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.
Notes on Individual Works
Josquin des Prez — Ave Maria...virgo serena
As noted above, this stunning motet is quintessential Josquin. Its opening melodic gesture, loosely tracing its plainchant origins, rises a perfect fourth, then stretches, in “Ma-ri-i-a,” up to the major third, and back down. Simple, but rhetorically perfect. Twice, a six-note gesture passes through each of the four voice parts, from highest to lowest in turn, spaced every four beats, for “Ave Maria” and “gratia plena.” The second and third soprano phrases slip in just as the basses are wrapping up their first and second, seamlessly introducing the subsequent bits of text without obscuring the earlier ones. Reorienting the texture, the fourth piece of text is introduced by the altos, slightly foreshortened. The rest of the voices join, with decorative descending scales, and the opening couplet is gracefully, inevitably, swept into a cadence among all four voices. The next begins only after the basses finish their final bit of imitation. The next stanza begins with duets–first soprano/alto, then tenor/bass. At “full of great joy,” Josquin brings all four voice parts into simultaneity, in a wide open voicing (as “full” as he could muster). Having summoned the full strength of the ensemble, he builds forward momentum through parallel motion in the outer voices, energized by cross rhythms in the inner voices, until all four voice parts erupt in fast-moving polyphonic “gladness.” It’s as though Josquin understands that, before the full four-part texture arrives, the piece needed to demonstrate its own internal logic. It's a structural idea so clean that later composers could take it apart phrase by phrase and rebuild it into whole new compositions. Each subsequent stanza unfolds in a rhetorically-guided combination of duet, trio, and four-part textures.
Beyond its pleasing structural ingenuity, the motet is brilliantly practical. Its stanzas visit each of the major feast days for Mary, making it a widely useful piece of music. When Petrucci published the first printed anthology of motets in Venice in 1502, the friar who assembled it—Petrus Castellanus, quietly revising Josquin's text along the way to sidestep a live doctrinal quarrel over the Immaculate Conception—chose to lead the whole volume with this piece, as though the entire enterprise of printed polyphony needed a founding statement, and only one piece would do.
Ludwig Senfl — Ave Rosa Sine Spinas
Senfl studied under Heinrich Isaac, who had been Josquin's contemporary and close professional rival—the two composers were literally weighed against each other for a job at the Ferrarese court in 1502, with a scout advising the Duke to hire Isaac because he was cheaper and faster, advice the Duke ultimately ignored. That makes Senfl something like a musical godson of Josquin's circle by adoption rather than blood, inheriting the same Franco-Flemish contrapuntal language secondhand and carrying it into German-speaking lands, where Martin Luther would later praise the two of them, Josquin and Senfl, in the same breath, as the only composers who could truly make the notes obey them rather than the reverse. Ave Rosa Sine Spinas is built on a cantus firmus—a chant melody unspooling in long tones straight through the piece, on the familiar Ave Maria prayer—while faster, decorous lines setting an effusive poetic gloss on the prayer weave and dazzle around it. One of our altos put it best: the cantus firmus is the lead outlines of a stained glass window, always present, structural, holding the whole thing together, while the imitative voices are the scintillating color caught in each individual pane.
Josquin des Prez — Inviolata, integra et casta es Maria
Here Josquin ups the ante of Senfl’s example of cantus firmus technique and performs a sleight of hand typical of the most capable composers of his era: a florid, decorous motet wrapped around an extremely strict compositional procedure. The alto and second tenor lay out a Marian plainchant sequence, as a cantus firmus, in long tones, note for note identical between the two parts except that one sings a fifth above the other and three beats later. It’s not just a nestled cantus firmus but a canon between two of them, nestled in the middle of the texture, growing tighter as the piece proceeds (three beats of separation in the first section, then two, then finally one). The three other voices drape melismatic garlands around those long notes, and the effect is so seamless you would never know the canon was there without seeing it on the page. The Josquin scholar John Milsom put it well: “It's as if Josquin, having built the piece's structural backbone with real labor, then took particular pleasure in concealing it beneath three curvaceous accompaniments.” It culminates powerfully, and beautifully, in three clear acclamations: O merciful one! O Queen! O Maria! Twenty-eight manuscript sources survive of this one motet—an extraordinary number for the period—and it went on to inspire masses and motets by later composers, and to turn up in the theoretical treatises of Zarlino and Salinas. It's easy to hear why: this is a piece of impeccable technique in total service of effusive devotion, the technique never once calling attention to itself.
