Guillaume de La Moeulle

Guillaume de La Moeulle, also known under the spellings La Mole, La Moulaz or La Mule, was a composer, instrumentalist and singer born in Geneva around 1485 and who died in the same city in September 1556. His career belongs to the Geneva of the Reformation, when the city had become a republic and Protestantism shaped local musical life.

Before settling permanently in Geneva, he served as secretary to the city's last bishop, Pierre de La Baume, and earned a reputation as a violinist, although he is referred to by a term of the period that does not allow his exact function to be determined with certainty. The republic granted him citizenship in January 1517. In 1545 he is documented as an instrumentalist in Lyon, and he probably lived there for some years before that, since Jacques Moderne published seven of his chansons between 1538 and 1543.

In October 1553, Calvin and his council appointed him cantor of the cathedral of Saint-Pierre, replacing Loys Bourgeois, who had moved to Lyon the previous year. Despite his poor health and financial difficulties, he composed numerous psalms, canticles and chansons spirituelles for four voices. The tenor melodies of these works were published in 1554, although those of the chansons spirituelles coincide with those of Didier Lupi, published in Lyon in 1548, which raises doubts about their authorship.

In 1555 and 1556 the Geneva consistory reprimanded him for playing the rebec at dances, and it rejected a petition to admit violins into the singing of psalms. His chansons approach the Parisian genre through their clear epigrammatic form and their careful fit between textual and musical rhythm, but they stand out for their passing chromaticisms and unstable tonality. His legacy survives mainly in works such as Licite m'est endurer pour mon mieulx or Le mien désir, modernly edited in the SCC series.