^* Don Fader (djfader@music.ua.edu) is Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of Alabama School of Music. His research focuses on the music, aesthetics, and cultural history of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, particularly the influence of the Italian style. He is the author of numerous articles and is currently writing a history of the goûts-réunis.

^[1] Jean Mongrédien, Catalogue thématique des sources du grand motet français (1663–1792) (Munich: K.G. Saur, 1984); Jean Mongrédien and Yves Ferraton, eds., Actes du colloque international de musicologie sur le grand motet français, 1663–1792 (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1986).

^[4] The question of whether opera influenced the motet à grand chœur or vice versa has recently been indirectly broached by Olivia Bloechel, who notes similarities between a section of Lalande’s De profundis and the chorus “Que tout gémisse” from Rameau’s Castor et Pollux; see “Choral Lament and the Politics of Public Mourning in the tragédie en musique,” Opera Quarterly 27, no. 4 (Autumn 2011): 344.

^[5] Jonathan Gibson has pointed out the problematic position of rhetoric in French aesthetics, especially in writings that address secular contexts; see “‛A Kind of Eloquence Even in Music’: Embracing Different Rhetorics in Late Seventeenth-Century France,” Journal of Musicology 25, no. 4 (Fall 2008): 394–433. However, techniques of text setting in sacred music cross national boundaries, and thus raise the question of whether “the culture of rhetoric” (and its musical traditions) might be different for sacred music than for secular music. C. Jane Gosine and Erik Oland attempt to address this question in the case of Charpentier’s works for the Jesuits by focusing on Jesuit approaches to the spiritual uses of the arts, but the connection between Jesuit rhetoric, the theories of Kircher, Burmeister, et. al., and Charpentier’s compositional practice is not addressed in particular detail; see “Docere, delectare, movere: Marc-Antoine Charpentier and Jesuit Spirituality,” Early Music 32, no.4 (Nov. 2004): 511–40. For a different view of the matter, see Théodora Psychoyou, “Les Miserere de Marc-Antoine Charpentier: Une approche rhétorique,” in Marc-Antoine Charpentier: Un musicien retrouvé, ed. Catherine Cessac (Sprimont: Mardaga, 2005), 313–46. The relationship to the Jesuits’ views of musical composition has been recently treated in brilliant detail by Andrew Dell’Antonio in the chapter entitled “Rapt Attention” in his Listening as Spiritual Practice in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 15–32. Its implications for France, although mentioned in the last chapter of Dell’Antonio’s book, remain an open question.

^[7] A more extended discussion can be found in Favier’s “Lalande et le sublime: Doctrines rhétoriques et tradition oratoire dans ses premiers grands motets,” in Lalande et ses contemporains: Actes du colloque international, Versailles 2001: Hommage à Marcelle Benoit, ed. Lionel Sawkins (Marandeuil: Éditions des Abbesses, 2008), 119–41.

^[8] The creation of the Concert Sprituel “marqua sans doute moins un affaiblissment du sentiment religieux que l’institutionalisation d’un type de divertissement dévot, largement promu par Louis XIV.” There is more material on the subject in Favier’s very fine article, “Aux Origines du Concert spirituel: Pratiques musicales et formes d’appropriation de la musique dans les églises parisiennes de 1680 à 1725,” in Organisateurs et formes d’organisation du concert en Europe 1700–1920: Institutionnalisation et pratiques, ed. Hans Erich Bödeker, Patrice Veit, and Michael Werner (Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2008), 297–319.

^[9] A more in-depth consideration of this issue can be found in Favier, “The French ‘Grand Motet’ and the King’s Glory: A Reconsideration of the Issue,” in Early Music: Context and Ideas II, ed. Reinhard Strohm, Ryszard Wieczorek, Robert Kendrick, Helen Geyer, and Zofia Fabianska (Krakow: Institute of Musicology, Jagiellonian University, 2008), 188–97.

References