Baif, Jean-Antoine de

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Baif, Jean-Antoine de

Baif, Jean-Antoine de, French poet; b. Venice, Feb. 19, 1532; d. Paris, Sept. 19, 1589. He was taken to Paris as a child, and formed a friendship with Ronsard and other eminent poets. In 1570, with the musician Joachim Thibault de Courville, he founded the Académie de Poésie et de Musique, which met in Baifs home (1571–74) and which pursued the aim of reviving the music and poetry of ancient Greece. He developed a system of “musique mesurée” which he believed would possess a moral force similar to the Greek ideas of “ethos” Settings of his early sonnets and chansons were composed by Arcadelt, F. Roussel, and Cereau, and of his chansonnettes mesurées and Psalms by Lassus, Le Jeune, Mauduit, and others.

Bibliography

M. Auge–Chiquet, La Vie, les idées et l’oeuvre de J.-A. d.B. (Paris, 1909).

—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire