Review: Josquin's Rome: Hearing and Composing in the Sistine Chapel

Abstract

Josquin's Rome: Hearing and Composing in the Sistine Chapel , by Jesse Rodin. AMS Studies in Music. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. xxvi, 395 pp. Josquin's Rome is a terrific book. Detailed analysis of Renaissance music is still very hard to come by. It is therefore a real pleasure to read a book that engages with the actual notes in a detailed and persuasive way. Jesse Rodin provides lots of musical examples, with markings, ensuring that the analytical points are crystal clear. He makes every musical observation serve a larger argument, so the discussion never descends to boring lists of features or musical events. Rodin also provides access to recordings and scores of much of the music discussed in the book. The recordings are available in excellent performances on a commercially released CD sung by Rodin's own ensemble, Cut Circle, and on the Oxford University Press website.1 Where the musical examples can be found on the CD, the band number and the timing of the example within the band are shown in the margin. The website also includes downloadable scores edited by Rodin of all the pieces he discusses (scores for seven little-known liturgical works are found in appendices C and D of the book). Rodin is among the first to exploit these kinds of web resources in support of advanced musicological research. Even in the case of Patrick Macey's Bonfire Songs—another book on Renaissance music that is conceived to be read with both new editions and recordings to hand—the CD is included with the book but the scores are available only from A-R editions. We still have not seen the whole package (book, scores, recordings) in one place. I am looking forward to the day when we can read an ebook, click on the musical example and hear it performed, and then click again to see the example in its larger context within the whole musical work. As the first chapter of Rodin's …