PART II: Multiple Award Winning Broadcaster Bernard Clark on The Red Book of Ossory

Bernard Clarke's commentary on THE RED BOOK OF OSSORY BY ANAKRONOS from his July 7 RTE show "In the Blue of the Night"

Part 2  

https://www.rte.ie/lyricfm/blue-of-the-night/#103447602
Scroll ahead to 1:50:53

Solage’s Fumeux fume is a much celebrated three-voice rondeaux about a Parisian literary club known as the Society of Fumeurs, or smokers. The name has been explained as meaning the “originals” or the “eccentrics”, and maybe as deriving from the name of their supposed founder, one mysterious “Jean Fumeux”; or perhaps as referring to their use of hashish, or marajuana. That said, the society and the text may also refer to metaphorical rather than actual smoking, or drug taking.

The composer Solage was active in Paris between 1370 and 1390, and ran a music school. The song is incredible in many ways: the text is very short, but the composition is unusually long and full of chromaticisms, inviting the singer and the audience to lose themselves in its meandering twists and turns (like strands of smoke?); the voices are also concentrated in an unusually low range for this period, evoking the moodiness and torpor suggested by the text? The text reads, or scans:

The smoker smokes through smoke,
A smoky speculation.
While others smoke in thought,
The smoker smokes through smoke,
Because smoke pleases him greatly
As he meditates.
The smoker smokes through smoke,
A smoky speculation.

L’Ars Subtilior

Solage Fumeux fume par fumee 5’14

Ensemble Organum/Marcel Peres (Harmonia Mundi)

The song is preserved in the Chantilly Codex, one of the two major sources for the so-called Ars Subtilior or “more subtle art”, a term which has been used since the 1960s to describe a style of music which was current in France during the final decades of the 14^th century. 

Fumeux fume is straight out of this style, its main features being an emphasis on subtle texts and rhythmic complexity. The label - ars subtilior -distinguishes these songs from the music of the previous two generations, and the so-called Ars Nova, or “new art”, which was associated with Guillaume de Machaut. Once again, how one performs this music is open to question. So here’s David Munrow’s take on Solage followed by Anakronos’ use of it on their new album The Red Book of Ossory.

The Art Of Courtly Love

Solage Fumeux Fume

Early Music Consort of London/David Munrow 3’58 (Virgin)

segue

Red Book of Ossory

Summe Deus Clemencie 5’20

The inherent strange melancholy of Fumeux Fume now animating Summe Deus Clemencie.

Inspirational to the composers of the Ars Nova tradition, and the Ars Subtilior, was the music of Guillaume DeMachaut and his inventive balance of tradition and innovation. It attracted many imitators.

The Ars Subtilior movement , this “more subtle” music with its greater rhythmic complexity and refinement consisted of secular songs, ballads, and canons and also the innovations in musical notation with the inclusion of “red notes” for “colouration”; they indicated a reduction of note valued by a third. There was playfulness: some composers constructed their scores in the shapes of instruments. Jacob Senleches’ Harpe de melodie was notated in the shape of a harp.

Here it is from the Pandora’s Box ensemble.

Pandora’s Box - Early Music Ensemble

Senleches La Harpe de Melodie

Pandora's Box/ Emily White: Miguel Tantos Sevilliano: John Kenny; alto & tenor sackbut, trombone, recorders, baroque violin, voice

And here it is, once again from the Ferrara Ensemble

L’Ars Subtilior

Senleches La Harpe de Melodie

Ferrara Ensemble/Crawford Young (Harmonia Mundi)

Somehow Anakronos have imbued this very French/Flemish music with an almost Oriental or Arabic feel.

It is delicate, beautiful and very full of refinement. The atmosphere is that of restrained reflection, gentility and devotion.

Caitriona Oleary in her booklet notes makes a point of Stanley Kubrick being asked if his characters were good or evil? They are both good and evil, he said. That is at work here too in the Red Book of Ossory

Red Book of Ossory

Jhesu Lux Vera Mencium 3’53

Such styles all make sense, though, given the forceful, tenderly acute texts to which most of the pieces here are set.

The sparseness and immediacy of the way in which Ubi Iam Sunt? unfolds is very telling in its simple and wan beauty –this is extremely telling. Get this disc, follow along with the text.

You will see what and how much in the world is?Seductive error?        

The leaders of the flocks, the pompous law-makers

Where are they now?

Red Book of Ossory

Ubi Iam Sunt? Oobee yam sue it?

There are many theories about how music was performed in earlier times. And one can quickly get bogged down in academic theorising. We’ll leave that to the professors. As regards Anakronos’ The Red Book of Ossory, I’m happy simply to say that, although in theory such a jumble of texts and styles from different seasons shouldn’t work, but it does. It’s a revelation. Get this disc. More from it tomorrow night…