ABSTRACT
The extent to which any history of music may be written is greatly dependent upon the chance nature of the survival of musical sources. In early to mid-seventeenth-century France, a period characterized by an extreme scarcity of extant sources of Latin sacred music, such thoughts are particularly apposite. By revisiting a major manuscript volume long known to musicologists, but still little understood, this study is intended to do just that. Consisting of 239 folios of music, the approximately 300 diverse works it contains constitute by far the largest body of Latin sacred music from, it is generally thought, the middle to late years of the seventeenth century. At the beginning of Pechon’s career, his position as a choriste at Saint-Germain would have involved no responsibility for the provision of liturgical music at the church.
