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 Fin...(+)
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).
