The Musical Mysteries of Josquin

The singer and composer Josquin Desprez traversed his time like a diffident ghost, glimpsed here and there amid the splendor of the Renaissance. He is thought to have been born around 1450 in what is now western Belgium, the son of a policeman who was once jailed for using excessive force. In 1466, a boy named Gossequin completed a stint as a choirboy in the city of Cambrai. A decade later, the singer Jusquinus de Pratis turned up at the court of René of Anjou, in Aix. In the fourteen-eighties, in Milan, Judocus Despres was in the service of the House of Sforza, which also employed Leonardo da Vinci. At the end of the decade, Judo. de Prez joined the musical staff at the Vatican, remaining there into the reign of Alexander VI, of the House of Borgia. The name Josquin can be seen carved on a wall of the Sistine Chapel. In 1503, the maestro Juschino took a post in Ferrara, singing in the presence of Lucrezia Borgia. Not long afterward, Josse des Prez retired to Condé-sur-l’Escaut, near his presumed birthplace, serving as the provost of the local church. There he died, on August 27, 1521. His tomb was destroyed during the French Revolution.

The murkiness of his existence notwithstanding, Josquin attained an enduring renown of a kind that no previous composer had enjoyed. In 1502, the Venetian printer Ottaviano Petrucci, the chief pioneer of movable-type music publishing, issued a volume of sacred motets, with Josquin’s four-voice setting of “Ave Maria . . . virgo serena” (“Hail Mary . . . serene virgin”) at its head. The piece must have cast a spell, and the beginning shows why. The highest voice, the superius, sings a graceful rising-and-falling phrase: G C C D E C. Each of the lower voices presents the motif in turn. After it arrives in the bass, the superius enters again on a high C, forming an octave pillar. A second phrase unfurls in similar fashion, then a third, with the voices staggered so that only two move together at a time. Eventually, the scheme changes, the texture thickens, and the descending order of vocal entries is reversed. About a minute in, all four voices coalesce to form a gleaming C-major sonority. The entire opening gives the illusion of breadth and depth, as though lamps have been lit in a vaulted room. Music becomes a space in which you walk around in wonder.

Interest in Josquin was strong enough that Petrucci released three volumes of the composer’s masses—settings of five sections of the Roman Mass (Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Agnus Dei). Posthumously, the flood of publications only increased, to the point where an observer wryly said, “Now that Josquin is dead, he is putting out more works than when he was still alive.” Extravagant claims were made. The humanist Cosimo Bartoli described Josquin as the Michelangelo of music; Martin Luther called him “the master of the notes.” In subsequent centuries, performances of his works all but ceased, yet his name remained one to conjure with. In 1782, the historian Charles Burney declared that Josquin had achieved “universal monarchy and dominion over the affections and passions of the musical part of mankind.” For August Wilhelm Ambros, in 1868, he was the first composer in history “who makes a prevailing impression of genius.” In the twentieth century, the early-music movement brought Josquin’s scores back to life, and the revival continues five hundred years after his death. The Tallis Scholars, the best known of Renaissance vocal ensembles, recently completed a recorded survey of eighteen masses attributed to Josquin. Such groups as Stile Antico, Cappella Pratensis, Blue Heron, and the Huelgas Ensemble are participating in a Josquin festival in Antwerp in August. The “Ave Maria” is a staple of choirs around the world.

With Josquin began the cult of the great composer—a mind-set that has left a distinctly ambiguous imprint on classical-music culture. And his rise to superhero status brought with it a curious paradox. Although commentators across five centuries have agreed on Josquin’s preëminence, his works can easily be confused with those of other gifted contemporaries. Two anecdotes from the early sixteenth century illustrate what might be called the Josquin mirage, in which the lustre of his name warps musical perceptions. Baldassare Castiglione, in his treatise “The Book of the Courtier” (1528), made note of the composer’s snob appeal in aristocratic settings: “When a motet was sung in the presence of the Duchess, it pleased no one, and was considered worthless, until it became known that it had been composed by Josquin Desprez.” The opposite fate befell a piece by Adrian Willaert, one of Josquin’s most accomplished successors. When Willaert first came to Rome, he found that the papal choir was singing one of his motets, under the impression that it was by Josquin. When Willaert corrected the mistake, the singers lost interest in the work. Such stories help to explain why attributions to Josquin proliferated after his death: affixing his name to a score was guaranteed to stir interest. The same syndrome has long haunted Renaissance art, where an emphasis on the singular profile of canonical artists has led to violent debates over authenticity and a thriving marketplace in forgeries.

