Layolle, Francesco de [Francesco dell’Aiolle, dell’Aiolli, dell’Ajolle, dell’Aiuola]

(b Florence, 4 March 1492; d Lyons, c1540). Italian composer and organist. There was some confusion about his identity because Einstein suggested that there were two musicians with this name. Archival research, however, has confirmed that he was the first, and at that time the only, member of his family to become a professional musician. His musical career began shortly after his 13th birthday, when he was appointed a singer in the chapel of the Florentine church of the SS Annunziata. There he became acquainted with the organist and composer Bartolomeo degli Organi, from whom he eventually received private instruction. The master-pupil relationship was evidently a close one, and in later years he married Maddalena Arrighi, a younger sister-in-law of Bartolomeo. He was a friend of Andrea del Sarto, who in 1511 painted Layolle’s portrait, together with his own and that of the architect Jacopo Sansovino, in a fresco depicting the journey of the Magi in the atrium of the SS Annunziata. Layolle remained in Florence until 1518. According to his pupil Benvenuto Cellini, he had by that time established a reputation as ‘a fine organist and an excellent musician and composer’. In 1521 he settled in Lyons, where he lived until his death.

He also enjoyed the friendship of several Florentine men of letters, among them the poet Luigi Alamanni, who dedicated the sonnet Aiolle mio gentil cortese amico to him and spoke flatteringly of him in two other works (Egloga prima and Selve). The writer Antonio Brucioli introduced him, Alamanni and Zenobi Buondelmonte as interlocutors in one of his Dialoghi della morale philosophia (Venice, 1538, 2/1544). These men were among the principal figures in a group of Florentine republicans who unsuccessfully conspired to overthrow the Medici government in the spring of 1521. When the plot was discovered, Alamanni and Buondelmonte fled to Lyons, where Layolle gave them shelter. Although this and subsequent actions leave no doubt that Layolle’s sympathies lay with the republicans, the records of the judicial proceedings, in which the conspirators were condemned in absentia, show that he was not directly involved in the plot.

In Lyons he was employed as the organist at the Florentine church of Notre Dame de Confort and also composed, collected and edited music for a few of the printing firms there. After a brief association with the bookseller Etienne Gueynard, marked by the publication in 1528 of the Contrapunctus seu figurata musica, he joined forces with Jacques Moderne. During the decade 1530–40 they worked in close collaboration; from the prefaces to the 1532 and 1540 editions of the Liber decem missarum it may be deduced that Layolle not only contributed to but also edited the various volumes of sacred music issued by Moderne. Possibly in the early 1530s Moderne also published the six volumes of his sacred works that are now lost. Their association continued until the composer’s death, the date of which, although not documented, has generally been accepted as 1540, the last year in which new music of his appeared in dated publications of Moderne. Bibliographical evidence seems to confirm this date, for it was apparently in 1540 that Moderne issued Layolle’s volume of the Cinquanta canzoni, which closes with a lament on the composer’s death.

Layolle entered fully into the artistic and intellectual life of Lyons. Lionardo Strozzi, writing in 1534, spoke of often making music there with members of the Florentine community, among them Layolle. In 1537 the poet Eustorg de Beaulieu published a rondeau in praise of ‘a beautiful garden on the Saône in Lyons belonging to maistre François Layola, a most expert musician and organist’. He was also a close friend of the banker Luigi Sostegni, who in 1538 forwarded some of his compositions to Rome. In his letter of acknowledgment the poet Annibale Caro stated that they were well received.

Layolle cultivated all the principal forms of vocal polyphony current in his time. Although it would appear that he was primarily a composer of secular music, his church music must also have included the contents of the six lost volumes of motets, each of which (according to a contemporary catalogue of the Colombina Library, Seville) contained 12 works. Since at present only 11 of his extant motets can be assigned to these publications, some 61 remain lost. In addition there are three masses, one listed in the Colombina catalogue and two others mentioned by Zacconi in his Prattica di musica (Venice, 1592), which likewise seem not to have survived. Layolle apparently contributed more pieces to the Contrapunctus of 1528 than the three ascribed to him in the volume. Sutherland, on the basis of internal musical evidence, showed that all of its pieces are the work of one composer, most probably Layolle.

