9 posts tagged “famous classical composers”

Loyset Compere was a French composer of the Renaissance. 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 Italian Renaissance style to France. Compere had a gift for melody, and many of his chansons became popular. Later composers even used several of them for masses. His chansons are his most characteristic compositions, and many scholars of Renaissance music consider them to be his best work.

Many of Compere's compositions were printed and disseminated widely. Their availability contributed to their popularity. Our company's chief Web Analyst told me that Compere 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.

He was probably born around 1445. His exact place of birth is not known, but documents of the time assign him to a family from the province of Artois in France, and suggest he may have been born in Hainaut. Some sources indicate that he described himself as coming from Arras, also in Artois. One can't help to notice, that the area around the current French-Belgian border produced an astonishing number of excellent composers in the 15th and 16th centuries, whose fame spread throughout Europe. Often they are known as the Franco-Flemish, or as the Dutch School.

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Johannes Ockeghem was one of the most famous composers in Europe in the latter half of the 15th century. Very few of his works have survived. Yet we know, that Ockeghem was famous throughout Europe for his expressive music and his technical mastery. Being a renowned bass singer himself, his use of wide-ranging and rhythmically active bass lines sets him apart from many of the other composers in the Netherlandish Schools.

Recent research has shown that Ockeghem was born in the town of Saint-Ghislain. The birthdate of Ockeghem is controversial, and dates as early as 1410, and as late as 1430 have been proposed. The comment by the poet Guillaume Cretin, in the lament he wrote on Ockeghem's death in 1497, "it was a great shame that a composer of his talents should die before 100 years old", is also often taken as evidence for the earlier date.

Details of his early life are lacking. Like many composers in this period, he started his musical career as chorister, and the first record of his musical activity comes from the cathedral of Notre Dame in Antwerp, where he was employed in 1443 and 1444. Between 1446 and 1448 he served Charles, Duke of Bourbon, in Moulins, France. Around 1452 he moved to Paris where he served as maestro di cappella to the French court, as well as treasurer to the St. Martin cathedral in Tours. In addition to serving at the French court for kings Charles VII and Louis XI, he held posts at Notre Dame Cathedral and St. Benoit. He is known to have traveled to Spain in 1470, as part of a diplomatic mission, which was an attempt to arrange a marriage between Isabella of Castile and Charles, Duke of Guyenne, the brother of king Louis XI. After the death of Louis XI in 1483, not much is known for certain about Ockeghem's whereabouts, though it is known that he went to Bruges and Tours, and he probably died in the latter town in February 6, 1497, since he left a will there.

Ockeghem probably studied with Gilles Binchois, and at the very least was closely associated with him at the Burgundian court. Since Antoine Busnois wrote a motet in honor of Ockeghem sometime before 1467, and writers of the time often link Dufay, Busnois and Ockeghem. Although Ockeghem's musical style differs considerably from that of the older generation, it is probable that he acquired his basic technique from them, and as such can be seen as a direct link from the Burgundian style to the next generation of Netherlanders, such as Obrecht and Josquin.

By 1467 Busnois was at the court of Burgundy, and he had begun composing for them immediately before the accession of Charles to the title of Duke. Charles, on becoming Duke of Burgundy, quickly became known as Charles the Bold, for his fierce and sometimes reckless military ambitions, that got him killed ten years later. In addition to his love of war, however, Duke Charles loved music, and in his employ Busnois was appreciated and rewarded.

In addition to his duties as a singer and a composer, Busnois accompanied the Duke on his military campaigns. Busnois was at the siege of Neuss in Germany in 1475, and survived the disastrous Battle of Nancy in 1477 at which Charles was killed and the expansion of Burgundy was forever stilled. Busnois remained in the employ of the Burgundian court until 1482, but nothing exact is known about his exploits between then and 1492, when he died. At the time of his death, he was working for the church in Bruges. Throughout this time he was exceptionally well-known as a composer, and his music circulated widely.

Antoine Busnois was a French composer and poet of the early Renaissance Burgundian School. While also noted as a composer of sacred music, such as motets, he was one of the most renowned 15th-century composers of secular chansons.

We don’t know much about his life. He was probably born around 1430, in the vicinity of Bethune in the Pas de Calais. He may have been related to the aristocratic family of Busnois. He clearly received an excellent musical education. An aristocratic origin may explain his early association with the French royal court: references to him appear there, and in 1461 he was a chaplain at Tours. He was not entirely a man of peace. This is indicated by a petition for absolution he filed in Tours, in which he admitted to being part of a group that beat up a priest, “to the point of bloodshed”, not one but five times. While in a state of anathema he was foolhardy enough to celebrate mass, an act which got him excommunicated; however Pope Pius II pardoned him.

He moved from the cathedral to the collegiate church of St. Martin, also in Tours, where he became a subdeacon in 1465. Later in 1465 Busnois moved to Poitiers, where he not only became master of the choirboys, but managed to attract a flood of talented singers from the entire region; by this time his reputation as singing teacher, scholar, and composer seems to have spread widely. However he departed just as suddenly as he came, in 1466 and moved to Burgundy.

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.

In addition to his work as a composer, Dunstable had a contemporary reputation as an astronomer, astrologer, and mathematician. Some of his astrological works have survived in manuscript, possibly in his own hand.

He died on Christmas Eve 1453, as recorded in his epitaph, which was in the church of St Stephen Walbrook in London (until it was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666). This was also his burial place. The epitaph - stating that he had "secret knowledge of the stars" - was reinstated in the church in 1904.

Very few manuscript sources of Dunstaple’s works survived in England, as is similarly the case for other 15th century composers. Even though England was a centre of musical activity, almost all of the music was destroyed between 1536 and 1540 during the Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII. As a result, most of Dunstaple’s work had to be recovered from continental sources. Since numerous copies of his works have been found in Italian and German manuscripts, his fame must have been widespread. He was praised by the French poet Martin Le Franc, who wrote in the massive verse-poem that Dunstable influenced other Renaissance composers. A few decades later in about 1476, the Flemish composer and music theorist Tinctoris hailed him as the chief exponent, of the new art which had originated with the English.

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.

Adam de la Halle, also known as Adam le Bossu which is translated into English as Adam the Hunchback was a French-born trouvère, poet and musician, who broke with the long-established tradition of writing liturgical poetry and Catholic funeral music to be an early founder of secular theater in France. Researches say, that he was born around 1237 and they are positive that he died in 1288.

Adam’s other nicknames, “le Bossu d’Arras” and “Adam d’Arras”, suggest that he came from Arras, France. The sobriquet “the Hunchback” was probably a family name; Adam himself points out that he was not one. His father, Henri de le Hale, was a well-known Citizen of Arras, and Adam studied grammar, theology, and music at the Cistercian abbey of Vaucelles, near Cambrai. Father and son had their share in the civil discords in Arras, and for a short time took refuge in Douai. Adam had been destined for the church, but renounced this intention, and married a certain Marie, who figures in many of his songs, rondeaux, motets and jeux-partis. Afterwards he joined the household of Robert II, count of Artois; and then was attached to Charles of Anjou, brother of Charles IX, whose fortunes he followed in Egypt, Syria, Palestine, and Italy.