The Franco-Flemish Masters

Dufay: Motets cover

Dufay: Motets

Blue Heron, Scott Metcalfe
Adriano 1 cover

Adriano 1

Dionysos Now!
Obrecht: Missa Caput; Salve Regina cover

Obrecht: Missa Caput; Salve Regina

Oxford Camerata, Jeremy Summerly
Gombert: Chansons and Motets cover

Gombert: Chansons and Motets

Noel Bisson, Peter Urquhart, Woodman Consort of Viols, Capella Alamire
Jean Mouton: Missa Dictes moy toutes voz pensées cover

Jean Mouton: Missa Dictes moy toutes voz pensées

Peter Phillips, The Tallis Scholars
The Ockeghem Collection cover

The Ockeghem Collection

Edward Wickham, The Clerks' Group

From the early 15th to the late 16th centuries, there was a flowering of musical innovation and productivity in a geographical area that included northern France, Belgium, and the southern Netherlands. Over the course of a roughly 200-year period, choral music in that region burst out of the constrictions of the ars nova style that had dominated both religious and secular composition throughout the 14th century and emerged as the first full expression of polyphony – writing for multiple voices, each equal in importance to the others. The musical innovations emerging from this region would exert a huge influence throughout Europe and contribute significantly to the shape of sacred composition up through the baroque era. As composers had to rely on chapel and court appointments to support them, Mass settings and motets were the most important musical products of this period – funeral and festal Masses were often written in honor of the composers’ patrons. But the composers of this school often wrote secular songs and instrumental music as well, some examples of which continue to be recorded and performed alongside their sacred music today. 

The earliest composers generally identified as part of the Franco-Flemish School are those who flourished around the ancient court of Burgundy, including Gilles Binchois and Guillaume Dufay. In the work of these composers you can still hear strong hints of the open textures, extended melismas, and vinegary harmonies of the ars nova style. With the later work of Johannes Ockheghem and Antoine Busnois, we see an emergence from that influence, as vocal parts are written with richer, closer, and denser harmonies and textures, while also becoming more interactive and less independent. In the late 15th century came composers like Jean Mouton and Pierre de la Rue, who introduced subtle innovations of style including a greater emphasis on canonic writing and the introduction of the parody Mass – a Mass setting that would use a previously-written melody (often of a popular song, such as “L’homme armé” or “Fortuna desperata”) as the structural basis for the composition.

In the 15th and 16th centuries, the influence of the Franco-Flemish composers spread throughout Europe. The music of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, in Italy, and of the toweringly influential Spanish composer Tomás Luis de Victoria draws deeply on the Franco-Flemish style, and then develops it further, looking forward to the later innovations of Claudio Monteverdi and Giovanni Gabrieli, which in turn would usher in the baroque period’s rococo elaborations of Renaissance style.

Rick Anderson

Dufay: Motets

Blue Heron, Scott Metcalfe
Dufay: Motets cover

The Boston-based Blue Heron choir is one of America’s leading interpreters of Renaissance choral music, and this collection of works by the Franco-Flemish composer Guillaume Dufay — the ensemble’s debut recording — is a great introduction to their sound. It focuses on sacred and liturgical music, but also includes a handful of secular songs and a few pieces from Dufay’s contemporaries John Dunstable, Hugo de Lantins, and Johannes Ockeghem.

Adriano 1

Dionysos Now!
Adriano 1 cover

The rather oddly-named Dionysos Now! ensemble has embarked on a multi-album project dedicated to the music of Adrian Willaert, one of the less famous composers of the Franco-Flemish School that flourished in northern France and Belgium in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. On the first installment, they perform Willaert’s Missa Mittit ad Virginem, along with the motet on which it’s based and several other sacred motets by the same composer. The ensemble’s sound is beautiful and they are recorded in a richly reverberant acoustic.

Brumel and Prez: Missa Berzerette Savoyenne

Antoine Brumel, Chanticleer
Brumel and Prez: Missa Berzerette Savoyenne cover

Chanticleer, America’s premier all-male choral ensemble, has created an absolutely exquisite album with this recording of a parody Mass by the Franco-Flemish composer Antoine Brumel. For his melodic source material, Brumel chose a secular song by Josquin Desprez: “Berzerette savoyenne.” From that tune he builds a complex edifice of devotional music that is performed with luminous tone and hushed wonder by Chanticleer, resulting in one of their most gorgeous releases.

Josquin: Missa Mater Patris; Bauldeweyn: Missa Da pacem

Peter Phillips, The Tallis Scholars
Josquin: Missa Mater Patris; Bauldeweyn: Missa Da pacem cover

Perhaps the foremost current exponents of what has come to be called the Oxbridge Sound are the Tallis Scholars, founded in 1973 and still led by Peter Phillips. On this recording, the group presents Mass settings by three composers of the Franco-Flemish School, all of them active in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, but only one of them (Josquin Desprez) still widely known today. Noel Bauldeweyn is almost forgotten, but his Missa Da pacem is exquisite, as is Antoine Brumel’s Missa Mater patris. Josquin’s Mass on the same song rounds out an outstanding program.

