The Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music

Volume 32 (2026) No. 1

Le Métier du maître de musique d’Église (XVII^e–XVIII^e siècles): Activités, sociologie, carrières. Edited by Bernard Dompnier and Jean Duron. Turnhout: Brepols, 2020. [424 pp. ISBN 978-2-503-58962-6.]

Reviewed by Peter Bennett*

1. Introduction

2. Survey of Contents

3. Conclusion

References

1. Introduction

1.1 The essays in this collection strikingly exemplify the kind of research outcomes that well-funded, interdisciplinary teams of scholars, working together over many years, can generate. Originally presented at a conference jointly held in 2017 by the Atelier du recherche of the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles and the Centre d’Histoire “Espaces et Cultures”of the Université Clermont Auvergne, the contributions from musicologists and historians of all stripes explore a wide range of aspects of the life, career, training, and social status of the “maître de musique,” primarily focused on France (with the eighteenth century somewhat emphasized) but with two contributions relating to Italy. Underpinning the whole enterprise are long-term projects by the two convenors and editors, Jean Duron (formerly CMBV) and Bernard Dompnier (formerly Université Clermont). While the activities of Duron and the CMBV will be well-known to musicologists working in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, Dompnier (a historian of liturgy) may be less familiar, though it is the prosopographical database MUSEFREM (Musiciens d’Église en France à l’Époque Moderne) that he instigated in 2003 that sets the scene for many of the essays.^[1]

1.2 In their introduction to the volume, Duron and Dompnier set out a central disciplinary dichotomy—that musicologists’ (in the narrow sense) primary interest in the maître has typically been in his role as composer (especially those maîtres who went on to prominence in the secular sphere, such as Rameau and Campra), while social historians have seen the maître in a much broader sense: and to that extent, the existing literature presents an unbalanced picture. Attempting to re-center the inquiry on the more typical maître in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who would not necessarily have been known for his compositional skills outside his immediate circumstances, the editors have sought to collect and synthesize contributions on all aspects of a complex profession.

2. Survey of Contents

2.1 The contributions are divided into five main sections, each emphasizing to varying degrees sociological, historical, pedagogical, and other questions. In the first section, “Le kaléidoscope d’une profession,” the authors explore institutional and customary questions from a wide range of geographical and institutional perspectives, at the same time taking a particular interest in the hierarchies between different types of maître (across institutions) and between maîtres and the clergy and chapters they served. Dompnier’s own scene-setting essay lays out the issues at stake in constructing a broad social history of a métier that straddles so many professional and cultural divides (composer, performer, pedagogue, administrator; church and concert hall; cleric and lay), pointing out that their central (to us) role as musician was the aspect of the profession least likely to be documented. Bastien Mailhot considers the status of the maître de musique at smaller churches (typically collègiales). Since they usually worked alone, such musicians were required to be more versatile than those at more major institutions (where, for example, a separate maître de grammaire would be engaged) and, as a result of their higher workload and lack of time for composition, they typically progressed up the professional ladder much more slowly than their counterparts at cathedrals. Thomas Leconte’s chapter revisits the relatively well-trodden field of the Chapelle-Royale, though he reframes the investigation to include the broader questions on the role of the maître—his function as composer and director, teacher and pedagogue, and recruiter of enfants de chœur, his status outside the chapelle, and his relationship with the huge body of clerics who ran the chapelle itself. On the basis of materials from the MUSEFREM database and a 1763 État that surveys all the churches in Paris, François Caillou presents a closeup of maîtres of Parisian parish and collegiate churches in the second half of the eighteenth century, long overshadowed by the Cathedral of Notre-Dame and the Sainte-Chapelle. Although such maîtres were less prominent than their colleagues at major institutions, they typically trained at the maîtrises of major cathedrals and were influential in Parisian music life more generally, figures such as Bordier and Guilleminot-Dugué having achieved the distinction of receiving performances of their works in the King’s presence, and Cordelet becoming a regular contributor to the Concert Spirituel. Finally in this opening section, Emilie Corswarem explores the role of maître de chant at the cathedral of Saint-Lambert (seat of the Prince-Bishopric of Liège) in the years up to 1650. Serving one of the most important and richest chapters in the empire, the maître (necessarily a cleric) had wide responsibility for musical provision, but a high status and means to accomplish it, overseeing a number of assistants. Figures such as Lambert Pietkin and Leonard Hodemont were also typical in that they were recruited from within a closed system, one that insulated the prosperous cathedral from the generally unfavorable conditions elsewhere.

