What better text for a song than one about making music? Alexander Agricola captured some of the esprit of just such a text in his three-voiced chanson setting of Sonnes muses melodieusement. The exuberant little French text exhorts the Muses to sing and play their instruments and every singer to learn the art of music well, all for the sheer joy of making "sweet accords and joyous harmony." Agricola set this text to music that embodies the joyous harmony of the poem. The three voices of his chanson inhabit different ranges and each freely flies across the breadth of its musical space. From the first lengthy melodic prolongation of the word "melodiously," melismas fill all three voices; these melismas bound upwards on the word "joyous." Four of the five lines of text are sung in imitation between the voices, as are fleeting motivic wisps in the middle of the lines. This imitation not only rhetorically spotlights the text's commands to the Muses—"Play!" "Sing!"—but also makes tangible in the music the image of singers learning their art from one another. Pertinently, the song survives today in a manuscript songbook in Florence, a songbook known to have been produced for a noble Sienese family. The book implies evenings of courtly diversion, either with a trio of entertainers or with the sophisticated family members themselves gathered around and singing with one another. Either way, the interactive play of voices in imitation and the joy of melodic exuberance would indeed bring about the "rejoicing of all who hear."

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