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chansons de geste
chansons de geste [Fr.,=songs of deeds], a group of epic poems of medieval France written from the 11th through the 13th cent. Varying in length from 1,000 to 20,000 lines, assonanced or (in the 13th cent.) rhymed, the poems were composed by trouvères and were grouped in cycles about some gr...
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Gilles Binchois
Gilles Binchois , c.1400-1460, Flemish composer. From about 1430 until his death Binchois served Philip the Good of Burgundy. His secular chansons are considered his best work. The 15th-century theorist Tinctoris ranked him with Dufay and Dunstable.
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Jacob Arcadelt
Jacob Arcadelt , c.1505-1568, Flemish composer, b. Liège. He spent much of his time at the Papal court in Rome. After 1555 he was in Paris in the service of the duke of Guise. Arcadelt was one of many Netherlander composers who worked in Italy. He wrote Italian madrigals, French chansons, mas...
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Jacob Obrecht
Jacob Obrecht , c.1450-1505, Flemish composer. Obrecht was ordained as a priest in 1480. He wrote an early four-part setting of the St. Matthew Passion. His sacred music combined the polyphony of Johannes Ockeghem with folk elements. An edition of Obrecht's works, ed. by Johannes Wolf (7 vol., 1908-...
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Ogier the Dane
Ogier the Dane , in the chansons de geste , a paladin of Charlemagne. Although his military feats save emperor and kingdom, he is for a time at odds with Charlemagne. In some versions Morgan le Fay takes him to Avalon, from where he returns after 200 years to save France. As Holger, or Olger, Dansk...
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Hervey Allen
Hervey Allen 1889-1949, American novelist and poet, b. Pittsburgh, grad. Univ. of Pittsburgh, 1915. After service in World War I, he taught English in Charleston, S.C., where, in collaboration with DuBose Heyward, he wrote Carolina Chansons (1922), a volume of verse. He wrote other books of poetr...
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Josquin Desprez
Josquin Desprez , c.1440-1521, Flemish composer, b. Hainaut, regarded by his contemporaries as the greatest of his age. Luther spoke highly of Desprez, who may have instructed Erasmus in music. He was in Milan from 1459 to 1479, and he sang in the papal choir intermittently from 1486 to 1494. After ...
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trouvères
trouvères , medieval poet-musicians of central and N France, fl. during the later 12th and the 13th cent. The trouvères imitated the troubadours of the south. Written in the dialect called langue d'oïl, their songs include love lyrics, romances, and the heroic chansons de ges...
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Guillaume Dufay
Guillaume Dufay , c.1400-1474, principal composer at the Burgundian court. After his early training in the cathedral choir at Cambrai, he sang in the papal chapel in Rome (1428-33) and later in Florence and Bologna (1435-37). He was in the service of the antipope Felix V for seven years and was a ca...
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romance
romance [O.Fr.,=something written in the popular language, i.e., a Romance language ]. The roman of the Middle Ages was a form of chivalric and romantic literature widely diffused throughout Europe from the 11th cent. With the Provençal troubadours the roman was a form of narrative, o...
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