Agricola - Ave domina sancta Maria

Alexander Agricola (1446-1506) was one of the leading composers of the Josquin generation. The illegitimate son of a wealthy Ghent businesswoman, his career led him to most of the countries of Western Europe. Alexander's surname was apparently Ackerman, but he is called Agricola in most sources. Despite ample documentary evidence of his mother's activities, the first concrete reference to Alexander as a musician is from Cambrai in 1476. He must have found employment later at the French royal court, since the next concrete reference is to him leaving there without permission to go to Italy in 1491. He returned to France the next year, and was subsequently presented with an employment opportunity at Naples for half again as much salary as Josquin demanded of Ferrara. That appointment disappeared with the death of Ferrante I (1494), but Agricola went to Italy anyway. By 1500, he returned to his native Burgundy, and accepted a court appointment there. He traveled to Spain twice with Philip the Fair, and died in Valladolid of a fever in 1506. An epitaph states that he was 60 at the time, but there is reason to believe that he may have been as much as 10 years younger. Agricola's music was first transmitted in quantity in the 1490s. His most characteristic works are his songs and secular instrumental pieces, with over 80 surviving. They are overwhelmingly in three parts, and frequently quote songs by other composers, often in oblique fashion. Agricola's series of instrumental variations on De tous biens plaine is a particularly conspicuous example of his flair for variety and ornamental figuration. Most of Agricola's motets, of which he wrote over two dozen, are in a compact and straightforward style. The succinct three-voice Si dedero was the most-copied work of its generation, as well as a popular model for other settings. Agricola's stature was consummated with Petrucci's publication of a dedicated volume of his masses in 1504, and it is in his eight mass cycles that Agricola's unusual sense for counterpoint shows most clearly. His Missa In minen sin is one of the largest cycles of the era, a virtual encyclopedia of motivic variation. Agricola did not show the concern for text championed by Josquin, nor the feel for open textures pioneered by Obrecht. His counterpoint is extremely dense, with a fantastical feeling developing upon the "irrationality" of Ockeghem's designs. Agricola's larger settings are consequently some of the most intricate and inventive of the era, combining an abundance of contrapuntal ideas with a seemingly intentional arbitrariness into a web of shifting musical connections.

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