AUTHORITATIVE | CURATED | First 500 words Free

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Medieval Era

(Yo-an’-nes O’-ka-gem) c. 1425–97 Franco-Flemish composer Born in St Ghislain near Mons (now in Belgium), Ockeghem is first recorded as a singer at the Church of Our Lady, Antwerp, in 1443. He joined the French royal chapel in 1451, becoming chapel-master by 1454. In 1459 King Charles VII appointed him treasurer of the abbey of St Martin of Tours. ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Medieval Era
• Theorist

(Yo-an’-nez Se-kon’-ya) c. 1370–1412 Franco-Flemish composer and theorist Ciconia was active principally in Italy. For many years he was regarded as the main link between Machaut and Du Fay, and although other influential composers have now come to the fore, he is still seen as one of the most important figures of his generation. He wrote songs in French and ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Medieval Era
• Theorist

(Yo-an’-nes Tink’-tôr-is) 1430–after 1511 French theorist Tinctoris attended university at Orléans and worked for most of his adult life at the Aragonese court in Naples. There he produced the most authoritative body of theoretical writing on music of his time. He was familiar with current musical practices, and dedicated one of his treatises to his contemporaries Ockeghem and Busnoys. His surviving ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Late Romantic

(Yo-han’-nes Bramz) 1833–97 German composer Brahms is a Janus-like figure in music history: he simultaneously faced the past and the future. Reviving and enlarging the classical principles of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, his music has often been seen as a conservative reaction against the ‘new music’ of Liszt and, in particular, Wagner. Yet Brahms’ highly personal blend of ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Medieval Era
• Poet

(Ge-yom’ da Ma-sho’) c. 1300–77 French Composer and Poet Machaut was the most important poet-composer of fourteenth-century France and had a wide and enduring influence. He was in constant demand by the greatest noble patrons of his day, and his music reflects this patronage. He was unusual, although probably not unique, among medieval writers in that he made an ...

• Styles & Forms
• Classical
• Renaissance

As a period in art history, the Renaissance dates from the beginning of the fifteenth century to the first part of the sixteenth. Under the influence of perspective and the rediscovery of Ancient Greek statuary, painting and sculpture in Western Europe, and particularly Italy, were transformed by a worldview we now know as ‘humanism’. This phenomenon led ...

• Inside the Music
• Classical
• Renaissance

Cantus firmus technique, in which a pre-existent melody forms the basis of a new composition, lends itself well to musical homage, and it is likely that the selection of cantus firmi was often influenced by the dedicatee or patron. This might mean the choice of a favourite song, or a section of plainchant whose text held some ...

• Arts & Culture
• Classical
• Early Romantic

During the mid-nineteenth century, and in particular Liszt’s time in Weimar in the 1850s, there were many personal and idealistic tensions in the musical world. The cohesive spirit of early Romanticism during the years following Beethoven’s death (1827) had become fragmented. Liszt had surrounded himself in Weimar with pupils who shared his musical ideals; they became known as the ...

• Influences
• Classical
• Medieval Era

Composers of the twentieth century and up to the present have often been drawn to the music of the medieval and Renaissance periods. A relatively early example is Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971), who became interested in the fourteenth-century technique of hocket and in the harmonic experiments of the Italian composer Carlo Gesualdo (c. 1561–1613). Hocket has since inspired many composers, both ...

• Inside the Music
• Classical
• Medieval Era

Du Fay’s Mass L’homme armé was one of the first of several dozen Masses of that name composed between the years 1450 and 1700. ‘L’homme armé’ (‘The Armed Man’) was a popular, probably satirical, tune which may have been aimed at the less-valiant members of the French army during the last stages of the Hundred Years’ War. Attracted by ...

• Inside the Music
• Classical
• Late Romantic

The sense of cultural and societal degeneration and decline affected both the subject-matter of music and, more intangibly, its forms and structures. Much of the music of Johannes Brahms (1833–97), for instance, deliberately invoked earlier models as a way of linking himself with his idea of a great but past tradition. He saturated his music with counterpoint and ...

• Inside the Music
• Classical
• Medieval Era

Written in the early 1360s, Machaut’s Mass cycle sets all the movements of the Ordinary, the dismissal (Ite missa est), and its response. Although not all the movements are based on chant (the Kyrie, Sanctus, Agnus Dei and the dismissal are based on their respective plainchant melodies, in isorhythm, whereas the Gloria and Credo are ...

• Instruments
• Woodwind

As ensemble music became more popular during the sixteenth century there was increased demand for wind instruments that could elegantly negotiate the lower ranges. Large versions of wind instruments intended for the higher registers lacked volume and agility and were often difficult to play. Various elements of existing instruments – the bass recorder’s crook and the shawm’s double reed, for ...

• Instruments
• Ensembles

A musical ensemble is a group of two or more musicians who have come together to play music. In theory, an ensemble could contain any number of instruments in any combination, but in practice, certain combinations just don’t work very well, either for musical reasons or because of the sheer practicality of getting particular instruments and players ...

• Instruments
• Brass

The term ‘horn’ is generally used to refer to the orchestral horn, also known as the French horn. Although it is used in jazz slang to indicate any wind instrument played by a soloist, the name here refers to the orchestral horn. History The early history of the horn is bound intimately to that of the trumpet. Both instruments ...