3 posts tagged “renaissance music”

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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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.