Josquin and the

Franco-Flemish School

Performed September 2026

Ave Maria Virgo Serena — Josquin des Prez (ca. 1450-1521)

Ave Rosa Sine Spinas — Ludwig Senfl (ca. 1486-1543)

Inviolata integra et casta — Josquin des Prez

Ego Flos Campi — Jacobus Clemens non Papa (ca. 1510-1555)

Missa Praeter Rerum Serie — Kyrie  — Cipriano de Rore (ca. 1515-1565)

Absalon, fili mi — Pierre de la Rue (ca. 1452-1518)

Lugebat David Absalon — Nicholas Gombert (ca. 1495-1560)

Mille Regretz — Josquin des Prez

El Grillo — Josquin des Prez

Scaramella — Josquin des Prez

Missa Veni Sancte Spiritus — Agnus Dei  — Pierre de Manchicourt (ca. 1510-1564)

Usquequo, Domine — Josquin des Prez

O mors inevitabilis — Hieronimus Vinders (fl. 1525-1526)

Missa Domine Deus Omnipotens — Sanctus  —Thomas Crecquillon

Notes on the Program

I was fourteen or fifteen when I first heard Josquin’s Ave Maria. A friend who attended a different school than I did raved about a piece he was singing in his choir: something called Sicut Cervus, by a composer named Palestrina. Curious, I set off to Borders Books and scoured the classical CD bins tucked into the back corner of the store. I found a CD recorded by New York's own Voices of Ascension, Beyond Chant, and brought it home. Track 1 was Palestrina’s Sicut Cervus. I immediately agreed with my friend: the piece was stunning. (And last year at this time, Res Facta dedicated a concert to Palestrina and his influence). I let the disc keep playing, and Track 2, Josquin's Ave Maria...virgo serena, landed on my ear in a different way. The piece felt somehow more spacious, more sparkling, and yet also more speech-like. Track 3 was Lassus's Justorum Animae. Night after night I’d follow the same routine: get ready for bed, cue up the CD, listen to the Palestrina, lay rapt as the Josquin surrounded me, let the Lassus play until 0:51—a gorgeous 9–8 suspension in the second sopranos—then hit stop and go to sleep.

I couldn’t put words to my fascination with the Josquin, but I was enchanted, hooked. I didn’t have the resources, then, to call up the sheet music on a computer, the way we do now, and I hadn’t experienced a sound world anything like it—in piano lessons, youth orchestra, band, or even choir. I hadn’t yet learned anything about Renaissance polyphony. I just knew I needed to hear more of it. More CDs followed. (Borders got a lot of my lifeguarding wages back then.) In a way, the performance of Josquin’s Ave Maria opening the program has been three decades in the making, as my pursuit of somehow immersing myself in that sound gradually steered my musical life in the direction of choral music. The Ave Maria has lived in my mind's ear for three decades now—not just as a favorite, of which I’ll never tire, but as a paragon of polyphonic craft, a kind of private instrument I've measured a great deal of other music against since, the way a carpenter carries a level in the truck long after the job that first required it is finished. 

My experience is hardly unique: People have been praising the quality of Josquin’s compositions since the moment they first appeared, more than 500 years ago. The job postings on Josquin’s resume suggest a composer in high demand. He worked for King René of Anjou in southern France and Cardinal Ascanio Sforza in Milan and Rome, then composed for the ducal chapel in Milan and the papal chapel in Rome, then was recruited to the chapel of Duke Ercole d’Este in Ferrara. (Notably, though a scout counseled Ercole to hire Heinrich Isaac in lieu of Josquin because Josquin was difficult to work with and wanted too much money, the Duke hired him anyway).

The coincidence of the apex of Josquin’s career and the invention of moveable type printing presses for music, combined with the quality his contemporaries saw in his work, lent Josquin outsized influence over the rest of the sixteenth century. In the early 1500s, no composers were yet writing symphonies, or operas, or mass-market piano music; choral masses and motet were the genres in which a composer could achieve cultural and commercial success. Petrucci's Liber primus missarum Josquin (1502) was the first volume of polyphonic masses by a single composer ever printed, followed by two more, then a Roman reprint decades later—a publication history no other composer of the period can match. The first motet collections to be printed (Petrucci’s motetti A  of 1502, his Motetti C of 1504, his Motetti libro quarto of 1505) all give Josquin pride of place and begin with one of his motets. Thus printed, his music could circulate. Moreover, Josquin’s music soon appeared in singing primers for choirboys (some of whom then became composers themselves). A German publisher would later quip, only half jokingly, that Josquin had composed more music after his death than during his life, as manuscripts of dubious authorship kept circulating under his increasingly marketable name. Josquin was, in other words, arguably the first composer whose name alone was an international brand, long before we had a sense of the concept. 

