Sacred Music from the Era of Louis XIII

This group of publications by the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles (CMBV) contributes both to the study and to the performance of sacred music from the time of Louis XIII, a period for which sacred music has not received much scholarly attention until recently. The year 2009 brought two important additions to the collection that is published under the CMBV’s Cahiers de musique series, including Annibal Gantez’s (1607–ca. 1668) Missa “Lætamini,” and a cycle of Magnificats on the eight Psalm tones by Artus Aux-Cousteaux (ca. 1590–ca. 1654) issued in eight separate volumes. These scores complement earlier publications of works of Antoine Boësset (1586–1643), and Guillaume Bouzignac (ca. 1587–after 1642) in the CMBV Cahiers de musique series, as well as a newly issued large collection of Boësset’s sacred works edited by Peter Bennett and published by A-R Editions (Sacred Music, Recent Researches in the Music of the Baroque Era, 164–65 [Middleton, WI: A-R Editions, 2010]) all adding substantially to the modest list of modern editions available to the scholar and musician for French sacred music from the early seventeenth century. The nine scores under consideration here contain music for four unaccompanied voices, offering a rich new body of unexplored choral music for collegiate choirs.

Annibal Gantez is known to us primarily through his 1643 book L’entretien des musiciens (The care of musicians), a delightfully entertaining and informative collection of letters that sheds light on the customs and practices of musicians associated with the maîtrises (choir schools) of seventeenth-century France. Recent research has established for the first time Gantez’s birth in Marseille in 1607 (Florence Chappée, “Annibal Gantez, auteur de L’entretien des musiciens (1643),” in Maîtrises & chapelles aux XVIIe & XVIIIe siècles: Des institutions musicales au service de dieu, ed. Bernard Dompnier, 271–89, Collection Histoires croisées [Clermont-Ferrand: Presses Universitaires Blaise-Pascal, 2003]), and also has given evidence that he served at least seventeen maîtrises during his peripatetic career, several of them for more than one period of employment. Gantez worked as far south as Toulon and as far north as Le Havre, and served St. Paul and St. Innocents in Paris in the three years before his move to Auxerre in 1643 where he published his book. No manuscripts of this composer have survived, but in 1642 Ballard published two of Gantez’s masses, one of which was the Missa “Lætamini ” (Mass of “Rejoicing”). Although it seems that he wrote and published his Missa “Lætamini ” in Paris, Gantez came to be affiliated with Burgundy because L’entretien des musiciens identified him as the maître de musique at Auxerre. Thus...