Giaches de Wert. Letters and Documents
View publication
Book Series
Epitome musical
Johannes Regis
Sean Gallagher
- Pages: 249 p.
- Size:170 x 244 mm
- Illustrations:1 b/w
- Language(s):English
- Publication Year:2011
- € 80,00 EXCL. VAT RETAIL PRICE
- ISBN: 978-2-503-53364-3
- Hardback
- Available
Review(s)
"(...) one should credit Gallagher with having written a book that adds not only to our knowledge of an important figure, but treats the music of Regis's time with the musical acuity and sensitivity that it assuredly deserves." (F. Fitch, in: Early Music, Vol. 40, No. 1, February 2012, p. 119-120)
Summary
The abundance of new information that has emerged since the mid
1980s concerning Ockeghem, Busnoys, Binchois, Du Fay and others has
in many ways reshaped the landscape of mid fifteenth-century music.
Meanwhile there have been major upheavals in our understanding of
the works and careers of Josquin, Obrecht and other composers of
the generation active during the last decades of the century.
Regis’s music and biography spans these two periods and two
groups of composers in intriguing ways. On the one hand he is the
only one among his contemporaries for whom extended personal
contact with both Binchois and Du Fay, the two leading figures of
the first half of the century, can be proposed with confidence.
While on the other hand, Regis is the only composer of his
generation to have several of his Latin-texted works published in
Petrucci’s prints of the early sixteenth century. Given this
unusual profile, it now seems especially important to gain a
clearer sense of Regis’s career and to situate his works
within the new historical picture that has begun to form of musical
developments in the second half of the fifteenth century. In
bringing together and adding to what is known of Regis’s
biography Chapter 1 focuses on his connections to three
institutions: the collegiate church of Saint-Vincent in
Soignies, Cambrai Cathedral, and the Burgundian court. Chapters 2
and 3 look closely at a group of works, including his two surviving
mass settings, most of which employ novel combinative techniques of
one sort or another. A missa sus lome arme by Regis copied at
Cambrai in 1462 is the earliest reference to any work based on the
famous L’homme armé melody. The material presented
here allows us to establish for the first time the specific
historical context in which a L‘homme armé mass was
composed. The final chapter is devoted to Regis’s tenor
motets, works that have by now received a good deal of scholarly
attention. In focusing on aspects of these motets that have gone
unnoticed (such as Regis’s use of four distinct ranges) or
that in my view merit more detailed study, my aim has been to
highlight the distinctive nature of each of the pieces. As examples
of a particular motet-type they have an unquestionable importance
in the historical development of the genre. But they are also among
the grandest musical gestures of the fifteenth century, each
inflected in its own way, as The Clerks so splendidly reveal in the
recordings that accompany the volume.