Musique mesurée

The mesurée Musique (French " metric music ", also mesurée Musique à l' antique " music in ancient poetic meters " ) was a composition model of the vocal music of the late 16th century in France. Starting from the syllable quantity in weight languages ​​such as ancient Greek, the syllables of the French were placed according to their length in long and short note values ​​. They appeared in the homophonic and in a metrical order, following the example of the music of ancient Greece, as it was understood in the 16th century.

Although this method of composition initially found no widespread use, some of the most famous composers of their time have dealt with it. Your desire to revive the artistic ethos of antiquity in particular through the text declamation, had strong parallels to Italian contemporary trends, such as the Florentine Camerata, which wrote the opera as a new art form, and thus ushered in the Baroque music.

History

The by the method of Musique mesurée composed works were inspired by the verse mesures. Since the late 1560s - years, the poet of the Pléiade group began under the leadership of Jean -Antoine de Baif to empathize with the metric of the ancient Greek and Latin poetry in the French language. They used the Silbenquantisierung of the ancient languages ​​. However, this attempt was more theoretical in nature; Baif and his fellow poets wanted to improve in the Age of Wars of the people through the use of classicizing diction, because they promised a positive ethical impact on the listeners of her. With the approval of the French king Charles IX. they met secretly in 1570 to found the Académie de musique et de poésie. In addition, the Baif his friend composer Joachim Thibault de Courville and the poet Pierre de Ronsard involved.

Although the original Académie had already disbanded after a few years, some composers thought the idea of ​​Musique mesurée for so good that they used as their main compositional technique. The best known among them were Claude Le Jeune, Jacques Mauduit, Eustache du Caurroy, Nicolas de la Grotte and Guillaume Costeley.

Compositional style

Musique mesurée first appeared in French secular chansons. They were mostly five voices and a cappella, although vocal music to this already knew the instrumental accompaniment, and written in verse-chorus form. The Musique mesurée was then used for other musical genres on spiritual and psalm settings. The sentence was predominantly homophonic way.

The arrangement of long and short syllables that followed the verse of poetry, was irregular and resulted in a sound sensation that appear as irregular change of pace of modern music. Short melismas occurred in the vocal line, especially with Claude Le Jeune. Long and short syllables were reproduced with note values ​​in the fixed ratio of 2:1, such as neighborhoods for the long, eighth notes for the short syllables. In modern notation is irregular long cycles would result from the fact why the Musique mesurée here without bar lines is set or only with bar lines at the end of phrasing.

Although the first Musique mesurée only a small group of musicians and composers was known and practiced in a small sphere, she appeared on the French music of the next century. The popular since the 1580s - years secular Air de Cour used the metric technique with rhyming verse. Even in the late 17th century, the influence of Musique was mesurée in French recitative of operas and sacred works noticeable.