SUR L'UTILITÉ DES ARCHIVES ET DES BIBLIOTHÉQUES: un témoignage personnel.

A Norwegian researcher reports on his doctoral work on the composer Henry Du Mont (ca 1610–84). When Skaadel began his work, in 1995, Du Mont was hardly known in Norway, and few recordings or modern scores were available. Fortunately Du Mont enjoyed royal patronage at the French chapel royal, which meant that his works were published by the royal printer, Robert Ballard, and preserved in Parisian libraries such at the Bibliothèque nationale de France and Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève. This allowed research into Du Mont's Cantica Sacra (1652, 2nd edition 1662), Airs à quatre parties (1663), Motets à deux voix (1668) and Moteta a II.III et IV. parties, all published by Ballard; as well as some works that survive only in manuscript, such as the motet Media vita in morte sumus (currently in Uppsala, Sweden), and various works in the Brossard Collection at the BnF. Some Marian motets now in the Brussels Conservatoire seem beyond the limits of Du Mont's recognized style, and are not by the composer. An interesting feature of Du Mont's works is that certain motets from the 1652 Cantica borrow their texts, forms and melodic motives from Netherlandish or Belgian models by such composers as Sweelinck, Peter Philips or Leonard de Hodemont, and their music from Italian composers such as Giovanni Rovetta or Gasparo Casati. Furthermore, Du Mont's Jubilemus exultemus is based on a motet by Hodemont that in turn uses as a model a madrigal from Monteverdi's Seventh Book. This is surprising, since the three composers did not know each other, and suggests wide dissemination of their publications. A copy of Hodemont's Armonia recreatione in the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève has an ex libris notice ‘Ad usum H. a Monte’, which suggests that Du Mont once owned it. It is also possible that he owned several other prints now in F-Psg. Although the computer, and, especially, electronic communication between computers, along with the availability of microfilms, has somewhat simplified some aspects of research, today's researcher may still need to use ‘real’ copies of material from libraries, along with a notebook and pencil. If libraries disappear, our collective memory goes with them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]