Emiel’s Guide to Classical Music: Episode 7 - Josquin

Josquin des Prez, or Josquin for short, was an artist of mythical proportions. This was partly due to his massive talent, but also partly a result of the changing humanist culture. At the start of his career music was still grouped with geometry and arithmetic in the Quadrivium of taught subjects – something natural, following divine laws.

By the time he died in his home-region of Condé-sur-l’Escaut in Northern France, music was an Ars poetica, a poetic art whose beauty lay in the breaking of rules to expressive ends. The composer came to be viewed in a modern sense as a poet of sound, blessed with talents from birth. In the writings of the humanists and theorists who brought about this change, that archetypal composer was Josquin, and he would remain so for a long time.

Born somewhere between 1840 and 1855, Josquin’s biography has proved difficult to piece together. He is first mentioned in 1466 by his true surname of Lebloitte in the will of his uncle who leaves him a plot of land. At this point he was a choir-boy in Picardy and likely studying under our friend Ockeghem.

After working in the service of various Milanese families he became in 1489 a member of the prestigious Papal choir – a recent restoration of the Sistine chapel revealed his signature carved into walls of the cantoria! At the Vatican his style achieved maturity and he had absorbed the light secular music of Milan and fully developed his writing of sacred music. Josquin was the favourite composer of one of the first music printers, Petrucci, and so his music gained unprecedented distribution, in fact the first volume dedicated entirely to a single composer was printed for Josquin. After he retired in France, his fame throughout Europe steadily grew.

So what is it about his art that inspired such reverence? We can turn to the first ‘classic’, the first piece of music widely considered to be great and timeless – unsurpassable in what it was. This was a motet called Ave Maria … Virgo serene, which Petrucci printed in his first collection of 1502. It recalls Mary’s life and the music and words fit like a glove with three fingers: 1. The declamation – the fit between note and syllable, 2. The syntax – how each part of the text relates to each part of the music, and 3. The illustration – how the music parallels the meaning of the words. (I have borrowed these from the musicologist Richard Taruskin).

Each of the five stanzas describes a different event in Mary’s life and the music poetically illuminates it’s meaning, giving each stanza a different character. For example, when ‘all things in heaven and earth are filled with joy’, the texture is filled by all the voices. The 2nd stanza concerns the birth of Mary and its harmonies are much richer as the imitation occurs at the interval of a fifth rather than the preceding octaves. The stanza on humility is split between two pairs of voices – the sound becomes smaller and sparser, setting up the next stanza which has a full homorhythmic texture and is almost dance-like in its triple meter. This is a work of genius in both its overall conception – the relations between stanzas, and in the smaller textural details which have been crafted down to the syllable. Every parameter of the music is fully under the composers control and crafted to paint the words in sound. I encourage you to listen for yourself!

Josquin explored new territories in music and produced effects which had not yet been heard. Theorists and composers look to his scores and study the way in which he achieved these to this day, but most importantly – his immediate influence on the next generation was staggering and catalysed the innovations which gave rise to our tonal system. For example, the homorhythmic declarations came to be viewed ‘vertically’ as chords with their own properties rather than a mere intersection between independently moving lines. Next week we will delve into this and explore how his successors took up the mantle.