Biography

Jessie Ann Owens is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Music at the University of California, Davis. She is author of Composers at Work: The Craft of Musical Composition 1450-1600 (Oxford University Press, 1997), the first systematic investigation of compositional process in early music; and co-editor with Katelijne Schiltz of Cipriano de Rore: New Perspectives on His Life and Music (Turnhout, 2016). Owens is past president of both the American Musicological Society and the Renaissance Society of America, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2023 she received the Paul Oskar Kristeller Lifetime Achievement Award from the RSA. With Blue Heron she received the Noah Greenberg Award for the world premiere recording of Cipriano’s 1542 I madrigali.

Project Summary

In the first decades of the Italian madrigal, the 1520s and 1530s, composers set single poems to music, typically lasting no more than a few minutes in performance. The texts, like their counterparts in the chanson repertory, were often light-weight in substance. The publication of Cipriano de Rore’s I madrigali a cinque voci in 1542 marked a sea change in madrigal composition. I madrigali is a collaboration between a composer and a poet to create a musical and poetic canzoniere. The poet, perhaps the Venetian priest Giovanni Brevio, curated and ordered a collection of lyric poems to form a sonnet cycle reminiscent of aspects of Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta. The composer, Cipriano de Rore, a Fleming newly arrived in Italy, found a novel way to represent the narrative arc of the poems in music: he used mode to represent the affect of the text, creating a musical cycle of unprecedented length and complexity.