Franco-Flemish School

A tradition of Renaissance polyphony developed by composers from the Low Countries who worked across Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Imitative counterpoint: A compositional technique in which a musical subject passes successively between voices. Staggered entries let independent vocal lines cohere in many Franco-Flemish works.
Guillaume Dufay: A fifteenth-century composer whose work helped shape European polyphony and the early Renaissance style. His career linked Low Countries training with major musical centers in Italy and France.
Burgundian Netherlands: A group of territories ruled by the dukes of Burgundy in the Low Countries during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Its courts and urban centers nurtured the early generations of the school.
Mass (music): A musical setting of some or all of the texts of the Catholic Mass. The mass became a principal large-scale genre for the school's composers.
Renaissance music: European music composed during the Renaissance, roughly from the fifteenth through the sixteenth centuries. The school formed one of the era's most influential international musical traditions.
Canon (music): A composition in which one or more voices imitate a leading voice according to a rule. Strict imitation is a concentrated form of the voice-to-voice writing cultivated by the school.
Josquin des Prez: A Renaissance composer celebrated for expressive sacred and secular music and controlled polyphonic writing. His international reputation made him the tradition's most influential late-fifteenth-century figure.
Burgundian School: A group of fifteenth-century composers associated with the Burgundian court and its musical culture. It provides an earlier courtly context for the Franco-Flemish tradition's development.
Motet: A polyphonic vocal composition, usually sacred, set to a Latin text outside the Mass ordinary. Motets allowed composers to explore textual expression and intricate imitation.
Roman School: A tradition of sixteenth-century sacred polyphony associated with composers working in Rome. Franco-Flemish composers helped establish the musical culture later associated with Rome.

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