LAMBILOTTE, LOUIS. - Jesuit, composer, and paleographer of sacred music, b. at Hamaide (Charlevoix) on March 27, 1769, d. at Vaugirard (Paris) on Feb. 22, 1855. For 30 years he was director of music and singing in various colleges of the Order (St-Acheul, Briga, Fribourg in Switzerland, Bruegelte, Vaugirard) and wrote motets, sequences, masses, oratorios, hymns for May and for feasts and academies, on texts by his colleagues or drawn from classical authors such as Racine, Fénelon, de Monfort. All his compositions were appreciated and well received in his time, and his collection *Choix de cantiques sur des airs nouveaux* (Paris 1852) enjoyed wide circulation and many editions.
In his later years he contributed greatly to the restoration of Gregorian chant, sparing neither research nor travel. 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). This was the first attempt to decipher the neumes of Gregorian melodies. It led him to conceive the plan of a new complete edition of Gregorian chant books; however, only a Gradual and a Vesperal were posthumously published by Fr. Dufaux (ibid. 1855-56). L. also wrote on theory: *Clef des mélodies grégoriennes* (ibid. 1851) and *Esthétique. Théorie et pratique du chant grégorien* (ibid. 1855). Though his untiring efforts to restore sacred music were not matched by the maturity of the times and though he himself was not always faithful in practice to his theories, he deserves credit for opening the way to the movement and for establishing it on solid and scientific foundations.