18 sm in modifying reiterations of similar melodic fragments. This is a technique which was to become radically important in the subtilior work of Johannes Ciconia, his virelai Sus un’ fontayne. Virtually everything has been said and written about Sus un’ fontayne, a magnificent paraphrase in which Ciconia quotes his master Filippo of Caserta three times. However, an aura of mystery still surrounds certain slight but disturbing inconsistencies between the two manuscripts in which the piece has come down to us (Modena and Oxford). These are chromatic inconsistencies which, however small they may be, seem to reflect hidden intentions. The issue may be summed up as follows: Sus un’ fontayne is a collage in which Ciconia brings together three fragments extrapolated from other ballades by Filippotto. Two of them (taken from En attendant and En remirant) are in some sense mirror images, in that in the one Filippo had quoted the music, and in the other the text of the same model by Machaut. Twice, ‘quoting the quoter’ (Ciconia quoting Filippo who had quoted Machaut), using the two modes of quotation – poetic and musical – alternately, Ciconia paraphrases and indeed comments upon the very process of quoting, and in so doing provides a prelude to the synthesis he produces himself, in which he quotes both music and text simultaneously. The third of Filippo’s ballades to be quoted by Ciconia, De ma dolour, gives us perhaps an even more intimate view of his intentions as ‘commentator’, especially because here we come to the rhyming words which are the key to the poem: ce noble flour – de ma dolour. Ciconia attributes to the piece by his master Filippo (the ‘noble flour qui tant cantoit suavement’) a searing sweetness, a paradoxical beauty capable of arousing both tremour et angosment in him – the symptoms of his tormented relationship with the models of his master and also, perhaps, the subtilitas teachings they contain. Sus un’ fontayne, then, is to be read essentially as Ciconia’s distancing himself from Filippotto and from his admiration for him. But there is something else: Ciconia’s
fontayne constitutes an ambitious essay in rhetorical and formal criticism, as we shall see. The form of the virelai enables Ciconia on the one hand to refer to the analogous form of the Italian ballade, and thereby to allude to the conflict between the Italian and French traditions; and, on the other, to obtain a symmetry between the text and the music which the standard ballade form would not have made possible. Each section of the music of a virelai provides for repetition to different words; thus the fragmentary quotations inserted into Sus un’ fontayne are also heard, symmetrically, twice: once to Filippo’s text, and then to a different one, by Ciconia. A ‘two-way’ structure such as this implicitly allows for a different, chromatic, treatment of the repeated sections when they are heard the second time round, and the particular treatment chosen will vary according to the intended degree of faithfulness to the model being quoted – indeed, this is a practice by no means foreign to the tradition of Italian subtilitas, as is attested by Anthonello, Bartholomeus and perhaps Filippo himself. However the desired chromatic obstacles adopted by Ciconia are far more complex than they can be accomodated within a simple ‘two-way’ structure. This is because if the chromatic alterations were made exactly as they appear in the Filippo original, in most, if not all cases, the result would be absurd with respect to the ‘new’ context, whereas if one introduces accidentals that are consistent with the new context, one is dealing with modifications, ‘glosses’, possibly criticisms of the original. Ciconia’s piece should thus doubtless be seen as a ‘deliberate paradox’; one must attribute to his contradictions an essential, ‘deliberate ambiguity’. And it is this deliberate ambiguity which brings out the ultimate aims of Ciconia’s critical essay, of his thought on the fluidity of musical and poetic forms and the relationship between them, while also explaining the differences in chromaticism between the sources. Above all, it provides an explanation for the thorny que-