A Sampling of Josquin’s Music to Honor his Death

courtesy of PIAS

Tomorrow harmonia mundi will release a three-CD compilation of music by Josquin des Prez. Drawing upon previously issued albums, harmonia mundi created this collection to mark the 500th anniversary of Josquin’s death, which took place almost exactly a month ago on August 27. As usual Amazon.com is taking pre-orders of the set, which, apparently, will only be released in physical form.

Josquin’s Wikipedia page describes him as “the most famous European composer between Guillaume Dufay and Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina.” I would probably argue that, once one departs from those academic institutions with curricula specializing in early music, both Josquin and Palestrina are better known than Dufay. However, what I have found interesting for several years is that Josquin’s popularity was not necessarily due to the quality of his compositions; and the opening decades of the sixteenth century carry more significance than the “lay reader” might imagine.

The fact is that Josquin’s legacy owes much to Ottaviano Petrucci, who printed the first book of polyphony using movable type. (This is why the “subtitle” of the International Music Score Library Project is the “Petrucci Music Library.”) One of Petrucci’s first publications is the earliest surviving printing of music by a single composer. The book was a collection of Josquin’s Mass settings, and it was printed in Venice in 1502. This turned out to be a “cash cow;” and Petrucci published two further volumes of Josquin’s Mass settings in 1504 and 1514, respectively. While I would not wish to diminish the inventive qualities of Josquin’s music, I still think it would be fair to hypothesize that, were it not for Petrucci, we probably would not be attaching quite so much significance to that 500th anniversary!

That said, the seven ensembles and six previous harmonia mundi releases from which the selections in this anthology have been drawn provide a thoroughly engaging account of Josquin’s music, secular as well as sacred. Given that Josquin’s Wikipedia page lists eighteen known Mass settings, the selection of two of them for this new release, Missa de Beata Virgine and Missa Pange lingua, the latter based on the melody of the “Pange Lingua” hymn, should provide a sufficient account of that genre. These are the opening selections on the first two discs, each followed by a generous selection from the 61 motets listed on Josquin’s Wikipedia page.

The remaining disc is devoted to secular music. There are six instrumental selections for lute or viols, which serve as “spacers” among a collection of twenty chansons, one of which, “El Grillo” (the cricket), is a frottola, even though it was not named as such in Josquin’s time. As one might guess from the title, this is the most playful of the vocal offerings. The chansons themselves tend to share what might be called a “lovelorn” rhetoric, reminding me of when Peter Cook introduced one of Dudley Moore’s art song parodies as having a text in which “the poet and his lover bemoan, bemoan, and … bemoan.” (For the record I used to know plenty of music graduate students who felt the same way about transcribing the notation in Petrucci’s publications.)

The overall duration of that final disc is 54 minutes. Some may find that to be a bit too much. However, technology now allows for “sampled listening;” and this CD provides just the right balance for the abundance of sacred music on the first two discs.