Musicology Rennaisance Review

Franco-Netherlandish/franco

the style of polyphonic vocal music composition in the Burgundian States (Burgundy, Picardy, Burgundian Flanders, ...) in the 15th and early 16th centuries, and to the composers who wrote it.

Nuper rosarum flores

("Recently Flowers of Roses/The Rose Blossoms Recently"), is a motet composed by Guillaume Dufay for the 25 March 1436 consecration of the Florence cathedral, on the occasion of the completion of the dome built under the instructions of Filippo Brunelleschi.The motet presents homographic tenors and is not an isorhythmic motet

Cantus firmus

("fixed song") is a pre-existing melody forming the basis of a polyphonic composition.

John Dunstable

(1390-1453) 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.

Guillaume Dufay

(1397-1474) was a Franco-Flemish composer of the early Renaissance. The central figure in the Burgundian School, he was regarded by his contemporaries as the leading composer in Europe in the mid-15th century. Regarded for motets.

Gilles Binchois

(1400-1460) 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, at least by contemporary scholars, his influence was arguably greater than either, since his works were cited, borrowed and used as source material more often than those by any other composer of the time.

Johannes Ockeghem

(1410-1497) was the most famous composer of the Franco-Flemish School in the last half of the 15th century, and is often considered the most influential composer between Dufay and Josquin des Prez. In addition to being a renowned composer, he was also an honored singer, choirmaster, and teacher.

Josquin des Prez

(1450-1525) often referred to simply as Josquin, was a Franco-Flemish composer of the Renaissance. He was the most famous European composer between Guillaume Dufay and Palestrina, and is usually considered to be the central figure of the Franco-Flemish School. Josquin is widely considered by music scholars to be the first master of the high Renaissance style of polyphonic vocal music that was emerging during his lifetime.

Martin Luther --95 Theses- Reformation

(1483-1546) was a German friar, priest and professor of theology who was a seminal figure in the Protestant Reformation. Initially an Augustinian friar, Luther came to reject several teachings and practices of the Roman Catholic Church. He strongly disputed the claim that freedom from God's punishment for sin could be purchased with money. He confronted indulgence salesman Johann Tetzel, a Dominican friar, with his Ninety-Five Theses in 1517. His refusal to retract all of his writings at the demand of Pope Leo X in 1520 and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Worms in 1521 resulted in his excommunication by the Pope and condemnation as an outlaw by the Emperor.

King Henry VIII

(1491-1547) was King of England from 21 April 1509 until his death. He was Lord, and later assumed the Kingship, of Ireland, and continued the nominal claim by English monarchs to the Kingdom of France. Henry was the second monarch of the Tudor dynasty, succeeding his father, Henry VII.

Jacques Arcadelt

(1507-1568) was a Franco-Flemish composer of the Renaissance, active in both Italy and France, and principally known as a composer of secular vocal music. Although he also wrote sacred vocal music, he was one of the most famous of the early composers of madrigals; his first book of madrigals, published within a decade of the appearance of the earliest examples of the form, was the most widely printed collection of madrigals of the entire era

Palestrina

(1525-1594) was an Italian Renaissance composer of sacred music and the best-known 16th-century representative of the Roman School of musical composition.[2] He has had a lasting influence on the development of church music, and his work has often been seen as the culmination of Renaissance polyphony.

Lassus

(1530-1594) 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).

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. He produced sacred music for use in Anglican services, although he himself became a Roman Catholic in later life and wrote Catholic sacred music as well.

Luca Marenzio

(1554-1599) was an Italian composer and singer of the late Renaissance. He was one of the most renowned composers of madrigals, and wrote some of the most famous examples of the form in its late stage of development, prior to its early Baroque transformation by Monteverdi. In all, Marenzio wrote around 500 madrigals, ranging from the lightest to the most serious styles, packed with word-painting, chromaticism, and other characteristics of the late madrigal style. Marenzio was influential as far away as England, where his earlier, lighter work appeared in 1588 in the Musica Transalpina, the collection that initiated the madrigal craze in that country. Marenzio worked in the service of several aristocratic Italian families, including the Gonzaga, Este, and Medici, and spent most of his career in Rome.

Thomas Morley

(1558-1602) 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. 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.

John Dowland

(1563-1626) was an English Renaissance composer, lutenist, and singer. He is best known today for his melancholy songs such as "Come, heavy sleep" (the basis for Benjamin Britten's Nocturnal), "Come again", "Flow my tears", "I saw my Lady weepe" and "In darkness let me dwell", but his instrumental music has undergone a major revival, and with the 20th century's Early music revival has been a continuing source of repertoire for lutenists and classical guitarists.

Carlo Gesualdo

(1566-1613) also known as Gesualdo da Venosa (Gesualdo from Venosa), Prince of Venosa and Count of Conza, was an Italian nobleman, lutenist, murderer and composer of the late Renaissance era. He is remembered for writing intensely expressive madrigals and sacred music that use a chromatic language not heard again until the late 19th century.

