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  • Pierre I Ballard et Robert III Ballard: Imprimeurs du roy pour la musique (1599–1673)
  • Jonathan Le Cocq
Pierre I Ballard et Robert III Ballard: Imprimeurs du roy pour la musique (1599–1673). By Laurent Guillo. 2 vols.: pp. 732; 814. Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles. (Mardaga, Sprimont, 2003, €166. ISBN 2-87009-816-3/-811-1.)

The Ballard family dominated the production of printed music in France for two centuries, from the foundation of their firm under Robert I Ballard and Adrian Le Roy in 1551 to its decline under Christophe-Jean-François Ballard in the late eighteenth century. In 1955 François Lesure and Geneviève Thibault produced a bibliography of the house from its inception to the death of Robert I in 1598, which is among the most useful secondary sources for scholars of French music of the period. Laurent Guillo's book is the immediate and long-overdue successor to that bibliography, taking up the firm's history from Robert's death through the next two generations of the family: Pierre I (c.1579–1639)—initially in collaboration with his mother Lucrèce Dugué—and Robert III (d. 1673). In those seventy-five years the Ballards produced a good 500 known prints or reprints, so Guillo's has been a huge undertaking requiring well over a decade of work, and resulting in over 1,500 pages in two weighty volumes. Without question a major work of painstaking scholarship, the book falls into three parts: a 250-page musicological study of the firm, 440 pages of indexes (together these comprise Vol. 1), and in Vol. 2 the chronological catalogue of editions containing roughly 500 items.

The historical study covers the history of the firm and the Ballard family, an overview of its output, an outline of bibliographical sources for the study, and a discussion of technical matters such as typography and collation (but not paper studies). Much of the ground is inevitably familiar: Guillo could hardly either omit discussion of the printed air de cour, the most prolific single genre the Ballards produced, or expect to go much beyond the various studies that have been devoted to it. Thus there is a great deal of collation of knowledge here, but this collation is impressively detailed and accurate. Every other page contains a useful table, graph, list, or quotation [End Page 426] from primary sources: examples include a summary of the lettres patentes, production statistics (output peaks appearing around 1609 and 1661), publication lists by genre and composer, a table of collaborations between composers and poets (Lully–Quinault triumphs, unless we include Bacilly's eighty-five settings of his own texts), detailed Ballard family trees, and a short list of paintings incorporating representations of Ballard prints, not to mention a full chapter of archival references to the Ballard family and of course a steady stream of scholarly citations.

This kind of detailed information aside, three aspects to Guillo's study contribute to its significance. The first is the nature of the period it covers. This runs from the final flowering of late Renaissance polyphony and the almost cult status of Le Jeune and Lassus (still being printed in 1618 and 1619 respectively), to the motets of Du Mont and the ballet music of Lully in the Baroque (though unfortunately where theatre music is concerned the firm produced mainly livrets by the likes of Benserade, Molière, and Quinault rather than musical editions). In between are the works of less well-known but nonetheless important musicians—the secular songs of Guédron, Boësset, Cambefort, and Rosiers, say, the sacred music of Formé, Nivers, Bournonville, and Fontenay, the theoretical treatises of Mersenne, Fleury, and Bacilly, and instrumental music (primarily for lute) by Antoine Francisque and Robert II Ballard (Pierre's brother), the rarity of the latter comparing starkly with the immense flow of often anonymous anthologies of first airs de cour and later chansons pour danser et pour boire that were mainstays of the Ballards' business. All this is by no means a neglected repertory among scholars, but it is nonetheless one with great potential for further exploration, making a bibliographical tool and an overview...

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