Tag: Music

A Flemish Folksong

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The Wedding Dance, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1566

I like to think that the revelers in Bruegel’s wedding scene are dancing to the popular Flemish tune T’andernaken. Originally a folksong, the piece was arranged for instruments by many 15th and 16th century composers including Jacob Obrecht, and Ludwig Senfl, There is even a setting by Henry VIII who somehow found time between marriages and beheadings to compose some admirable music.

I have heard the tune performed several times over the years by the Medieval and Renaissance music group The Folger Consort, usually as an instrumental but twice the sung folksong. In 2012 it was included in the program City of Ladies: The Musical World of 15th Century Burgundy. It was a lovely surprise to hear a song in Flemish, the language that surrounded me in my childhood. Many of the Folger concerts include songs in Latin, French, German, Italian, and Spanish, but it was a special treat to hear Flemish. The moment occurred again this Valentine’s Day in the concert Love Songs of the 15th Century. The program promised two instrumental settings of T’andernaken, the earliest, by Tyting,, and another by Antoine Brunel. But apparently tenor Jason McStoots could not resist the opportunity to sing the folksong and gave us a lively impromptu performance.

From The Folger Consort’s program notes by Consort director Robert Eisenstein:

T’andernacken is a Flemish folksong that became for some reason the basis for some of the earliest, purely instrumental pieces in the 15th-century repertoire… Composers vied with each other in fashioning more and more virtuosic settings of the tune, and it was popular well into the 16th century.  

T’andernaken was first published in The Antwerp Songbook in 1544. As a love song it is far different in tone from the Courtly Love tradition of the period. It is in the folk tradition of songs that tell a story of ordinary people, their heartaches and misadventures in love. It is a cautionary tale that women across the ages can recognize and to me it has a distinctly Flemish sensibility; the hard knocks of life met with earthy humor, unvarnished realism, and determination to enjoy life despite all.

The story is narrated by a man who reports on a conversation he overheard between two young women in the town of Andernach:

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In The Bleak Midwinter

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As we shiver through this bitter winter a favorite carol I listened to again over Christmas keeps playing through my head:

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.

When I first heard the haunting melody and read the lyrics decades ago I thought it was a medieval carol. It seemed to share a sensibility with three of my favorites, The Coventry Carol, There is No Rose, and the Corpus Christi Carol. But no, it is a poem by the Victorian poet Christina Rossetti set to music by Gustav Holst. But perhaps I did pick up some medieval vibes for Christina was the sister of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the leading medievalist of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. This group of artists were dedicated to returning painting to the era before Raphael. They believed that the spiritual and creative integrity of medieval art had been lost. They particularly despised Sir Joshua Reynolds, founder of the Royal Academy of Arts, nicknaming him Sir Sloshua, sloshy being their term for inauthentic and conventional art. (So similar to the modern word slop for poor quality AI images). Many of Dante Gabriel’s paintings, like the one below, contain medieval iconography and characters in richly detailed medieval dress. The scene glimpsed through the window echoes similar scenes in Renaissance paintings.

St. George and Princess Sabra by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
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The Women Troubadours

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On My Bookshelf I find a volume perfect for Women’s History Month, the story of medieval women songwriters whose words sound as fresh as if they were written today.

The troubadour is a familiar figure in Medieval history, a singer of songs of unrequited love for a beautiful and virtuous lady. But women troubadours? They were virtually forgotten until Meg Bogin published this study in 1976, the first since a German monograph in 1888. The book includes translations of the 23 songs that survive by 20 women. These voices from almost a thousand years ago are remarkably fresh and intimate, giving us a rare window into the lives of women in an age dominated by men.

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