One could not be blamed for thinking the title of this Gothic Voices collection of late fourteenth and early fifteenth century French chansons and motets -- The Medieval Romantics -- as a little oxymoronic. After all, didn't the Romantics live some four centuries later? Yes, they did, but there's no shortage of examples of late medieval music that bear more than a passing resemblance to "romanticism" in regard to certain kinds of harmonic and textural preferences. This is partly coincidental; what sounded tonal to Guillaume ...
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One could not be blamed for thinking the title of this Gothic Voices collection of late fourteenth and early fifteenth century French chansons and motets -- The Medieval Romantics -- as a little oxymoronic. After all, didn't the Romantics live some four centuries later? Yes, they did, but there's no shortage of examples of late medieval music that bear more than a passing resemblance to "romanticism" in regard to certain kinds of harmonic and textural preferences. This is partly coincidental; what sounded tonal to Guillaume de Machaut was a little different from what was, say, tonal to Palestrina or Johann Sebastian Bach. Superficially, the medieval notion of tonality is a little closer to what Wagner represents with a great concern for textural fluidity and use of variable degrees of harmonic audacity. In late fourteenth century French Court music there is a definite trend toward an expressive style, particularly as witnessed in sources such the Chantilly Codex, containing music written for the Papal...
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