Biography
Pierre de Villiers was a French composer, active in Lyon in the second quarter of the 16th century . His first name "Pierre" remains uncertain.
Even if François Lesure indicates a namesake canon of the cathedral of Cambrai in 1516, the identity of the two people is not proven. Dobbins has discussed elsewhere the possibility that Pierre (?) de Villiers was the same as Hubert-Philippe de Villiers , writer and translator from Italian, secretary to Henry I of Bourbon -Condé , and known to musician , or at least that they were from the same family.
We can assume that Pierre de Villiers resided in Lyon from the end of the 1530s, since it was there, between 1532 and 1543, that most of his music appeared. Other clues make it clear: his song Lo meissony sur lo sey is in Franco- Provençal , he puts to music pieces by poets present in Lyon at that time: Charles de Sainte-Marthe , Pernette du Guillet or Maurice Scève and Charles of Sainte-Marthe dedicated to him in 1540 a roundel from his collection entitled La Poésie Française. In Lyon, the gaze is more specifically directed towards the Collège de la Trinité : the indicationTrinitas in unitate that his mass De Beata Virgine bears , and two mentions of his name by the humanist Barthélemy Aneau , who taught then directed in this college for thirty years, could mean that Villiers was a music teacher in this college. That said, his name has not yet been found in any Lyon archives.
Dobbins reports that his motet Sancte Stephane praising a prelate of the city of Augsburg ( civibus Auguste gloriae ), Villiers could have visited this city , which hosts a Sankt-Stefan cathedral. In 1545, the Augsburg printer Philip Ulhard published a four-voice motet Tundite vos Musae lachrymas under the name of Piere Vuilliers , which gives some depth to this hypothesis .
Beyond his activity as a composer or teacher, it is possible that Villiers held the role of musical editor for some time in the studio of Jacques Moderne , following the death of Francesco Layolle . This hypothesis made by Pogue, is based on the fact that Villiers is then the most published composer in his collections and on the fact that Villiers adds his mass De Beata Virgine during the reissue of the collection Liber decem missarum made by Modern in 1540.
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