Ursuline Music Manuscript

The manuscript started its journey in 1730 Paris. There, a group of music publishers based in the Latin Quarter decided to publish a volume of contrafacta—spiritual texts set to popular tunes. The practice of retrofitting popular music with moral lessons was called sacred parody, and it was part of a broader trend in Western Europe throughout the early to mid-18th century. Unlike the modern conception of parody, this kind was not intended to be humorous: Instead, the word implied an appropriation of existing music for a new textual usage. Sacred parodies had been common in Renaissance music; a “parody Mass” recycled music from earlier uses and set it to relevant texts according to the Christian calendar.  

The target audience for the contrafacta were people of piety, such as the Ursuline nuns and missionaries; children, such as the nuns’ boarding students in New Orleans; and, especially in Europe, upper-class women. In prerevolutionary France, the extreme wealth of the aristocracy prompted moral panic where women were concerned. It was one thing for them to be rich; it was another for them to be licentious, immoral. Changing the lyrics of popular airs from opera was seen as a way to take the “danger” out of the songs, while the melodies preserved an element of pleasure. Using popular tunes as a hook, contrafacta could serve as “a powerful tool for the edification of the faithful,” writes Jennifer Gipson, one of four essayists who contributed to HNOC’s 2014 fascimile of the Ursuline Music Manuscript, French Baroque Music of New Orleans: Spiritual Songs from the Ursulines Convent (1736).

The contrafacta were first published in 1730, with the full title Nouvelles poésies spirituelles et morales sur les plus beaux airs de la musique françoise et italienne avec la basse (New spiritual and moral poetry set to the most beautiful French and Italian tunes with figured bass). The collection proved successful, and subsequent printings included additional recueils (volumes) of songs, with the final edition, published in 1737, featuring eight volumes. Sometime during the Lenten season of 1736, the copyist of the Ursuline manuscript, a scribe—most likely a young woman of means, known only as C. D.—transcribed the first four volumes. As was the custom, she added creative flourishes to the manuscript, including illustrations around the song titles and in the margins. In 1754, a mysterious donor, known only as Monsieur Nicollet, sent the bound manuscript to the Ursuline nuns in New Orleans, where it has remained ever since. 

The manuscript is divided into five categories: Praises of God; Mysteries of Our Lord, Jesus Christ; Virtues; Vices; and the Four Ends of Man. A table of contents is appended at the end of each section, and the copyist took it upon herself to highlight in red ink all the chansons morales (moral songs). These moral songs were often light and pleasurable, “useful for certain ‘occasions when the others might seem perhaps too serious,’” Gipson writes in her essay, quoting from the original preface of Nouvelles poésies spirituelles et morales, which C. D. included in her transcription. “The combination of pleasure and utility is key,” Gipson explains, “for the qualification ‘moral’ does not indicate a more pious text. In 18th-century lexicon, ‘moral’ could refer to the investigation of human nature.”

The tables of contents also credit the composers of the melodies, making the lists a who’s who of the French and Italian baroque, including François Couperin, Jean-Baptiste Lully, and Louis-Nicolas Clérambault. Source material for the melodies includes André Campra’s 1714 cantata Silène and the André Campra–Henry Desmarest collaboration Iphigénie en Tauride (1704). 

The manuscript came to HNOC in 1998, when we acquired the vast archives of the Ursuline convent and school, which date to the city’s earliest days. In 2014 HNOC published a full-size facsimile of the manuscript, French Baroque Music of New Orleans: Spiritual Songs from the Ursuline Convent (1736), accompanied by in-depth scholarly essays in English and French. Part academic book, part musical score, French Baroque Music of New Orleans is intended to serve researchers, performers, and lovers of baroque music and colonial Louisiana history. The Ursuline manuscript’s 294 musical works are reproduced in full color, and the accompanying essays—four in English with French summaries and one in French with an English summary—illuminate the object’s poetic, musical, historical, and bibliographic contexts.

In 2024, HNOC and the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra presented selections from the Ursuline Music Manuscript at St. Louis Cathedral, part of the free concert series Musical Louisiana: America’s Cultural HeritageOpens in new tab. Listening to the ensemble’s crystalline voices and following along with the original score, one can imagine the Ursuline nuns and their students singing both for God and for pleasure, in a young city whose musical history was just beginning.