Reginaldus Libert (Reginald; also Liebert) (fl. c. 1425–1435) was a French composer of the early

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 a minor member of the

Burgundian School The Burgundian School was a group of composers active in the 15th century in what is now northern and eastern France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, centered on the court of the Dukes of Burgundy. The school inaugurated the music of Burgundy. The ...

, a contemporary of

Guillaume Dufay Guillaume Du Fay ( , ; also Dufay, Du Fayt; 5 August 1397(?) – 27 November 1474) was a French composer and music theorist of the early Renaissance. Considered the leading European composer of his time, his music was widely performed and repr ...

, and one of the first to use

fauxbourdon Fauxbourdon (also fauxbordon, and also commonly two words: faux bourdon or faulx bourdon, and in Italian falso bordone) – French for ''false drone'' – is a technique of musical harmonisation used in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, ...

in a

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 ...

setting. Little to nothing is known of his life. He may be the same as a Reginaldus who was employed at the cathedral in Cambrai as a singing teacher to the boys in 1424. Four compositions by Libert have been identified. Two are rondeaux, which was the popular type of French

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 ...

at the time. Both rondeaux are for three voices with only the uppermost voice being supplied with a text (instruments were often used for the other parts, especially in the music of the Burgundians). His most famous composition is a complete setting of the

, for three voices, which contains some of the earliest use of

. An unusual feature of this mass is that it contains music not only for the Ordinary (

Kyrie Kyrie, a transliteration of Greek , vocative case of (''Kyrios''), is a common name of an important prayer of Christian liturgy, also called the Kyrie eleison ( ; ). In the Bible The prayer, "Kyrie, eleison," "Lord, have mercy" derives f ...

, Gloria,

Credo In Christian liturgy, the credo (; Latin for "I believe") is the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed – or its shorter version, the Apostles' Creed – in the Mass, either as a prayer, a spoken text, or sung as Gregorian chant or other musical sett ...

Sanctus The Sanctus ( la, Sanctus, "Holy") is a hymn in Christian liturgy. It may also be called the ''epinikios hymnos'' ( el, ἐπινίκιος ὕμνος, "Hymn of Victory") when referring to the Greek rendition. In Western Christianity, th ...

Agnus Dei is the Latin name under which the " Lamb of God" is honoured within the Catholic Mass and other Christian liturgies descending from the Latin liturgical tradition. It is the name given to a specific prayer that occurs in these liturgies, and ...

) but the

Proper Proper may refer to: Mathematics * Proper map, in topology, a property of continuous function between topological spaces, if inverse images of compact subsets are compact * Proper morphism, in algebraic geometry, an analogue of a proper map for ...

as well; in this regard it resembles the ''Missa Sancti Jacobi'' of Guillaume Dufay, which is often considered to be the earliest example of fauxbourdon to which the term was applied by the composer. Libert's mass uses a plainsong source which permeates all the movements, and migrates from voice to voice. Stylistically, this mass, as well as his other compositions, fit the period around 1430. Libert also wrote a setting of the

for four voices. Both this Kyrie and the complete mass survive in the Trent Codices.Wright, "Libert, Reginaldus", Grove.

References

* Craig Wright: "Reginaldus Libert";

Brian Trowell Brian Lewis Trowell (21 February 1931 – 12 November 2015) was an English musicologist and the Heather Professor of Music at the University of Oxford. Prior to his post at Oxford, he was the King Edward Professor of Music at King's College L ...

, "Fauxbourdon". Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy (Accessed January 7, 2006)
(subscription access)
* Craig Wright, "Burgundy", in ''The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians'', ed. Stanley Sadie. 20 vol. London, Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1980. *

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.

Notes

External links

Libert at HOASM
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Libert, Reginaldus Year of birth missing Year of death missing French classical composers French male classical composers Renaissance composers Burgundian school composers