LM5a “L’Alouette”

The attribution to Janequin of “Or sus, or sus: l’Alouette” (“The lark”) has been challenged by several scholars, most succinctly by Peter Woetman Christoffersen in “‘Or sus vous dormez trop’: The Singing of the Lark in French Chansons of the Early Sixteenth Century” (Festskrift Henrik Glahn, ed. Mette Müller, pp. 35-67, Copenhagen, 1979). The complicated epos of “The Lark” is treated in depth in chapter 3 of Clément Janequin: French Composer at the Dawn of Music Publishing, pp. 35–42.

Missa La Bataille

François Lesure rejected out of hand (in a review of Samuel Pogue’s Jacques Moderne: Lyons music printer of the sixteenth century, Genève, Droz, 1969, in Revue de Musicologie LV, 1969) any responsibility on Janequin’s part for the Missa La bataille published by Moderne in 1532. The question is discussed in detail in chapter 4 of Clément Janequin: French Composer at the Dawn of Music Publishing, pp. 95–100.

1533 Motet collection

In his 1980 Grove article on Janequin, Howard Mayer Brown cautioned that the existence of a volume of motets by Janequin listed by Fétis in 1839 “is by no means proven beyond doubt.” The probability of a 1533 motet collection by Janequin with the title Sacrae cantiones is discussed in chapter 5 of Clément Janequin: French Composer at the Dawn of Music Publishing, pp. 35–42.

Three-voice chansons

When Lesure and Merritt presented their edition of Janequin’s secular chansons (Clément Janequin: chansons polyphoniques, Editions L’Oiseau-Lyre, 1965-71), they omitted the three-voice chansons attributed to Janequin by Gardano in his Primo libro of 1541, but made place for a group of three-voice arrangements printed by Susato in 1552 and for a different group printed by Le Roy and Ballard in 1578. Their choices are explored in Tightening the Canon: Janequin and Three-voice Arrangments in the Authenticity Studies section.

Verdelot’s fifth voice

Lawrence F. Bernstein raised a number of interesting questions (in the historical commentary to his La Couronne edition) about the fifth voice attributed to Verdelot in a version of Janequin’s “La Guerre” published by Susato in 1545. Some possible explanations are offered in Verdelot, Susato and Janequin: Fanfares Without Politics in the Authenticity Studies section.

Janequin’s mass setting

François Lesure himself was responsible (in a dictionary article in 1970) for casting doubt on the authenticity of the Janequin mass published by Du Chemin in 1554. How this came about, and how this misstep proliferated is described in Missa l’aveuglé dieu: A Case of Critical Contagion in the Authenticity Studies section.