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You would have heard music like this, from perhaps the first truly great composer, Josquin des Prez.
Music was very different in the Middle Ages. Everyone sang the same tune at the same note, and one of the (unbelievably many) revolutionary introductions of the renaissance was polyphony - different voices singing different melodies and counterpoint and blend. The barbershop quartet is perhaps the most recognizable form of this to us, but it was brand new, and Josquin was the master.
To our ears this sounds like church music, and while he wrote many masses for the Church, this was a secular song (chanson) likely written for a noble patron of the arts. Not particularly upbeat (the lyrics more or less translate to "life is short"), we're unlikely to hear anything like this today.
But this was the real deal, from the first true master who pre-dated Palestrina by nearly a century.
6 comments:
Good choice. One of my Pandora radio channels is dedicated to the music of Josquin Desprez.
Interesting and one wonders who 'paid' for that to be done. I 'knew' polyphony was old, but I didn't realize it was THAT old. Thanks!
i had a music history teacher in college who made a joke in class one day. the punch line was, "But, you know, Josquin De Prez never did write cantus firmus masses." none of us got it.
Not particularly upbeat (the lyrics more or less translate to "life is short"), we're unlikely to hear anything like this today.
How about Tim McGraw's "Live like you're dyin' "?
I have always wondered if polyphonic music led to the rise of the West. After all, it's just a way of planning for multiple things to happen at once, e.g., a factory.
Apropos what Chas Clifton said, I recall reading a magazine article some 25 years ago (pre-internet for all you Noobs out there) which proposed that it was monks singing in harmony with multiple parts which gave rise to the concept of metrical time (instead of a year of days and nights that seemed different lengths, there was a day-night of the same length, which varied with the seasons between more daylight and more night) which gave rise to clocks, industrialism, science, engineering, and Western Civilization. There is an old book called "The Twelfth Century Renaissance" that exposits this very idea.
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