Claudin de sermisy biography of rory

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claudin de sermisy biography of rory

ISBN1-56159-174-2

  • Gustave Reese, Music in the Renaissance. Several of his songs are on the topic of an unhappy young woman stuck with an unattractive and unvirile old man, a sentiment not unique to his age.[1]

    Most of his chansons are for four voices, though he wrote some for three early in his career, before four-voice writing became the norm.

    Influence

    Sermisy was well known throughout western Europe, and copies of his music are found in Italy, Spain, Portugal, England and elsewhere. He was buried in the Sainte-Chapelle.

    Sermisy wrote both sacred music and secular music, and all of it is for voices. In 1532 he also participated in the similar meeting between the kings at Boulogne, for which he wrote a ceremonial motet.

    For a while in the early 1520s Sermisy was a canon at Notre-Dame-de-la-Rotonde in Rouen, but he left there in 1524 to take a similar position in Amiens.

    Claudin de Sermisy

    French composer

    Claudin de Sermisy (c.

    The texts Sermisy chose were usually from contemporary poets, such as Clément Marot (he set more verse by Marot than any other composer). In 1515 he went to Italy with Francis I, and in 1520 he was part of the musical festivities arranged by Francis I and Henry VIII of England at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, directed by Jean Mouton, where he was almost certainly a singer.[2] He may have been a composer of some of the music there as well.

    London, Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1980. Another stylistic trait seen in many of Sermisy's chansons is an initial rhythmic figure consisting of long-short-short (minim-crotchet-crotchet, or half-quarter-quarter), a figure which was to become the defining characteristic of the canzona later in the century. Typical topics were unrequited love, nature, and drinking.

    Typically Sermisy's chansons are chordal and syllabic, shunning the more ostentatious polyphony of composers from the Netherlands, striving for lightness and grace instead. In 1515 he went to Italy with Francis I, and in 1520 he was part of the musical festivities arranged by Francis I and Henry VIII of England at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, directed by Jean Mouton, where he was almost certainly a singer.

    Of his sacred music, 12 complete masses have survived, including a Requiem mass, as well as approximately 100 motets, some magnificats and a set of Lamentations. Unlike many of his contemporaries writing sacred music in France, there is no evidence he had any Huguenot sympathies; he seemed to remain a faithful Catholic all his life.

    For a while in the early 1520s Sermisy was a canon at Notre-Dame-de-la-Rotonde in Rouen, but he left there in 1524 to take a similar position in Amiens. He acquired a large house there, large enough to shelter refugees from the church in St Quentin when the Spanish sacked their city in 1559. In 1554 he also was given a prebend at Ste Catherine in Troyes.

    Since the prevailing style of polyphony among contemporary composers during his late career was dense, seamless, with pervasive imitation, as typified in the music of Mouton and Gombert, it is significant that he tended to avoid this style, preferring clearer textures and short phrases: a style more akin to the chansons he wrote earlier in his career.