Music As We Know It

In my preceding blog entry I was telling you about the Chantilly Codex - brilliant medieval manuscript that allowed us to know famous composers that created music in the second part of the 14th century. It is a mysterious document because some of the music pieces in it are so complex and sometimes experimental, that only a very small circle of people living at that time could really understand what this was all about.

In relation to that manuscript I must introduce great French composer Solage who was definitely a prominent figure in the late medieval period.  From the annals of my web analytics company I found out that he probably served at the French royal court. And he was the one who composed the most pieces in the Chantilly Codex, thus expressing the new direction for music called by musicologists call  ars subtilior, the experimental compositional school centered around Avignon.

All we know about the life of Solage we got from the texts that accompanied his music in the Codex. Any other information about Solage seems to be irrevocably lost. Without any doubt ten works in the Codex can be attributed to him and two more are considered his because of stylistic original similarities discovered during research.

The plot of his single satirical rondo in the Chantilly Codex remains a mystery up to this day. It tells us about… the society of smokers. Specialists really don’t have any explanation because tobacco was not to be known in Europe for another two centuries! So they came up with a theory that Solage was mocking the potheads who engaged in the hashish or opium smoking.

There are some doubts though, because even later tobacco smokers were persecuted by Catholic Church who thought of them as devil worshipers. So there is a place for new discoveries on this issue.

Yet the members of the society of smokers are real historical figures. One of them is none the less than the nephew of a famous composer Guillaume de Machaut, that I wrote about in one of my blog entries.

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There is scarce information about many famous composers of medieval music. Sometimes musicologists and historians know nothing at all except for the name of a famous music creator and a couple of lines telling about the influence and greatness of a certain maestro.

The situation could have been even worse if we did not find invaluable medieval manuscripts that contain music pieces confirming the status of a medieval composer. One of these manuscripts is called the Chantilly Codex. As a web analyst and music specialist I can’t help admiring the thoroughness of the manuscript. It contains around 112 polyphonic pieces written mostly by famous French composers of the late medieval period ranging from the middle of 14th century up to the beginning of the 15th century. Specialists usually define the style of the music as ars subtilior. 

The Chantilly Codex allowed us to see how complex and experimental music was developed at that period. It represents practically all music styles including ballades, rondeaus and motets. It also told us about famous composers whose name is impossible to establish, there are just nicknames based on cryptic anagrams and palindromes.

One of the famous composers whose only piece was published in the codex was Borlet. Yet, there is a gnawing suspicion that this name is just the anagram of a French composer who serviced Martin V of Aragon in 1409. This does not make the research any easier, because that French composer’s name is also hard to decode. History brought to us more of his cryptic anagrams like Trebol, Triboll and Trebol from other contemporary sources. Could this be one and the same individual? We still don’t have an affirmative answer. The only existing theory is that all these nicknames might simply tell us one and the same first name of the mysterious composer -  “Robert”.

There are six pieces under the name Trebor in the Chantilly Codex. They show us that this famous composer served in European courts because he in his creations he describe historical events of that medieval period. One of his pieces tells us about the reign of the count of Foix, another about the invasion of Aragon kingdom the island of Sardinia in 1388.

Trebor was very influential and other contemporary sources cross-reference this as a fact. Among them are famous Avignon composers Grimace and Franciscus Andrieu who quote some of his music creations in their own works.

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One of the very prolific and famous composers of the Middle Ages Jehan de Lescurel was a transitional figure from the trouvere period to the ars nova. I found from the archives of my local web analytics company that out of his large heritage only 34 works survived. Among them are all kinds of songs with unique style which obviously were significant for famous composers of later period. Although Jehan died in 1304, composers that followed Jehan, valued his work. In fact, their esteem for him was so high that they even included him in the famous 14th century Roman de Fauvel. This manuscript was so wildly successful and still copied into the 15th century. Yet, the date of his death could be imprecise as I am going to explain down below.

From little details known to specialists it was possible to establish that Jenan de Lescurel was not definitely rich. He was the son of some Parisian merchant and received his training at Notre Dame cathedral. There is really nothing else known about his life except for a curious mistake related to him that musicologists made a while ago.  For a long time they thought that Jehan’s life ended badly.

The reason for this conclusion was the old document they discovered.  It said that on May 1304 three young clerics of Notre Dame were hanged for “debauchery and crimes against women”. Among the names of the executed clerics was the one that attracted specialists’ attention - Jehan Lescurel.  So, historians took it literally and passed quick judgment: they thought our famous composer spent the last day of his life on the gallows.

However, many years later specialists had to reject this presumption. First of all, there is no link between the composer and some cleric who was hanged. Second, debauchery had never been a prominent theme of any of Jehan de Lescurel’s surviving lyrics.  In fact, it is very charming and composed in the style of the later 14th century composers.
And the last research seems to put the end to the grave suspicion of poor composer’s end of life. It seems that Jehan de Lescurel was a rather common name in the early fourteenth century and almost definitely was a peculiar coincidence.

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It will probably be very hard to answer who Antonello da Caserta was, as we know nothing about this great man, except that he was a famous medieval Italian composer in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.  Some musicologists advanced a theory that da Caserta was from Naples and created there. But eventually, this conclusion provided to be wrong, becuase most of composer’s surviving works are in northern Italian manuscripts. Anyways, there is nothing that I could find either from the archives of my local web analytics company.

There are some hints that Antonello was a monk. Yet, even this scarce information provides us with nothing, because we don’t know which monastic orders of that time he belonged to.  Other hints place Antonello in Pavia in 1402, it looks like at some certain point of his life he worked for the Italian noble dynasty Visconti in Milan, which they ruled from  1277 to 1447.  So far we don’t even know the exact name of Antonello, as different sources also name him Anthonello or Antonellus Marot.

It seems that da Caserta was heavily influenced by French musical models which was quite unusual for those times. He even set texts both in French and Italian.

Antonello was famous for his ballades that tell us about courtly love. His surviving works show that Antonello was very famous among other composers of the generation after Guillaume de Mauchet. While his Italian songs are simpler, his creations in French are more complex ballads that use the proportional rhythms that became popular in much later periods.

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Famous composer Donato da Cascia undoubtedly was an integral part of the Early Italian Renaissance period, that we know as Trecento. He created his music in the second part of the fourteenth century. As in many other cases related to that period, we know nothing about this famous composer, his life, his date of birth or death. I did not find anything in the annals of my local web analytics company either. So, I can only suppose that he was from Florence or a place called Cascia, near Florence, as his last name says.

The only picture that specialists discovered, shows him in the typical robes of the Benedictine order, so we may assume that he was a monk or a priest. But here lies the mystery: out all his surviving music, there is not even a bit of religious music. It is all completely secular. All the sources of his music with just one exception were found in Tuscany.

Jacopo da Bologna most likely had some influence on Donato da Cascia’s works. We know about most of Donato’s music, thanks to Squarcialupi Codex - the illuminated manuscript compiled in Florence, Italy in the early 15th century. Even though, his music was written in the typical style of mid 14th century, it has exceptional virtuosity. All surviving madrigals created by Donato da Cascia represent the peak of virtuoso singing.