Marie Bobillier
Marie Bobillier, real name Antoinette Christine Marie Bobillier (12 April 1858 – 4 November 1918) was a French musicologist, music critic, writing under her pseudonym Michel Brenet. Biography. Born in Lunéville of a military father, captain and then colonel in the artillery, Marie Bobillier, a single daughter, lived her childhood in several cities, including Strasbourg and Metz, before finally settling in Paris in 1871. She learned to play the piano, but a scarlet fever contracted at the age of thirteen rendered her disabled, influencing her decision to devote her life to research, after having been to the Pasdeloup concerts . She was one of the first French women musicologists. Her first publication, "Histoire de la symphonie à orchestre" (1882), won a prize in Brussels (Royal Academy of Science, Letters and Fine Arts of Belgium), engaging her ever-increasing reputation in the French musicological world. With a rigorous method that drew on the most reliable sources and documents, she made a series of publications - several valuable studies devoted to vocal music by Ockeghem, Goudimel, Palestrina (1906), Sébastien de Brossard, Haendel, Haydn, Grétry and Berlioz. Bobillier also approached classical and medieval instrumental music and left a precious and independent "Dictionnaire pratique et  historique de la musique", completed and published by Amédée Gastoué in 1926. Her book "Notes sur l’histoire du luth en France" paved the way for further research in this area. Her major works are "Les musiciens de la Sainte-Chapelle du Palais"("her masterpiece" according to La Laurencie), "Les concerts en France sous l’ancien régime" and "La librairie musicale en France de 1653 à 1790", where she demonstrates her great scholarship and competence as a music historian. Jean-Marie Fauquet summed up Marie Bobillier's work in one sentence: "It is of exceptional quality, both in terms of the variety of  subjects dealt with and the method applied". As a critic or musicologist, she collaborated with magazines such as ' (from 1911 to 1913), of which she was one of the founders with Jean Chantavoine (1877–1952), Louis Laloy and Lionel de La Laurencie – she wrote bibliographies of French, German, English and Italian books, in the "Revue musicale", the ', the "Archives historiques, artistiques, littéraires", "Le Correspondant", the "Courrier musical", the "Guide du concert", the "Journal musical", "Le ménestrel" and the "Tribune de Saint-Gervais" (the monthly newsletter of the "Schola Cantorum de Paris"), etc. ; Abroad, she collaborated with the "Rivista Musicale Italiana" and  the "Musical Quarterly". She also contributed to Lavignac's Encyclopedia of music. Endowed with a very reserved personality and while "the stage frightened her", she gave a few lectures but declined participating in learned societies. She left notes, quotations and transcripts, accumulated throughout her research, bound after her death in nineteen volumes, and preserved under the name "Documents sur l’histoire de la musique" at the Bibliothèque nationale. Her pseudonym comes from the village of Les Brenets in the Doubs department, where her father's family came from. She died in Paris on 4 November 1918, aged 60. Works. Publisher. Marie  Bobillier published music scores by Alexandre-Pierre-François Boëly at M. Senart (before 1909).