Nicolas Champion - Music

Music

While only six of his works survive with reliable attribution, the recent reevaluation of a four-voice setting of the De profundis (Psalm 130) (long attributed to Josquin des Prez) gives evidence of his quality as a composer.

Champion's surviving music includes two masses, both for five voices: Missa Maria Magdalena and Missa Ducis saxsonie: Sing ich niet wol; two psalm motets, one for four and one for six voices; and a secular song, Noch weet ick, in Dutch. The setting of De profundis, long attributed to Josquin, is relatively well-known: for example, Grout and Palisca's History of Western Music, often used in college music history courses, gives it as an example of Josquin's late style. The famous copyist Pierre Alamire attributed it to Champion in its earliest extant source, the manuscript VienNB Mus 15941, and the case has recently been made that the attribution should remain with Champion, for stylistic reasons.

Stylistically his music is similar to Josquin's in many respects, including its large-scale tonal organization, use of motifs and paraphrase, and motivic development. In addition he used florid, rhythmically active textures with many layers.

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