"Wake up, you are sleeping too late!" opens the text of a sixteenth century French chanson. The text goes on to ask the "jolly madame" to hear the sound of the lark and the cuckoo, though the second bird's song speaks of depravity. Faced with such a text, a "Parisian" chanson composer had several options. He could follow the older French tradition of the chanson rustique and give the text a simple, "rustic" setting that allowed the evocations of peasant life—and the associated sexual double-entendres—to come to the fore. Alternatively, he could treat the chanson text in a more extended, contemporary "narrative" manner, showing off his contrapuntal skill and allowing the listeners and singers to comprehend the subtexts on their own. Finally, he could adopt the fashionable "programmatic" style of Clément Janequin and directly reflect the onomatopoeic sounds of the morning birdcalls with cute vocal effects.

Actually, when Clément Janequin set this very text, he did all three simultaneously. From the opening measures, he carefully includes a simple pre-existing melody (from Claude Le Jeune) in both tenor and soprano voices (and bass, to a lesser extent). He also ended the chanson with repeated statements of the tenor-upper voice duo, and quoted most phrases of this "rustic" melody more or less overtly in his setting. However, also from the opening moments, Janequin demonstrates his desire to move beyond the simpler rustic melody in favor of more florid counterpoint. Appropriately, he does so first in most voices when they reach the text ma dame joliette, allowing each a graceful little melisma. Also in the chanson, the composer begins to interrupt the vocal lines with direct reflections of the birdsong in question; before the tenor can sing the complete melismatic line on joliette, he cuts off once with just joli, syllables Janequin uses elsewhere as nonsense birdsong. Janequin confirms the brief gambit a little later, when all voices interrupt the word Escoutez (listen), to sing instead a cooing es-cou. By the time the name of the lark is invoked, all voices are flying along in syncopated fragments of the text, chosen for their sonic properties (petite, jour, jour, que te dit Dieu). Thus blooms in sound the full chorus of birdsong, church bells, and wakeful mankind. The morning is in full swing, but the villainous cuckoo's presence reminds the listener at last that sinful revelations may also come with the dawn.

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