Start

Introduction
   Life
   Works
   Additional
      chansons?

Loire Valley chns
   Copenhagen
   Dijon
   Laborde
   Leuven
   Nivelle
   Wolfenbüttel

Other sources
   Music
   Text

Bibliography

Abbreviations

Papers and notes

General Index of music editions
   
by first line
   by composer

 

Editions and papers
on this site:

Copenhagen Chansonnier

Amiens MS 162 D

Sacred music of the 15th century

Uppsala MS 76a

Homepage
Peter Woetmann Christoffersen


Papers on

Basiron’s chansons
Busnoys & scibes PDF
Caulaincourt
Chansons in Fa-clefs
Chansoner på nettet
Fede, Works
Dulot’s Ave Maria
Open access 15th c.
MS Florence 2794

 

 
The Complete Works of Gilles Mureau (c1442-1512) – poet-musician of Chartres

(This edition is available also as a PDF-file, including the introduction and all music)

Four secular songs – that is all the composer Gilles Mureau is known for today. Among the four was a song that became an international hit, “Je ne fais plus, je ne dis ne escris”, while the remaining three did not enjoy a comparable circulation – even if they were known in Florence during the 1480s and 1490s. Copyists began to ascribe the ‘hit song’ to the far more famous musicians Busnoys and Compere, and it was provided with an extra “Si placet” altus part in Ottaviano Petrucci’s pioneering printed collection of secular music from 1501, the Odhecaton. Long before that, Mureau’s name as a composer apparently started to sink into oblivion outside Central France, and it looks as if he for the greater part of his career concentrated on other things, and that the songs may belong to his youth.

This introduction aims to discuss what we know about his life and work, and to review his few preserved songs on this background. His stature as a composer might turn out to be more important than one would expect from the treatment as a third-rank composer he usually receives in the musicological literature. Mureau’s literary ambitions and his way of transforming his poetic texts into music may have had some influence on the younger generation of chanson composers. At the end comes a short discussion of the difficulties of ascribing anonymous chansons along with an investigation into some candidates for inclusion into the works of Mureau.

Contents:

Introduction

Life
Works
Additional songs by Mureau?

Four chansons

»Grace actendant ou la mort pour tous mes« 4v

»Tant fort me tarde ta venue« 3v

»Je ne fais plus, je ne dis ne escris« 3v

»Pensez y se le povez faire« 3v

Appendix: Three anonymous chansons from Florence 176

»Que feray, las, fors languir en destresse« 3v

»Je te veulx desavouer oeil« 3v

»Qu’en a affaire Male Bouche« 3v

PWCH August 2011