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A Thematic Catalogue of the Works of Michel-Richard de Lalande (1657-1726).

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A Thematic Catalogue of the Works of Michel-Richard de Lalande (1657-1726). By Lionel Sawkins. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. [xlvii, 700 p. ISBN 0-19-816360-6. $225.] Music examples, facsimiles, tables, bibliographies, indexes.

Lionel Sawkins has been working with the music of Michel-Richard de Lalande for more than thirty years, and he has long been recognized by his colleagues as the leading authority. He began publishing on Lalande in 1975, and by 1984 had complete control of the sources for Lalande's motets, contributing 400 entries to the Catalogue thematique des sources du grand motet (ed. Jean Mongredien [Munich: K. G. Saur, 1984]). Along the way, Sawkins wrote a dissertation, "The Sacred Music of Michel-Richard de Lalande (1657-1726)" (Ph.D. diss., University of London, 1993), and edited a great deal of Lalande's music. The present thematic catalog, all 700 big pages of it, is a lifetime achievement and a resounding success.

The importance of Lalande is perhaps not common knowledge today even among musicologists and music librarians. A generation younger than Jean-Baptiste Lully, Lalande quickly rose to prominence at the court of Louis XIV. He became one of the four Sous-maitres de la chapelle in 1683, personally chosen by the king,...

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