Claude Le Jeune (French pronunciation:[klodləʒœn]; 1528 to 1530 – buried 26 September 1600) was aFranco-Flemish composer of the lateRenaissance. He was the primary representative of the musical movement known asmusique mesurée, and a significant composer of the "Parisian"chanson, the predominant secular form in France in the latter half of the 16th century. His fame was widespread in Europe, and he ranks as one of the most influential composers of the time.
He was born inValenciennes, where he probably received his early musical training. Sometime fairly early in life he became aProtestant. The first record of his musical activity is from 1552, when four chansons attributed to him were published atLeuven, in anthologies of works by several composers.[1] In 1564, he moved toParis, where he became acquainted with theHuguenots.[2] By this time, he had already acquired some international fame, as evidenced by the appearance of his name in a list of "contemporary composers of excellence" in a manuscript copy of thePenitential Psalms ofOrlande de Lassus, which were probably composed in the 1560s inMunich. Lassus may have met Le Jeune in the mid-1550s during a trip to France; however this has not been definitely established.
In 1570, Le Jeune began his association with theAcademie de musique et de poésie, headed byJean-Antoine de Baïf, an association which was to be decisive both on Le Jeune's music and on the direction taken by the Academie. That Baïf was aCatholic, who even wrote a sonnet extravagantly praising theSt. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in 1572 (in which somewhere between 5,000 and 30,000 Protestants were murdered) appears not to have dissuaded Le Jeune from working with him, and Le Jeune continued to set his poetry, and follow the ideals of the Academie, into the 1580s. In 1581, in collaboration with Baïf,d'Aubigné andRonsard, he wrote incidental music for the wedding of theDuke of Joyeuse and the queen's half-sister,Marie de Lorraine.[1]
Unfortunately, Le Jeune was found out to be the author of an anti-Catholic tract in 1589, and was forced to flee Paris during the siege that year: only the intervention of his friend, the composerJacques Mauduit, at the city's St. Denis gate saved his life and prevented the destruction of the manuscripts he carried with him (according toMarin Mersenne, who wrote extensively about both composers in hisHarmonie universelle of 1637). OtherHuguenot composers were not so fortunate.Claude Goudimel, a very similar composer whom Le Jeune may have known, was murdered by a Catholic mob inLyon during the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre in late August 1572.
Next, Le Jeune settled inLa Rochelle, a stronghold of theHuguenots, but sometime in the mid-1590s he must have returned to Paris, for his name appears in a list of musicians of the royal household ofHenry IV both in 1596 and 1600. Few other details from late in his life are known, but he must have been composing prolifically, judging by the enormous quantity of music which remained in manuscript at his death, most of which was published in the first two decades of the 17th century. He died in Paris, and is buried in the Protestant cemetery of La Trinité.
Le Jeune was the most famous composer of secular music in France in the late 16th century, and his preferred form was the chanson. After 1570, most of the chansons he wrote incorporated the ideas ofmusique mesurée, the musical analogue to the poetic movement known asvers mesurée, in which the music reflected the exact stress accents of the French language. Inmusique mesurée, stressed versus unstressed syllables in the text would be set in a musical ratio of 2:1, i.e. a stressed syllable could get a quarter note while an unstressed syllable could get an eighth note. Since the meter of the verse was usually flexible, the result was a musical style which is best transcribed without meter, and which sounds to the modern ear to have rapidly changingmeters, for example alternating 2/8, 3/8, etc.
In opposition to the chanson style of theNetherlandish composers writing at the same time, Le Jeune's "Parisian" chansons inmusique mesurée were usually light andhomophonic in texture. They were sunga cappella, and were usually from three to seven voices, though sometimes he wrote for as many as eight. Probably his most famous secular work is his collection of thirty-threeairs mesurés and six chansons, all to poems by Baïf, entitledLe printemps. Occasionally he wrote in a contrapuntal idiom reminiscent of the more severe style of his Netherlandish contemporaries, sometimes with a satirical intent; and in addition he sometimes used melodic intervals which were "forbidden" by current rules, such as the expressive diminished fourth; these strictures were codified by contemporary theorists such asGioseffe Zarlino in Venice, and were well known to Le Jeune.
Le Jeune also was keenly aware of the current humanist research into ancient Greek music theory. Greek use of the modes and the threegenera intrigued him, and in his music he used both thediatonic genus (atetrachord made up of semitone, tone, and tone) and thechromatic genus (a tetrachord made up of semitone, semitone, and an augmented second).(Theenharmonic genus, consisting of quarter tone, quarter tone, and major third, was rarely used in the 16th century, although Italian theorist and composerNicola Vicentino constructed an instrument allowing it to be used in performance.) His chansons using the chromatic genus are among the mostchromatic compositions prior to the madrigals ofGesualdo.
Probably Le Jeune's most famous sacred work is hisDodécacorde, a series of twelvepsalm settings which he published in La Rochelle in 1598. Each of the psalms is set in a different one of the twelvemodes as given byZarlino. Some of his psalm settings are for large forces: for example he uses sixteen voices in his setting of Psalm 52. Published posthumously was a collection of all 150 psalms,Les 150 pseaumes, for four and five voices; some of these were extremely popular, and were reprinted in several European countries throughout the 17th century.
His last completed work, published in 1606, was a collection of thirty-six songs based on eight-line poems, divided into twelve groups, each of which contained three settings in each of the twelve modes. The work,Octonaires de la vanité et inconstances du monde (Eight-line Poems on the Vanity and Inconstancy of the World), based on poems by theCalvinist preacherAntoine de Chandieu, was for groups of three or four voices. According to Le Jeune's sister Cecile, who wrote the introduction to the publication, he had intended to complete another set for more voices but died before finishing it. It was one of the last collections ofchansons of the Renaissance, of any type; following its publication, theair de cour was the predominant genre of secular song composition in France.
Of Le Jeune's sacred music, a total of 347 psalm settings, thirty-eight sacred chansons, elevenmotets, and amass setting have survived. His secular output included 146 airs, most of which were in the style ofmusique mesurée, as well as sixty-six chansons, and forty-three Italianmadrigals. In addition, three instrumentalfantasias were published posthumously in 1612, as well as some works forlute. He was fortunate in that his copious manuscripts were published after his death: his friend, the equally gifted and prolific composer Jacques Mauduit, was fated to have most of his music lost.
Contemporary critics accused Le Jeune of violating some of the rules of good melodic writing andcounterpoint, for example using the melodicinterval of the major sixth (somethingPalestrina would never have done), and frequentlycrossing voices; some of these compositional devices were to become features of theBaroque style, premonitions of which were beginning to appear even in France towards the end of the 16th century.
Psalms
Secular works
