Music As We Know It

There are some famous composers whose heritage has been ignored and neglected for a long time. It happened to the best music creators like J.S. Bach and others.  Something similar happened to Dieterich Buxtehude, whose name and creations faded in the past.  Yet, today specialists recognize him as the most important German composer of the mid-Baroque period. 

As with many other baroque composers, we know little about his life. His date of birth is still disputed but, generally, specialists agree that it was around 1637. Although Dieterich spent most of his life in Germany, he seems to be born in Denmark and always considered himself Danish.  

Known as the genius composer who influenced later generations of followers, including Bach, Hendel and even Gustav Maller, Buxtehude became reknown at his times as a virtuoso musician as well. He was highly regarded by his contemporaries as an accomplished organist and lutenist. 

Most of his life he was an organist of the famous protestant church Marienkirche in a free imperial city of Lubeck.  This envious position gave him relative freedom in his musical career and considerable creative latitude. He wrote in a wide variety of vocal and instrumental idioms, in addition to the standard organ repertoire, which are frequently performed during church services and recitals today. 

Due to his efforts, evening church concerts Abendmusik sponsored by local businessmen came into prominence. They were paid for and, thus, free for the general public.  Dieterich Buxtehude always performed there with organ and orchestrated a gigantic variety of vocal music as well.  It is interesting to note that in 1926 Marienkirche church in Lubeck renewed this tradition, so people can listen to  Abendmusic in the present days. 

The fame of Buxtehude grew and soon the crowds of young musicians and composers from all over Europe would gather to listen to his Abenmusic. Among them were Hendel, Bach, Telemann and Mattheson. Dietrich became a model for them and an influential figure.  J.S. Bach who was then a twenty year old lad walked over two hundred miles to Lubeck just to meet Dietrich and hear him play. He spent in Lubeck almost three months going religiously to each Abendmusik in Marienkirche. 

Hendel and Mattheson met Buxtehude a couple of years before his death in 1707. They quickly hit it off and got along so well, that Dieterich even offered to retire and appoint one of them as a new Marienkirche organist. There was only one stipulation - the future organist would have to marry his eldest daughter.  Apparently Dieterich’s daughter was not a beauty, as two famous composers refused and hastily left Lubeck within one day after their arrival.

It is hard to find the exact historical category for famous Italian composer Gregorio Allegri. He was born in 1582 in Rome, he mostly lived there throughout his life and died in 1652.  Roman composers of that time were stilistically conservative. Chronologically, this was the shining time of Baroque music, but most Roman composers created music closer to the late Renaissance music.  This is why Allegri’s compositions present an exotic mixture of both these two styles. 

 

Gregorio was not only the composer, he was a Catholic priest as well.  Most of his compositions are related to sacred music which helped him to get noticed by Pope and obtain a prestigious appointment in the choir of the great Sistine Chapel. 

His most celebrated composition is Miserere mei Deus based on the Biblical Psalm 50.  For centuries choir has been performing it annually during Holy Week in the Sistine Chapel.  The Miserere is also one of the most prominently recorded example of late Renaissance music as well.  This work is surrounded by mystery too because Vatican forbade its distribution or copying under the treat of excommunication.

However it did not stop the attempts to procure an illegal copy.  The teenage composer Mozart who visited the Rome in 1770 heard Miserere twice and transcribed it from memory.  Mozart’s copy was later obtained and published in England but only showed the basic music without all ornamentation for which it was famous.

There were many composers who claimed to invent a new musical genre - the opera. But, possibly the true inventor was an Italian composer Jacopo Peri. He was born in Rome in 1561 and studied music in Florence. Then he worked in a number of churches as a singer and an organist until he landed a great job at the famous Medici court.He became rather popular there growing from the position of the first tenor and organist to the pedestal of a famous composer of the court madrigals and music for plays. His style of music writing is ranging from the late Renaissance to early Baroque music.

Jacopo Peri would probably spent his life by writing incidental music for the court but in the 1590s he got acquainted and became friends with Jacopo Corsi, who at the time was the leading patron of music in Florence.

Soon they found that they share common interests. They both were living in the transitional period between the Renaissance and Baroque styles and thought highly of Greek and Roman works. In fact, they felt so strongly about the ancient art that they hold it in higher esteem than contemporary art.

The urge to return to the times of antiquity made our two composers full of desire to recreate Greek tragedy the way they understood it. They created the music and invited then popular poet Ottavio Rinuccini to write a text. At the end of their labors a first opera Dafne was born in 1597, which did not survive to our days.

Obviously, this joint work had some success because Jacopo Peri and Ottavio Rinuccini started creating their second work that they named Euridice. Unlike Dafne, Euridice survived to the present day. We can see that it was a far cry from ancient Greeks understanding of the classical tragedy. Yet, during the development of both operas they introduced first recitatives and arias as the integral part of the play.

Eruidice was first staged on October 6, 1600. Jacopo Peri created a number of other operas and more pieces for court entertainment. However, he quickly went out of fashion while the star of the young reformist composer Claudio Monteverdi rose up and began to shine. Peri quietly died in 1633 in Florence, and his death was hardly noticed by any of his fellow citizens.

Even now, nobody stages Peri’s operas. His operatic style is looked upon as some kind of musical curiosity. However we are all indebted to him, because his influence on young Baroque composers was immense and, after all, he was the inventor of the opera.

