Jacques Mauduit - Music and Influence

Music and Influence

Mauduit was a prolific composer of chansons in the relatively recent style of musique mesurée, in which the rhythmic values assigned to notes exactly matched the stresses of the French words, typically in a 2:1 ratio of stressed to unstressed. While he never achieved the fame of Claude Le Jeune, part of this may have been due to Mersenne's failure to publish his complete works, a project which he promised but never completed. Mauduit's style was simple and clear, setting texts without alteration, and achieving variety using mostly harmonic means.

While his five-voice Requiem mass for Pierre de Ronsard dates from 1585, Mauduit's first publication was a collection of Chansonnettes mesurées de Jean-Antoine de Baïf, for four voices (1586). This collection was the first publication consisting exclusively of musique mesurée. Much of his music from the late 16th century is presumed to be lost.

He was also a composer of airs de cour for solo voice and lute, as well as a ballet La déliverance de Renaud for 92 singers and 45 instrumentalists, which was performed in 1617.

Among lost works mentioned by Mersenne are over 300 psalm settings, Vespers, Tenebrae settings, 104 hymns, masses and motets; indeed Mauduit may have suffered one of the highest percentages of lost music of any major composer of the late Renaissance.

Mauduit continued to use the technique of musique mesurée into the 17th century, and in contexts for which it was not originally intended, such as large settings for groups of voices and instruments, some of which may have been in the Venetian style. Mersenne also credited Mauduit with introducing the viol consort into France; he also claimed that it was Mauduit who suggested adding the sixth string to the viol.