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Poor, abandoned, old composer

Like many other composers of the time, his life ended in financial difficulties. His compositions no longer held the high esteem they once did in Venice. He went “out of fashion”. Changing musical tastes quickly made his creations outmoded. Trying to make his ends meet Vivaldi had to sell off a lot of his manuscripts, practically for pennies. Then he had to sell off more manuscripts to pay for his move to Vienna. But it did not really work out for him there too. Poor and abandoned, the old composer died. He was buried in a simple grave in Vienna, forgotten for many hundred of years,  till they re-discovered him in twentieth century.

Master of violin

That’s true. Vivaldi was ordained as a priest at 25, and soon nicknamed “The Red Priest”, possibly because of his red hair. He became master of violin at an orphanage called the Devout Hospital of Mercy in Venice. There were only four such institutions in Venice. Their purpose was to give shelter and education to children who were abandoned, orphaned, or whose families could not support them. They were financed by the Republic of Venice. The boys learned a trade and had to leave the orphanage at age 15. The girls received musical education and the most talented stayed and became members of the orphanage’s renowned orchestra and choir. For those kids, Vivaldi wrote most of his concertos, cantatas, and sacred music.

His creation of “The Four Seasons” became a revolution in musical conception. Through music Vivaldi showed us flowing creeks, singing birds, barking dogs, buzzing mosquitoes, crying shepherds, storms, silent nights, hunting parties, frozen landscapes, children ice-skating, and burning fires. Each concerto was associated with a Vivaldi’s sonnet, describing the scenes depicted in the music.

My favorite composer

If somebody would ask me to choose my favorite composer, first name that would pop up in my head would be “Antonio Vivaldi”. If I think of appropriate words for Vivaldi, there are no others but “pure genius”. Since the beginning of my career in local web analytics company, I did not stop listening to Vivaldi’s masterpieces for a moment. And each time I find something new, deep and profound in his music. I studied the life of a great composer in details and found  more about Vivaldi, that somehow was left behind in the most history books that I read.

They say that success is shorter than life. This expression can be used to describe the life of Antonio Vivaldi. He had known windfall of luck, kings and other royalty were his patrons, but he ended his life as a pauper.

It goes without saying that universally everybody knows about his masterpiece “The Four Seasons” - a series of four violin concertos. It is his best known work and a highly popular Baroque music piece. Vivaldi was a not only a baroque music composer, and a famous virtuoso violinist, but also a Venetian priest.

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Light elegance of Compere music

In the 1470s Compere worked as a singer in Milan at the chapel of Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza. The chapel choir in the early 1470s grew into one of the largest and most famous singing ensembles in Europe. After the murder of the duke in 1476, Compere appears to lose his job in the chapel, and he may have returned to France at this time. During the next ten years he began to work at the French court, and he accompanied Charles VIII on his invasion of Italy in 1494. We find his traces in Rome in 1495 during the occupation of the city by Charles and his army. Next he had a series of church positions. By 1498 Compere was at Cambrai, and from 1500 to around 1504 he was at Douai; his final appointment was at a church in St Quentin. Throughout this time he seems to have been in part-time service to the French court, as evidenced by his many compositions for official and ceremonial occasions. Funeral home directory people stated that he died at St Quentin in August 16, 1518.

Unlike his contemporaries, Compere seems to have written few masses. By temperament he seems to have been a miniaturist, and his most popular and numerous works were in the shorter forms of the day—primarily chansons and motets. Two stylistic trends are evident in his music: the style of the Burgundian School, and the lighter style of the Italian composers current at the time. Compere wrote several works in a unique form, sometimes called a free motet, which combines some of the light elegance of the Italian popular song of the time with the technique of the Netherlanders. His choice of secular texts tended towards the irreverent and suggestive.

French composer of the Renaissance

Loyset Compere was a French composer of the Renaissance. He was one of the most significant composers of motets and chansons of that era, and one of the first musicians to bring the light Italian Renaissance style to France. Compere had a gift for melody, and many of his chansons became popular. Later composers even used several of them for masses. His chansons are his most characteristic compositions, and many scholars of Renaissance music consider them to be his best work.

Many of Compere's compositions were printed and disseminated widely. Their availability contributed to their popularity. Our company's chief Web Analyst told me that Compere was one of the first composers to benefit from the new technology of printing, which had a profound impact on the spread of the Franco-Flemish musical style throughout Europe.

He was probably born around 1445. His exact place of birth is not known, but documents of the time assign him to a family from the province of Artois in France, and suggest he may have been born in Hainaut. Some sources indicate that he described himself as coming from Arras, also in Artois. One can't help to notice, that the area around the current French-Belgian border produced an astonishing number of excellent composers in the 15th and 16th centuries, whose fame spread throughout Europe. Often they are known as the Franco-Flemish, or as the Dutch School.

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The most famous composer of Netherlandish School

Johannes Ockeghem was one of the most famous composers in Europe in the latter half of the 15th century. Very few of his works have survived. Yet we know, that Ockeghem was famous throughout Europe for his expressive music and his technical mastery. Being a renowned bass singer himself, his use of wide-ranging and rhythmically active bass lines sets him apart from many of the other composers in the Netherlandish Schools.

Recent research has shown that Ockeghem was born in the town of Saint-Ghislain. The birthdate of Ockeghem is controversial, and dates as early as 1410, and as late as 1430 have been proposed. The comment by the poet Guillaume Cretin, in the lament he wrote on Ockeghem's death in 1497, "it was a great shame that a composer of his talents should die before 100 years old", is also often taken as evidence for the earlier date.

