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