Obrecht: Missa Caput; Salve Regina

Oxford Camerata, Jeremy Summerly
Obrecht: Missa Caput; Salve Regina cover

Though not widely remembered today outside of specialist circles, Jacob Obrecht was one of the most famous and important composers of sacred music in 15th-century Europe, and the recent resurgence in interest in his music (thanks to the early music movement) has brought some exquisite music back to light. This recording by the Oxford Camerata brings Obrecht’s Missa Caput together with two Salve Regina settings and the motet “Venit ad Petrum,” all sung in a beautifully restrained, straightforward style.

Gombert: Chansons and Motets

Noel Bisson, Peter Urquhart, Woodman Consort of Viols, Capella Alamire
Gombert: Chansons and Motets cover

As the popularity of Renaissance choral music has grown in recent decades, one of the most common ways of presenting a composer’s works has been to create programs that put sacred songs alongside secular ones. On this recording, the excellent Capella Alamire ensemble presents both sacred motets and love songs by Nicolas Gombert, a composer of the Franco-Flemish School who flourished in what is now northern France in the early 16th century.

Jean Mouton: Missa Dictes moy toutes voz pensées

Peter Phillips, The Tallis Scholars
Jean Mouton: Missa Dictes moy toutes voz pensées cover

During the Renaissance period, it was very common for composers to write Mass settings that used popular songs as melodic sources; the cactus firmus would be the popular melody, and a whole large-scale choral composition would elaborate upon it. For this Mass, the Franco-Flemish composer Jean Richafort used the melody of a song called “Dictes moy toutes voz pensées” (archaic French for “tell me all your thoughts”) to create a lush and somber masterpiece of religious music, sung beautifully here by the Tallis Scholars.

The Ockeghem Collection

Edward Wickham, The Clerks' Group
The Ockeghem Collection cover

If you can’t get enough of the sacred music of Johannes Ockeghem, then this five-disc box is exactly what you need. It contains no fewer than thirteen of the Franco-Flemish master’s Mass settings, several of them “parody” Masses written on the basis of such popular songs of the era as “L’homme armé” and “Fors seulement.” The Clerks Group, led by Edward Wickham, is an outstanding ensemble known for the practice of singing from facsimile editions of original Renaissance manuscripts.

La Rue: Masses

Beauty Farm
La Rue: Masses cover

Between the early 15th and the early 17th centuries, something happened in the Franco-Flemish region of Europe (basically, the area between what are today northern France and northern Belgium). Over those 200 years, five generations of composers arose who created a new and distinct style of choral music, which has come to be called the Franco-Flemish School. Pierre de la Rue was a member of the third generation of these composers, and today his life and early career remain shrouded in mystery – it’s not at all clear where he was born or educated. We know that he was developing as a composer in the last decade or two of the 1400s and came to musical maturity around the turn of the 16th century, when two of the Masses on this recording (Missa Almana and Missa Puer natus est) were first published, though it seems likely that Missa Almana was written prior to his appointment to the Burgundian Habsburg court sometime between 1489 and 1492. The other two compositions presented here, Missa de Sancto Antonio and Missa Tous les regretz, are both later works; the latter is one of his most popular and frequently performed, and is a parody Mass based on a popular melody later also used by his younger contemporary Nicolas Gombert.

 

What about these performances? Beauty Farm is a small, all-male vocal ensemble that focuses its work almost exclusively on the Franco-Flemish masters, and includes members of such illustrious larger ensembles as Graindelavoix, Collegium Vokale Ghent, and the Huelgas Ensemble. Even those who generally prefer the sound of larger or mixed-voice choral groups are strongly urged to give Beauty Farm’s recordings a try; this one exemplifies the ensemble’s unusual ability to conjure a rich, colorful sound from its small forces, and the dark timbre of the voices is a particularly good match for the somber and introspective mood of De la Rue’s music – a flavor that may be owed to the famously melancholy mood of his patroness’s court. This is utterly gorgeous music, and both the performances and the recording quality are quietly ravishing.

Richafort: Requiem [in memoriam Josquin Desprez]

Huelgas Ensemble, Paul van Nevel
Richafort: Requiem [in memoriam Josquin Desprez] cover

Jean Richafort may not be the most famous of the Franco-Flemish School composers who flourished in 15th and 16th century France and Belgium, nor was he terribly prolific. But his surviving music is some of the most sumptuously lovely of that period, and on this recording the funeral Mass he wrote in tribute to his teacher, the much more famous Josquin Desprez, is rendered beautifully by the Helgas-Ensemble under the direction of Paul van Nevel.