From what we know about the life of Michel Pignolet de Montéclair, he (like most professional musicians past and present) kept busy by playing, creating, teaching and running a music shop—in other words, living a life that looks either desperately chaotic or organically multi-faceted, depending on your point of view. Born in Andelot in 1667, a river town in northeast France, he joined the choir school of Langres Cathedral, about 30 miles away, at the age of nine. By the time Montéclair arrived in Paris in 1687 (the year of Jean-Baptiste Lully’s death), French culture had undergone a radical transformation by way of the visionary patronage of Louis XIV.