What is the form of a virelai?
What is the form of a virelai?
The standard virelai form has three stanzas, each preceded and followed by a refrain. Each stanza is in three sections, the first two having the same rhyme scheme and the last having the rhyme scheme of the refrain.
What are the 3 formes fixes?
This is a collective designation for the three chief forms of late medieval French poetry and music: ballade, virelai, and rondeau.
What are the different formes fixes?
The formes fixes (French: [fɔʁm fiks]; singular: forme fixe, “fixed form”) are the three 14th- and 15th-century French poetic forms: the ballade, rondeau, and virelai. Sometimes forms from other countries and periods are referred to as formes fixes.
Is virelai secular?
As a composer of the fourteenth century, Machaut’s secular song output includes monophonic lais and virelais, which continue, in updated forms, some of the tradition of the troubadours.
What does formes fixes mean in music?
Fixed patterns or styles with which certain forms of music must comply. This term specifically applies to the music of France in the Renaissance, such as the ballade and the rondeau.
What does Ars Nova translate to?
Ars Nova, (Medieval Latin: “New Art”), in music history, period of the tremendous flowering of music in the 14th century, particularly in France.
What is a virelai poem?
The virelai is a French poetic form with alternating rhymes and line lengths. Here are basic guidelines: nine lines per stanza. lines one, two, four, five, seven, and eight have five syllables. lines three, six, and nine have two syllables.
What was unusual about Guillaume de Machaut most famous composition?
He was the first composer to write single-handedly a polyphonic setting of the mass ordinary, a work that has been recorded in modern performance. In most of this four-part setting he employs the characteristic Ars Nova technique of isorhythm (repeated overlapping of a rhythmic pattern in varying melodic forms).
What is a virelai in English?
Virelai, one of several formes fixes (“fixed forms”) in French lyric poetry and song of the 14th and 15th centuries (compare ballade; rondeau).
How many stanzas are in a virelai?
The virelai as a song form of the 14th and early 15th century usually has three stanzas, and a refrain that is stated before the first stanza and again after each. Within each stanza, the structure is that of the bar form, with two sections that share the same rhymes and music (“stollen”), followed by a third (“abgesang”).
Why do composers use virelai?
For the later composers, especially Antoine Busnois and Jean d’Ockeghem, the main attraction of the virelai seems to have been that the music written for the first two sections of the stanza could be entirely different from that for the refrain; and it was usually even written in a different metre.
What is a virelai nouveau poem?
Another form described by Père Mourgues is the virelai nouveau, which has a two-line refrain at the beginning, with each stanza ending with a repetition of either the first or the second refrain verse in alternation, and the last stanza ending in both refrain verses in reversed order.