Well over three hundred pieces were ascribed to Josquin at one time or another. In recent decades, musicologists have been culling dubious items from the catalogue. This spring, I followed the work of two leading Josquin authorities, Joshua Rifkin and Jesse Rodin, who are preparing a drastically pruned list of likely Josquin pieces—a hundred and three in all. Some scholars worry that the deattribution process has got out of hand; the half-joking fear is that Josquin will end up disappearing almost completely, like the Cheshire Cat. Thanks to the pandemic-era phenomenon of the Zoom seminar, I was able to watch some of the deliberations, which kept raising bigger philosophical questions: How does an aura of infallibility come to surround a figure like Josquin? What becomes of the music that lapses into anonymity, just as “The Man with the Golden Helmet” seems to have fallen out of the Rembrandt canon?

There is nothing fake about that aura: Josquin was an astonishing composer, one whose contrapuntal dazzlements can make Bach look clumsy. But he dwelled within a comprehensively astonishing community of creative artists. To explore Renaissance choral music is to enter a forbidding forest of names: Dunstable, Power, Binchois, Dufay, Busnois, Ockeghem, Regis, Faugues, Compère, Weerbeke, Agricola, de Orto, Obrecht, Isaac, de la Rue, Mouton, Brumel, Févin, Richafort, Ghiselin, Gombert, Pipelare, Martini, Clemens non Papa, Morales, Willaert, Lassus, Palestrina. Every one of them wrote music worth hearing. The period bears witness to the emergence of composition as an art: Josquin becomes the patron saint of an essentially new profession that is struggling to gain the level of recognition long accorded to painters and poets. Distinct personalities materialize from the historical mist. We hear the sound of the self, singing toward a kind of freedom.

The term “composer” began to enter general circulation only in the late fifteenth century. The practice of naming the authors of musical works was still catching on. Documents of the period usually call Josquin a cantore, or singer. Yet his rise to fame helped bring about a change in status. In 1502, a courtier to Ercole I, the Duke of Ferrara, wrote a letter evaluating candidates for a musical appointment. One of them, Heinrich Isaac, was “easy to get along with,” the courtier said; another, Josquin, “composes when he wants to, and not when one wants him to.” Also, Josquin asked for two hundred ducats, Isaac for much less. Ercole I hired Josquin.

Composers were a new phenomenon because written music was itself a relatively recent innovation in the long history of the arts. The earliest examples of fully decipherable staff notation, from the early eleventh century, record Gregorian chant; multivoiced sacred music was written down at Notre-Dame, in Paris, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Troubadours, trouvères, and other poet-composers produced a beloved corpus of song, though the words tended to receive more attention than the notes. The most formidable figure of the age was Guillaume de Machaut, who lived from around 1300 to 1377. Celebrated chiefly for his sung poems of courtly love, Machaut also wrote two dozen motets and the earliest mass cycle for which a composer is known. Such large-scale elaborations on canonical texts sustained careers in the following century, as Popes, princes, and other potentates sought to flesh out courtly ceremonies with splendid sounds. The history of written music is inextricable from structures of worldly power, even if the composers occupied a low place in the hierarchy.

