2021/10/19 by David Fallows · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · #Medieval Literature and History #Historical, Literary, and Cultural Studies #Art
paper · pdf · doi:10.1093/em/caab065
openalex publication_date 2021/10/19 · openalex created_date 2021/12/06 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/24
Until 1997 Josquin’s life seemed easy to understand. But in that year two major discoveries were announced. First, Pamela Starr showed that we had all been putting the start of his career in the papal chapel three years too early: the earliest supposed documents had him simply as ‘Jo. de pratis’, who turned out to be Johannes de Pratis, also known as Johannes Stockem from Liège. That seemed to be a small detail, however interesting. If it cut short his time in Rome by a few years, he was even so there for apparently ten years. But it did alert us to the possibility that further documents could concern other people with similar names. Then came the bombshell: the announcement by Paul Merkley and his wife, the much-lamented Lora Matthews, that the Josquin who had served in Milan Cathedral and then the Sforza court from 1459 to 1479 was not Josquin des Prez. Quite suddenly, the first 20 years of the composer’s career, always thought to have been spent in Italy, disappeared with a faint cry. There had been earlier hints that not everything was in place. In the 1980s two small documents were published apparently showing him in the southern French court of René of Anjou (Le bon roi René) when he should have been in Milan. And perhaps the turning point, at least for me, came in the early 1990s when a portrait of Jacob Obrecht came to light, stating that he was born in 1457–8. Since Obrecht’s music turns up in the sources slightly earlier than Josquin’s it made no sense to see him as 20 years younger than Josquin, then thought to have been born around 1440. Actually, the signs had been there even longer. Already in 1976 Jacquelyn Mattfeld had published an article asking why there was no trace of Milan’s Ambrosian chant in Josquin’s work if he had been there for the crucial first 20 years of his career. And a glance at the four well-known Gaffurius codices in Milan Cathedral shows that they contain many works of Weerbeke and Compère but not a note of Josquin until well after 1500. But from 1997 new Josquin documents came pouring in. Merkley and Matthews produced more from Milan as well as Ferrara, Condé and Aix-en-Provence. Adalbert Roth found new papal documents. Rob C. Wegman found surprising details in Troyes. Bruno Bouckaert found two stunning new documents in Cambrai: one of them led the way to seeing that Josquin was a choirboy there and the other more or less conclusively showed that he left the papal chapel very soon after the documents there run out in 1494, thereby reducing his Rome years from the previous twelve to only five. And finally Herbert Kellman succeeded in finding many details about Josquin’s father and grandfather. That had been an amazing roller-coaster ride. How I had the hubris to submit my own book Josquin to the publishers in 2008, I cannot remember. But the astonishing coincidence is that from that moment the documents dried up. And twelve years later, for the book’s paperback reprint (2020), I was able to state that not a single new document about Josquin has emerged since. The new story still has many gaps and much guesswork, but it is far more colourful than what we had previously. On a conservative estimate, he served at least four kings and two popes. The old story, with its 20 years in Milan and twelve years in Rome, was thoroughly Italian-based. The new story takes him to Cambrai, to Aix-en-Provence, to Paris, to Milan, to Vienna (!), to Condé and probably even to Spain. The emphasis is no longer on Italy but is fully international with a focus on France and the Low Countries. As concerns the matter of ‘true or false’ Josquin, the key moment for some of us came ten years earlier, in 1987, when Joshua Rifkin and Jaap van Benthem showed independently and by different means that Absalon fili mi was almost certainly not by Josquin. This motet was perhaps the all-time favourite among commentators and particularly in general histories. (It was the single work chosen for facsimile in the Josquin article for the 1980 Grove.) But that story began much earlier. Already in 1540, less than 20 years after Josquin’s death, Georg Forster remarked that ‘I recall a certain great man saying that now Josquin is dead he is writing more compositions than when he was still alive’. And Zarlino tells us that in about 1515 the young Adrian Willaert heard his own six-voice Verbum bonum sung by the papal chapel, who thought it was by Josquin and promptly dropped it from their repertory on learning the truth. And the story continued. Albert Smijers in his Werken van Josquin des Prés (1922–69) already left out many pieces he thought spurious, among them, as it happens, Absalon fili mi (which would have been the first piece in the first fascicle edited after his death by Miroslav Antonowycz, for which we must assume that Antonowycz had received a groundplan). Later Edgar Sparks dismissed six motets (1971) and the Mass Da pacem (1972)—this last at the time the most often performed and recorded of all Josquin’s Masses. There is a crack circulating on the social media that the quintessential pointless musicological paper has the title ‘Is this work by Josquin?’ And the same crack turns up in a new influential book about musicology. But in my view this is among the most challenging and urgent questions we have, partly because Josquin was a towering figure, partly because there were so many other towering figures in his generation, and partly because the questioning forces us to look at the music in ever greater detail. So it is good to have a new considered statement on the matter in this issue from Jesse Rodin and Joshua Rifkin, two of today’s leading figures in Josquin research. I happen to disagree passionately with many of their decisions; but I welcome their statement all the same. Another matter that remains urgent concerns chronology. When Claudio Sartori produced the documents on Josquin at Milan in 1956, everybody went into shock. Gustave Reese brought out a ‘revised edition’ of his Music in the Renaissance (1954; rev. 1959) mainly to take account of these new details. (In his ‘Preface to the Revised Edition’ he also mentions new material on the lives of Ciconia and Obrecht, but I cannot see any changes in those sections.) And Helmuth Osthoff had to propose drastic new chronologies for his article in Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (1957) and his two-volume monograph (1962–5) on the composer. Since the abolition of the ‘Milan years’ in 1997, many of us have been at work trying to restore common sense to the picture of Josquin’s output. Among the most disputed works is the five-voice acrostic motet Illibata Dei virgo nutrix. For Osthoff and Sparks it seemed around 1470, despite having no source earlier than about 1495; and that remains my own view. But Joshua Rifkin in an unpublished conference paper of 1978 proposed that it was from the late 1490s despite its resemblance to the style of Busnoys and Du Fay in the years around 1470; and Richard Sherr laid out the details of the argument in 1988. Rifkin and I have been arguing about this one (alongside much else) for perhaps 35 years; so it is good at last to see his detailed discussion of the matter in this issue. Much rests on the brilliance of the counterpoint, which Rifkin explores in marvellously illuminating detail, even though he long ago asserted that Josquin ‘began as Josquin’. I still think that if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck there is a good chance that it’s a duck. Relief of Josquin des Prez, in Henry Hugh Armstead’s Frieze of Parnassus (1872) on the Albert Memorial, London (photo © Jacob Mariani) But as concerns looking at the music in extra detail, John Milsom’s contribution does precisely that, with highly surprising results. It has been marvellous reading these articles, and I hope others will feel similarly stimulated. Meanwhile, though, can anybody tell me how a statue of Josquin appears on the Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens? (See the photograph on this page and on this issue’s front cover.) It plainly derives from Opmeer’s woodcut of 1611 and stands on the south face among the great French and Italian composers: Auber, Méhul, Rameau, Lully, Grétry, Monteverdi, Carissimi and Palestrina (all beautifully identified on the statues). They were carved by Henry Hugh Armstead (1872), a close colleague of the monument’s main designer, Sir Gilbert Scott. I have no information that either Armstead or Scott had any special interest in music, let alone in Josquin; but then you underestimate the broad learning of those Victorians at your peril.