Josquin Desprez Research Articles

La “musica degli angeli”: Josquin Desprez al liceo

Music and singing, which are present in every form of worship in the Christian rite, have acquired from the outset a very particular connotation, in which Jewish tradition and Neoplatonism have merged: every musical manifestation in the liturgy has as its model the perennial praise given to God from the angelic choirs. This conception, combined with the Pythagorean doctrine of the harmony of the spheres, informed throughout the Middle Ages fundamentals aspects of music theory and the aesthetic frame of reference for every sound manifestation, especially in devotional contexts (Gregorian chant, polyphony).The Neo-Platonic Judeo-Christian approach to music, which was associated with a cosmological conception based on music regulated by arithmetical relationships, informed compositional techniques and formal organization of music from the Carolingian era onwards. It is also reflected in great works of art, in architectural solutions in the sacred buildings, and found a scenic manifestation in the first liturgical dramas. Moreover, it was the prototype of the structure of Dante’s Paradise in the Divine Commedy. This essay offers an interpretation of the motet for 24 voices Qui habitat by Josquin Desprez as grounded in these philosophical and aesthetic tenets linking composers from Middle Ages to the Renaissance and presenting still today an extraordinary model of trans-disciplinary education (music, philosophy, art history, literature), when the aim is to preserve exchange and communication among the arts.

Modern Illuminations in Poetry and Music: Charles Wuorinen's Ashberyana

MODERN ILLUMINATIONS IN POETRY AND MUSIC: CHARLES WUORINEN’S ASHBERYANA SARAH ROTHENBERG OURTEEN YEARS AFTER ITS CREATION, Charles Wuorinen’s Ashberyana stands as a tour-de-force of musical text-setting, bringing together, to mutual benefit, the work of two contemporaneous artists at the height of their powers. Wuorinen’s compositional agility, wit and deep understanding of English language poetry rise to the idiosyncratic challenges of John Ashbery’s poetic genius. The resultant work, composed in 2005, is a transparent and illuminating marriage of music and text in which the audacious inventiveness of each artist shines with diamond-sharp brilliance. This year, as we celebrate Charles Wuorinen’s 80th birthday, we also mourn the death of John Ashbery, who died this past September at the age of 90. Eleven years apart in age, these two men, distinct in personality, share key attributes: towering intellects, fierce artistic independence, and profound historical knowledge of their respective art forms. (As well as a taste for dry martinis.) Thoroughly committed to modernism, each possesses a rare historical sense of his own place in the larger trajectory of his respective art-form—the embodiment of F 248 Perspectives of New Music authentic artistic personality as outlined by T. S. Eliot in his seminal essay, Tradition and the Individual Talent. Eliot argues that true originality does not spontaneously appear, but is tied to an understanding of the past; even if the brilliance of innovation seems completely new, a seeming rebellion against all that is current, the sustainability of such brilliance is tied to an understanding of tradition: [Tradition] cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature . . . has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.1 This keen knowledge of artistic past, in both Wuorinen and Ashbery, provides the foundation for daring originality—both of these artists understand what has preceded the moment into which they are born. John Ashbery was quietly erudite, an insatiably curious reader who continually dug into the past, with a refined taste for the obscure, from such early surrealist poets as Raymond Roussel back to medieval times. He was also a great music-lover, with a large and diverse record collection , who cultivated a special penchant for forgotten composers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in addition to following his musical contemporaries. He wrote eloquently and prolifically about painting, was active as an art critic in the 1960s, and shared deep friendships with many artists of his time. Associated with a rigorous modernism, Wuorinen’s concept of the modern is one in which tradition holds with innovation. Occasional overt homages to music of the medieval, renaissance, and classical traditions have figured throughout his compositional career, as evidenced in such early works as Two Lute Songs of Thomas Campion (1956) and Salve Regina: John Bull (1966); several works inspired by the Renaissance genius Josquin Desprez—Josquin: Ave Christe (1988), Josquiniana (2002), Ave Maria . . . Virgo Serena (Josquin) (2007)— Jan’s Dowland (2014); and, recently, cadenzas for a Haydn piano concerto, which were preceded over five decades ago, in 1965, by cadenzas to a Mozart concerto. These tributes, besides being delightful musical works, serve as a gracious acknowledgement of techniques that have informed Wuorinen’s approach to composition. Modern Illuminations in Poetry and Music 249 With his deep respect for craft, Wuorinen’s roots go back to the two seminal modernists of the last century, Schoenberg and Stravinsky—as testament, their photographs sit side by side on a music stand in his study. Wuorinen absorbed the late works of Stravinsky with such depth that they become a springboard for his own distinctive style; this was recognized in his tribute of 1975, A Reliquary for Igor Stravinsky, in which Wuorinen received...

