JOSQUIN des PREZ: MOTETS FOR THE BLESSED VIRGIN
1 Ave Maria 04:42
Vultum tuum deprecabuntur
2 Prima Pars - Vultum tuum deprecabuntur 01:45
3 Secunda Pars - Sancta Dei genitrix 01:21
4 Tertia Pars - Intemerata Virgo 02:23
5 Quarta Pars - O Maria 01:57
6 Quinta Pars - Mente tota 02:25
7 Sexta Pars - Ora pro nobis0 2:32
8 Septima Et Ultima Pars - Christe, Fili Dei 02:59
9 Ave, nobilissima creatura 07:52
10 Pater Noster/Ave Maria 07:13
11 Salve Regina 02:31
12 Benedicta es, coelorum Regina 05:08
13 Ave Maria (Senfl) 13:16
DESPREZ JOSQUIN
Motets for the Blessed Virgin
Few composers have ever achieved such
undisputed preeminence in the eyes of their
contemporaries as Josquin des Prez enjoyed at
the beginning of the 16th century Before his time,
composers, however great, were valued as
craftsmen, not artists as we use the term. And
later, opinion was rarely unanimous, nor did
contemporary estimates always agree with ours.
Bach was esteemed far beneath many lesser
lights- or so now we think Partisans of Brahms
and Wagner battled one another in the 19th
century, as those of Schoenberg and Stravinsky
continue to do today
Only Beethoven seems to rival Josquin's musícal hegenony over his time And many interesting
parallels can in fact be drawn between Josquin and Beethoven as cultural figures. Both of them
achieved legendary and symbolic status within
their lifetimes, and both of them broke through to
plateaus of prestige and cultural influence beyond
the reach of any predecessor By the force of their
example they each caused the world to look not
only upon their music, but upon music itself, with
new eyes, and to listen with new ears
In an unusual study entitled "Musical Genius-
Evolution and Origins of a Concept, " Edward
Lowinsky went so far as to associate those origins
with Josquin's prestige. He was the first composer
to in terest his fellow men as a personality He was
the subject of gossip and anecdote, and the
picture that emerges again resembles Beethoven:
a cantankerous, arrogant, distracted sort of man,
difficult in social intercourse but excused by grace of his transcendent gift Josquin, like Beethoven,
was looked upon with awe as one marked off from
others by divine inspiration - a status previously
reserved for prophets and saints This, indeed, is
the kernel of our common con ception of artistic
genius, but it is only the more trivial side of the coin
On profounder levels, too, Josquin marked a
turning point in the conception of music as an art
With him, for the first time, music began to
conform to Renaissance, humanist ideals. It
became "ex pressive, " that is, concerned with
personal feeling and its communica tion. Before
Josquin, music traditionally was ranked alongside
mathematics and astronomy as an art of measurement and cosmic speculation. After him, it
was viewed as one of the arts of rhetoric. Of
course, Josquin alone was not responsible for these changes, which reflected profound social and cultural movements. But he was among their
chief protagonists Through his mastery and genius he became their musical focal point.
Given his colossal stature, it is astonishing how poorly we know him. Documentation of his career is far skimpier than with many lesser figures, though it increases daily through the dedicated efforts of whole cadres of scholars at work in the archives of France and Italy. It was in the former
land that Josquin was born around 1440 and died in 1521, but he spent the bulk of his career in the latter: from 1459 to 1472 as a singer in the
cathedral of Milan, from 1474 to 1486 in the
service of the Sforza family in the same city, from
1486 to around the turn of the century in the papal
chapel choir in Rome
Then he returned home, possibly to the court of
King Louis XIl, and remained in France until his
death except for one year, beginning in April 1503, when he enjoyed his greatest eminence as court
com poser to the duke of Ferrara During this brief
tenure Josquin was the highest-paid musician in
Europe, and the chief ornament of the most
musical court in the Western world Following his
Ferrara year, Josquin did as many aging musicians of eminence did at the time: he retired to a clerical
sinecure, as provost at the church of Notre Dame
in Condé. He died past the age of 80, active as
composer to the very end. His career thus
spanned some 60 creative years
The great, exasperating irony is that, with few
exceptions, we can not correlate Josquin's
enormous musical legacy with this biographical
framework. Most of his music is preserved in
sources that are obviously far younger than their
contents (and in many cases postdate Josquin's death), and so Josquin chronology has become a
musicologist's nightmare It cannot be said that
even after decades of work on the problem we have come very far.
An example is the great motet Ave, nobilissima
creatura heard on this record, which, in recent
studies, one prominent Josquin scholar (Winfried
Kirsch) has classified as an early work, and
another (Jeremy Noble) has just as confidently placed "among Josquin's maturest masterpieces."
There is no positive evidence to go on, only the in dividual scholar's judgment of "style, " where subjectivity and circulari ty reign, and where all
depends upon what criteria are judged relevant.
There is no safeguard here against prejudice, and no assurance that our ideas of relevance coincide with Josquin's In the present in stance, it would seem that Kirsch based his judgnent on the fact
that a Gregorian cantus firmus is given a threefold
presentation in the tenor voice, going through a
proportional diminution (that is, a rhythmic speedup) on every recurrence. This is indeed a very old
device, based on practices that can be traced to
the 13th century, if not earlier.
Noble, on the other hand, noticed the very rational
organization of the six-voice texture, the at times
emphatic and climactic declamation of the text, and the fact that the cantus firmus is so placed as
to make a dramatic and "expressive" effect at its first entry. These are features we associate with
"humanistic" esthetics, and so it is natural to
regard a work that exhibits them as "late. " But
only if we assume that Josquin's career marked a steady progress from the "Gothic" to the
"humanistic. " And that is a prejudice, not a fact.
But chronology is not the only problem
Authenticity is equally a nightmare No two
scholars agree on this list of Josquin's genuine
works, and the reasons, ironically enough, have to
do with his very stature and popularity Once the
music printing business got under way in the 16th
century, editors found that the saleability of just
about any piece could be enhanced by attributing
it to Josquin, and so our composer has the longest
list of opera dubia of all time. Add to that the
paucity, already observed, of manuscript sources
from Josquin's lifetime, and the magnitude of the
problem is clear. So many pieces exist only in late
sources (and to compound the mess, in sources
from any, where Luther’s well-publicized love of
Josquin's music further enhanced his prestige),
that once again we are often left only with chancy and unreliable "internal" evidence to go on in
determining what is Josquin and what is pseudo-
Josquin
Cappella Nova
Ruth Cunningham, Wendy Erslev, Sarah Hamby, Imogen
Howe, Christine Hunter, Cornelia Ryding - Sopranos
Barbara Gambino, Susan Hellauer, Lawrence Lipnik, Leonore Max, Patricia Petersen - Altos
Peter Bannon, lan Capps, Curtis Lasell, Steven Marcus,
Edward Stevenson - Tenors
Thomas Baker, Richard Bodig, Jonathan Clune, Paul de
Simone, Louis Flaim - Basses
Richard Taruskin, Director
