André Verchaly

André Verchaly (Angers, 4 December 1903 – Marseille, 12 September 1976) was a French musicologist specialising in secular vocal music of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, during the reigns of Henri IV and Louis XIII. His work belongs to the French academic tradition of historical musicology, and his name is associated with the editing and study of chamber repertoires of that period.

His training was first and foremost musical: he studied piano with Isidore Philipp and composition with Paul Vidal in Paris, between 1924 and 1930. After his career as a pianist and accompanist, which ran from 1925 to 1939, he turned to historical research. He attended Paul-Marie Masson's musicology classes at the Sorbonne between 1942 and 1946, and obtained the diploma of advanced studies in history.

For much of his professional life he worked as a technical music adviser at the Ministry of Youth, from 1945 to 1968, with a four-year interruption devoted to research at the CNRS (1955–1959). In 1949 he was appointed general secretary of the French Musicological Society. He continued the line opened by Gérold, which he extended with new contributions, and he contributed to the major French and foreign music dictionaries and encyclopaedias.

His legacy lies above all in his studies of the court air, the lute and lute tablatures, with articles on Gabriel Bataille, Desportes and Jacques Mangeant, and in editions such as Airs de cour pour voix et luth (1603–1643). His work is valued for combining notable documentary rigour with elegant prose.