VUZALIZER: A Max/MSP Object for Real-time Generation of RCMC Canons

Regular Complementary Canons of Maximal Category (RCMC) or Vuza Canons were introduced to the musical world with Dan Tudor Vuza's seminal papers at the pnm Conference in the 1990s. Musicians have always been intrigued by canon construction, q.v. the complex polyphony of the Flemish composer Josquin Desprez or the contrapuntal techniques of Johann Sebastian Bach, whose properties have been translated into formal algebraic terms. Nowadays the process of building mosaic canons can be implemented using programming languages allowing composers to use these extremely complex macro-structures. In this paper we will discuss our algorithm that allows composers to create and directly manage RCMC Canons. In addition, we will describe VUZALIZER, a Max/MSP object which generates Vuza Canons.

Elaboração mensural e motivicidade no Agnus Deida Missa L’homme Armé Super Voces Musicalesde Josquin Desprez

Este trabalho consiste na análise das elaborações mensurais e aspectos da periodicidade motívica presentes no Agnus Dei da Missa L’homme Armé Super Voces Musicales de Josquin Desprez. A análise é fundamentada a partir dos apontamentos sobre cânones mensurais realizados por Glareanus (Dodechocordon, 1547), Bellermann (Mensuralnoten und Taktzeichen des XV. und XVI. Jahrhunderts, 1906), Apel (The Notation of Polyphonic Music 900-1600, 1949) e por meio dos conceitos da ‘Motivicidade’ de Joshua Rifkin e ‘Agrupamentos Sonoros Plenos’ de Marcos Pupo Nogueira, elucidando características das estratégias composicionais utilizadas pelo compositor.

Who Composed the Missa Cueur langoreulx? The Case for Mathurin Forestier

The anonymous five-voice Missa Cueur langoreulx, which survives uniquely in a manuscript emanating from the atelier of Petrus Alamire, is an early example of a mass based on a polyphonic work by Josquin Desprez. At its heart lies an ingenious suite of ever-changing fuga-canons that rework and develop the one on which Josquin structured his five-voice chanson Cueur langoreulx. Through analysis of the canons and critical scrutiny of the polyphony, we conclude that the Missa Cueur langoreulx may be by the enigmatic Mathurin Forestier, an early sixteenth-century composer who lacks a secure biography, but who is known from his attributed works to have had a keen interest both in complex canons and in Josquin’s music, and whose masses feature in a number of Alamire manuscripts.

A Sixteenth-Century Example of Josquin Emulation: The Anonymous Missa Cueur langoreulx and its Source

Among the twenty-two anonymous masses contained in the so-called Alamire manuscripts is an unedited canonic, five-voice Missa Cueur langoreulx. Th e mass is unique to MontsM 766 (a manuscript thought to have been sent to Charles V in Spain). The model for this mass is identified as a chanson by Josquin Desprez and the relationship between the mass and its model is examined. An analysis of MontsM 766 suggests a purpose and theme of the manuscript, and situates the Missa Cueur langoreulx in the context of its sole source. In order to determine the composer’s working methods and to relate the mass to sixteenth-century polyphonic tradition, this paper explores the anonymous composer’s treatment of his borrowed material, as well as the modal, mensural, and thematic structure of the mass in comparison to that of the chanson. In addition to bringing a previously unknown mass based on a little-discussed chanson by a major Renaissance composer to attention, this study refines our knowledge of polyphonic borrowing ...

Tristre plaisir et douloureuse joie. Die Stimme der Melancholie in der französischen Chanson des 15. jahrhunderts

In the late Middle Ages, melancholy was often regarded as a pathological disease to which music provided the cure; music, by its very nature, being exhilarating and of a convivial nature. Even Marsilio Ficino, who almost single-handedly re-evaluated the state of melancholy as being the sign of a great genius, used music only to soften his melancholic mind, not to conjure melancholy up. But in the literary and musical practice of the French chanson during the fifteenth century, melancholy was regarded as a kind of idolorous joy long before Ficino published his influential treatises — and music served as a means of the first importance to cultivate (and relish) one’s own melancholy. This is shown by a discussion of texts by Guillaume de Machaut, Alain Chartier, Jean Froissart or Rene d’Anjou, but primarily through an analysis of some of the most important chansons of the fifteenth and early sixteenth century: Gilles Binchois’ Tristre plaisir (on a text by Alain Chartier); Pierre de la Rue’s Pourquoy non and Josquin Desprez’ Plaine de deuil and Nimphes, nappes/Circumdederunt me. Not only the texts by themselves but the specific ways in which their musical settings ›tune‹ them, give voice(s) to their lyrical subjects, are analysed in various ways.