Jacobus Clemens non Papa — Ego Flos Campi
Clemens sets just a handful of verses from the Song of Songs, likening the speaker's beloved to the rose of Sharon, a lily among thorns, a fountain of gardens. He belongs to the generation that absorbed Josquin's late imitative technique already filtered through Gombert's intensification of it—denser, more continuous, fewer breathing spaces between points of imitation than Josquin himself typically allowed. Listen for the cadences especially: the same simultaneous false relations that animate the Gombert later on this program—a G natural sounding against an A-flat in the same instant, a device some theorists of the period considered his particular signature—ripen here too, lending even this gentle, floral text a quiet harmonic ache underneath its sweetness.
Cipriano de Rore — Missa Praeter Rerum Seriem: Kyrie
Cipriano de Rore left Flanders for Italy and eventually inherited Adrian Willaert's post at St. Mark's in Venice, then probably the most prestigious musical appointment in the country. But before that, from 1547 to 1558, he served Duke Ercole II d'Este in Ferrara, the very court Josquin himself had once served, composing madrigals of such harmonic sophistication that history has sometimes forgotten he was also a sacred composer of genius, a true successor to Josquin. This mass is his homage to both master and patron at once: it takes Josquin's own six-voice Christmas motet Praeter rerum seriem and builds a new mass directly on top of it, adding a seventh voice and turning one of the existing lines into a long-note cantus firmus that spells out, in Latin, "Hercules secundus dux Ferrarie quartus vivit et vivet"—long live Duke Ercole—sung throughout to the devotional melody Josquin himself had quoted. Josquin’s original is most recognizable at the outset, where an imitative duet emerges from the depths of the ensemble, in two bass parts. De Rore develops Josquin's own magisterial opening idea, glazing a new alto part onto the existing polyphony, adding just enough of his own voice that the homage never curdles into mere copying.
Pierre de la Rue — Absalon, fili mi
Nicholas Gombert — Lugebat David Absalon
We pair these two settings, a generation apart, of King David's grief over his rebellious, slain son. Both set the same crucial kernel of text—"Absalom, my son, who would grant that I might die for you"—and both reach for one of the starkest expressions of loss in the entire motet repertoire, but the two composers get there by very different means. De la Rue, working in the generation just before Gombert's intensification of imitative technique, leaves the grief more spaced, more articulated by cadence, closer to Josquin's own habit of letting one line finish its thought before the next begins. The setting is drastically low in range; our sopranos will take a seat while we sing it. The vocal darkness natural to that range is intensified by De la Rue’s brazen lowering (flatting) of certain pitches. As he submerges the voices for the two statements of “non vivam ultra” (“I shall live no more”), the already aubergine hue of the harmony darkens, falling too deep below the surface sunlight to be seen.
Gombert's setting is both larger in scale and thicker in texture, at eight voices instead of four. In some of its most impassioned moments it eschews rests almost entirely, piling one voice's lament on top of the next before the previous one has finished, so the sorrow never quite has room to resolve—Gombert combining, as one contemporary theorist noted, the continuous texture inherited from Ockeghem with the imitative technique inherited from Josquin, "both full of harmonies and imitations" at once. Listen, too, for the simultaneous false relations threading through the Gombert, the same device we heard in the Clemens: two adjacent pitches, a half-step apart, sounding at the same instant, souring the harmony at exactly the moments the text most needs it sour. Composers of this era didn’t put dynamics in scores, and yet the manner in which Gombert dispenses the voices across the text—alternating slow whole notes and faster moving ones for both the tender, lamenting “o fili mi,” and the explosive “et clamabat—allow a choir to convey the mercurial, confusing gamut of that most intense of human emotions: grief.
Josquin des Prez — Mille regretz
Whether or not this is truly Josquin's—the attribution has never been fully settled, and probably never will be—hardly diminishes what may be the most performed piece in his entire, contested catalogue. In under two minutes, it holds sorrow at leaving and the pull of the open road in the same breath, its opening Phrygian half-step (an idea Josquin likely picked up from his own teacher, Ockeghem, decades earlier, and one he would return to again near the end of his life in the Missa Pange lingua) doing an enormous amount of emotional work with very little material. The scholar David Fallows, who believes the attribution, put it about as well as anyone has: few pieces manage to pack so much meaning into so little time.
