Antiquity to 1600s - People Terms (not notebook)

Heinrich Isaac (1450 - 1517)

A pupil of Florentine organist Antonio Squarcialupi, he taught in the household of Lorenzo de' Medici in Florence (c. 1484-92) and set to music some of Lorenzo's own carnival songs. He apparently left Florence during the Medicean exile, entering the service of the emperor Maximilian I about 1494; in 1497 he was appointed court composer. Between 1497 and 1514 he travelled extensively, finally settling in Florence. [term's] main publications were a collection of masses (1506) and the posthumous Choralis Constantinus (1550-55), one of the few complete polyphonic settings of the Proper of the Mass for all Sundays (and certain other feasts); it also contains five settings of the Ordinary. At least in part the work was commissioned for the diocese of Constance in 1508 and employs plainsongs unique to the Constance liturgy. [term] left his great monument unfinished; it was completed by his pupil Ludwig Senfl. In his sacred music [term] treats the cantus firmus (fixed melody) resourcefully, placing the chant in any voice or sharing it between two parts, either in long notes or embroidered with shorter notes. He also uses it as a thematic basis for composing contrapuntal imitations, a technique that came to dominate 16th-century music. His famous "Innsbruck, ich muss dich lassen" ("Innsbruck, I must leave you") recalls the style of the simpler frottola. This song was later reworked as a chorale, "O Welt ["World"], ich muss dich lassen," familiar through arrangements by J.S. Bach and by Brahms.

Orlando di Lasso/de Lassus (1532 - 1594)

A serious Latin setting by this composer, in which he was much drawn to classical texts and themes, his most notorious work in this category was the Prophetiae Sibyllarum (The Sibylline Prophecies), published posthumously in 1600. In antiquity the Sibyls were specially gifted prophetic women; in the Christian tradition the twelve sibyls were assimilated to be connected with biblical prophecy and are best known today from Michelangelo's renderings on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The 12 anonymous prophetic poems [term] set to music are quasi-pagan mystical texts that demanded some form of unusual musical treatment to present their mysterious contents. Drawing on a kind of musical humanism emerging in Italy, [term] adopted a style of extreme, tonally disorientating chromaticism, coupled with starkly homorhythmic, declamatory manner that brought out the weird words and weirder harmonies with a rhetorical urgency. Read pgs. 221-225

John Dunstable (1390 - 1453)

Although he looms large in traditional historiography for his decisive impact on a new generation of continental musicians, [term] was at least as much a continuer and an adapter of traditional Medieval genres. He wrote a considerable number of isorhythmic motets; he was particularly expert in this loftiest of genres. He was brought up musically in the spirit of the quadrivium, the art of measurement. But the content with which he invested old forms was something different. His music displays an unprecedented smooth technique in part writing; its dissonances are consistently subordinated to consonances in ways that begin to approximate the rules of dissonance treatment still taught today in counterpoint class. His most radical, Quam pulchra es (How Beautiful thou art), a setting from the Song of Songs. Verses from the Song of Solomon had become very popular in England as a result of the development of votive services addressed to the Virgin Mary, mediator between man and God. The lyrics attributed to King Solomon, now came into their own as votive antiphons. The "Old Hall" generation through [term] interpreted this text. A new discant setting that emerged is widely regarded as the "declamation motet" although a better name might be "cantilena motet" because of its similarity to the courtly chanson. The seductive sweetness of Qualm pulchra es is largely the result of an extreme control of dissonance. There are only nine dissonant notes and they conform to highly regulated dissonance treatment still codified in counterpoint rules. No less expressive is the declamation. The homorhythmic texture of the old conductus is here adapted to the actual rhythms of spoken language. The naturalistic declamation is used seductively to spotlight key words and phrases, chiefly terms of endearment and symbols of feminine sexuality. The words singled out are carissima (dearest), collum tuum (your neck), and ubera (breasts), the latter emphasized twice, once by the male lover and the next by the female lover. The most dramatic set of all the female lover's commands is, "Veni dilecte mi" (Come, my beloved), set off by homorhythm, by long note values, and by time stopping fermatas. Read pg. 138 - 140.

Francino Gaffurio (1451 - 1522)

An Italian music theorist and composer of the Renaissance. He was an almost exact contemporary of Josquin des Prez and Leonardo da Vinci. He was one of the most famous musicians in Italy in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. He was widely read, and showed a strong humanist bent. In addition to having a thorough understanding of contemporary musical practice, he met composers from all over Europe, since he had the good fortune to be living and working at one of the centers of activity for the incoming Netherlanders. His books have a pedagogical intent, and provide a young composer with all the techniques necessary to learn his art. The major treatises of his years in Milan are three: Theorica musicae (1492), Practica musicae (1496), and De harmonia musicorum instrumentorum opus (1518). The second of these, the Practica musicae, is the most thorough, proceeding through subjects as diverse as ancient Greek notation, plainchant, mensuration, counterpoint, and tempo. One of his most famous comments is that the tactus, the tempo of a semibreve, is equal to the pulse of a man who is breathing quietly—presumably about 72 beats per minute. [term] wrote masses, motets, settings of the Magnificat, and hymns, mainly during his Milan years. Many of the masses show the influence of Josquin, and all are in flowing Netherlandish polyphony, though with an admixture of Italian lightness and melody. His music was collected in four codices under his own direction.

Jacob Obrecht (1457 - 1505)

Beginning with the generation of [term] composers of Masses and motets typically practiced "pervading imitation" style when not using a cantus firmus. They learned it directly or indirectly from Busnois and his contemporaries. Anton Webern wrote a dissertation on the music of Heinrich Issac, but was aware of Renaissance composers such as [term] and Josquin de Prez, in which a cantus firmus was turned upside down or back to front for the sake of variety or for virtuoso compositional display.

Jacob Obrecht (1457 - 1505)

Beginning with those composers who were reaching maturity in the 1470's, the generation after that of Ockeghem and Busnois (Busnoys), residence at the high-paying Italian courts became the rule. Some may have gotten their positions through Ockeghem, who in 1472 received a personal communication from Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza in Milan requesting help in recruiting French singers for his chapel. Indeed, several important composers of the early sixteenth century had their professional start in the Milanese court chapel choir around this time. The outstanding representative was [term], who after a distinguished career in various Dutch and Belgian cities was summoned to the magnificent court of Ercole I, the Duke of Ferrara, where he died of plague.

Guillaume DuFay (1397 - 1474)

Binchois and [term] are hailed as the French followers of Dunstable, and demonstrated countenance angloise in their works. The liturgical genre most often treated in the fauxbourdon manner was the hymn, the most song-like of chants. What is often viewed as "Renaissance" about Binchois and [term] is their use of English harmony and part-writing. Composers even invented book, almost "recipe-books" for assuming the "English guise" in their works. [Term] composed a large quantity of secular songs in all the formes fixes. He used one of his ballades, Se la face ay pale (If my face is pale, love's to blame) as a cantus firmus for his best known Mass of the same name. [Term] was a pioneer in basing sacred music on secular tenors. Far from blasphemy, it seems to have worked the other way, as a means of consecrating the secular.

Johannes Ockeghem (1410/25 - 1497)

Busnois was [term's] counterpart (and Binchois' successor) at the court of Burgundy, where he served Charles the Bold, the last of the Burgundian dukes. As [term] may have been a pupil of Binchois, so Busnois (Busnoys) may have received instruction from [term]. He is perhaps the earliest leading composer from whom autograph manuscripts survive, so we know how he personally spelled his surname (often routinely modernized in the scholarly literature to Busnois). The 15th century was one of those times when intellectual attainments and cerebral virtuosity were considered appropriate in and artist. Busnois put his formidable linguistic, musical and intellectual skills to work in praise of [term] in a motet called In hydraulis ("On the water organs"), which compares his great contemporary with the mythic musicians Pythagoras and Orpheus. [term] returned the compliment in the form of an even more elaborate motet called Ut heremita solus ("Lonely as a hermit"), whose opening seems to combine a reference to Busnoy's hermit patron saint with an encomium, loneliness, often being synonymous with eminence (as in "its lonely at the top"). Read pgs. 156-157

Guillaume DuFay (1397 - 1474)

Chant settings and fauxbourdon Many of [term's] compositions were simple settings of chant, obviously designed for liturgical use, probably as substitutes for the unadorned chant, and can be seen as chant harmonizations. Often the harmonization used a technique of parallel writing known as fauxbourdon. Secular music Most of Du Fay's secular songs follow the formes fixes (rondeau, ballade, and virelai), which dominated secular European music of the 14th and 15th centuries. He also wrote a handful of Italian ballate, almost certainly while he was in Italy. As is the case with his motets, many of the songs were written for specific occasions, and many are datable, thus supplying useful biographical information. Most of his songs are for three voices, using a texture dominated by the highest voice; the other two voices, unsupplied with text, were probably played by instruments. Occasionally [term] used four voices, but in a number of these songs the fourth voice was supplied by a later, usually anonymous, composer. Typically he used the rondeau form when writing love songs. His latest secular songs show influence from Busnois and Ockeghem, and the rhythmic and melodic differentiation between the voices is less; as in the work of other composers of the mid-15th century, he was beginning to tend towards the smooth polyphony which was to become the predominant style fifty years later. A typical ballade is Resvellies vous et faites chiere lye, which was written in 1423 for the marriage of Carlo Malatesta and Vittoria di Lorenzo Colonna. The musical form is aabC for each stanza, with C being the refrain. The musical setting emphasizes passages in the text which specifically refer to the couple being married. Read pg. 121-127.

Heinrich Isaac (1450 - 1517)

Composer of Innsbruck, ich muss dich lassen, and a large number of motets. His main work is the Choralis Constantinus, which is a collection of pieces. It is the most extensive collection of motets, nearly 450 in volumes 1-3. Pieces that are movements of the Mass Proper. The Mass Ordinary: Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Agnus Dei. Mass Proper changes depending on time of year. [Term] composed 450 different pieces that function for the mass proper movements. Anything for the Mass Proper is called a motet. His student Senfl finished the compilation. Guido Adler was the acknowledged expert on [term]. When Webern approached Adler in Vienna, he wanted to learn about [term]. Webern studied Choralis Constantinus, and studied counterpoint within motets.

Claudin de Sermisy (1490 - 1562)

During the 15th century the chanson had become an international courtly style. A french song in a fixed form, might be written anywhere in Europe by a composer, of any nationality whether at home or abroad. The age of printing in the 16th century brought a change; a new style of French chanson that was distinctively French the way the Tenorlied was German and the frottola Italian. Its centers were the printing capital: Paris to the north and Lyons to the south, with Paris sufficiently out in front that the genre is generally known as the "Parisian" chanson. Its great master was [term], who served King Francis I as music director of the Chapel Royal. Attaignant's very first song book, the Chansons Nouvelles en Musique (New Songs with Music) of 1528, opens with a run of 8 by [term], the second of which, Tant que vivray ("As long as I live") to a text by Francis I's court poet, Clement Marot, has always been the textbook example of the new chanson because of its memorable very strongly harmonized tune. The humanistic poetic idiom of Marot and his literary contemporaries proved to be a crucial generative influence on the new chanson style. [term's] chanson clothes the syllabification of its poem in a musical scansion (the rhythm of a line or verse) that seems as strict as formulaic as those in the frottola.

Antoine Busnois (1430 - 1492)

French composer, best-known for his chansons, which typify the Burgundian style of the second half of the 15th century. [term] entered the service of Charles the Bold (later duke of Burgundy) as a singer sometime before 1467. He traveled with Charles on his various campaigns, and after Charles's death in 1477, he remained a member of the ducal chapel in service to Charles's heir, Mary of Burgundy, until her death in 1482. His activities after this period are not known for certain, but at the time of his death, [term] held the post of rector cantoriae at the church of Saint-Sauveur, in Bruges. In his later years, his reputation as a composer was second only to that of Ockeghem among his contemporaries. His chansons (about 60 have survived) were admired particularly for their melodic beauty, rhythmic complexity, harmonic colour, and clarity of structure. In addition to the chansons for three or four voices, [term] wrote two masses, eight motets, two hymns, a Magnificat, and a Credo.

Adrian Willaert (1490 - 1562)

He achieved the extraordinary balance, clarity, and refinement identified with perfection while avoiding the density and conceits associated with some of his contemporaries. He deliberately restored some basic elements of Josquin's earlier style, as idealized and propagated by the humanists. [term] was the supreme technician and that is why, for Zarlino and all who read his treatise, [term] was the perfecter of music. His accomplishment can be keenly illustrated by a motet that parallels the famous Ave Maria of Josquin. Benedicta es, Coelorum Regina, published in 1545, draws its melodic material from the same Gregorian sequence that had previously served as a source both for motets by both Josquin and Jean Mouton. In [term's] motet the chant material is thoroughly absorbed into the imitative texture, and there are no essential functional distinctions among the voices, which links it with the opening of Josquin's Ave Maria, the model of models. While [term] fllowed Josqiun in his attention to declamation and rhetorical use of homorhythm for emphasis, he is nevertheless recognizably a post-Josquin composer in his use of harmony. The obvious give away is the final chord of the motet, a full triad approached plagally - even now the most typical source of "amen" cadence. By the middle of the century such endings were standard. [term's] motet is a veritable textbook on cadence avoidance, often achieved by what we still call the "deceptive cadence."

