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Clément Janequin
1485 - 1558
born in Châtellerault, France, composed during the Renaissance period
Biography
Among the great composers of his age (for example, Isaac, Josquin, Taverner, Willaert, Morales), Clément Janequin looms as something of a sport, a master storyteller, an audacious joker, a lover of the bawdy anecdote, an imperishable tone poet, a keen observer who turned street cries to music through the medium of the chanson. While his contemporaries practiced flowing contrapuntal austerities and exquisite charm, Janequin's onomatopoeic glees are alive with a sensation of the actual that lends him a close kinship to his great contemporary, François Rabelais, and has kept his music in performance from his time to now. Ezra Pound traced Janequin's art to a sensibility born with troubadour poet Arnaut Daniel, embodying so vivid a line that the famous Chant des oiseaux in Gerhart Münch's transcription for solo violin (reproduced as the body of Pound's Canto LXXV) retained the geste "not of one bird but of many." And yet, despite the enormous international avidity for his work, his life is sparsely documented and remains largely conjecture. He may have been a pupil of Josquin's as his work is grounded in masterly contrapuntal technique. From 1505 he was known to have been in the service of Lancelot de Fau, a well-appointed man-of-affairs who became Bishop of Luçon in 1515, and who seems to have retained Janequin until his death in 1523.