Apparently it was at this time that he withdrew from practical music-making and instead decided to devote himself to publishing his entire output of sacred music, an immense undertaking, and the earliest recorded such attempt in music history. The publication was troublesome; one of the printers failed to align the notes to staves correctly, and the entire process ended in arbitration at one point: however eventually, in the mid 1530s, he was able to issue four large collections of his music. Two of the volumes he dedicated to Pope Clement VII, and the other two to Cardinal Ippolito de'Medici. He seems to have held several ecclesiastical positions in Avignon in the last two decades of his life, including the deanship of St. Agricole, and he died in that town in 1548. Works Carpentras composed several masses, numerous settings of the Magnificat, psalm settings, hymns, motets, and secular songs, as well as many settings of the Lamentations, which were his most famous work both during his lifetime and until 1587 when Palestrina was commissioned by the Counter-Reformation church to replace them. Stylistically, his music is typical of the generation after Josquin, smoothly polyphonic with pervasive imitation. Carpentras alternates points of imitation with homophonic sections, especially in his settings of the Lamentations. References and further reading Article "Carpentras", in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie. 20 vol. London, Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1980. Howard Mayer Brown, Richard Scherr: "Carpentras", Grove Music Online ed. L. Macy (Accessed July 13, 2005), (subscription access) Gustave Reese, Music in the Renaissance. New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 1954. Harold Gleason and Warren Becker, Music in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Music Literature Outlines Series I). Bloomington, Indiana. Frangipani Press, 1986. External links Renaissance composers French classical composers French male classical composers 1470s births 1548 deaths People from Carpentras