Limericks for early music geeks

One year, around State Fair time, the classical station in the Twin Cities ("Mostly Mozart Public Radio" I used to call it) sponsored a contest, awarding $150 to the composer of the best limerick on the theme of "famous composers and the State Fair."  I thought, "hmmm…" and came up with a small cache of them (but not the 150 bucks), which I add to occasionally when I need a word game to keep me awake on a long post-gig drive, or if I get to wondering whether anyone else is as tickled as I am by the term "cantus firmus."  The names of early music guys seem particularly suited for limericks:

“Hildy” said Hildegard’s friends

Back in Bingen, ‘mongst animal pens

"You may be a mystic

But getcha some lipstick

‘Cause what you could use is some mens.”

John Dunstable made it his cause

To update old musical laws

Saying, "He who objects

To my music, or texts,

Can sit on my Contenance Angloise!"

Clemens non Papa, Jacobus

Lamenting his aged epidermis,

Says "I useta could do

Contrapunctus à 2,

But now'days I just cantus firmus!"

Minnesota, by the way, has a legendarily kick-ass State Fair.

I looove these guys!

I've always gotten a bang out of this picture of the two late great late-medieval composers, Guillaume Dufay and Gilles Binchois.  My boys are chillin aren't they? Dufay seems to be holding a cigarette - the calligraphic flourish above his right hand looks for all the world like smoke - and there's Binchois, Dean Martin to Dufay's Sinatra, leaning on his harp.  Like any two musicians anywhere, hanging out on break.  As a matter of fact, they're probably late for the next set…

But the Ratpack aside, these guys look to me like musicology's answer to "Ole and Lena." For instance:

"Modena, Bibl. Estense, a. M. 5.24. - written in the margin:

Of a St. Swithen's did Dufay and Binchois find themselves after Mass engaged in the exchange of pleasauntries and pious chitchat with the Abbess, when Binchois did suddenly and loudly make wind.  Later, Dufay turned upon his friend.  'Fool!' he hissed, 'Knave! How come you to let fly before the Abbess a fart?'  'By my faith,' quoth the other, 'I knew not whose turn it was!'" (trans. Dr. Burney)

 I needed something to do while waiting for my master's degree to pay off.