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Nicolas Gombert (c. 1495 – c. 1560)[1] was a Franco-Flemish composer of the Renaissance. He was one of the most famous and influential composers between Josquin des Prez and Palestrina, and best represents the fully developed, complex polyphonic style of this period in music history.
Adrian Willaert and Nicolas Gombert are generally recognized as the exemplars of the late Franco-Flemish school, before the center of Renaissance art-music moved to Italy. A Fleming, Willaert relocated to Italy and along with the originally Flemish composer Orlando di Lasso brought the Franco-Flemish style of simultaneously dense and lyrical counterpoint to Italy. Like Willaert, Gombert brought the polyphonic style to its highest state of perfection; if imitation is a common device in Josquin, it is integral in Gombert.
Gombert's style is characterized by dense, inextricable polyphony. Extended homophonic passages are rare in his sacred works, and he is particularly fond of imitation at very close time intervals, a technically very difficult feat (although he only rarely wrote strict canon). He preferred the lower voice ranges instead of the four voices (SATB) which were the most common voicings for pieces at the time, such as five and six parts in mostly male registers. Gombert, unlike his predecessor and mentor, Josquin des Prez, used irregular numbers of voice entries and avoided precise divisions of phrases, resulting in a less-punctuated, more continuous sonic landscape. Syncopations and cross-accents are characteristic of his rhythmic idiom, giving ictus to his otherwise seamless, enduring lines.
Exemplary among Gombert's formally perfect pieces that employ cross-relations are his six-voice motet on the death of Josquin, Musae Jovis, with its clashing semitones, and occasional root-position triads a tritone apart. and his six-voice chanson Tous les Regretz.
Out of the ten masses that Gombert composed, nine survive complete. The chronology of the masses is not known, but an approximate order can be deduced from stylistic characteristics. Two musical characteristics, sequence and ostinato, that were rare in Gombert’s later works, are present in his earlier masses Quam pulchra es and Tempore paschali.
The motet was Gombert's preferred form, and his compositions in this genre not only were the most influential part of his output, but they show the greatest diversity of compositional technique. His motets, alongside those of Adrian Willaert and Jacobus Clemens non Papa, stand out from the rest of the Flemish motet composers. Familiar characteristics of motets of the preceding generation, such as ostinato, canon, cantus firmus, and double texts, are unusual in Gombert's style, excepting where he used aspects of the previous generation's style as an homage, such as in his motet on the death of Josquin, Musae Jovis. When considering texts for his motets, Gombert obtained his inspiration from Scripture – such as the Psalms – as opposed to the liturgy of the Roman Catholic church. He was less attentive to textual placement and clarity than to the overall expressive sonority.
Gombert's eight settings of the Magnificat, which may have won him his pardon, are among his most famous works. Each is written in one of the church modes, and consists of a cycle of short motets, with the individual motets based on successive verses of the Magnificat text.
Some of Gombert's works are for unusually large vocal ensembles, including 8, 10, and 12 voices. These works are not polychoral in the usual sense, or in the manner of the Venetian School in which the voices were spatially separated; rather, the voice sub-groupings change during the pieces. These large ensemble compositions include an eight-voice Credo, the 12-voice Agnus from the Missa Tempore paschali, and 10- and 12- voice settings of the Regina caeli. In comparison with the northern Italian cori spezzati style, Gombert’s multi-voice works were not antiphonal.Instead of dividing forces consistently, Gombert frequently changed the combinations of voice groups. These vocal pieces contained more direct repetition, sequence and ostinato than his other music.
His surviving works include 10 masses, about 140 motets, about 70 chansons, a canción (probably written when he was in Spain), a madrigal, and a handful of instrumental pieces
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