Nuper rosarum flores – Guillaume Dufay (1397 - 1474) скачать в хорошем качестве

Nuper rosarum flores – Guillaume Dufay (1397 - 1474)

Guillaume Dufay's motet Nuper rosarum flores (Recently Roses Blossomed) was written for the consecration of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence at its completion on the Feast of the Annunciation on March 25, 1436. The cathedral had been under construction since 1296, but the building remained unfinished until the architect Filippo Brunelleschi finally figured out how to construct the enormous dome. Brunelleschi’s construction was the largest dome in the world until the late nineteenth century, and it remains the world’s largest brick and mortar dome. Pope Eugenius IV, for whose coronation Dufay had previously written another motet, presided over the consecration. A list of the singers at the first performance of Nuper rosarum is known, and at the head of this list is Guillaume Dufay himself. Although this piece was composed for and performed in a cathedral in Italy, Dufay was French. He was the most famous of a group of composers working in what is now northern and eastern France, Belgium and the Netherlands, and often referred to as the Burgundian School because of the association of many of the composers with the Dukes of Burgundy. The burgeoning wealth of the Burgundian nobility resulted in the area becoming Europe’s most influential cultural center, attracting artists like Jan Van Eyck as well as the best musicians. The music of this period, the early Renaissance, may sound strange to the ear of the modern listener, as it maintained some of its medieval characteristics while gradually evolving into the polyphonic style of the later Renaissance and the music of Netherlands School composers such as Johannes Ockeghem and Josquin Des Prez. Nuper rosarum is one of the last of Dufay’s thirteen so- called isorhythmic motets, but according to the editor of the score used in this performance, it is not, strictly speaking, an isorhythmic motet at all. This bit of music history trivia is actually important because it shows that Dufay was in the process of moving away from the old styles and adopting and inventing new ones. During the previous century musicians had developed the isorhythmic method of composition, a very structured, complex style using a repeated rhythmic pattern (talea). The talea may appear in one or more voices and is usually independent of any melodic pattern (color), which may be of a much different length. At first only the tenor voice was isorhythmic, but during the early fifteenth century the technique became applied to all voices. Many of Dufay’s motets were fully isorhythmic, but by the time he composed Nuper rosarum he had broken free of the strict isorhythmic style. The talea in the tenor line is sung with four different rhythmic durations, and the two upper voices are not isometric but are freely composed, although repeated melodic patterns appear in the four-voice sections. The overall impression of the motet is of a set of four increasingly complex and florid variations, each beginning with a duet for the upper voices that leads into a four-voice section with the lower voices carrying the cantus firmus, or chant melody. If you can’t detect the actual isorhythmic pattern, you will definitely hear its effect as the piece gathers more momentum in each section. The cantus firmus in the lower voices is Terribilis est locus iste ("Awe-inspiring is this place"), the antiphon for the consecration of a church, while the text assigned to the upper two voice parts is a Latin poem written by Dufay for the event. The Florentine diplomat and humanist scholar Giannozzo Manetti (1396–1459) was in attendance at the consecration, and described the music of the liturgy as follows: “Such harmonies exalted even to heaven, that truly it was to the listener like angelic and divine melodies; the voices filled the listeners' ears with such a wonderful sweetness that they seemed to become stupefied, almost as men were fabled to become upon hearing the singing of the sirens. I could believe without impiety that even in Heaven, yearly on this most solemn day that marks the beginning of human salvation, the angels sing thus.... I was so possessed by ecstasy that I seemed to enjoy the life of the Blessed here on earth." The Gregorian Singers performed Nuper Rosarum and other music of Burgundian School composers in two concerts on October 13 and 15, 2017, titled A Taste of Burgundy: Franco-Flemish Music and Art of the Fifteenth Century. The concerts featured a lecture and discussion of the visual art and artists of the period by Jim Robinson of the Art Academy in St. Paul, and were funded in part by a grant from the Minnesota Regional Arts Council.