This is not, I think, a record for those stem and somber folk who keep writing to remind me that I do not show sufficient reverence for genius--or to tell MHS that it must jettison me or else! The mystique of artistic genius is a fairly recent aberration. Probably traceable to Plato's notions of daimons, it may have had to do with failing religious beliefs and a need for something to latch on to. By the nineteenth century it was a hype, promoted to their own ends by the likes of P.T. Barnum, Joseph Duveen, and Franz Liszt. Liszt even intensified the spiritual connection by parading around in clerical dressup and writing sentimental pieces called ''Angelus!" etc. Nowadays genial reverence is also supposed to be directed to doctors, lawyers, college professors, FBI dicks, and heads of the FDA. Good grief!
As the old saw goes, genius is ten percent inspiration and ninety percent perspiration--though inspiration stands undefined. In other eras, artists were professional workers, trained in a particular craft from which they hoped to extract a living and sometimes did. Does anyone still need to be told that a "masterpiece" was that effort by a journeyman in the painter's guild that his superiors (the "masters") deemed good enough to permit him to go practice his craft independently (instead of filling in backgrounds and fig-leaves for them)? As for music, anyone with a functioning brain and a fairly good ear can compose. (Having proved that point to myself, I abandoned the trade on the grounds that the world had enough problems as it was.)
There are no thundering geniuses now under consideration. There are a dozen or so men {not sexism but fact) who cobbled up or wrote dances that people might want to dance and songs that people might want to sing to pleasure themselves and hold ennui at bay. A few of them are footnotes to the history of western music; most are nearly anonymous. The dances are typical. The songs represent the transition from complex polyphony to the sometimes vacuous homophony (or monotony) of brunettes and bergerettes and other play-pastoral effusions paving the way to the Petit Trianon.
I've encountered the term Chansons gaillardes before only as the title of a set of Poulenc's songs whose naughty texts rather shocked me back in the '40s. Gaillard means jolly or wanton, with decidedly macho overtones, so I assume that naughtiness is the criterion. The texts here--all about little breasts wherein Love had made his sojourn and horned satyrs sporting in the herbage with belles filles and the relative merits of wine and women-seem to bear me out. The performers are a group of (to judge from their photos) attractive young Frenchpersons, most of whom are already phonographically established as authoritative on early music. Recommended to admirers of counter-tenors, krummhorns, hunting bugles, and sourdelines--whatever they may be.
