Musique mesurée

Musique mesurée à l'antique (French: [myzik məzyʁe a lɑ̃tik]) was a style of vocal musical composition in France in the late 16th century. In musique mesurée, longer syllables in the French language were set to longer note values, and shorter syllables to shorter, in a homophonic texture but in a situation of metric fluidity, in an attempt to imitate contemporary understanding of Ancient Greek music. Although this compositional method did not attain popularity at first, it attracted some of the most famous composers of the time. Its basis in a desire to re-create the artistic ethos of Ancient Greece, especially in respect to text declamation, had a strong similarity to contemporary movements in Italy, such as the work of the Florentine Camerata which engendered the first operas, and brought about the beginning of the Baroque era in music.

Pieces written as musique mesurée were settings of the poetical form known as vers mesurés. Beginning in the late 1560s in Paris, under the direction of Jean-Antoine de Baïf, a group of poets known as the Pléiade attempted to recreate the metrical effect of ancient Greek and Latin poetry in French, using the quantitative principles of those languages. The attempt was more than an academic one: Baïf and his associates, horrified by the barbarity of the age, including the bloody religious wars which raged throughout the last decades of the century, sought to improve mankind by bringing back the ancient diction, which was believed to have had a positive ethical effect on its hearers. For this attempt they had the approval of the current king of France, Charles IX, and they met in secret to plan their musical revolution. Baïf, with the royal patent, founded the Académie de Poésie et de Musique in 1570, along with his intimate musical associate Joachim Thibault de Courville. Poet Pierre de Ronsard was also involved in the group.

...
Wikipedia