Biography
Simon Gorlier was a French instrumentalist and composer and a printer-bookseller active in Lyon in the second quarter of the 16th Century.
He has the distinction of having been both an instrumentalist (rather at the start of his career) and a printer (rather at the end of his career). His Lyon origins could not be specified; he could not be linked to the Lyon consular family of the Groliers.
The first thing we know about him is that he published a guitar tablature book in Paris in 1551, containing instrumental pieces and transcriptions of vocal pieces (psalms, songs, motets).
In 1553, he was the author of three printed pamphlets in which he attacked the theories of Loys Bourgeois on the scale and muances, as he expounded them in his Droict chemin de musique (Geneva, 1550).
He gets theFebruary 17, 1558a royal privilege to print any kind of music. In the period 1558-1562 he then printed at least nine books of music, mainly instrumental and all lost except one. This loss is irreparable for knowledge of the instrumental repertoire of Lyon in the middle of the century.
Despite the little that remains, it appears that Gorlier wanted to give his publications a good appearance: he had two beautiful frames engraved for his title pages and between April andJuly 1558, Robert Granjon sued him which shows that he would have tried to use characters of civility in his editions (these had just been implemented by Granjon and were still protected by a privilege ofdecember 1557.
A few acts are known which show that he would have been a bookseller until around 1582.
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