The chansons of De Bussy and Millot: A study in originality

Abstract

The principal object of this thesis is to furnish a practical edition of the complete surviving works of De Bussy and Millot. These two sixteenth-century French composers between them had some seventy-six chansons published in Paris between 1553 and 1585, only thirteen of which - two by De Bussy and eleven by Millot - have since appeared in modern editions. Thus, the greater proportion of the volume is given over to transcriptions of the surviving chansons of De Bussy and Millot, and to transcriptions and photocopies of selected settings by their contemporaries, which have been added for comparative purposes.The actual text of the thesis is divided into three chapters, the first of which is biographical and historical, while the third presents the findings of a detailed analytical study of the chansons of both composers. A comparison of the works attributed to De Bussy and Millot with settings of the same texts by their contemporaries forms the basis of the second and central chapter - a study which serves to illustrate the extraordinary extent to which plagiarism and musical parody were practised by composers of the period.