Solage

Occasionally a music historian have to become an archaeologist. Zero known archival records, for instance, provide any biographical information regarding a past due fourteenth hundred years French composer called Solage. However he will need to have been an eminent amount in French royal circles. One essential music manuscript from past due in the hundred years credits him with at least a tenth of most its music. Therefore out of this fragment of the artifact, the historian makes whatever implications are feasible. Something of Solage’s lifestyle and circumstances could be inferred in the manuscript itself. The so-called Chantilly Codex, a wealthy display manuscript of 100 French music and motets in the last decades from the hundred years, breathes the fact of French royal and commendable courtly lifestyle. Though it had been copied by an expatriate Italian scribe, it most likely was designed for the courts from the Matters of Foix, Gaston Fébus, and his kid Mathieu, or for the fabulously rich court from the schismatic Popes Clement VII and Benedict XIII in Avignon. For Solage to feature therefore prominently in the music of the courts, he’d have to move around in high circles certainly. Further morsels of tantalizing recommendations may be within Solage’s 10 or 12 bits of music themselves. All carry traces from the past due fourteenth hundred years French high and cultured design of the ars subtilior. Two of these indicate Solage most likely resided in Paris in the 1370s: his chanson Plusieurs gens voy makes fun of Parisian styles (and of a specific lady called “Jacquete”), while his wildly chromatic Rondeau Fumeux fume alludes to a trendy Parisian culture of intellectuals including poet Eustache Deschamps. But by around 1380, Solage appears to have remaining Paris to provide Duke Jean de Berry (also known for his patronage from the Tres Riches Heures). Two of his 10 chansons had been most likely made up for the marriage of Duke Jean’s boy to Catherine (the sister from the Ruler of France); another, his S’aincy estoit, praises the Duke personally. An additional chanson mentions the god Phoebus, maybe a mention of Gaston Fébus, who organized a relationship for the Duke of Berry. Solage evidently taken care of his close ties using the French royal family members, aswell. Joieux de cuer consists of textual allusions to Louis, the Duke of Orléans, and his wife, the girl of Giangalleazo Visconti of Milan.