(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 ...
(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 ...
(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. ...
(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 ...
d. 1445 English composer Power was a contemporary of Dunstaple and, although rather less famous than him, was nonetheless an important figure in a period when English music was extremely influential. The majority of his works are movements from the Mass Ordinary. He broke new ground in the composition of Mass cycles, linking the movements of his Mass ...
The seven centuries covered here saw, essentially, the making of modern Europe. They saw the rise of the papacy and its numerous conflicts. They saw the shaping and reshaping of nations and empires. Yet beyond, and often because of, these conflicts and changes, they also saw the formation of great cultures. As nation met nation in ...
Classical ideals began to emerge and take shape in musical treatises in the late fifteenth century. One of the most famous exponents of this was Johannes Tinctoris (1430–after 1511), who, in his writings, claimed that music had been reborn in the works of John Dunstaple (c. 1390–1453) and his followers around 1440. Also central to Renaissance thinking about music ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
In 1905, and probably for several decades before that, there were more pianos in the United States than there were bathtubs. In Europe, throughout the nineteenth century, piano sales increased at a greater rate than the population. English, French and German makers dispatched veritable armies of pianos to every corner of the Earth. It was the ...
Although the terms ‘fortepiano’ and ‘pianoforte’ were used indiscriminately by musicians of the time, for the sake of clarity the former term is now specifically used to indicate keyboard instruments of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the latter to mean the modern instrument. The piano displaced the harpsichord musically and socially, taking over the latter’s ...
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