Subtle Decadence:Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Ars Subtilior

By Robert Jackson Wood

Baude Cordier's rondeau "Belle, Bonne, Sage"

Austere three-part harmonies intoning liturgies in Latin. Monks in robes copying out ledger lines by candlelight. Music notated partially in red ink and shaped like a heart?

It’s an extreme case, for sure. But the iconic musical valentine (shown above) by 14th century French composer Baude Cordier nevertheless fascinates in its flamboyance amid the more sober images we tend to associate with the musical Middle Ages. How to explain this quirky musical wink?

For one, as an example of the mannered style known as ars subtilior—“the more subtle art”—which forms the sonic and structural basis of choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s upcoming works Et Atendant and Cesena. A modern coinage, ars subtilior is the name used to refer to a small group of mostly secular works, created around the papal court at Avignon in the late 14th century, that attempted to push notational and rhythmic techniques of the time to their limits. A call to innovation had been made by a small coterie of court intellectuals for whom complexity in music was king. Composers answered, producing music that not only helped to flatter the cognoscenti’s arcane erudition but that also ushered in one of music history’s first periods of technical decadence. Innovation had been advocated not for expressive ends, but for innovation itself.

Einstein on the Blog: "Who are these people?"

Music historian Richard Taruskin on the premiere of Einstein on the Beach at the Metropolitan Opera in 1976, from his Oxford History of Western Music:

The wildly enthusiastic audience, perhaps needless to say, did not consist of Met subscribers. Instead, it was as if the “downtown” New York arts scene—painters, conceptual artists, experimental theater hands, art-rockers and their fans, along with a scattering of curious “classical” musicians who felt distinctly like onlookers—had migrated northward and invaded the precincts of high art for a night. “Who are these people?” one of the opera house administrators supposedly asked Glass. “I've never seen them here before.” As Glass tells the story, “I remember replying very candidly, ‘Well, you'd better find out who they are, because if this place expects to be running in twenty-five years, that's your audience out there."