Music in the French Secular Theater, 1400-1550.

Mainly for musicians, this book also has a great deal to say to people interested in the theater of the past. As Elizabethan music is part of Shakespearean drama so the chansons, dances, fanfares, and street cries were inseparable from the early French stage. The author shows what pieces would have been chosen for different contexts and how a fanfare, for example, would have sounded; and he finds in the dramatic chansons, the hit tunes of their day, a sequence that differs significantly from that of conventional music history. He begins with an account of plays and performances - an unprecedented correlation of widely dispersed materials. Later he makes a unique study of the whole scope of theatrical chansons: no one before has tried to determine the extent and character of the popular chanson's influence on polyphonic settings. A complete catalogue of songs mentioned in the plays of the period, their various polyphonic settings and how they differ is included.