Josquin exemplifies the art of polyphony: the interweaving of multiple voices according to strict contrapuntal rules. The primary mandate was to control dissonance—a term that was understood differently in medieval and Renaissance times than it is today. It indicated not just discordant combinations of tones but also problematic relationships between notes. The octave, the fifth, and sometimes the fourth were considered to be “perfect” consonances; thirds and sixths were “imperfect”; other intervals fell into the “dissonant” category. A wariness of thirds partly explains why medieval music can sound stark and strange to modern ears. Thirds are at the core of tonal harmony, defining major and minor keys. In the early fifteenth century, English composers, led by John Dunstable, began using thirds in abundance. Their lush, chord-rich sound became known as the “English countenance,” surprising and delighting listeners on the Continent. English sources are also the first to name composers in large numbers.

Geopolitics had a hand in what happened next. King Henry V of England, who may have dabbled in composing, won at Agincourt, in 1415, and soon took over northern France. English officials brought with them their favorite choristers; Dunstable evidently served John of Lancaster, Henry V’s brother and military commander. Thanks to Joan of Arc, England’s holdings soon shrank, but not before its music had seeped into northern France and Belgian lands. Coincidentally or not, this region brought forth the next major wave of musical activity. A vast number of fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century composers, Josquin included, belonged to what is today called the Franco-Flemish School.

Leading the procession was Guillaume Dufay (circa 1397-1474), who brought dancing elegance to exalted masses and streetwise chansons alike. His motet “Nuper rosarum flores” was written for the consecration of Florence’s cathedral, in 1436, its stately sonorities echoing against Filippo Brunelleschi’s octagonal dome. Other mid- and late-fifteenth-century composers expanded the field of possibility. Antoine Busnois specialized in a lucid interplay of motifs; Johannes Ockeghem in opulent, unpredictably flowing designs; Johannes Regis in intricate structures that gather narrative energy from the calculated addition and subtraction of voices. (Josquin may have based his setting of “Ave Maria” on Regis’s motet of the same name.) By 1500, dozens of Franco-Flemish singer-composers had radiated across Europe, establishing a virtual monopoly at certain Italian musical centers, the Vatican included.

How a relatively small region in northwestern Belgium and northeastern France became so dominant is not entirely clear. Education was a factor: singing schools were widespread there, bringing in young talent from various classes of society. The dukes of Burgundy spent liberally on the arts, in what turned out to be a vain attempt to raise themselves to kingly status. Once the Franco-Flemish composers acquired positions of influence, they cemented their authority by making mutual gestures of praise and commemoration. Busnois wrote a motet hailing Ockeghem; Ockeghem memorialized Gilles Binchois; Josquin fashioned a haunting song-motet on Ockeghem’s death; and when Josquin died he received tributes from five younger colleagues. At times, the network could be mistaken for a racket, as when composers helped one another build up portfolios of benefices—church positions that paid generously without requiring regular attendance.

The Franco-Flemings were worldly in other ways. Deft synthesizers, they wove secular strains into sacred pieces, giving them a degree of popular appeal. In a widely studied English mass, the anonymous “Missa Caput,” a cantus firmus, or “fixed melody,” runs throughout the cycle. At first, these unifying motifs were drawn from Gregorian chant, but composers also made use of current songs, some of them risqué. A Gloria by Dufay deploys a ditty with the words “You have mounted me on my haunches and done nothing / May God do to you what has been done to me.” Such pranks seem subversive to modern sensibilities, but at the time they may have reinforced the Church’s power to absorb and control all forms of culture. In musical terms, these earworms could assist listeners as they confronted a new kind of large-scale narrative. One jaunty, belligerent little tune, “L’Homme Armé,” or “The Armed Man,” inspired nearly fifty masses, including two virtuosic efforts by Josquin.

