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• Halle, Adam de la: 4 Rondeaux

Halle, Adam de la: 4 Rondeaux

for 3 voices or instruments.

Adam de la Halle, trouvère and poet, was born in Arras around 1245. Many of his songs are monophonic, but he was also one of the first musicians to compose polyphonic music to completely secular texts, at a time when polyphonic was generally reserved for religious music.
Compared with composers of the succeeding centuries, Adam de la Halle is quite flexible in his approach to the rondeau, and each of the present four pieces is different formally. Fines amourettes has been defined as a virelai, and Dieus soit en cheste maison as a ballade with as initial refrain. However, given the flexibility of the thirteenth-century rondeau, arguing about whether a piece of this kind is a rondeau or a virelai falls neatly into the medieval tradition of arguing over angles on pinheads.
The four pieces found here are printed after Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS f. fr25566; Fines amourettes appears also in Cambrai, Bibhothèque Municipale, MS 1328. The original note values have been divided by eight. A slur joining two notes indicates a plica, a kind of vocal ornament in which the epiglottis is used to "click" from a main note to an adjacent one. Editorial accidentals are printed small above the stave, applying to the one note only. I am grateful to Jeanine Alton for transcribing the texts of these songs.
These songs can be sung, or played on matching instruments; in any instrumental performance it is very important that the three instruments are well-balanced.