Quote:
Originally Posted by EldKatt
Why does this thread never die? ;(
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I quite agree, EldKatt. But forgive me, I cannot resist the invitaion to register my "worst."
As per one prefessor's dictum that I not downgrade a composer until I'd heard everything, I confess that I have heard all of Johannes Ciconia's 60 or so works, and have read score on some.
They're terrible. Completly dicomfited polyphony, rendered in a bland, flat modal style with elementary rhythms and poor text underlay. His one hit, "O Rosa Bella," I'm certain is misattributed; perhaps it's really Landini.
Ciconia is "reputable" in that he is very early for a named composer of polyphony who has a portfolio of reasonable quantity. He represents the generation between Machaut and DuFay, that's like 1380-1420. It begins dominated by Italians - Francesco Landini and Zacara da Teramo; John Dunstaple arrives to usher in the common triad towards the end of that period. This was the final floweing of homophony-free polyphony, and includes the ars subtilior, Solage, the others in the Chantilly Codex and the composers in the Old Hall Ms, most of whom have only one or two works.
Ciconia's cream rose to the top only because his name represents a period of time where we have poor representation of named composers; there are no other ma. Ciconia's harmonic technique is wayyy inferior to Machaut and doesn't even come close to the likes of Dunstaple or DuFay. His isorhythmic motets are especially bad, the combined texts working themselves into a meaningless, Dadaistic jumble of Latin.
That is why he's my pick for worst, although he's still better than some 19th century composers of parlour music that I've seen. None of these are, however, reputable.
Uncle Dave
Jul 20 2008, 11:26 PM
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