Tristre plaisir et douloureuse joie. The Voice of Melancholy in the French Chanson of the Fifteenth Century

In the late Middle Ages, melancholy was often regarded as a pathological disease to which music provided the cure; music, by its very nature, being exhilarating and of a convivial nature. Even Marsilio Ficino, who almost single-handedly re-evaluated the state of melancholy as being the sign of a great genius, used music only to soften his melancholic mind, not to conjure melancholy up. But in the literary and musical practice of the French chanson during the fifteenth century, melancholy was regarded as a kind of dolorous joy long before Ficino published his influential treatises — and music served as a means of the first importance to cultivate (and relish) one’s own melancholy. This is shown by a discussion of texts by Guillaume de Machaut, Alain Chattier, Jean Froissait or Rene d’Anjou, but primarily through an analysis of some of the most important chansons of the fifteenth and early sixteenth century: Gilles Binchois’ Tristre plaisir (on a text by Alain Chartier); Pierre de la Rue’s Pourquoy non and Josquin Desprez’ Plaine de deuil and Nimphes, nappes/Circumdederunt me. Not only the texts by themselves but the specific ways in which their musical settings ›tune‹ them, give voice(s) to their lyrical subjects, are analysed in various ways.

Richard Strauss: A Musical Life by Raymond Holden (review)

GERMANS Richard Strauss: A Musical Life. By Raymond Holden. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011. [xiii, 316 p. ISBN 9780300126426. $35.] Illustra - tions, appendices (including discography), bibliography, index.Until quite recently-perhaps only the last two or three decades-the history of Western music has been viewed primarily through the prism of written, prescriptive composition. Composers who created the immortal canon that all students and admirers of classical art music have been taught to revere were privileged above all other sorts of musicians, even though it is almost impossible to find a canonical figure who did not act at some time or another as a performer, conductor, administrator, impresario, copyist, publisher, editor, critic, theorist, teacher, or anything else that might further a career, promote particular musical works, or improve one's financial fortunes. Textbooks usually acknowledged that Josquin Desprez was also a singer, J. S. Bach an overworked church musician, Joseph Haydn a busy administrator of the Esterhazy orchestra, W. A. Mozart an enterprising pianist and concert promoter, Robert Schumann a provocative writer and critic, and Gustav Mahler a demanding conductor, among many other possible examples, but notice of these and similar non-compositional activities by numerous other musicians was usually made with the implication that these tasks were somehow asides or even impediments to the higher calling-in the nineteenth century's formulation-of composition. The typical view of Mahler's career, for example, states that he [took] up the baton from sheer necessity (Deryck Cooke, Gustav Mahler: An Introduction to His Music [Cambridge: Cam bridge University Press, 1980], 8). It is only quite recently that his efforts as a conductor and opera administrator have received serious scholarly attention on their own merits, rather than being glossed over as mere obstacles to his real work, the composition of symphonic masterworks.The career of Richard Strauss, Mahler's contemporary, has been examined with similar emphases. Strauss's biographers have naturally been drawn first to his handful of orchestral tone poems, more than a dozen operas, and several score of Lieder, all of which are cornerstones in their respective repertoires, and those compositions have regularly served as the framework for the recounting of his life. His long career also embraced performance on the podium and at the piano, the leadership and administration of at least a half-dozen significant musical organizations, and work as an advocate for concert music, composers' rights, and copyright reform. These activities have been discussed to one degree or another in the many biographies of Strauss-including several excellent ones written for the fiftieth anniversary of his death in 1999-but the focus in all such studies has invariably remained on his compositional output.Against that background, this new biography of Strauss is a significant addition to the literature. Its author, Raymond Holden, has written frequently in the past fifteen years about Strauss's activities as a conductor, and this single volume brings together many of Holden's studies in combination with a compact outline of Strauss's life and a sizeable number of appendices. In fact, the supporting documentation amounts to well over a third of this book, with extensive (although not exhaustive) listings of Strauss's regular appearances as a conductor (appendix 1) and facsimile extracts from a few of Strauss's own marked scores (appendix 5) as the most important. Holden also includes his own translation of the Munich Intendant Ernst von Possart's detailed description of Strauss's important 1896 revival of Don Giovanni (appendix 2), a thoroughgoing explication of Strauss's reworking of Mozart's Idomeneo (appendix 3), and a list of Strauss's primarily commercial recordings (appendix 4). Collectively, these supporting items are new and critically important resources for anyone interested in Strauss's work as a conductor. …

Two mid-16th-century manuscripts of polyphonic music from Brno

A preliminary investigation into the repertory of the Brno manuscripts has focused on a description and analysis of their contents and an examination of how the repertory reflects liturgical practices at the parish church of St James in Brno around 1550. By this time the town community had largely turned to Lutheranism, although unofficially and somewhat covertly due to Brno's status as a royal town. As a result of these unique confessional circumstances, only a small amount of archival material relating to the parish church and school has been preserved. Nevertheless, it is clear that liturgical books originating from the end of the 15th century were still used in the middle of the 16th century, and the polyphonic repertory (Josquin Desprez, Isaac, Brumel, De La Rue, Finck, Stoltzer and others) gathered in these manuscripts was intended to supplement the monophonic repertory.

