Loys Bourgeois

Loys Bourgeois (Louis Bourgeois) (c.1510 to 1515 – 1559 or later) was a French composer and music theorist of the Renaissance. He is most famous as one of the main compilers of Calvinist hymn-tunes in the middle of the 16th century. In addition, the Protestant doxology known as the Old 100th, one of the most famous melodies in all of Christendom, is commonly attributed to him.

Life

Next to nothing is known about his early life. His first publication, some secular chansons, dates from 1539 in Lyon. By 1545 he had gone to Geneva and become a music teacher there, based on civic records. In 1547 he was granted citizenship in Geneva, and in that same year he also published his first four-voice psalms.

In 1549 and 1550 he worked on a collections of psalm-tunes, most of which were translated by Clement Marot and Théodore de Bèze, though the extent to which he was composer, arranger or compiler is not certain. The edition of 1551 containing these works is lost.

Unfortunately, he ran afoul of local musical authorities, for he was sent to prison on December 3, 1551 for changing the tunes for some well-known psalms "without a license." He was released on the personal intervention of John Calvin, but the controversy continued: those who had already learned the tunes had no desire to learn new versions, and the town council ordered the burning of Bourgeois's instructions to the singers, claiming they were confusing. Shortly after this incident, Bourgeois left Geneva never to return: he settled in Lyon, his Geneva employment was terminated, and his wife tardily followed him to Lyon.

While in Lyon, Bourgeois wrote a fierce piece of invective against the publishers of Geneva. By 1560 he had moved to Paris. Curiously, his daughter was baptized as a Catholic, and also in 1560 a Parisian publisher produced a volume of secular chansons by the composer—a form he had condemned as "dissolute" during his Geneva years. No records of his life survive after 1560, and one source (1) gives his date of death as 1559.

Music and influence

Loys Bourgeois is the one most responsible for the tunes in the Genevan Psalter , the source for the hymns of both the Reformed Church in England and the Pilgrims in America. In the original versions by Bourgeois, the music is monophonic, in accordance with the dictates of John Calvin, who disapproved not only of counterpoint but of any multiple parts; only later did Bourgeois provide four-part harmonizations. The four-part settings are syllabic and chordal, a style which has survived in many Protestant church services to the present day.

Of the tunes in the Genevan Psalter, some are from secular chansons, and others are from the Strasbourg Psalter; many of the remainder were probably composed by Bourgeois. By far the most famous, although his authorship cannot be definitely established, is the tune known as the Old 100th.

References and further reading

• Frank Dobbins, "Loys Bourgeois", 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
• Frank Dobbins, "Loys Bourgeois", Grove Music Online ed. L. Macy (Accessed March 29, 2005), (subscription access)
• Harold Gleason and Warren Becker, Music in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Music Literature Outlines Series I). Bloomington, Indiana. Frangipani Press, 1986. ISBN 089917034X