Musique mesurée

Its basis in a desire to re-create the artistic ethos of Ancient Greece, especially in respect to text declamation, had a strong similarity to contemporary movements in Italy, such as the work of the Florentine Camerata which engendered the first operas, and brought about the beginning of the Baroque era in music.

Beginning in the late 1560s in Paris, under the direction of Jean-Antoine de Baïf, a group of poets known as the Pléiade attempted to recreate the metrical effect of ancient Greek and Latin poetry in French, using the quantitative principles of those languages.

The attempt was more than an academic one: Baïf and his associates, horrified by the barbarity of the age, including the bloody religious wars which raged throughout the last decades of the century, sought to improve mankind by bringing back the ancient diction, which was believed to have had a positive ethical effect on its hearers.

As originally planned, the members of the Académie would be in a hierarchy of two grades: first, the composers and singers, known as the professionnels, and after that, the gentleman listeners, known as the auditeurs, who were also to provide financial backing for the enterprise.

The most famous of these was Claude Le Jeune, followed by Jacques Mauduit, Eustache Du Caurroy, Nicolas de La Grotte, and Guillaume Costeley.

[1] While musique mesurée was created and sung by a small group of people for a limited audience, and for the most part in secret, it was to have a profound effect on French music for the next hundred years.

The air de cour, the secular style of song which dominated the musical scene in France beginning in the 1580s, used the principles of musique mesurée with the difference that it usually used rhyming verse.