Josquin (review)

Reviewed by: Josquin Stephanie P. Schlagel Josquin. By David Fallows. (Collection Épitome Musical.) Turnhout: Brepols, 2009. [xvii, 522 p. ISBN 9782503530659. $138.] Music examples, illustrations, maps, appendices, bibliography, index. Nearly ten years ago I wrote in this space: "[A]n extended narrative of Josquin's oeuvre would indeed be a foolish undertaking at this point in time" (review of The Josquin Companion, ed. Richard Sherr [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000], Notes 58, no. 4 [June 2002]: 822). Musicologists were deep into the project of reediting Josquin's complete output and had called into question the authenticity of some of his most beloved works when newly discovered biographical facts turned the entire enterprise on its head. Josquin the composer was teased apart from several doppelgänger and we learned his full legal name, Josquin Lebloitte dit Desprez. Armed with this information, archival researchers (notably Lora Matthews and Paul Merkely, among others) were able to document his early whereabouts more thoroughly, revise our understanding of his service to the Milanese cardinal Ascanio Sforza, and establish the dates of his tenure at the Papal Chapel. Most significantly, the discoveries enabled us to escape the uncomfortable but difficult-to-refute extrapolation that he had been born in the early 1440s. In sum, by 2000, all scholarship concerning Josquin's career before 1489 became wrong. A solid biography as well as important details of Josquin's employment, procurement of benefices, and sojourns is now firmly established. Though gaps remain and significant disagreement concerning the authenticity and chronology of some major works continues, the picture has stabilized enough to merit a reconsideration of Josquin's development as a composer in light of archival research, manuscript studies, and style-critical debates (many unpublished) that have emerged at a dizzying pace within the last ten years. David Fallows takes on the task in the first major monograph on Josquin since Helmuth Osthoff's two-volume study (Josquin Desprez [Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1965-67]), and the first ever in English. Following the traditional life-and-works model, in each chapter Fallows first considers the evidence establishing Josquin's place of employment in a given period, then discusses repertory he assigns to that time. Fallows goes beyond summarizing his own or others' findings, instead creating a narrative out of disparate primary and secondary sources and elegantly filling gaps: where Josquin received his earliest training; where he was between the appointments to René d'Anjou and Ascanio Sforza; when he departed the Papal chapel, and where he was from then until 1503. He explains inconsistencies in both familiar and newly discovered documents. Case by case, he considers claimed sightings of Josquin in locations that seem to conflict with this framework by logically explaining them or dismissing them as references to people other than our Josquin: thus, Josquin Desprez could not have been the Josquin who was transporting dogs between the Gonzaga family and Ascanio Sforza in 1498 and 1499, but it is physically possible for our guy to have travelled from Ferrara to Condé in eleven days. There may be truth to Heinrich Glarean's stories of how Josquin came to write Memor esto verbi tui and Guillaume se va chauffer; this is a matter not of confused Josquins but rather of misidentified kings (Louis XI and Louis XII). Most exciting is Fallows's assertion concerning Josquin's training prior to entering [End Page 506] the service of René d'Anjou. Fallows rejects anecdotes naming Josquin as a choirboy and later master of music at St. Quentin (though he did at one time hold a canonry there). Instead, he connects several documents that together establish him as an altar boy until 1466 in Cambrai—not at the cathedral, but at the collegiate church of St. Géry—putting the young musician in direct contact with Guillaume Du Fay. Generally Fallows avoids issues of authenticity, reserving analysis for confidently accepted works (p. 100), and he is cautious about deriving biographical details from the music. But placing Josquin in Cambrai at the same time as Du Fay reopens the case of Missa L'ami baudichon, the attribution of which has been doubted in recent years because, among other reasons, its writing (with its...

