10 posts tagged “biography”

It seems that princess was a very brave and passionate woman. When she was twenty years old, Anna met Friedrich von der Trenck, whose adventurous life inspired works by literary giants such as Victor Hugo and Voltaire. In 1743, Anna secretly married him. When her brother, who was already a king, discovered she had married secretly and was pregnant, he annulled her marriage and imprisoned her husband for ten years. Then Frederick exiled her in anger to Quedlinburg Abbey, a place where many aristocratic women were sent to give birth to children out of wedlock. However, Anna continued to correspond with Friedrich von der Trenck until her death.

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Before Julius Caesar and Octavian Augustus, there was a man who, actually, hastened the end of the Roman Republic by his example. His name was Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix, but usually he was known simply as Sulla.

Sulla had the best chance to become the first Roman Emperor but for some unknown to historians reasons he simply did not want to. Contemporaries compared him to half fox and half lion, due to his perceived cunning and bravery. He enjoyed the absolute power of a dictator. Yet one day he stunned Rome by publicly resigning his dictatorship. It happened near the end of 81 BC. Sulla not only resigned, he also disbanded loyal to him legions and reestablished normal consular government, He dismissed his personal guard and walked unguarded in the forum, offering to give account of his actions to any citizen.

Admiring his noble deed, Roman citizen chose him as a consul for the year of 80 BC. After his time as a consul was over, Sulla simply retired to his country villa. He chose not to get involved with political activities in Rome anymore.  Instead, he started writing his memoirs that were completed just before his death. He died in his bed surrounded by his favorite actors and dancers.

Later greedy for power Julius Caesar ridiculed Sulla for resigning voluntarily. Yet, Sulla died peacefully, while Caesar was brutally murdered by senators’ daggers. So one can see, who was right in the end. Unfortunately, example of Sulla inspired other Roman generals who were dreaming of dictatorship. Though he resigned his complete command of the Republic, Sulla was the one who provided the inspiration for Caesar's future dictatorship. His example proved that it could be done, and therefore inspired other Roman generals to attempt it.

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.

John Dunstable, born around 1390 in Dunstable, Bedfordshire, was an English composer of polyphonic music of the late medieval era and early Renaissance. He was one of the most famous composers active in the early 15th century, and was widely influential, not only in England but on the continent. In our funeral home directory, we found very little about Dunstable. Nothing is known of his musical training and background. He was clearly a highly educated man, though there is no record of an association with either Oxford or Cambridge universities. He is widely held to have been in the royal service of Duke of Bedford, the fourth son of Henry IV and brother of Henry V. As such he may have stayed in France for some time, since the duke was Regent of France from 1423 to 1429, and then Governor of Normandy from 1429 to his death in 1435. He owned property in Normandy, and also in Cambridgeshire, Essex and London. After the death in 1437 of another patron, the Dowager Queen Joan, he evidently was in the service of Duke of Gloucester, the fifth son of Henry IV.

Unlike many composers of the time, he was probably not a cleric, though there are links with St. Albans Abbey; he was probably married, based on the record of women sharing his name in his parish, and he also owned a manor in Hertfordshire.

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."

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.

The Magnus Liber was intended for liturgical use. According to Anonymous IV, “Magister Leoninus (Leonin) was the finest composer of organum; he wrote the great book (Magnus Liber) for the gradual and antiphoner for the sacred service.” All of the Magnus Liber is for two voices, although little is known about actual performance practice: the two voices were not necessarily soloists.

According to Anonymous IV, Leonin’s work was greatly improved and expanded by the later composer Perotin.

Some reknown musicologists believe that Leonin may have been the same person as a contemporaneous Parisian poet, Leonius, after whom Leonine verse may have been named. This would make Leonins use of meter even more significant.

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 was always history, music, art, and literature fan. Over the years I built a close circle of friends who share same interests with me. I guess, this is why I want to start my blog with entires about life and death of famous and unknown composers.

Today I would like to tell you about medieval composer Perotin. Only few facts of his biography kept in history.     

Perotin was a European composer, believed to be French. He lived around the end of the twelfth and beginning of the 13th century, and he was the most famous member of the Notre Dame school of polyphony. Perotin was one of very few composers of his day whose name has been preserved, and can be reliably attached to individual compositions; this is due to the testimony of an anonymous English student at Notre Dame known as Anonymous IV, who wrote about him. Anonymous IV called him “Perotin Magister”, which means Perotin the master or expert. Nothing is known about his time of death.