Behind the scenes, heady contrapuntal games came into play. Emily Zazulia, in her forthcoming book, “Where Sight Meets Sound,” writes about the sometimes deliberately obscure instructions that the singers had to decode in order to realize the score. Dufay’s “Missa L’Homme Armé” contains the instruction “The crab goes out in full, but returns by half”—meaning that the line should be sung first backward and then forward at double speed. In Ockeghem’s “Missa Prolationum,” voices sing the same melody simultaneously, but at different speeds. Josquin’s “L’Homme Armé” masses, in turn, echo and amplify Dufay’s reversed melody and Ockeghem’s multispeed canons. A special prize goes to Jacob Obrecht, whose “Missa Grecorum” presents a version of the cantus firmus with the notes ordered according to their durations: first the longest, then the next longest, and finally the shortest. Fabrice Fitch, in his new book, “Renaissance Polyphony,” likens the result to the cut-up technique of William S. Burroughs.

The ultimate feat was to conceal such arcana beneath an immaculate musical surface. Two esteemed values of the period were varietas, variety, and dulcedo, sweetness. The theorist-composer Johannes Tinctoris wrote of leading the listener into a state of sensuous transport that culminates in spiritual elevation. Not everyone accepted this proposition: Girolamo Savonarola, the censorious preacher of Florence, considered polyphony a ploy of the Devil, its sonic luxuriance obscuring holy writ. At the end of the sixteenth century, polyphonic filigree would recede before the incisive melodic thrust of Baroque style. Yet Josquin and his contemporaries had brought about a permanent revolution: composers of the future would draw freely from the well of the past.

Renaissance polyphony has long given me joy, but I’ve never felt certain of my ability to tell one composer from another. In need of further education, I reached out to Jesse Rodin, who teaches at Stanford and leads the vocal ensemble Cut Circle. He oversees an online resource called the Josquin Research Project, which has an advanced search function allowing users to trace patterns across hundreds of works. Rodin invited me to attend his online Josquin seminar, and directed me toward a similar course taught by Joshua Rifkin, who is based at Boston University. Other Josquin experts dialled in from around the world. My Mondays and Tuesdays were soon filled with debates about unnotated accidentals, contrapuntal interlocks, mensuration signs, and the like.

I asked Rodin, who is forty-two, how he ended up in this contentious corner of the musicological field. “I’m a Jewish kid from the Upper West Side,” he told me, with a laugh. “I didn’t grow up with Catholic polyphony. The dominant music in the house was Pete Seeger and the Weavers.” Rodin didn’t discover Josquin until he was in college, at the University of Pennsylvania, but he had relished all kinds of singing from an early age, and had developed a knack for memorizing vocal lines, which served him well when he turned to Renaissance music.

“The most difficult thing with this music is getting to know it from the inside,” Rodin said. “When I was an undergrad, I was taking the train back and forth to Philadelphia, and I’d listen to the Tallis Scholars recordings on repeat. I’d put on a Kyrie for, like, an hour, over and over.” Although Rodin remains appreciative of the Tallis Scholars’ pioneering work in this repertory—their first recording of a Josquin mass appeared in 1986—he sees a downside to their style: “It’s beautiful, in tune, rather magical. But the slow tempos, the rich timbre, and the reverberant acoustic can have a distancing effect—as if you’re reaching through the dark to the notes.” Rodin, in his recordings with Cut Circle, favors a livelier approach, with a less rounded sound and more focus on moment-to-moment phrasing.

Josquin’s works fall into three categories: masses, motets, and songs. The masses don’t depart radically from the pattern set forth by Dufay and Ockeghem, although their refinement is extreme. The motets experiment with arrays of five and six voices, balancing density and clarity. The songs, known as chansons, are settings of secular texts. Despite their sometimes saucy or mundane content—“Faulte d’argent” begins “Lack of money is sorrow unparalleled”—they adhere to cultivated techniques of canon and imitation. (Incidentally, David Fallows, in his painstakingly researched 2009 book, “Josquin,” suggests that the composer himself suffered no financial hardship: having received a substantial bequest from an uncle, he may have been able to write “when he wants to” because he could afford to.)

If Rodin had to select a defining characteristic for Josquin, it would be obsessiveness—a mania for the working out of musical ideas. In “Josquin’s Rome,” a study of the composer’s Sistine Chapel period, Rodin notes the predominance of “circular, recursive” melodic lines, and observes, “Obsessive repetition of this kind often generates a heightened sense of tension that can only be resolved with a significant point of arrival. Indeed more than any of his contemporaries, Josquin’s music is characterized by tense, pregnant moments that demand resolution, sometimes in the form of extraordinary climactic passages.”