<i>Inter-American Music Review</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Inter-American Music Review John G. Lazos Inter-American Music Review. Vol. 17–18 (2007–8). Concordis Modulationis Ordo Ismael Fernández de La Cuesta In Honorem. [Festschrift in honor of Royal Academician Don Ismael Fernández de La Cuesta.] 2 vols. ix, 366 pp.; xii, 526 pp. For some time Ismael Fernández de la Cuesta y González de Prado (b. 1939), the renowned professor of plainchant and musicology at the Real Conservatorio Superior de Música de Madrid, has drawn particular attention to Iberian music. Then in 2005, preeminent musicologist Robert Stevenson, Editor of Inter-American Music Review, invited Hispano-American and Spanish collaborators to participate in this tribute to Fernández de la Cuesta. Friends and colleagues from all over the world, including musicologists, performers, composers, music critics, historians, and linguists responded to the invitation. Those scholars that Stevenson has long since encouraged have proven to be fertile advocates for Hispanic music. This Spanish music, enriched by a Mozarabic influence moved beyond its original borders, passed long ago the Atlantic, to become into the “music from the Americas.” 1 The first volume of this multilingual (English, Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese) Festschrift comprises 31 articles and 4 book reviews. The second volume comprises 33 articles (2 in English, the rest in Spanish) as well as 2 music compositions and an up-dated biography of the honoree. Altogether, these volumes contain a rich array of subjects, which vary in length from 3 to 56 pages. Set in chronological order, from medieval Hispanic liturgy to contemporary scholarship, emphasis is placed in the periods of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Considering the number of articles assembled, it is necessary to follow the old saying “para muestra solo basta un botón.” For this review, three articles have been chosen from each volume. Lorenzo Candelaria lucidly resolves the obscurity of a liturgical choir book in “The Mystery of the Rosary Cantorales: A Study in Attribution.” The intrigue relates to a manuscript acquired by Yale University in 1989 that had been known only by its call number: Ms 710 from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Candelaria has solved the riddle of its provenance that was thought to be either Flemish or Italian; in fact, it is a Spanish Kyriale. Among its 103 folios is included a four-part polyphonic work titled Et incarnates est, originally attributed to “Jusquin,” it is no other than Josquin Desprez’s Missa sine nominee. What is more, this is “the only Josquin Mass material preserved in an American library” (26). While she confesses to not being a Hispanist, Susan McClary’s “Mediterranean Trade Routes and Music of the Early Seventeenth Century” poses several pointed questions about the “so-called New Musicology” (135). As she notices, the structure of this orderly canon have excluded music from many other traditions, including Spanish. McClary’s reading of Girolamo [End Page 270] Frescobaldi’s score for “Maddalena alla Croce”, which is included, refers to Fernand Braudel’s provocative writings. 2 The Arabic influence, evident in the Hispanic music tradition as in current matters (she reminds 9/11 date), is certainly present in the “blatant eroticism of this little piece [which] scandalizes many present-day listeners” (137). McClary connects this Mediterranean influence, referred to by Braudel, in the Frecobaldi’s score, showing how our conventions have ignored it because of the prevailing dichotomy between the sacred and the sexual. Elisabeth Le Guin acknowledges in “Un ofrecimiento extranjero” that, as someone educated in the Anglo-Saxon system, she did not have much awareness of Hispanic music. She makes the astute point that if there is no awareness, there is no interest. Fortunately, for Le Guin, her awareness of Hispanic music changed while following the history of Luigi Boccherini’s decision to move in 1768 to Spain from Paris. As historians, the author notes, we are molded by the periods we study and, yet, as foreigners, we can bring a fresh perspective to the field. What Boccherini’s opera 9 has to offer, apart from its impressive musical cosmopolitism, is a redefinition of “Italianism no less than Spaniard, as parallel elements” (202). This is what...

Lorenzo Candelaria . The Rosary Cantoral: Ritual and Social Design in a Chantbook from Early Renaissance Toledo.(Eastman Studies in Music.)Rochester, N.Y. : University of Rochester Press . 2008 . Pp. x, 212. $55.00.

Liturgy, as well as being a vital ingredient in both the exercise of power and the construction of local identities, is fundamental to understanding how music and ceremony actually worked in early modern civic and devotional contexts. This was most obviously true of the period before the Council of Trent, when the church resolved to abolish all local liturgies less than two hundred years old. Even after Trent, festal calendars could be revised to incorporate new cults, while patron saints of minor importance in the Roman calendar continued to assume greater weight in their specific geographical and institutional environments, much as they had done in the years before reform. Lorenzo Candelaria's high-quality manuscript, finely illuminated in the Franco-Flemish style, is a characteristic expression of this dynamic. Copied between 1500 and 1520 for the Rosary Confraternity of the Dominican monastery of San Pedro Mártir in Toledo, most of whose members worked in the silk trade, its original layer mostly consists of chants for the Ordinary of the Mass together with a handful of sequences, antiphons, and tracts. Unusually for the period, most of the chants are decorated by tropes, ornamental additions to the basic chant which by this date had largely fallen out of use. To this central core of melodies, which establish Toledan usage, further additions were made in the course of the sixteenth century, among them further tracts whose texts are in accordance with the reformed Medicean Gradual of 1614–1615. Finally, a third hand has inserted two pieces of four-voice polyphony, probably towards the end of the sixteenth century; one is an unidentified setting of the “Et incarnatus est” section from the credo section of an unknown Mass based on the popular “L'homme armé” melody, the other the setting of the same text taken from the Missa Sine Nomine by Josquin Desprez, a major composer whose works continued to be disseminated in Spanish sources long after his death in 1520. Now in the Beinecke Library at Yale, which bought it from the Connecticut book dealer Laurence Witten, who sold a great deal of early printed and manuscript material, the Beinecke Kyriale is in fact the only source for any of Josquin's music in North America.

