Born in Paris on December 12, 1703, René Drouard de Bousset was the oldest of eight children of Jean-Baptiste de Bousset, a celebrated singer and composer, and Marguérite de Sequeville. He is sometimes referred to as du Bousset or Dubousset. His family moved from the rue des petits Augustins to rue du Plâtre sometime between 1719 and 1725. René continued to live there after his father’s death in 1725 until about 1754 when his harpsichord pieces (now lost) were advertised for sale at his new home address. By 1759 Bousset was living on the Ile-St-Louis. Jean-Benjamin de La Borde (1734-1794) reports that although Bousset was trained as a painter, he started a musical career in his early twenties. He is known to have studied organ with Antoine Calvière (c.1695-1755) and composition with Nicholas Bernier (1665-1734). Bernier was Maître de musique at Sainte-Chapelle and famous as a teacher. Along with Jean-Baptiste Morin (1677-1745), Bernier was one of the earliest writers of cantatas in France. Bernier achieved a perfect blend of French and Italian styles in his first book of cantatas. The cantatas were made up of recitatives and da capo airs with expressive melodies based on the French tradition. It is no wonder that Bousset adopted the same technique of melding the two styles to great advantage, since he studied with Bernier. On the death of his father, Bousset was appointed Maître de musique for the Académie des inscriptions and the Académie des sciences. Bousset’s duties for both academies involved composing a motet annually for the feast of St. Louis and other services. Although there is no formal record that he studied with his father, he does credit his father’s influence in the dedication of his first publication of Airs sérieux et à boire (Serious airs and drinking songs) in 1729. In February 1739, he was appointed organist at St. André-des-Arts, where he received a salary of 300 livres. By this time he had published two volumes of Airs sérieux et à boire and six concertos en trio. His two volumes of Cantates spirituelles were published in 1739 and 1740. François-Joseph Fétis (1784-1871) in his Biographie universelle reported that Bousset “had been greatly drawn to the madness of the Convulsionnairies,” a group of eighteenth-century French religious pilgrims, who exhibited convulsions and later formed a religious sect and a political movement. The sect originated at the tomb of François de Pâris, a Jansenist deacon who was buried at Saint-Mèdard. The Convulsionnaires were associated with the Jansenist movement, which became more politically active after the papal bull Unigenitus banned the sect. Jansenists accepted the existence of relics and miracles and believed that God’s grace could be revealed through them. Pilgrimages to the tomb of Pâris continued over the years 1727-1730. During this period, roughly a dozen pilgrims declared that they had been miraculously cured at the tomb. In 1731 over 70 cures were announced from a variety of ailments, including paralysis, cancer and blindness. Miracles were not necessarily unusual in this period. It was reported that l’Abbé de Bescherand, who made daily pilgrimages to the cemetery had his “body wracked by convulsions that lifted him into the air, his face contorted by grimaces, and foaming at the mouth, he yelled and screamed for hours on end.” A number of other pilgrims began to exhibit similar convulsions, and the convulsion phenomenon began to rival and eclipse the miracle phenomenon. After the cemetery was closed in early 1732, the Convulsionnaires went underground and began to assemble in private homes. Bousset’s religious fervor led him to reject his secular writings and he reportedly broke the plates of his Airs sérieux et à boire. When his teacher Calvière died in 1755, he was one of four organists to replace him for one quarter of the year as organist of Nôtre-Dame Cathedral. At this time he also became organist at Sainte-Chapelle. He was appointed survivancier to Nicolas Forqueray as organist at Saint-Merry, however, Forqueray outlived Bousset. Fètis reported that “On Sunday, May 18, 1760, he (Bousset) was playing the organ at Nôtre-Dame (for the consecration of Cardinal de Rohan) with unusual vivacity. ‘Never,’ he exclaimed, ‘have I felt in such good form as I do today.’ At the Agnus Dei, he fell ill, paralysis set in, and the next day he died.” Despite having an active career in his last five years, his affairs were in a sorry state when he died. His three daughters were left dependent on the charity of the church for survival. In retrospect, Bousset was known more as a performer than a composer. Fètis called him one of the best French organists. Titon du Tillet (1677-1762) wrote that Bousset’s Airs were “well received by the public” and his Cantates spirituelles were composed in a manner “that would not fail to please.” Bousset’s cantatas utilize Biblical themes. The first volume (1739) contains six cantatas, five for high voice, and one for bass. The second volume (1740) has three cantatas for high voice(s): one is a duet. Some of them are written with a symphonie of one or two violins (or alternately flute and violin), an obbligato viol and basso continuo. The five high voice cantatas in the first volume also appear in a manuscript songbook that belonged to the Demoiselles or Dames of Saint-Cyr, so it is likely that they were studied or performed there. The French cantata owes it existence to the new spirit that began to emerge in French society with the decline of the reign of Louis XIV, which began when he revoked the Edict of Nantes. The edict had granted French Protestants religious and civil liberties. When deprived of this liberty, more than 400,000 Huguenots emigrated to England, Prussia, Holland and America, depriving France of its most industrious merchant class. The cantata can be seen as a bridge between the age of Lully and the age of Rameau. The first Italian cantatas were brought to Paris by Luigi Rossi in 1647, but met with great resistance. It took fifty years