“Que ne vous requinquez-vous, Vielle, Que ne vous requinquez, donc?”
“Why do you trick yourself out, old woman? O why do you trick yourself so?”
In order to stop this sort of thing the clergy had recourse to “farcing” the canticles, _i.e._ translating each verse into the vernacular, and interlarding the Latin with the translation, in hopes that the people, if sing they would, would adopt these words; but the farced canticles were not to the popular taste, and they continued to roar out lustily their folk-songs, often indelicate, always unsuitable. This came to such a pass that either the organ was introduced to bellow the people down, or else the system was accepted and regulated; and to this is due the _fauxbourdon_. But in Italy and in the South of France it passed for a while beyond regulation. The musicians accepted it, and actually composed masses, in which the tenor alone sang the sacred words and the other parts performed folk-songs.
“The singers were allowed innumerable licences. Whilst the tenor sustained the Gregorian melody, the other voices indulged in extempore descant, regardless of the style of the main composition, violating time, and setting even the fundamental tone at defiance. The composers, to advance another step in the analysis of this strange medley, took particular delight in combining different sets of words, melodies of widely diverse character, antagonistic rhythms, and divergent systems of accentuation, in a single piece. They assigned these several ingredients to several parts, and for the further exhibition of their perverse skill, went even to the length of coupling themes in the major and the minor. The most obvious result of such practice was that it became impossible to understand what was being sung, and that instead of concord and order in the choir, a confused discord and anarchy of dinning sounds prevailed. What made the matter, from an ecclesiastical point of view, still worse, was that these scholastically artificial compositions were frequently based on trivial and vulgar tunes, suggesting the tavern, the dancing-room, or even worse places, to worshippers assembled for the celebration of a Sacrament. Masses bore titles adopted from the popular airs on which they were founded; such, for example, as _Adieu, mes amours_, _À l’ombre d’un buissonnet_, _Baise moi_, _Le vilain jaloux_. Even the words of love ditties and obscene ballads were being squalled out by the tenor (treble?) while the bass (tenor?) gave utterance to an _Agnus Dei_ or a _Benedictus_, and the soprano (alto?) was engaged upon the verses of a Latin hymn. Baini, who examined hundreds of the masses and motetts in MS., says that the words imported into them from vulgar sources ‘make one’s flesh creep, and one’s hair stand on end.’ He does not venture to do more than indicate a few of the more decent of these interloping verses. As an augmentation of this indecency, numbers from a mass which started with the grave rhythm of a Gregorian tone were brought to their conclusion on the dance measure of a popular _ballata_, so that _Incarnatus est_ or _Kyrie eleison_ went jigging off into suggestions of Masetto and Zerlina at a village ball.”[3]