Presentation

Picardy Musical Heritage is a website dedicated to the critical edition of music by composers from Picardy or who worked in this region – situated in the North of France – during the Renaissance. The site collects the critical editions of 268 pieces of music (259 available online), 41 references to manuscripts and printed sources produced from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, and 8 biographies. Critical editions may be downloaded, free of charge, in three formats: pdf, Sibelius and MEI files. This is a project in progress, periodically enriched with new musical editions.

Picardy Musical Heritage makes available to our community of music lovers, musicians and researchers a large repertoire of masses, motets and chansons totally forgotten for centuries. In many cases, Picardy Musical Heritage offers the only existing edition of this repertoire.

The user will find music by famous composers, such as Antoine Bruhier, Nicolle des Celliers de Hesdin, Eustache Du Caurroy, François Dulot, Paschal de L’Estocart, Nicolas de Marle, Vulfran Samin, Mathieu Sohier, and others less known, such Jean Doublet (organist at Beauvais cathedral in the 1530s) or Laurent Bonard (master of the choirboys at Amiens cathedral in the 1550s), who held notable positions in Picardy musical institutions.

The website also proposes original biographies of the composers in order to promote the musical heritage of Picardy, a region notable for the education of singers and composers, who disseminated their musical culture in many European courts. The results of the group's researches are published in the volume La musique en Picardie  du XIVe au XVIIe siècle, edited by Camilla Cavicchi, Marie-Alexis Colin and Philippe Vendrix (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012). See also Richard Wexler, Antoine Bruhier: Life and Works of a Renaissance Papal Composer (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014).

Musicologists interested in contributing are invited to contact the person responsible for the project, Marie-Alexis Colin.