Like their modern-day counterparts, church musicians of the ancien régime had to be mobile. The often precarious nature of their employment meant they could not count on serving one institution for life—or even for very long. As these singers and instrumentalists traveled from church to church and city to city in search of work, they brought with them music and performance traditions learned elsewhere, which in turn mingled with the foreign habits they sometimes encountered in their new positions. The circulation of church musicians and their music through France forms the subject of this intriguing new book, a collection of essays by scholars affiliated with MUSEFREM, the decade-long research project devoted to early modern French sacred music. At a time when the field of musicology is eager to grapple with new issues of musical dissemination and cultural transmission, the book offers a useful account of some of the methodologies available for exploring the geographic and institutional movements of a particularly itinerant community and its music.

Historical evidence for the circulation of people and scores is manifold, and the book’s essays divide into three general categories depending on the authors’ object of study: sources and repertoires (including the movement of manuscripts, publications, and genres from one location or context to the next), structures (such as ecclesiastical organization, bureaucracy, and hiring practices), and case studies of specific churches or musicians. Two essays from the first category, I suspect, will most interest musicologists. In the first, Jean Duron looks at the ways provincial composers of sacred music borrowed from and imitated the dramatic works of Jean-Philippe Rameau. He puts forward the attractive theory that these church composers borrowed from Rameau not to theatricalize their sacred compositions, but rather because his original passages already contained a certain “grâce divine” (111) that called out for reworking into new sacred contexts. Thierry Favier, meanwhile, examines Georg Philipp Telemann’s Deus judicium tuum, a motet à grand chœur composed in 1738 for a popular concert series in Paris, the Concert spirituel. Favier expertly traces the cultural and musical constraints shaping both the composition and reception of Telemann’s motet, the first work by a German composer performed at the Concert spirituel. Most of the other essays in the volume deal with musicians of far less renown, but their findings are no less interesting. Those that take up institutional policy are particularly evocative of the everyday realities and hardships faced by average musicians. Marie-Claire Mussat reproduces several letters of candidature sent by young singers to churches in hopes of securing employment. She reveals some of the strategies applicants used in letters to pique the interest of their correspondents and to negotiate better conditions. Georges Escoffier’s essay begins to fill in the other side of the equation: the ways institutions recruited new musicians to staff their continually depleted ranks. Letters of recruitment, word of mouth, want-ads in newspapers, competitions—church administrators employed diverse methods to attract competent singers and instrumentalists to their far-flung parishes. The volume is at its best when it places such issues of institutional logic and personal strategy in dialogue with one another.

Each contributing author displays an impressive command of the literature and archival materials; nevertheless, there is a noticeable hesitancy throughout the book to draw firm conclusions or venture bold hypotheses on the nature of musical circulation in the ancien régime. Part of this no doubt is due to the communal nature of the enterprise, with each scholar assigned one piece of a larger puzzle. The refusal to indulge in historical synthesis may be admirable, but as a result the broader significance of some of the book’s more localized reports on specific church practices and repertoires is unclear. Finally, it should be noted that despite the book’s title the majority of essays address the mid- to late eighteenth century, perhaps because of the greater number of surviving sources. These qualms aside, MUSEFREM has produced a rich, multifaceted work, one that sheds new light on a difficult but fascinating topic.