Jean Desfontaines (c. 1658 – after 1752) was a French Baroque composer. Desfontaines was a pupil of

Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe Jean (?) de Sainte-Colombe () was a French composer and violist. Sainte-Colombe was a celebrated master of the viola da gamba. He is credited (by Jean Rousseau in his ''Traité de la viole'' (1687)) with adding the seventh string, tuned to the no ...

. He was a prolific music teacher in Paris, however, it does not seem that he held a public office.

Works

His output includes airs, the cantata ''Narcisse'', the pastorale ''Le Désespoir de Tircis'' and sacred music, which consists of 192 works numbered JeD. 1 to JeD. 192. He wrote music on all 150

psalms The Book of Psalms ( or ; he, תְּהִלִּים, , lit. "praises"), also known as the Psalms, or the Psalter, is the first book of the ("Writings"), the third section of the Tanakh, and a book of the Old Testament. The title is derived ...

, a

magnificat The Magnificat (Latin for "

y soul Y, or y, is the twenty-fifth and penultimate letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. According to some authorities, it is the sixth (or sevent ...

magnifies

he Lord He or HE may refer to: Language * He (pronoun), an English pronoun * He (kana), the romanization of the Japanese kana へ * He (letter), the fifth letter of many Semitic alphabets * He (Cyrillic), a letter of the Cyrillic script called ''He'' ...

) is a canticle, also known as the Song of Mary, the Canticle of Mary and, in the Eastern Christianity, Byzantine tradition, the Ode of the Theotokos (). It is traditionally incorporated ...

''Anima mea'' and 41 ''petits

motet In Western classical music, a motet is mainly a vocal musical composition, of highly diverse form and style, from high medieval music to the present. The motet was one of the pre-eminent polyphonic forms of Renaissance music. According to Margar ...

s'' on liturgical texts of

Neo-Latin New Latin (also called Neo-Latin or Modern Latin) is the revival of Literary Latin used in original, scholarly, and scientific works since about 1500. Modern scholarly and technical nomenclature, such as in zoological and botanical taxonomy ...

poetry.

External links

Introduction to the catalogue of motets by Jean Desfontaines
* French male classical composers French Baroque composers 1650s births 18th-century deaths 18th-century classical composers French composers of sacred music 18th-century French composers 18th-century French male musicians Year of birth uncertain Year of death unknown 17th-century male musicians {{France-composer-stub