Jean Maillard (c. 1515 – after 1570) was a French

composer A composer is a person who writes music. The term is especially used to indicate composers of Western classical music, or those who are composers by occupation. Many composers are, or were, also skilled performers of music. Etymology and Defi ...

of the

Renaissance The Renaissance ( , ) , from , with the same meanings. is a period in European history marking the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity and covering the 15th and 16th centuries, characterized by an effort to revive and surpass ideas ...

. While little is known with certainty about his life, he may have been associated with the French royal court, since he wrote at least one

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 ...

for them. Most likely he lived and worked in

Paris Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. S ...

, based on evidence of his print editions, which were prepared there. Since later in his career he set verse by

Huguenot The Huguenots ( , also , ) were a religious group of French Protestants who held to the Reformed, or Calvinist, tradition of Protestantism. The term, which may be derived from the name of a Swiss political leader, the Genevan burgomaster Be ...

poet Guillaume Guéroult, as well as

Clément Marot Clément Marot (23 November 1496 – 12 September 1544) was a French Renaissance poet. Biography Youth Marot was born at Cahors, the capital of the province of Quercy, some time during the winter of 1496–1497. His father, Jean Marot (c.&n ...

, he may have either become a

Protestant Protestantism is a Christian denomination, branch of Christianity that follows the theological tenets of the Reformation, Protestant Reformation, a movement that began seeking to reform the Catholic Church from within in the 16th century agai ...

or had Protestant sympathies; this could explain his disappearance from Paris around 1570. If he did leave the city then, his destination is unknown. No record of him after that year has been found. Maillard is mentioned by Rabelais in ''

Gargantua and Pantagruel ''The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel'' (french: La vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel) is a pentalogy of novels written in the 16th century by François Rabelais, telling the adventures of two giants, Gargantua ( , ) and his son Pantagruel ...

'', and also by

Ronsard Pierre de Ronsard (; 11 September 1524 – 27 December 1585) was a French poet or, as his own generation in France called him, a "prince of poets". Early life Pierre de Ronsard was born at the Manoir de la Possonnière, in the village of C ...

in his ''Livre des Mélanges'' (1560 and 1572). He was evidently famous during his time, and many of his motets were used as source material for

parody mass A parody mass is a musical setting of the mass, typically from the 16th century, that uses multiple voices of another pre-existing piece of music, such as a fragment of a motet or a secular ''chanson'', as part of its melodic material. It is dist ...

es by composers as distinguished as

Palestrina Palestrina (ancient ''Praeneste''; grc, Πραίνεστος, ''Prainestos'') is a modern Italian city and ''comune'' (municipality) with a population of about 22,000, in Lazio, about east of Rome. It is connected to the latter by the Via Pren ...

; in addition

Lassus Orlande de Lassus ( various other names; probably – 14 June 1594) was a composer of the late Renaissance. The chief representative of the mature polyphonic style in the Franco-Flemish school, Lassus stands with Giovanni Pierluigi da Palest ...

reworked some of his music.

Claude Goudimel Claude Goudimel (c. 1514 to 1520 – between 28 August and 31 August 1572) was a FrenchPaul-André Gaillard, "Goudimel, Claude", ''The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians'', ed. Stanley Sadie. 20 vol. London, Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 19 ...

also used a secular

chanson A (, , french: chanson française, link=no, ; ) is generally any lyric-driven French song, though it most often refers to the secular polyphonic French songs of late medieval and Renaissance music. The genre had origins in the monophonic s ...

of Maillard's as source material for a

mass Mass is an intrinsic property of a body. It was traditionally believed to be related to the quantity of matter in a physical body, until the discovery of the atom and particle physics. It was found that different atoms and different elementar ...

. Six of Maillard's masses have survived, and two others are known to have been lost. Considerable other music of his has survived in printed editions, including eighty-six motets, settings of the ''

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 ...

,''

lamentations The Book of Lamentations ( he, אֵיכָה, , from its incipit meaning "how") is a collection of poetic laments for the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE. In the Hebrew Bible it appears in the Ketuvim ("Writings") as one of the Five Megillot ...

, ''chansons spirituelles'', and secular

s. Stylistically, his sacred music is more closely related to the contemporary

Franco-Flemish The designation Franco-Flemish School, also called Netherlandish School, Burgundian School, Low Countries School, Flemish School, Dutch School, or Northern School, refers, somewhat imprecisely, to the style of polyphony, polyphonic vocal music com ...

idiom of pervasive, dense, complex

polyphony Polyphony ( ) is a type of musical texture consisting of two or more simultaneous lines of independent melody, as opposed to a musical texture with just one voice, monophony, or a texture with one dominant melodic voice accompanied by chords, h ...

than to the relatively clear and succinct style of his fellow French composers. In particular, he used short motifs in close

imitation Imitation (from Latin ''imitatio'', "a copying, imitation") is a behavior whereby an individual observes and replicates another's behavior. Imitation is also a form of that leads to the "development of traditions, and ultimately our culture. I ...

, and often used strict canonic devices. About half of his motets are for four voices; the rest are for five or six, with one motet for seven voices. Many of his motets have the

cantus firmus In music, a ''cantus firmus'' ("fixed melody") is a pre-existing melody forming the basis of a polyphonic composition. The plural of this Latin term is , although the corrupt form ''canti firmi'' (resulting from the grammatically incorrect tr ...

in long note values in the highest voice, while the other voices carry on in a polyphonic, imitative texture. His ''Missa pro mortuis'' was an early Requiem mass setting, and one of the only examples from France in the 16th century. Unlike his sacred music, his secular music was in the prevailing popular idiom of the 1540s.

Modern editions

Maillard's sacred works are being edited for publication by Raymond H. Rosenstock. His editions of motets already published several years ago by A-R Editions in the USA provide useful further information and authoritative modern transcriptions; he has also edited Maillard's masses, published by The Institute of Mediaeval Music in Canada.

References and further reading

*Article "Jean Maillard (i)", in ''The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians'', ed. Stanley Sadie. 20 vol. London, Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1980. *

Gustave Reese Gustave Reese ( ; 29 November 1899 – 7 September 1977) was an American musicologist and teacher. Reese is known mainly for his work on medieval and Renaissance music, particularly with his two publications ''Music in the Middle Ages'' (1940) ...

, ''Music in the Renaissance''. New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 1954. *Marie-Alexis Colin, Frank Dobbins: "Jean Maillard", Grove Music Online ed. L. Macy (Accessed September 11, 2005)
(subscription access)

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Maillard, Jean 1510s births 16th-century deaths French classical composers French male classical composers Renaissance composers