Douce beauté. Pierre Guédron et l’air de cour, 1590-1640

The Boston Camerata explores again a little-known side of early music repertoire; Douce beauté (Sweet Beauty). With its accessible melody, strophic form and simplified polyphony to facilitate the understanding of the text, the air de cour marks the entry of France into the baroque era. 

Joel Cohen and his ensemble perform a bouquet of pieces by with its most famous representative Pierre Guédron, in their original polyphonic version or in reductions for solo voice and lute. They also play various interesting examples of contrafacta, sacred adaptations of the airs’ profane texts using the same music, and evidence of the influence this musical style had in neighboring countries with foreign adaptations in Dutch, English, Spanish or German.