Carpentras (composer)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Carpentras (actually Elzéar Genet, also Eliziari Geneti; * around 1470 in Carpentras , † June 14, 1548 in Avignon ) was a French composer of the Renaissance . He enjoyed great fame during his lifetime, and left behind remarkable settings of the Lamentations , which remained part of the repertoire of the papal choir throughout the 16th century . In addition, he was probably the most prominent musician from Avignon since the time of the Ars subtilior at the end of the 14th century.

Life

He was born in the city of Carpentras , otherwise nothing is known about his early life. He took church vows sometime before 1505, for when he was employed by the Avignon Chapel that year he was known as a clericus . He spent most of his life alternately in Avignon and Rome .

Apparently he was acquainted with the bishop of Avignon Giuliano della Rovere, because when the bishop became Pope Julius II , Carpentras went with him to Rome, where he sang in the papal chapel ; In 1508 he is listed there as a singer. However, he left the chapel after a few years to attend the court of Ludwig XII. from France, although little is known about him at the time. Apparently he composed vast amounts of secular music, some of it quite irreverently, for when he returned to Rome in 1513 he made a specific promise to stop. In 1514 he became Kapellmeister of the papal band , now under the Medici Pope Leo X , who was an avid patron of music and the arts. When Leo died in 1521, Carpentras fled Rome to Avignon; because the new Pope Hadrian VI. was disinterested in music, if not hostile to it, and many musicians chose to vote with their feet.

As Hadrian VI. Died in 1523, he was succeeded by the new Pope Clement VII as a patron of the arts, and Carpentras returned to Rome. Once there, he was surprised to find that his own music was still being sung, albeit in corrupted versions. As a result, he made careful copies of some of his works, such as the aforementioned settings of the Lamentations, and presented this collection to Clement VII as the “true” or “corrected” version. He did not stay in Rome, however, and after only two years he left for Avignon, this time for good.

In 1526 he fell ill with tinnitus , a condition that panicked him and which he described as a continuous hissing in his head. Apparently it was at this point that he withdrew from practical music-making and decided instead to devote himself to the publication of his collected church music, an immense endeavor and the earliest known attempt of this kind in music history. Publishing was tedious, one of the printers failed to line up the notes correctly with bars, and the entire output ended at random. However, by the mid-1530s, he was finally able to publish four large collections of his music. He dedicated two of the volumes to Pope Clement VII and the other two to Cardinal Ippolito de 'Medici .

He appears to have held several ecclesiastical positions in Avignon over the last two decades of his life, including the deanery of St-Agricol. He died in this city in 1548.

plant

Carpentras composed several masses , numerous movements of the Magnificat , psalm settings , hymns , motets and secular songs, as well as many settings of the Lamentations, which were his best known work both during his lifetime and in 1587, when Palestrina was commissioned by the Counter-Reformation Church to do them replace. Stylistically, his music is typical of the generation after Josquin , balanced polyphonic with omnipresent imitations . Carpentras alternates points of imitation with homophonic sections, especially in his settings of the lamentations.

literature

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Carpentras
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Genet, Elzéar (real name); Geneti, Eliziari
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French composer
DATE OF BIRTH around 1470
PLACE OF BIRTH Carpentras
DATE OF DEATH June 14, 1548
Place of death Avignon