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Artist
Charles-Emmanuel Borjon de Scellery
1+ albums
17th centuryfrench
about
Charles-Emmanuel Borjon de Scellery (1633–1691) was a French jurist, man of letters, and accomplished musical amateur whose historical significance in early music rests on a single, influential publication devoted to the musette (the bellows-blown French court bagpipe). Born in 1633 and active as an advocate (avocat) in the parlements of Dijon and Paris, he moved in educated, metropolitan circles and cultivated music as a serious, technically informed pursuit rather than as casual diversion. Later reference tradition repeatedly misstates his forename as “Pierre,” but the Bibliothèque nationale de France authority record makes clear that Pierre is the name of his father, and that the author of the musette treatise is Charles-Emmanuel. Borjon de Scellery was widely regarded in his own time as a remarkable performer on the musette, and in 1672 he published at Lyon his Traité de la musette, avec une nouvelle methode…, a compact but richly informative work that combines practical instruction with organological description and an anthology of airs and branles gathered from different regions of France. The treatise is especially valuable because it embeds playing advice within a broader cultural and historical framing of the instrument, and it includes plates that document contemporary instrument forms and related wind instruments. He died in Paris in 1691, leaving a reputation not only for musical cultivation but for refined “curiosity” in the period sense—one late nineteenth-cent
