The bulk of Part IV digs into the repertoire to explore the myriad ways composers activated an esthetics of opposition across a nearly 100-year span. Chapter 11 considers how Guillaume Du Fay’s early songs pit introductory melismas against densely texted phrases to create productive oppositions. The chapter also shows how Du Fay’s stunning Malheureulx cueur gives voice to the virelai form.

Powerful conclusions are central to the esthetic world this book describes. Many pieces trade on the so-called drive to the cadence; others feature deliberate ratchetings down. This chapter discusses seven heterogeneous examples, each extraordinary in its own right: songs by Johannes Okeghem and the little-known Malcort, a motet by Johannes Regis, and mass music by Jacob Obrecht, Josquin des Prez, Alexander Agricola, and an anonymous composer.

Up until about 1480 most French songs were cast in one of three fixed poetic and musical forms: the rondeau, virelai, and ballade. Chapter 10 presents new ideas about how each repetition scheme conditions how the music happens in time, taking further an analysis by Christopher Page about the dynamics of the rondeau while offering a fresh interpretation of the virelai’s experiential horizons.

Though not often highlighted in literature on music aesthetics, the Saint-Simonians, a group of French Romantic socialists, exerted widespread influence on politics, philosophy and the arts after 1830. Their conception of music as a political-affective tool in the hands of an artistic avant-garde impacted the aesthetics and practice of musique populaire, a category embracing ‘popular’ and ‘folk’ music. Pierre-Jean de Béranger, the most popular writer of chansons in this period, declared his sympathy for the cause of radical social change in song, while his friend the working-class socialist philosopher Pierre Leroux influenced music aesthetics through his alliance with the novelist George Sand (Aurore Dupin). Drawing on Leroux’s writings for its philosophy of history, Sand’s major ‘music novel’, Consuelo, advocated for musique populaire, as its operatic singer heroine finally abandons the stage and becomes a travelling folk musician.

The poetry and music of the trouvères in Northern France is the focus of Chapter 5. We explore the lives and music of Chrétien de Troyes, Adam de la Halle, Gautier de Coinci, Rutebeuf, and the female trouvère Gertrude of Dagsburg. We chart the ways in which the trouvères modelled themselves on the Occitan troubadours, translating their concept of courtly love, along with their song forms and genres, into an Old French linguistic context. We also consider some of the key differences between the two spheres, especially the increasingly urban - rather than courtly - environment in which the thirteenth-century trouvères worked, and their greater involvement in literary and musical production beyond songs, such as romances (romans) and other narrative poetry, and the French motet. The emergence of distinctive poetic-musical structures, known as the formes fixes, was another key feature of thirteenth-century French song, as was the phenomenon of refrains, or snippets of song, that were borrowed and quoted across a wide range of musical and literary genres.