Claudin de Sermisy helped fuel a new "Ars Gallica" in the early sixteenth century. Several generations of composers had produced reams of formes fixes chansons, followed by popularly imitative French settings. However, in the 1520s, a new sparser, more elegant style became fashionable in Paris. Following the simpler verses of favored court poet Clément Marot, Sermisy and others began writing chansons for four voices in a simpler style, closely following the rhythms of the French text and tending toward the clear textures of homophony. The musical fad fed a publishing explosion from the firm of Attaignant, and the new French style would be exported. Dont vient cela was no exception, with manuscript copies made by musicians in Florence, Munich, Regensburg, and Basel; in addition, this wildly popular chanson was reissued in fully 11 new printed collections, for nearly 120 years!

That said, the poetry and music of Dont vient cela are both quite unassuming. The two verses of poetry borrow heavily (if elegantly) from the conventions of "courtly love," with the lover promising devotion to the distant one who has made his heart a prisoner. The end of each stanza presents choices: the object of his desire can be brutal to him, or can find a "new love" in her heart. Sermisy not only reflects this textual moment by beginning a musical phrase upon a striking and explicit B flat major sonority, but by repetition of the last (hopeful?) line. His entire setting also reflects the uncertainty of the lady's choice, by vacillating throughout between modal centers on F ("major") and D ("minor"). As with much of the "Parisian" chanson repertory, the four voices tend toward simple and direct homophonic phrases, clear cadences, and elegantly arched melodies. Members of a refined Parisian society, as well as bourgeois across Europe, may perform it with elegance—and a hint of passion.

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