Quam pulchra es

Motet by John Dunstable

Lute song/ayre

The lute song was a generic form of music in the late Renaissance and very early Baroque eras, generally consisting of a singer accompanying himself on a lute, though lute songs may often have been performed by a singer and a separate lutenist. A bass viol was very often used to support the bass line in performance. Many of the composers of lute songs were themselves lutenists, and performed the songs themselves; many were also madrigalists or composers of chansons. In general, lute songs were written from about 1550 to around 1650, though there is evidence that some music was performed this way much earlier

Italian Madrigal

The madrigal originated in part from the frottola, in part from the resurgence in interest in vernacular Italian poetry, and also from the influence of the French chanson and polyphonic style of the motet as written by the Franco-Flemish composers who had naturalized in Italy during the period

Burgundian Chanson

Written by composers of the area of Burgundy. Simple in style and generally in three voices with a structural tenor

chorale

a musical composition (or part of one) consisting of or resembling a harmonized version of a simple, stately hymn tune.

Council of Trent

held between 1545 and 1563 in Trento (Trent) and Bologna, northern Italy, was one of the Roman Catholic Church's most important ecumenical councils. Prompted by the Protestant Reformation, it has been described as the embodiment of the Counter-Reformation.

Tenor Mass

in which the same cantus firmus served for all five portions of the Ordinary of the mass

Triumphs of Oriana

is a book of English madrigals, compiled and published in 1601 by Thomas Morley, which first edition[1] has 25 pieces by 23 composers (Thomas Morley and Ellis Gibbons have two madrigals). It was said to have been made in the honour of Queen Elizabeth I. Every madrigal in the collection contains the following couplet at the end: "Thus sang the shepherds and nymphs of Diana: long live fair Oriana" (the word "Oriana" often being used to refer to Queen Elizabeth).

Musica Transalpina

is a collection of madrigals published in England in 1588. The madrigals had crossed the Alps (hence the name) in the sense that the madrigal form was borrowed from the Italians, and the pieces were mainly by Italians (although the lyrics were rendered into English). It is significant for marking the beginning of the golden age of the madrigal in England. Musica transalpina contains 57 separate pieces by 18 composers, with Alfonso Ferrabosco the elder having the most, and Luca Marenzio second most.[1] Ferrabosco had lived in England in the 1560s and 1570s, which could explain the large number of his compositions in the book; he was relatively unknown in Italy.

Pope Marcellus Mass

is a mass by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. It is his most well-known and most often-performed mass, and is frequently taught in university courses on music. It was had been sung at the Papal Coronation Masses

Missa Pange lingua

is a musical setting of the Ordinary of the Mass by Franco-Flemish composer Josquin des Prez, probably dating from around 1515, near the end of his life. Most likely his last mass, it is an extended fantasia on the Pange Lingua hymn, and is one of Josquin's most famous mass settings.

Parody Mass

is a musical setting of the mass, typically from the 16th century, that uses multiple voices of another pre-existing piece of music, such as a fragment of a motet or a secular chanson, as part of its melodic material.

text painting

is the musical technique of writing music that reflects the literal meaning of a song. For example, ascending scales would accompany lyrics about going up; slow, dark music would accompany lyrics about death.

English discant

is three-voice parallelism in first-inversion triads."[2] However, because it allowed only three, four, or at most five such chords in succession, emphasizing contrary motion as the basic condition, it "did not differ from the general European discant tradition of the time".[3] Because English discant technique has commonly been associated with such a succession of first-inversion triads, it has inevitably become confused with fauxbourdon, with which it has "no connection whatsoever".[4] This misinterpretation was first brought forward in 1936 by Manfred F. Bukofzer,[5] but has been proved invalid, first in 1937 by Thrasybulos Georgiades,[6] and then by Sylvia Kenney[7] and Ernest Sanders.[8] A second hypothesis, that an unwritten tradition of this kind of parallel discant existed in England before 1500, "is supported neither by factual evidence nor by probability".[3]

Contenance Angloise

or English manner, is a distinctive style of polyphony developed in fifteenth-century England. It used full, rich harmonies based on the third and sixth. It was highly influential in the fashionable Burgundian court of Philip the Good and as a result on European music of the era in general.

15th century motet

the Renaissance motet is a polyphonic musical setting, sometimes in imitative counterpoint, for chorus, of a Latin text, usually sacred, not specifically connected to the liturgy of a given day, and therefore suitable for use in any service. The texts of antiphons were frequently used as motet texts. This is the sort of composition that is most familiarly designated by the term "motet," and the Renaissance period marked the flowering of the form.

Counter-Reformation

was the period of Catholic resurgence beginning with the Council of Trent (1545-1563) and ending at the close of the Thirty Years' War (1648), and was initiated in response to the Protestant Reformation

Frottola

was the predominant type of Italian popular, secular song of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. It was the most important and widespread predecessor to the madrigal.

English Madrigal

were a cappella, predominantly light in style, and generally began as either copies or direct translations of Italian models. Most were for three to six voices.