Music Reference.(Maestros in America: Conductors in the 21st Century; A Conductor's Guide to Nineteenth-Century Choral-Orchestral Works; Chambonnieres, A Thematic Catalogue: The Complete Works of Jacques Champion de Chambonnieres )(E-book review)(Book review)

Chambonnieres, A Thematic Catalogue: The Complete Works of Jacques Champion de Chambonnieres (1601/02-1672). Compiled by Bruce Gustafson. http://sscm-jscm.press.uiuc.edu//instrumenta.html (accessed 19 November 2008).

The high quality and thoroughness that we justifiably expect from Bruce Gustafson's work with French harpsichord music and its sources is evident everywhere in this new online catalog. Gustafson has already produced the groundwork for research in his French Harpsichord Music of the 17th Century: A Thematic Catalog of the Sources with Commentary (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1979), as well as numerous articles and editions of the music. The author's previous work on Jacques Champion de Chambonnieres began with the 1979 catalog, its 1990 updates in an appendix to A Catalogue of French Harpsichord Music, 1699-1780 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), and continues with the Broude Trust's forthcoming modern edition of the famous Bauyn manuscript.

That Gustafson would return to Chambonnieres over the years is natural since this music is the foundation of the magnificent and influential French harpsichord school that flourished from the 1630s beyond the mid-eighteenth century. Chambonnieres was a third-generation keyboard performer and composer in French royal service. His father Jacques Champion, sieur de la chapelle, and grandfather Thomas Champion (called "Mithou") were highly praised by Marin Mersenne in his Harmonie universelle (Paris: S. Cramoisy, 1636-37), who went on to describe Cham-bonnieres's playing and compositions as evidence that the harpsichord had "met its ultimate master." Hundreds of manuscript copies of Chambonnieres's works produced during and after his lifetime attest to his popularity, and less than two years before his death he printed two books of his harpsichord pieces. Chambonnieres's astute judgment of young Louis Couperin brought the latter to Paris in the early 1650s and established that family's dynasty in organ and harpsichord performance across the eighteenth century. Chambonnieres also taught Jacques Hardel and perhaps Jean Henry d'Anglebert.

The Chambonnieres thematic catalog is the first volume in a new series--JSCM Instrumenta--produced by the Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music, the online journal of the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music. These are data collections that can be "revised by the author when new information is discovered." This catalog is also the foundation for a complete works edition, underway by Gustafson and Denis Herlin.

After Gustafson's preface, where he justifies the need for a catalog to gain control of the "complex web of concordances and versions" of Chambonnieres's works, the introduction provides Chambonnieres's biography, followed by overviews of the printed and manuscript sources. The "Explanation of the Catalogue" clearly guides the user through the catalog's contents and features, explaining its structure, ordering, abbreviations, and other details. These introductory materials end with the list of RISM abbreviations for the seventy-six libraries (to date) that own manuscripts or prints with Chambonnieres's music.

The catalog itself follows, listing the 153 known harpsichord works attributed to Chambonnieres. Because chronology is frequently difficult to ascertain in these works, Gustafson's ordering is based on authority; he begins with sixty pieces in the order that the composer himself determined for his two published collections (both printed in 1670) then moves to works that appear only in manuscripts, beginning with the most authoritative. Each catalog entry provides the "G" catalog number, standard generic title(s) for the piece, any applicable characteristic title, key, a "skeletal" melodic incipit from two to six measures long, numbers of measures in each strain, a list of known sources, and where applicable, any parodies and modern editions. The names of manuscript sources follow the usage introduced over the years by scholars and will be familiar to those who have worked in the field--these names are also explained in the later section called "Musical Sources."

Gustafson refers to the remaining sections as "supplemental files." The three indexes enable the user to approach the works from a variety of angles. The first is a theme index, using the numerical system developed by Gustafson in his 1979 catalog and his Lully thematic locator (Bruce Gustafson, with Matthew Leshinskie, A Thematic Locator for the Works of Jean-Baptiste Lully: Coordinated with Herbert Schneider's Chronologisch-thematisches Verzeichnis samtlicher Werke von Jean-Baptiste Lully [LWV] [New York: Performers' Editions, 1989]). These tools are very valuable for identifying concordances. The second index separates the works first by tonality and genre, then genre alone, while the third lists the twenty-six pieces with characteristic titles (such as the gigue "la Verdinguette," G. 35). The section entitled "Musical Sources" gives detailed descriptions of the provenance, scribes, and contents for the forty manuscripts with Chambonnieres's music. Next is a discussion of the accessible exemplars of the 1670 prints and 1690 reprints, followed by "Parodies," where "texts that were said to have been sung to melodies by Chambonnieres" are transcribed. The very thorough "Biographical Sources" as well as the first section of the introduction provide an excellent biographical sketch of Chambonnieres surpassed only by David Fuller's entry in the New Grove.