Josquin’s supreme ritual of repetition comes in his “Missa La sol fa re mi,” the title of which specifies the five-note motto of the piece: A G F D E. That pattern appears in the mass some two hundred and fifty times, although it undergoes enough variation that it never grows dull. In the latter part of the Credo, during sections describing the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, the tenor repeats the motto relentlessly, yet swirling activity in the other voices distracts the ear. The feeling of unity becomes subconscious—and thereby all the more potent.

I decided to pick a Josquin work and burrow into it. I chose the “Miserere,” a five-voice setting of Psalm 50/51: “Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy loving-kindness.” This is one of Josquin’s longest non-mass pieces, lasting about fifteen minutes in performance. He probably wrote it in Ferrara, around 1503. In a curious turn, none other than Savonarola, the castigator of polyphonic excess, may have provided the occasion. Just before the friar was put to death, in 1498, he wrote a meditation on Psalm 50/51, in which the words “miserere,” “miseria,” and “misericordia” recur with agonized insistence. “Abyss invokes abyss,” Savonarola writes. “The abyss of misery invokes the abyss of mercy.” Ercole I, Josquin’s patron in Ferrara, revered Savonarola and may have welcomed a musical tribute to him. The musicologist Patrick Macey has proposed that Josquin took inspiration from the repetitions in Savonarola’s text. The “Miserere” is built around twenty-four iterations of the phrase “Miserere mei, Deus”; the first tenor does nothing but repeat the phrase, in near-monotones.

As in the “Missa La sol fa re mi,” a potentially tiring scheme yields music of brilliant variety. For one thing, the tenor’s central pitch is always shifting. In the first part, it moves stepwise down an octave; in the second part, it goes back up; in the final part, it sinks again. Furthermore, the collective refrains change shape and character. They last anywhere from three and a half to eight bars, and the gaps separating them range from three and a half bars to twenty-eight. Toward the end, the pleas for mercy are couched in gorgeous cascading patterns, even as the intervening gaps grow achingly long. Josquin, so often the most orderly of composers, here uses asymmetry to keep his listeners on edge, like supplicants. For the scholar John Milson, the “Miserere” evokes a spellbinding preacher who builds a sermon around a single phrase. This possibly ironic memorial to Savonarola shows how wrenchingly devout polyphony can be.

Joshua Rifkin is, at seventy-seven, a grand seigneur of early music. A self-described “Jewish atheist from the Bronx,” he acquired youthful notoriety in the nineteen-sixties by participating in John Cage’s nineteen-hour marathon performance of Erik Satie’s “Vexations,” and by issuing an LP of Baroque arrangements of Beatles songs. In 1970, Rifkin spurred a ragtime revival when he made a best-selling recording of Scott Joplin rags; the movie “The Sting” ensued. In musicological circles, he is known for his meticulous readings of documentary sources. In 1982, he unsettled the early-music world with a radically pared-down recording of Bach’s Mass in B Minor; his argument was that Bach had written most of his sacred choral works for ensembles of only four voices, not dozens. In the Josquin seminar, Rifkin spoke in a discursive, donnish manner, but his mesmerizing command of the material gave one a sense of having made an expansive intellectual journey.

Active as a composer in his youth, Rifkin came to Josquin by way of the musical modernists, who prized polyphonic complexity as an antecedent for their own cerebral games. (Anton Webern, one of the founders of serialist composition, produced a doctoral thesis on Heinrich Isaac.) Rifkin told me, “I didn’t really get Josquin, at first. The terms in which people were then talking about him—the sublimity, the exalted sense of text setting, and so forth—didn’t appeal to me. But I kept digging in, trying to figure out how this music worked, and in the process I realized what a spectacular composer he really was.” Rifkin began to discern what he called “motivicity”—an endless interplay of small musical modules, defined by both pitch and rhythm. In this sense, Josquin resembles Bach, Rifkin’s other great obsession. “With both of them, you find a level of sustained craftsmanship that, at the same time, yields moments of vivid, jaw-dropping drama,” he said.

