Jean Mouton (his first name is also spelled Jehan, the medieval ayw, of Johannes, in Latin) was a (Franco-)Flemish Polyphony-composer of the Third Generation (championed by Josquin Des Prez), best known for his refined motets. He probably got his first job, as singer and teacher, at the collegiate church in Nesle (southeast of Amiens) in 1477, becoming in 1483 its maître de chapelle. Sometime around this time he was ordained priest (later deriving some income from benefices — ecclesiastical positions — at St. André in Grenoble and in St. Quentin), and in 1500 was in charge of choirboys at the cathedral in Amiens. In 1501 Mouton was active in Grenoble (in the Dauphiné), teaching choirboys, but he left in 1502, most likely entering the service of Anne, the last Queen of Brittany and wife of Louis XII of France, and in 1509 he was granted a position again in Grenoble which he could hold in absentia. For the remainder of his life Mouton served the French court in one capacity or another, since 1515 as principal composer under the next Valois-king, François I, often writing music for state occasions — weddings, coronations, papal elections, births and deaths.

He may have edited the masterly illuminated Medici Codex, an official gift from François I to Lorenzo de Medici, Duke of Urbino. His compositions were among the favorites of Pope Leo X, for whose election in 1513 he composed the motet “Christus vincit”; Leo who evidently liked Mouton’s music rewarded him with the honorary rank of apostolic notary (a college in the Roman Curia) on the occasion of a motet he composed for the pope in 1515; the pope made this award during his meeting in Bologna with the French king after the Battle of Marignano. This trip to Italy was the first, and probably only trip that Mouton made outside of France.

Circa 1520 the Swiss music theorist Heinrich Glarean met Mouton and praised him effusively, writing that “everyone had copies of his music”, characterizing Mouton’s melodic style with the phrase “his melody flows in a supple thread” and used several examples of Mouton’s music in his influential treatise, the Dodecachordon. Adrian Willaert (of the fourth generation, champion of the Venetian school) was his student in Counterpoint and Canon-techniques at the royal court in Paris circa 1514-15 and honored him by basing two Parody masses (“imitation” was at the time considered hommage, not plagiarism) on Motets by him: “Gaude Barbara” and “Missa Quaramus cum Pastoribus”. It is unproven but likely that Mouton was in charge of the elaborate musical festivities by the French (as William Cornysh, on the English side) at the meeting between François I and Tudor-king Henry VIII at the Field of the Cloth of Gold in June 1520. Near the end of his life, Mouton moved to St. Quentin, apparently taking over as canon from Loyset Compère who died in 1518, where Jehan also died and was buried.

[This contribution is endebted to the book “De Vlaamse Polyfonie” by KULeuven’s musicology professor Ignace Bossuyt and the HOASM site which links below.]