Across early modern Europe popular tunes functioned as canvases for new texts and they served thereby as a tool for oral and written communication. Song enabled literate, semiliterate, and illiterate members of the population to participate in the circulation of news, gossip, and rumors and to mock both current events and individuals through satire. When performed, songs also encouraged audience participation when a tune had a refrain. In France in the 17th and 18th centuries, popular songs, often referred to as vaudevilles or pont-neufs, permeated urban and rural soundscapes. Popular tunes played an important social role in the lives of individuals from all social spheres, from singers begging for donations in the streets to members of fashionable Parisian society who gathered at salons and at the court. Mondains, members of fashionable society who frequently had literary pretensions, composed and preserved (in manuscripts, known today as chansonniers, as well as in printed publications) song texts that circulated between friends, acquaintances, and in the streets. Vaudevilles became associated with the Pont-Neuf, a spacious “new” bridge that functioned as a central thoroughfare but also a public space in which Parisians came to shop, hear the latest gossip, and be entertained by charlatans, street singers, and itinerant actors. Popular song also flourished in close connection to theater, and in the late 17th century popular songs began to play an increasingly prominent role in the Parisian theaters, namely the Comédie-Italienne and the Comédie-Française. By the early 18th century, comic opera (opéra-comique) emerged as a flexible satirical genre of popular theater. In this genre, which at first intermingled sung tunes with spoken prose, vaudevilles served as musical and structural building blocks and enabled audience participation in a manner similar to street performances. Besides the use of vaudevilles, early French comic operas continued the tradition developed in street song and in the late-17th-century theaters of parodying operas and opera airs. Some airs from Jean-Baptiste Lully’s ballets and operas, for example, became vaudevilles and survive with many new texts intended to be sung to simplified versions of his melodies. People from all social ranks, including street performers, servants, salonnières, courtiers, playwrights, and actors created and performed these parodic songs. When we discuss a body of popular songs during the reign of Louis XIV, then, we must imagine a constantly changing repertory that absorbed any tune that was, in contemporary parlance, “in the mouths” of the population. The study of French popular song, therefore, requires a broad interdisciplinary approach.
Songwriters and song lyrics: architecture, ambiguity and repetition
