The Origin of Making a Career as a Musician

Last night in Mission Dolores Basilica, Chanticleer concluded its season with a program entitled No Mean Reward: Chanticleer and the Golden Fleece. The Order of the Golden Fleece was founded by Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy. Its place in music history involves the financial support it provided for the composition of some of Europe’s most exquisite polyphony. As Kate van Orden put it in her book, Music, Authorship, and the Book in the First Century of Print, this marked the beginning of “career musicians,” capable of making a living through published music as well as performance.

The earliest career musicians that van Orden cites are Guillaume Du Fay (1397(?)–1474) and Josquin des Prez (c. 1450–1521). Both of them were featured on Chanticleer’s program, along with Antoine Busnois (c. 1430–1492), Johannes Tinctoris (c. 1435–1511), and Alexander Agricola (c. 1457–1506). We know of these composers today because they could thrive in the brave new world of “publish or perish.”

Over the course of about an hour, Chanticleer introduced these composers, one by one, to its audience of attentive listeners. As might be expected, the samples were relatively modest; and, in introducing the selections, the vocalists did not dwell on characteristics that would distinguish one composer from another. Nevertheless, the program concluded with what might be called a “compare and contrast” finale.

The melodic line of “L’homme armé” (taken from the late fifteenth-century Mellon Chansonnier, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Listeners were first introduced to “L’homme armé” (the armed man), a secular song that dates back to the Late Middle Ages. As music notation allowed for more sophisticated approaches to composition, this particular song became a popular selection for contrapuntal elaboration. The program concluded with settings of three different sections of the Mass, each emerging from embellishments of “L’homme armé” and each by a different composer previously introduced on the program. The “Gloria” section was provided by Busnois, the “Sanctus” by Tinctoris, and a particularly elaborate approach to the “Agnus Dei” by des Prez. This made for an engaging perspective on how music was made with the emergence of music as a potentially viable career.