Jacques de Cysoing was a late thirteenth-century
Franco- Flemish trouvère. He wrote nine songs that survive, all of them with their melodies.
Probably born into a noble Flemish family in
Cysoing
Cysoing () is a commune in the Nord department in northern France, southeast of Lille. It is twinned with the English town of Much Wenlock. An obsolete spelling is ''Cisoin''.
Heraldry
Population
Bordering municipalities
Cysoing is bor ...
, "
messire" Jacques probably flourished during the reign of
Guy of Dampierre as
Count of Flanders
The count of Flanders was the ruler or sub-ruler of the county of Flanders, beginning in the 9th century. Later, the title would be held for a time, by the rulers of the Holy Roman Empire and Spain. During the French Revolution, in 1790, the co ...
(1251–1305), for he addresses his ''
serventois'' ''Li nouviaus tans'' to the count. Other events that date Jacques are a reference to the
Battle of Mansurah in 1250 in one of his songs and a reference in an ''
envoi
Envoi or envoy in poetry is used to describe:
* A short stanza at the end of a poem such as a ballad, used either to address an imagined or actual person or to comment on the preceding body of the poem.
* A dedicatory poem about sending the book o ...
'' of
Thomas Herier to "Jakemon" at "Cyson", probably in the third quarter of the century.
All of Jacques's musical compositions are in ABABx form and are preserved in only a few manuscripts, but one, ''Nouvele amour'', exists in eight different versions, including two ''
contrafacta''. The popularity of this one piece is probably explained by its
rondeau form, though the original text is not a rondeau. Jacques's song ''Quant la saisons'' is a ''
chanson avec des refrains
A (, , french: chanson française, link=no, ; ) is generally any lyric-driven French song, though it most often refers to the secular polyphonic French songs of late medieval and Renaissance music. The genre had origins in the monophoni ...
'' in which each of the eight stanzas has a different refrain and some of these refrains are found in other songs.
References
*Aubrey, Elizabeth
"Jacques de Cysoing."''Grove Music Online''. ''Oxford Music Online''. Accessed 14 September 2008.
{{Authority control
Trouvères
Male classical composers