Play (help·info)Prophetiae Sibyllarum ("Sibylline Prophecies" or "Sibylline Oracles") are a series of twelve motets by the Franco-Flemish composer Orlande de Lassus. The works are known for their extremely chromatic idiom.
Play (help·info)Prophetiae Sibyllarum ("Sibylline Prophecies" or "Sibylline Oracles") are a series of twelve motets by the Franco-Flemish composer Orlande de Lassus. The works are known for their extremely chromatic idiom.
This cycle of motets is said to have been given as a personal gift to Albrecht V. of Bavaria, Lassus' employer, after his arrival in Munich. By the time he had begun work in Germany, Lassus had already enjoyed great success in Italy as a composer for Costantino Castrioto, and was looking to make a new name for himself. The motets were first published in 1600, after Lassus' death in 1594, by his son Rudolph. There remains, however, a small amount of disagreement over the dates of the original manuscript. Boetticher suggests the date to be around 1550–52, during Lassus' time in Naples, while Alfred Einstein prefers a date between 1555 and 1560, by which time Lassus could have seen depictions of the sibyls in places like the Sistine Chapel in Rome, and in the Borgia Apartments of the Vatican. [1]
Crook (1998) claims that the introduction, "Carmina Chromatico", has become, "probably the most analyzed piece of Renaissance music by any composer in any genre," [2] since Lowinsky's 1961 discussion of the prelude's "triadic atonality". [3] This can be understood by studying the Prologue to the cycle. The texture remains triadic, typical of the polyphony of that time, but modulates so often that the listener quickly loses the original tonal center. Lowinsky's discussion has led to other quandaries on the topic of the tonal coherence of the prologue. William J. Mitchell, takes issue with Lowinsky's conclusion and suggests that "perhaps the erosion of any stable tonal center is less the fault of Lasso, who seems to have made a splendid effort, than of the analysis which is indeed atonal." [4] These debates are ultimately built on the question of theorists' license to analyze the piece through our modern lens of tonality and atonality.
The Prophetiae Sibyllarum text is made up of one three-line prologue and twelve six-line motets. All of the poems are in dactylic hexameter. The prophecies, each told by a different prophetess, tell of the coming of Christ. Given the Renaissance's fascination with mysticism and antiquity it is no surprise that Lassus would choose these prophecies as his text. [5] The extremely chromatic setting of this text points toward Lassus' interactions with Cipriano de Rore and Nicola Vicentino, both known for their experiments with chromaticism, during his time at St. John Lateran. Lowinsky also speculates that "rendering the Sibylline prophecies in chromatic style, the young genius probably implied that chromaticism was the music of the future." [6]
Prologue
I. Sibylla Persica
II. Sibylla Libyca
III. Sibylla Delphica
IV. Sibylla Cimmeria
V. Sibylla Samia
VI. Sibylla Cumana
VII. Sibylla Hellaspontica
VIII. Sibylla Phrygia
IX. Sibylla Europaea
X. Sibylla Tiburtina
XI. Sibylla Erythraea
XII. Sibylla Agrippa
Josquin Lebloitte dit des Prez was a composer of High Renaissance music, who is variously described as French or Franco-Flemish. Considered one of the greatest composers of the Renaissance, he was a central figure of the Franco-Flemish School and had a profound influence on the music of 16th-century Europe. Building on the work of his predecessors Guillaume Du Fay and Johannes Ockeghem, he developed a complex style of expressive—and often imitative—movement between independent voices (polyphony) which informs much of his work. He further emphasized the relationship between text and music, and departed from the early Renaissance tendency towards lengthy melismatic lines on a single syllable, preferring to use shorter, repeated motifs between voices. Josquin was a singer, and his compositions are mainly vocal. They include masses, motets and secular chansons.
Giovanni Gabrieli was an Italian composer and organist. He was one of the most influential musicians of his time, and represents the culmination of the style of the Venetian School, at the time of the shift from Renaissance to Baroque idioms.
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Orlande de Lassus was a composer of the late Renaissance. The chief representative of the mature polyphonic style in the Franco-Flemish school, Lassus stands with Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina and Tomás Luis de Victoria as the leading composers of the later Renaissance. Immensely prolific, his music varies considerably in style and genres, which gave him unprecedented popularity throughout Europe.
Tonality is the arrangement of pitches and/or chords of a musical work in a hierarchy of perceived relations, stabilities, attractions and directionality. In this hierarchy, the single pitch or triadic chord with the greatest stability is called the tonic. The root of the tonic chord forms the name given to the key, so in the key of C major, the note C is both the tonic of the scale and the root of the tonic chord. Simple folk music songs often start and end with the tonic note. The most common use of the term "is to designate the arrangement of musical phenomena around a referential tonic in European music from about 1600 to about 1910". Contemporary classical music from 1910 to the 2000s may practice or avoid any sort of tonality—but harmony in almost all Western popular music remains tonal. Harmony in jazz includes many but not all tonal characteristics of the European common practice period, usually known as "classical music".
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