ABSTRACT
Scholars of French music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have tended to avoid the word “baroque,” recoiling from its etymology of misshapen pearls, and have preferred the term “classic” to accord with the great emphasis on Greek and Roman antiquity that pervaded French taste in the visual arts, theatre, and the newly created French opera (tragédie lyrique), whose name as well as form referred to classical tragedy. The earliest French keyboard music of consequence comes from the Renaissance, when the publisher Attaingnant brought out seven volumes of organ and harpsichord music in 1531. Nothing more is known until nearly a century later, when in the 1620s Titelouze published a large number of his organ works, which he thought to be the first ever published in France. They stand apart stylistically from their sixteenth-century predecessors, but give little hint of the “classic” style that was to appear after another hiatus of two generations. There is no significant harpsichord music from this “preclassic” period.
