Modulorum Ioannis Maillardi: The Four-Part Motets.

These new editions of sacred music by Jean Maillard will prove to be useful additions to the library of any scholar interested in French music of the sixteenth century. Taken together, these volumes offer sixty-one of Maillard's over eighty settings of Latin texts, motets for four, five, six, and seven voices. Maillard was an able contrapuntist whose music joined a clear if often repetitive sense of melodic shape with a penchant for reworking melodies drawn from plainsong and psalmody. His abiding interest in cantus firmus technique might at first come as something of a surprise to those familiar with the mid-century compositional practice of Adrian Willaert and other masters who attended increasingly to the semantic and syntactic valences of texts rather than the manipulation of contrapuntal relationships per se. But on closer inspection Maillard's approach seems not that far from the new logocentrism of Renaissance musical tastes. Indeed, as Rosenstock notes, Maillard's works are rich in musically expressive manifestations of the texts he sets: florid ornaments denote important words even as changes in rhythm mark off important syntactic units. Maillard's skills as a contrapuntist are themselves at times employed as a means of amplifying texts, as in a remarkable six-voice work, Fratres me elongaverunt, which uses a simultaneous canon in augmentation and diminution as a musical representation of a biblical motto: "Me oportet minui, Illum autem cresecere."

The works reproduced here are drawn from two prints issued by the Parisian music firm of Le Roy et Ballard in 1565, collections dedicated to the young Charles IX and his mother, Catherine de'Medici. (Each of these original prints contained works for four through seven voices. A-R Editions has chosen to redistribute the contents so that all of the four-part pieces from both 1565 prints appear in one modern volume and all of the five-, six- and seven-part compositions appear in another. Within this scheme the modern editions nevertheless preserve the original sequence of works. Rosenstock provides complete translations of the Latin texts and useful notes on the scriptural and musical traditions upon which the motets draw.) The laudatory prefaces that open these prints invoke the French monarchy as an exemplary center of a realm in crisis and allude in more cryptic language to the peril of the composer himself, who Rosenstock thinks may have been a Protestant sympathizer. Maillard's career nevertheless remains largely enigmatic, despite his close connection with the royal printer and the court upon which it depended for its commercial monopoly.

Some of the music assembled here seems to have been selected with its dedicatees in mind. The first volume of the Modulorum, for instance, opened with a setting of Domine, salvum fac regem, a text that Rosenstock calls a coronation piece. Stemmata maiorum, from the second book of 1565, the editor similarly thinks was conceived in praise of Catherine as regent, to whom he also links the several settings of Marian texts that open this volume. Yet the process of selection was probably more complex (and less dependent on the composer himself) than Rosenstock seems to allow: nearly half of the works assembled in the 1565 prints had been previously issued by Le Roy et Ballard (in two other prints) years before, pieces whose prior existence argues against the notion that these works were composed expressly for Charles or Catherine. The old music, moreover, is here organized according to a scheme of eight modal categories that was apparently not a priority in the earlier prints. This sort of organization, which during the middle years of the sixteenth century seems to have been the object of increasing concern on the part of musical editors, has received much recent discussion. We would do well to consider Maillard's rooter books in the rich context of the printers and patrons of early modern France.

RICHARD FREEDMAN Haverford College