Solage: Le basile

Le basile, like Pluseurs gens voy, counts as Ars Nova rather than Ars Subtilior, and there aren’t the rhythmic games hallowed in Subtilior. The rhythms are still wackier than Pluseurs gens: there is enough syncopation across barlines to justify the Mensurstich notation, and there is confusion about whether voices are off by half a bar or not, which the score indicates with alternative barline arrows.

This rendering also doesn’t sound quite as smooth, because of clashes in accidentals: the score needs more ficta accidentals than the source transcription shows, but I didn’t want to take over with my own editing. And some of the jarring intervals look to be in the source, unrelated to accidentals.

I can’t say Le basile has grabbed me in the way the Subtilior pieces have, or even Pluseurs gens: it’s not as tight as the latter, and not as funky as the former. But the more musically cluey may think differently.

This piece has broken LilyPond, btw, even more than the previous ones: the combination of Mensurstich, changing metres, and syncopation across bars has proven too much for the software, although I haven’t been able to replicate the error in a score snippet. So you’ll see a couple of barlines within the staff that shouldn’t be there—bar 2, for starters.

This is the last of the transcriptions in my friend Christina’s Honours thesis. The other pieces definitely by Solage don’t present the same rhythmic challenges; so she did not feel it necessary to retranscribe them from the four-square existing score published by Apel. That means I don’t get to put Fumeux fume par fumée up; but Daniel Buxeda Rodriguez already has. I think the license allows me to put it up on YouTube as I have the others; I’m checking.

So, if you’ll pardon a few wrong notes, and a synthesised French Horn, here is Solage’s song on the basilisk:

The scores, midis and so forth are all linked to at my Solage page.