Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dsjbd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-04T20:21:16.071Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Aristocratic and Popular Piety in the Patronage of Music in the Fifteenth-century Netherlands*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Roger Bowers
Roger Bowers*
Affiliation:
Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

It has always been recognized that during the fifteenth century the vigorous and affluent commercial towns of the Low Countries served as centres of artistic excellence, especially in respect of painting and of manuscript production and illumination. That the region was no less fertile a generator of practitioners and composers of music—especially of music for the Church—has also long been appreciated. If for present purposes the Low Countries be defined—rather generously, perhaps—as the region coterminous with the compact area covered by the six dioceses of Thérouanne, Arras, Cambrai, Tournai, Liège, and Utrecht (see map), then it was an area if not packed with great cathedrals, yet certainly thickly populated with great collegiate churches, which sustained skilled choirs and offered a good living and high esteem to musicians who composed; the area also sustained a catholic and generous patron and consumer of artistic enterprise of all sorts, sacred and secular music included, namely, the House of the Valois Dukes of Burgundy and its Habsburg successors. From the end of the fourteenth century to the first half of the sixteenth, the region produced church musicians in such numbers that it became the principal area of recruitment for those princes of the south of Europe who were seeking the ablest men available to staff their household chapels. The Avignon popes of the 1380s and 1390s, the dukes of Rimini and Savoy, and the Roman popes of the mid-fifteenth century, and from the 1470s onwards the fiercely competitive dukes of Milan and Ferrara, the popes, cardinals, and bishops of the Curia, the king of Naples, the prominent families and churches of Florence and Venice, all alike recruited from the North; and though many of the ablest, like Ciconia, Dufay, Josquin, Isaac, and Tinctoris, were lured south to spend their lives in the sunshine, many more remained at home to maintain the Low Countries tradition.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 28: The Church and the Arts , 1992 , pp. 195 - 224
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1992

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

Music examples played during the course of the lecture were as follows: Gilles Binchois, Agnus Dei (à 3); Antoine Busnois, Mass L’Homme armé (Sanctus); Jacob Obrecht, Salve crux, arbor vite. All were performed on gramophone records by Pro Cannone Antiqua, directed by Bruno Turner.

References

1 In outline at least, it is possible to trace a continuous history of the music of the household chapel of the dukes of Burgundy and of the archdukes of the Netherlands (and their regents) between 1364 and 1506 through the publications following: Craig Wright, Music at the Court of Burgundy, 1364-1419: a Documentary History (Henryville, 1979); Jeanne Manx, Histoire de la musique et des musiciens de la cour de Bourgogne sous le règne de Philippe le Bon (1420-1467) (Strasbourg, 1939); van Doorslaer, G., ‘La chapelle musicale de Philippe le Beau’, Revue Belge d’Archéologie et d’Histoire de l’Art, 4 (1934), pp. 21–57 Google Scholar, 139-65. There is supplementary material for both the fifteenth and the early sixteenth centuries to be found in the following: Edmond vander Straeten, La Musique aux Pays-Bas avant le xix’ siècle, 8 vols (Brussels, 1867-88; repr. New York, 1069), 7, pp. 94-261, passim; Muziek aan (let Hofvan Margaretha van Oostrijk-Jaar-hoek van het Vlaamse Centrum voor Oude Muziek, 3 (1987); G. G. Thompson, ‘Music in the court records of Mary of Hungary’, Tijdschrift van de Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis [hereafter TVNM], 34 (1984), pp. 132-73.

2 Albert Smijers, ‘De Illustre Lieve Vrouwe Broederschap te ‘s-Hertogenbosch’, TVNM, 11 (1923-5), pp. 187-210; 12 (1926-8), pp. 40-62, 115-67; 13 (1929-32), pp. 46-100, 181-237; 14 (1932-5), pp. 48-Ios; 16 (1940-6), pp. 63-106, 216; 17 (1955), pp. 195-230; continuation by M. A. Vente, ibid., 19 (1960-3), pp. 32-43,163-72. Smijers, Albert, ‘Meerstemmige muziek van de Illustre Lieve Vrouwe Broederschap te’s-Hertogenbosch’, TVNM, 16(1940), pp. 1–30 Google Scholar, and ‘Music of the Illustrious Confraternity of Our Lady at ‘s-Hertogenbosch from 1330 to 1600’, in Arthur Mendel, ed., Papers read at the International Congress of Musicology, New York 1939 (New York, 1939), pp. 184-92.

