Paris, Saint-Germain Quarter, spring 1531. In the workshops of Pierre Attaingnant, located on rue de la Harpe, near Saint-Cosme church, the tension is palpable. The first music printer in France is about to bring off the press a new collection of keyboard pieces, Le tout reduict en la tablature D'orgues, Espinettes et Manicordions, the last in a series of seven books, all published between January and April of that same year: the winter was a laborious one! This series distinguishes three genres: sacred counterpoint, the diminished chanson, and finally dance music. The present program will be devoted mainly to the last two. The danseries bring together pavanes, gaillardes, but also basses-danses and branles, that is, the four dances most widespread and practiced at the court of the Valois. The chanson books, for their part, take up polyphonic pieces by contemporary composers such as Janequin, Sermisy, or Willaert. By whose hand were these pieces born? Attaingnant neglects to tell us. It is likely that several musicians collaborated on this publication, perhaps the organists of the parishes of Saint-Côme-Saint-Damien or Saint-André des Arts, whom Attaingnant frequented. In any case, the seven books sold out in very little time, so much so that by the end of the century a bookseller declared the 1531 tablatures “unfindable,” and in 1623 the organist Jehan Titelouze wrote that it was “out of men’s memory” that keyboard tablatures had ever been printed in France. May this program therefore bring back to life these pieces so quickly fallen into oblivion, pieces that laid some of the foundations of the French keyboard school.
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