Great Unsung Composers of Christendom
This year marks the 500th anniversary of the birth of Palestrina, the great composer of sacred polyphony, whose masterful compositions for the sacred liturgy have been described by Catholic musicologist Susan Treacy as “a cathedral in music.” Palestrina was so much the musical voice of the Catholic Reformation in the sixteenth century that he is rightly revered as one of the most important composers of all time.
He is buried at St. John Lateran Cathedral, one of the four major basilicas of Rome, the inscription on his tomb lauding him as the “Prince of Sacred Music”, and he was described by the great composer Felix Mendelsohn as one of the West’s four musical tetrarchs—alongside Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart. Clearly, Palestrina’s praises have been widely sung, and rightly so, placing him beyond the realm of the unsung heroes celebrated in this series. The same can be said of other great composers of sacred polyphony, such as Thomas Tallis and William Byrd.
Leaving these giants aside, we will focus instead on some of the great composers from the history of Christendom who are not as well-known or as widely lauded.
Guido of Arezzo, an eleventh century Benedictine monk, is well-known to professional musicologists but is largely unknown outside of the ivory towers of academe. This is unjust because he is responsible for the language that all musicians use. A music theorist and teacher, his seminal work, Micrologus, was the most influential musical treatise of the middle ages with the exception of Boethius’ De institutione musica. He is widely acknowledged as the inventor of the modern staff notation which was foundational to the development of Western musical notation.
Moving forward three hundred years to the high middle ages, the French composer Guillaume de Machaut composed the first polyphonic setting of the Mass. His Messe de Nostre Dame (Mass o
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