Louis Bourgeois

Louis, or Loys, Bourgeois was a French Renaissance musician, theorist, and editor, born in Paris about 1510; the details of his death, conventionally placed about 1561, remain uncertain. His earliest known publications were secular chansons issued at Lyon in 1539. He later moved to Geneva, became a citizen, and served the Reformed churches as a cantor and music teacher during the years when vernacular metrical psalmody was taking shape.

Bourgeois made his most important contribution through the Genevan Psalter. He composed, adapted, edited, and organized melodies for French versions of the Psalms by Clément Marot and Théodore de Bèze. His 1550 treatise Le droict chemin de musique proposed a method for learning to sing. In 1551 Geneva's authorities briefly imprisoned him for altering familiar psalm melodies without authorization; John Calvin intervened for his release. The episode shows that these tunes were already communal possessions that worshipers resisted relearning, even while editors were still revising them.

OLD HUNDREDTH first appeared in the 1551 Genevan Psalter with Psalm 134 and is customarily attributed to Bourgeois, although the precise authorship of individual Genevan melodies is not always demonstrable. The tune later acquired its English name through its association with William Kethe's version of Psalm 100 and became still more familiar with Thomas Ken's doxology. Bourgeois did not compose it for Cennick's table grace; their works, separated by nearly two centuries, were joined by later hymnal practice.