Music at the Burgundian Court, 1430-1500

00:00 Dance dit le Bourguynon (Anonymous) 02:10 Puisque je voy, belle (Arnold de Lantins, fl. 1420-1432) 07:06 Hé! Compaignons (Guillaume Dufay, 1397-1474) 09:26 D'un autre amer mon cueur s'abesseroit? (Johannes Ockeghem, c1410-1497) 11:40 Tsat een meskin (Jacob Obrecht, 1458-1505) 13:43 N’araige jamais mieulx (Robert Morton, c1430-1479) 17:56 J’atendray tant qu'il vous playra (Dufay) 20:00 Veni Sancte Spiritus (sequence for Whitsunday; Dufay) 23:25 Hosanna from the Mass “Se la face ay pale" (Dufay) Music of Gilles Binchois, c1400-1460 24:50 Amours merchi 26:32 De plus en plus 29:13 Amoreux suy 32:52 Adieu, adieu, mon joieulx souvenir 34:47 Je loe Amours 37:22 Tristre plaisir 41:41 Filles à marier 43:06 Beata nobis gaudia (hymn for Whitsuntide) 46:04 Agnus Dei Pro Musica Antiqua (Brussels) - Safford Cape, director Renée Defraiteur, soprano / Christiane Plessis, contralto René Letroye & Franz Mertens, tenor / Max Bourdon, bass Silva Devos, recorders / Hertha Theunen-Seidl, lute Janine Rubinlicht, descant viol / Gaston Dôme & André Douvere, tenor viol Restitution and Scoring: Safford Cape The Burgundian supremacy and the flowering of the First Renaissance are contemporaneous events, and so it might be expected that a centre of power and prosperity such as the Duchy of Burgundy would be a source of intense musical activity as well. On the one hand, Europe was prosperous: Florence, Venice, Nuremberg, and Bruges were carrying on lucrative trade. On the other hand, new vistas were stimulating thought and action: enthusiasm for Greek and Latin antiquity was becoming general. Distant explorations were to lead to the discovery of America. Something new and renovating was in the air, but the effort towards spiritual development which had been at work for centuries was still dominant, and had not yet been overshadowed by the seductive attraction of material things, which attraction — and its corollary, a keen interest in physical and scientific phenomena — was to be one of the effects of the new Humanist movement. Thus this moment of history, covering some twenty-five years before and forty years after the middle of the fifteenth century, and mainly coinciding with the reign of Philip the Good, was the focus-point of tendencies which later diverged and even confronted each other: first, the spiritual idealism, the metaphysical approach to life in concrete practice — the fact that man really and in truth searched his supreme good and his last end in supra-terrestrial things — in a word, a line of conduct which coloured his artistic creations with a divine, or at least, a definitely idealistic, light; and, merging into one with this, the new (or newly recovered) sensitiveness to the seductive power of material beauty together with the desire to incarnate the more spiritual aspirations in a material form as magnificent and appealing as possible. The result was the First Renaissance — perhaps one might call it the Christian Renaissance — the making of which was in the hands of men such as Masaccio, Donatello, Fra Angelico, Memling, van der Weyden, John Dunstable, Guillaume Dufay and Gilles Binchois. The moment, anchored as it was in the two opposing worlds of spiritual and material expansion, was one of those in which human activity gives its full measure. The Burgundian School is said by contemporary 15th-century authorities to have received from John Dunstable, through Dufay and Binchois, that peculiar contemplative sweetness, so striking in their work. Arnold de Lantins, whose name connects him with eastern Belgium, is also a typical exponent of this new style. The men of the following generation — Johannes Ockeghem, Robert Morton, and their younger colleague Jacob Obrecht — were resolutely engaged in another conception, mysterious as for its first origins, that of the Flemish School, which constitutes a second aspect of the music heard et the Court of Burgundy. Whether Dufay did or did not influence this succeeding manner is a debatable question, but however that may be, it is characterized by a continuous melodic flow unbroken by the cadential punctuation so freely used by Dufay and Binchois; by high-reaching melodic sequences; and by something hazy and reserved on the psychic plane which is in sharp contrast with the clearcut frankness of the two former masters and their school. The contrast, in fact, is that between Germanic and Latin sensitivity. The musicians represented on this record were connected in some way with the Burgundian Court, excepting Arnold de Lantins, who seems to belong to the group of singers and composers native to the principality of Liége, and who very likely continued to work in Italy as followers of Johannes Ciconia. Arnold de Lantins was with certainty in that country in 1428. But his work is so intimately related to that of Dufay, and is of such exceptional quality, that the probability of his works having been performed at the Burgundian Court is very great.