Pierre de la Rue
[1] A member of the same generation as Josquin des Prez, and a long associate of the Habsburg-Burgundian musical chapel, he ranks with Agricola, Brumel, Compère, Isaac, Obrecht, and Weerbeke as one of the most famous and influential composers in the Netherlands polyphonic style in the decades around 1500.
[1] In 1489 he was paid by the Confraternity of the Illustre Lieve Vrouwe in 's-Hertogenbosch, again as "Peter vander Straten", and the document indicates that he had come from Cologne, so he evidently had spent some time in Germany as a tenor singer.
In addition, music by the composers favored by the previous dukes of Burgundy such as Charles the Bold – Adrien Basin, Gilles Joye, Hayne van Ghizeghem, and Robert Morton – was also probably still being performed and studied.
Juana was inconsolable, unable to leave the corpse of her dead husband, and had become quite insane; why La Rue stayed as long as he did is not known, but it is not impossible that his dark, intensely expressive music was one of the few things that brought her solace.
[7] On his travels with the Grande chapelle he met many of the other Franco-Flemish composers who were working at the same time (for instance, Josquin, Isaac and Robert de Févin) and these meetings may also have proved decisive in the development of his style.
While his epitaph alludes to the possibility that he may have worked at the courts in France and Hungary at some time, no other corroborating evidence has been found; however there remain biographical gaps in the 1470s and 1480s: for example, the location of "St Ode" is not yet known.
He asked to be buried on the left side of the altar in the church in Kortrijk, although the exact location can no longer be found, and the epitaph only survives in several partially contradictory copies.
His epitaph indicates he was a thrifty, virtuous person, not "given to the crimes of Venus" (as, for example, composer Nicolas Gombert, who was sent to the galleys for molesting a choirboy, Ghiselin Danckerts, who was fired from the Sistine Chapel choir for being excessively "given to women", or Gilles Joye, who wrote a mass based on the name of his favorite prostitute).
[10] La Rue wrote masses, motets, Magnificats, settings of the Lamentations, and chansons, a diverse range of compositions reflective of his status as the primary composer at one of Europe's most renowned musical institutions, surrounded by other similarly creative people.
He had a liking for extreme low voice ranges, descending sometimes to C or even the subterranean B flat below the bass staff; he employed more chromaticism than most of his contemporaries; and much of his work is rich in dissonance.
One of his masses for six voices, the Missa Ave sanctissima Maria, is a six-voice canon, a technically difficult feat reminiscent of some of the work of Ockeghem.
In addition he uses germinal motifs – small easily recognizable patterns from which larger melodic units are derived, and which give unity to a composition.
La Rue was the first composer to write a Magnificat on each of the eight tones, and additionally wrote six separate settings of the Marian antiphon Salve regina.
Since La Rue never spent time in Italy, he did not employ the Italian frottola style which featured light, homophonic textures (which Josquin used so effectively in his popular El Grillo and Scaramella), and which so charmed the other members of his generation.
