Johannes Ciconia - Music

Music

Ciconia's music mingles styles. Pieces typical of northern Italy, such as his madrigal Una panthera, appear with pieces steeped in the French ars nova. The more complex ars subtilior style surfaces in Sus un fontayne. While it remains late medieval, his writing increasingly points toward the melodic patterning of the Renaissance, for instance in his setting of O rosa bella. He wrote music both secular (French virelais, Italian ballate and madrigals) and sacred (motets, mass movements, some of them isorhythmic). He is also the author of two treatises on music, Nova Musica and De Proportionibus (which expands on some ideas in Nova Musica). His theoretical ideas stem from the more conservative Marchettian tradition, and can be contrasted with those of his Paduan contemporary Prosdocimus de Beldemandis.

Although contrafacts and later sources of his compositions suggest that he was well known in Florence, his music is scarcely represented in major Florentine sources of the period; for instance, no example of his works in the Squarcialupi Codex. But many of his motets and Mass sections appear in the Bologna MS Museo Internazionale e Biblioteca della Musica, Q15.