Salacious Chansons and other Renaissance Ribaldry - New York Ensemble for Early Music's Gleemen

Salacious Chansons liner notes

The songs on this record, though apparently so straightforward and informal, represent a major musical revolution at the turn of the 16th century that quickly spread to all corners of Europe. The all-pervasive antecedent of the style was the secular Burgundian chanson, usually arranged for solo voice and a few instruments, highly contrapuntal, detailed, delicate and refined, deliberately conservative in an attempt to adhere to medieval forms and textures. When the interest of the finest trained composers of the late fifteenth century was stimulated toward popular song as a possible starting-point for serious music, their compositions dealt the final deathblow to those medieval forms, and ultimately built the foundations for modern tonality and sonority.