Martin Luther (1483 - 1546)

He described his musical ideals in the preface to a schoolbook, entitled, Symphoniae jucundae (Pleasant Polyphonic Pieces), where he observed that all men are naturally musical, which means the Creator wished them to make music. "But, what is natural should still be developed into what is artful.With the addition of learning and artifice, which corrects, develops and refines the natural music, then at last it is possible to taste with wonder, yet still comprehend God's absolute and perfect wisdom in his wondrous work of music...But any who remain unaffected are clodhoppers indeed and are fit to hear only the words of dung-poets and the music of pigs." The kind of music [term] is praising here is what scholars call Tenorlied: a polyphonic setting of a lyrical song-melody placed usually in the tenor. Such a setting of a tenor, or cantus firmus, either traditional or newly composed, by the early 16th century would have been considered a fairly dated style in other countries. That is no surprise. We also know that Germany took up the monophonic courtly love song later than its western and southern neighbors. [term] proved a great devotee to Tenorlied ,which was given a new lease on life by the growth of the printing trade. Next to the divine Josquin, he worshipped its foremost practitioners, Ludwig Senfl, whose expanded version of Ave Maria...Virgo serena was much admired. "I could never compose a motet like Senfl's...but on the other hand, Senfl could never preach as well as I." [term] said. Read Pgs. 206-210

Josquin de Prez (1450-1521)

He is paralleled in importance by Beethoven. He was the first composer to interest his contemporaries and posterity as a personality. By the end of his life, he was the subject of gossip, and regarded as a cantankerous, arrogant, distracted man, difficult in socialization but excused by the grace of his transcendent gifts, much like Beethoven. He was able to achieve an unprecedented reputation during his time because of the printing press. He was one of the chief beneficiaries of Petrucci's printing press. He was also the victim of commercialization: a modern problem is sorting out works falsely attributed to him, as printers of the day sought to capitalize on his reputation by attributing false works to him. There is a section in the Grove called "Doubtful and Misattributed Works," specifically dedicated to nearly 200 dubious or false works. The qualities humanist thinkers valued so highly in his works were mainly ones associated with the Italian "lowering" of style, such as lucidity of texture, text-based form, and clarity of declamation (almost patter-like). Humanists looked to classical models for how to think and communicate. As these qualities were reinterpreted in the 16th century [term], seemed to represent a new ordering of aesthetic values. Through the writings of Glareanus, his most enthusiastic supporter, his works became classics on which this new aesthetic rested. Glareanus went so far as to declare [term] the creator of "ars perfecta" ( a perfected art that could never be improved). Read Taruksin, pg. 170 - 180.

Josquin de Prez (1450-1521)

He joined the papal chapel choir in Rome around 1489, and it was here that he began to make his mark as a composer, and his music began to circulate. Petrucci's initial publication of this composer was in 150, and contained six carmina (instrumental pieces based on or in the style of a song). In 1502, Petrucci published the first book dedicated to a single composer, Liber primus missarum [term] (The First Book of Masses by [term]). It was a book that opened and closed with his masses on l'homme armé. In 1502, the advisor to the Duke of Ferrara advised his employer to hire Heinrich Isaac over [term]. As Isaac was content with only 120 ducats, when [term] demanded 200. Additionally, Isaac was said to compose faster, and [term] deemed only to compose when he felt like it. The Duke ignored the advice and hired [term] anyway. [Term] kept the implied promise to honor his patron by writing the Missa Hercules Dux Ferrariae (The Mass of Hercules, Duke of Ferrara) and was published by Petrucci in 1505 via the second volume of masses by the composer. It has kept the Duke's name alive. It cleverly fashions a cantus firmus out of the Duke's name and title, what Zarlino would later term soggetto cavato della vocali (theme carved out of vowels). HER-CU-LES DUX FER-RA-RI-E = rE-Ut-rE-Ut-rE-fA-mI-rE

Bishop Bernadino Cirillo (1500 - 1575)

He participated in the Council of Trent and was interested in improving Church music. He published litanies to the Virgin Mary. [term] advocated a return to the simplicity and harmony of the earlier forms of Church music rather than elaborate forms of organ music.

Heinrich Glaren (1488 - 1563)

He was a music theorist and most enthusiastic supporter of Josquin de Prez. He declared de Prez the creator of ars perfecta ( a perfected art that could never be improved). He authored a treatise that popularized the music of de Prez, and was published in 1547 under the title Dodecachordon. He was a different sort of theorist, as he was neither composer nor practical musician, but rather all around scholar of the purest humanistic type, a disciple of the great Renaissance humanist, Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536). He held professional chairs, not in music, but in poetry and theology at the University of Freiburg. As a music theorist, he consciously modeled himself on Boethius, the classical prototype of the encyclopedic humanist. But his actual musical views differed radically from everything Boethius had stood for.

Alexander Agricola (1445 to 1506)

He wrote in a highly distinctive style, taking the mysteriously sinuous lines of Ockeghem as his point of departure. His music is often very busy and highly detailed, with repeated sequence, repetition of terse rhythmic and motivic units, and a desire to usurp the underlying pulse, sometimes seeming to border on the perverse, either by prolonging cadential figures to cadence on the "wrong" beat, or by shifting the metrical beat of some parts against others. As an example, the closing Agnus Dei of his unusually extended Missa 'In myne zin' features the cantus firmus stated in equal notes of eleven quavers' duration each in first statement, followed by a statement of five quavers' duration each, or in the second Salve Regina setting, offsetting part of the statement of the cantus firmus by a quaver for its entire duration, in both cases with the other voices proceeding in a more strict quadruple meter above. Other "games" played in the music include posing puzzles of mode and musica ficta for the performers (e.g. the Kyrie of the Missa Le serviteur plays with the expectations of the very well known plainchant cantus firmus by setting up some knotty issues of the implied possibility of modal inflection with consistent extra flats.) The music is characteristically athletic in all voice parts, with the lower parts in particular featuring much that requires very fine singers, and not representing the normal simply harmonic function of the tenor-bass combinations used by most of his contemporaries. Often a highly elaborate set of quick motifs will spring unexpected from a previous slow-moving texture (e.g. the eruption of detailed duos beginning at Glorificamus te and climaxing at Adoramus te in the Gloria of the Missa in myne zin). Taruskin considers him to be a prolific composer of chanson as well. "...who wrote his share of Masses, motets, and songs for the courts and churches of Burgundy, France , and Italy but whose chief claim to fame was a whole raft of instrumental songs that eventually found their way into Petrucci's output via his presses. Petrucci devoted his sixth volume of printed music by a single composer to him.

Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583 - 1643)

His Cento partite sopra passacgli (A Hundred Variations on Passacagli), the last of his keyboard publications, released in 1637, is a celebrated example of variations over ground bass. It represents years of practiced improvisation with astonishing variety, with frequent and surprising forays into contrasting rhythms and tempi, and startling harmonic effects. Its title is misleading because it does not contain 100 variations, nor are they all examples of a passacaglia. Read pg. 274-275

Giovannu Puerluigi da Palestrina (1525 - 1594)

His Masses were written for the Catholic church right at the moment that it was renewing its age old mission to be the "church militant" in response to the Reformation, in what would become known as the Counter Reformation. At least as early as the 1540's, particularly in Roman circles, some church men had taken a negative attitude towards the music of the post-Josquin generation, which for all its technical excellence ran counter, the thought, to the proper function of church music. One prime objection was to the increasing use of secular musical styles. There were also objections to the elegant imitative texture that had been so widely adopted was far too artistic. Such music, in its preoccupation with its own beauty of form, exemplified the sin of pride and interfered with the understandability of the sacred texts, to which it was meant to be subordinate. Impressive artistic complexity obscured understanding the holy words. [term's] second book of masses, published in 1567, is prefaced by a letter of dedication in which he testified to his resolve, "in accordance with the views of most serious and most religious-minded men, to bend all my knowledge, effort, and industry toward that which is the holiest and most divine of all things in the Christian religion - that is, to adorn the holy sacrifice of the Mass in a new manner." The final Mass in the book is entitled Missa Papae Marcelli (The Mass of Pope Marcellus). And indeed, it is a Mass that conformed very closely to what was apparently desired by the short reigned pope, for it set the sacred words, "in such a way that everything was audible and intelligible, as it should be." Read pgs. 188-191

Orlando di Lasso/de Lassus (1532 - 1594)

His appointments were secular, though they did entail the writing of huge quantities of service music. During his lifetime, a staggering 79 printed volumes of his music were issued. His output covered every viable sacred and secular genre in Europe. A single piece in which four languages, demonstrating his bent for witty mixtures, juxtapositions of styles, and awareness of possibilities of a kind of musical rhetoric, can be selected out of his massive output. The Parisian chanson Je l'ayme bien (I love her) is from [term's] very first publication, Antwerp 1555. Its a Parisian chanson, by then the style was 25 years old, and was elegantly reconciled to ars perfecta in [term's] setting. Mantona mia cara (My lady, my darling) was printed in 1581 in a volume of low-style Italian songs published in Paris, although probably written much earlier. There could be no better emblem of [term's] cosmopolitan style than this silly little Italian song, written by a Flemming in imitation of a clumsy German soldier, who as a suitor, barely speaks his lady's language. It belongs to the genre VILLANELLE, or town songs (or more precisely, todesca, meaning villanella with a ridiculous German accent), was a strophic song with refrains, hence the direct descendant of the trifling FROTTOLA. The refrains are usually non-sensical: here it takes the form of a suitor's feeble attempts to serenade his lady on the lute. Another comical piece is Audite nova (Hear the news!), written in the solemn manner of a Latin motet that quickly shifts to a preposterous tale about a dimwitted farmer (Der Bawr von Eselskirchen) literally, "The Farmer from Ass-Church) and his honking goose, the latter rendered musically as one might expect. Read pgs. 221-225

William Byrd (1540-1623)

His first important publication was a volume of motets called Cantiones quae ab argumento sacrae vocantur (Songs that are Called Sacred Because of their Text), which he published jointly with his mentor, Tallis in 1575, five years after his appointment as organist to the Chapel Royal. He and Palestrina were outstanding composers of the first generation of musicians who kept the "ars perfecta" tradition (a term of appropriation employed by Glareanus in the Dodecahordon, 1547, to describe the music of Josquin de Prez as a "perfected art" to which nothing could ever be added). They were the last generation of composers who saw their work as service to the divine, and whose primary social status as artists was defined in relation to the institutions of the Catholic Church. As his career went on, [term] had less opportunity to play the role of official church composer in the ars perfecta style. There was obviously no room for Palestrina in England , and no chance to make a reputation composing Masses (they weren't Catholic anymore). The range of suitable texts for motets was stringently circumscribed by the narrow limits of Catholic-Anglican overlap (mainly psalms). As life became more difficult for Catholics, [term] withdrew from the world. While Palestrina's devotion brought him world fame, [term's] meant virtually giving up his career. His withdraw took place in stages: in 1589 and 1591, he published two volumes of Cantiones Sacrae motets of a very different sort from the original publication (same name) with Tallis of 1575. Their texts were no longer liturgical, but were biblical pastiches, mostly of intensely plaintive or penitential character. "O Domine, adjuva me" (Deliver me O Lord), "Tristitia et anxietas" (Sorrow and Distress), and "Infelix ego" (Unhappy am I). The final stage of his compositional activity was devoted to setting forbidden liturgical texts, coinciding with his effective retirement, at the age of 50, from the Chapel Royal, and his move to the country. From 1593 to 1595, he composed three settings of the Mass Ordinary, respectively for four, for three, and five voice parts. This music could only be sung behind closed doors, but they were the first settings of the Mass Ordinary ever printed in England. In 1605 and 1607, he followed up with two volumes of propers, called Gradualia, a comprehensive body of gorgeously fashioned but modestly scaled polyphonic music for the whole liturgical year. His preface to Gradualia contains one of the most eloquent descriptions of musical rhetoric ever penned. Sacred words, he wrote have a "cryptic and mystic power". He also said, "As I have learned by trial, the most suitable of all musical ideas occur as of themselves to one thinking upon things divine and earnestly and diligently pondering them, and suggest themselves spontaneously to the mind that is not indolent and inert."

Heinrich Glaren (1488 - 1563)

His main theoretical innovation, reflected in the pseudo-Greek title of his book, lay in the recognition of four additional modes beyond the eight established by earlier theorists of Gregorian chant. These modes, which he christened Ionian and Aeolian (together with their plagal, or "hypo-" forms), had their respective finals on C and A and hence corresponded to what we now know as the major and minor scales. He illustrated all twelve modes by citing the works of Josquin. While it is questionable whether his novel terms really contributed to the understanding of contemporary music, he certainly did succeed in grounding contemporary music in a discourse of classical authority, turning Josquin into the musical equivalent of a classical master like Horace or Cicero. It was him who brought "the Renaissance" to music and made Josquin the great "Renaissance" composer.

