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for musical directions dates Duke Ercole d’Este in Ferrara in 1503,
from the dominance of Italy in he left there ahead of the plague which
Renaissance musical culture. killed his successor, Jacob Obrecht. At
More important than any other this point he apparently went directly
factor, though, was the question home to Condé-sur-l’Escaut in northern
of musical heritage: there wasn’t
much of one. Western music was
imagined and invented in those
two centuries. So too were several
key instruments: the violin,
the guitar and the hurdy-gurdy
for example. (I am joking about
the hurdy-gurdy. Many popular
instruments of the time have
also been lost, become curiosities
or, like the sackbut, evolved
into more sophisticated forms.)
The most characteristic element
of Renaissance musical
style enjoys renewed interest
France, where he died in 1521.
Handel and others, exemplifies the
today: polyphony. This is the
simultaneous playing or singing
of multiple melodies. It
emerged from church singing,
at first as a second voice woven
around a main line called the
cantus firmus. Over time polyphonic
Baroque more than perhaps any musi- compositions became more and more
cal form except opera. His Fantasias for elaborate. As a kind of culmination, we A book of Josquin’s masses is the
viols were written at age 21, when the have Thomas Tallis’ Spem in alium, writ- oldest surviving set of printed works
polyphonic fantasia form was already ten for eight choirs of five voices each. by a single composer, and during his
old-fashioned, but they are masterpieces Perhaps unexpectedly, it sound s neither lifetime there were several other press
of audacious invention and brilliant turgid nor busy. Today’s renaissance in runs of his work as well. His name was so
working-out of counterpoint, indeed choral singing has made several record- much a guarantee of a sale that one 16
worthy of Bach. And as with Mozart, we ings available, and you can also hear it
can only regret the loss of the glorious in Janet Cardiff’s permanent exhibition
music he might have created had he lived in the Rideau Street Chapel in Ottawa.
longer.
We can look to the composer Josquin
But listen to what he did leave! Desprez to give us a window on the
As a single-disc introduction to evolution of music in the Renaissance
Purcell’s music, the superb Canadian period. He was born around 1450,
soprano, Karina Gauvin, has a disc on perhaps in France, and we have very
the ATMA label called: Purcell. Among little biographical information about
others, it includes both vocal and instru- him, yet he was perhaps the greatest
mental pieces from Dido and Æneas and name of the period before Palestrina.
The Faery Queen.
He may have been a choirboy at St.
The Renaissance period, which Quentin in northern France, but that
preceded the Baroque, is a longer one, town was the centre of a thousand-year
starting about 1400, but it contains history of war, in which Church records
fewer composers, less music and less were destroyed. He may have studied
varied music. The reasons for this are counterpoint with Johannes Ockeghem,
multiple. A bourgeois class with time a Flemish composer of great renown.
for entertainment only emerged toward Josquin seems to have traveled to the
the end of the period. Musical notation, south of France, then to Milan. In Rome
and printing for its distribution, were he was a member of the papal choir and
just developing. Political stability was may have carved his name into the wall
established slowly. The use of Italian of the Sistine Chapel. Employed by the
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Century printer declared, “Now Josquin
is dead, he’s composing more than ever.”
Later scholarship has eliminated many
works of dubious attribution, but what is
clearly Josquin’s has been compared to
Beethoven’s in terms of its musical quality
and its influence on the music of the
time. Josquin pulled together elements
from French, Italian and Flemish sources
to create a style in which musical subpatterns
or motifs were shared between
voices and identified with sung texts.
We take this kind of thing for granted
in music today.
The superb singing of the Tallis
Scholars will introduce you to Josquin
on Gimell Records’ Missa Malheur me bat
and Fortuna desperata, but there wasn’t
room on that CD for two whole masses
plus the popular tunes which provide the
cantus firmus or parody structure — and
the name — for each one. The parody
was a common Renaissance mass form,
66 ULTRA HIGH FIDELITY Magazine