Comparing Notre Dame Mass And The Kyrie Of Palestrina's

After listening to Machaut, the music has wavelike melodies containing long melismas. The listener should hear three voices. Ma fin est mon commencement is a polyphonic chanson, which was heavily favored. Machauts work presents the listener with an enigmatic text as well as a musical structure that involves retrograde movement. Ma fin est mon commencement features two sections, A and B, and palindromes in voices. Each voice is distinct, as they do not imitate one another. The two sections, A and B, repeat, AbaAabAB. The harmony can be described as consonant with open, hollow cadences.

This composition consists of three movements of which we will further examine movement II, Adagio Cantabile. This movement is placed in high contrast with the other two, particularly in tempo.

The eight-part collection for various combinations of trumpets and trombones, Canzona septimi toni no. 2 by Giovanni Gabrieli, employs antiphony as a means of taking advantage of church acoustics. His strategic separation of two instrumental groups illuminates the dialogic structure of Gabrieli’s composition. It’s meter alternates between duple and triple, finally returning to duple meter pending the completion of the piece . In terms of harmony, the work contains mainly homophony, again, alternating between both instrumental groups placed antiphonally within the church. The through-composed canzona exhibits Gabrieli’s cultivation of musical material in dialogue between instrumental groups. The timbre, meter, and antiphony utilized in Gabrieli’s

19. Who is Guillaume de Machaut? 14th century poet and musician who composed the first complete polyphonic setting of the entire Ordinary of the Mass.

The longest fragment of Alcman consists of the hundred or so lines, complete or partial, of his parthenion or maiden song. It seems to have been sung by a choir of girls at a religious festival before dawn, competing in music and beauty with another choir… Its swift simplicity, brilliant images and melodic beauty convey the grace and gaiety of an archaic world. ‘’

1. Discuss the use of music in Catholic and Protestant worship practice, from the development of polyphony, through the music of J.S. Bach. In so doing, discuss the shift in responsibility for musical development from the Catholic Church to the Lutheran Church.

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina was an Italian Renaissance composer of spiritual music and the best­known 16th­century representative of the Roman School of musical composition. He has had a marvelous influence on the development of church music, and his work has often been seen as the culmination of Renaissance polyphony. Palestrina's masses show how his compositional style developed over time. One of the symbols of Palestrina's music is that dissonances are typically credited to the "weak" beats in a measure.This produced a smoother and more consonant type of polyphony which we now consider late Renaissance music, given Palestrina's position as Europe's leading composer. In this piece, Sicut Cervus,

“Medieval motets tended to be isorhythmic; that is, they employed repeated rhythmic patterns in all voices—not only the cantus firmus—which did not necessarily coincide with repeating melodic patterns.”2 This new isorhythmic principle, brought on mostly by the composer Machaut, was used not only in the tenor voice but also rather with much more freedom in the upper voice parts. The application of discant over a cantus firmus marked the beginnings of this new revolutionary style, the motet, in Western music. The key motet composers in the medieval period were few in number; Phillip de Vitry and Machaut were one of the earliest composers to institute the isorhythmic technique, which set the style for other medieval composers like Willelmus de Winchecumbe. Guillaume de Machaut was a more famous named late-medieval composer to institute the discant which caught on in other music styles and only helped to evolve the motet into its later stylings. These composers helped carry the motet to the new Flemish motet style.

     This madrigal is an excellent example of Monteverdi’s late Renaissance vocal style, with its elaborate

1.     Gregorian chant consists of a single-lined melody and is monophonic in texture. This piece also consists of these basic structures as well as not having any harmory or counterpoint. This piece performed by U of I faculty member Steven Rickards, is sung a cappella.

The Genevan Psalter is a gathering of one hundred twenty-six tunes intended to be sung with metrical interpretations of the one hundred fifty Biblical Psalms and three other Scriptural tunes. It is once in a while alluded to as the French Psalter, as the tunes were intended to be sung with French metrical adaptations of the Psalter. As the first and most compelling music to be formed particularly by and for Reformed Christians, these tunes speak to a huge component of the legacy of all Reformed or Calvinistic

First, we visit St. Peter’s Basilica and Adjoining Piazza in Rome. The beautiful structure still used today, initially was brought to fruition by Donato Bramante as a temple shaped like a Greek cross. Quickly Pope Paul V rejected the design, deeming the Greek cross to be pagan-like. He commissioned Carlo Maderno to make some changes to the floor plan, adjusting the look into a Latin cross. The florid baroque styles are seen entering the Apse and Alter, which “symbolized the power and richness of the church” (392). The sculptures throughout, specifically in the Apse, are dramatic and real, shunning classical styles.

One of the greatest composers of music, even though it was only slightly notated at the time, was Guillaume de Machaut (d. 1377), “one of the undisputed pinnacle geniuses of Western music…” His most famous piece was the four-voice Mass of Notre Dame, which maintained his reputation through the changes in fashion (Roberge). After almost a millennium’s worth of music was composed and contributed, the style of music began to change with the next era.

The Renaissance and Baroque era entailed very different characteristics, due to the Renaissance composers writing more freely and being more individual then those of the Baroque era where they followed more ‘rules’ and experimented less. This essay will show the difference in two pieces by different composers, even though they were written less than a century apart.

The interesting fact about this composition is that the tempo is expressive of “religious solemnity” (Pilich). Obviously one can comprehend the fact that music contains not only mere words but can foster certain emotions that are associated with a particular piece of music.