Petrus de Domarto

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Petrus de Domarto (fl. c. 1445–1455) was a Franco-Flemish composer of the Renaissance. He was a contemporary and probable acquaintance of Ockeghem, and was the composer of at least one of the first unified mass cycles to be written in continental Europe.

Renaissance music

Renaissance music is vocal and instrumental music written and performed in Europe during the Renaissance era. Consensus among music historians has been to start the era around 1400, with the end of the medieval era, and to close it around 1600, with the beginning of the Baroque period, therefore commencing the musical Renaissance about a hundred years after the beginning of the Renaissance as it is understood in other disciplines. As in the other arts, the music of the period was significantly influenced by the developments which define the Early Modern period: the rise of humanistic thought; the recovery of the literary and artistic heritage of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome; increased innovation and discovery; the growth of commercial enterprises; the rise of a bourgeois class; and the Protestant Reformation. From this changing society emerged a common, unifying musical language, in particular, the polyphonic style of the Franco-Flemish school, whose greatest master was Josquin des Prez.

Johannes Ockeghem Franco-Flemish composer

Johannes Ockeghem was the most famous composer of the Franco-Flemish School in the last half of the 15th century, and is often considered the most influential composer between Guillaume Dufay and Josquin des Prez. In addition to being a renowned composer, he was also an honored singer, choirmaster, and teacher.

In Renaissance music, the cyclic mass was a setting of the Ordinary of the Roman Catholic Mass, in which each of the movements – Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei – shared a common musical theme, commonly a cantus firmus, thus making it a unified whole. The cyclic mass was the first multi-movement form in western music to be subject to a single organizing principle.

Contents

Life

Domarto's life is poorly documented. He was listed as a singer at the Church of Our Lady in Antwerp in 1449, five years after Ockeghem was known to be there, and there is evidence he was in Tournai in 1451. He had a high reputation (which makes the lack of documentation on his life curious), but even so was passed over for a post as master of the choirboys (in favor of Paulus Iuvenis). [1] No other documentation on his life has yet come to light.

Antwerp Municipality in Flemish Community, Belgium

Antwerp is a city in Belgium, and is the capital of Antwerp province in Flanders. With a population of 520,504, it is the most populous city proper in Belgium, and with 1,200,000 the second largest metropolitan region after Brussels.

Tournai Municipality in French Community, Belgium

Tournai, known in Dutch as Doornik and historically as Dornick in English, is a Walloon municipality of Belgium, 85 kilometres southwest of Brussels on the river Scheldt. In the province of Hainaut, Tournai is part of Eurometropolis Lille–Kortrijk–Tournai, which had 2,155,161 residents in 2008.

Music and reputation

Domarto's two mass settings, the Missa Spiritus almus and a Missa sine nomine, were famous at the time. The latter of the two may have been one of the earliest cyclic masses composed on the continent, most likely in the 1440s, and imitates some features of contemporary English composers such as Leonel Power. [1] The Missa Spiritus almus, likely dating from the 1450s, is a cantus-firmus mass, with the melody always in the tenor, but with a changing rhythmic profile as it changes mensuration throughout the piece. The procedure was evidently influential on the next generation of composers, for it was still being copied in the 1480s, and Busnois may have based one of his own masses on the same method (the Missa O crux lignum). The theorist and writer Johannes Tinctoris criticised it for exactly the features that inspired other composers.

Leonel Power was an English composer of the late Medieval and early Renaissance eras. Along with John Dunstaple, he was one of the major figures in English music in the early 15th century.

Mensural notation musical notation system used for European vocal polyphonic music

Mensural notation is the musical notation system used for European vocal polyphonic music from the later part of the 13th century until about 1600. The term "mensural" refers to the ability of this system to describe precisely measured rhythmic durations in terms of numerical proportions between note values. Its modern name is inspired by the terminology of medieval theorists, who used terms like musica mensurata or cantus mensurabilis to refer to the rhythmically defined polyphonic music of their age, as opposed to musica plana or musica choralis, i.e., Gregorian plainchant. Mensural notation was employed principally for compositions in the tradition of vocal polyphony, whereas plainchant retained its own, older system of neume notation throughout the period. Besides these, some purely instrumental music could be written in various forms of instrument-specific tablature notation.

Johannes Tinctoris Flemish composer

Jehan le Taintenier or Jean Teinturier, Latinised in Johannes Tinctoris was a Renaissance composer and music theorist from the Low Countries. He is known to have studied in Orléans, and to have been master of the choir there; he also may have been director of choirboys at Chartres. Because he was paid through the office of petites vicars at Cambrai Cathedral for four months in 1460, it has been speculated that he studied with Dufay, who spent the last part of his life there; certainly Tinctoris must at least have known the elder Burgundian there. Tinctoris went to Naples about 1472 and spent most of the rest of his life in Italy.

The two surviving secular compositions by Domarto are both rondeaux, formes fixes of the type popular with the Burgundian School.

The formes fixes are the three fourteenth- and fifteenth-centuries French poetic forms: the ballade, rondeau and virelai. Each was also a musical form, generally a chanson, and all consisted of a complex pattern of repetition of verses and a refrain with musical content in two main sections.

Burgundian School musical movement

The Burgundian School was a group of composers active in the 15th century in what is now northern and eastern France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, centered on the court of the Dukes of Burgundy.

Works

Masses

  1. Missa Spiritus almus (four voices)
  2. Missa sine nomine (three voices)

Secular

Rondeaux, each for three voices:

  1. Chelui qui est tant plain de duel
  2. Je vis tous jours en esperance

Notes

  1. 1 2 Wegman, Grove online

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References

Gustave Reese was an American musicologist and teacher. Reese is known mainly for his work on medieval and Renaissance music, particularly with his two publications Music in the Middle Ages (1940) and Music in the Renaissance (1954); these two books remain the standard reference works for these two eras, with complete and precise bibliographical material, allowing for almost every piece of music mentioned to be traced back to a primary source.

International Standard Book Number Unique numeric book identifier

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Choral Public Domain Library collaborative site for sharing musical scores

The Choral Public Domain Library (CPDL) is a sheet music archive which focuses on choral and vocal music in the public domain or otherwise freely available for printing and performing.