Gallus Dressler (16 October 1533 – 1580/9) was a German composer and music theorist who served as Kantor in the church school at

Magdeburg Magdeburg (; nds, label=Low Saxon, Meideborg ) is the capital and second-largest city of the German state Saxony-Anhalt. The city is situated at the Elbe river. Otto I, the first Holy Roman Emperor and founder of the Archdiocese of Magdebur ...

. Though a few of his works have remained in the choral repertoire, he is best known for his theoretical writings, especially his ''Praecepta musicae poeticae'' (MS, 1563), which contains some of the earliest detailed description of the compositional process of the Renaissance

motet In Western classical music, a motet is mainly a vocal musical composition, of highly diverse form and style, from high medieval music to the present. The motet was one of the pre-eminent polyphonic forms of Renaissance music. According to Margar ...

Life

Dressler was born in Nebra in Thuringia, but probably received most of his musical education in the Netherlands. He seems particularly influenced by Clemens non papa, and a perusal of the musical examples he cites in his theoretical writings shows that he was strongly influenced by the Franco-Flemish generation immediately following

Josquin des Prez Josquin Lebloitte dit des Prez ( – 27 August 1521) was a composer of High Renaissance music, who is variously described as French or Franco-Flemish. Considered one of the greatest composers of the Renaissance, he was a central figure of the ...

. After a brief tenure at Jena in 1558, Dressler succeeded

Martin Agricola Martin Agricola (6 January 1486 – 10 June 1556) was a German composer of Renaissance music and a music theorist. Biography Agricola was born in Świebodzin, a town in Western Poland, and took the name Agricola later in life, a common practic ...

as Kantor of the church school in

, where most of his career was spent. His compositions were almost entirely in the genre of the Latin

, largely ignoring the Lutheran chorale, though he is noted for some of the first German-language motets. Dressler studied at

Wittenberg Wittenberg ( , ; Low Saxon language, Low Saxon: ''Wittenbarg''; meaning ''White Mountain''; officially Lutherstadt Wittenberg (''Luther City Wittenberg'')), is the fourth largest town in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany. Wittenberg is situated on the Ri ...

, receiving the master's degree in 1570, and was closely associated with the Philippists. In fact, when the more orthodox wing of Lutheranism became ascendant in Magdeburg, Dressler left for a position in Anhalt.

''Praecepta musicae poeticae''

Dressler's chief contribution comes to us in this unpublished manuscript, which from its organization and tone may have been his notes for teaching composition classes. As such it is one of the first sources to give in detail a practical approach to the composition of the Renaissance

. Dressler's explication of

musica poetica ''Musica poetica'' was a term commonly applied to the art of composing music in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century German schools and universities. Its first known use was in the ''Rudimenta Musicae Planae'' (Wittenberg: 1533) of . Previously, musi ...

can be summarized in two principles: the application of the rhetorical principles of exordium, medio, and finis to the structure of a motet, and the application of the grammatical principle of a "clausula" (sentence) to smaller musical units demarcated by cadences. The modal aspect of Dressler's musical poetics agrees in principle with that of

Pietro Pontio Pietro Pontio (or Ponzio; March 25, 1532 – December 27, 1596) was an Italian theorist and composer. Pontio was born and died in Parma. He is best known for his 1588 treatise ''Ragionamento di Musica'', which is thought to have influenced Claud ...

and other contemporary theorists, but Dressler takes it a step further by teaching the use of the principal cadences of the given musical mode (cadences to the final and dominant degrees) to assert stability in the exordium and the finis, and cadences to other degree during the medio to provide contrast and interest. Dressler's treatise also includes a brief but perceptive sketch in which he identifies four phases in the history of Renaissance music: the

John Dunstaple John Dunstaple (or Dunstable, – 24 December 1453) was an English composer whose music helped inaugurate the transition from the Medieval music, medieval to the Renaissance music, Renaissance periods. The central proponent of the ''Contenance ...

/ Guillaume Dufay generation,

, the post-Josquin generation (dominated, in his mind, by Clemens non papa), and Dressler's own contemporaries.Dressler, Gallus. ''Praecepta musicae poeticae'', MS, 1563. The Latin text as published by Bernhard Engelke in ''Geschichtsblätter für Stadt und Land Magdeburg'', XLIX-L (1914-1915) is available online through Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum, but it is somewhat flawed. A new critical text and English translation by Robert Forgacs was published in 2007 by the University of Illinois Press.

References

External links

*
''Praecepta musicae poeticae'' from Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum (Engelke's transcription)
* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Dressler, Gallus 1533 births 1580s deaths People from Nebra (Unstrut) German music theorists 16th-century German composers 16th-century Latin-language writers