Pierre Attaignant (1494-1552)

His major contribution to music printing consists in his popularizing the single-impression method for music printing, which he first employed in his 1528 publication Chansons nouvelles en musique à quatre parties. In this system, the individual notes were printed directly onto segments of staff, and so the notes, staff lines, and text could all be printed with one send through the printing press. The main disadvantage of this method was the alignment of the staff lines, which often had a "bumpy" look—-some being slightly higher or slightly disjointed from others. Nevertheless, this method became standard music printing practice across Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. Apart from his 36 collections of chansons, he also published books with pieces in lute or keyboard tablature, as well as Masses and motets. Among the most important documents for keyboard music in general and for French Renaissance keyboard music in particular are the seven volumes of tablature published by him in Paris in the spring of 1531

Guillaume DuFay (1397 - 1474)

His setting of the Marian hymn Ave maris stella assimilates a famous chant melody to the style of the courtly chanson and also uses fauxbourdon. His chant paraphrase technique, meaning the embellishment of chant, is extremely decorative. The plainchant's opening leap of a 5th is filled in with what amounts to the original melody. The alternation of cadences in the piece creates a bipartite structural symmetry not at all typical of plainchant melodies, but typical of courtly songs, whose fixed formes always comprised two main sections. Read pg. 142-146.

Giovannu Puerluigi da Palestrina (1525 - 1594)

His status as a virtual musical pope made him the most prolific composer of masses. Complete settings of the Ordinary securely attributed to him number 104. Another dozen or so survive with disputed attributions. His fame, like Josquin, had made him a brand name. 43 Masses were published during his lifetime, beginning in 1554, and another 40 after his death. The resurgence of Mass as the dominant genre testifies to the quasi-official character of [term's] activity. Not that he neglected the motet, with almost 400 to his credit, including a celebrated book of works based on the Song of Songs (Song of Solomon) and another 50 with Italian rather than Latin texts. He also composed two ambitious books of service music, seeking to outfit the entire church calendar. One was a book of Vesper hymns (1589), the other a complete cycle of Mass Offertories that appeared in the last full year of his life. Then there was the book of secular part songs - madrigals - but even in this genre, which [term] devalued in his devout maturity, even going so far as to say he never wrote his invaluable classic, "Vestiva i colli," "The Hills are Bedecked"). Read pgs. 186-193.

William Byrd (1540-1623)

His way of shaping musical motives, so closely modeled on the precarious, threatened Latin words, into contrapuntal structures of such dazzling technical finish sums up the whole notion of the ars perfecta and raises it one final, matchless, unprecedented notch. In the case of [term's] Mass Ordinary settings, the works are literally without precedent. The tradition of Mass composition in England was decidedly broken by the Reformation. The grandiose festal masses of Taverner and his generation - implying secure institutional backing - were not suitable models for Masses that would be sung by undercover congregations using whatever vocal forces it could muster up. Nor is there any indication that continental Mass music, unprintable in England, could have come his way. He had to reinvent it. He reinvented Mass based on his own motet experience, in which he worked out a very personal ars perfecta imitation and rhetorical homophony. His Masses are essentially extended, multipart "freestyle" motets, affording a new way of approaching text, and subsequent composers embraced it. He did not take for granted text, but set it with unparalleled awareness of its semantic content. Where Palestrina had segregated the two techniques (systematic imitation, declamatory homorhythm), [term] integrates them with singular terseness and word responsiveness.

Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583 - 1643)

His works are the most distinctive embodiments of practices arising in the wake of the Counter Reformation. He was the most flamboyantly impressive keyboard composer of his time and the most characteristic. Many of his works were circulated in manuscript during his time, and he personally oversaw the publication of 16 volumes between 1608-1637. Just four of them contain vocal compositions - madrigals, motets, and arias - with the remaining 12 devoted to instrumental works. Four of those feature keyboard compositions that are among his most novel, most theatrical, and most elaborately "open-ended" (meaning they reflected his vividly over the top Baroque side). These compositions came in two types: the formally capricious, unpredictable TOCATTA and the PARTITA, which are variations over ground bass. Read pg. 274-275

Josquin de Prez (1450-1521)

In 1504 he was associated with the collegiate church of Notre Dame, there he died in 1521, probably at the age of 70. His will has a provision that the Notre Dame choir was to stop before his house during all fall processions and sing his polyphonic setting of the Lord's Prayer in his memory.

Giovanni Gabrielli (1554 - 1612)

In ecclesiis benedicte Domino (Bless the Lord in the Churches), probably composed sometime after 1605, shows him at the height of his powers. There are fifteen parts in all deployed in three groups plus an organ part. The three groups are of distinctive, mutually exclusive composition. There are four parts (SATB) labeled capella, standing for the chorus ; there are four parts (SATB) labeled voce, standing for vocal soloists, and there are six parts assigned to specific instruments. The final part includes three cornetti (instruments held and fingered like oboes but played with a brass cup mouthpiece), two trombones, and the violino, then a new instruments, making an early appearance in notated music, and in this case, sounding in a range now associated with the modern viola. The vocal and instrumental parts are distinct from one another in both style and in function; but so are the choral and solo parts within the vocal contingent. The soloists' parts have a great deal of written embellishment that again probably reflects what was previously the unwritten improvisatory norm. In ecclesiis builds from a modest opening to a dazzling conclusion. It begins with ta single soprano voice supported by an independent organ continuo line. The chorus enters as if in response at Alleluia, its music contrasting in every conceivable way with that of the soloist: in texture, in its homorhythmic relationship with the bass, and in its strikingly dancelike triple meter. The soprano soloist meanwhile sings in alternation with the chorus, emphasizing the ancient responsorial effect and showing its relationship to the new concerted style. But even more basic to the concerto idea, and its truly subversive aspect from the standpoint of the ars perfecta, is the emphasis on short-range contrast rather than long-range continuity. Also new is the "general pause" - the rest in all parts appearing in m. 10. It is not only a rhetorical pause but a pragmatic concession to the reverberant enclosed space that would have originally resonated with [term's]. The grand pauses are there to let the echo dissipate. Next, the bass soloist sings another little "concerto" to the bare organ's support - and now the chorus is back with another Alleluia in response. Whereas the bass' music differed from the soprano, the chorus' response is the same. The Alleluias are acting as refrains, or as RITORNELLO. The use of which is endemic to the concertato style as is he use of basso continuo. [term] anchors the ars perfecta from the beginning of his motet. There is not one single point of imitation. There are motives that pass from voice to voice, especially in the vocal soloists' parts, but never are these motives combined into a continuous interwoven fabric. The aspects of virtuosity and spectacle place a new emphasis on the act of performance. The art of music has been more thoroughly dramatized and professionalized than ever before. Read pgs. 214-216

Isabelle d'Este (1474 - 1539)

In music she sponsored the composers Bartolomeo Tromboncino and Marco Cara and played the lute herself. Unusually, she employed women as professional singers at her court, including Giovanna Moreschi, the wife of Marchetto Cara. She is the great patroness of the frottola, and is a potential candidate for the muse of the Mona Lisa by da Vinci. Cara was one of the leading frottolists of his day, and was employed at the Mantua court in Lombardy. She is the daughter of the famous Duke of Ferrara, whom des Prez turned his name into a cantus firmus for a mass named after him. Her patronage oversaw a rebirth of Italian song, with Cara and Tromboncino. Read pg. 218-219.

Thomas Morley (1557 - 1602)

It was the English that who were conquered by the Italians. As a translator, arranger, monopolistic publisher, and as literary propogandist, [term] deserves most of the credit for the English craze for Italian music that flared up after the publication of the first volume of Musica Transalpina in 1588. This was a large anthology of fifty-seven mainly Italian madrigals for four, five and six voices, with their texts translated into English by a London music lover, named Nicholas Yonge. Yonge's bestseller was followed two years later by poet Thomas Watson's "The First Sett of Italian Madrigalls Englished, containing mainly works by Marenzio. Next, it was [term's] turn to make a killing. Aiming for the widest possible appeal, he concentrated first on the lighter Italian genres that had descended from dance songs: the canzonet (little homorhtyhmic song), the ballet (little dance), and the like, based most directly on works by Giovanni Gastoldi. These are genres that have the fa-la-la non-sense refrains, which parody solmization syllables and have become firmly associated with the English madrigals as commonly defined. Their continued popularity among glee clubs and singing groups goes all the way back to [term's] popularizing efforts. Read pgs. 234-236

Adrian Willaert (1490 - 1562)

Largely thanks to [term], Venice was full of outstandingly learned Italian musicians: Zarlino, Nicola Vicentino, Girolamo Parabosco, Costanzo Porta and, above all, Andrea Gabrielli, to name only his most famous Italian pupils. The chori spezzati, pieces for multiple choirs pioneered rather tamely in the first half of the 16th century by [term] and some of his Venetian contemporaries, became a craze by the end of the century - at least in those churches that could afford and accommodate such presentations. Both the spacialized effect and the multiplication of voice parts contributed to the awe-inspiring result, bypassing reason and boosting faith. Read pgs. 170, 181, 182-5, 212, 219, 230

John Calvin (1504(9) - 1564)

Music did not rank very high on the Reformation agenda, but the effects of reform were felt keenly in the musical sphere, for it was a revolt within the very stronghold of cultivated music, and the source of its richest patronage. What many reformers hated was the ars perfecta, whose very perfection now came under suspicion. But, musical agreement among Reformers ended there. They had no united vision of music's positive place in religion. One of the most negative was [term dude], the Geneva reformer, whose emphasis on austerity and complete rejection of the sacraments left little room for music in his services and none at all for professional music. The only musical artifact of the [term] movement was the Geneva Psalter (1543), a book of psalms put into metrical verse for singing to the tunes of popular songs. Music had no place as a cultivated art in the [term] -ist church. He feared the seductiveness of melody. - Taruskin

Clemens non Papa (1510 - 1556)

Of all these works, his Souterliedekens were perhaps the most widely known and influential. The Souterliedekens were published in 1556-1557 by Susato in his Musyck Boexken ("Music Books"), IV-VII and comprised the only Protestant part-music in Dutch during the Renaissance. Based on a preceding volume of Souterliedekens printed by Symon Cock that contained monophonic settings of the psalms in Dutch, Clemens's Souterliedekens became the first complete polyphonic settings of all 150 psalms in Dutch. Presumably, the original verse translation of the Psalter into the Dutch language was completed by Willem van Nievelt from Wittenberg. [term's] part-settings are generally simple, and designed to be sung by people at home. They use the well-known secular tunes that were printed in the Cock edition, including drinking songs, love songs, ballads, and other popular songs of the time, as a cantus firmus. Most of them were set for 3 parts, and there are 26 different combinations of these voices. Some of the Souterliedekens are based on dance-songs and are frankly homophonic and homorhythmic, while others use imitation. It is notable that these pieces of music survived the ban in 1569 when the government under the Duke of Alba censured all books that were deemed heretical. After [term's] death, his works were distributed to Germany, France, Spain, and even among various circles in England. The influence of [term] was especially prominent in Germany. Franco-Flemish composer Lassus in particular knew his music well and incorporated elements of his style.

Thomas Morley (1557 - 1602)

Once he got the commercial ball rolling, there was no stopping it, or so it seemed. He published a collection in 1601 that was emblematic of that movement, called "The Triumphs of Oriana" consisting of madrigals by some two dozen composers, all in praise of Queen Elizabeth and all ending with a common refrain, "Long Live fair Oriana." This, nationalism, public relations, and entrepreneurship conjoined to turn the century's most quintessentially Italian musical genre, or at least a lightened variant of it, into a genre the English accepted as their own. Read pgs. 234-236

Johannes Tinctoris (1435 - 1511)

Read 145, 162, 166 We can get some idea of the preeminent elite composers of the day from the writings of [term], a minor composer himself, but a theorist of encyclopedic ambition. His dozen treatises attempt collectively to encompass all of contemporary music, its practices, practitioners and products alike. The composers from whom [term] drew his didactic examples are the ones whose works are found in sources throughout Europe, irrespective of provenance. He called Dunstable the fountainhead of contemporary music, and consigned everything earlier to oblivion. He famously announced in 1477 that there was not a single piece of music more than forty years old that is "regarded by the learned as worth hearing" because as mentioned previously, he found the music composed "so ineptly, so stupidly." [term] presented in honor roll of his great contemporaries - bestowing benedictions on a favored few. Pride of place went to Johannes Ockeghem and Antoinne Busnoys, who in their joint preeminence have, much like Leonin and Perotin, like Dufay and Binchois, haunted historical memory as a pair. In the 1470's the theorist [term] divided the musical genres of his day into high, middle and low. Highest was the cyclic mass, with its technical virtuosity. English polyphony of this time maintains a consistently high style, as evidenced in the complex polyphony of the Eton Choirbook. Motets, however, came to be written in a more accessible middle style, adopting the melody driven texture that had been associated with secular song. A further "lowering" of style is evident in the motetti missales, cycles of substitute motets for the Mass written in Milan in the 1470's and influenced by the popular lauda. His low genres consist of secular music, such as the bergerette, a love song related in a form to the older virellai, but consistently of a single stroph with an ample refrain.

Tomás Luis de Victoria (1548 - 1611)

Read pg 186 The Italian Giovanni pierLuigi da Palestrina and the English William Byrd were the outstanding musicians who unquestioningly kept the ars perfecta faith. Together with [term], a Spanish organist and composer active for many years in Rome and Orlando di Lasso, theirs was the last generation who unanimously saw the highest calling of their art in divine service, and whose primary social status as artists was defined in relation to the institutions of the Catholic Church.

Bartolomeo Tromboncino (1470 - 1535)

Read pg. 219 Isabella who would have hired famous Flemmings if she could have afforded them, instead became the patroness who oversaw - through Cara and his colleague [term] - the rebirth of Italian song as a literate tradition. The frottola....

