Journal of the Alamire Foundation

Using as its starting point the miniature of Margaret of Austria in the manuscript Brussels, Royal Library, Ms. 228, the essay places this famous chansonnier in multiple contexts. After a brief bibliographic biography, it surveys manuscript images and diptych portrayals of Margaret, owner images and main openings within the Habsburg-Burgundian manuscript complex, and the other five chansonniers that Margaret owned. It shows that the Brussels 228 miniature is unique in almost all its components and that the manuscript represents a synthesis of her two earlier surviving chansonniers. Positioning the manuscript within aspects of her biography normally overlooked by musicologists, it shows both that the song texts would have acquired new meaning at the time of Brussels 228’s compilation and that the manuscript was an opening salvo in Margaret’s visual campaign to regain her lost status.

In the first half of the Cinquecento, the illustrious patron of the arts Alvise Cornaro (c. 1482-1566) gathered together in his house in Padua an impressive circle of artists and literary figures who were among the leading lights of the city’s cultural life. Among these were the architect Giovanni Maria Falconetto and probably the young Palladio; the playwright Angelo Beolco known as Ruzante, with his company of actors; painters and sculptors such as Tiziano Minio; and men of letters including Pierio Valeriano, Bernardino Scardeone, Pietro Bembo, Sperone Speroni, and Giangiorgio Trissino. Not only did Cornaro establish a true open-air theatre in the courtyard of his house, against the backdrop of the famous loggia of Falconetto (1524), but in the mid-1530s he also erected an octagonal room, called the Odeo, as a setting for musical performances. Cornaro probably acquired his passion for music through Ruzante, the famous playwright and actor, and himself a musician, who lodged in Cornaro’s house. Ruzante’s comedies were highly regarded, particularly because his texts lent themselves to musical setting. Unfortunately no documents have as yet been discovered that can yield information as to what music was performed, but hypotheses can be formulated regarding the possible musical repertoire and its manner of execution.

TorunK 29-32 is attached to the only surviving copy of Paul Kugelmann’s print Etliche Teutsche Liedlein Geistlich und Weltlich… (Königsberg, s.d.). The manuscript, consisting of four partbooks, was probably written c. 1558-60. Its scribe and possible first owner may have been Paul Kugelmann, a musician at the court of Duke Albrecht in Königsberg. The last private owner of the partbooks was Heinrich Bötticher, a music-lover from Toruń (Thorn), at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The approximately ninety pieces in the manuscript include French chansons, German secular and sacred songs, and Latin motets. All the French and many of the German and Latin texts are inscribed only as incipits. Pieces with text incipits were probably intended for instrumental performance, a reflection of the fact that Kugelmann was a trumpet player and that many other instrumentalists—among them four ‘welsche cantores’—were also employed in the ducal Instrumentalkapelle at that time. These players were probably the main users of the manuscript. Some of the composers represented in TorunK 29-32 were connected to Königsberg, including Kugelmann himself, Adrianus Petit Coclico, and Franciscus de Rivulo. One composition was written by—or connected in a special way to—Duke Albrecht’s wife, Anna Maria. Some interesting links exist between Kugelmann’s partbooks and other sources from the Baltic region, particularly GdańPAN 4003.

Although Josquin is by far the best-represented foreign composer in Gonçalo de Baena’s Arte novamente inventada pera aprender a tanger (Lisbon, 1540), his music is undeniably under-represented both in the extant sixteenth-century Portuguese manuscripts containing Franco-Flemish polyphony and in volumes imported from the Netherlands such as Coimbra MM 2 and VienNB 1783. Josquin’s reputation made him, along with Ockeghem, a symbol in Portuguese humanistic culture, but up to at least the late 1530s his name seems to have been much better known than his music. Nevertheless, possible allusions to specific works by Josquin can be found in early- and mid-sixteenth-century Portuguese polyphony. By the 1520s, the general technical and stylistic characteristics of his and the following generation of northerners had begun to permeate locally produced polyphony. This eventually replaced the late-fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century panconsonant and homorythmic style associated with the Aragonese and the so-called Spanish court repertory.

This article examines the reception of Giovanni de Macque’s madrigals in the Netherlands and northern Europe. The pivotal role of the Antwerp-based publisher Phalèse in disseminating Macque’s madrigals outside Italy is demonstrated. The Antwerp public was drawn to the composer’s lighter and less sophisticated pieces—particularly his two volumes of Madrigaletti et napolitane (Venice, 1581-82), reissued in a single volume by Phalèse in 1600. This success was partly due to the pieces’ hybrid style, midway between madrigal and canzonetta, and partly due to their type of polyphonic writing, which facilitates adaptation for keyboard and lute. A concluding discussion focuses on imitations that northern-European composers made based on Macque’s pieces reissued by Phalèse.

That composers created settings of the mass ordinary for use within the mass ceremony is known to both performers who sing this music and scholars who study it. Yet the original function of this music as an essential part of a complex dramatic worship ritual seldom informs its performance or analysis today, and for good reason: this elaborate context, in which music combines with ritual gesture and action in sacred space adorned with religious images, is no longer part of our modern experience.

This essay explores a path-breaking multi-media project designed to rebuild this bridge to the past and enable performers, scholars, and students to re-imagine the context for which this music was created, allowing function to offer insights into questions of performance practice and analysis. The Sounds of Salvation: A Re-creation of the Mass for St. Donation by Jacob Obrecht is an extensive collaborative project by musicologist M. Jennifer Bloxam and Stratton Bull, the Artistic Director of Cappella Pratensis, who here describe their process and reflect on the challenges and benefits of the three components of the project: a commercial CD/DVD presenting a filmed re-creation of the ceremony, a website devoted to Obrecht and the mass for St. Donatian, and a concert and workshop tour based on the project.