Louis Bourgeois (composer)

The extent to which he was composer, arranger or compiler was not certain, until a long-lost copy of the Genevan Psalter of 1551 came to the library of the Rutgers University.

Unfortunately, he fell foul of local musical authorities and was sent to prison on 3 December 1551 for changing the tunes for some well-known psalms "without a license."

His daughter was baptized in Paris in May 1560 (as a Catholic), and also in 1560 a Parisian publisher posthumously printed a volume of his secular chansons – a form he had condemned as "dissolute" during his Geneva years.

Louis Bourgeois is the one most responsible for the tunes in the Genevan Psalter, the source for the metrical psalmody of both the Reformed Church in England and the Pilgrims in America.

Many of the four-part settings are syllabic and chordal, a style which has survived in many Protestant church services to the present day.