Jean Maillard

Jean Maillard (c.1510 – after 1570) was a French composer of the Renaissance.

While next to nothing is known about his life, he may have been associated with the French royal court, since he wrote at least one motet for them. Most likely he lived and worked in Paris, based on evidence of his print editions, which were prepared there.

Maillard is mentioned by Rabelais in Gargantua and Pantagruel, and also by Ronsard in his Livre des Mélanges (1560 and 1572). He was evidently famous during his time, and many of his motets were used as source material for parody masses by composers as distinguished as Palestrina; in addition Lassus reworked some of his music. Claude Goudimel also used a secular chanson of Maillard's as source material for a mass.

Six of Maillard's masses have survived, and two others are known to have been lost. Considerable other music of his has survived in printed editions, including numerous motets, settings of the Magnificat, lamentations , chansons spirituelles, and secular chansons. Stylistically, his sacred music is more closely related to the contemporary Franco-Flemish style of pervasive, dense, complex polyphony than to the relatively clear and succinct style of his fellow French composers. On the other hand, his secular music was in the prevailing popular idiom.

His Missa pro mortuis was an early Requiem mass, and one of the only examples from France in the 16th century.

References and further reading

• Article "Jean Maillard (i)", in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie. 20 vol. London, Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1980. ISBN 1561591742
• Gustave Reese, Music in the Renaissance. New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 1954. ISBN 0393095304