Johannes Martini - Music and Influence

Music and Influence

Martini wrote masses, motets, psalms, hymns, and some secular songs, including chansons. His style is conservative, sometimes referring back to the music of the Burgundian School, especially in the masses. Some stylistic similarity to Obrecht suggests that the two may have known each other, or at the very least Martini may have seen Obrecht's music. Obrecht was a guest in Ferrara in 1487, and his music is known to have circulated in Italy in the early 1480s.

Some of the earliest examples of the paraphrase mass are by Martini. His Missa domenicalis and Missa ferialis, which have been tentatively dated to the 1470s at the earliest, use paraphrase technique in the tenor voice – the normal voice for carrying the cantus firmus – but also include the same melodic material in other voices at the start of points of imitation. The paraphrase technique was to become one of the predominant methods of mass composition in the early 16th century.

In addition to his mostly conservative output of masses, he is the first composer known to have set psalms for double choir singing antiphonally. This style, which was to become famous in Venice under the direction of Adrian Willaert seventy years later, seems to have had no influence at the time: yet it was a striking innovation.

His secular music is in both French and Italian.