LAMBILLOTTE, LOUIS. - Jesuit, composer and paleographer of sacred music, b. at Hamaide (Charlevoix) on 27 March 1769, d. at Vaugirard (Paris) on 22 Feb. 1855. For 30 years he was director of music and singing in various colleges of the Order (St-Acheul, Briga, Fribourg in Switzerland, Brugelette, Vaugirard) and wrote motets, sequences, masses, oratorios, canticles for the month of May and for feasts and academies, on words by his colleagues or taken from classical authors, such as Racine, Fénelon, de Monfort. All compositions relished and well received in his day, and his collection Choix de cantiques sur des airs nouveaux (Paris 1852) obtained wide circulation and many editions.
Toward the last years of his life he worked greatly for the restoration of Gregorian chant, sparing neither research nor travels. He discovered in the monastery of St. Gall a manuscript antiphonary, cod. 359 of the 9th century, which he published under the title Antiphonaire de St Grégoire (Brussels 1851). His was the first attempt to decipher the neumes of the Gregorian melodies. This led him to conceive the plan of a new complete edition of the books of Gregorian chant; but there appeared posthumously only a Graduale and a Vesperale, edited by P. Dufaux (ibid. 1855-56). L. also composed works of theory: Clef des mélodies grégoriennes (ibid. 1851) and Esthétique. Théorie et pratique du chant grégorien (ibid. 1855). If the times were not ripe for his tenacious efforts at the restoration of sacred music, and if he himself was not always in practice faithful to his theories, he must nevertheless be given the credit for having opened the way to the movement and for having fixed it upon solid and scientific foundations.
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