Prosodie chez Charles Trenet : la métrique du français, le rythme de jazz et les jeux vocaux de l’interprète

Abstract

Charles Trenet is a songwriter and an artist with a very recognisable singing manner. He plays with multiple music and vocal styles, inheriting the traditions of the French ‘chanson de café-concert’ and combining them with modern swing rhythms of his time. As a singer, Trenet is very precise in his choice of rhythmic accents, shifts of tempo, timbre and intonation. The article examines several recorded songs of the artist, trying to identify his key prosodic strategies and the semantic and stylistic effects of his vocal manner, which made him at the same time a ‘singing fool’ and a French ‘swing revolutionist’.