3 Strohm, Reinhard, Music in Late Medieval Bruges (Oxford, 1985)Google Scholar.

4 Barbara Haggh, ‘Music, Liturgy and Ceremony in Brussels, 1350–1500’ (Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Ph.D. dissertation, 1988).

5 Kristine Forney, ‘Music, ritual and patronage at the church of Our Lady, Antwerp’, Early Music History [hereafter EMH], 7 (1987), pp. 1-57.

6 Wegman, Rob, ‘Music and musicians at the Guild of Our Lady in Bergen op Zoom, c.1470–1510’, EMH, 9 (1989), pp. 175–249 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 See Wright, Craig, ‘Dufay at Cambrai: discoveries and revisions’, Journal of lite American Musicological Society, 28 (1975), pp. 163–229 Google Scholar, esp. pp. 192-207, and ‘Performance practices at the cathedral of Cambrai, 1475-1550’, Musical Quarterly, 64 (1978), pp. 295-328; David Fallows, ‘Cambrai’, in Stanley Sadie, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 20 vols (London, 1980), 3, pp. 641–2.

8 Wright, Music at the Court of Burgundy, pp. 55-83, 138-58, 212-30.

9 Wright, Music at the Court of Burgundy, pp. 62-5.

10 Ibid., pp. 84-110, 165-78, 231-4.

11 Marix Histoirede la musique, pp. 24,61-2, 80,127-8, 160-2,164.

12 The chronology and manner of Philip’s restoration of the chapel cannot be determined pre cisely, since the necessary archival sources are missing for the period 1419–36. It appears (ibid., pp. 80-1) that as late as November and December 1428 the adult staff of the chapel was still of only ‘skeleton’ dimensions, numbering but five. However, in January 1430 the members of the chapel could be described as ‘en grand nombre, des plus excellents en art de musique que l’on peust et seust eslire et trouver’ (ibid., p. 28). Further, when one of the chapel staff, the chaplain Gilles Binchois, composed his four-part isorhythmic motet Nove cantum melodieíTanti gaude germinisi… Enixa meritis/Tenor for the baptism on 18 January 1431 of Antoine, the short-lived, first-born son of Philip and his third wife, Isabella of Portugal, he set a text which called on the members of the chapel by name to welcome and honour the new-born, and the names—including his own—totalled nineteen: David Fallows, ‘Binchois, Gilles’, in Sadie, New Grove Dictionary, 2, pp. 709,718; Marix, Jeanne, Les Musiciens de la Courde Bourgogne au quinzième siècle (1420-67) (Paris, 1937), pp. 212–17 Google Scholar. Meanwhile, the boys of the chapel are not encountered again after 1428 (Marix, Histoire de la musique, pp. 61-2, 164). Consequently it appears that it was during 1429 that Philip the Good transformed his former skeleton chapel of a few chaplains, clerks, and boys into a musically fully professional but wholly adult chapel. As first disclosed in detail by the surviving household accounts of 1436 (ibid., p. 242), the chapel then consisted of the chief and sixteen chaplains and two clerks—totalling nineteen, as previously in Binchois’ motet text of 1431.

13 These statistics have been distilled from the lists of personnel printed in Marix, Histoire de la musique, pp. 242-63.

14 David Fallows, ‘Specific information on the ensembles for composed polyphony, 1400-1474’, in Stanley Boorman, ed., Studies in the Performance of Late Mediaeval Music (Cambridge, 1983), pp. no–17, 145–59. The very high voice of the adult soverano falsetto, capable of sustaining a tessitura extending as a matter of course to around e a tenth above middle c, was apparently very rare; however, it appears that it was not until about the 1530s that the excess of demand over supply prompted the creation of its synthetic substitute, the soverano castrato.

15 van Doorslaer, ‘La chapelle musicale de Philippe le Beau’, pp. 33-57,139-65.

16 PRO, MSS E 101/407/4, fols 21r, 36r„ 46r (1421-2); E 101/410/3, fols 3or-v (1448-9: 37 gentlemen listed; however, one—William Boston—was away on secondment to the chapel of King Henry’s newly-founded King’s College, Cambridge, as Master of the Choristers: PRO E 403/771, m. 11; Cambridge, King’s College, Mundum Book I, fols 95r, 143r, 155r, and Commons Book I (1447-8), passim; PRO E ioi/411/15, fols 16v-17r (1465-6).