2.2 The second section, “Faire carrière,” examines the various trajectories that individuals followed to reach the goal of maître de musique or organist. Youri Carbonnier analyses MUSEFREM data to track the career of a typical young maître—the age at which he might receive his first appointment as maître, any previous appointments, the distance from his home town, and other questions—finding that the most common age for an appointment was 22, barely older than many of the enfants de chœur that the maître would be required to oversee. In a very substantial and richly documented contribution, Nicolo Maccavino surveys the activities of maestri di cappella in a number of cities in Sicily during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while Sylvie Granger uses a statistical analysis of 100 individuals on MUSEFREM to track geographical mobility in the years just before 1790. To conclude this section, Erik Kocevar surveys the careers of organists, exploring in particular how they were recruited and appointed: a number of prominent organists belonged to musical dynasties (e.g., Beauvarlet, Couperin) or families associated with the church in other roles (Rameau), but more typically the appointment process involved either an open competition, a direct approach from the chapter or organist himself, or some kind of pupil–teacher succession.

2.3 The third section, “L’entrepreneur de musique,” looks outside the immediate confines of the provision of music for the church to the wider role that a maître might have had in the local community and musical culture. In a wide-ranging essay surveying numerous individuals, their training, and their careers, Galliano Cilliberti describes the role of the maestro di capella in Rome and Vatican territories in the seventeenth century and how it involved engaging with the marketplace for musical performers. Christophe Maillard explores how, in a city with two major churches (typically a cathedral and a collègiale), chapters and their maîtres might compete (or not) for prestige: while there are examples of disputes (Tours is one particular case), both types of institutions often had the resources to employ very fine musicians, who actually cooperated in civic events more frequently than not. Moving further into the secular sphere, René Depoutot considers the fascinating musical set-up in Nancy in the eighteenth century, where, under the recently returned Duke Leopold of Lorraine, the city’s major churches were reorganized, and a theater and concert hall constructed on the Place Royale. In the later eighteenth century, two maîtres, Claude-Frederic Seurat and Joseph-Antoine Lorenziti, took prominent roles in the Concert des amateurs and the Comédie, at the same time negotiating the complex relationship with the duke, their church employers, and the demands of their civic duties. Focusing even more on the role of the maître in secular and concert life, Thierry Favier explores the rise of the public concert across France in the eighteenth century, contrasting those cities where bishop and clergy were generally supportive of their maître directing a musical academy, and those where— in the Jansenist spirit of the time—such activities were condemned.

2.4 The fourth section, “Le maître et le livre,” explores the various ways in which the musical legacy of the maître was preserved and disseminated through publications and/or archives. Jean Duron surveys the handful of collections (or inventories of collections) that survived the destruction of the Revolution, exploring the organization and contents of each (what it might tell us about how the maître operated on a daily basis, the “jeu d’usage”), before focusing on the more famous example of Sébastien de Brossard and shedding new light on the function of Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Meslanges. Laurent Guillo takes the reader through the steps that a maître might take to get his works published, together with his motivations (financial and otherwise). Finally, Nathalie Berton-Blivet explores how printed petit motet collections fulfilled the requirements of the maître’s home institution at the same time as responding to the market’s requirement for versatility.

2.5 The fifth and final section, “Pratiques d’enseignment,” examines the role that the maître might play in the musical training of the enfants de chœur in his care. Xavier Bisaro reminds us that a significant amount of time and energy would have been spent on the teaching of plainchant, and he explores the theoretical underpinnings of treatises by Sébastien de Brossard and Henri Hardouin, and the introduction of the “si” syllable in the newer harmonically inflected conception of the scale. In a contribution that stands slightly apart from others in this section, Aline Smeesters considers two case studies in which newly written occasional Latin poetry was commissioned and set by the composers André Pevernage and Jacques Lesueur, identifying a number of factors—the presence of confraternities and musical societies (especially those dedicated to Saint Cecilia), an active Latin tradition, and a highly educated body of clerics—that favored the production of neo-Latin verse. Jean Duron explores teaching and learning of composition in the maîtrise, focusing on figures who were known either for their own students (for example Guillaume Poitevin in Aix, known for Gilles, Campra, and Blanchard) or as composers or theorists in their own right (Sébastien de Brossard in Meaux, René Ouvrard at the Sainte-Chapelle, etc.). Perhaps most interestingly, Duron explores the kinds of materials that the maître would use in his instruction, focusing on a number of manuscript tables and diagrams by Brossard that must have featured in the elementary instruction of enfants de chœur. Concluding this section, Jean-Paul Montagnier argues that, following Mersenne’s observation that the way to learn composition is to study the works of “des bons Maistres,” we should consider printed mass ordinary settings as much a pedagogical tool as a repertoire for performance, providing models for the process of composing “en mosaique” that the aspiring composer could imitate.

3. Conclusion

3.1 The volume’s own conclusion, by Bernard Hours, draws together many of the threads running through the collection, but ultimately points out that the few hundred or so maîtres who were active in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not constitute a “corps” or community, but were essentially isolated individuals, united only in that their lives and careers followed similar trajectories, notwithstanding the interactions that obviously occasionally occurred. From the perspective of a scholar operating outside the French musicological community, it is indeed the glimpses into the lives of these individuals and their situations, many of which are unfamiliar (the role of many maîtres towards the end of the eighteenth century in secular music making is perhaps the most striking), that may prove to be the most stimulating points of entry for further research.