The extant sacred works illustrate his mastery of the most advanced techniques of his day and reveal that he was one of the first Italians to fuse successfully Italianate tonal-harmonic precepts with Franco-Flemish contrapuntal techniques. Missa ‘Adieu mes amours’, uses both parody and cantus firmus techniques: throughout the work only the first phrase of the chanson melody is used, employed as a tenor ostinato in various rhythmic patterns. Presentation of the entire melody is reserved for the last Agnus Dei, when in an expanded five-part texture, it is set out in the tenor beneath a freely composed canon for two altos. This mass also shares some thematic similarities with one of his motets, Libera me, Domine, which follows it in both editions of the Liber decem missarum. The parody technique is more fully exploited in Missa ‘O salutaris hostia’, where several voices of the polyphonic model are drawn upon simultaneously. Missa ‘Ces fascheux sotz’, composed between 1532 and 1540, is also a parody mass in which Gardane’s two-part chanson is extensively reworked into a complex and spirited fantasy for four voices.

The variety of contrapuntal techniques and the beauty of the melodies and harmonies in the motets also confirm Layolle’s place in the front rank of composers of his generation. It is possible that Layolle paraphrased a traditional melody in the first section of the lovely Christmas motet for four voices, Noe, noe, noe. The cantus firmus technique is prominent in Media vita and Salve, virgo singularis; in the four-voice Ave Maria an ostinato derived from the antiphon’s first phrase, provides the basis of the structure. Canons are successfully interwoven into the fabric of Ave virgo sanctissima, Libera me, Domine and Congregati sunt. Another setting of Ave Maria is a three-part canon.

Apart from a few early works, the bulk of his secular Italian music survives in two collections, the Venticinque canzoni a cinque voci (1540) and the Cinquanta canzoni a quatro voci, published by Moderne. Entitled canzoni, these pieces are in fact madrigals. Their texts, drawn from a number of poets – among them, Petrarch (the most frequently represented), Alamanni, Machiavelli and the brothers Strozzi – are typical of those set by the earliest masters of the genre. They also display many of the general musical characteristics found in contemporary madrigals. Several of the four-voice canzoni were in fact published in some of Arcadelt’s madrigal books; however, they were either omitted or ascribed correctly to Layolle in most later editions of the same volumes. One work, Lasciar il velo, was popular enough to be mentioned by Doni in his Dialogo della musica (Venice, 1554). It was also published in lute transcriptions by both Crema (1546) and Gintzler (1547), as well as in an ornamented vocal arrangement by Maffei (1562).

Two works in the collection of five-voice canzoni have French texts and are based on popular chansons. Another, Sì ch’io la vo seguire, makes use of a cantus firmus, unusual for madrigals of this period. The remaining works with French texts, published by Moderne in the first five volumes of Le parangon des chansons, display a diversity of styles. Notable among them are the canonic duo Les bourguignons, which celebrates the raising of the siege of Péronne in 1536, and Ce me semblent, written in the manner of the Parisian chanson made popular by Claudin.

WORKS

Edition:Music of the Florentine Renaissance: Francesco de Layolle, Collected Works, ed. F.A. D’Accone, CMM, xxxii/3–6 (1969–73) [D iii–vi]

sacred

secular

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EinsteinIM

G. Tricou: ‘Les deux Layolles et les organistes lyonnais du XVIe siècle’, Mémoires de la Société littéraire, historique et archéologique de Lyon (1898), 229

R. Gandolfi: ‘Intorno al codice membranaceo … N.2440’, RMI, xviii (1911), 537–49, esp. 540

H.E. Wooldridge: The Oxford History of Music, ii (London, 1932), 101

N. Bridgman: ‘Giovanni Camillo Maffei et sa lettre sur le chant’, RdM, xxxviii (1956), 3–34, esp. 22

C.W. Chapman: ‘Printed Collections of Polyphonic Music Owned by Ferdinand Columbus’, JAMS, xxi (1968), 34–84

D. Sutherland: Francesco de Layolle (1492–1540): Life and Secular Works (diss., U. of Michigan, 1968)

S.F. Pogue: Jacques Moderne, Lyons Music Printer of the Sixteenth Century (Geneva, 1969), 34

D. Crawford: ‘Reflections on Some Masses from the Press of Moderne’, MQ, lviii (1972), 82–91

D.A. Sutherland, ed.: The Lyons Contrapunctus (1528), RRMR, xxi–xxii (1976)

R.J. Agee: ‘Ruberto Strozzi and the Early Madrigal’, JAMS, xxxvi (1983), 1–17, esp. 9

FRANK A. D’ACCONE