Composers and repertory: an overview

The entrance of Petrus Alamire into the chapel of the Habsburg-Burgundian court, in the official capacity of scribe (escripvain) and keeper of the books (garde des livres), heralded a change in the manuscripts that transmitted the repertoire of the court. Earlier manuscripts that claim some connection to the court – whether through repertoire that featured their composers or through a patron’s relation to Habsburg-Burgundy – matched norms of the time in the substantial number of compositions they contained and in their mixture of genres. For example, the so-called Chigi Codex (I-Rvat Chigi 234), compiled for Philippe Bouton, a Burgundian courtier from the days of Philip the Good to Philip the Fair, contains twenty masses, a Credo, and a dozen motets. B-Br 9126, made for Philip the Fair and his wife Joanna of Castile, includes nine masses, three Magnificats, and ten motets, while A-Wn 1783, presumably a gift from Philip to Emanuel I of Portugal and his wife, Maria of Spain, consists of eighteen masses, a Kyrie, and a Credo. In contrast, the manuscripts that Alamire began to supervise, often richly elaborate, frequently concentrated on a single genre – most often masses – and included relatively few compositions. The influence was surely the pioneering series of mass prints the first commercial printer of music, Ottaviano Petrucci, had begun in Venice in 1502. Alamire’s cache of new manuscript creations includes those such as D-Ju 2 (seven

masses), D-Ju 3 (eight masses), I-Rvat 34 (five masses and a Credo), A-Wn 15495 (seven masses), A-Wn 15497 (six masses and two Kyries). The Mechelen Choirbook, with its seven masses, fits perfectly into Alamire’s new practice of manuscripts with a smaller and more coherent repertoire. It contains music of just two composers: Matthaeus Pipelare and Pierre de la Rue.