Details of his early life are lacking. Like many composers in this period, he started his musical career as chorister, and the first record of his musical activity comes from the cathedral of Notre Dame in Antwerp, where he was employed in 1443 and 1444. Between 1446 and 1448 he served Charles, Duke of Bourbon, in Moulins, France. Around 1452 he moved to Paris where he served as maestro di cappella to the French court, as well as treasurer to the St. Martin cathedral in Tours. In addition to serving at the French court for kings Charles VII and Louis XI, he held posts at Notre Dame Cathedral and St. Benoit. He is known to have traveled to Spain in 1470, as part of a diplomatic mission, which was an attempt to arrange a marriage between Isabella of Castile and Charles, Duke of Guyenne, the brother of king Louis XI. After the death of Louis XI in 1483, not much is known for certain about Ockeghem's whereabouts, though it is known that he went to Bruges and Tours, and he probably died in the latter town in February 6, 1497, since he left a will there.

Ockeghem probably studied with Gilles Binchois, and at the very least was closely associated with him at the Burgundian court. Since Antoine Busnois wrote a motet in honor of Ockeghem sometime before 1467, and writers of the time often link Dufay, Busnois and Ockeghem. Although Ockeghem's musical style differs considerably from that of the older generation, it is probable that he acquired his basic technique from them, and as such can be seen as a direct link from the Burgundian style to the next generation of Netherlanders, such as Obrecht and Josquin.

At the court of Burgundy

By 1467 Busnois was at the court of Burgundy, and he had begun composing for them immediately before the accession of Charles to the title of Duke. Charles, on becoming Duke of Burgundy, quickly became known as Charles the Bold, for his fierce and sometimes reckless military ambitions, that got him killed ten years later. In addition to his love of war, however, Duke Charles loved music, and in his employ Busnois was appreciated and rewarded.

In addition to his duties as a singer and a composer, Busnois accompanied the Duke on his military campaigns. Busnois was at the siege of Neuss in Germany in 1475, and survived the disastrous Battle of Nancy in 1477 at which Charles was killed and the expansion of Burgundy was forever stilled. Busnois remained in the employ of the Burgundian court until 1482, but nothing exact is known about his exploits between then and 1492, when he died. At the time of his death, he was working for the church in Bruges. Throughout this time he was exceptionally well-known as a composer, and his music circulated widely.

Composer of motets and chansons

Antoine Busnois was a French composer and poet of the early Renaissance Burgundian School. While also noted as a composer of sacred music, such as motets, he was one of the most renowned 15th-century composers of secular chansons.

We don’t know much about his life. He was probably born around 1430, in the vicinity of Bethune in the Pas de Calais. He may have been related to the aristocratic family of Busnois. He clearly received an excellent musical education. An aristocratic origin may explain his early association with the French royal court: references to him appear there, and in 1461 he was a chaplain at Tours. He was not entirely a man of peace. This is indicated by a petition for absolution he filed in Tours, in which he admitted to being part of a group that beat up a priest, “to the point of bloodshed”, not one but five times. While in a state of anathema he was foolhardy enough to celebrate mass, an act which got him excommunicated; however Pope Pius II pardoned him.

He moved from the cathedral to the collegiate church of St. Martin, also in Tours, where he became a subdeacon in 1465. Later in 1465 Busnois moved to Poitiers, where he not only became master of the choirboys, but managed to attract a flood of talented singers from the entire region; by this time his reputation as singing teacher, scholar, and composer seems to have spread widely. However he departed just as suddenly as he came, in 1466 and moved to Burgundy.

Elegant harmonies of John Dunstable

Dunstable created elegant harmonies in his own music using thirds and sixths. Taken together, these are seen as defining characteristics of early Renaissance music. Of the works attributed to him only about fifty survive, among which are two complete masses, three incomplete but multi-section masses, fourteen individual mass sections, twelve complete isorhythmic motets, as well as twenty-seven separate settings of various liturgical texts, including.

He is believed to have written secular music, but no songs in the vernacular can be attributed to him with any degree of certainty. Yet, because so much of the surviving 15th century repertory of English carols is anonymous, and Dunstable is known to have written many, most scholars consider it highly likely that some of the anonymous carols from this time are actually by Dunstable.

Dunstable was probably the most influential English composer of all time, yet he remains an enigma: his complete works were not published until the quincentenary of his death in 1953, but even since then works have been added and subtracted from his oeuvre; we know very little of his life and nothing of his undoubted learning; we can only make an educated guess at most of the chronology of the small amount of music that has come down to us. And we understand little of his style - why he wrote as he did, what artistic or technical principles guided his composing, how his music was performed, or why it was so influential.

Astronomer, astrologer, and mathematician

In addition to his work as a composer, Dunstable had a contemporary reputation as an astronomer, astrologer, and mathematician. Some of his astrological works have survived in manuscript, possibly in his own hand.

He died on Christmas Eve 1453, as recorded in his epitaph, which was in the church of St Stephen Walbrook in London (until it was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666). This was also his burial place. The epitaph - stating that he had "secret knowledge of the stars" - was reinstated in the church in 1904.

Very few manuscript sources of Dunstaple’s works survived in England, as is similarly the case for other 15th century composers. Even though England was a centre of musical activity, almost all of the music was destroyed between 1536 and 1540 during the Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII. As a result, most of Dunstaple’s work had to be recovered from continental sources. Since numerous copies of his works have been found in Italian and German manuscripts, his fame must have been widespread. He was praised by the French poet Martin Le Franc, who wrote in the massive verse-poem that Dunstable influenced other Renaissance composers. A few decades later in about 1476, the Flemish composer and music theorist Tinctoris hailed him as the chief exponent, of the new art which had originated with the English.