2 languages
Jacques Arcadelt
From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist
Jacques Arcadelt, also Jacob Arcadelt, was a Franco-Flemish Renaissance composer. He was born on 10 August 1507 in Namur, in the Habsburg Netherlands, and died on 14 October 1568 in Paris. As a young man he moved to Italy and by the end of the 1520s he was in Florence, where he could have met Philippe Verdelot, the author of the first attributed madrigals. Around 1538 he moved to Rome, where until 1551 he was a singer and composer in the Sistine Chapel. In 1542 he got to know Michelangelo, but his settings of two of the artist's sonnets were received with indifference.
Music and breakthrough
In 1551 he returned to France. In 1557 he published a book of masses, dedicated to his new employer, Cardinal Charles de Guise, for whom he was choirmaster. He left behind work spanning forty years or more: twenty-four motets, one hundred and twenty-five French chansons, about two hundred and fifty madrigals, three masses and settings of the Lamentations of Jeremiah and the Magnificat. All of it is vocal. Rabelais mentioned him in Gargantua and Pantagruel, between Janequin and Sermisy, in a choir singing a bawdy song.
Influence
Arcadelt is regarded as the most influential member of the early, classical phase of the madrigal. Through his publications the madrigal also became known outside Italy. His first book of madrigals was often reprinted and later used as a model, because later composers saw his style as an ideal. His music shows how a poem and a melody can become one whole in a few voices.
Listening
Discography
Studio albums
- 1991Madrigali
- 1993Laudate Dominum: From the Abbey of St. Michael's
- 2008Vergine bella: Madrigali da sonar
- 2011Le Divin Arcadelt: Candlemas in Renaissance Rome
- 2013Il cor tristo
- 2018Madrigali - Chansons - Motetti
- 2023Missa Noe Noe
Mentioned in other articles
- Madrigaal Genre
In Florence in the 1520s and 1530s, northern composers such as Philippe Verdelot and Jacques Arcadelt wrote part-songs on Italian poems, often in the spirit of Petrarch.