Petrus Wilhelmi De Grudencz

Scant details of the life of Magister Petrus Wilhelmi de Grudencz have but slowly peeked through the mists of time. A man of that name studied at the famous University of Kraków (in modern-day Poland); he entered in 1418, yielding a birth date of 1400 or before; he achieved a bachelor's degree in 1425 and followed it with a master's in 1430. Much of the rest of Grudencz's life emerges in deductions from surviving appearances of his music, or from archival hints of his presence. Scholars presume that he lived in Vienna during the 1430s and 1440s, since a motet ascribed to him (Presulem aphabeatum) is in a Viennese manuscript from that time. King Friedrich III awarded him safe-conduct to Frankfurt in 1442, to attend the Imperial Diet. In that year as well, archival evidence appears of Grudencz as a priest in the Pomeranian diocese of Chelmno (Kulm). Other music that seems to be by the same composer survives in manuscripts of Czech provenance from the 1450s and 1460s, indicating his later presence in Silesia. The earliest set of manuscript partbooks anywhere, the Glogauer Liederbuch, contains a double-texted motet that may have been copied into the manuscript by the composer himself; since this motet also seems to be by Grudencz, he could thus have been alive to copy these books as late as 1480. Between 20 and 30 pieces of music have been ascribed to Grudencz; the recovery of his musical oeuvre has been hampered both by the lack of manuscript sources from Eastern Europe in the Renaissance and by a certain mystique surrounding the composer himself. Only one piece of his music has a proper composer attribution; many others have been discovered through his penchant for acrostics: some seven motets and 15 songs contain acrostics in the text bearing some form of the name Petrus Wilhelmi de Grudencz. He was particularly interested in composing polytextual Bohemian motets in an exuberant style derived from ars nova traditions (though they are not isorhythmic). Apparently Grudencz also crafted many of the clever Latin poetic texts to these works, which link his music to major events such as the Council of Basle (Pontifices ecclesiarum) and to individuals such as King Frederick III and the Silesian noble Andreas Ritter (Probitate eminentem -- Ploditando exarare). In the latter work, the two motet texts ironically work against one another in their musical setting, evidence of the great wit of Magister Wilhelmi.