Solage - Fumeux fume par fumée (Rondeau)

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Fumeux fume par fumée (Rondeau)
Composer: Solage (fl. late 14th century)
Performers: Ensemble Organum, dir. Marcel Pérès
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"Fumeux fume is a very strange composition created in Gaston's circle. Written by Solage, one of a group of marginal rhetoricians, the fumeurs, it is fully chromatic in conception. This, combined with the low tessiture of the three voices and an alliterative text, makes for a bizarre effect. Of the composer, who worked in various Ars Subtilior centers, little is known."

~Paul Van Nevel

"Solage, possibly Jean So(u)lage was a French composer, and probably also a poet. He composed the most pieces in the Chantilly Codex, the principal source of music of the ars subtilior, the manneristic compositional school centered on Avignon at the end of the century.

Specific references in the texts of some of his songs indicate he probably was associated with the French royal court. The ballade S'aincy estoit glorifies Jean, duc de Berry, and was written to celebrate his second marriage, to Jeanne de Boulogne, which took place with great pomp near Avignon on 25 May 1389. The pair of ballades, Corps femenin par vertu de nature and Calextone qui fut dame also refer to Jeanne de Boulogne, and their texts show that the former was composed shortly before and the latter shortly after this wedding. Although it is tempting to suppose that Solage might have been in the service of the duke of Berry, it is just as likely that he was in the service of Gaston Fébus, compte de Foix, who had a considerable financial interest in this marriage.

Stylistically, Solage's works exhibit two distinctly different characters: a relatively simple one usually associated with his great predecessor and elder contemporary Guillaume de Machaut, and a more recherché one, complex in the areas of both pitch and rhythm, characteristic of the ars subtilior ("more subtle art"). These two styles mostly exist separately in different songs but sometimes are found mixed in a single composition, where they can be used to underscore the musical and poetic structure. [...] the simpler style is not necessarily an indication of an earlier date nor the complex style a reliable sign of a later date. Solage uses his techniques to link text and music together, either in terms of form or else of meaning (Dulong 2009, 46). Nevertheless, some of his ars subtilior music was quite experimental: the best-known example in this complex style is his bizarre Fumeux fume par fumée (approx: "The smoky one smokes through [or for] smoke"), which is extravagantly chromatic for the time; it also contains some of the lowest tessitura vocal writing in any music of the period (Anon. n.d.).[better source needed]

Solage's rondeau is associated with a putative literary school of fumeurs. There have been many interpretations of this sobriquet. Although it is tempting given the outré nature of some poems to suppose that it refers to the smoking of some drug, the simplest explanation in the case of the above work is that it was written for the Parisian Fumeurs, the Society of Smokers, "an eccentric literary clique of ostentatiously dressed bohemians that named themselves after Jean Fumeux and flourished in the 1360s and 1370s". One scholar suggests that Eustache Deschamps's poetry, which contains most of the surviving references to the fumeurs, was satirical. The literature associated with the Fumeurs is dated between 1366 and 1381, and Solage's ballade Plusieurs gens voy also alludes to them. In his Règles de la Seconde Rhétorique Deschamps claims to be the nephew of Machaut, and in his Ballade 447 states that Machaut "brought me up and did me many kindnesses". Though there is no independent verification of these claims, it seems likely that they must have been on close terms. On the other hand, if indeed the Fumeurs were literally devotees of smoking, since tobacco was not known in Europe for another two centuries, some other drug, e.g. hashish or opium, must have been implied. However, the current consensus among musicologists is that there was no physical smoking. In the Middle Ages, the French expression "avoir des fumées au cerveau" (having smoke in the brain) referred to mental confusion, a condition attributed to internal vapours which, according to ancient authorities such as Hippocrates and Aristotle, could be evacuated from "heated and smoky brains" either by sneezing or by drinking. [...] All of Solage's known compositions are found in the Chantilly Codex, and only one of these is found anywhere else."

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solage
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