Introduction: Voulez ouyr?

The text and performance of Janequin’s work raises important issues about the representations of social classes in literature and the performance of everyday speech in a choral context. It introduces the voices of Parisian street singers in ways that seem immediately realistic — vinegar, green sauce, mustard, herring — yet also draw attention to their literary construction as ultimately the song exposes the impossibility of its own project: ‘Si vous en voulez plus ouyr, allez les donc querre !’ In a sixteenth-century context, the joke is perhaps on the elite audiences who would hear Janequin’s pieces performed at court yet would not deign to expose themselves on foot to the hawkers on the Petit Pont whose voices Janequin transposed into polyphony. Modern scholars might feel the provocation differently. For those researchers interested not only in reading about the past, but in understanding how it sounded, Janequin’s conclusion summarizes the problem concisely, for we evidently cannot ask his street singers directly and can only approach their voices through the existing sources. Howmight researchers go about understanding past sound worlds, and the sound world of early modern France in particular? One of our main motivating factors in preparing this special number has been the relative absence of works within early modern French studies devoted to the increasingly buoyant discipline of sound studies. Although the pioneering work of R. Murray Schafer, and, for early modern England, that of Bruce R. Smith, date back to the last century, the majority of wider-ranging recent research on sound within pre-modern French studies has tended to focus upon the nineteenth century or the medieval period. A number