17 For a concentrated survey, see Vaughan, Richard, Philip the Good (London, 1970), pp. 150–60 Google Scholar.

18 Wright, Music at the Court of Burgundy, pp. 92-8; Manx, Histoire de la musique, pp. 61-2, 80, 127-8,160-2,164.

19 Jaap van Benthem, ‘A waif, a wedding, and a worshipped child: Josquin’s Ut Phebi radiis and the Order of the Golden Fleece’, TVNM, 37 (1987), pp. 64-81; Prizer, William, ‘Music and ceremonial in the Low Countries: Philip the Fair and the Order of the Golden Fleece’, EMH, 5(1985), pp. 129–33 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Ibid., pp. 128-9, esp. n. 4.3; see also Alejandro Enrique Planchan, ‘Guillaume Dufay’s bene fices and his relationship to the court of Burgundy’, EMH, 8 (1988), pp. 159-60.

21 Charles the Bold was reported to have composed music himself, and also to have been an enthusiastic singer—his lack of a tuneful voice notwithstanding: Richard Vaughan, Valois Burgundy (London, 1975), pp. 168-9, and Charles the Bold (London, 1973), pp. 161-2; Judith Cohen, The Six Anonymous l’Homme Armé Masses in Naples, Biblioteca Nazionale, MS VI E 40™ Musieological Studies and Documents, 21 (n.p., 1968), pp. 62-71; van Doorslaer, ‘La chapelle musicale de Philippe le Beau’, pp. 36–7.

22 Fallows, ‘Specific information on the ensembles for composed polyphony’, pp. 147–8.

23 Vaughan, Philip the Good, p. 128. A handsome manuscript copy of Jean Miélot’s French translation (‘Traité sur l’Oraison Dominicale’) of the Tractatus de Oratione Dominicali, illuminated by Jean Tavernier (or a pupil), (Brussels, Bibliothèque royale, MS 9092, fol. 9r) is illustrated with a well-known illumination depicting Philip in attendance upon Mass performed by his chapel; it is reproduced in Robert Wangermee, Flemish Music and Society in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (Brussels, 1968), p. 56, and Edmund Bowles, Musikleben im 15. Jahrhundert = Musikgeschichte in Bildem, 3 (Leipzig, 1977), p. 113 (plate 102).

24 van Doorslaer, ‘La chapelle musicale de Philippe le Beau’, p. 25.

25 Ibid., p. 45.

26 As well as the two quotations following, see n. 12 above.

27 Manx, Histoire de la Musique, p. 30, quoting the Chronicle of Jean le Fèvre, seigneur de Saint-Rémy.

28 Ibid., p. 36, quoting Olivier de la Marche.

29 Wright, ‘Dufay at Cambrai’, p. 185; Planchait, ‘Guillaume Du Fay’s benefices and his relationship to the court of Burgundy’, pp. 135–40.

30 Wright, Music ai the Court of Burgundy, pp. 165-6,168-71,174–7. Wright creates circumstantial cases for adding Baude Cordier and Cassin Hullin as composers of sacred music employed by the first two Valois dukes, and discusses several other members of the ducal chapels who composed courtly song.

31 David Fallows, ‘The contenance angloise: English influence on continental composers of the fifteenth century’, Renaissance Studia, i (1987), pp. 195-208. In offering this new translation of these well-known verses, I gladly acknowledge my debt to both the detail and the substance of Fallows’s article, and also to the previous translation by Ernest Sanders quoted there.

32 See Manx. Histoire de la Musique, pp. 223-41.

33 van Doorslaer.’La chapelle musicale de Philippe le Beau’, pp. 139–59. Except for Reijngoot, each of these composers is the subject of an article in Sadie, New Grove Dictionary.

34 Facsimile edition of Brussels MS 5557: Rob Wegman, A Choirbook of the Burgundian Court Chapel: Brussel, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, MS 5557 (Brussels, 1989); see also his ‘New data con cerning the origins and chronology of Brussels, Koninklijke Bibliotheek 5557’, TVNM, 36 (1986), pp. 5-25. Inventory of Brussels, Bibliothèque royale, MS 9126: Charles van den Borren, ‘Inventaire des manuscrits de musique polyphonique qui se trouvent en Belgique’, Acta Musicologica, 5 (1933), pp. 70-1; Charles Hamm, Herbert Reliman, and Jerry Call, eds, Census-Catalogue of Manuscript Sources of Polyphonic Music, 1400-1500, 5 vols (Rome, 1979-88), I, p. 94.

