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| Composer : | Gombert, Nicolas (1495 - 1560) | ||
| Instrumentation : | Sextet | ||
| Style : | Renaissance | ||
| Arranger : Publisher : | MAGATAGAN, MICHAEL (1960 - ) | ||
| Date : | c. 1538 | ||
| Copyright : | Public Domain | ||
| Added by magataganm, 09 Jun 2020 Nicolas Gombert (c. 1495 – c. 1560) was a Franco-Flemish composer of the Renaissance. He was one of the most famous and influential composers between Josquin des Prez and Palestrina, and best represents the fully developed, complex polyphonic style of this period in music history. Details of his early life are sketchy, but he was probably born around 1495 in southern Flanders, probably between Lille and Saint-Omer, possibly in the town of La Gorgue. German writer and music theorist Hermann Finck wrote that Gombert studied with Josquin; this would have been during the renowned composer's retirement in Condé-sur-l'Escaut, sometime between 1515 and 1521. Adrian Willaert and Nicolas Gombert are generally recognized as the exemplars of the late Franco-Flemish school, before the center of Renaissance art-music moved to Italy. A Fleming, Willaert relocated to Italy and along with the originally Flemish composer Orlando di Lasso brought the Franco-Flemish style of simultaneously dense and lyrical counterpoint to Italy. Like Willaert, Gombert brought the polyphonic style to its highest state of perfection; if imitation is a common device in Josquin, it is integral in Gombert. Gombert's style is characterized by dense, inextricable polyphony. Extended homophonic passages are rare in his sacred works, and he is particularly fond of imitation at very close time intervals, a technically very difficult feat (although he only rarely wrote strict canon). He preferred the lower voice ranges instead of the four voices (SATB) which were the most common voicings for pieces at the time, such as five and six parts in mostly male registers. Gombert, unlike his predecessor and mentor, Josquin des Prez, used irregular numbers of voice entries and avoided precise divisions of phrases, resulting in a less-punctuated, more continuous sonic landscape. Syncopations and cross-accents are characteristic of his rhythmic idiom, giving ictus to his otherwise seamless, enduring lines. Harmonically, Gombert's compositions stressed the traditional modal framework as a baseline, but especially in dense textures of six or more voices, he wrote polymodal sections wherein a subset of voices would sing the lowered pitches of F or B♭ while another subset would sing the raised pitches of F♯ or B: a D major and D minor chord or a G major and a G minor chord might be simultaneously sounded. Melodic motion in one voice that, to retain melodic and harmonic coherence with the other voices, employed musica ficta, or an extended set of pitches from the basic modal framework, was very prominent in his musical stylings. The false relations, usually between an F and an F♯ or a B♭ and B, create a dissonance that Gombert employed for emotional effect while adhering to traditional rules of counterpoint. Exemplary among Gombert's formally perfect pieces that employ cross-relations are his six-voice motet on the death of Josquin, Musae Jovis, with its clashing semitones, and occasional root-position triads a tritone apart., and his six-voice chanson Tous les Regretz. Out of the ten masses that Gombert composed, nine survive complete. The chronology of the masses is not known, but an approximate order can be deduced from stylistic characteristics. Two musical characteristics, sequence and ostinato, that were rare in Gombert’s later works, are present in his earlier masses Quam pulchra es and Tempore paschali. The motet was Gombert's preferred form, and his compositions in this genre not only were the most influential part of his output, but they show the greatest diversity of compositional technique. His motets, alongside those of Adrian Willaert and Jacobus Clemens non Papa, stand out from the rest of the Flemish motet composers. Familiar characteristics of motets of the preceding generation, such as ostinato, canon, cantus firmus, and double texts, are unusual in Gombert's style, excepting where he used aspects of the previous generation's style as an homage, such as in his motet on the death of Josquin, Musae Jovis.] When considering texts for his motets, Gombert obtained his inspiration from Scripture – such as the Psalms – as opposed to the liturgy of the Roman Catholic church. He was less attentive to textual placement and clarity than to the overall expressive sonority. Gombert's eight settings of the Magnificat, which may have won him his pardon, are among his most famous works. Each is written in one of the church modes, and consists of a cycle of short motets, with the individual motets based on successive verses of the Magnificat text. Some of Gombert's works are for unusually large vocal ensembles, including 8, 10, and 12 voices. These works are not polychoral in the usual sense, or in the manner of the Venetian School in which the voices were spatially separated; rather, the voice sub-groupings change during the pieces. These large ensemble compositions include an eight-voice Credo, the 12-voice Agnus from the Missa Tempore paschali, and 10- and 12- voice settings of the Regina caeli. In comparison with the northern Italian cori spezzati style, Gombert’s multi-voice works were not antiphonal. Instead of dividing forces consistently, Gombert frequently changed the combinations of voice groups. These vocal pieces contained more direct repetition, sequence and ostinato than his other music. His secular compositions – mostly chansons – are less contrapuntally complex than his motets and masses, but nonetheless more so than the majority of contemporary secular pieces, especially the 'Parisian' chanson. During the middle of the sixteenth century, Gombert received credit for several of the Parisian chansons, but later studies have discovered that he was not the sole 'Nicolas' of those secular pieces but many were actually by Nicolas de La Grotte or Guillaume Nicolas. Authors of the texts used in many chansons, a genre in which Gombert excelled, were mostly anonymous. He turned to older verse, often of a folkish type, with typical subject matter including unhappy love, farewells, separations, infidelities and the like. Many of these chansons appeared in lute and vihuela arrangements, with their wide geographical distribution showing their immense popularity. His surviving works include 10 masses, about 140 motets, about 70 chansons, a canción (probably written when he was in Spain), a madrigal, and a handful of instrumental pieces. Source: Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Gombert). Although originally written for Voice (SSATTB), I created this interpretation of the "In illo tempore loquente Jesu ad turbas (“While Jesus was speaking to the crowd”) for Flute Choir (6 Flutes). | |||
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