The motet at the court of Francis I.

Format:

Book

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Brobeck, John Thomas.

Contributor:

Bernstein, Lawrence F., advisor.

University of Pennsylvania.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Music.

0413.

Penn dissertations--Music.

Music--Penn dissertations.

Local Subjects:

Penn dissertations--Music.

Music--Penn dissertations.

0413.

Physical Description:

675 pages

Contained In:

Dissertation Abstracts International 52-08A.

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

text file

Summary:

It is widely recognized that while Francis I ruled France (1515-47) royal musicians produced a large, idiosyncractic repertory of sacred and secular polyphony, much of which was published in Paris by the first French printer of polyphonic music, Pierre Attaingnant. Because of the extent to which chansons predominate in Attaingnant's prints, stylistic similarities between the secular works and the motets written by Claudin de Sermisy and Pierre Certon, two of the crown's chief musicians, traditionally have been attributed to the overwhelming popularity of the so-called "Parisian chanson" during the third and fourth decades of the century. Textual and musical analysis of the ninety-three motets attributed to Claudin, however, reveals considerable technical and aesthetic differences between the two genres, a number of which arise from the composer's overriding concern to reflect musically the syntax and the rhetoric of the unrhymed motet texts he favored. Moreover, although similar analysis of the polyphonic repertory created by the musicians of Louis XII (r. 1498-1514) indicates that no one type of motet predominated at the royal court before 1515, clear antecedents for Sermisy's "syntactic" motets can be found among the compositions of Antoine de Fevin, Mathieu Gascongne, and Jean Mouton, all of whom served in the royal chapel during his formative years at the court. It may be suggested, on the basis of this analysis and a review of the history and the musical patronage of the court, that the "syntactic" style of motet writing became dominant in the royal chapel during the third decade of the century not as a direct result of the emergence of the Parisian chanson, but rather in response to the musical tastes of the king and the increasing cultural isolation of the court at that time, an isolation brought on in large part by the disaster of Pavia in 1525 and the growing effectiveness of the crown's musical patronage. During the final decade of Francis's reign, the "syntactic" style gradually was supplanted by Pierre Certon's attempted rapprochement of the courtly tradition with the more contrapuntal manner of writing favored in the imperial chapel, an attempt that met with limited success.

Notes:

Thesis (Ph.D. in Music) -- Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania, 1991.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 52-08, Section: A, page: 2748.

Supervisor: Lawrence F. Bernstein.

Local Notes:

School code: 0175.

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.