35 Laurence Feininger, ed., Antoine Busnois: Mass l’Homme armé-Monumenta Polyphoniae Liturgicae Sanctae Ecclesiae Romanae, ser. I, i, pt ii (Rome, 1948).

36 Vaughan, Richard, Philip the Bold (London, 1962), pp. 194, 197 Google Scholar; John the Fearless (London, 1966), pp. 233; Philip the Good, pp. 128-30; Citarles the Bold, pp. 161-2; Valois Burgundy, p. 185.

37 The fraternities mentioned below were pre-eminently associations of lay persons, and the nature of the enterprises and operations which they promoted manifested and responded to the preoccupations and priorities of lay society. Membership was, however, normally no less open to any member of the clergy, in his capaciry just as a member of the community, who wished to further and be associated with the objectives of the fraternity—and in this respect, these organizations are, perhaps, better considered as ‘popular’ rather than quintessentially ‘lay’.

38 The lordship of Bergen was not raised to the status of a Margraviate of the Empire until 1533.

39 Wegman, ‘Music and musicians at the Guild of Our Lady in Bergen op Zoom’, pp. 178-82. The college also maintained a master for its free Grammar School.

40 A reference in 1474–5 to Herrjan van Andehoven as ‘canon and singing-man’ (canonic ende singer) of Bergen appears to suggest that the adult department of the choir was, at least in part, staffed by the collation of the prebends upon men who were both prepared to reside, and also were able to serve no less as singing-men of the choir than as canons of the chapter: ibid., p. 187, n. 21.

41 Wegman, ‘Music and musicians at the Guild of Our Lady in Bergen op Zoom’, pp. 185,217.

42 Ibid., pp. 183–5, 219-20. The interpretation of this document offered here differs radically from that suggested by Wegman. He presents a scenario in which the gild employed a self-contained choir of its own, independent of that of the collegiate church, to whose members the modest payments made by the gild constituted their principal source of income. Wegman’s own calculations (see, for example, p. 197) are themselves the best evidence of the implausibility of this scenario—especially his observation that, if he is right, ‘even good singers or choirmasters in Brabant (particularly laymen) had to work very hard in order to earn more than unskilled hodmen in Antwerp.’ Rather, it seems very clear from this docu ment that the gild was contracting with the chapter to employ the existing singers of the choir of the collegiate church in work supplementary to their standing duties, for which an appropriate payment was made by the gild to each singer as merely a supplement to his prime stipend received from the college.

43 Nevertheless, the gild paid the choirmaster and six, rather than five, singing-men until 1494: ibid., p. 214. The additional singers who participated on only an occasional and casual basis appear certain to have been simply other members of St Gertrude’s choir.

44 Ibid., pp. 193-4.

45 Ibid., pp. 182-3,191.

46 From the 1490s the boys and the Sangmeester were generally paid by the gild for 422 services per year, which gives the figure used here for the standard number of services (the ‘Lof, of course, would not have been sung on Holy Saturday): ibid., pp. 191, 227–36. Prior to c.1491 there were apparently some additional services on offer, whereby conscientious singers could register up to 480 services per year.

47 Ibid., pp. 195-6.

48 Ibid., pp. 214-1 s, 239.

49 Wegman, ‘Music and musicians at the Guild of Our Lady in Bergen op Zoom’, pp. 231-3,

50 Ibid., pp. 216,245.xs

51 Ibid., pp. 198-212.

52 Sparks, Edgar, ‘Obrecht, Jacob’in Sadie, New Grove Dictionary, 13, pp. 482–3 Google Scholar.

53 This and the following paragraph have been drawn principally from Smijers, ‘Music of the Illustrious Confraternity of Our Lady at ‘s-Hertogenbosch’, pp. 184–92.

54 For a possible reference to boys of the gild choir at ‘s-Hertogenbosch, see Wegman, ‘Music and musicians at the Guild of Our Lady in Bergen op Zoom’, p. 245.

