Johannes Tinctoris
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Johannes Tinctoris (c.1435 – 1511) was a Flemish composer and music theorist of the Renaissance. He is known to have studied in Orleans, and to have been master of the choir there; he also may have been director of choirboys at Chartres. Because he was employed at Cambrai Cathedral for four months in 1460, it has been speculated that he studied with Dufay, who spent the last part of his life there; certainly Tinctoris must at least have known the elder Burgundian there. Tinctoris went to Naples in 1472 and spent most of the rest of his life in Italy.
Tinctoris published many volumes of writings on music. While they are not particularly original, borrowing heavily from ancient writers (including Boethius, Isidore of Seville, and others) they give an impressively detailed record of the technical practices and procedures used by composers of the day. He wrote the first dictionary of musical terms (the Diffinitorium musices); a book on the characteristics of the musical modes; a treatise on proportions; and a book on counterpoint, which is particularly useful in charting the development of voice-leading and harmony in the transitional period between Dufay and Josquin. The writings by Tinctoris were influential on composers and other music theorists for the remainder of the Renaissance.
While not much of the music of Tinctoris has survived, that which has shows a love for complex, smoothly flowing polyphony, as well as a liking for unusually low tessituras, occasionally descending in the bass voice to the C two octaves below middle C (showing an interesting similarity to Ockeghem in this regard). He wrote masses, motets and a few chansons.
Tinctoris was also known as a cleric, a poet, a mathematician, and a lawyer; there is even one reference to him as an accomplished painter.
References and further reading
- Heinrich Hüschen, "Johannes Tinctoris," in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie. 20 vol. London, Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1980. ISBN 1561591742
- Gustave Reese, Music in the Renaissance. New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 1954. ISBN 0393095304
- Johannes Tinctoris, Liber de arte contrapuncti, tr. Oliver Strunck, in Source Readings in Music History. New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 1950.de:Johannes Tinctoris