1510–1560 · France · Baroque
Louis Bourgeois (Loys Bourgeois) was a Renaissance composer and writer on music theory from France who worked in Paris, Lyon and Geneva. He took a leading part in assembling the Calvinist melodies of the 16th century, and tradition credits him with Old 100th, a tune often used for the Protestant doxology. A choral setting of it is among the sheet music on this site.
Loys, or Louis, Bourgeois was a French composer and music theorist. The Geneva records call him a native of Paris and the son of the late Guillaume Bourgeois. His surname is spelled in several ways in the sources: Borgois, Bourgois, Bourgoys, Bourjois. He worked in three cities, Paris, Lyon and Geneva, mostly within the Calvinist world.
Little is known about his early life. The first trace he left is three secular chansons printed in a Lyon collection of 1539.
By 1545 Bourgeois was in Geneva, working as a music teacher. On 14 July 1545 the city council first recorded him as a cantor on a salary of 60 florins, together with the cantor Guillaume Fabri, to take the place of Guillaume Franc, who had left for Lausanne. He was to sing the psalms at services and teach them to the children.
From 1546 until 1551 his salary was 100 florins and Bourgeois began teaching the children at the church of Saint-Gervais. He lived in the house called the choirboys' house, in front of Saint-Pierre cathedral. He made several repairs to it, and the cost was only partly reimbursed to him. In May 1546, together with the pastors, he drew up a table of the psalms to be sung each Sunday. The council ordered it to be printed and posted on the doors of the churches.
In 1547, according to the records, he had recently married Jeanne Leurat, whose father Jean Leurat was slow to pay the dowry. On 24 May Bourgeois was granted citizenship of Geneva free of charge, as the council thought well of him. In the same year he published his first four-voice psalms.
In 1549 and 1550 Bourgeois took part in collections of psalm tunes; Clément Marot and Théodore de Bèze had translated the texts for most of them. Nobody could say how much of this was his own invention, how much arrangement and how much simple gathering, until a copy of the 1551 Genevan Psalter, believed lost, reached the Rutgers University library. In a note to the reader Bourgeois sets out the exact share of his predecessors, his own changes and the melodies that were his.
He ranks among the three principal composers of the Genevan Psalter's tunes and wrote several dozen of them; many are still heard in Protestant services. He also worked on teaching singing. In April 1550 he showed the council a sheet for teaching singing, and the council rewarded him with a measure of wheat. In May Calvin allowed him to print at his own expense a short treatise on music, the Droict chemin de musique. On 5 September he obtained two months' leave, having found a replacement.
In January 1551 he asked to be rewarded in grain for improving the singing of the psalms, but the council put the decision off until the work was finished. This probably concerned the tunes of the Eighty-three Psalms, which appeared in 1551 and were reprinted until 1554. In March he is named among those who took part in a banquet with drums and trumpets. In September of that year the heavily indebted city halved his wages, and a child was born in his family. The council gave him two measures of wheat as compensation.
On 3 December 1551 Bourgeois was sent to prison for changing, without permission, the tunes of some well-known psalms. He was later released, but the matter did not end there: those who had already learned the old tunes did not want to learn the new ones. The council complained that the congregation had been confused and ordered Bourgeois's address to the singers to be burned.
In March 1552 he produced a new table giving the order of the psalms to be sung, and the council paid for its printing. In July a minister from Lausanne warned the Geneva council that Lausanne would probably not accept the changes Bourgeois had made. In 1551 and 1552 his relations with the council seem to have become strained.
In August 1552 he was given three months' leave, having found a replacement, to go to Lyon and Paris and publish works there. He then asked for an extension of eight more weeks. The council refused and ended his employment on 27 December. A petition from Bourgeois received at the end of January 1553 changed nothing: from February the cantor Pierre Vallette took his place. Bourgeois left Geneva and never returned.
On 24 March 1553 the Geneva council paid his wife 8 florins for repairs to their house and 60 sous to join her husband in Lyon. In that same year, 1553, Bourgeois published his Eighty-three Psalms in Lyon. What exactly he did in the city is not known.
Around 1554 he was criticised by the musician and music printer Simon Gorlier, and Bourgeois answered him sharply in three pamphlets. These printed sheets were recently found in the municipal library of Grenoble. While living in Lyon he also wrote a fierce invective against the Geneva publishers. In 1557 he is mentioned as a music master living in Lyon.
The same pamphlets also name the musicians Alamanno Layolle, Philibert Jambe de Fer and François Roussel, all living in Lyon at that time.
In 1560 Bourgeois was in Paris: on 27 May his daughter Suzanne was baptised at the church of Saint-Côme, with the instrumentalist Gregor Brayssing as godfather. He was then living in the rue Hautefeuille. The girl was baptised as a Catholic.
In the same year, 1560, a song of his came out with the publisher Nicolas Du Chemin. In 1561 Nicolas le Clerc reissued the Eighty-three Psalms, and after that Bourgeois's trace is lost.
Louis Bourgeois is the composer most responsible for the tunes of the Genevan Psalter. This psalter became the source of metrical psalmody both for the Reformed Church in England and for the Pilgrims in America. Some of its tunes are reminiscent of secular chansons, others were borrowed directly from the Strasbourg Psalter. The rest were composed in turn by Guillaume Franc, Bourgeois and Pierre Davantès.
Bourgeois's original versions are written for a single melodic line, as Calvin demanded; Calvin rejected counterpoint and every other kind of part-writing. Bourgeois nevertheless supplied four-part harmonizations too, though these were kept for music-making at home. Many of these settings are syllabic and chordal, with one note to each syllable of the text and the voices moving together. This manner of writing is still alive in numerous Protestant services.
Bourgeois's most famous tune is Old 100th. Tradition credits it to him, and the Protestant doxology is often sung to it. It is among the best-known melodies in the whole Christian world. His melodies are also heard in modern hymns: the penitential song in German "Du, Gott, liebst uns von Ewigkeit", dating from 1974, was included in some regional editions of the Catholic hymn book Gotteslob, among them the Mainz diocese one.
Bourgeois is known in the French Protestant world through the Genevan Psalter: he wrote several dozen of its melodies, and many of them are still heard in Protestant services. His output is not limited to church music: as early as 1539 three of his secular chansons were printed in Lyon, and in 1560 another song of his came out with Nicolas Du Chemin. While living in Geneva he condemned this genre as dissolute. Alongside the single-line psalms he also left four-part settings for singing and playing at home.
The Eighty-three Psalms are tied to Bourgeois's name: the book appeared in 1551 and was reprinted until 1554, Bourgeois published it in Lyon in 1553, and Nicolas le Clerc reissued it in 1561. Earlier, in 1547, he had published his first four-voice psalms, and in 1550 Calvin allowed him to print a short treatise on music, the Droict chemin de musique. In the note to the reader in the 1551 edition Bourgeois himself described what his predecessors had done and what he had changed.
Bourgeois was also a theorist: he prepared a sheet for teaching singing and the treatise Droict chemin de musique. The site has his Old 100th for SATB mixed choir, at a mid-level difficulty. That is the place to begin getting to know the composer.