Assessing the authenticity of a Josquin piece involves two kinds of work: an evaluation of the sources in which it first appeared and a comparative analysis of the music itself. In the first stage of the process, scholars must become forensic detectives, analyzing watermarks, scribal handwriting, and quirks of notation. No original Josquin manuscripts survive; the graffiti at the Sistine Chapel is the only trace of his hand (unless it is an ancient hoax). Instead, everything exists in copies, of varying quality. Even the Petrucci editions that sealed Josquin’s fame are not above suspicion. Since the composer was alive when they were published, it’s natural to assume that he played a role in their production. Yet, Rifkin told me, Petrucci was plainly consulting secondhand sources, not original manuscripts: “His editions have mistakes that you see in other copies in circulation.” Of the seventeen Josquin masses that Petrucci published, only eleven make it into the “almost certain” category of Rifkin and Rodin’s revised catalogue. Josquin, in retirement in Condé, may have been either unaware of Petrucci’s questionable activity or helpless to stop it.

The principal test case in Rifkin’s seminar was “O virgo virginum” (“O virgin of virgins”), a spacious, sombre six-voice motet in praise of the Virgin Mary. The earliest copy is found in a manuscript at the Vatican. Since Josquin sang in the Sistine Chapel, this seems a trustworthy source—except that no composer is specified. The first attribution occurs in a hand-copied anthology that probably originated in Venice and is now held at the Biblioteca della Musica di Bologna. Before Rifkin delivered his verdict, he asked his students to examine a digital scan of Bologna R 142 and judge it for themselves. “Everybody here is becoming part of the canonical exercise,” he said.

I spent a slightly deranged weekend scrutinizing the scan, which was in black-and-white and a bit blurry. R 142 contains twenty alleged Josquin pieces, copied by two different scribes. Scribe 1, who was responsible for assigning “O virgo virginum” to Josquin, rendered the composer’s name in stylish fashion, with a cross through the “q.” His other attributions include five items indubitably by Josquin—but also one motet that is elsewhere ascribed to the French composer Mathurin Forestier. Scribe 2, for his part, evidently went back and added Josquin’s name to several pieces that had previously been anonymous: you can see him squeezing it into pockets of empty space on the page. In all, R 142 feels like a shaky source; the scribes appear overeager to pad their compilation with Josquiniana.

In another session, Rifkin trained attention on the music itself. He compared “O virgo virginum” with a six-voice motet that is assigned to Josquin in so many contexts that its authorship is considered secure: “Preter rerum seriem” (“This is no normal scheme of things: God and man is born of a virgin mother”). The two pieces begin in strikingly similar fashion. A pair of bass voices start a canon, one imitating the other at a slight distance, while the tenor unfolds a chant melody in slow motion. The focus then shifts to the upper voices: the superius takes over the chant while two altos wind around each other.

On close examination, though, the resemblances break down. In “Preter rerum,” the superius continues to follow the tenor step by step. In “O virgo,” the two voices diverge: the superius carries on singing in long values while the tenor noodles away in faster-moving figures. You have the feeling that the composer of “O virgo” took “Preter rerum” as a model but soon lost patience with Josquin’s systematic methods. Of course, this could also be Josquin himself in a less rule-bound mood, yet he would have been unlikely to engage in the fuzzy contrapuntal moves that crop up in “O virgo.” Rifkin’s students jumped into the discussion, pointing out dissonances, parallel unisons, and other imprecisions. Rifkin delivered the final verdict: “Close, but no cigar.”

The two sessions that Rifkin spent on “O virgo virginum” were a revelatory exercise in X-raying a composer’s identity. The discrepancies between this motet and better-attested Josquin pieces expose his musical physiognomy in startling detail. This is the real value of Rifkin and Rodin’s revisionist dissection of the catalogue: it furnishes precise insights into a figure who remains mysterious to his core.

