160034 SE Pierre de la Rue (2015W)

Pierre de la Rue, who served for almost a quarter of a century as chapel singer at the Habsburg-Burgundian court, must be regarded as one of the most important composers of the generation around 1500, alongside such major figures as Jacob Obrecht, Josquin Desprez, Henricus Isaac, Alexander Agricola and Antoine Brumel. Nevertheless, a great part of La Rue’s music has yet not been analyzed and culture-historically contextualized in an exhaustive manner. This situation will most certainly improve thanks to the scholarly activities in the wake of the quincentenary of La Rue’s death in 2018. It is especially with regard to this anniversary that the Seminar is intended to be a research Seminar, not destined to merely reflect the scholarly state of debate, but to produce new knowledge: to strive for a better understanding of sources (quite a few of them in Vienna), musical works, techniques of composition (like canon or ostinato techniques) and culture-historical horizons – in the hope that some useful contributions to La Rue research may count among the results.