Chœur Louisbourg / Monique Richard / Skye Consort CHANSONS D'AMOUR D'ACADIE ET DE FRANCE

To mark its 10th anniversary, the Louisbourg Choir offers an original and exceptional musical program of Acadian folksongs and polyphonic songs from the Renaissance. Drawn from the collections La Fleur du rosier: chansons folkloriques d’Acadie (Labelle and Creighton, 1988) and Chansons d’Acadie 6e série (Boudreau and Chiasson, 1996), the folksongs have been specially arranged for this occasion by Seán Dagher of the Skye Consort. He has brought them to life here in new and creative ways: rich vocal harmonies and the timbral colors of early instruments are deployed with the finesse and subtlety usually associated with serious art music. 

The polyphonic chansons are the work of Jacotin (active from 1516 to 1556), one of the most mysterious of Renaissance musicians. Often based on earlier monodic songs, some courtly, others saucy or rustic, these skillfully constructed chansons are the works of a highly gifted composer following in the tracks of Josquin Desprez and Jean Mouton. Jacotin began his career in Rome, serving Pope Leo X as a member of his private chapel, the Sixtine chapel. He continued, and completed, his career in France where, during the reigns of Francois I and Henri II, he served the royal court as one of the “chantres et chanoines ordinaires de la chapelle de musicque”. Well regarded, notably by the humanist François Rabelais, the poet Jehan Du Four, and the music theorists Pietro Aaron and Stephano Vanneo, Jacotin’s works, like those of several other minor masters at the same time, have unjustly fallen into oblivion.

This is unfortunate because, as the musicologist Edward Lowinsky has rightly pointed out, the true artistic level of a culture can best be measured by the accomplishments of its minor masters, rather than by the work of established grand masters such as Josquin, Palestrina, Bach, or Mozart. Over the past 20 years, a good deal of musicological research has been carefully carried out on some of these numerous minor masters, rescuing them from the shadows to which most music historians have confined them. Nonetheless and cruelly, professional vocal ensembles still neglect them. There are some scattered recordings of Jacotin’s songs, but only of fewer than 10 of the 43 known songs, and these are mostly earlier recordings of debatable quality, and often in instrumental rather than vocal versions. Hence it becomes clear why a recording largely, though not entirely, dedicated to Jacotin is interesting, relevant, valuable, original and, in fact, unique. (Patrice Nicolas)