At the same time, the seminar left me in a vaguely melancholy mood. What happens to “O virgo virginum” if it is no longer stamped with the Josquin brand? Barring some new revelation, its composer is now a Renaissance ghost: Composer X. The business of music doesn’t know what to do with anonymity. The “Missa Caput,” for example, was once attributed to Dufay, and for that reason it used to receive more performances than it does now, even though it is still the same paradigm-altering piece. Too often, we simplify the history of the arts by reducing it to a parade of strong personalities. When that logic is applied to music before 1600, it consigns to oblivion vast numbers of works that cannot be linked to one exceptional individual.

Consider an anonymous publication from 1543 titled “Musica quinque vocum motteta materna lingua vocata” (“Music in five voices, called motets in the mother tongue”). The musicologist and conductor Laurie Stras, who has recorded this repertory with the British ensemble Musica Secreta, has floated the possibility that the motets were written for singers at the convent of Corpus Domini, in Ferrara, where Leonora d’Este, Lucrezia Borgia’s daughter, served as the abbess. Leonora was a noted musical intellectual, almost certainly a composer. Some or all of these works could be hers. Nobles typically maintained anonymity in their artistic endeavors; a noblewoman turned nun would have had special incentive to keep her identity hidden. In a further twist, the motet “Tribulationes civitatum audivimus” (“We have heard the trials of the citizens”) alludes to Josquin’s “Miserere,” with its Savonarolan subtext. The piece might be, as Stras says, a protest from a rebellious city that the Inquisition had in its sights.

In a way, all composers of the Josquin era were at least partly anonymous. Shorn of biographical particulars, steeped in a shared language, they constituted an imaginative crowd, not an alliance of heroic individuals. The scholar Wolfgang Fuhrmann, noting that “Josquin’s references to and confrontations with other composers are becoming ever more tangible,” concludes that “the image of the genius standing on his own seems ever more implausible.” Rodin shows how Josquin took cues from lesser-known contemporaries, among them the wildly inventive Marbrianus de Orto, another member of the Sistine Chapel ensemble. In the final Agnus Dei of Josquin’s “Missa L’Homme Armé super voces musicales,” the “Armed Man” tune peals forth on top, in extended values. De Orto includes a similar flourish at the end of his own “L’Homme Armé” mass, generating an atmosphere of festive triumph.

Maurice Ravel used to tell his students that they would find themselves when they failed to copy their models faithfully. Composer X is most compelling at the moments she ceases to be Josquinian. (It’s extremely unlikely that “O virgo virginum” was written by a woman, but anonymity allows the imagination to roam.) Contrapuntal eccentricities aside, the motet displays a sure grasp of formal architecture, its material marshalled in cresting and subsiding waves. Two minutes in, the music comes to a near-standstill: first the upper voices and then the lower ones begin rocking between what we would now call chords of G and C minor. That motion gives way to a steady upward surge, over a liquid chain of chords that, if scored for orchestra, might not sound out of place in Berlioz. Finally, as in Josquin’s “Ave Maria,” all the voices ring out, with the superius tracing a high, piercing arc. Such hazy gorgeousness feels a bit decadent next to Josquin’s crystalline constructions, yet it has its own allure.

What Josquin gave to music was the honor of a lineage: a personified past against which successors could define themselves. Over time, that tradition took on mighty, and sometimes oppressive, weight: it was almost exclusively male, it served the ruling classes, it furthered the politics of European domination. Josquin had been dead only a few years when missionaries began to impose polyphonic singing on Aztec people in Mexico. The Incas underwent the same indoctrination, even though, as a chronicler observed, they possessed their own music “of great order and harmony.” But Josquin could have had little inkling of that grander, darker future. A bequest in his will arranged for his setting of “Pater noster” to be sung outside his house in Condé during church processions. As far as he knew, he would be remembered in no other way. ♦