(d after 1589). French composer. In December 1559 a Noel Millot was registered as one of the 12 clerks at the Ste Chapelle, Paris; this may have been Nicolas Millot, who is named as a singer in the royal chapel in several Parisian documents between 1560 and 1590. His four-voice settings of Accace d'Albiac's Proverbes de Salomon were published in 1567 with a dedication to Charles IX who in 1572 sent him from Chambord to Tours to find two boy choristers. In 1575 he won the silver lyre prize in the St Cecilia competition at Evreux for his chanson Les espis sont à Ceres, and was described as ‘one of the maîtres de chapelle to King Henri III’; when he resigned this post to the castrato Estienne le Roy in March 1585, he was reported to have been ‘sous-maître de la chapelle de musique du Roy’ for over 20 years. In 1578 he was referred to as a singer (‘haute-contre’) and composer at the royal chapel. His last recorded appointment was as maître des enfans in the chapel of the queen mother (Catherine de' Medici); his signature appears (in a weak hand) on a will in 1590.
30 polyphonic chansons by Millot were printed at Paris between 1556 and 1578. They include settings of poems by Eustorg de Beaulieu (Voici le beau temps), Guillaume Guéroult (Susane un jour) and Ronsard, as well as popular verse (e.g. J'ay l'alouette which is related to the folksong L'alouette, gentille alouette). His musical style is predominantly old-fashioned, resembling that of the Parisian chansons of Sandrin, Janequin and Arcadelt; the courtly pieces are generally homophonic with occasional imitative passages, and the rustic songs are more syllabic and contrapuntal. Only rarely does the contemporary tendency towards a treble melody and homophonic texture appear. The 20 Proverbes do not use Gindron's Huguenot melodies, as Janequin's settings do, but are freely composed.
Works
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Les [20] proverbes de Salomon mis en musique, 4vv (Paris, 1567) |
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30 chansons, 3–5vv, 155620, 1556²¹, 155715, 155910, 1559¹³, 1567¹¹, 156910, 156917, 15704, 15709, 1572², 157814, 157815 |
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1 ed. in Thibault and Perceau; 1 ed. F. Lesure, Anthologie de la chanson parisienne au XVIe siècle (Monaco, 1953) |
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1 ed. F. Dobbins, Oxford Book of French Chansons (Oxford, 1987) |
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26 ed. in SCC, xix (1991) |
Bibliography
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M. Brenet: Les musiciens de la Sainte-Chapelle du Palais (Paris, 1910/R)
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G. Thibault and L. Perceau: Bibliographie des poésies de P. de Ronsard mises en musique au XVIe siècle (Paris, 1941)
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F. Lesure and G. Thibault: Bibliographie des éditions d'Adrian le Roy et Robert Ballard (1551–1598) (Paris, 1955), 23–198