French Sacred Music of the 14th Century, Vol. I

Paul Guttry (Performer), French Anonymous (Composer), Graneti (Composer), Defronciaco (Composer), Loys (Composer), Baralipton (Composer), Baude Cordier (Composer), Jean Tapissier (Composer), Egidius De Thenis (Composer), John Delorey (Performer), Bradford Findell (Performer), Arthur Rawding (Performer) | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Performer: Paul Guttry, John Delorey, Bradford Findell, Arthur Rawding
• Composer: French Anonymous, Graneti, Defronciaco, Loys, Baralipton, et al.
• Audio CD (November 29, 1994)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Lyrichord Discs Inc.
• ASIN: B0000022B6
• In-Print Editions: MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #660,129 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Customer Reviews

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The precursors to Machaut's mass, July 22, 2011

By 

Michael Schell (www.schellsburg.com) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: French Sacred Music of the 14th Century, Vol. I (Audio CD)

This is a fun and quite serviceable collection of mass movements from the Ivrea and Apt manuscripts, which document the polyphonic liturgical music composed for the court of the Avignon popes during the 14th century. These mass movements are significant in that they're, with some crude exceptions, the first written polyphonic settings of the ORDINARY of the mass. The sophisticated, game-changing polyphony of St. Martial and Notre Dame only set the PROPER of the mass (sections such as the Intriot, Gradual and so forth, whose text varies from day to day). Thus these are the earliest surviving Glorias, Credos, etc., to be written in a sophisticated learned style.

It was this music, and its relatives compiled outside Avignon in the form of the Tournai Mass, Toulouse Mass, Barcelona Mass and so forth, that became Machaut's models for his great Messe de Nostre Dame, generally regarded as the masterpiece of sacred medieval polyphony.

There are extensive liner notes, with the manuscript sources clearly indicated, which is very helpful when you don't have composer names, and the pieces don't have names any more descriptive than "Kyrie", "Gloria", etc. Several of the examples cited by Taruskin in Chapter 9 of his Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century are recorded here. I'm glad to have this little-known but historically important music available for us lovers of medieval music.