55 Forney, ‘Music, ritual and patronage at the church of Our Lady, Antwerp’, ‘p. 2.

56 Wegman,‘Music and musicians at the Guild of Our Lady at Bergen op Zoom’, p. 188.

57 See Kellman, Herbert, ‘Alamire, Pierre’, in Sadie, New Crove Dictionary, 1, pp. 192–3 Google Scholar.

58 For a summary inventory of the contents, see Hamm, Kellman, and Call, eds, Census Catalogue of Manuscript Sources of Polyphonic Music, 1400-1550, 1, pp. 268-71; Albeit Smijers, ‘Meerstemmige muziek van de Illustre Lieve Vrouwe Broederschap te ‘s-Hertogenbosch’, TVNM, 16 (1940), pp. 9–30 Google Scholar.

59 This figure is distilled from E. de Moreau, Histoire Je l’Eglise en Belgique, 4 vols and 2 ‘Tomes complémentaires’ (Brussels, 1946-8), Tome complémentaire 1, pp. 465-517. However, this total doubdess includes some number of minor or impoverished institutions which were in no position to endeavour to form a polyphonic choir.

60 See especially the constitution of the choral force at the cathedral church of Notre Dame in Paris: Wright, Craig, Music and Ceremony at Notre Dame Je Paris, 500-1500 (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 18–27 Google Scholar. It may be observed that, with the single exception of Beverley Minster, English choral organization displayed far greater rationality and simplicity—a legacy, no doubt, of the intrusion of Norman powers of rationalization, simplification, and organization in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries.

61 Strohm, Music in Late Medieval Bruges, pp. 12–13,25-6.

62 Forney, ‘Music, ritual and patronage at the church of Our Lady, Antwerp’, p. 6; in the last decade of the fifteenth century the number of adult singers began to be increased towards eighteen: ibid., p. 17.

63 Forney, ‘Music, ritual and patronage at the church of our Lady, Antwerp’, pp. 4-5,6,9—n, 52-4. For a plan of the church, showing the location and dedications of the several chapels, see ibid., p. 5.

64 Ibid., pp. 33-6.

65 Ibid., pp. 5,18-20.

66 Ibid., pp. 3-6,9,21-6. The Gild of St Anne had begun its existence as at least in some sense a trade gild, of the hosiers; its accounts have not survived, and it is not certain, though very likely, that the singers attended to raise this Mass, like the others, to polyphonic performance.

67 For a reference to the discovery in Antwerp of fragmentary manuscript sources of music of this period which may have originated at the church of Our Lady, see ibid., p. 38 and n. 96.

68 Ibid., pp. 32-44; Kooiman, Elly, ‘The biography of Jacob Barbireau (1455-91) reviewed’, TVNM, 38 (1988), pp. 36–58 Google Scholar.

69 Strohm, Musk in Late Medieval Bruges, pp. 12-13,25-6,43-5.

70 Ibid., pp. 28,36, 38.

71 Ibid., pp. 48-9. This endowment recalls that made in 1425 by Philip the Good to the collegiate church of St Pierre of Lille, likewise augmenting by four the number of its choristers: ibid., pp. 22,94.

72 See ibid., pp. 42-3,45.

73 Ibid., pp. 52-5.

74 Ibid., pp. 33,39, 85-6, 144.

75 Ibid., pp. 43,45.

76 Strohm, Music in Lale Medieval Bruges, pp. 47-8.

77 Ibid., p. 56.

78 Ibid., pp. 61-2,63-4.

79 Ibid., pp. 26-7,70-2.

80 Ibid., p. 15. Such a practice was probably widespread; Wegman mentions the endowment of St Gertrude’s church in Bergen in 1487 by a wijntavemier, Dierick de Clerck, for the regular singing of a Mass of the Name of Jesus: Wegman, ‘Music and Musicians at the Guild of Our Lady in Bergen op Zoom’, pp. 195-6.

81 Strohm, Music in Late Medieval Bruges, pp. 36-7.

82 Ibid., pp. 145-7.

83 Ibid., pp. 38-41,132, 144-8.

84 Strohm, Music in Late Medieval Bruges, p. 49.

85 Ibid., pp. 17-18, 145.

84 Ibid., p. 23; for further examples, see ibid., p. 27.

87 Ibid., pp. 46-7.

88 Ibid., pp. 23,117.

89 Ibid., pp. 29-31.

90 Forney, ‘Music, ritual and patronage at die church of Our Lady, Antwerp’, pp. 32-7.