Guillaume-Gabriel Nivers

Guillaume-Gabriel Nivers was a French organist, composer and theorist. His first livre d’orgue is the earliest surviving published collection with traditional French organ school forms. Nivers’s other music is less known; however, his treatises on Gregorian chant and basso continuo are still considered important sources on 17th century liturgical music and performance practice.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article on Guillaume-Gabriel Nivers.

From the period sources

Guillaume-Gabriel Nivers, organist of St.-Sulpice in Paris by 1640 and later one of the four organists to King Louis XIV, also served as music-teacher to the Queen, according to A Biographical Dictionary of Musicians (1900). He was a significant figure in the reform of Gregorian chant, publishing his “learned and judicious work,” Dissertation sur le Chant Gregorien, in 1683. This treatise, described by A General History of the Science and Practice of Music, Vol. 1 (1875) as “of the controversial kind,” aimed to correct abuses that arose from the “wantonness and levity of the singers” of his time, who had “mutilated and distorted the Cantus Gregorianus” under the influence of the emerging “theatric style of music.” Nivers’s efforts were so successful that the King employed him to correct the Roman antiphonary for use in French churches, and subsequent editions bore “testimony to the skill and industry” of his reformation, ensuring the preservation of this “precious relic of antiquity.”