Life
Payen was born in Soignies, and received his earliest musical training in that town, in the church of St. Vincent. When he was about 13 years old he went to Spain to sing in the choir of Charles V; children were commonly recruited in the Low Countries for service in the imperial chapel. In the 1530s he may have attended university, but this portion of his life is poorly documented. In the 1540s he rose in the chapel hierarchy, becoming successively a clerc and a chaplain, and in 1556 he took over the post of maestro di capilla, the director of music, from Cornelius Canis who had retired the previous year simultaneously with the abdication of Charles V. Thus Payen became the first maestro di capilla for Habsburg monarch Philip II of Spain.
Payen acquired honors including prebends. In 1558 he became canon at the church in Tournai. He died in Madrid the next year or shortly after.
Read more about this topic: Nicolas Payen
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Poor devil, poor devil, he’s best gone out of a life where he rides his rocking-horse to find a winner.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“life is a trick, life is a kitten in a sack.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“There is no calm philosophy of life here, such as you might put at the end of the Almanac, to hang over the farmer’s hearth,—how men shall live in these winter, in these summer days. No philosophy, properly speaking, of love, or friendship, or religion, or politics, or education, or nature, or spirit; perhaps a nearer approach to a philosophy of kingship, and of the place of the literary man, than of anything else.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)