Week 5: Franco-Flemish Composers, 1450-1520
1. Stuff done this week
More reading about Renaissance music; my notes from Burkholder et al. (2014) are to be found in this blog-entry.
2. Listening done this week
This week I'm in a gospel mood!
I was completely taken by that rootsy gospel sound of Michelle David and The Gospel Sessions. I bought tickets for their show in Paradiso on the 8th of April. I just love the energy and simple grooves they play, combined with the powerful voice of Michelle.
I watched the music documentary Miss Sharon Jones! about Sharon Jones's struggle with pancreatic cancer. In away her whole life has been a struggle for acceptance. The music business found her "too small and too black" and would not publish her music. Just at the moment when she and the band The Dapp Kings start to get mainstream attention, she is felled by cancer.
The documentary is moving and features a strong woman and a lot of exciting music by her.
Here, a cover song of the Allman Brother's song "Midnight Rider", which the Dapp Kings gave a cool groovy soul spin to. Love the way the lines are layered up... and then the horns kick in...
My band, Crimson Inc., is thinking of doing a cover version of The Weight by The Band. I found this moving version with the Staples Singers, a famous gospel group. I have been listening to it quite a lot. Mavis Staples sings the second chorus, and her voice has such a beautiful, warm quality to it. Then, there is the layered tension building lyric: "And you put the load right on me (You put the load right on me)", that forms the hook in this song.
This rock song just needed some of that gospel sound, it just lifts it and you can see the musicians really getting into it. That is a beautiful place to be.
3. What I have learned
Here my notes on chapter 9 of Burkholder et al. (2014):
Political changes and consolidation
Musicians in the late 15th century and early 16th century depended on patrons.Political and economic changes influenced the market for musicians and the flow of music.- England: England withdrew from France in 1453 after having been defeated in the Hundred Year's War. Charles the Bold died in 1477 and the duchy of Burgundy came under control of the King of France. France became a strong, centralized state.
- Burgundy/Austria: The Burgundian possessions in the Low countries went on to Charles's daughter Mary of Burgundy. She married Maximillian of Hapsburg, uniting her lands with Austria and Alsace.
- Spain:The marriage of Queen Isabella of Castile and Leon (Northern and central Spain) to King Ferdinand of Aragon (Eastern Spain, Sardinia, and Sicily) lead to the formation of modern Spain. In 1492, Isabella and Ferdinand conquered Granada from the Islamic Moors and expelled the Jews from Spain. This ended centuries of coexistence between Muslims, Jews and Christians in Spain. Furthermore they sponsored Colombus expedition to the New World.
- Holy Roman Empire: Marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella's daughter Mary and Holy Roman Emperor Maximillian's son unified Austria, The Low Countries, Southern Italy, Spain, and Spanish America under the Hapsburg emperor Charles V (r.1519 - 1556).
The Franco-Flemish School
A number of eminent composers from the southern Low Countries and Northern France developed an influential and strong internationally oriented style, between the period 1450 and 1520. Three generations of composers were linked to this "Franco-Flemish school". The first generation composers emphasized the innovations produced by the Burgundian School composers. As the masters of the Franco-Flemish style held office in many parts of Europe, this school of music should not be regarded as a local style.General traits
Composers of the period shared many elements of style:
- Music structure was determined by the text
- Four voice texture was now standard, sometimes five or six voices were added, imitative counterpoint and homophony were common
- Full harmonies, smooth melodies and motivic relationships
- All parts were composed phrase by phrase, instead of layering voices around cantus-tenor duet
- Replacement of tenor by bass, as foundation and lowest voice in harmony
- Simple triads began to replace open 5ths and octaves at cadences, giving the music a more "modern" quality than the fauxbourdon-compositions of the Burgundian composers, even though church modes were still being used.
- Borrowed melodies were still used, but distributed among the other voices, instead of just the tenor
- Mass, motet and chanson continued to be dominant genres
- Breaking away from form fixes, composers cast songs in new shapes.
- Instrumental pieces became more common, though vocalworks were dominant
- Clarity; clearly articulated phrases
- Strong preference for purely vocal (a cappella) choir song.
Ockeghem and Busnoys
After Dufay, Jean de Ockeghem (ca 1420-1497) and Antoine Busnois (ca 1430-1492). Ockeghem served the King of France, while Busnoys served Charles the Bold, Mary of Burgundy and Maximilian of Hapsburg. Masses, motets and chansons have been handed over from Ockeghem. He set the lowest vocal (following the Burgundian style) as a bass. Ockeghem composed long winding phrases, that only received a pronounced cadence at the end. We find less imitative counterpoint in the voices; he had a strong preference for canon. Busnoys for his chansons.The Generation of 1480-1520
The three most eminent figures in the generation of Franco-Flemish composers born around the middle of the 15th century were Henricus Isaac (ca 1450-1517), Jacob Obrecht (ca 1457-1505), and Josquin Desprez (ca 1450-1521).Obrecht wrote masses in the old cantus firmus style, but he experimented with it by laying cantus firmus on the other voices, besides the tenor. The phrasing of his music is clear and symmetrical.
