Petrus de Cruce

The high medieval works of fourteenth-century composer Guillaume de Machaut, using their characteristic texture of an instant top voice, slower middle voice, and a long-note “tenor,” are excellent pieces, and like all great pieces they make the essential style where these are written seem somehow inevitable. However that style had not been inevitable. Someone acquired to work through the structure of fast, moderate, and gradual — of chipper, talkative best voice underlaid having a dour middle collection, and some long records of chant for underneath. That somebody was Petrus de Cruce. His instant forerunner was Franco of Cologne, a composer mixed up in years after 1250. Franco formulated the form from the polytextual motet — generally a three-part vocal structure having a different text message for each component. The various text messages might match or contradict one another; one may be secular and another sacred; they could even maintain different dialects (French or Latin). The listener who’s flummoxed by this construction is on the right course, for the polytextual motet was a complicated form, not really a basic one. Petrus, who worked well by the end from the thirteenth hundred years, made it more technical yet. His primary innovation was to improve the amount of feasible subdivisions from the “breve” — the shorter of both main rhythmic devices of middle ages music. In the music of his predecessors, each breve may be split into a “ideal” three semibreves or into an “imperfect” two. Petrus, more popular as both theorist and composer, posited rather the breve may be divided into as much parts as the composer wished. (Used he consumed to seven.) The effect was the so-called Petronian motet, with a high collection that journeys along at a rate that age opera would contact [parlando. His items, of which maybe eight endure, are strange for contemporary listeners, however the modern idea of melody both subtly from the needs of text message and artfully followed by music in much longer note values will there be in chrysalis stage. Much like most other middle ages composers, little is well known of Petrus’ lifestyle. In fact they are mostly of the thirteenth-century composers that has been discovered by name. Occasionally known with the French type of his name, Pierre de la Croix, he was a Parisian churchman, the scion of a robust family members in Amiens.