There is sadly little biographical information about the Parisian organist and composer Louis-Antoine Dornel. The date of his birth can be established at around 1680, though his place of birth remains unknown. His death is also unrecorded, though in 1780 La Borde’s Essai sur la musique ancienne et moderne reports that Dornel had died 25 years earlier at the age of 75, placing his death during the second half of the 1750s.

It is possible that Dornel was a pupil of the organist Nicolas Lebègue; in 1706 he succeeded François D’Agincourt as organist at Sainte Madeleine-en-la-Cité, following a competition with Jean-Philippe Rameau, who had been unable to persuade the church authorities to agree to his terms for accepting the post. Dornel left his post in 1716 to take up a temporary position at l’Abbaye Ste-Geneviève which became permanent on the death of André Raison in 1719. Dornel is also known to have played at Ste-Geneviève-des-Ardents, and St-Germain-le-Viel. His position as maître de musique at the Académie française between 1725 and 1742 afforded him opportunities to compose motets for choir and orchestra, many of which were performed at Paris’s pioneering public concert series, the Concert Spirituel.