Most of them were "rustic" in character, similar to patter songs, using onomatopoeia, double entendres, and frequent obscenity, a common feature of popular music in France and the Low Countries in the 1530s.
[1][2] Some details of Passereau's life have been compiled by scholars, including pioneering 19th-century musicologist François-Joseph Fétis in his enormous Biographie universelle des musiciens (1834).
Passereau first appears in the historical record as a tenor singer in the chapel of the Count of Angoulême (who was later to become King Francis I); therefore he was already an adult, and born before about 1495.
He is known to have written one sacred composition, a motet, Unde veniet auxilium michi (the text is from Psalm 120, and used in the Office of the Dead).
[2][3] Additional features of Passereau's chansons include the use of quick declamation, chordal passages with occasional polyphony, generally syllabic word setting, satirical and ribald subjects, and catchy rhythms.