Claude Le Jeune (v. 1530-1600): Un compositeur entre Renaissance et baroque. (Book Reviews).

Claude Le Jeune (v. 1530-1600): Un compositeur entre Renaissance et baroque. By Isabelle His. (Serie musique.) Arles: Actes Sud, 2000. [511 p. ISBN 2-7427-2891-0. Fr 199 (pbk.).]

A little more than four hundred years after his death, Claude Lejune is remembered chiefly for his chansons en vers measure a l'antique, a rather specialized genre of polyphonic song he composed in the 1570s to suit the humanist experiments of Jean-Antoine de Baif and his short-lived Academie de poesie et de musique. Subsequently published in Le Jeune's posthumous Le printans and eventually issued in modern transcription by Henri Expert about a century ago, these pieces have more or less dominated all discussion of Lejeune's music. Now, thanks to the careful scholarship of the French musicologist Isabelle His, we are able at last to learn about the remainder of Le Jeune's prodigious musical output--some 650 compositions by him survive--and to reexamine his place in music history. Readers of this book will form an image of Le Jeune very different from the rather monolithic one portrayed in textbooks and in performances of music from around the year 1600. Indeed, his music and musical life transcend almost eve ry imaginable category, embracing a wide range of genres and techniques. He wrote, in addition to the chansons en vers measures, many other lyrical chansons, chan sons spritiuelles, polyphonic airs, Latin sacred music, and even some instrumental fantasies. His works show great contrapuntal skill and an enduring interest in traditions of cantus firmus and canon. His music also attends in subtle ways to the literary anti sacred texts he chose to set, for Le Jeune was deeply immersed in humanistic thought about the power of tones to move listeners in profound ways.

For His, this patent variety serves as an invitation to explore Le Jeune's musical personality in four related "facets," each of which serves as the central theme of a different chapter of her book. The study begins by summarizing what is known about Le Jeune's life from extant archival documents and from the various dedications and other liminary materials found in his record of publication. (The complete texts of these prefaces appear in a convenient appendix.) Throughout his life, Le Jeune was an ardent Huguenot, and thus we should not be surprised to learn that his aristocratic patrons (such as Odet de La Noue, son of a prominent Huguenot general, or Henri de Navarre, who later became king of France) were themselves either Protestants or Protestant sympathizers. All of this provides a useful narrative backdrop for His's examination of Le Jeune's many psalm settings, which are all based in one manner or another upon the texts and tunes of the Calvinist Psalter. Clearly these works were not intended for co ngregational use per se, but rather form part of a large body of private, devotional music that scholars are beginning to explore.

The second and third chapters of the study turn to repertories for which the documentary record of Lejeune's career is less helpful as a narrative framework, but which nevertheless form cohesive genres within the composer's oeuvre. His extensive interest in traditions of cantus firmus, canon, and polyphonic arrangement shows Le Jeune's debt to a long line of French and Franco-Flemish polyphonists, including Adrian Willaert, Clement Janequin, and Jean Richafort, among others. These works speak (in His's view) to the likely formation of Le Jeune's musical outlook in his native town of Valenciennes, poised on the border between modern France and Belgium. Among Le Jeune's works are also a good number of pieces that depend on Italian models in one way or another. The author shows that a surprising number of the chansons found in Le Jeune's Les meslanges of 1585, for instance, are in fact arrangements (with French texts) of Italian ...