al Writers upon Music." He was
a teacher and a Dominican monk at Paris. He was contemporaneous with
Franco of Cologne.
The fourth period of the old French school extended from 1230 to 1370.
The three great names were Phillippe de Vitry, Jean de Muris and
Guillaume de Machaut. They were regarded by their contemporaries as
exponents of the _ars nova_, in contradistinction to the Franconian
teaching, which was called _ars antiqua_. One of these differences was
the use of a number of signs permitting singers to introduce
chromatics in order to carry out the imitations without destroying the
tonality. Jean de Muris was born in Normandy. He was a doctor in the
Sorbonne, and from 1330 a deacon and a canon. He died in 1370. He was
a learned man of an active mind. He speaks of three kinds of
tempo--lively, moderate and slow. He says that Pierre sometimes set
against a breve four, six, seven and even nine semibreves--a license
followed to this day in the small notes of the _fioratura_. This kind
of license on the part of the deschanteurs had been carried to a great
length, the melodic figures resulting being called "_fleurettes_"
("little flowers"). John Cotton compared the singers improvising the
_fleurettes_ of this kind to revelers, who, having at length reached
home, cannot tell by what route they got there. Jean de Muris reproved
them in turn, saying: "You throw tones by chance, like boys throwing
stones, scarcely one in a hundred hitting the mark, and instead of
giving pleasure you cause anger and ill-humor." Machaut was born in
Rethel, a province in Champagne, in 1284. He was still living in 1369.
He was a poet and musician who occupied important positions in the
service of several princes, and wrote a mass for the coronation of
Charles V. Naumann thinks that Machaut was the natural predecessor of
the style of Lassus and Palestrina. He says that the use of double
counterpoint slackened from this time, whereby the music of the
Netherland composers--Dufay, Willaert and Palestrina--is simpler and
less artificial than that of Odington and Jean de Garland. Chords
were more regarded. This also had its source in the north.
III.
The Gallo-Belgic school occupies an intermediate place between the old
French and Netherlandish. Its time was from 1360 to 1460, and Tournay
the central point for most of the time. The first great name in this
school was Dufay, 1350-1432. The compositions remained the same as
formerly, triplum, qu
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