Underrated Classical Musicians: Clement Janequin

 I started writing about Clement Janequin only to realize I wrote about him here almost exactly a year ago. While re-reading Testaments Betrayed by Milan Kundera and wondering how I never actually read or finished all the books he talks about, he made an interesting observation that Clement Janequin was an almost exact contemporary of Rabelais, and notes a Rabelaisian kinship. It's difficult not to hear the larger-than-life roistering, the bizarreness, the carrying vulgarity into the art of the sublime, a world of fantasy where literally anything at all is possible. So as I said before, one can see Janequin as a musical Rabelais, if one squints....

Here's what I wrote last year:

From the much longer era of history when violent chaos was omnipresent and the high organization of war was seen as the less squalid option, La Guerre, also sometimes called La Bataille, gives us an onomatopoetic experience of war in the form of a part-song, or chauson.

Clement Janequin specifically comes to us from the same era of French history as Rabelais, and therefore also of Martin Luther and the original break into the Protestant-Catholic wars of the 16th century, which, like World War I, groups went into with a crazy optimism about their easy resolution - at the end of this piece comes the inevitable shouts of 'VICTOIRE!'. If one squints one's ears, one can hear it as a kind musical Rabelaisian equivalent, everything is fun, and perhaps everything is a little cruel too - perhaps such was the nature of life in the earlier eras of French history, which were the polar opposite of the refined French culture we know of so well. Every consonant in this piece does double duty, not only giving the meaning of the words themselves but also meant to evoke the sounds of battle. Janequin was the master of this kind of onomatopoetic chauson, there are others we will probably feature, which evoke the sounds of bird calls and the hunt.

Though he lived into his seventies, Clement Janequin was practically a rock star in his day, demand was so high for these onomatopoetic part-songs that he published five volumes of them. He never took any musical post for too long, and one can only speculate as to why, but near the end of his life, he was named the 'Composer Ordinary' to King Henri II, only the second composer to ever achieve such a status in the French court.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mifKSYClA6E