Published in 2026 to mark the four-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Louis Couperin, the Louis Couperin 400 series from Lyrebird Music presents substantially revised and expanded editions of the composer’s surviving keyboard music for harpsichord and organ, prepared by Jon Baxendale and David Ponsford. Conceived not simply as performing editions but as major scholarly studies, the publications combine newly revised musical texts with extensive bilingual prefaces and critical commentaries examining the musical, liturgical and cultural world in which Couperin worked.
The harpsichord volume reassesses the surviving sources for the Pièces de clavecin, including questions of concordances, ornamentation, chronology and transmission, while also incorporating the important pieces preserved in the Oldham manuscript, several of which remain unique witnesses to Couperin’s music. The organ volume, by contrast, is centred upon the Oldham manuscript itself –– the principal surviving source for Couperin’s organ music and one of the most important documents relating to seventeenth-century French liturgical keyboard practice. In addition to the organ music, the volume also includes appropriate liturgical chant for performers wishing to recreate the alternatim practice for which the repertory was conceived. Throughout both editions, particular attention is given to rhetoric, notation, chant, tempo, registration and the relationship between written sources and performance traditions in the decades preceding the emergence of the French classical organ canon.
Taken together, the extensive bilingual prefaces –– comprising more than one hundred pages in both English and French –– form the most substantial modern monograph yet devoted to Louis Couperin, his music and the artistic circle in which he moved, as befits an edition issued to mark the composer’s four-hundredth anniversary. Drawing upon recent archival and musicological research, the studies place Couperin within the wider intellectual and cultural milieu of mid-seventeenth-century Paris, exploring his connections with Saint-Gervais, the French court, contemporary keyboard culture and the emergence of French classicism.
Issued in hardback, wire-bound, collector’s and digital formats, the Louis Couperin 400 editions form part of Lyrebird Music’s wider commitment to combining rigorous scholarship with practical performing materials for modern performers, teachers and researchers.