Josquin's Qui habitat and the Psalm Motets

Traditional methods of stylistic analysis may be useful for delimiting repertories and musical genres on the basis of common features, but they have proved inadequate to the task of distinguishing between general style traits that a composer may choose to cultivate and the compositional voice that is uniquely his own. Particularly relevant in this regard are the questions raised by compositions ascribed to Josquin Desprez. Examples from among the psalm motets that bear his name in the sources illustrate the usefulness of stylistic criteria in establishing affinities shared by a group of works and, conversely, the radically different conclusions that have been drawn by scholars working in the field regarding specific pieces as to their composer and the date of their composition. This circumstance has apparently led to an increased reliance on source-critical criteria for accepting or rejecting Josquin's authorship. Josquin's Qui habitat in adiutorio Altissimi, one of the most widely circulated and securely attributed of the psalm motets that carry the composer's name, serves as a paradigm for identifying compositional procedures that go beyond the stylistic generalities shared by Josquin and his immediate contemporaries (i.e., traits in use everywhere that could be imitated with comparative ease by a skilled composer) and that can therefore be understood as elements of Josquin's unique compositional voice. The most striking feature of this sort in Qui habitat is a skillful and ingenious use of a variety of iterative procedures, including internal repetitions that appear to be largely wanting in the music of his contemporaries even in their use of syntactic imitation. Owing to their close identification with the composer's unique idiom, such procedures furnish a touchstone for determining the reliability of the attributions in the sources. Specifically, their presence in the small repertory of psalm motets that appear to have been more or less universally admitted to the Josquin canon provides a basis for comparison with a number of works whose attributions to Josquin have been questioned.

The Rosary Cantoral. Ritual and Social Design in a Chantbook from Early Renaissance Toledo

The Rosary Cantoral is a rare and beautifully decorated manuscript of Latin plainchant for the Catholic Mass compiled in Toledo, Spain, around the year 1500. In an engaging and richly interdisciplinary essay, Lorenzo Candelaria approaches the Rosary Cantoral as a cultural artifact, unlocking the secrets behind its images and music to reveal the social history and rituals of an elite brotherhood dedicated to the rosary and aspects of the religious community it served: the Dominicans of San Pedro Martir de Toledo.The Rosary Cantoral: Ritual and Social Design in a Chantbook from Early Renaissance Toledo presents a model for realizing the fuller significance of illuminated music manuscripts as cultural artifacts and offers unprecedented insights into the social and devotional life of Toledo, Spain, around the turn of the sixteenth century. After solving the mystery of the Rosary Cantoral's origins, subsequent essays probe the meaning and cultural significance of the manuscript's iconography (including a border decoration after Albrecht Durer), its rare Spanish chants for the Mass, and two striking musical works for multiple voices (one by Josquin Desprez and another on L'homme arme).Ultimately, this book focuses on the extraordinary circumstances that engendered the compilation of the Rosary Cantoral around 1500: a system of patronage between a brotherhood of suspected heretics and a religious house that was a key supporter of the Inquisition in Toledo. Lorenzo Candelaria (University of Texas at Austin) is co-author of American Music: A Panorama.

Music in the Collective Experience in Sixteenth-Century Milan (review)

