Surname
Billard
Given Name
Aubert
Role
Composer
Musician
Active period
1392 - 1394
Workplace
Paris
Institution
Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris
Biography
NG2 Billard
Billart
(fl ?c1400). French composer. He is known only from the four-voice Marian isorhythmic motet Salve virgo virginum/Vita via veritas/Salve regina in GB-Ob Can.misc.213 (ed. in Van den Borren, no.24). This is a work of exceptional mensural complexity and repeated harsh dissonances in the upper voices, optimistically described by Van den Borren as giving ‘some idea of improvised counterpoint, as it was practised in the fifteenth century’. The top voice has as its text one of the best-known glosses (Chevalier no.18318) on the antiphon used in the tenor. Given the manuscript context and the style of the work, Billart may well be identifiable with Aubert Billard (Albertus Billardi), a clerk and chaplain at Notre Dame, Paris, from 1392 to 1394.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A. Pirro: La musique à Paris sous le règne de Charles VI (1380–1422) (Paris, 1930/R)
C. Van den Borren, ed.: Polyphonia sacra: a Continental Miscellany of the Fifteenth Century (Burnham, Bucks., 1932, 2/1963)
C. Wright: Music and Ceremony at Notre Dame of Paris, 500–1500 (Cambridge, 1989), 301–2
DAVID FALLOWS
Billart
(fl ?c1400). French composer. He is known only from the four-voice Marian isorhythmic motet Salve virgo virginum/Vita via veritas/Salve regina in GB-Ob Can.misc.213 (ed. in Van den Borren, no.24). This is a work of exceptional mensural complexity and repeated harsh dissonances in the upper voices, optimistically described by Van den Borren as giving ‘some idea of improvised counterpoint, as it was practised in the fifteenth century’. The top voice has as its text one of the best-known glosses (Chevalier no.18318) on the antiphon used in the tenor. Given the manuscript context and the style of the work, Billart may well be identifiable with Aubert Billard (Albertus Billardi), a clerk and chaplain at Notre Dame, Paris, from 1392 to 1394.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A. Pirro: La musique à Paris sous le règne de Charles VI (1380–1422) (Paris, 1930/R)
C. Van den Borren, ed.: Polyphonia sacra: a Continental Miscellany of the Fifteenth Century (Burnham, Bucks., 1932, 2/1963)
C. Wright: Music and Ceremony at Notre Dame of Paris, 500–1500 (Cambridge, 1989), 301–2
DAVID FALLOWS
Bibliography
NG2
Wright 1989