Biography
A composer of vocal music from the Franco-Flemish tradition, Ciconia spent the greater part of his career working in Italy. He ranked among the foremost figures of the generation that bridged the intricate, rhythmically charged textures of the late Middle Ages with the clearer, more balanced lines that marked the onset of the Renaissance. Individual pieces display these contrasting idioms in differing proportions, and a number achieve a striking blend of both. Every form current in his day appears in his output, among them mass movements, motets, canons, virelais, madrigals, and ballatas. With his English contemporary Leonel Power he formed one of the two stylistic poles whose convergence produced the defining repertory of the Franco-Flemish Renaissance, the decisive act of synthesis falling to Guillaume Dufay.