Johannes Ockeghem (1410/25 - 1497)

Read pgs. 145-147 [term] composed a sung lament - a déploration - on the death of Binchois in 1460, which suggests he may have been a pupil of the leading composer to the Burgundian court. [term] came from St. Ghislain in the French-speaking Belgian provence of Hainaut. By 1443 he was a singer at the cathedral of Notre Dame in Antwerp, the leading church of Flanders. It was at the court and chapel of the French king, however, that [term] made his real mark, beginning in 1451. He became a great favorite of Charles VII and his successor, Louis XI, such that by the time of his death he was surely the most socially exalted musician in Europe, and the richest as well. [term] was particularly venerated. By all odds the most beautiful musical manuscript of the fifteenth century is a priceless presentation volume from 1498 known as the Chigi Codex, which contains the just-deceased [term's] virtually complete collected sacred works and some of Busnois' as well.

Ottavino de Petrucci (1466 - 1539)

Read pgs. 156, 216, 218-19, 296 - 206, 217, 132, 163, 169-173 In the area of music, the innovative Venetian printer [term] released his first volumes in 1501, a,most 50 years after the German printer Johannes Gutenberg (1400-68) had invented moveable type and issued the first printed books. Most famously, the "Gutenberg Bible." Alongside the masses, motets and instrumentalized chansons for which Petrucci is best remembered, the enterprising Venetian also issued Italian songbooks for the brisk local trade. The first such book, Frottole Libro Primo (First Book of Frottolas), came out in 1504 the fourth year of his business activity and seventh year of publication. A scant decade later, by 1514, [term] had released 15 such volumes, each containing about 50 or 60 songs, which accounted for more than half of his total output. The triple impression method employed by [term] and the other early Italians produced stunning results - [term's] early books were never surpassed as models of printerly art - but the process wasted time and resources and was overly difficult. [term's] early volumes, with their cumbersome production methods and handsome appearance were luxury items, collectables, items of conspicuous consumption.

Adrian Willaert (1490 - 1562)

Read pgs. 170, 181, 182-5, 204, 212, 219, 230 The other main perfecting touch that distinguished the classic polyphony of the mid-16th century genres, mass and motet, was the codification of dissonance treatment, a polishing process. Zarlino was again the authoritative theorist and confessed his particular indebtedness to his revered teacher, to whom he referred as the "new Pythagorous." We know him as [term], who in a way was Josquin's creative grandchild. For his primary teacher Jean Mouton, who had a special affinity with Josquin. [term] was one of the last in the line of Flemmings and Frenchmen who had dominated Italian court and chapel music since the early 15th century. He lived and worked in Italy, at once the focal point of patronage and the center of the burgeoning music business. He was lucky to find an admirer in Andrea Gritti, the doge (chief magistrate) of Republican Venice who chose him as maestro di capella at the splendid 11th century church of St. Marks. He was installed in 1527 and served until his death in 1562. He also struck up a profitable relationship with the local music printers who bought out about 2 dozen volumes devoted to his masses, motets, and secular vocal and instrumental music. He became a one-man music industry. His secret, the thing that made him the true classic of his time and the arbiter supreme of established excellence, was his stylistic moderation and lack of idiosyncrasy.

Thomas Tallis (1505 - 1585)

Read pgs. 170, 197 Monopoly with William Byrd. Vaughn Williams wrote a Fantasia on a Theme by [term].

Giovannu Puerluigi da Palestrina (1525 - 1594)

Read pgs. 186-193. All but a few of [term's] some 100 Masses are based on preexisting music. That in itself is not remarkable; the polyphonic Mass Ordinary cycle ws from the very beginning a cannibalistic genre. But [term] also retained an active interest in the techniques of earlier composers whose work he discovered in the manuscripts of the Sistine Chapel. [term] was let go from service at the Sistine Chapel because Pope Paul IV chose to enforce a long dormant celibacy rule, and [term] was married. His first volume of Masses released in 1554 was dedicated to [term's] protector and recently elected Pope, Julius III, and opened with one based on the liturgical antiphon Ecce sacerdos magnus "Behold the great preist." presumably composed for Julius ascent. It was an old fashioned tenor cantus firmus mass. The Agnus Dei even had some old fashioned "poly-mensural" tricks. [term] demonstrated his intimate familiarity with Josquin by basing a Mass on the motet Benedicta es, coelorum regina. [term] reached back even further for models, rooting himself deeply in the Franco-Flemish school. Sure enough, he wrote a l'homme armé Mass, one of the last contributions to this test/title. [term's] predecessor at the Sistine Chapel, Cristobal Morales, had composed two l'homme armé Masses in the 1540s. More than 30 of his Masses are the paraphrase type, in which a Gregorian chant is absorbed into a prevadingly imitative texture. But, half of his Masses are imitation (parody) Masses, in which the motives of a polyphonic model are exhaustively rewoven into new textures. More than 20 times [term] based a Mass on one of his own motets, or even madrigals, (including the renounced Vestiva i colli).

Giovannu Puerluigi da Palestrina (1525 - 1594)

Read pgs. 186-193. [term] was the quasi-official spokesman for the Catholic church, at a time when it was being challenged by Reformation movements in Germany. He was born in or near Rome and died there. By then he had either been directly in the Papal service or at the musical helm of one of the major Roman churches for more than forty years. His service began with the election of Pope Julius III, and it ended ten popes later with Clement VIII. That is the central fact of his career. He was the pope's composer, a veritable papal institution in his own right. His status gave him a particular commission: in 1577 at the height of his fame, [term] was asked by Pope Gregory XIII to revise the plainchant that bore the name of the pope's sainted namesake, Gregory I. Chant was seen as a long tradition, divinely revealed, yet it would now be subject to "modernistic" style in the spirit of the ars perfecta, purged of its Gothic impurities. [term] did not complete the project which reached publication 20 years after his death. Indeed it is not known exactly how much of the revision was completed by him or his assistant. The result was what one might expect from [term]: a simpler, more directed, or "classic" melodic line.

Giovannu Puerluigi da Palestrina (1525 - 1594)

Read pgs. 191-196 His third book of Masses, published in 1570, contained complicated works in Netherlandish style. Clearly there was never an actual inquisitorial ban on Catholic worship music imposed by the Council of Trent. Still, the style of the Missa Papae Marcelli remains arguably a coerced official style - not a style in other words, that [term] or Ruffo or any other composer at the time would have adopted spontaneously, but, rather, one imposed by an external force. As the Missa Papae Marcelli shows, [term's] post Council of Trent style could be a style of special grandeur, grace, and expressivity. It is a "freely composed" Mass, one of the few by [term] not to incorporate preexisting material - or, at least, none that has yet been detected. This makes the composer's shaping hand all the more crucial and gives the mass a musical shape more elegant than ever. Despite (or perhaps because of) the loss of the usual external scaffold.

John Taverner (1490 - 1545)

Read pgs. 195-196 Alternatives to Perfection. The ideals implicit in the ars perfecta were not universally shared, as we have only to glance across the English Channel to discover. When last we looked, with music connected to the Eton Choirbook in the later half of the 15th century, English church music had diverged significantly in style from music on the continent, and the stylistic differences, it was already evident, indicated a difference in attitude. This continued with the music of [term], Willaert's great English contemporary. With [term] the luxuriant melismatic cantus firmus polyphony that characterized the Eton Choirbook antiphons continued its jungle growth. Their music, aspiring to raise the listener's mind up above the terrestrial, provided a sensory overload; higher treble parts than anywhere else, lower bass parts, and richer harmonies. Motivic imitation - an orderly, rational procedure if ever there was one - is only a sporadic decoration, not a structural frame. The heaviest overload of all came in the guise of length, a heavenly expanse in which the listener is lost, by design. An early Tudor setting like [term's] of the Mass Ordinary - a text that can be recited in a couple of minutes - will typically last 3/4 of an hour.

Giovanni Gabrielli (1554 - 1612)

San Marco had a long tradition of musical excellence and [term's] work there made him one of the most noted composers in Europe. The vogue that began with his influential volume Sacrae symphoniae (1597) was such that composers from all over Europe, especially from Germany, came to Venice to study. Evidently he also made his new pupils study the madrigals being written in Italy, so not only did they carry back the grand Venetian polychoral style to their home countries, but also the more intimate style of madrigals; Heinrich Schütz and others helped transport the transitional early Baroque music north to Germany, a trend that decisively affected subsequent music history. The productions of the German Baroque, culminating in the music of J.S. Bach, were founded on this strong tradition, which had its roots in Venice. [term] was increasingly ill after about 1606, at which time church authorities began to appoint deputies to take over duties he could no longer perform. He died in 1612 in Venice, of complications from a kidney stone.

Johannes Ockeghem (1410/25 - 1497)

Such emulations of the original Caput Mass, whoever its author may have been, certainly show how some composers of this time were inclined toward tours de force. The most famous examples in the 15th century are two Masses by [term] - works with which his musical reputation is permanently bound. One of them is the Missa Prolationum, the "Mass of Time Signatures." It is sung in four parts, but written in two. The peculiar title advertises the fact that each of the two voices carries a double time signature; and when the Mass is actually sung, each of the four voices realizes its note values according to a different mensuration scheme. The other jewel in [term's] catalogue is Missa cuiusvis toni, the "Mass in Any Mode." It is notated without clefs. The singers can decide on one of four different clef combinations, each of which, when supplied mentally, fixes the notated music on one of the "four finals" - when the final is D, the modal scale will be Dorian; when E, Phrygian; when F, Lydian; and when G, Mixolydian. Read pgs. 150-152, 166, 144-147, 157

Orlando di Lasso/de Lassus (1532 - 1594)

Taruskin considers him to be a paragon (a person of quality, or perfection in their time) of his day. One of the last great wandering Netherlanders, he was born in Mons, now an industrial town in southern Belgium. By the age of 12 he was already a professional chorister in the service of the Duke of Mantua, where he adopted an Italian name by which he is best known. He served faithfully as court and chapel musician to the Dukes of Bavaria in Munich. He was born a French speaker, educated in Italy, and matured in Germany, making him a solid model of composition of his age. Whereas the model of ars perfecta was brought to its peak by religious universalism and his contemporary, Palestrina, Lassus was brought up in the age of music printing and saw the beginning of world music commerce. He and Palestrina together, sum up the contradictory ideals and leanings of a musical world in transition. Read pgs. 222-225

Johannes Ockeghem (1410/25 - 1497)

The bergerette. Although its name ("shepherdess") suggests a pastoral style, it originated in French court circles and was a sort of high-toned synthesis of two earlier fixed forms, the rondeau and the virelai. An early classic of the genre, prob dating from the 1460's, was [term's] Ma bouche rit et ma pensée pleure ("My mouth laughs but my thoughts weep") - a classic by virtue of its wde dissemination in many manuscripts and its later emulation by younger composers. The outstanding textural novelty of Ma bouche rit is the use of almost systematic imitation entirely confined to the superius and the tenor, the voices that make up the structural pair. It became a standard practice that typifies the convergence of the middle and low genres - a convergence that, depending on the context (motet or chanson, for example), can be construed as either the lowering of the middle or the raising of the low. In the case of the bergerette , it is clearly a case of raising the low. No less significant is the casting of the music in two absolutely self-contained sections, with the second (here, the residuum, "the rest") actually labeled as such. That amounts to mimicry of the musical structure of the motet.

Giovanni Gabrielli (1554 - 1612)

The first composer to give definite specifications for his works, or the first composer to practice the art of orchestration as we know it. Besides eleven concerted motets of his own that he published along with his uncle's concerti in 1587, the only volumes of music he saw fit to publish in his lifetime were a book of what he called Sacrae symphoniae (1597), here adapting a new concerto idea of "many different things simultaneously coordinated to an old world with classy Greek roots that meant 'things sounding together in harmony.'" The second book of Sacrae symphoniae, issued posthumously in 1615, was the epoch -maker because of its exact specification of the instrumentation and dynamics. Read pgs. 214-216

Martin Luther (1483 - 1546)

The great exception to the pervasive musical hatred of the time was the largest and most successful of the continental reformed churches, named for the man himself. Although he was by far the most spectacular and theatrical of reformers, he was in some ways the most conservative, retaining a far more regular and organized liturgy than his counterparts in keeping the sacrament of the Eucharist, renamed the Lord's Supper in its modified [namesake term] form. Moreover, he was personally a fervent music lover who played several instruments, loved to sing, and even composed a bit. He did not fear the seductiveness of melody as Calvin and Zwingli, but instead wished to harness and exploit it for his own purposes. His most widely quoted remark, "Why should the devil have all the good tunes?" Even more like the Swiss reformers, he cultivated polyphonic music for the glorification of God in churches, schools and homes. The polyphonic church music he favored was still different from music up to that period. It was not totally divorced from the ars perfecta, since [term] wanted music modeled after JOSQUIN DE PREZ, whose compositions he treasured. Still, he opposed professionalization and hierarchy, seeing his church as a universal priesthood of believers. The music he wanted was not for professional choir, but for a congregational community. Read pgs. 206-210

Jean Mouton (1459 - 1522)

The historical significance of [term] has long been acknowledged, but his music has rarely received the attention that his position would suggest is merited. To modern audiences only a few pieces are familiar: the remarkable Nesciens mater, the joyous Noë, noë psallite, and the evocative Queramus cum pastoribus. (That all these three are Christmas motets is probably coincidental.) [term] was a provincial cathedral musician. In 1501, however, he took a position in Grenoble, on the edge of the Alps, but he left this post without permission only a year later. It seems likely that he had joined the chapel of the Queen, Anne of Brittany, who visited Grenoble in the summer of 1502, and the last twenty years of his life were spent in far more exalted circumstances than perhaps he could have imagined achieving as a middle-aged choirmaster in Amiens. As well as his continued employment at the French court, [term] found favour with the music-loving Medici Pope, Leo X, who reigned from 1513 to 1521 and named the composer an apostolic notary. There are several mentions in contemporary writings of the high regard in which Leo held [term's] music. Like many clerical singers in the late Middle Ages, [term] acquired several benefices (positions as canon, rector or similar, which could carry considerable income while often being held vicariously). At his death in 1522, [term] was buried in St Quentin, as a few years earlier had been Loyset Compère, another composer who may previously have held the same canonry. Alongside his own output of musical works, [term] taught composition to Adrian Willaert, a leading figure of the next generation who was director of music at St Mark's, Venice, for thirty-five years.

