Nicolas Gombert - Music and Style

Music and Style

Gombert is perhaps the most representative composer of the generation between Josquin and Palestrina, especially in the area of sacred music. He brought the polyphonic style to its highest state of perfection; if imitation is a common device in Josquin, it is pervasive in Gombert. Extended homophonic passages are rare in his sacred works, and he is particularly fond of imitation at very close time intervals, a technically very difficult feat (although he only rarely wrote strict canon). He preferred the lower voice ranges, and instead of the four voices which was usual at the time, he preferred larger groupings, such as five and six voice parts. Gombert, unlike his predecessor and mentor, Josquin des Prez, used irregular numbers of voice entries and avoided precise divisions of phrases. Syncopations and cross-accents are characteristic of his rhythmic idiom, and harmonically, Gombert's compositions stressed the traditional modal framework. Musica ficta, a term that refers to chromatically altering pitches, was very prominent in his musical stylings. His music is notable for its use of suspended dissonance, as well as featuring many false relations. Dissonance he uses for expressive effect, for example as an expression of grief in his six-voice motet on the death of Josquin, Musae Jovis, with its clashing semitones, and occasional root-position triads a tritone apart.

Out of the ten masses that Gombert composed, nine survive complete. Chronologically, the mass sequence is not specified, but an approximate chronology can be deduced from stylistic characteristics. Two musical characteristics, sequence and ostinato, that were rare in Gombert’s later works, are present in his earlier masses Quam pulchra es and Tempore paschali.

The motet was Gombert's preferred form, and his compositions in this genre not only were the most influential part of his output, but they show the greatest diversity of compositional technique. His motets, alongside those of Adrian Willaert and Jacobus Clemens non Papa, stand out from the rest of the Flemish motet composers. Familiar characteristics of motets of the preceding generation, such as ostinato, canon, cantus firmus, and double texts, are unusual in Gombert's style, excepting where he used aspects of the previous generation's style as an homage, such as in his motet on the death of Josquin, Musae Jovis. When considering texts for his motets, Gombert obtained his inspiration from scripture – such as the Psalms – as opposed to the liturgy of the Roman Catholic church. He was less attentive to textual placement and clarity than to the overall expressive sonority.

Gombert's eight settings of the Magnificat, the ones that may have won him his pardon, are among his most famous works. Each is written in one of the church modes, and consists of a cycle of short motets, with the individual motets based on successive verses of the Magnificat text.

Some of Gombert's works are for unusually large vocal ensembles, including 8, 10, and 12 voices. These works are not polychoral in the usual sense, or in the manner of the Venetian School in which the voices were spatially separated; rather, the voice sub-groupings change during the pieces. These large ensemble compositions include an eight-voice Credo, the 12-voice Agnus from the Missa Tempore paschali, and 10- and 12- voice settings of the Regina caeli. In comparison with the northern Italian cori spezzati style, Gombert’s multi-voice works were not antiphonal. Instead of dividing forces consistently, Gombert frequently changed the combinations of voice groups. These vocal pieces contained more direct repetition, sequence and ostinato than his other music.

His secular compositions – mostly chansons – are less contrapuntally complex than his motets and masses, but nonetheless more so than the majority of contemporary secular pieces, especially the 'Parisian' chanson. Gombert during the middle of the sixteenth century received credit for several of the Parisian chansons, but later studies have discovered that he was not the sole 'Nicolas' of those secular pieces but many were actually by Nicolas de la Grotte or Guillaume Nicolas. Authors of the texts used in many chansons, a genre in which Gombert excelled, were mostly anonymous. He turned to older verse, often of a folkish type, with typical subject matter including unhappy love, farewells, separations, infidelities and the like. Many of these chansons appeared in lute and vihuela arrangements, with their wide geographical distribution showing their immense popularity.

His surviving works include 10 masses, about 140 motets, about 70 chansons, a canción (probably written when he was in Spain), a madrigal, and a handful of instrumental pieces.