Clément Janequin: French Composer at the Dawn of Music Publishing

Clément Janequin’s spectacular entertainment chansons jump-started French music printing, spread his fame across sixteenth-century Europe, and earned him lasting success with vocal ensembles and audiences around the world.

Clément Janequin was the musical poster boy for the Valois kings of France, a bestseller for the fledgling sixteenth-century music-printing industry and, notwithstanding his status as an ordained priest, a major supplier of hymn-style harmonizations of Huguenot melodies. Ever since the sixteenth century, vocal ensembles have embraced his barking dogs, chirping birds, and thundering horse hoofs, and then moved beyond the bird and battle songs to a repertory rich in lyric beauty and Rabelaisian wit.

This first in-depth biography looks at Janequin’s revolutionary approach to entertainment music, his pioneer status in the developing music-printing industry, and his contributions to sacred music in the turmoil that followed the Reformation (including the first known hymn-style harmonization of what became known as Old One Hundredth). It traces his early life in Bordeaux, Luçon, Auch, and Angers during the period when Pierre Attaingnant made Janequin a central name in early French music publishing, and subsequently the composer’s transition to Paris, where, as the first composer to make the attempt, he put his revenues from music printing (from the firms of Nicolas Du Chemin and Le Roy & Ballard) at the core of his economic-survival strategy. Recounted with both scholarly detail and Janequinian humor, the volume includes an extensive selection of musical examples.