Reviewed by: Music in the Collective Experience in Sixteenth-Century Milan Stephen Rice Music in the Collective Experience in Sixteenth-Century Milan. By Christine Suzanne Getz. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. [xii, 313 p. ISBN 0-7546-5121-5. $99.95]. Illustrations, music examples, appendices, bibliography, index. Christine Suzanne Getz, professor at the University of Iowa, has in recent years made notable contributions to the history of music in the Duchy of Milan during the sixteenth century (including articles in Musica disciplina, Studi musicali, Early Music History, and the Journal of the Royal Musical Association). The present volume builds on these studies (repeating parts of their content on occasion) and provides a comprehensive view of music making in the region. Getz draws on much previously unknown archival material, as well as discussing significant quantities of music, most of it unavailable in modern editions. Judging from the book's title, the reader would expect to find a study in the radically democratizing vein of Reinhard Strohm's Music in Late Medieval Bruges (2d ed. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990]), in which the historical agenda is wrested away from an elite culture that had dominated earlier musicology, to focus instead on the "sound-scape" of the city in its exuberant patchwork. The titles, preambles, and conclusions of Getz's chapters point strongly in this direction. That the rest of the book largely does not do so is in itself no weakness: much of the information she provides [End Page 595] is extremely valuable, and some of it fascinating. The majority of what she has to say in the body of each chapter concerns archival discoveries (of which there are many) linked with a thorough command of secondary literature; as such her book can more readily be viewed as a contribution to, rather than a rethinking of, existing scholarship. The attempt to situate the study in the revisionist camp therefore gives rise to a somewhat uneasy historiography, in which archival material that by its nature casts light more on courtly culture than demotic is pressed into the service of the "collective consciousness" of the book's title. An example of the chapter headings, compared with its contents, will illustrate this point. Chapter 3, "The Civic Ceremonial at the Duomo of Milan," discusses (as might be expected) the maestri di cappella and the fluctuating forces of the cathedral choir, proceeding to examine in detail two sets of music generated in the service of the institution: Hermann Matthias Werrecore's motet book published in 1555, and the Mass settings of Vincenzo Ruffo. All of these aspects of the cathedral's music are essential to any such study: what is not clear is how Getz's claims about them are substantiated. Of Werrecore's motet book she writes: the motet cycle, a genre that was associated specifically with Renaissance Milan, functioned, by its very nature, as an expression of Milanese civic identity, and this particular expression of artistic patriotism was fostered at the Duomo 'in medio ecclesiae.' (p. 108) The notion that the motet cycle was peculiarly Milanese arises from the short-lived subgenre of the motetti missales; in Werrecore's collection, however, there are no such pieces (and Getz acknowledges this, p. 105). Instead the book contains a setting of the hymn Ave maris stella—unusually, of all seven verses—and a multipartite Improperia, as well as the sequence-motet Inviolata, integra et casta es, Maria, in which Werrecore, like most sixteenth-century imitators, follows Josquin Desprez in dividing the text into three sections. Since all of these texts are quite frequently set at this time, as are the majority of the unipartite pieces contained in the motet book, no specifically Milanese agenda emerges from its contents, and it is still unclear how they might unite the "collective consciousness" rather than simply serving the cathedral's liturgy. The term in medio ecclesiae, moreover, is taken to embody the daily function of the Duomo (irrespective of whether particular services were in fact held in the center of the building) in contrast to the cathedral's role as the physical center of the city (in medio civitatis) and hence, following the book's title, its spiritual heart...

The Sounds of Milan, 1585-1650 (review)

The Sounds of Milan, 1585-1650. By Robert L. Kendrick. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. [xxi, 528 p. ISBN 0-19-513537-7. $74.] Music examples, bibliography, index. For most musicologists, Milan between the ages of Josquin Desprez and Giovanni Battista Sammartini is term incognita. Perhaps surprisingly, the best-known composer of the period is the nun Chiara Margarita Cozzolani, discussed in detail in Robert Kendrick's Celestial Sirens: Nuns and Their Music in Early Modern Milan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), and who quickly became a staple on the early music concert circuit. In his latest book, the author, an associate professor at the University of Chicago, explores in depth the sacred musical culture of this northern Italian metropolis in its religious, political, social, and artistic context (excepting the contributions of the nuns, and with the addition of a few remarks on secular vocal and instrumental music). This study is based on extensive research in the libraries and archives of Milan and elsewhere. The documents and books the author has studied are not limited to those concerned directly with music, but also with other aspects of the religious, social, and cultural activities of the city. Although most of the composers found in this densely packed volume are obscure, and will likely remain so, Kendrick convincingly demonstrates that within its own local sphere, Milan in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries had a musical life as rich and varied as those of Rome or Venice, whose composers and repertory had greater renown and wider circulation both then and now. In the first of the book's three parts (of three chapters each), the author examines the sites where sacred music was performed in early modern Milan. He opens the book with a retelling of the 1598 entry into Milan of the Hapsburg princess Margaret of Austria, and her procession through the civic and sacred spaces of the city, almost constantly in the presence of performing musicians. He then turns to the two most important buildings for sacred music, the Duomo and the shrine of Santa Maria presse San Celso, and then finally to the other churches and monasteries that sponsored music (with a brief nod to the palazzi). In part, this examination is traditional, including the names and dates of maestros and other musicians, and the size and nature of the musical establishments in each church. Kendrick digs deeper, however, attempting to link personnel changes, printed collections of sacred music, and individual compositions by musicians at each institution with historical developments in both the city at large and at the institution itself, and, even more interesting, with the changing architectural and decorative details of the churches. The author here demonstrates an extraordinarily broad and deep knowledge of the city's culture, and keen analytical skills as well, revealing much of considerablc interest. On the other hand, trying to establish causal links between the painted or architectural environment and details of a musical composition is a perilous enterprise, relying as it does on the author's connoisseurship (Kendrick's frequent use of the conditional voice makes it clear he is aware of the pitfalls). There may indeed, for example, be a connection between the archaizing classicism of Federico Zuccari's 1597 St. Agatha altarpiece for the Duomo and the traditional cast of Giulio Cesare Gabussi's Beata Agata (1608), probably composed for performance at this altar (pp. 39-42), but, as Kendrick explains later in the book (p. 214), Gabussi and his contemporaries frequently employed the conservative style exhibited in this motet in their sacred music. Several diverse aspects of Milanese musical life are the topics of the chapters of part 2. In chapter 4, Kendrick examines the extant theoretical and musical-aesthetic writings published in the city during this period, including the diminution treatises by Giovanni Batlista Bovicelli (Regole, pfissaggi di musica, madrigali et molelli passeggiali [Venice, 1594]), Riccardo Rognoni (Passaggi per potersi essercitare net diminuire terminatamente con ogni sorte di instromenti et unco diversi passuggi per la semplice voce, humana [Venice, 1592]), and Francesco Rognoni Taeggio (Selva di vani passaggi seconda l'usa moderno per cantare e, suonare con ogni sorte de stromenti, [Milan, 1620]); the speculative writings of Teodoro Osio; and the output of several academies. …