Josquin Desprez (ca 1450-1521)
 |
| Josquin Desprez (Wikipedia, 2017) |
The grand master of the Franco-Flemish style is without doubt Josquin Desprez. He was born in the Southern Low Countries, but served various Italian courts (under which: The Vatican) for many years. Josquin also wrote mostly masses, motets and chansons. His masses, mostly imitation masses, usually have a secular cantus firmus.
Josquin did not layer the voices in his polyphonic textures on top of each other, but rather, he would apply systematic imitation in all voices. Especially his motets contain original innovations; they are both written in homophonic (where one voice carries the melody) textures as imitative style. Text and music are always carefully balanced together with Josquin. He perfected the characteristic calm and modest vocal style of the Renaissance.
widely regarded as one of the most influential composers in the history of Western music. The stylistic traits of his music, both in contrapuntal technique and in text-setting, gave the defining direction to the High Renaissance and with it the course of music history as a whole. Not only was Josquin admired by Martin Luther as the greatest of composers, but his music was distributed throughout Europe and especially in Germany for decades after his death.
Josquin did not layer the voices in his polyphonic textures on top of each other, but rather, he would apply systematic imitation in all voices. Especially his motets contain original innovations; they are both written in homophonic (where one voice carries the melody) textures as imitative style. Text and music are always carefully balanced together with Josquin. He perfected the characteristic calm and modest vocal style of the Renaissance.
widely regarded as one of the most influential composers in the history of Western music. The stylistic traits of his music, both in contrapuntal technique and in text-setting, gave the defining direction to the High Renaissance and with it the course of music history as a whole. Not only was Josquin admired by Martin Luther as the greatest of composers, but his music was distributed throughout Europe and especially in Germany for decades after his death.
At least 18 masses, over 50 motets, about 65 chansons are attributed to him.
Josquin's chansons show the characteristics of the late 15th century style seen in Obrecht and Isaac:
- clarity in form and tonal organization
- fluid tuneful melodies
- use of imitation and homophony
- careful declamation of the text
- abandonment of formes fixes in favor of strophic texts and simple 4-5 line poems
- four, five or six voices instead of three
- equal melodic importance for all voices, instead of just cantus-tenor pair
His eighteen masses are as varied as his motets and chansons and abound in technical ingenuity. Nine use a secular tune (either monophonic or drawn from a polyphonic chanson) as a cantus firmus.
Writers a generation after Josquin praised him for creating melodies that expressed feeling and soulfulness. Before Josquin this expressive power of music was rarely mentioned in literature.
There are two principal ways that music can reflect the meaning of the words, both of which became common in the 16th century:
- text depiction: using musical gestures to reinforce visal images in the text
- text expression: conveying through music the emotions or overall mood suggested by the text.
Masses on Borrowed Material
Composers often based masses on borrowed material, including chant, monophonic songs and polyphonic works. Before Josquin's generation, the typical practice was to place the borrowed tune in the tenor of the mass as a cantus firmus, resulting in a so called cantus-firmus mass.But the Franco-Flemish composers adapted complete sections of earlier liturgical or secular work, to create "new" work. The result of this practice was the imitation mass. Motifs, theme's, entire passages and voices from other compositions could be incorporated in the mass.
With the change in musical structure near the end of the 15th century, from music organized around a structural tenor or cantus-tenor framework to a texture in which all voices were essential to the counterpoint and similar in style, new options openend up for reworking borrowed material without relying on a cantus-firmus structure.
Josquin's younger contemporaries developed a new approach to basing a mass on a polyphonic work Instead of using one voice as a cantus firmus, the composer borrows extensively from all voices of the model. The tenor is no longer the main structural voice, and no one voice would function well as a cantus firmus. The composers craft is demonstrated by the new combinations and variations he can achieve with the borrowed material. A mass composed in this manner is termed an imitation mass, because it imitates another polyphonic work.
Although composers continued to write cantus-firmus masses in the sixteenth century, they turned increasingly to imitation and paraphrase (based on a borrowed chant melody) masses, because they preferred imitative textures to the structural scaffolding of cantus-firmus technique, which came to be regarded as archaic.
Old and New
The music of the late 15th and early 16th centuries interweaves old and new elements. In some ways, Ockeghem and Busnoys represent the last climax of medieval thinking. Yet their music's expanded range, greater quality of voices, increased use of imitation, and freer treatment of borrowed material exemplify new traits that become typical of the next century.In some respects the musical language of Josquin and his generation is still with us, present in the attentive text-setting, imitative and homophonic textures, and rules of counterpoint and voice-leading practiced by composers over the next several centuries. So, in a sense we are the heirs of the Renaissance.
Comments
Post a Comment