Trying to start a fight, are you? LOL.

Which Renaissance?

Nicolai Montani?

Gesualdo was not a visionary genius, just incompetent?

Seriosly, have heard some preetty lame things about Orlando Gibbons' son, Christopher. E.g, Grove, "Gibbons excelled less as a composer than as an organ-player [...]"

Although he was contemporary with Froberger, so perhaps no longer Renaissance. I never know whether to think of his father as Renaissance, pre-Baroque, or just to classify him by English monarch.

If ANY composer from the Renaissance has music still in existence, that is no lame composition to have lasted that long.

Granted, some are better than others, but still... most of the lame Rennaissance composers are the wannabe emulators alive today (such as Charles is hinting at)

I discovered this item on CPDL just yesterday: "Lord thou hast commanded (Baruch Bulman)". The editor includes the note that it is "one of the less competent compositions from Tudor England". I had to stifle my laughter.

Haven't we all wanted to sing "for-ni-ca-ti-on" in semi-competent points of imitation?

That A. Nonymous wrote some of the worst stuff I have ever heard.

At least the composer had the good sense to omit the bits about "whoredom" found in the original text!

I would venture you are the only one here who could name an album by the Village People!

The problem with such a thread is that only the most musicological know the really poor composers, because they still languish in manuscript. And since the Renaissance style is so consistent, it's harder to tell 'just works" from good.

As a repertoire, the motets Attaignant was publishing in the 1530s are not "all that". There's some pretty incompetent stuff among some of the South American anonymi. But the worst Renaissance music was written in the 19th century. The ahistoric attempt to impose 18th-century Rome's taste on the Church, for all places and times, was extremely unfortunate.

The ahistoric attempt...

Amen and amen.

There was quite a slew of sisters and brothers and fathers in the late XIXth through rather late into the early XXth centuries who churned out one after another of faux-Palestrina masses and motets which, though they likely caused a great stir and gaggle of admiration from their brethren and sistern, were not worth the proverbial paper on which they had been printed. When originality and the probe of genius have exhausted the musical vocabulary and forms of a given epoch, only amateurish dilletantes will continue to churn out fakes charading as period meisterstucke. Why would anyone perform an uninspired (no matter that its composer likely thought herself inspired) Palestrinesque mass or motet rather than one that was actually Palestrina's? But they did.

Should the 'composers' of this genre be thought of as amongst 'the worst Renaissance commposers'? They certainly were not moderns in their day. They likely dreamed that they were composing Rennaisance music. It certainly was not the music of their own day. So, is their work bad Renaissance music? (???)

I used to be perplexed by the frequent consecutive and even parallel fifths in Renaissance keyboard writing: one finds a lot of it in Erbach, Hassler and especially egregious examples in Simon Lohet. One can learn to imagine fancy voice crossings or else just accept it as part of the instruments idiom.

[edit: Oops. He's Baroque. Excuse my attempts at trolling.]

I was going to say Monteverdi and Gesualdo at first last night. But worst is a relative term.

It would be interesting to figure out the point at which musicology reached the point of desiring to start "documenting" the good as well as the bad. I mean, stuff that they realized at the time was sub-par, but still decided to keep it. (We know that it was happening as early as the Polka Mass craze began.)

Purcell, as Chuck says, was a full-blown baroque composer.
He is worthy of the highest regard.
It was he who brought England 'into the modern world' musically.
His celebrated 'Voluntary for ye double organ' was surely
modeled after a French basse et dessus de trompette.

Could someone explain how Claude Greenmountain "makes" any list as a "worst composer?"

2 words: seconda pratica

2 words: seconda pratica

Well now, that was some prepared dissonance!

I may never forgive Felix for that! It was a Protestant conspiracy.