Jean Mouton - Life

Life

He was born Jean de Hollingue either in 1459 or earlier, but records of his early life, as is so often the case with Renaissance composers, are scanty. Most likely he was from the village of Haut-Wignes (now Wirwignes), near Boulogne-sur-Mer. He probably began his first job, singer and teacher at the collegiate church in Saint Omer, then moved to Nesle (southeast of Amiens) in 1477, and in 1483 was made maître de chapelle there. Sometime around this time he became a priest, and in 1500 he was in charge of choirboys at the cathedral in Amiens. In 1501 he was in Grenoble, teaching choirboys, but he left the next year, most likely entering the service of Queen Anne of Brittany, and in 1509 he was granted a position again in Grenoble which he could hold in absentia. Mouton was now the principal composer for the French court. For the remainder of his life he was employed by the French court in one capacity or another, often writing music for state occasions—weddings, coronations, papal elections, births and deaths.

Mouton composed a motet, Christus vincit, for the election of Leo X as pope in 1513. Leo evidently liked Mouton's music, for he rewarded him with an honorary title on the occasion of a motet he composed for the pope in 1515; the pope made this award during a meeting in Bologna between the French king and the pope after the Battle of Marignano. This trip to Italy was the first, and probably only trip that Mouton made outside of France.

Sometime between 1517 and 1522 the Swiss music theorist Heinrich Glarean met Jean Mouton, and praised him effusively; he wrote that "everyone had copies of his music." Glarean used several examples of Mouton's music in his influential treatise, the Dodecachordon.

Mouton may have been the editor of the illuminated manuscript known as the Medici Codex, one of the primary manuscript sources of the time, which was a wedding gift for Lorenzo de' Medici, who was Duke of Urbino.

It is considered to be very likely, but not proven, that Mouton was in charge of the elaborate musical festivities by the French at the meeting between François I and Henry VIII at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, based on the similarity to the similar festivities five years earlier after the Battle of Marignano.

Near the end of his life, Mouton moved to Saint-Quentin, where he may have been a canon, taking over for Loyset Compère who died in 1518. Mouton died in Saint-Quentin and is buried there, with the following head-stone:

CI GIST MAISTRE JEAN DE HOLLINGUE, DIT MOUTON, EN SON VIVANT CHANTRE DU ROY CHANOINE DE THEROUANNE ET DE CETTE EGLISE QUI TRESPASSA LE PENULTIEME JOUR D'OCTOBRE MDXXII PRIEZ DIEU POUR SON AME