and 1576), and Simon Goulart's Thresor de musique d'Orlande ([Geneva], 1576, 1582, and 1594). Each of these anthologies transmits both contrafacta chansons -- works whose texts have been altered to create a religious interpretation -- and those of Lasso's original chansons considered spiritual in subject by the editors. (Freedman's book's title is perhaps misleading, for the focus is more the contrafacta chansons than Orlando di Lasso's original chansons.)

The book begins by describing the historical context of the Lasso contrafacta collections within Protestant musical thought, and the interest among Protestant printers in issuing spiritual recreational music. The author continues with a discussion of the poetry -- both the originals as Lasso set them and the new spiritual versions -- providing readers with basic understanding of style and tone of French Protestant lyrics, including subjects, styles, and listener interpretation. Freedman demonstrates the complexity of the editorial process, comparing the work of the three printers. The central portion of the book analyzes selected chansons from the collections. Here the author compares musical approaches to the poetry, including those chansons with differing contrafacta texts, within the relationship between text and music. One chapter is devoted to the poetry of Marot and its contrafacta settings and another to those of Ronsard. Goulart it seems was more sensitive than Pasquier to musical response to text and adjusted the words with clear regard to Lasso's original music. The book later considers the organization of the new printed contrafacta collections and the interpretation each editor may have created in their new arrangement. Goulart, for example, seemed to "impose a systematic scheme of modal organization... forming a kind of site where spiritual transformation takes place" (163). The final chapter briefly examines authorship in contrafacta books within the printed book culture. Freedman's appendices present the prefaces (with translations) to the contrafacta books and the printing privileges of Lasso's music issued by Le Roy et Ballard.

Freedman speculates that the contrafacta chansons with spiritual texts were considered superior to the secular ones, that is, the chansons "could be a suitable musical goal only if they were enlisted in the expression of an equally suitable written text," that is, a spiritual one (xiv); the contents of Lasso's books were now made "'authentic' by virtue of the devotional purposes now recovered" (177).

The book attempts to point to spiritual qualities in Lasso's music itself, that is, in the music apart from its text, and thus raises an important issue. To be sure, a music work whose secular words were altered to create a religious subject would seem to have a musical style appropriate for either realm. But we must ask if the spiritual nature of a lauda, for example, or a chanson spirituelle, or a madrigale spirituale is found solely through its textual subject, or could specific musical characteristics define a work's spiritual nature in the sixteenth century? As Freedman correctly points out, mode and modal order seem to have been manipulated to point to religious nature in Lasso's music. But Freedman is less convincing in his interpretation of music's emotional or expressive qualities as features of spiritual character. Indeed, defining spiritual features in poetry is also a puzzling task: there are many Reformation and Counter-Reformation texts whose spiritual nature is determined only by the context su rrounding the work, that is, the title page of the book or the rubric of the piece. Nearly one-half of the chanson texts in Vautrollier's collection, for example, remain as Lasso set them; they are interpreted as spiritual by the context.

Contrafact music for devotions has long been acknowledged but not sufficiently studied and Freedman's book is a welcome contribution. By isolating a significant repertoire, that is, works by a respected prolific composer whose texts were altered within the context of the Reformation, the author goes far in addressing important issues, including printer's roles in collecting and "correcting" works and reputation of the works within the social context of the Reformation.