Prudent-Louis Aubéry du Boulley

Prudent-Louis Aubéry du Boulley (Verneuil, 1796 – Verneuil, 1870) was a French composer and music educator whose work centred above all on the musical life of the Norman province and on encouraging music-making among amateurs. Although his name does not feature among the great figures of his time, his career illustrates well how music spread in France during the Restoration and the July Monarchy.

Born in Verneuil, he showed an early inclination towards music: at the age of eleven he composed marches for the local wind band. He played the flute and the horn and, in 1808, moved to Paris to study composition with Momigny and later with Méhul and Cherubini at the Conservatoire. He returned to Verneuil in 1815 and divided his life between music and the management of a rural estate in the nearby village of Grosbois.

His output was prolific and geared towards the popular genres of the day. He wrote an opera, Les amants querelleurs, which the Opéra-Comique accepted but which was finally staged at the Théâtre du Gymnase in 1824. He devoted particular attention to the guitar, for which he wrote a method, and much of his chamber music combines this instrument with strings or winds. Following the reorganisation of the National Guard, he also supplied several volumes of music for wind band. In 1830 he published the Grammaire musicale, an introduction to music theory in the form of a dialogue, which ran to three editions.

From the mid-1830s his main undertaking was to coordinate the music of his region, especially for band. In 1835 he founded a society of bands from towns west of Paris, including Évreux, Nonancourt, Dreux, Vernon, Alençon and Chartres, which met twice a year to form a joint band of several hundred musicians. Despite his poor health, he travelled from village to village supplying instruments, teaching and new performers; his own town came to have a band of more than twenty musicians. In 1839 he published an account of the society together with a catalogue of his works.

His catalogue exceeds one hundred and seventy numbered works and includes, alongside abundant music for brass, wind band and guitar, a symphony for full orchestra dated 1847. His legacy is mainly local and pedagogical, but it clearly documents the role of the amateur band in provincial musical life in the nineteenth century.