Heinrich Isaac (1450 - 1517)

The influence of [term] was especially pronounced in Germany, due to the connection he maintained with the Habsburg court. He was the first significant master of the Franco-Flemish polyphonic style who both lived in German-speaking areas, and whose music was widely distributed there. It was through him that the polyphonic style of the Netherlands became widely accepted in Germany, making possible the further development of contrapuntal music there. The Austrian serialist composer Anton Webern (1883-1945) gained his Ph.D on [term's] Choralis Constantinus, with Prof. Guido Adler, the doyen of musicology in Austria and Germany. One of the three leading composers (with Jakob Obrecht and Josquin des Prez) of the Flemish school in the late 15th century.

Josquin de Prez (1450-1521)

The motet Ave Maria...Virgo serena has been his most famous work, but also his most exemplary (representative) one. Petrucci chose this motet to open his first motet collection in 1502. The text combines three different liturgical items: a central votive antiphon to the Blessed Virgin Mary, framed by a prefacing quatrain that quotes both the words and the music of the Gregorian sequence for the Feast of Annunciation (commemorating the occasion the angel Gabriel uttered the first, "Hail Mary!"), and by a closing couplet that voices a common prayer formula of the day. The central antiphon is a metrical hymn that echoes Gabriel's "Ave" through five stanzas that recall in turn the five major feasts commemorating events of Mary's life: The Immaculate Conception (Dec 8), Nativity (Sep 8) Annunciation (March 25), Purification (Feb 2), and Assumption (Aug 15). [term's] music keeps with the humanistic expectations of the day: ideals of clarity, force of expression, and declamation (the fit between notes and syllables). There is also an overall level of structure or syntax, the ways in which various parts of the text and those of the music relate to each other and to the whole. There is also a level of textual illustration, the ways in which the music can be made to parallel or underscore the semantic content (meaning of the words). Read pg. 174-181.

Giovannu Puerluigi da Palestrina (1525 - 1594)

The opening idea of the Kyrie is both the subject of the mass' first point of imitation and the mass' main melodic building block; it embodies the quintessence of [term's] style in what is known as the "recovered leap." This model motif begins iwth an ascending leap of a fourth, which is immediately filled in, or "recovered," by descending step-wise motion. It is the double reciprocity - immediate reversal of contour after a leap, the exchange of leaps and steps - that creates the "balanced" design with which the name Palestrina has become synonymous. The wealth of passing tones (many of them accented), guaranteed by the stepwise recovery of skips gives [term's] texture its much - esteemed patina. Otherwise the style of this Kyrie does not differ especially from the ars perfecta idiom with which we are familiar, because this movement is a sparse texted, traditionally melismatic one where textual clarity was not of a paramount concern. It is in the "wordy" movements of the Mass - the Gloria and the Credo - that we can see the special qualities dictated by the council of trent, the setting of the very first phrase of polyphony in the Credo can serve as paradigm. The bass has the model motif that had opened the Kyrie, its first note repeated twice to accommodate two unaccented syllables. Four of the six voices sing the phrase in choral homorhythm with melodic decorations taking place only where syllables are held long, so as to not obscure the words. We can summarize the structure of the Credo as a strategically planned series of cadential "cells" or "modules" each expressed through a fragment of text delcared homorhythmically by a portion of the choir iridescently shifting succession and rounded off by a beautifully crafted cadence. The movement ends with a full six part compliment in a massive tutti at the final "amen" that develops the arching "recovery" idea - upward leaps followed by downward scales - into a thrilling peroration (concluding part of a speech meant to thrill an audience). The expressivity of this music arises out of the cadence patterns. It is with [term] that we first begin to notice the effects of strategic harmonic delays. Very important Read 194 - 196 to finish.

Andrea Gabrielli (1532 - 1585)

The polychoral style and the Counter-Reformation attitudes associated with it reached new heights in Venice. The two musicians who brought Catholic music to its pinnacle and were organists at St. Mark's Basilica under Zarlino were from the same family. However [term] competed successfully, after several failures, for the first organist position in 1566 and held the post until his death 20 years later. During that time, there were several secular celebrations, such as naval victories over the Turks in 1571, that [term] wrote music for. He also wrote theatrical works, including a set of choruses performed in 1585 at a gala staging Sophocle's tragedy, Oedipus Tyrannus. It is the earliest surviving music specifically composed for the humanist revival Greek drama. Read pgs. 212-214

William Byrd (1540-1623)

The religious predicaments of the Elizabethan period were epitomized in the recusant [term's] long career as the country's foremost musician, a career that spanned virtually the whole of Elizabeth I's reign from 1588 to her death in 1603. In the beginning, Elizabeth's tolerance for the elaborate ritual within the Church of England made it possible for the high art of Latin polyphony to flourish again. Yet it was a changed art nonetheless. It had been affected by continental styles. [Term] was a great protagonist of this change, which in the face of English withdraw from the universal church might seem a bit paradoxical.

Giovanni Gabrielli (1554 - 1612)

There seems to be a distinct change in [term's] style after 1605, the year of publication of Monteverdi's Quinto libro di madrigali, and [term's] compositions are in a much more homophonic style as a result. There are sections purely for instruments - called "Sinfonia" - and small sections for soloists singing florid lines, accompanied simply by a basso continuo. "Alleluia" refrains provide refrains within the structure, forming rondo patterns in the motets, with close dialogue between choirs and soloists. In particular, one of his best-known pieces, In Ecclesiis, is a showcase of such polychoral techniques, making use of four separate groups of instrumental and singing performers, underpinned by the omnipresent organ and continuo.

Giovanni Gabrielli (1554 - 1612)

Though [term] composed in many of the forms current at the time, he preferred sacred vocal and instrumental music. All of his secular vocal music is relatively early; he never wrote lighter forms, such as dances; and late in his career he concentrated on sacred vocal and instrumental music that exploited sonority for maximum effect. Among the innovations credited to him - and while he was not always the first, he was the most famous to do these things - were the use of dynamics; the use of specifically notated instrumentation (as in the famous Sonata pian' e forte); and the use of massive forces arrayed in multiple, spatially separated groups, an idea which was to be the genesis of the Baroque concertato style, and which spread quickly to northern Europe, both by the report of visitors to Venice and by [term's] students, which included Hans Leo Hassler and Heinrich Schütz. Like composers before and after him, he would use the unusual layout of the San Marco church, with its two choir lofts facing each other, to create striking spatial effects. Most of his pieces are written so that a choir or instrumental group will first be heard on one side, followed by a response from the musicians on the other side; often there was a third group situated on a stage near the main altar in the center of the church. While this polychoral style had been extant for decades (Adrian Willaert may have made use of it first, at least in Venice) [term] pioneered the use of carefully specified groups of instruments and singers, with precise directions for instrumentation, and in more than two groups. The acoustics were and are such in the church that instruments, correctly positioned, could be heard with perfect clarity at distant points. Thus instrumentation which looks strange on paper, for instance a single string player set against a large group of brass instruments, can be made to sound, in San Marco, in perfect balance. A fine example of these techniques can be seen in the scoring of In Ecclesiis.

Loyset Compère (1445 - 1518)

Unlike his contemporaries, [term] seems to have written few masses (at least very few survive). By temperament he seems to have been a miniaturist, and his most popular and numerous works were in the shorter forms of the day—primarily chansons and motets. Two stylistic trends are evident in his music: the style of the Burgundian School, which he seems to have learned in his early career before coming to Italy, and the lighter style of the Italian composers current at the time, who were writing frottolas (the light and popular predecessor to the madrigal). [term] had a gift for melody, and many of his chansons became popular; later composers used several as cantus firmi for masses. Occasionally he seems to have given himself a formidable technical challenge and set out to solve it, such as writing quodlibets (an example is Au travail suis, which combines no less than six different tunes written to the same text by different composers). [term] wrote several works in a unique form, sometimes called a free motet, which combines some of the light elegance of the Italian popular song of the time with the contrapuntal technique of the Netherlanders. Some mix texts from different sources, for instance a rather paradoxical Sile fragor which combines a supplication to the Virgin Mary with a drinking song dedicated to Bacchus. His choice of secular texts tended towards the irreverent and suggestive. His chansons are his most characteristic compositions, and many scholars of Renaissance music consider them to be his best work. They are for three or four voices, and are in three general categories: Italianate, light works for four a cappella voices, very much like frottolas, with text set syllabically and often homophonically, and having frequent cadences; three-voice works in the Burgundian style, rather like the music of Dufay; and three-voice motet-chansons, which resemble the medieval motet more than anything else. In these works the lowest voice usually sings a slow-moving cantus firmus with a Latin text, usually from chant, while the upper voices sing more animated parts, in French, on a secular text. Many of [term's] compositions were printed by Ottaviano Petrucci in Venice, and disseminated widely; obviously their availability contributed to their popularity. [term] was one of the first composers to benefit from the new technology of printing, which had a profound impact on the spread of the Franco-Flemish musical style throughout Europe. [term] also wrote several settings of the Magnificat (the hymn of praise to the Virgin Mary, from the first chapter of the Gospel of Luke), as well as numerous short motets.

William Byrd (1540-1623)

[Term] and Tallis were jointly granted a patent for the printing of music and ruled music paper for 21 years, one of a number of patents issued by the Crown for the printing of books on various subjects. They used the services of the French Huguenot printer Thomas Vautrollier, who had settled in England and previously produced an edition of a collection of Lassus chansons in London. The two monopolists took advantage of the patent to produce a grandiose joint publication under the title Cantiones quae ab argumento sacrae vocantur. It was a collection of 34 Latin motets dedicated to the Queen herself, accompanied by elaborate prefatory matter including poems in Latin. There are 17 motets each by Tallis and [term], one for each year of the Queen's reign. His contributions to the Cantiones are in various different styles, although his forceful musical personality is stamped on all of them. The inclusion of Laudate pueri which proves to be an instrumental fantasia with words added after composition, is one sign that Byrd had some difficulty in assembling enough material for the collection. Diliges Dominum, which may also originally have been untexted, is an eight-in-four retrograde canon of little musical interest. [Term] contribution to the Cantiones also includes compositions in a more forward-looking manner which point the way to his motets of the 1580s. Some of them show the influence of the motets of Alfonso Ferrabosco I (1543-1588), a Bolognese musician who worked in the Tudor court at intervals between 1562 and 1578.[12] Ferrabosco's motets provided direct models for [term] Emendemus in melius, O lux beata Trinitas, Domine secundum actum meum and Siderum rector as well as a more generalised paradigm for what Joseph Kerman has called [term] 'affective-imitative' style, a method of setting pathetic texts in extended paragraphs based on subjects employing curving lines in fluid rhythm and contrapuntal techniques which [term] learnt from his study of Ferrabosco. The Cantiones were a financial failure. In 1577 [term] and Tallis were forced to petition Queen Elizabeth for financial help, pleading that the publication had "fallen oute to oure greate losse" and that Tallis was now "verie aged". They were subsequently granted the leasehold on various lands in East Anglia and the West Country for a period of 21 years

Giovanni Gabrielli (1554 - 1612)

[term's] first motets were published alongside his uncle Andrea's compositions in his 1587 volume of Concerti. These pieces show much influence of his uncle's style in the use of dialogue and echo effects. There are low and high choirs and the difference between their pitches is marked by the use of instrumental accompaniment. The motets published in [term's] 1597 Sacrae Symphoniae seem to move away from this technique of close antiphony towards a model in which musical material is not simply echoed, but developed by successive choral entries. Some motets, such as Omnes Gentes developed the model almost to its limits. In these motets, instruments are an integral part of the performance, and only the choirs marked "Capella" are to be performed by singers for each part.

Vincenzo Galilei (1520 - 1591)

[term] was one of the pioneers in the systematic study of acoustics, mainly in his research (assisted by his son) in the mathematical formula of stretched strings. His son told his biographer that [term] introduced him to the idea of systematic testing and measurement through their Pisa house basement which was strung with lengths of lute string materials, each of different lengths, with different weights attached. [term] made some substantial discoveries in acoustics, particularly involving the physics of vibrating strings and columns of air. He discovered that while the ratio of an interval is proportional to string lengths [for example, a perfect fifth has the proportions of 3:2] it varied with the square root of the tension applied (and the cube root of concave volumes of air). Weights suspended from strings of equal length need to be in a ratio of 9:4 to produce the 3:2 perfect fifth. This work was taken further by Marin Mersenne who formulated the current law of vibrating strings. Mersenne was a regular correspondent to many scientists and, after the death of [term] he maintained a regular link to his son, and treated him as a prized member of his scientific network. Read pgs. 241-244 bc i didn't include it. Seriously.

