Alexander Agricola

born in 1446 in Gent, Flandern, Belgium

died in 1506 in Valladolid, Castilla y León, Spain

Alexander Agricola

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Alexander Agricola (born Alexander Ackerman;[1] 1445 or 1446 15 August 1506) was a Franco-Flemish composer of the Renaissance. A prominent member of the Grande chapelle, the Habsburg musical establishment, he was a renowned composer in the years around 1500, and his music was widely distributed throughout Europe. He composed music in all of the important sacred and secular styles of the time.[2]

Life

As is common with composers of the period, very little is known of his early life. He was born in Ghent, as suggested by a recently discovered epitaph, written in 1538.[3] Most of his life he spent in posts in Italy, France and the Low Countries, though there are gaps where his activities are not known, and he seems to have left many of his posts without permission. He was a singer for Duke Sforza of Milan from 1471 to 1474, during the period when the Milanese chapel choir grew into one of the largest and most famous ensembles in Europe; Loyset Compère, Johannes Martini, Gaspar van Weerbeke, and several other composer-singers were also in Milan during those years.[4]

In 1474 Duke Sforza wrote a letter of recommendation for him to Lorenzo de' Medici, and Agricola accordingly went to Florence. In 1476 he is known to have been in Cambrai, in the Low Countries, where he probably was employed as a singer. For the long period from 1476 to 1491 nothing definite is known except that he spent part of the time in the French royal chapel, and he must have been building his reputation as a composer during this time, for he was much in demand in the 1490s, with France and Naples competing for his services. In 1500 he took a position with Philip the Handsome, who was Duke of Burgundy and King of Castile. He apparently accompanied the Duke on his travels through his empire; by this time he was one of the most esteemed composers in Europe. He was in Valladolid, Spain, in August 1506, where he died during an outbreak of the plague on August 15 of that year.

Musical style

Related schools and composers

Agricola is one of the few transitional figures between the Burgundian School and the style of the Josquin generation of Netherlanders who actually wrote music in both styles.

Agricola's style is related to that of Johannes Ockeghem, especially early in his career, and towards the end of his life he was writing using the pervasive imitation characteristic of Josquin des Prez. While few of his works can be dated precisely, he does use many of the non-imitative, complex, rhythmically diverse contrapuntal procedures more often associated with Ockeghem. Unlike Ockeghem, however, he was willing to employ repetition, sequence, and increasingly imitation in the manner of the other composers who were working around 1500 when the technique became widespread.

Genres

Agricola wrote masses, motets, motet-chansons, secular songs in the prevailing formes fixes such as (rondeaux and bergerettes, other chansons), and instrumental music. Much of his instrumental music was based on secular music by Gilles Binchois or Ockeghem. Many of these pieces had become quite popular in the late 15th century.

Compositional hallmarks

Above all the variants in his general musical style over his working life, Agricola himself wrote in a highly distinctive style, taking the mysteriously sinuous lines of Ockeghem as his point of departure. His music is often very busy and highly detailed, with repeated sequence, repetition of terse rhythmic and motivic units, and a desire to usurp the underlying pulse, sometimes seeming to border on the perverse, either by prolonging cadential figures to cadence on the "wrong" beat, or by shifting the metrical beat of some parts against others. As an example, the closing Agnus Dei of his unusually extended Missa 'In myne zin' features the cantus firmus stated in equal notes of eleven quavers' duration each in first statement, followed by a statement of five quavers' duration each, or in the second Salve Regina setting, offsetting part of the statement of the cantus firmus by a quaver for its entire duration, in both cases with the other voices proceeding in a more strict quadruple meter above.

Other "games" played in the music include posing puzzles of mode and musica ficta for the performers (e.g. the Kyrie of the Missa Le serviteur plays with the expectations of the very well known plainchant cantus firmus by setting up some knotty issues of the implied possibility of modal inflection with consistent extra flats.) The music is characteristically athletic in all voice parts, with the lower parts in particular featuring much that requires very fine singers, and not representing the normal simply harmonic function of the tenor-bass combinations used by most of his contemporaries. Often a highly elaborate set of quick motifs will spring unexpected from a previous slow-moving texture (e.g. the eruption of detailed duos beginning at Glorificamus te and climaxing at Adoramus te in the Gloria of the Missa In myne zin).

His music was very highly regarded in its day, the very distinctive style leading to one contemporary commentator referring to it as "crazy", and another as "sublime".

Other Agricolas

There are other composers named Agricola who are sometimes confused with Alexander:

  • Georg Ludwig Agricola (1643-1676; also an important writer)
  • Johannes Agricola (1560-1601)
  • Johann Friedrich Agricola (1720-1774; also a musicographer, organist and singing master)
  • Johann Paul Agricola (1638 or 1639-1697)
  • Martin Agricola (1486-1556; famous mainly as a theorist and teacher)
  • Wolfgang Christoph Agricola (c. 1600 c. 1659)

References

  • Gustave Reese, Music in the Renaissance. New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 1954. (ISBN 978-0-393-09530-2)
  • L. Macy Alexander Agricola, Grove Music Online. URL accessed 28 October 2010. (subscription required)
  • Edward R. Lerner, "Alexander Agricola." The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie. 20 vol. London, Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1980. (ISBN 978-1-56159-174-9)
  • Honey Meconi, Pierre de la Rue and Musical Life at the Habsburg-Burgundian Court. Oxford, Oxford University Press. 2003. ISBN 978-0-19-816554-5

Notes

  1. Visual Reference Guides, Classical Music, General Editor: John Burrows, Dorling Kindersley Limeted
  2. Wegman/Fitch, Grove online
  3. Rob C. Wegman, et al. "Agricola, Alexander." In Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/52210 (accessed May 22, 2011).
  4. Lerner, Grove

External links

"Alexander Agricola" in the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia.

  • Free scores by Alexander Agricola in the Werner Icking Music Archive
  • Free scores by Alexander Agricola in the Choral Public Domain Library (ChoralWiki)
  • Free access to high-resolution images of manuscripts containing works by this composer from Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music
  • Free scores by Alexander Agricola in the International Music Score Library Project

Recordings

  • Désir D'aymer. Love Lyrics Around 1500: From Flanders To Italy, Capilla Flamenca, 2007 (Eufoda 1369). Contains recordings of several secular songs by Alexander Agricola.
  • Missa In myne Zyn, Capilla Flamenca / Dirk Snellings, 2010 (Ricercar 306).
  • Cecus. Alexander Agricola and his contemporaries. Memorial, Colours & blindness, Graindelavoix / Bjorn Schmelzer, 2010 (Glossa GCDP32105). Contains recordings of songs and instrumental works by Agricola and contemporaries, and laments on the deaths of Agricola and Johannes Ockeghem.
This page was last modified 30.09.2012 18:32:25

This article uses material from the article Alexander Agricola from the free encyclopedia Wikipedia and it is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.