Nicolas Lebègue

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Nicolas-Antoine Lebègue (1631 – July 6, 1702) was a French Baroque composer, organist and harpsichordist. Although he was an innovative composer and quite famous during his lifetime, Lebègue's music is rarely performed or recorded today. He is perhaps best remembered as the teacher of Nicolas de Grigny.

Little is known about Lebègue's early years and musical training. By 1656 he was living in Paris and by 1661 he was already known as the famous Paris organist. Indeed, the surviving copies of his music are much more numerous than those of other organ composers of the era, apparently he was a highly acclaimed musician. In 1664 he became organist of Church Saint-Merry. He occupied that post until his death in 1702. He published three "livres d'orgue" [organ books] that, according to their prefaces, were designed to show how professional organists played in Paris. Lebegue wrote in the 8 church modes, just like the Renaissance organ masters such as Titelouze, but his works are already tending toward modern tonality. He codified the types of French classical organ pieces (Plein jeu, tierce en taille, echo, dessus de cromhorne, etc.) that are standard in all the other classical French organ composers, but he also is an important intermediary step between the Renaissance organists and JS Bach, who copied De Grigny's Livre d'Orgue by hand. Although some tonalities seem to us like minor and some like major, there is also a characteristic modulation that may differentiate them. For instance A minor can modulate to C major or to E major. These modulations come from the "mediant" of the old church modes. In other words, although the tonic in both cases is A, one mode may have a mediant of C and the other of E.

1 Works
2 See also
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Works

Title page of Troisieme livre d'orgue.

Lebègue was the first French composer to apply the term suite to harpsichord suites and one of the first to compose suites for organ. He also contributed to the development of the unmeasured prelude by introducing the usage of different note values in such pieces and by making attempts to explain, in publications, how to play the pieces. The very first published unmeasured preludes appear in Lebègue's Le pièces de clavessin (1677).

His surviving works include:

1er livre d'orgue (1676), 8 organ suites in the eight Church Modes.
2e livre d'orgue (1678), a mass and Magnificat settings for organ.
3e livre d'orgue (1685), miscellaneous organ pieces.
two volumes of harpsichord works (Pièces de clavecin, 1677 and 1687), some of which were, for some time, falsely attributed to Dieterich Buxtehude (see List of compositions by Dieterich Buxtehude).

[edit] See also

French organ school

[edit] References

Edward Higginbottom. "Nicolas Lebègue", The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. S. Sadie and J. Tyrrell (London: Macmillan, 2001), xiv, 429.