Review: The Josquin Research Project by Jesse Rodin and Craig Sapp

Abstract

The Josquin Research Project . Jesse Rodin, Project Director; Craig Sapp, Technical Director. URL: http://josquin.stanford.edu/ I wish I had had a tool like this twenty years ago. At about that time I was engaged on a stylistic analysis of the three-voice Mass in the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries as part of my doctoral studies.1 My aims were ambitious: to understand some fundamental changes in the way musical textures operated and were conceived across as broad a sample as possible of pieces with shared scoring and texts. It was painstaking work, involving the close study—aided only by pen and paper—of what I had selected as a corpus of “representative” scores. This produced some useful conclusions about changing approaches to musical texture: I was able to trace a steady if piecemeal shift toward an increasingly stratified and contrapuntally nonhierarchic texture, to plot some important steps in the germination of the imitative style and the conditions that stimulated it, and to witness some intriguing mismatches between empirically observable stylistic change and the lasting influence of the theoretical principle of the discant-tenor duo. My heuristic tools were patterns of ranges, the nature, degree, and frequency of tenor-contratenor part crossing, the incidence of large leaps, and imitation—basic parameters of structure and local compositional building blocks. The same kinds of material, in other words, that form the focus of the Josquin Research Project. But whereas my efforts involved many hours of close observation and counting, and equipment no more sophisticated than an electronic calculator, this resource, at the click of a few buttons, provides researchers with an array of data that can open up a broad and—in its extent and diversity—currently unforeseeable range of research trajectories. If my study was perforce limited by the sheer number of man-hours involved and inevitable repertorial choices, this body of material should, as it continues to expand in its remit, suffer from …