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THE EARLIEST SURVIVING MUSIC MANUSCRIPT FROM NEW ORLEANSFrench Baroque Music of New Orleans: Spiritual Songs from the Ursu - line Convent (1736) = Musique francaise baroque a la Nouvelle-Orleans: Recueil d'airs spirituels des Ursulines (1736). Edited by Alfred E. Lemmon, with essays by Jean Duron, Alfred E. Lemmon, Mark McKnight, Jennifer Gipson, and Andrew Justice. New Orleans: The Historic New Orleans Collection, 2014. [Pref. in Eng. with summary in Fre., p. vi-vii; introd. in Fre. with summary in Eng., p. viii-xii; other essays in Eng. with summaries in Fre., p. 1-26; featured composers and contributors, p. 27; color facsim., p. 29-283. Softcover. ISBNs 0-917860- 65-9 & 978-0-917860-65-2; ISMN 979-0-800031-00-7. $110.]The French founded the city of New Orleans in 1718, and immediately populated it largely with adventurers, vagabonds, and undesirables from Paris and the rest of France. In 1724 the colony had enough young boys sired by the colonials to bring in priests to educate them. Not to be outdone by the boys, in 1727 the girls of New Orleans were provided with education, too. A small contingent of Ursuline nuns, brought in to offer medical support for the colony, also had the goal to save these young girls from the sins of their fathers through religious instruction. A significant tool for such education was the singing of songs with proper texts.The Ursuline manuscript, the facsimile of which is the subject of this review, is a collection of 294 such songs. It was copied in France in 1736 by an anonymous young woman "C. D." and brought to New Orleans in 1754 as a giftfrom a "Mr Nicollet." As such it is the oldest music of any kind that was performed in the city that has survived to the present day. The Ursuline facsimile has been carefully and beautifully edited by Alfred Lemmon, director of the Williams Research Center of the Historic New Orleans Collection where the manuscript has resided since 1998. The handwriting of the original is very clear, including an original one-page "avis" by C. D., and there are no problems in reading the music or the texts. The intent is to serve performers who wish to sing the songs, but it also provides the scholar with important material for the early history of music in what became one of the most important centers of music in America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. (A few of the songs were recorded on the compact disc Manuscrit des Ursulines de La Nouvelle Orleans, Le Concert Lorrain, cond. Anne- Catherine Bucher, K617 K617134 [2001].)To understand the significance of the Ursuline manuscript, Lemmon has included five essays that place the document in context. All are well annotated. Jean Duron introduces the facsimile with an overview of the manuscript as well as the printed edition on which it is based: the Nouvelles poesies spirituelles et morales sur les plus beaux airs de la musique francoise et italienne avec la basse, which was published in Paris in eight recueils (collections) from 1730 to 1737. As the title of the printed publication suggests, most of the music consists "of contrafacta-spiritual texts set to fashionable tunes" (p. viii). He surmises that Monsieur Nicollet was Gabriel-Francois Nicollet, who authored "a guidebook to practicing the Sacred Heart aspect of Catholic adoration" (p. viii) at about the same time that he donated the manuscript to New Orleans. Duron then describes all that is known of the Ursuline convent during its earliest years. Lemmon's own essay reviews the history of colonial music in the city from 1718 to 1804, when New Orleans leftthe realms of France and Spain and joined the United States. In the preface, Lemmon also describes the Historic New Orleans Collection and its importance as an archive for historical research into the life and music of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.Mark McKnight describes the Nouvelles poesies in greater detail. This is a huge collection of more than 450 songs, which were accompanied by fables in the style of La Fontaine, but the fables were not copied into the Ursuline manuscript. … |
