ABSTRACT
When in 1670 Jacques Champion de Chambonnières initiated the publication of 60 of his pieces in the first harpsichord collections of their kind, Les Pieces de claveßin de Monsieur de Chambonnières, he explained that he had done so because his music was circulating in unfaithful copies (“copies Infideles”) that he believed were compromising his reputation. Today’s ideas about the nature, functions and replication of musical texts might lead us to suppose that Chambonnières was worried about textual corruption, but this is not the case; harpsichordists of Chambonnières’s day valued spontaneity, and spontaneity meant not only that performers need not follow texts literally but that no harpsichord composition could be represented adequately by a single text, even a holograph. For Chambonnières, the copies Infideles were bad not because they were textually corrupt but because their readings represented performing styles other than his own, styles he considered to be in poor taste. The texts in his 1670 publication enabled him to regain control of his compositions by indicating, insofar as text could, how he himself performed them. They preserve elements of his performing style, but they are less to be regarded as authoritative texts of his works than as texts of authoritative performances.
