Mlle Bocquet

Mademoiselle Bocquet was a French lutenist and composer of the first half of the seventeenth century, born in Paris around the beginning of that century and also dying in Paris after 1660. Her birth dates are uncertain, as only an approximation survives, and it is not certain whether her Christian name was Anne or Marguerite.

Her name is linked to the literary circle that Mademoiselle de Scudéry, of whom she was a confidante, gathered in her salon between 1653 and 1659, a salon inspired by that of the Hôtel de Rambouillet. There she mingled with artists and with some of the founders of the Académie Française, among them Sarazin, Conrart, Pélisson and Chapelain. Her contemporaries praised her skill on the lute, which is described as prodigious.

With great likelihood, she is credited with a manuscript preserved in Paris containing seventeen preludes for lute intended to mark the cadences, together with a prelude in all the keys. These pieces traverse a range of tonalities and draw on the chromatic possibilities of the instrument. Other lute works signed with her surname are found in French, German and English sources of the second half of the seventeenth century.

Her legacy is modest in volume, but valuable because it documents the presence of a woman composer in French chamber music of her time. Her work was recovered in a modern edition in 1972.