for French composers to adopt the Italian style. Italianate music was not well liked by Louis XIV. His taste ran to simple Airs from Lully’s Cadmus, not brilliant Italian playing. Life in the court of Louis XIV during the last years of his reign was aggravated by famines and financial catastrophes. Mme de Maintenon’s pious religious influence turned the court away from the former brilliant frivolity to somber pietism. Courtiers were increasingly drawn to the exciting world of the Parisian salon away from boring court life. Conversation in Parisian salons was witty and cultivated. Music may have provided a background to conversation. Literary matters were the focal point, but discussion ranged on topics from music, mathematics, astronomy and medicine to chemistry. As society returned to the city for artistic and intellectual stimulation, music began to thrive. It became fashionable to be learned. Sometimes musicians were honored guests at salons. Rameau went to salons at La Pouplinière’s, and the Couperin’s to Mme de Lambert. Even the composer Clérambault gave a concert in his home every two to three weeks. The term cantate was just beginning to come into use when Sebastien de Brossard (1655-1730) compiled his Dictionaire de musique, published in 1703. The term did not appear in his first dictionary, but in a later edition, he wrote: “In recent times very successful French cantatas have been composed. In them the various stages of each plot are presented in contrasting movements.” The early cantata, written for connoisseurs, included melodic and harmonic refinements not usually found at the Opéra. It used instrumental techniques found in Italy and was essentially a miniature dramatic work presenting a story in recitatives and airs, sometimes ending with a moral. The popularity of the cantata could have been a reaction against the old-fashioned music of Lully, coupled with the appeal of a performance in an intimate setting by professional musicians. The poet Jean-Baptiste Rousseau (1671-1741) gave the French cantata its distinctive shape. Around 1700, Rousseau became secretary to a powerful official, Hilaire Rouillé du Coudray. Rouillé loved music, especially Italian music. Rousseau started writing poems based on Italian cantata poetry and developed his own style of recitatives and airs, using classical mythology and allegories as his subjects. Rousseau writes: “ The Italians call these little poems ‘cantatas’ because they are particularly suitable for singing. They usually divide the poem into three recitatives alternating with airs.” He decided to give style to his cantatas using the “recitatives to form the body, and the airs the soul or moral.” Rousseau wrote twenty-seven cantata texts. Few cantata poets are known besides Rousseau and Antoine Houdar de la Motte (1672-1731), who wrote the texts for André Campra and Elizabeth Jacquet de La Guerre. The Mercure de France published 167 cantata texts between 1711 and 1771. The sacred cantata was a very small subset of the mostly secular French cantatas. Elizabeth Jacquet de La Guerre (1665-1729), Sébastien de Brossard (1655-1730) and René Drouard de Bousset (1703-1760) were the three main composers who wrote sacred cantatas. De La Guerre wrote 12 sacred cantatas, six published in 1708 and six in 1711. Brossard wrote six sacred cantatas, date unknown, but before 1730. Bousset wrote nine sacred cantatas in 1739 and 1740. In Bousset’s first volume of Cantates spirituelles, he used psalm texts. The following cantatas are based on psalms: 1) Maison du Dieu (Psalm 83), 5) Nous reverons donc (Psalm 121) and 6) Chante, Sion (Psalm 147). His second volume of three cantatas seems to feature a return to French style, with binary airs and movements flowing from one to another. The two-voice cantata, Elevons nos esprits, is unusual with through-composed and binary airs, only one recitative and extended instrumental sections. The second movement uses a pair of verses, one for each voice. Unlike the cantatas with identifiable stories, (Abraham and Tobie), Elevons has no story line. It is essientially a paean glorifying the works of God. Anne Danican Philidor’s (1681-1728) series of concerts, called Concert spirituel, which began its long career in 1725 at the Tuileries in Paris and lasted until 1790, initially presented motets and symphonies on religious Fête-days when the theaters and Opéra were closed. Later secular works to French texts were introduced. Philidor also started the Concert français, whose offerings were secular and included the popular cantata. This series had to compete with the other music presentations, but due to the quality of the musicians and the popularity of the cantata, they were quite successful. In this atmosphere the eighteenth-century French cantata blossomed, becoming so popular that by 1713 one observer remarked: " . . . cantatas and sonatas spring up under our very feet. A musician no longer arrives without a sonata or cantata in his pocket, and there are none who do not wish to write a work and have it engraved and beat the Italians at their own game; poets can scarcely keep pace with them and indeed there are even some texts that have suffered more than once the torture of Italianate music, so that here we are suffocated by cantatas." (L. T. M. de La Tour, Mercure galant, Nov, 1713) From the first cantatas by both Morin and Bernier to the late cantatas of Bousset, the primary life of the French cantata was short-lived. Bousset’s cantatas came after the popular period of this genre, and because they were sacred, not secular, it may be that they attracted a different audience. Very few printed copies of the cantatas of Bousset still exist. There are copies of his original publications in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, and a privately owned manuscript, dated 1760, contains the twelve sacred cantatas of Elizabeth Jacquet de La Guerre as well as the nine cantatas by René Drouard de Bousset. The 1760 manuscript is the primary source for this recording.