Jacques Mauduit

Jacques Mauduit (16 September 1557 – 21 August 1627) was a French composer of the late Renaissance. He was one of the most innovative French composers of the late 16th century, combining voices and instruments in new ways, and importing some of the grand polychoral style of the Venetian School from Italy; he also composed a famous Requiem for the funeral of Pierre de Ronsard.

Much of the biographical information about Mauduit comes from the writings of Marin Mersenne. Mauduit was born in Paris, and being an aristocrat, received an excellent education in humanities, languages and philosophy, but was evidently self-taught in music. Mauduit was a member of the Académie de Poésie et de Musique, the secretive group founded by Jean Antoine de Baïf to promote musique mesurée à l'antique, an attempt to recreate the rhetorical and ethical effect of ancient Greek music using modern French poetry and music. After the death of Joachim Thibault de Courville in 1581, Mauduit became the principal musician of the Académie.

Evidently Mauduit was a man of some personal courage, for during the siege of Paris in 1589–1590, in the closing phase of the bloody French Wars of Religion, he assisted Claude Le Jeune in escaping from the city (had he been caught, both would have been executed), and he also helped save much of Le Jeune's music as well as the unpublished work of Baïf. He outlived all of the other composers of the Académie, dying in Paris in 1621.

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.

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