Fauxbourdon
Fauxbourdon (from the French faux bourdon "false bass") describes a type of setting of three-part pieces of music that has been used in church singing since the 15th century , in which a second and third voice are sung parallel to the melody-leading upper voice, but slightly lower. This type meant an extension of the otherwise unanimous Gregorian chant .
In contemporary musicology, Fauxbourdon describes a sentence model for three-part singing over melodies of the psalmody , in which the cantus firmus, which is usually transposed up an octave, was in the superius ( soprano ) and the contratenor accompanied it a fourth and the tenor a sixth lower. The contratenor was not specifically written down, but an au fau (l) x bourdon or similar was used as a reference for the three-part performance . noted. The extensive parallelism of the voices ensured the intelligibility of the texts. The fauxbourdon was a characteristic of the Burgundian style that flourished in the Netherlands in the mid-15th century. Guillaume Dufay used it extensively. The earliest example is the Postcommunio Vos qui secuti estis in Dufays ' Missa Sancti Jacobi (handed down in the Bologna manuscript I-BC Q15 , approx. 1440).
Related terms are English. faburdon or Italian falso bordone , but they were used by different authors at different times with different meanings. The exact meaning and etymology of these historical uses are controversial in musicology. Faburdon (or faburden) is the name given in England in the 15th century to the deep voice against the leading voice. In the 18th century, for example, falso bordone was usually used to describe four-part church chants, which proceed syllabically , i.e. place one note per syllable. It is thus richer than the unanimous Gregorian chant, but it dispenses with strongly divergent voices, which were otherwise widespread at this time.
Another meaning of Fauxbourdon as a musical figure has been documented since Joachim Burmeister (1606). This figure denotes successive third-sixth sounds, i.e. any kind of sixth chord progression . According to the word faux, the Fauxbourdon primarily expresses “wrong” and “sinful”.
swell
- Joachim Burmeister : Musica poetica . Rostock 1606. Reprint, ed. by Rainer Bayreuther and us. by Philipp Kallenberger: Laaber-Verlag, Laaber 2007, ISBN 978-3-89007-393-4 .
literature
- Heinrich Besseler : Bourdon and Fauxbourdon: Studies on the origin of Dutch music . 2nd revised edition. After revisions left by the author, ed. and supplemented by Peter Gülke , VEB Breitkopf and Härtel, Leipzig 1974.
- Dagmar Hoffmann-Axthelm: Faburdon / fauxbourdon / falso bordone . In: Concise dictionary of musical terminology . Vol. 3, ed. by Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht and Albrecht Riethmüller , editor-in-chief Markus Bandur, Steiner, Stuttgart 1972 ( online ).
- Hans-Otto Korth: Fauxbourdon. In: Ludwig Finscher (Hrsg.): The music in past and present . Second edition, factual part, volume 3 (Engelberg - Hamburg). Bärenreiter / Metzler, Kassel et al. 1995, ISBN 3-7618-1104-7 , Sp. 379–393 ( online edition , subscription required for full access).
- Rudolf Flotzinger, Art. Fauxbourdon , in: Oesterreichisches Musiklexikon online .
