Cornelius Canis (also de Hondt, d'Hondt) (between 1500 and 1510 – 15 February 1562) was a Franco-Flemish composer, singer, and choir director of the Renaissance, active for much of his life in the Grande Chapelle, the imperial Habsburg music establishment during the reign of Emperor Charles V. He brought the compositional style of the mid-16th century Franco-Flemish school, with its elaborate imitative polyphony, together with the lightness and clarity of the Parisian chanson, and he was one of the few composers of the time to write chansons in both the French and Franco-Flemish idioms.
Canis wrote both sacred and secular vocal music. No specifically instrumental music has survived, and he may not have written any.
A considerable body of music by Canis has survived, including two masses, 35 motets, and 31 chansons. The works list has grown in recent decades: three of the motets and two chansons are recent discoveries.[4] All of his works are for from three to six voices. The two masses, Missa Pastores loquebantur and Missa super Salve celeberrima are both for six voices, while the motets and chansons all vary from three to six.
Canis's motets are written in the manner of the post-Josquin generation of Franco-Flemish composers, using a wide variety of contrapuntal procedures carried out with considerable skill. Imitation is often pervasive, and may be either strict or free; the time interval separating successive voices in imitation may be either very short or long. Canis also strove for contrast by varying his contrapuntal procedures in successive sections of the same composition, and by writing melodic lines which varied from short to wide-ranging.
Contrasting with the elaborate polyphonic procedures he used in his sacred music, Canis's chansons show a mix of both Netherlandish polyphony and French, particularly Parisian, simplicity. During the 1540s and 1550s there were two general types of chansons being composed: the Parisian, by composers such as Clément Janequin and Claudin de Sermisy, which tended to be homophonic and written in short phrases, with only brief periods of imitation; and the Franco-Flemish, which was more polyphonic and imitative: the Franco-Flemish chansons were akin to the sacred music by the same composers. Canis used some features of the Parisian chanson, including homophony, short rhythmic units, and cadential formulae, grafting them onto an otherwise polyphonic fabric.
Some of Canis's chansons use a cantus-firmus technique, in which Canis takes a line or two of music from a pre-existing chanson, including examples by Janequin, Claudin de Sermisy, and Gombert, and reworks it in a contrapuntal texture much different from the original, but using the same words. Text source : Wikipedia (Hide extended text) ... (Read all)
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