CODEX CHANTILLY vol.3

CODEX CHANTILLY vol. 3

This recording, the third CD of Tetraktys’ Chantilly codex project, contains the book’s two most famous works. These are the two Baude Cordier “picture songs,” and they are famous more for how they look than for how they sound. Currently bound at the start of the music section of the manuscript, one, “Belle bonne sage,” is notated on staves drawn in the shape of a heart, and the other, “Tout par compas,” is notated on staves drawn in the shape of a circle.

These beautiful, playful pages are two of only four chansons notated in picture form to have survived from the middle ages. The other two picture pieces are the anonymous “En la maison Dedalus,” another circle representing the mythological Labyrinth, now bound as part of a music theory manuscript in the Music Library of the University of California, Berkeley, and the fully-painted copy of “La Harpe de Mellodie” by Senleches, with its notes on staves drawn to represent the strings of a harp (“La Harpe de Mellodie” was copied in the Chantilly codex too, but on normal staves), now bound in a manuscript in Chicago’s Newberry Library.