Antoine Brumel - A discography (original) (raw)

This discography is presently in a preliminary state. It is believed to contain a substantial percentage of an eventual full listing, but has not been scoured for completeness or organized into sections based on individual works. It should prove informative nonetheless.

Discographic material below has been collected to this stage with substantial help from Pierre-F. Roberge.

Antoine Brumel (c.1460-c.1515) may have been the only major Franco-Flemish polyphonist of the Josquingeneration to be born within France proper, perhaps near Chartres. The earliest historical record of Brumel is from Chartres in 1483. He held a master's position in Geneva from 1486, and left in 1492 under mysterious circumstances. He is mentioned again at Laon in 1497, and was placed in charge of the children at Notre Dame in 1498, where he soon resigned. In 1501, he was in Chambéry, and finally took the prestigious appointment at Ferrara in 1506, after a year of negotiations. The Ferrara chapel was disbanded in 1510, and nothing concrete about Brumel is known afterward.

Brumel was one of the composers to whom Petrucci devoted a volume of masses (1503), and indeed his masses continue to be his most famous works. Among his fifteen surviving mass cycles and four Credos, all are in four parts but one: The twelve-part Missa Et ecce terrae motus is by far his most popular work today. Brumel's Missa pro defunctis is also notably the first to set the Dies irae to polyphony. Brumel wrote over thirty motets in a variety of styles, as well as a handful of secular songs and instrumental pieces. His style progresses from an irregular approach to rhythm in overlapping parts to more emphasis on strongly declamatory passages. His increasingly chordal style is often taken to reflect Italianate tendencies, a trait he shares with Weerbecke.