French court-aires with their ditties Englished: how language influences text settings in the 17th century French air de cour

Understanding how words and music combine to produce a song has occupied musicians and poets for centuries. The relationships that words and music form make the task of achieving such an understanding complex and never ending, but important to pursue, because of the centrality of song as a mode of human expression. This thesis examines the relationship between text and music in the seventeenth-century French air de cour and how an attempt to translate them into English diminished their aesthetic potency. Central to this thesis is a case study of Edward Filmer’s 1629 collection French court-aires with their ditties Englished.