`Me veux-tu voir mourir': Joan Albert Ban versus Antoine Boësset (1640-1641)

The controversy of ‘Ban versus Boësset’ concerns how to compose vocal airs. The Dutch priest and amateur musician Joan Albert Ban had (1597/8-1644) had developed a theory for the composition of vocal music in which every semantic element of the text had to be expressed in the music. Mersenne, who had heard about this theory through Constantijn Huygens, wanted to put Ban’s theory to test, and sent to Ban the words of an air, Me veux-tu voir mourir, already set to music before, by the French composer Antoine Boësset. Ban composed music to this text so that it could be compared in France with that of Boësset. Mersenne and several more Frenchmen declared Boësset’s composition vastly superior to Ban’s. This was hard to accept by Ban, especially since the French did not provide a motivation for their preference. The result was an ‘epistolary war’ between Ban and his French commentators. This chapter investigated the various arguments that were put forward by the combatants, part of which are ‘topical’, that is, they have to do with the subject of the controversy, others are ‘non-topical’ or ‘circumstantial’, that is, they are rather personal, emotional, or chauvinistic in character. The topical arguments include the interpretation of the text, the choice of mode or key, the role of accents and emphasis in the text, and the role of the representation of semantic elements of the text in the music. The circumstantial arguments include Ban’s feeling of standing alone against a collective of French adversaries, his feelings of Dutch inferiority aginst French superiority, argmunets ad hominem, and Ban’s feeling of being trapped, since Boësset’s composition already pre-dated the comparitive test. The analyses presented in this chapter show that in the study of controversies one must never forget that circumstantial arguments can play roles at least as important that the topical arguments.