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Juan Pujol

Juan Pujol (c.1573–May, 1626) was a Catalan composer of the late Renaissance. While best known for his sacred music, he also wrote popular secular music.

Life

Pujul was born and died in Barcelona. He became a priest in 1600, and served successively as the maestro de canto (singing master) at the cathedrals at Tarragona, Saragossa, and Barcelona, where he remained from 1612 until his death. Most of his music dates from the time he was in Barcelona. Evidently a condition of his employment was to produce a fixed quantity of new liturgical music each year. Unusually for many composers of the time, most of it has survived.

Music

Pujol wrote much of his music for the patron saint of Catalonia, St. George, and most of his compositions are based on Gregorian chant. He was a prolific composer, writing 13 masseses, 8 settings of the Magnificat, 6 settings of the Nunc dimittis, 12 antiphons, 12 responsories, 9 complete settings of the Passion, litanies, lamentations, sequences, motets, hymns, and no less than 74 psalm settings. In addition he wrote 19 sacred villancicos, a form unique to the Iberian peninsula. Surviving secular music includes romances, letrillas, lirass, novenas, tonos, a folia, and 16 other works, some of which were collected in groups of madrigalss of the time; they were evidently popular in Spain in the early part of the 17th century.

His missa pro defunctis—the Requiem mass—is a formal and staid setting, contrasting to the intensely emotional setting by his Spanish contemporary Tomás Luis de Victoria, who wrote his at almost exactly the same time. Its use of cantus firmus technique is conservative, and even archaic; most cantus firmus masses had been written more than a hundred years before. Yet many of his masses and psalm settings are polychoral, borrowing the style of the contemporary Venetian school; however the musical language is of the late Renaissance, rather than the early Baroque, which was then developing in Italy and Germany.

Sources