His career was also coincident with a broader cultural shift toward humanist values. At the beginning of his career, music was still an art of measurement, in the quadrivium alongside arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. By the end, music was increasingly associated with the arts of rhetoric. More so than his predecessors,’ Josquin’s masses and motets exhibited a greater transparency of texture and clearer sense of declamation. Richard Taruskin suggests that “as these qualities were reinterpreted in the sixteenth century, Josquin became willy-nilly the protagonist of a new ordering of esthetic values. Through the writings of German humanist theorists like Henricus Glareanus, his most enthusiastic exponent, his works became the classics on which the new esthetic rested.” Glareanus, writing in 1547, reached for the highest comparison available to a sixteenth-century reader: Virgil. "No one has more effectively expressed the passions of the soul in music than this symphonist. Just as Virgil, with his natural facility, was accustomed to adapt his poem to his subject... so our Josquin, where his matter requires it, now advances with impetuous and precipitate notes, now intones his subject in long-drawn tones." Glareanus would later go further still, declaring Josquin the creator of an ars perfecta—a perfected art that could, by definition, never be improved upon. 

What was it, technically, that inspired this reverence? The scholar Joshua Rifkin has a useful, if slightly overworked, term for one aspect of it: "motivicity"—not motive in the Beethovenian sense of a rhythmic cell hammering obstinantly across a symphonic movement, but something having more to do with clarity of texture and text— a way of crafting polyphonic choral textures wherein longer spans of shapely, rhetorically-minded melody are imitated one voice to the next and each part picks up not merely a sequence of pitches but a piece of meaning already set in motion by the one before it. You'll hear this most clearly tonight right at the start, in the first two phrases of Ave Maria. A six-note pattern, appearing every two bars, from soprano down to bass, cadences clearly before the next idea is introduced. Josquin embroiders the texture with some decorative melismas, but never so much that the rhetorical sense of the line is obscured. One of our altos Kate reacted to the experience of rehearsing the polyphonic Josquin pieces on this evening’s program: “There seems to be more space in this polyphony (than Tallis and Byrd)--and I love the imitation.” It's not so different, actually, from the idea I keep returning to when I write about this ensemble elsewhere: that these pieces in this imitative polyphonic style are less permanent objects to be admired than relationships to be entered into, voice mutually obliged to voice, (sibi mutuo obligentur in the words of the Renaissance theorist Tinctoris)--each composition a res facta (a thing made) whose physical manifestation, the score, isn’t complete until sung, among voices. 

Josquin des Prez died in 1521. The composer of comparable fame and notoriety to follow, Palestrina, was born four years later, in 1525. Between them lies what some scholars have called a "lost generation:" composers born in Josquin's own Franco-Flemish lands, coming of age just as he was dying, active and mature well before Palestrina had composed a note, who never achieved anything like his singular fame but who absorbed, extended, and at moments genuinely rivaled his art. Some received Josquin through direct institutional lines: Cipriano de Rore quite literally held Josquin's old post at the Ferrarese court, decades later, still writing under the long shadow of his predecessor's reputation there, and directly iterated on Josquin’s music. Clemens non Papa, working mostly in what is now Belgium and the Netherlands, seems to have received Josquin only as an already-crystallized sound, transmitted through print. Hermann Finck’s 1556 treatise designates Gombert a "pupil of Josquin of blessed memory." Whether that's literal or more in the honorific sense that he inherited Josquin’s legacy is genuinely unsettled. These composers absorbed Josquin’s style of imitation and intensified it, bringing the different voice parts in closer proximity, foreshortening the imitation, leaving it more pervasive throughout. This thickens the textures (which, incidentally, were already thicker as all of Josquin’s masses are for four voice parts, but the mass movements we present this evening are for six and seven parts). It thickens the harmony, too: where Josquin often punctuated the end of a point of imitation (a phrase) with a cadence between two or four voices, with just one voice providing dissonance, Clemens, Gombert, and Manchicourt funnel all their voices into major cadence point, smooshing two or even three dissonant notes together in an exquisite harmonic squeeze. 

Tonight's program belongs as much to them—Gombert, Clemens non Papa, de Rore, Vinders, Manchicourt, Crecquillon—as it does to Josquin. Almost none of them ever met Josquin. All of them were, in some sense, engaging with him. In some cases, that engagement is explicit. As was routine practice in Renaissance mass composition, none of the mass movements you'll hear tonight were invented from nothing. Each reworks something that already existed. Cipriano de Rore's Kyrie takes Josquin's own motet Praeter rerum seriem and builds a new mass directly on top of it, voice for voice—homage doubled, since de Rore was writing for the same Ferrarese patron Josquin himself had once served, adding a new soprano line and turning an existing part into a cantus firmus spelling out, in long Latin syllables, a paean to the reigning Duke. Thomas Crecquillon's Sanctus reworks his own earlier motet on the same text. And Pierre de Manchicourt's Agnus Dei turns to something older: the Gregorian sequence for Pentecost, Veni Sancte Spiritus, which inspires phrases throughout the six-voice texture. 

Three different relationships to the past—citation, self-quotation, chant paraphrase—housed inside three otherwise similarly grand, similarly Franco-Flemish-sounding movements. It's a good reminder that "originality," for these composers, meant something quite different from what we usually mean by the word now, and arguably something more interesting: not invention ex nihilo, but transformation of material a whole musical community already held in common—the same communal fabric, incidentally, that a listener in 1550, a fourteen-year-old in a Borders Books thirty years ago, and you, at this concert, are all, in their different ways, a part of. That, in the end, is what Res Facta exists to do as well. Not invent from nothing. Take the made things these composers left behind—ink on a page, mutual obligations waiting to be honored—and, for one evening, in this room, make them sound again, with you.