Gherardus Mes

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Gherardus Mes (active around 1561) was a Franco-Flemish composer of the Renaissance .

Life

So far, music historians have not been able to determine the dates of birth or death of Gherardus Mes; also possible places of his work are not known. His identity results only from a group of compositions he left behind. On the title page of a printed edition of these pieces there is still the information that he was a pupil of Jacobus Clemens non Papa .

Little is known of his works. The most significant work is his collection of the Souterliedekens , a setting of the 150 psalms in Dutch stanzas, which were probably written by the Dutch nobleman Willem van Zuylen van Nijevelt and published in 1540 with a notated melody. The movements of Mes appeared in Antwerp in 1561 as the eighth volume of the Musijck Boexkens , an eleven-volume series by the publisher Tielman Susato . This publisher had already published Clemens non Papa's three-part psalm movements in 1556/57.

Gherardus Mes used various compositional techniques in his basement songs; at times he used the melody attached to the Psalms collection of 1540 as the soprano part , while Clemens non Papa used these melodies in the tenor part . Sometimes Mes wrote a completely new composition in which he occasionally used the existing melody, on which the composition then goes its own way. In some cases Mes used an existing melody, but a different one from Clemens non Papa. The Souterliedekens by Gherardus Mes were still popular in the 17th century; some of them were used by the priest and poet Stalpart van der Wiele from Delft . No copy of this collection has survived in full because the bass part is missing. An attempt to reconstruct the missing bass voice was made by the musicologist Louis Peter Grijp . Apart from the Souterliedekens, only one motet by Gherardus Mes has survived.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Louis Peter Grijp: The Souterliedekens by Gherardus Mes (1561) , in: From Ciconia to Sweelinck, Donum natalicum Willem Elders, Amsterdam 1994
  2. ↑ Louis Peter Grijp: Booklet of the CD "Souterliedekens, sixteenth century secular songs ans psalm settings from the Netherlands", Camerata Trajectina under the direction of Louis Peter Grijp
personal data
SURNAME Mes, Gherardus
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Franco-Flemish composer of the Renaissance
DATE OF BIRTH 16th Century
DATE OF DEATH 16th century or 17th century