Briefly Noted

As a pupil of Josquin Desprez and a prominent exponent of the dense and virtuosic style of choral writing associated with the Flemish school, Antoine Brumel is regularly included with such lowland masters as Jacob Obrecht, Jean Mouton, and Alexander Agricola. But Brumel was a Frenchman, a fact one might never guess based on a casual listening survey of his works; perhaps more interesting is the fact that his fame exceeded that of most of his contemporaries in the Flemish school both during his lifetime and after his death. Of his fifteen known Mass settings, the Mass Et ecce terrae motus is perhaps the most viscerally powerful and intellectually impressive. The work takes its cantus firmus from the opening notes of the Easter antiphon Et ecce terrae motus factus et magnus (And Behold, There Was a Great Earthquake), a melodic idea consisting of only three pitches, but which Brumel varies by contrapuntal and canonic means and embroiders into a lavishly complex exposition of the techniques taught him by his mentor. One has to wonder, though, what Desprez would have thought of the occasionally startling harmonic gestures that arise spikily from the lush polyphonic landscape of this piece, gestures that, in some cases, anticipate by fifty or more years the idiosyncratic style of Carlo Gesualdo. Dominique Visse leads his Ensemble Clément Janequin and the excellent Sacqueboutiers de Toulouse through a powerful and beautifully recorded rendition of this work, one which can be confidently recommended to any library with a collecting interest in Renaissance polyphony.

Josquin Desprez in Ferrara

The recovery of two notarial documents prepared in Ferrara on behalf of Josquin Desprez soon after his arrival in that city in the spring of 1503 demonstrates his intentions at that time to obtain the provosty of Notre Dame of Condé and reveals the complicated exchange of benefices that brought about that result. The documents name Loyset Compère and Pierre Duwez as respondents to Desprez in a quadrangular exchange of positions. In this transaction Josquin appointed the dean of the chapter of Condé to resign the benefice he held in the collegiate church of Saint-Quentin. Since this was a position over which the King of France enjoyed full legal rights of collation, Josquin ordered the position to be surrendered to that monarch or his confessor, rather than to the pope. Accordingly these documents provide a very strong indication that Louis XII of France was the composer's patron before he came to Ferrara and that the king approved of this benefice exchange.In light of these implications, aspects of the composer's career before and after his Ferrarese service are reconsidered, including occasions on which he composed works for patrons in the French and imperial networks, such as Margaret of Austria, and his collaboration with the poet Jean Lemaire de Belges. Repertoire from Josquin's year in Ferrara is discussed, along with the Hercules Mass. Sections of his setting of the psalm Miserere mei deus are commented on, in connection both to a Biblical passage concordant with a verse of the psalm and to remarks by the theorist Glareanus. The expressive qualities of the Miserere are related to the devotional and ceremonial of duke Ercole, especially in the context of the outbreak of the plague in Ferrara.

Music and Patronage in the Sforza Court (review)

These are heady times for research on Josquin Desprez. Paul and Lora Merkley have spent many hours in the archives of Milan recovering important new documents that have greatly altered the accepted view of Josquin's career and the chronology of his music; as a side benefit of their research, they have uncovered much new documentation for other singers employed in the chapel of the Sforza dukes of Milan from approximately 1470 to 1499. The Merkleys have previously published their findings on Josquin's biography in a series of articles beginning in 1994, but now the material is reworked, with added discussion of selected compositions by Josquin and contextualization of the documents within the Milanese courtly milieu. The sheer magnitude of new documentary material presented by the Merkleys is astonishing, and scholars will turn to this book as a mine of information on the careers of musicians active in Italy in the late fifteenth century.