Johannes Ockeghem (1410/25 - 1497)

[term] wrote Caput Masses in emulation of English mass. [term's] Mass is presumed to be a relatively early work. The original Caput Mass set a standard as can be seen by comparing its Kyrie to that written by [term]. As was the English practice, an anonymous Missa Caput Kyrie carried an added Latin text that necessitated a very spacious musical treatment. [term], having only eighteen canonical words to set , streamlined his setting. His way of distinguishing himself was to transpose the tenor down an octave so that it became the effective bass - no doubt originally sung by the composer himself, leading his choir with his famously deep voice. [term's] audacity in transposing this particular cantus firmus melody down an octave meant that it begins with one note - B natural - that normally cannot function as a bass since the diatonic pitch set can offer no perfect fifth above it with which to resonate. He goes ahead and writes an F above the cantus firmus B anyway, which forces alteration of the F to F# causa necessities (by necessity), producing what we would call a B-minor triad. But the F# is immediately contradicted by the superius' F natural against the second cantus firmus note, D, producing what we would call a D minor triad. This harmonic succession, by virtue of a root progression by thirds and a melodic cross relation, is still odd to the ear even after half a millennium. By harnessing the old devices of musica ficta to new effect - a pungent effect implicit in the cantus firmus taken over from an earlier composer but one that the earlier composer had not exploited - [term] announces his emulatory designs in the Caput tradition and proclaims himself a worthy heir to his distinguished predecessor.

Clément Janequin (1485 - 1588)

a leading 16th-century French composer of chansons, famous for his program chansons, part-songs in which sounds of nature, of battles, and of the streets are imitated. He worked in Bordeaux in the service of Lancelot du Fau, who became bishop of Luçon, and later for the bishop of Bordeaux. He entered the priesthood and in 1525 became canon of St. Emilion. Variously employed after 1529, when the bishop died, he was at times a student and settled in Paris in 1549. From about 1555 he was singer, and later composer, to Henry II, although not a full-time servant of the King. He died a pauper. Although he set psalms and composed two masses and a motet, [term's] fame lies in his 286 chansons. His program chansons include "La Bataille de Marignan" ("La Guerre"), imitating sounds of battle; "Voulez ouir les cris de Paris," with Paris street cries; and "Le Chant des oiseaux," with the sounds of birds. His style shows fine formal balance and subtle handling of texts. He is rare among great composers in that he never held an important and regular position as musician or composer to a nobleman or a bishop or archbishop. Read pgs. 220-221

Guillaume DuFay (1397 - 1474)

composed Nuper roarum flores (Garland of Roses), a motet composed in the honor of Pope Eugene IV. It is the most famous because of the way it manipulates symbolic numbers. It is an isorhythmic motet. The exiled Pope Eugene IV set up court in Florence and built a magnificent cathedral dedicated to the Virgin Mary. He commissioned [term] for this motet and it was to be the show of all shows. The motet is cast into four large musical sections, plus a dazzling melismatic "Amen" at the end. The layout is remarkable for its symmetry. The first section is the longest, and it begins with an introitus for the upper (texted) voices lasting 28 tempora. The Gregorian cantus firmus, the fourteen-note incipit of the Introit antiphon for the dedication of a church (Terribilis est locus iste, "Awesome is this Place"), now enters carried by a pair of tenors that present it in two seven-note groups. Each of the succeeding sections presents the same 7+7 disposition of the tenor and the same balanced alternation of duo in full compliment. The pair of tenors is written out only once, with directions to repeat, with each tenor statement cast in a different mensuration. Read pgs. 122-124.

Cristobal de Morales (1500 - 1553)

composer who, together with Tomás Luis de Victoria and Francisco Guerrero, is recognized as one of the three most important Spanish composers of the 16th century. His reputation continued to grow after his death. His works were published widely during his lifetime and quickly found their way to cathedrals as far away as Cuzco in Peru. The earliest printed polyphony prepared for use in the New World was [term's] 1544 book of masses, now part of the cathedral treasure of Pueblo, Mexico. Of his 21 masses, 16 were published in Rome in 1544, under [term's] personal supervision. [term] was the first Spanish composer to write magnificats in all eight ecclesiastical modes. They were unquestionably the most popular of his works in the 16th century and were widely reprinted. Of his many motets, the two best known are Lamentabatur Jacob and Emendemus in melius, both in five parts. His motet Jubilate Deo omnis terra (in six parts), commissioned by Pope Paul III to mark the peace treaty between Charles V and Francis I, was later parodied by Tomás Luis de Victoria in his mass Gaudeamus, and Francisco Guerrero based his mass Sancta et immaculata on the same motet. No less a figure than Giovanni Palestrina parodied a [term] motet for his mass O sacrum convivium.

Pierre Attaignant (1494-1552)

is considered to be first large-scale publisher of single-impression movable type for music-printing, thus making it possible to print faster and cheaper than predecessors such as Ottaviano Petrucci. He published over 1500 chansons by many different composers, including Paris composers Claudin de Sermisy, Pierre Sandrin and Pierre Certon, and most prominently Clément Janequin with five books of chansons. He acquired royal privileges for his music books, which were renewed many times. Eventually he was named imprimeur et libraire du Roy en musique (printer and bookseller of the King for music).

Alexander Agricola (1445 to 1506)

is one of the few transitional figures between the Burgundian School and the style of the Josquin generation of Netherlanders who actually wrote music in both styles. His style is related to that of Johannes Ockeghem, especially early in his career, and towards the end of his life he was writing using the pervasive imitation characteristic of Josquin des Prez. While few of his works can be dated precisely, he does use many of the non-imitative, complex, rhythmically diverse contrapuntal procedures more often associated with Ockeghem. Unlike Ockeghem, however, he was willing to employ repetition, sequence, and florid imitation in the manner of the other composers who were working around 1500 when the technique became widespread. He wrote masses, motets, motet-chansons, secular songs in the prevailing formes fixes such as (rondeaux and bergerettes, other chansons), and instrumental music. Much of his instrumental music was based on secular music by Gilles Binchois or Ockeghem. Many of these pieces had become quite popular in the late 15th century.

Leonel Power (1370 - 1445)

pg. 148-149 Another four-part English mass is attributed to [term]: it comprises an ordinary complex based on a tenor derived from the marion antiphon Alma Redemptoris Matter. This composition, found only in northern Italian manuscripts copied around 1430-35, contains some of the best evidence of the prestige of English music and its influence on the continent at the time. Unifying the sections of mass cycles on the basis on common tenors, meant laying out a foundation in advance and building from the ground up. This architectonic conception had previously been the special distinguishing characteristic of the motet. What happened, in effect, was that the rigidly conceive, highly structured style of the isorhythmic motet - the high style of the 14th century - passed from the motet into the domain of the cyclic mass which was potentially a kind of isorhythmic motet writ large.

Nicolas Gombert (1495 - 1560)

was a Franco-Flemish composer of the Renaissance. He was one of the most famous and influential composers between Josquin des Prez and Palestrina, and best represents the fully developed, complex polyphonic style of this period in music history. However, Taruskin doesn't mention him. [term] was employed by the emperor Charles V as a singer in his court chapel in 1526 and possibly as a composer as well. Most likely he was taken on while Charles was passing through Flanders, for the emperor traveled often, bringing his retinue with him, and picking up new members as he went. A document dated 1529 mentions [term] as magister puerorum ("master of the boys") for the royal chapel. He and the singers went with the emperor on his travels throughout his holdings, leaving records of their appearances in various cities of the empire. These visits were musically influential, in part because of [term's] stature as a musician; thus the travels of Charles and his chapel, as did those of his predecessor Philip I of Castile with composer Pierre de la Rue, continued the transplantation of the Franco-Flemish polyphonic tradition onto the Iberian Peninsula. In 1540 during the height of his career, he vanished from chapel records. [term] was convicted of sexual contact with a boy in his care and was sentenced to hard labor in the galleys. The exact duration of his service in the galleys is not known, but he was able to continue composing for at least part of the time. Most likely he was pardoned sometime in or before 1547, the date he sent a letter along with a motet from Tournai to Charles' gran capitano Ferrante I Gonzaga. The Magnificat settings preserved uniquely in manuscript in Madrid are often held to have been the "swansongs" that according to Cardan won his pardon; according to this story, Charles was so moved by these Magnificat settings that he let [term] go early. It is not clear how [term] was able to compose while rowing in the galleys as a prisoner.

Loyset Compère (1445 - 1518)

was a Franco-Flemish composer of the Renaissance. Of the same generation as Josquin des Prez, he was one of the most significant composers of motets and chansons of that era, and one of the first musicians to bring the light Italianate Renaissance style to France. The Sforza dukes of Milan managed to recruit future stars at an early phase of their careers, including [term], who trained under Weerbeke in Milan during the 1470's. He eventually went back home to serve in the court chapel of King Charles VIII in Paris. Weerbeke and his specifically crafted Milanese music made a significant impact on [term]. His marian pastiche, Ave Maria, is about as low in style as a motet can go, leading on to suspect a double purpose, hailing both Maria Virgo and Galeazzo Maria, both virgin protectress and noble patron. It is a virtual sendup of the ancient ars combinatoria (basically, combined ancient human thought a la Taruskin), cast in a patter-declamation with syllables placed on minims, that renders the text with a dispatch bordering on flippancy. In the motet's prima pars (first part), a cantus firmus is sneaked into the altus, the least conspicuous voice, and paraphrased in such a way as virtually to disappear amongst the counterpoint. The plainsong original begins with the familiar words of the daily "Hail, Mary!" prayer. As the piece proceeds, the texture changes from teh fairly fragmented state of the opening, through structurally paired voices, continuing through opposition of high and low voices, and ending with an emphatic homorhythm. The secunda pars (2nd section) expands the litany to include a wide variety of patron saints, mirroring the crowd of new names with pervasively imitative texture in which the order and the interval of entries and the rhythmic values are unpredictably varied. The motet explodes at the end into a long and exceptionally virtuosic triple "proportion." This is truly something new - Funny Church Music - funny, but still pious. Piety of this kind was geared towards the hearers, and not way over their heads as in English polyphony.

Guillaume DuFay (1397 - 1474)

was a Franco-Flemish composer of the early Renaissance. A central figure in the Burgundian School, he was regarded by his contemporaries as one of the leading composers in Europe in the mid-15th century. His unique and complex motet "Nuper rosarum flores" demonstrates the influential exchange of musical ideas among artists around the world during the early Renaissance period. [Term] composed in most of the common forms of the day, including masses, motets, Magnificats, hymns, simple chant settings in fauxbourdon, and antiphons within the area of sacred music, and rondeaux, ballades, virelais and a few other chanson types within the realm of secular music. None of his surviving music is specifically instrumental, although instruments were certainly used for some of his secular music, especially for the lower parts; all of his sacred music is vocal. Instruments may have been used to reinforce the voices in actual performance for almost any of his works. Seven complete Masses, 28 individual Mass movements, 15 settings of chant used in Mass propers, three Magnificats, two Benedicamus Domino settings, 15 antiphon settings (six of them Marian antiphons), 27 hymns, 22 motets (13 of these isorhythmic in the more angular, austere 14th-century style which gave way to more melodic, sensuous treble-dominated part-writing with phrases ending in the "under-third" cadence in [term's] youth) and 87 chansons definitely by him have survived. Of [term's] masses, his Missa se la face ay pale and Missa L'Homme armé are listed on AllMusic as essential compositions.

Antoine Busnois (1430 - 1492)

was a French composer and poet of the early Renaissance Burgundian School. While also noted as a composer of motets and other sacred music, he was one of the most renowned 15th-century composers of secular chansons. He was the leading figure of the late Burgundian school after the death of Guillaume Dufay. His contemporary reputation was immense; he was probably the best-known musician in Europe between Guillaume Dufay and Johannes Ockeghem. He wrote sacred and secular music. Of the former, two cantus firmus Masses and eight motets have survived, while many others were most likely lost. He set the Marian antiphon Regina coeli several times. Stylistically, his music can be considered a midpoint between the simplicity and homophonic textures of Dufay and Binchois, and the soon-to-be pervasive imitative counterpoint of Josquin and Gombert. He used imitation only occasionally but skillfully, created smooth and singable melodic lines and had a strong feeling for triadic sonorities, anticipating 16th-century practice. According to Pietro Aron, [term] may have been the composer of the famous tune L'homme armé, one of the most widely distributed melodies of the Renaissance and the one more often used than any other as a cantus firmus in Mass composition. Whether or not he wrote the first Mass based on L'homme armé, his was by far the most influential; Obrecht's setting, for example, closely parallels that of [term], and even Dufay's quotes from it directly. Richard Taruskin attempts to prove that Busnois' was the model of later L'homme armé masses were based upon a study of the composer's numerological symbology within the work, and by demonstrating that Dufay and others were emulating (or paying homage) to this aspect, among others. David Fallows points out that the complexity of the [term's] mass may indicate that he was actually borrowing from Dufay. But [term's] chansons (French secular songs) are the works on which his reputation mainly rests. Most are rondeaux, but some are bergerettes; many of them achieved the status of popular songs, and some were perhaps based on other popular songs which are now lost. He probably wrote the words for almost all of his chansons (anticipating Wagner by four hundred years!). Some of his tunes were recycled as cantus firmus for Masses composed more than a generation after his death, for instance Fortuna desperata (which was used both by Obrecht and Josquin). An unusual chanson is Terrible dame, which is not only an antiphonal dialogue (unique in the chanson literature) but has an Old French title requiring no special skill to translate. While most of [term's]secular songs are set to French words, at least two employ Italian texts and one is in Flemish. Most are for three voices, although there are a few for four.

