Guillaume Le Heurteur

Guillaume Le Heurteur (also cited as Hurteur) was a French composer and choirmaster active around 1530–1545, whose music circulated almost entirely in printed editions from Paris and Lyon. Very little is known about his life, and the few facts we have come from the title page of his motet book published by Attaingnant in 1545, where he is named as a priest, canon and master of the choristers at the collegiate church of Saint Martin in Tours. Although his output is not very large, his work shows the transition between Franco-Flemish polyphony and the style of the Parisian chanson.

His surviving production comprises four masses, two Magnificats, about twenty-two motets and twenty-six chansons. Several of the masses rest on pre-existing material: the Missa 'Impetum' is based on an anonymous motet printed by Attaingnant in 1528, and the Missa 'Ung jour Robin' is built on a chanson by Sermisy. The Missa 'Osculetur me' may derive from a lost motet on texts from the Song of Songs, although this hypothesis cannot be confirmed. Moreover, a lost Attaingnant book on the same biblical text mentions it on its title page, which suggests that his motet catalogue may once have been more extensive.

In his sacred music, his writing alternates blocks of chords with contrapuntal passages, which rarely are strict imitations and more often group voices in homorhythm or combine a fast melody with a slower harmonic support. The two Magnificats illustrate this variety: the Magnificat primi toni is mostly homophonic in its six-voice section, whereas the quarti toni offers canonic writing in the same passage, which is the most conservative aspect of his counterpoint.

His four-voice chansons conform to the Parisian style, with brief phrases, concise structures, frequent cadences and transparent textures, although they show somewhat greater linear independence than Sermisy's. The two- and three-voice versions take as their models four-voice chansons by Sermisy, Derrick Gerarde, Jacotin or Rocquelay, but transform them profoundly, turning chords into linear duos or trios without entirely losing the profile of the original.

Le Heurteur occupies a modest but useful place in the history of Renaissance French music. His work documents the move from imitation to homophony and the practice of reworking borrowed material, and his masses and Magnificats remain reference points for understanding Parisian printed production in the first half of the sixteenth century.