 

 

Giulio Caccini, one of the earliest great Baroque composers was a very unusual and extraordinary man. His contribution to music and to the development of music history is invaluable.  Giulio acquired his tremendous fame as a composer of innovative solo songs that were a gigantic step from Renaissance music. He was great music teacher that trained dozens of famous musicians who started singing in this new baroque style. One of them sang in Orfeo which was first opera created by the composer Monteverdi.

Giulio Caccini is credited as one of the founders of the genre of opera and an extremely influential creative force of new Baroque music. He was of not of noble origin and was born in 1551 in the family of a simple carpenter in Rome. Five years later his brother Giovanni was born who was destined for fame too as he would become a famous sculptor and architect.

Young Gulio played lute, viola and the harp but his greatest talent was tenor singing that impressed influential family of Medici who brought him to their court in Florence.  He had various engagements there including participation in entertainments like intermedi - one of the precursors of the opera. Gulio sang at the weddings and statesmen meetings accompanying himself on the viol.

He belonged to the close circle of humanists who dedicated their lives to recovering lost masterpieces of antiquity.  We know that Caccini toured Italy too. He visited Rome where music school was still very conservative, yet his singing and music started changing the direction of music there too.

However, with all the mix of intellect and talents, Giulio Caccini was a simple human being easily motivated by greed, jealousy and envy. He also played a terrible part in the tragedy related to the family of Medici.

Pietro, one of the sons of Cosimo Medici married his first cousin Eleonora di Garcia de Toledo.  In the marriage she was having an a love affair. Caccini notified Francesco Medici who became next Duke of Tuscany about the adultery.  Pietro killed Eleonora and then murdered her imprisoned lover Bernardino Antinori.

Caccini was also highly competitive using all means for his career advancement with Medici family. He was the main reason why great composer Cavalieri was kicked out of Florence. He also prohibited his singers to participate in the production of the rival composer Jacopo Peri who is often named as the inventor of the opera.

Giulio Caccini died in Florence in 1618 but he left us another great genius - his daughter Francesca.  She grew to become a famous composer like her father. In fact, Francesca is the most famous and influential female European composer in any genre, between Hildegard of Bingen in the 12th century and the 19th century.  Francesca Caccini was also responsible for creating the first opera by a woman composer.

In my previous blog entries I promised to continue telling you about lost in the history famous composers of the transitional era.  Although, they were extremely popular at the late medieval times, their heritage either vanished throughout the years or brought us some minimal but significant evidence about their talents.

Fate played one of the most peculiar tricks on famous Italian composer of the late medieval times Giovanni Mazzuoli. In fact I found during my web analytics research that there was the second name assigned to him  - Giovanni degli Organi.  Giovanni Mazzuoli was famous not only as a composer but also as a great musician organist  during his life from around 1360 till 1426.

Giovanni learned to play the organ from his father Niccolo. The latter trained his son while he was also serving as an organist of the church of Orsanmichele until 1376.  Thanks to his gift and intensive training, Giovanni was handed over the very same position after the death of his father in 1379.  He also played the organ in several other churches and cathedrals and taught his son Piero as his father did. Pieró assisted Giovanni during his last years of service.

When we say, that Giovanni was a famous composer we actually telling a little white lie.  None of his works reached our times. There are several works attributed to him, but specialists can not claim them his for sure.  So, how can serious web analysts judge his works and write his name to posterity?

An important source of medieval Italian music - Squarcialupi Codex -  is the illuminated manuscript compiled in Florence, Italy in the early 15th century. It consists of  216 parchment folios. Most of them are well-preserved and they are, in fact, in a great condition. There is a large section in Squarcialupi Codex dedicated exclusively to the musical pieces created by Giovanni Mazzuoli. The section is marked out under his name and a portrait is presented at his head. But for unknown reasons, the pages are blank. There is absolutely no music written there. All pages are decorated around the edges but left blank otherwise.

Another Italian manuscript San Lorenzo discovered not so long ago does contain his musical compositions.  Unfortunately, the paper of the manuscript is in such poor condition that the pages with Mazzuoli music are essentially unreadable.  Curiously, though, his son Piero Mazzuoli, who also created music is also included in this manuscript. And over a dozen of his musical pieces survived. Basically, this is one of the rare cases when a great composer is best remembered for the absence, rather than the presence of his musical compositions.

In the ocean of classical music there will always be famous composers, whose bio got lost due to the sands of time.  There were wildly popular not only as composers but also as famous musicians as well. I found their names from the research that I conducted at my web analytics company with several other coworkers. The ones that I will tell you about played their important role in the transition from medieval to Renaissance music. My story about them will continue in the future blog entries.

One of them was a great Frenchman Richard Loqueville  who played the harp as a virtuoso and taught it to the son of the Duke of Bar in 1410.  We know only about the eight years of his creativity and then his traces in the history vanished.  During this short period this famous composer also taught singing to the choirboys of the duke’s court and later taught music at Cambrai Cathedral. History brought to us less than a dozen pieces of his music.

Another famous composer who helped the transition to Renaissance music was Nicholas of Radom who was connected to the Polish court.  He created somewhere in the early 15th century at the court of the Polish king Jagiello and left us pieces of memorable polyphonic music full of religious contemplation.

History brought to us the name of a famous for his times composer Pycard, whose full name is unknown. We don’t even know whether he came  from England or France. What we know is that his music is complex and unusual in its virtuosity.  Survived pieces tell us that he was one of the most technically advanced and creative composers of the 14th century. His name and music survived only because specialists found them in the invaluable Old Hall Manuscript- the largest, most complete, and most significant source of English sacred music of the late 14th and early 15th centuries.

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.

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.

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.

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.