Matthaeus Pipelare ( – ) was a

Netherlandish The Low Countries comprise the coastal Rhine–Meuse–Scheldt delta region in Western Europe, whose definition usually includes the modern countries of Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands. Both Belgium and the Netherlands derived their ...

composer, choir director, and possibly

wind instrument A wind instrument is a musical instrument that contains some type of resonator (usually a tube) in which a column of air is set into vibration by the player blowing into (or over) a mouthpiece set at or near the end of the resonator. The pitc ...

player of the

Renaissance The Renaissance ( , ) , from , with the same meanings. is a period in European history The history of Europe is traditionally divided into four time periods: prehistoric Europe (prior to about 800 BC), classical antiquity (800 BC to AD ...

. He was from Louvain, and spent part of his early life in Antwerp. Unlike many of his contemporaries, many of whom traveled to

Italy Italy ( it, Italia ), officially the Italian Republic, ) or the Republic of Italy, is a country in Southern Europe. It is located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and its territory largely coincides with the homonymous geographical ...

Spain , image_flag = Bandera de España.svg , image_coat = Escudo de España (mazonado).svg , national_motto = ''Plus ultra'' (Latin)(English: "Further Beyond") , national_anthem = (English: "Royal March") , i ...

or elsewhere, he seems never to have left the

Low Countries The term Low Countries, also known as the Low Lands ( nl, de Lage Landen, french: les Pays-Bas, lb, déi Niddereg Lännereien) and historically called the Netherlands ( nl, de Nederlanden), Flanders, or Belgica, is a coastal lowland region in N ...

. In spring 1498 he became the choir director at the Illustrious Confraternity of Our Lady at

's-Hertogenbosch s-Hertogenbosch (), colloquially known as Den Bosch (), is a city and municipality in the Netherlands with a population of 157,486. It is the capital of the province of North Brabant and its fourth largest by population. The city is south of th ...

, a position he held until 1500. From his name it is presumed that either he or perhaps his father was a wind player, for example a town piper. Pipelare's style was wide-ranging; he wrote in almost all of the vocal forms current in his day: masses, motets, secular songs in all the local languages. No instrumental music has survived. In mood his music ranged from light secular songs to sombre motets related to those of

Pierre de La Rue Pierre de la Rue ( – 20 November 1518) was a Franco-Flemish composer and singer of the Renaissance. His name also appears as Piersson or variants of Pierchon and his toponymic, when present, as various forms of de Platea, de Robore, or de Vic ...

, an almost exact contemporary. He wrote 11 complete

mass Mass is an intrinsic property of a body. It was traditionally believed to be related to the quantity of matter in a physical body, until the discovery of the atom and particle physics. It was found that different atoms and different eleme ...

es which have survived to modern times (although many of the manuscripts were destroyed in the

Second World War World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposi ...

), as well as 10 motets, and 8

chanson A (, , french: chanson française, link=no, ; ) is generally any lyric-driven French song, though it most often refers to the secular polyphonic French songs of late medieval and Renaissance music. The genre had origins in the monophonic so ...

s; the chansons are both in French and

Dutch Dutch commonly refers to: * Something of, from, or related to the Netherlands * Dutch people () * Dutch language () Dutch may also refer to: Places * Dutch, West Virginia, a community in the United States * Pennsylvania Dutch Country People E ...

. One of the masses is a four-voice

cantus firmus In music, a ''cantus firmus'' ("fixed melody") is a pre-existing melody forming the basis of a polyphonic composition. The plural of this Latin term is , although the corrupt form ''canti firmi'' (resulting from the grammatically incorrect tre ...

setting of L'homme armé, a style which was already old-fashioned by the time he was writing; the tune moves from voice to voice, but is usually in the tenor. His ''Missa Fors seulement'' is based on his own

, which he used as the cantus firmus. ''Memorare Mater Christi'' is a seven-part motet on the sorrows of the Virgin Mary; each of the seven voices represents a different ''dolor''. The third of the seven voices even quotes the contemporary Spanish

villancico The ''villancico'' (Spanish, ) or vilancete ( Portuguese, ) was a common poetic and musical form of the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America popular from the late 15th to 18th centuries. Important composers of villancicos were Juan del Encina, Ped ...

"Nunca fué pena mayor" (never was there a greater pain) by

Juan de Urrede Juan de Urrede (c.1430-after 1482, Salamanca, Spain) or Juan de Urreda was a Flemish singer and composer active in Spain in the service of the Duke of Alba and King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. He was born Johannes de Wreede in Bruges. He comp ...

Sequential In mathematics, a sequence is an enumerated collection of objects in which repetitions are allowed and order matters. Like a set, it contains members (also called ''elements'', or ''terms''). The number of elements (possibly infinite) is called th ...

writing and syncopated rhythms are characteristic of his music.

Discography

*Matthaeus Pipelare: Missa L'homme armé; Chansons; Motets",

Huelgas Ensemble The Huelgas Ensemble is a Belgian early music group formed by the Flemish conductor Paul Van Nevel in 1971. The group's performance and extensive discography focuses on Renaissance polyphony. The name of the ensemble refers to a manuscript of pol ...

(

Paul Van Nevel Paul Van Nevel (born 4 February 1946) is a Belgian conductor, musicologist and art historian. In 1971 he founded the Huelgas Ensemble, a choir dedicated to polyphony from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Van Nevel is known for hunting out li ...

), Sony *Matthaeus Pipelare: Paradise Regained - Masses, The Sound and the Fury, Fra Bernardo (2014)

References

Gustave Reese Gustave Reese ( ; 29 November 1899 – 7 September 1977) was an American musicologist and teacher. Reese is known mainly for his work on medieval and Renaissance music, particularly with his two publications ''Music in the Middle Ages'' (1940) ...

, ''Music in the Renaissance''. New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 1954. *

External links

Matthaeus Pipelare's ''Fors seulement'' (II) Chanson, and its Related Motet and Mass Performance Editions and Commentary
(George H. Black, Jr.; doctoral dissertation, Louisiana State University) * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Pipelare, Matthaeus 1450s births 1510s deaths Flemish composers Renaissance composers Musicians from Leuven 15th-century Franco-Flemish composers 16th-century Franco-Flemish composers