Biography
Philippe Duc (born around 1550 in Flanders; died after 1586) was a Franco-Flemish composer of the Renaissance.
The date of birth and birth of Philippe Duc have not yet been determined by music historical research. No information has been passed on about his early days and his education. He spent most of his life in Italy, but it is not known when he arrived there. It is assumed that he lived in Padua for at least a certain time, because his first book with four-part madrigals in 1570 dedicated to the Flemish students living here. In this publication, he finds warm words for her and for the city of Padua. The composer apparently also had good connections to the House of Habsburg, because ten of his motets are contained in the first four volumes of the anthology Novi thesauri musici, a collection published by Pietro Joanelli in 1568 dedicated to Emperor Maximilian II. The records of the imperial chapel also note that Philippe Duc received a fee of 25 guilders in 1577 for the composition of two masses in honor of Emperor Maximilian. He dedicated his madrigal book from 1586 to Johann Jakob and Karl Kisl in Graz; these were the sons of the treasurer of the Austrian Archduke Karl. In addition, the minutes of some of his sacred works are under the manuscripts in Austrian archives. After 1586, the composer's trail is lost; when and where he died is still unknown today.
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Philippe Duc's sacred works, which are mainly handed down in connection with the Habsburg court, are essentially based on the Franco-Flemish tradition of his time in the succession of Jacobus Clemens non Papa; a more detailed investigation by musicology has yet to be carried out. His secular work, on the other hand, is relatively well known through the three traditional individual prints. Here you prefer to find those "light" elements that are typical of the student environment; in addition, there is also a tendency to parody. This is contained in the Bacchus hymn "Sequamini et socij", which also shows a mixture of different languages. Another example is the serenade "L'aria s'oscura", which quotes street songs and achieves a pseudo-dramatic effect through the rapid proclamation of voices; here the proximity to the style of Alessandro Striggio the Elder and Orazio Vecchi can be clearly seen. His cycle "Le vergini" with sonnets, madrigals and a canzone belongs to the type of spiritual madrigal. The final part of "Vergine non poss'io" is remarkable in that a kind of Cantus firmus with a structure-forming function is used here.
Biography text from Last.fm, available under CC BY-SA.