Is it too late to say 'Happy New Year'? I could swear I did a blog post earlier this month, but maybe that's just my faulty memory. Anyway, now that the New Year is slightly underway, I want to talk about something curious that I've been trying to work out.
For those who may be unfamiliar, Jehan Symon dit Hasprois (we'll just call him Hasprois for brevity's sake) is a late 14th-early 15th century composer who had a stint at the antipope's court in Avignon. This was the context I found his name in when searching through Craig Wright's Musicians at the Court of Burgundy, and I later found out that he did much more: serving Charles V of France, staying in the Portugese court for some time, having several benefices (including at Arras, Rozoy and Cambrai), and so on. Most importantly for our purposes today, he died in 1428. So far so good, and I set about drafting a short biography for Ricercar DataLab's Prosopography of Renaissance Singers project.
However, something threw me off this established sequence of events. In a 2024 publication within the book Composers in the Middle Ages, Dr. Yolanda Plumley mentions that in 2004 Dr. Alejandro Planchart had turned up evidence from Arras that Hasprois died in 1417. When I found this midway through compiling a biography draft for Hasprois, I had to shut down my computer and stare at the wall for a bit. Then, a day later, I had a call with the project supervisor to talk about this detail and how it affects our perception of Hasprois's life. It was a meaningful enough departure from previous scholarship that it merited Hasprois getting a written biography on the RDL page (as opposed to 'See [Grove] Dictionary', which meant that my initial efforts would have been redundant if not for the death-year issue), and I realized that I need to distinguish what could have happened and what cannot have happened before 1417.
So, for some context, the information in the first paragraph is mainly from a scholar called Dr. Ursula Günther, and not only has she authored an article going into the lives of late 1300s composers (titled Zur Biographie einiger Komponisten der Ars subtilior), she has written the Grove Dictionary entry on Hasprois's life, complete with the 1427 death year.1 Some of the things that she mentions reach until 1427, such as holding a canonicate at Cambrai (which was only vacated in 1427) and his career as an apostolic notary. Now, 'Jehan Symon' or any of its regional spelling variants is a pretty common name as far as late 14th-century people go. There's no doubting that there are multiple of them, and Günther and Plumley/Planchart have possibly gotten two seperate Jehan Symons, only one of which died before or in 1417. So I went back to Zur Biographie, checking what happened before and after that year. The canonicates from Rozoy and Arras were from before 1417, as is the service to Charles V and relation to the Portugese court, but the Jean Symon who died in 1417 cannot have been an apostolic notary, or a canon at Cambrai (though he was possibly a priest there, which is different status-wise and that was before 1417). So I have managed to clear up some details, but then distinguishing the specific events that happened to Jehan Symon dit Hasprois (as opposed to another Jehan Symon) before 1417 is another question altogether.
As you could probably tell by now, I'm banking on Plumley/Planchart's 1417 death year for Hasprois, which is the basis of why I am doing this whole investigation. But I have to crosscheck Günther's sources again, and I only managed to find a free online copy of one of them today. Also, I am this close to ordering a photographic reproduction of the source that Planchart mentioned to Plumley from the Archivo Segreto Vaticano out of desperation. Such is life.
O preclara stella maris, from the Glogauer Liederbuch. The actual piece itself is not half bad, but the sound engineer was clearly half asleep for the organ solo at the beginning, because the overtones of the organ were emphasized instead of the actual sounding pitches. And that leads to... an genuinely interesting piece of new music! Shame that it wasn't done intentionally, but it gave me some inspiration once I realized what was going on.