The city of Paris has enjoyed many historical periods where its mode of art or poetry became wildly popular cultural exports. Surprisingly, this even happened in the sixteenth century. Around the turn of the century, secular music in Italian lands experienced a new style, moving toward the simple style of the Frottola. The musical form and its predominantly homophonic style, though direct and quite accessible in its musical expression, did not travel well. However, just a decade or two afterwards, the cultural elite of Paris happened upon a nearly identical musical style—simple and direct, chordal and homophonic, elegantly mirroring the smooth rhythms of the fashionable court poetry. In collections printed by Attaignant, this music traveled well and traveled far. A completely simple little chanson such as Claudin de Sermisy's Languir me fais enjoyed a spectacular popularity: over the span of a few decades, it was copied for musical use in fully 22 locations, and even made its way into a music theory textbook (by Adrian petit Coclico).

Both text and music of the chanson are decidedly miniature. The poem, from the well-known pen of French court poet Clément Marot, takes two stanzas of only four lines to express the conventional longing of the "courtly" lover: he must languish and beg humbly for any hope from the object of his affections. Sermisy sets the text to an elegantly rounded musical form: the opening musical phrase of languishing is overtly recycled at the end of both stanzas (and repeated there for good measure). The middle lines contrast by expanding the melodic range of the upper voice ever so slightly and by making the overall vocal textures a bit more diffuse. Yet the lover's state remains constant and always returns to the unchangeable thought, the gently cascading melody of which bounds the chanson.

© Timothy Dickey, Rovi