Jean Mouton (1459 - 1522)

was a French composer of the Renaissance. He was famous both for his motets, which are among the most refined of the time, and for being the teacher of Adrian Willaert, one of the founders of the Venetian School. [term] was hugely influential both as a composer and as a teacher. Of his music, 9 Magnificat settings, 15 masses, 20 chansons, and over 100 motets survive; since he was a court composer for a king, the survival rate of his music is relatively high for the period, it being widely distributed, copied, and archived. In addition, the famous publisher Petrucci printed an entire volume of [term's] masses (early in the history of music printing, most publications contained works by multiple composers). The style of [term's] music has superficial similarities to that of Josquin des Prez, using paired imitation, canonic techniques, and equal-voiced polyphonic writing: yet [term] tends to write rhythmically and texturally uniform music compared to Josquin, with all the voices singing, and with relatively little textural contrast. Glarean characterized [term's] melodic style with the phrase "his melody flows in a supple thread." Around 1500, [term] seems to have become more aware of chords and harmonic feeling, probably due to his encounter with Italian music. At any rate this was a period of transition between purely linear thinking in music, in which chords were incidental occurrences as a result of correct usage of intervals, and music in which the harmonic element was foremost (for example in lighter Italian forms such as the frottola, which are homophonic in texture and sometimes have frankly diatonic harmony). [term] was a fine musical craftsman throughout his life, highly regarded by his contemporaries and much in demand by his royal patrons. His music was reprinted and continued to attract other composers even later in the 16th century, especially two joyful Christmas motets he wrote, Noe, noe psallite noe, and Quaeramus cum pastoribus, which several later composers used as the basis for masses. He also influenced posthumously the outstanding music theorist Gioseffo Zarlino, himself a pupil of Willaert, who referred to him, somewhat enthusiastically as his "precettore".

Clément Janequin (1485 - 1588)

was a French composer of the Renaissance. He was one of the most famous composers of popular chansons of the entire Renaissance, and along with Claudin de Sermisy, was hugely influential in the development of the Parisian chanson, especially the programmatic type. The wide spread of his fame was made possible by the concurrent development of music printing. Few composers of the Renaissance were more popular in their lifetimes than [term]. His chansons were well-loved and widely sung. The Paris printer Pierre Attaingnant printed five volumes with his chansons. La bataille, which vividly depicts the sounds and activity of a battle, is a perennial favorite of a cappella singing groups even in the present day. [term] wrote very little liturgical music: only two masses and a single motet are attributed to him, though more may have been lost. His 250 secular chansons and his (over 80) psalm settings and chansons spirituelles — the French equivalent of the Italian madrigale spirituale — were his primary legacy. The programmatic chansons for which [term] is famous were long, sectional pieces, and usually cleverly imitated natural or man-made sounds. Le chant des oiseaux imitates bird-calls; La chasse the sounds of a hunt; and La bataille (Escoutez tous gentilz), probably the most famous, and almost certainly written to celebrate the French victory over the Swiss Confederates at the Battle of Marignano in 1515, imitates battle noises, including trumpet calls, cannon fire and the cries of the wounded. Onomatopoeic effects such as these became a commonplace in later 16th century music, and carried over into the Baroque era; indeed "battle music" was to become a cliché, but it first came into prominence with [term]. In addition to the programmatic chansons for which he is most famous, he also wrote short and refined compositions more in the style of Claudin de Sermisy. For these he set texts by some of the prominent poets of the time, including Clément Marot. Late in his life he wrote the Psalm settings based on Genevan tunes. Since there is no documentary evidence, the question of whether he sympathized with the Protestants remains unanswered. Read pgs. 220-221

Jean-Antoine de Baïf (1532 to 1589)

was a French poet and member of the Pléiade. He elaborated a system for regulating French versification by quantity, a system which came to be known as vers mesurés, or vers mesurés à l'antique. Other poets had made experiments in the same direction; however, in his specific attempt to recapture the ancient Greek and Latin ethical effect of poetry on its hearers, and in applying the metrical innovations to music, he created something entirely new. He was a versatile, inventive poet and experimenter who, for example, invented and made use of a system of phonetic spelling. With the musician Thibault de Courville, he founded a short-lived Academy of Poetry and of Music in order to promote certain Platonic theories on the union of poetry and music. His metrical inventions included a vers baïfin, a verse of 15 syllables. His theories were exemplified in his little songs, Chansonnettes mesurées (1586), with music written by Jacques Mauduit. His Mimes, enseignements et proverbes (1576; "Mimes, Lessons, and Proverbs") is considered to be his most original work.

Jacob Obrecht (1457 - 1505)

was a Low Countries (greater Netherlands) composer. He was the most famous composer of masses in Europe in the late 15th century, being eclipsed by only Josquin des Prez after his death. He wrote mainly sacred music—masses and motets—and he also wrote some chansons. Combining modern and archaic elements, [term's] style is multi-dimensional. Perhaps more than those of the mature Josquin, the masses of [term] display a profound debt to the music of Johannes Ockeghem in the wide-arching melodies and long musical phrases that typify the latter's music. [term's] style is an example of the contrapuntal extravagance of the late 15th century. He often used a cantus firmus technique for his masses: sometimes he divided his source material up into short phrases; at other times he used retrograde versions of complete melodies or melodic fragments. He once even extracted the component notes and ordered them by note value, long to short, constructing new melodic material from the reordered sequences of notes. Clearly to [term]there could not be too much variety, particularly during the musically exploratory period of his early twenties. He began to break free from conformity to formes fixes, especially in his chansons. Of the formes fixes, the rondeau retained its popularity longest. However, he much preferred composing Masses, where he found greater freedom. Furthermore, his motets reveal a wide variety of moods and techniques. In his Missa Sub tuum presidium, the number of voice parts in the five movements increases from three in the Kyrie, to four in the Gloria, and so on up to seven in the Agnus Dei. The title chant is clearly heard in the top voice throughout the work, and five additional Marian chants are found in movements other than the Kyrie. His late four-voice mass, Missa Maria zart (tender Maria), tentatively dated to around 1504, is based on a devotional song popular in the Tyrol, which he probably heard as he went through the region around 1503 to 1504. Requiring more than an hour to perform, it is one of the longest polyphonic settings of the Mass Ordinary ever written. Despite working at the same period, [term] and Ockeghem differ significantly in musical style.[42] [term] does not share Ockeghem's fanciful treatment of the cantus firmus but chooses to quote it verbatim. Whereas the phrases in Ockeghem's music are ambiguously defined, those of [term's] music can easily be distinguished, though both composers favor wide-arching melodic structure. Furthermore, [term] splices the cantus firmus melody with the intent of audibly reorganizing the motives; Ockeghem, on the other hand, does this far less. [term's] procedures contrast sharply with the works of the next generation, who favored an increasing simplicity of approach (prefigured by some works of his contemporary Josquin). Although he was renowned in his time, [term] appears to have had little influence on subsequent composers; most probably, he simply went out of fashion along with the other contrapuntal masters of his generation.

Heinrich Isaac (1450 - 1517)

was a Netherlandish Renaissance composer of south Netherlandish origin. He wrote masses, motets, songs (in French, German and Italian), and instrumental music. A significant contemporary of Josquin des Prez, [term] influenced the development of music in Germany. Several variants exist of his name. One of the most prolific composers of the time, producing an extraordinarily diverse output, including almost all the forms and styles current at the time; only Lassus, at the end of the 16th century, had a wider overall range. Music included masses, motets, songs in French, German, and Italian, as well as instrumental music. His best known work may be the lied "Innsbruck, ich muss dich lassen," of which he made at least two versions. It is possible, however, that the melody itself is not by [term], and only the setting is original. The same melody was later used as the theme for the Lutheran chorale O Welt, ich muss dich lassen, which was the basis of works by Johann Sebastian Bach, including his St Matthew Passion and Johannes Brahms. Of his settings of the ordinary of the mass, 36 survive; others are believed to have been lost. Numerous individual movements of masses survive as well. But it is composition of music for the Proper of the Mass - the portion of the liturgy which changed on different days, unlike the ordinary, which remained constant - which gave him his greatest fame. The huge cycle of motets which he wrote for the mass Proper, the Choralis Constantinus, and which he left incomplete at his death, would have supplied music for 100 separate days of the year. [term] is held in high regard for his Choralis Constantinus. It is a huge anthology of over 450 chant-based polyphonic motets for the Proper of the Mass. After the death of [term], Ludwig Senfl, who had been [term's] pupil as a member of the Imperial court choir, gathered all the [term] settings of the Proper and placed them into liturgical order for the church year. But the anthology was not published until 1555, after Senfl's death, by which time the reforms of the Council of Trent had made many of the texts obsolete. The motets remain some of the finest examples of chant-based Renaissance polyphony in existence. [term] composed a 6-voice motet Angeli Archangeli for the Feast of All Saint's Day, honoring angels, archangels, and all other saints. Another famous motet by [term] is Optime pastor (Optime divino), written for the accession to the papacy of Medici pope Leo X. This motet compares the Pope to a shepherd capable of soothing all of his flock and binding them together. While in the service of the Medici in Florence, [term] wrote a lament on the death of Lorenzo de' Medici, Quis dabit capiti meo aquam (1492), which set words by Lorenzo's favorite poet, Angelo Poliziano

Clemens non Papa (1510 - 1556)

was a Netherlandish composer of the Renaissance based for most of his life in Flanders. He was a prolific composer in many of the current styles, and was especially famous for his polyphonic settings of the psalms in Dutch known as the Souterliedekens.Italian influence is absent in his music. He represents the northern European dialect of the Franco-Flemish style. He was one of the chief representatives of the generation between Josquin and Palestrina and Orlandus Lassus. He was primarily a composer of sacred music. In fact, his musical output was roughly 80 percent sacred music, either liturgical or for private use. Of his approximately 233 motets, only three contain secular texts, in the form of hymns of praise of music. However, he did compose just above 100 secular works that encompass the whole gamut of poetic genres that were used by composers in his generation. Considering that his career as a composer lasted for barely two decades, [term] was an extremely prolific composer: 15 masses, including 14 parody masses and a requiem mass[2] (most of which were published from 1555 to 1570 by Pierre Phalèse the Elder in Leuven); two mass sections (a Kyrie and a Credo) 15 Magnificats c. 233 motets Just over 100 secular pieces, including: 89 chansons (only 77 of which are considered authentic and are included in the complete edition of his works), 8 Dutch songs, 8 textless pieces, 2 intabulated chansons, and 1 instrumental canon (doubtful) 159 Souterliedekens, i.e., Dutch settings of the psalms, using popular song melodies as cantus firmus.

Alexander Agricola (1445 to 1506)

was a Netherlandish composer of the Renaissance writing in the Franco-Flemish style. A prominent member of the Grande chapelle, the Habsburg musical establishment, he was a renowned composer in the years around 1500, and his music was widely distributed throughout Europe. He composed music in all of the important sacred and secular styles of the time. He was a singer for Duke Sforza of Milan from 1471 to 1474, during the period when the Milanese chapel choir grew into one of the largest and most famous ensembles in Europe; Loyset Compère, Johannes Martini, Gaspar van Weerbeke, and several other composer-singers were also in Milan during those years. In 1474 Duke Sforza wrote a letter of recommendation for him to Lorenzo de' Medici, and he accordingly went to Florence. He was in Valladolid, Spain, where he died during an outbreak of the plague on 15 August of that year.

Gilles Binchois (1400 to 1460)

was a Netherlandish composer, one of the earliest members of the Burgundian school and one of the three most famous composers of the early 15th century. While often ranked behind his contemporaries Guillaume Dufay and John Dunstable by contemporary scholars, his works were still cited, borrowed and used as source material after his death. He was the consummate master of the chanson; he composed more than 50 examples, most of them rondeaux. "De plus en plus" (More and More) was one of his most memorable rondeaux. He is often considered to be the finest melodist of the 15th century, writing carefully shaped lines which are not only easy to sing but utterly memorable. His tunes appeared in copies decades after his death, and were often used as sources for Mass composition by later composers. Most of his music, even his sacred music, is simple and clear in outline, sometimes even ascetic; a greater contrast between [term] and the extreme complexity of the ars subtilior of the prior (fourteenth) century would be hard to imagine. Most of his secular songs are rondeaux, which became the most common song form during the century. He rarely wrote in strophic form, and his melodies are generally independent of the rhyme scheme of the verses they are set to. [term] wrote music for the court, secular songs of love and chivalry that met the expectations and satisfied the taste of the Dukes of Burgundy who employed him, and evidently loved his music accordingly.

