Frans de Prins: an eighteenth-century Leuven carillon book

About Frans de Prins

The musician behind the initials is almost certainly Franciscus Martinus Josephus De Prins (1746–1814), a member of a well-known Leuven family of musicians and organist at several of the city's churches and chapels. On All Saints' Day 1778 he played the new Vanden Gheyn carillon of the Sint-Geertruikerk and became its titular player. A manuscript of 101 pages, marked as his in 1781, survives in the University Archives of KU Leuven, where it arrived through the nineteenth-century collection of Xavier van Elewyck.

The book holds about 220 pieces, roughly a quarter of them adapted for carillon. The rest come from the keyboard, dance and popular repertoire of the eighteenth century, and menuets, marches, gigues and contredanses dominate; the wholly secular character of the contents sits oddly with the idea that the book was compiled for the abbey carillon of Sint-Geertrui. The DP numbers in the catalogue titles belong to a modern transcription of the manuscript, not to an eighteenth-century opus list, which is why a single dance can be cited as DP 109 without the composer having written a hundred works.

A study of the source, Het beiaardboek van Frans De Prins, was prepared by Gilbert Huybens, Luc Rombouts and Carl van Eyndhoven. The 57 files here are a selection from that material: short pieces, most of them running to less than two minutes apiece.

Listening and playing notes

A carillon gives the player no sustained tone: each note is a strike, and the bell rings on after the clapper has left it. That makes repeated notes and quick passing figures blur, so keep the texture thin and let the bass strike on the beat rather than just before it. On piano or organ the same pieces work as teaching material, where the challenge is to keep the dance rhythm strict and the repeats varied by touch instead of by tempo. Add no ornaments that the page does not show.

Selected scores

1. Marche des Mousquetaires (DP 58)

   A march from the manuscript and the most-viewed file on the page; the DP number marks its place in the modern transcription, not an opus.

2. La jalousie Angloise (DP 43)

   A contredance whose title translates as English jealousy, one of several pieces in the book that name a neighbour or a nation.

3. Romance (DP 109)

   A slow piece among the dances; its number above 100 shows that the transcription runs well past the 57 files catalogued here.

4. La Capricieuse (DP 39)

   One of several pieces whose title describes a character rather than a dance type, in the manner of French keyboard pieces of the period.

5. Walace March (DP 63)

   A march titled with the Scots name Wallace, spelled here with a single l.

6. Zieleken die opt'tiater spronck (DP 2)

   A dialect title rather than a dance label, and second in the manuscript's numbering; the phrase is not reliably translated.

7. Alle Mansele (DP 27)

   Another dialect title from the Leuven book, catalogued between the contredanses that make up most of its contents.

8. Cascon (DP 4)

   A short piece from the first pages of the manuscript; the title is probably a proper name, but the file gives no source for it.

9. Contredance Kt geschoren (DP 44)

   An explicitly labelled contredance. The abbreviation in the middle of the title cannot be resolved from the catalogue entry.

10. La Lavandiere (DP 38)

    The laundress: a titled dance of the kind the manuscript borrows from French keyboard and theatre music.