Claude Le Jeune

Claude Le Jeune (French pronunciation: [klod lə ʒœn]; 1528 to 1530 – buried 26 September 1600) was a Franco-Flemish composer of the late Renaissance.

He was the primary representative of the musical movement known as musique mesurée, and a significant composer of the "Parisian" chanson, the predominant secular form in France in the latter half of the 16th century.

In 1581, in collaboration with Baïf, d'Aubigné and Ronsard, he wrote incidental music for the wedding of the Duke of Joyeuse and the queen's half-sister, Marie de Lorraine.

Claude Goudimel, a very similar composer whom Le Jeune may have known, was murdered by a Catholic mob in Lyon during the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre in late August 1572.

Next, Le Jeune settled in La Rochelle, a stronghold of the Huguenots, but sometime in the mid-1590s he must have returned to Paris, for his name appears in a list of musicians of the royal household of Henry IV both in 1596 and 1600.

Few other details from late in his life are known, but he must have been composing prolifically, judging by the enormous quantity of music which remained in manuscript at his death, most of which was published in the first two decades of the 17th century.

It was one of the last collections of chansons of the Renaissance, of any type; following its publication, the air de cour was the predominant genre of secular song composition in France.

He was fortunate in that his copious manuscripts were published after his death: his friend, the equally gifted and prolific composer Jacques Mauduit, was fated to have most of his music lost.