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Il ne m’en chault plus de nul ame 3v · Ockeghem, Johannes

Appearance in the group of related chansonniers:

*Laborde ff. 76v-77 »Il ne m’en chault plus de nul ame« 3v J. Ockeghem · Edition · Facsimile

This page with edition as a PDF

Text: Rondeau cinquain; full text:

Il ne m’en chault plus de nul ame
fors de vous qui mon cueur enflame
a vous bien loyaument amer
sans jamais vous habandonner
a tousjours estre vostre dame. 

Qui m'en loue ne qui m'en blame,
quoy qu'on en disoit, homme ou femme,
ilz en ont tous beau grumeller.

Il ne m’en chault plus de nul ame
fors de vous qui mon cueur enflame
a vous bien loyaument amer.

Car par tout m'en vous tiens et clame
que tant je vueil et que tant j'ame
plus que nul sans riens excepter,
s'ilz en devoyent tous crever
et deusse perdre du corps l'ame.

Il ne m’en chault plus de nul ame
fors de vous qui mon cueur enflame
a vous bien loyaument amer
sans jamais vous habandonner
a tousjours estre vostre dame.

I do not any more warm to any soul
except for you who inflame my heart
to full faithfully loving you
without ever abandoning you
always being your lady. 

Whoever praised me or whoever blamed me,
whatever some said, man or woman,
they can all grumble as they want.

I do not any more warm to any soul
except for you who inflame my heart
to full faithfully loving you.

For anyway I keep to you and declare
that I so much want you, and I love you
more than any other man, excepting no one,
even if they all must shatter from it,
and I might lose my soul from my body.

I do not any more warm to any soul
except for you who inflame my heart
to full faithfully loving you
without ever abandoning you
always being your lady. 

Evaluation of the sources:

The Laborde chansonnier is the only extant source for this rondeau. The Dijon scribe added it with the ascription “J. Ockeghem” when he took over the work on the unfinished and undelivered chansonnier project (see further the descriptions of sources Dijon and Laborde). His copy looks clean and unhurried, but his exemplar may not have been of the highest quality.

The text is seemingly without any errors, but the last line of the song is not performable as it stands. Wrong note values appear in contratenor and superius (bb. 33 and 36) and a semibrevis value is missing in superius bat 35. It is probably not the best source for an assessment of Ockeghem’s song – but it is the only one we have.

Comments on text and music:

A woman’s flaming love declaration to a man is set for male voices as it stands in the Laborde chansonnier.  The top note of the upper voice is c'', but its range extends down to g – for a moment (b. 30) it goes below the tenor as well as the contratenor (d-g' and G-d'). The setting is complicated. Starting forthright declamatory in a nearly syllabic delivery of the words, in the second line the words become staggered in free polyphony, and the third line starts in disguised imitation at the octave between tenor and superius (bb. 13-15). The rondeau’s second section is in free canonic imitation, the fourth line at the fifth with the tenor as the leading voice (bb. 21 ff) and then in unison imitation with the tenor taking up the last notes of the superius entry (bb. 27-28) while the superius begins the fifth line (bb. 28 ff).

The poem’s refrain and tierce are both remarkable by being each created as one sentence; one meaning reaching over all five lines of verse and dominated by the nearly equivoque “ame” rime. The music in its construction follows the poem closely. From the declamatory opening to the drawn-out final flourish there is no marked breaks in the music. The middle cadence is weak and completely unmarked in the Laborde chansonnier, and the beginnings of two of the core voice imitations are hidden, so that listeners would not single them out at first hearing. Only the two bars rest in the upper voice bars 21-22 create a point of rest in the stream of music; the song is a complete musical sentence paralleling the meaning of the poem. Accordimg to the traditional view of Ockeghem’s style this fluent cohesion is characteristic.

In the Laborde chansonnier the song is presented without any hexachordal signatures, but with strategically placed accidental B-flats. This pernits the music to take a quite colourful turn: From a sound in the first half dominated by F-hexachords and B-flats, over the imitation of minor thirds in the fourth line to the sudden breakthrough of G-hexachords and B-naturals with the final line’s “a tousjours estre vostre dame”.

PWCH January 2023