8 posts tagged “biographies”

In my blog entries, I describe mostly outstanding creative people who had God given talents in spite of the harsh times that they were living. Luckily, not everybody is born a genius. There were other composers. I would not call them minor talents or diminish their creativity in any way. They also deserve the utmost respect and gratitude of the following generations. One of these dedicated people was Princess Anna Amalia of Prussia. I found out about her when I was doing my regular research for my web analytics company.

Princess Anna Amalia of Prussia was one of eight children of Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia. She was a younger sister of the famous Frederick II, King of Prussia and she was born in 1723 in Berlin. Among her other famous close relatives were Wilhelmine, Margravine of Bayreuth, Louise Ulrika, Queen of Sweden and Augustus William, Prince of Prussia. Anna was eleven years younger than her brother Frederick, and would have been seven years old when he made his attempt to run away from home, after being humiliated by his father. Both children were musically inclined, but for Anna formal musical instruction was only possible after the death of her father, who hated music with all his heart. Music was her secret consolation against his cruelty to her - in his bursts of rage he would often drag her across a room by the hair. Fortunately, her mother encouraged Anna to learn how to play the harpsichord, flute, and violin. And she received her first lessons from her brother, future king.

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In the 1470s Compere worked as a singer in Milan at the chapel of Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza. The chapel choir in the early 1470s grew into one of the largest and most famous singing ensembles in Europe. After the murder of the duke in 1476, Compere appears to lose his job in the chapel, and he may have returned to France at this time. During the next ten years he began to work at the French court, and he accompanied Charles VIII on his invasion of Italy in 1494. We find his traces in Rome in 1495 during the occupation of the city by Charles and his army. Next he had a series of church positions. By 1498 Compere was at Cambrai, and from 1500 to around 1504 he was at Douai; his final appointment was at a church in St Quentin. Throughout this time he seems to have been in part-time service to the French court, as evidenced by his many compositions for official and ceremonial occasions. Funeral home directory people stated that he died at St Quentin in August 16, 1518.

Unlike his contemporaries, Compere seems to have written few masses. 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, and the lighter style of the Italian composers current at the time. Compere 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 technique of the Netherlanders. His choice of secular texts tended towards the irreverent and suggestive.

Dunstable created elegant harmonies in his own music using thirds and sixths. Taken together, these are seen as defining characteristics of early Renaissance music. Of the works attributed to him only about fifty survive, among which are two complete masses, three incomplete but multi-section masses, fourteen individual mass sections, twelve complete isorhythmic motets, as well as twenty-seven separate settings of various liturgical texts, including.

He is believed to have written secular music, but no songs in the vernacular can be attributed to him with any degree of certainty. Yet, because so much of the surviving 15th century repertory of English carols is anonymous, and Dunstable is known to have written many, most scholars consider it highly likely that some of the anonymous carols from this time are actually by Dunstable.

Dunstable was probably the most influential English composer of all time, yet he remains an enigma: his complete works were not published until the quincentenary of his death in 1953, but even since then works have been added and subtracted from his oeuvre; we know very little of his life and nothing of his undoubted learning; we can only make an educated guess at most of the chronology of the small amount of music that has come down to us. And we understand little of his style - why he wrote as he did, what artistic or technical principles guided his composing, how his music was performed, or why it was so influential.

Vitry has been most famous in music history for writing the Ars Nova in 1322, a treatise on music, which gave its name to the music of the entire era. While his authorship and the very existence of this treatise have recently come into question, a handful of his musical works do survive, and show the innovations in notation, particularly mensural and rhythmic, with which he was credited within a century of their inception. Such innovations as are exemplified in his stylistically-attributed motets for the Roman de Fauvel were particularly important, and made possible the free and quite complex music of the next hundred years. In some ways the "modern" system of rhythmic notation began with the Ars Nova, during which music broke free from the older idea of the rhythmic modes, patterns which were repeated without being individually notated. The notational predecessors of modern time meters also originate in the Ars Nova.

Vitry is reputed to have written chansons and motets, but only a few have survived. Each motet is strikingly individual, exploring a unique structural idea. Five of Vitry’s three-part motets have survived in the Roman de Fauvel; an additional nine can be found in the Ivrea Codex. He was widely acknowledged as the greatest musician of his day, and even Petrarch wrote a glowing tribute of him: "…he is the great philosopher and truth-seeker of our age."

We know much more about Philippe de Vitry. We even know that time of his birth and death: October 31, 1291 - June 9, 1361. Philippe de Vitry was a French composer, music theorist and poet. He was an accomplished, innovative, and influential composer, and may also have been the author of the Ars Nova treatise.

He was born in Paris. At online funeral home directory we found very sketchy biographical details of his life. Given that he is often referred to in documents as "Magister," he is thought likely to have studied at the University of Paris. Later he was prominent in the courts of Charles IV, Philippe VI and Jean II, serving as a secretary and advisor; perhaps aided by these Bourbon connections, he also held several canonries, including Clermont, Beauvais, and Paris, also serving for a time in the antipapal retinue at Avignon starting with Clement VI. In addition to all this, he was a diplomat and a soldier, and is known to have served at the siege of Aiguillon in 1346. In 1351 he became Bishop of Meaux, east of Paris. Moving in all the most important political, artistic, and ecclesiastical circles, he was acquainted with many lights of the age, including Petrarch and the famous mathematician, philosopher and music theorist Nicole Oresme. De Vitry died in Paris.

At the court of Charles, after Charles became king of Naples, Adam wrote his Jeu de Robin et Marion, the most famous of his works. His shorter pieces are accompanied by music, of which a transcript in modern notation, with the original score, is given in Coussemaker’s edition. His Jeu de Robin et Marion is cited as the earliest French play with music on a secular subject. The pastoral, which tells how Marion resisted the knight, and remained faithful to Robert the shepherd, is based on an old chanson, Robin m’aime, Robin m’a. It consists of dialogue varied by refrains already current in popular song. The melodies to which these are set have the character of folk music, and are more spontaneous and melodious than the more elaborate music of his songs and motets.

Musicologists consider Le Jeu de Robin et Marion and Le Jeu de la feuillée forerunners of the comic opera. An adaptation of Le Jeu Robin et Marion, by Julien Tiersot, was played at Arras by a company from the Paris Opera Comique on the occasion of a festival in 1896 in honour of Adam de le Hale.

Leonin is the first known significant composer of polyphonic organum. He was probably French, and he probably lived and worked in Paris at the Notre Dame Cathedral, and was the earliest member of the Notre Dame school of polyphony who is known by name. The name Leonin is derived from “Leoninus,” which is the Latin diminutive of the name Leo, thus it is likely that Leonin’s given French name was Leo.

All that is known about him comes from the writings of a later student at the cathedral known as Anonymous IV, an Englishman who left a treatise on theory and who mentions Leonin as the composer of the Magnus Liber, the “great book” of organum. Much of the Magnus Liber is devoted to clausulae—melismatic portions of Gregorian chant which were extracted into separate pieces, with the original note values greatly slowed down, and provided with a fast-moving upper part. Leonin was also probably the first composer to use the rhythmic modes, and possibly also to invent a notation for them. It was Leonin’s incomparable achievement to introduce a rational system of rhythm into polyphonic music for the first time, and, equally important, to create a method of notation expressive of this rhythm.

I am so glad to find myself in this online community - Vox.com. Lots of people here enjoy free membership, they share their interests, hobbies, photos, and notes. I enjoy History, Astrology, Genealogy, Classical Music, Art and Literature. I want to share my interests with you. I write about biographies of famous people, myths and mysteries and other interesting topics.