Orlando di Lasso/de Lassus (1532 - 1594)

was a Netherlandish or Franco-Flemish composer of the late Renaissance. He is today considered to be the chief representative of the mature polyphonic style of the Franco-Flemish school, and one of the three most famous and influential musicians in Europe at the end of the 16th century (the other two being Palestrina and Victoria). By the 1560s [term] had become quite famous, and composers began to go to Munich to study with him. Andrea Gabrieli went there in 1562, and possibly remained in the chapel for a year. Giovanni Gabrieli also possibly studied with him in the 1570s. Some kings and aristocrats attempted to woo him away from Munich with more attractive offers, but Lassus was evidently more interested in the stability of his position, and the splendid performance opportunities of Albrecht's court, than in financial gain. In the late 1570s and 1580s Lassus made several visits to Italy, where he encountered the most modern styles and trends. In Ferrara, the center of avant-garde activity, he doubtless heard the madrigals being composed for the d'Este court. However, his own style remained conservative and became simpler and more refined as he aged. His final work was often considered one of his best pieces: an exquisite set of twenty-one madrigali spirituali known as the Lagrime di San Pietro ("Tears of St. Peter"), which he dedicated to Pope Clement VIII, and which was published posthumously in 1595. Lassus died in Munich on 14 June 1594, the same day that his employer decided to dismiss him for economic reasons. He never saw the letter. He was buried in Munich in the Alter Franziskaner Friedhof, a cemetery that was cleared of gravestones in 1789 and is now the site of the plaza including the national theater of Munich.

Cristobal de Morales (1500 - 1553)

was a Spanish composer of the Renaissance. He is generally considered to be the most influential Spanish composer before Tomás Luis de Victoria. Almost all of his music is sacred, and all of it is vocal, though instruments may have been used in an accompanying role in performance. He wrote many masses, some of spectacular difficulty, most likely written for the expert papal choir; he wrote over 100 motets; and he wrote 18 settings of the Magnificat, and at least five settings of the Lamentations of Jeremiah (one of which survives from a single manuscript in Mexico). The Magnificats alone set him apart from other composers of the time, and they are the portion of his work most often performed today. Stylistically, his music has much in common with other middle Renaissance work of the Iberian peninsula, for example a preference for harmony heard as functional by the modern ear (root motions of fourths or fifths being somewhat more common than in, for example, Gombert or Palestrina), and a free use of harmonic cross-relations rather like one hears in English music of the time, for example in Thomas Tallis. Some unique characteristics of his style include the rhythmic freedom, such as his use of occasional three-against-four polyrhythms, and cross-rhythms where a voice sings in a rhythm following the text but ignoring the meter prevailing in other voices. Late in life he wrote in a sober, heavily homophonic style, but all through his life he was a careful craftsman who considered the expression and understandability of the text to be the highest artistic goal. His masses, of which 22 survive, use a variety of techniques, including cantus firmus and parody. Six masses are based on Gregorian chant, and these are mostly written in a conservative cantus-firmus style. Eight of his masses use the parody technique, including one for six voices based on the famous chanson Mille regretz, attributed to Josquin des Prez. The melody is arranged so that it is clearly audible in every movement, usually in the highest voice, giving the work considerable stylistic and motivic unity. [term] also wrote two masses on the famous L'homme armé tune, which was so often set by composers in the late 15th century and 16th century; one of these is for four voices, and the other for five. The four voice mass uses the tune as a strict cantus firmus, and the setting for five voices treats it more freely, migrating it from one voice to another. [term] was the first Spanish composer of international renown. His works were widely distributed in Europe, and many copies made the journey to the New World. Many music writers and theorists in the hundred years after his death considered his music to be among the most perfect of the time.

Juan del Encina (1468 - 1529)

was a composer, poet and playwright,[2]:535 often called the founder, along with Gil Vicente, of Spanish drama. While working for the Duke of Alba, he was the program director, along with Lucas Fernandez.Here [term] wrote pastoral eclogues, the foundation of Spanish secular drama. [term's] plays are predominantly based on shepherds and unrequited love.

Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583 - 1643)

was a musician from Ferrara, one of the most important composers of keyboard music in the late Renaissance and early Baroque periods. A child prodigy, he studied under Luzzasco Luzzaschi in Ferrara, but was influenced by a large number of composers, including Ascanio Mayone, Giovanni Maria Trabaci, and Claudio Merulo. [term] was appointed organist of St. Peter's Basilica, from 21 July 1608 until 1628 and again from 1634 until his death. [term's] printed collections contain some of the most influential music of the 17th century. His work influenced Johann Jakob Froberger, Johann Sebastian Bach, Henry Purcell, and countless other major composers. Pieces from his celebrated collection of liturgical organ music, Fiori musicali (1635), were used as models of strict counterpoint as late as the 19th century.

John Dunstable (1390 - 1453)

was an English composer of polyphonic music of the late medieval era and early Renaissance periods. He was one of the most famous composers active in the early 15th century, a near-contemporary of Leonel Power, and was widely influential, not only in England but on the continent, especially in the developing style of the Burgundian School. His influence on the continent's musical vocabulary was enormous, particularly considering the relative paucity of his (attributable) works. He was recognized for possessing something never heard before in music of the Burgundian School: la contenance angloise ("the English countenance"), a term used by the poet Martin le Franc in his Le Champion des Dames. Le Franc added that the style influenced Dufay and Binchois — high praise indeed. Writing a few decades later in about 1476, the Flemish composer and music theorist Tinctoris reaffirmed the powerful influence [term] had, stressing the "new art" that [term] had inspired. Tinctoris hailed [term] as the fons et origo of the style, its "wellspring and origin." The contenance angloise, while not defined by Martin le Franc, was probably a reference to [term's] stylistic trait of using full triadic harmony, along with a liking for the interval of the third. Assuming that he had been on the continent with the Duke of Bedford, [term] would have been introduced to French fauxbourdon; borrowing some of the sonorities, he created elegant harmonies in his own music using thirds and sixths. Taken together, these are seen as defining characteristics of early Renaissance music, and both Le Franc's and Tinctoris's comments suggest that many of these traits may have originated in England, taking root in the Burgundian School around the middle of the century. Read pg. 132-138.

William Byrd (1540-1623)

was an English composer of the Renaissance. He wrote in many of the forms current in England at the time, including various types of sacred and secular polyphony, keyboard (the so-called Virginalist school), and consort music. Although he produced sacred music for Anglican services, sometime during the 1570s he became a Roman Catholic and wrote Catholic sacred music later in his life. His first known professional employment was his appointment in 1563 as organist and master of the choristers at Lincoln Cathedral. He obtained the prestigious post of Gentleman of the Chapel Royal in 1572 following the death of Robert Parsons, a gifted composer who drowned in the Trent near Newark on 25 January of that year. Almost from the outset [term] is named as 'organist', which however was not a designated post but an occupation for any Chapel Royal member capable of filling it. This career move vastly increased [term] opportunities to widen his scope as a composer and also to make contacts at Court. Queen Elizabeth (1558-1603) was a moderate Protestant who eschewed the more extreme forms of Puritanism and retained a fondness for elaborate ritual, besides being a music lover and keyboard player herself. [term] output of Anglican church music (defined in the strictest sense as sacred music designed for performance in church) is surprisingly small, but it stretches the limits of elaboration then regarded as acceptable by some reforming Protestants who regarded highly wrought music as a distraction from the Word of God.

Thomas Morley (1557 - 1602)

was an English composer, theorist, singer and organist of the Renaissance. He was one of the foremost members of the English Madrigal School. He was also involved in music publishing, and from 1598 up to his death he held a printing patent (a type of monopoly). He used the monopoly in partnership with professional music printers such as Thomas East. [term] was 'chiefly responsible for grafting the Italian shoot on to the native stock and initiating the curiously brief but brilliant flowering of the madrigal that constitutes one of the most colourful episodes in the history of English music'. Living in London at the same time as Shakespeare, he became organist at St Paul's Cathedral. He was the most famous composer of secular music in Elizabethan England. He and Robert Johnson are the composers of the only surviving contemporary settings of verse by Shakespeare. While [term] attempted to imitate the spirit of Byrd in some of his early sacred works, it was in the form of the madrigal that he made his principal contribution to music history. His work in the genre has remained in the repertory to the present day, and shows a wider variety of emotional color, form and technique than anything by other composers of the period. Usually his madrigals are light, quick-moving and easily singable, like his well-known "Now is the Month of Maying" (which is actually a ballett); he took the aspects of Italian style that suited his personality and anglicised them. Other composers of the English Madrigal School, for instance Thomas Weelkes and John Wilbye, were to write madrigals in a more serious or sombre vein. In addition to his madrigals, [term] wrote instrumental music, including keyboard music (some of which has been preserved in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book), and music for the broken consort, a uniquely English ensemble of two viols, flute, lute, cittern and bandora, notably as published by William Barley in 1599 in The First Booke of Consort Lessons. [term's] Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (published 1597) remained popular for almost two hundred years after its author's death, and is still an important reference for information about sixteenth century composition and performance. [term] was buried in the graveyard of the church of St Botolph Billingsgate, which was destroyed in the Great Fire of London of 1666, and not rebuilt. Thus his grave is lost.

Andrea Gabrielli (1532 - 1585)

was an Italian composer and organist of the late Renaissance. He was the first internationally renowned member of the Venetian School of composers, and was extremely influential in spreading the Venetian style in Italy as well as in Germany. [term] was a prolific and versatile composer, and wrote a large amount of music, including sacred and secular vocal music, music for mixed groups of voices and instruments, and purely instrumental music, much of it for the huge, resonant space of St. Mark's. His works include over a hundred motets and madrigals, as well as a smaller number of instrumental works. His early style is indebted to Cipriano de Rore, and his madrigals are representative of mid-century trends. Even in his earliest music, however, he had a liking for homophonic textures at climaxes, foreshadowing the grand style of his later years. After his meeting with Lassus in 1562, his style changed considerably, and the Netherlander became the strongest influence on him. Once [term] was working at St. Mark's, he began to turn away from the Franco-Flemish contrapuntal style which had dominated the music of the 16th century, instead exploiting the sonorous grandeur of mixed instrumental and vocal groups playing antiphonally in the great basilica. His music of this time uses repetition of phrases with different combinations of voices at different pitch levels; although instrumentation is not specifically indicated, it can be inferred; he carefully contrasts texture and sonority to shape sections of music in a way which was unique, and which defined the Venetian style for the next generation. Not everything [term] wrote was for St. Mark's, though. He provided the music for one of the earliest revivals of an ancient Greek drama in Italian translation: Oedipus tyrannus, by Sophocles, for which he wrote the music for the choruses, setting separate lines for different groupings of voices. It was produced at Vicenza in 1585. Evidently Andrea Gabrieli was reluctant to publish much of his own music, and his nephew Giovanni Gabrieli published much of it after his uncle's death. His collected sacred works, published two years after his death, contain several Masses and motets that employ larger and more varied forces than previous music. There was a trend in Mass to be written for 16 voices, organized into four antiphonally deployed four-part choirs. Read pgs. 212-214

Giovanni Gabrielli (1554 - 1612)

was an Italian composer and organist. He was one of the most influential musicians of his time, and represents the culmination of the style of the Venetian School, at the time of the shift from Renaissance to Baroque idioms. He went to Munich to study with the renowned Orlando de Lassus at the court of Duke Albert V. Lassus was to be one of the principal influences on the development of his musical style. By 1584 he had returned to Venice, where he became principal organist at St Mark's Basilica in 1585, after Claudio Merulo left the post; following his uncle's death the following year he took the post of principal composer as well. Also after his uncle's death he began editing much of the older man's music, which would otherwise have been lost; his uncle evidently had had little inclination to publish his own music, but his nephew's opinion of it was sufficiently high that he devoted much of his own time to compiling and editing it for publication.

Vincenzo Galilei (1520 - 1591)

was an Italian lutenist, composer, and music theorist, and the father of the famous astronomer and physicist. He was a seminal figure in the musical life of the late Renaissance and contributed significantly to the musical revolution which demarcates the beginning of the Baroque era. [term], in his study of pitch and string tension, produced perhaps the first non-linear mathematical description of a natural phenomenon known to history. It was an extension of a Pythagorean tradition but went beyond it. Many scholars credit him with directing the activity of his son away from pure, abstract mathematics and towards experimentation using mathematical quantitative description of the results, a direction of utmost importance for the history of physics and natural science in general. Read pgs. 241-244 bc i didn't include it.

Pietro Aron (1480 to 1545)

was an Italian music theorist and composer. He was born in Florence. A self-taught musician, he is known for his treatises on the contrapuntal practice of the period. His earliest treatise, De institutione harmonica, on counterpoint, is written in Italian even though most scholarly writings of the time are in Latin. In Thoscanello de la musica (later Toscanello in musica), he was the first to observe the change from linear writing to vertical: this was the first period in music history where composers began to become conscious of chords and the flow of harmony. He included tables of four-voice chords, the beginning of the trend which was to result in functional tonality in the early 17th century. He also discusses tuning, and the book is the first to describe quarter-comma meantone. Other topics covered by him include the use of the eight modes, four-voice cadences, notation of accidentals. He was a friend and frequent correspondent of music theorist Giovanni Spataro. Only Spataro's letters to him have survived. Topics discussed by the two include contemporary composers and composition, notation, and especially the use of accidentals. Only one four-voice frottola attributed to him survives. It is known that he may have written a Credo, and a five-voice Mass setting, as well as madrigals and motets, however they are all lost.

institutione harmonica/ Toscanello in musica

written by Aron Pietro. Writings on counterpoint, with one written in Italian even though most scholarly writings of the time are in Latin. In the other, Pietro was the first to observe the change from linear writing to vertical: this was the first period in music history where composers began to become conscious of chords and the flow of harmony. He included tables of four-voice chords, the beginning of the trend which was to result in functional tonality in the early 17th century. He also discusses tuning, and the book is the first to describe quarter-comma meantone.