Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century

The final stage, of course, consisted of specially composed songs-without-words in a style adapted
from those of chanson arrangements and tenor tacet sections, but without preexisting material. Such
pieces amounted to the earliest repertoire of “abstractly” conceived chamber music, intended for an
audience of playing and listening connoisseurs. The earliest important contributors to this genre were the
same composers already encountered in connection with the chanson arrangement. The most prolific was
Henricus Isaac (d. 1517), a Fleming who worked in Florence, later at the Austrian court of the Holy
Roman Emperor Maximilian I. The runners-up were Martini, Josquin des Prez, and Alexander Agricola
(d. 1506), who wrote his share of Masses, motets, and songs for the courts and churches of France and
Italy, but whose chief claim to fame was a whole raft of carmina that eventually found their way to the