Josquin des Prez — El Grillo and Scaramella
We include two frottole—light Italian songs—to remind us Josquin was as comfortable with a joke as with a devotional canon. El Grillo has fun with onomatopoeia, its cricket protagonist singing tirelessly while other birds flit off from place to place after only a few notes. Scaramella sends up a stock comic braggart-soldier—the ancestor, more or less, of the commedia dell'arte's Scaramuccia, and by extension of the English "Scaramouch"—marching off to war with nothing but a lance and a little round shield, then primping in his shoes and boots, any real martial grandeur deflated on arrival. Underneath the joke is a small piece of compositional wit: the melody sounds at first as though it belongs to the soprano, but it's actually in the tenor, which enters first, in canon with the voice above it, before the rest of the texture is built up around the pair.
Pierre de Manchicourt — Missa Veni Sancte Spiritus: Agnus Dei
Manchicourt spent most of his career close to home—Tours, Tournai, Arras—before being recruited late in life to lead Philip II of Spain's Capilla Flamenca, the Flemish chapel the Habsburg court maintained precisely because its severe, contrapuntally dense native style suited the king's own famously austere tastes; Manchicourt held the post, particularly favored by Philip, until his death in Madrid in 1564. This Agnus Dei paraphrases not a mass or chanson but the Gregorian sequence for Pentecost, Veni Sancte Spiritus, the ancient "Golden Sequence" still sung today before the Gospel reading at Pentecost Mass. Here, too, the pervasive imitation leads to some rich harmonic moments. And, as De Rore’s mass does, Manchicourt’s opens with a sumptuous duet in the two lowest voice parts.
Josquin des Prez — Usquequo, Domine
A psalm of complaint—"How long, O Lord, will you forget me?"—set for just four voices. What's striking is how plain Josquin's means are: the opening question is set to just two notes, one an aching half step above the other; other lines of text are set to long stretches of scalar motion, simply up and down, and elsewhere near-total stasis on a single repeated pitch, the melody barely moving at all. Yet all of these approaches land the emotional weight of the text exactly, without ornament, without excess. It's motivicity again, but stripped down to its studs—proof that the technique doesn't require complexity to be devastating.
Hieronimus Vinders — O mors inevitabilis
A lament for Josquin himself, written by a composer we know almost nothing else about, built over a cantus firmus drawn straight from the Requiem Mass—Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, grant them eternal rest—laid beneath the grieving text like a slow tolling bell underneath the counterpoint above it. "O inevitable death, bitter death, cruel death... you took him away from us, who through his harmony gave splendor to the church. Therefore, you musicians, say: may he rest in peace." It is, quite literally, the sound of the next generation burying the one before it, using the older composer's own musical language to do so, and it belongs on tonight's program as much as anything Josquin wrote himself—perhaps more than anything else here, it's the sound of a "school" recognizing, in real time, that it had just become one.
Thomas Crecquillon — Missa Domine Deus Omnipotens: Sanctus
Crecquillon closes the concert with a movement built from his own earlier motet on this same text—self-quotation rather than homage to another master, a composer returning to his own material and finding, the second time, something new to make of it.
With its major-mode implications and bold melodic motions, this piece is surely the most affirmative, optimistic sounding of the lot. There's a bookend here I couldn't resist pointing out. The very first sound you heard tonight, at the opening of the Josquin Ave Maria, was a rising perfect fourth—upward-reaching, a gesture that seems to lean forward into the piece before a single word of text has even landed. Crecquillon's Sanctus opens with the same interval, wholly imitative, voice after voice climbing the same fourth, less spacious than Josquin's paired duets, closer-set, but no less confident of where it's headed. As the movement unfolds, that rising fourth starts to foreshorten rhythmically, gaining a little more urgency each time it recurs, the phrases arriving faster than they left. At "Pleni sunt caeli," Crecquillon inverts it—a descending fourth now, as if the music itself is physically following the text down from the heavens to the earth that is also, the text insists, full of God's glory. The Osanna erupts as a fanfare, harmony moving fast and bright underneath it. And then, rounding the final corner toward the last "Osanna," that rising fourth comes back one voice at a time—basses first, then tenors, then altos, and finally, triumphantly, the sopranos on top of the whole texture, the same gesture that opened the evening now closing it from the other direction. It's a sure, swaggering, deeply satisfying piece of compositional craft. I noticed the kinship between these two openings back in score study, choosing pieces for this program, well before a single rehearsal—just reading the two openings on the page, that rising fourth arriving in the inner ear with the same force it has now, in the room, as sung sound. Once I saw it, I couldn't unsee it, and I built the program around it on purpose: the whole evening framed by the same four notes, rising at the start, and, eighty minutes later, rising home again.