Kombination und Rekombination in der Renaissance

A distinctive feature of the music of the 15th and 16th centuries is the use of pre-existent music as the basis or starting point for a new composition. Such works can be distinguished by two fundamentally different compositional approaches, each of which entails its own problems: On the one hand there are compositions based on additive processes and contrapuntally sophisticated structures such as canons, on the other hand there are those in which a usually polyphonic model is fragmented and its components are recombined into a new composition. In the contribution at hand, this distinction is established on the basis of detailed analyses of Josquin's works. It is shown that recombinant approaches sometimes play a role in his compositions. The example of more recent works by Adrian Willaert and Nicolas Gombert shows that these techniques became increasingly more important for later generations of composers.