The Lost Voices Project

Companion resource to Les livres de Chansons Nouvelles de Nicolas Du Chemin (1549–1568), hosted by the Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance in Tours, France

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Cartier, Antoine

fl. 1550’s–1588

Some 29 chansons for three and four voices are ascribed to Cartier in publications of Du Chemin and Le Roy et Ballard. Cartier worked as organist to the church of St. Séverin in the Latin Quarter of Paris between 1570 and 1588. Cartier was active in France during the 1550’s too, for in 1557 the firm of Le Roy et Ballard published a book of three-voice chansons by him, the Vingt et une chansons nouvellement composées à trois parties par M. Antoine Cartier. This album was dedicated to a member of the Pléiade literary circle, Loise Larcher, who evidently had been one of Cartier’s pupils. In his preface to this book, Cartier explains that the chansons found here began as arrangements of works for four voices. This preface is transcribed in François Lesure and Genevieve Thibault, Bibliographie des éditions d'Adrian Le Roy et Robert Ballard, 1551-1598 (Paris: Heugel, 1955), p. 29. For a bibliographical description of the chansonnier, see pp. 72-73 of the same volume. A’Vostre advis” to a text by N. Bargedé; Caverneuse montagne to a poem from Pontus de Tyard, Continuation des Erreurs of 1551; “Quand un bon pere asiste” to a text from G. Corrozet’s Blasons domestiques of 1539. Frank Dobbins, “Cartier, Antoine” New Grove 2, V, 211. Also see Brooks, Courtly Song in Late Sixteenth-Century France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).