Josquin's Missa Quem dicunt homines (notes for CD release)

the other Josquin : Missa Quem dicunt homines The late 1510s witnessed major changes in musical style in northern France – changes spearheaded by a group of composers who were all in some way connected with the French royal court: Jean Mouton, Jean Richafort, Anthonius Divitis, Antoine de Févin, and of course Josquin hi self. Richafort's otet Que dicu t ho i es e joyed al ost instant fame as the perfect embodiment of new stylistic ideals – above all, a gentle, placid flow, continuous imitation between all voices, with motives typically entering on off-beats, and being so melodically generic that o ly their recurre ce i other voices defi ed the as " otives." … At this early stage of its history, the parody Mass was typically an extended meditation on the musical material of the model. In this regard the earliest Masses on Quem dicunt homines, those by Mouton, Divitis, Richafort, and Josquin, seem to explore the very limits of what can be done with the material of a single motet. As a group they give the impression of having been written in a contest, at least in spirit: these composers all knew each other, and they were obviously aware of each other's efforts. (Prof. Rob C Wegman) “Quem dicunt homines me esse?” – whom do men say that I am? Christ’s question to his disciples could also be Josquin’s question to us. And, like the disciples, we would have to offer uncertain, contradictory and incomplete replies. The 1500s and 1900s shared a view of Josquin: his was the best music of his time. In the 1500s this meant lots of not-Josquin works were attributed to him, a trend which was reversed in the last century as lesser works were removed from Josquin’s oeuvre. But, as we have become more obsessed with accurate attribution, it is not just lesser works which have been consigned to anonymity and, all too often, consequent disappearance from the repertoire. A sixteenth century example is the beautiful six-voice Verbum bonum et suave by Willaert which was dropped from the Papal choir’s repertory as soon as they found it wasn’t by Josquin1. A modern one might be the Missa Caput, recorded half a dozen times in the quartercentury of the LP era when attributed to Dufay, recorded only once or twice in the same period since becoming anonymous. The mass which is the centrepiece of this recording falls into the same category; an extraordinary masterpiece, which has been sidestepped by the early music revival since Osthoff and Smijers rejected the attribution to Josquin in the 1950s. The argument against Josquin’s authorship is 1 stylistic: the mass might more readily fit somewhere in the two decades after Josquin’s death than around 1520. But stylistic arguments can be dangerous. Would Beethoven’s late quartets be played so often if modern scholarship decided they could no longer be listed as Beethoven’s, being ‘untypical’ of his style? While this is unlikely to happen to the quartets, given the nineteenth-century documentary support for Beethoven’s authorship, we have much less hard evidence from the early sixteenth century. There is a risk that the consequently-necessary stylistic arguments become circular: we identify a ‘core’ set of works which define the composer’s style, and use that definition of style to exclude works which don’t fit the style, so that our act of choosing the core works ends up defining as ‘genuine’ only the works which look like what we expected. ‘Big data’ analysis in the digital humanities, exemplified for early renaissance music by the exciting Josquin Research Project2, runs the same risk: to look for ‘fingerprints’ of a composer’s style, you need to specify which works are genuinely his… A different approach might be to imagine an ‘other’ Josquin (a phrase coined by Prof Rob Wegman3, who has also sought to rehabilitate our mass), the sort of surprising innovator whose stylistic development might encompass a wider range of works, for better or worse: experiments are not always successful! So, who wrote ‘our’ Missa Quem dicunt homines? The mass exists in only one copy, probably made between 1535-1540, where it has pride of place as the first of a series of Josquin masses. There are no conflicting attributions; scholarly rejection of the attribution is based solely on stylistic grounds. To some extent we can see the circular argument here: it is a ‘parody’ mass, a genre which developed right at the end of Josquin’s life, and the only other parody mass attributed to Josquin (the Mater Patris mass) has been questioned, partly on quality grounds but partly because there are no other Josquin masses of this kind(!). More recently, even the Fortuna desperata and Malheur me bat masses which contain elements of parody writing have come under fire because ‘canonical’ Josquin just doesn’t do this. Let’s be clear: the Mass on this recording is a masterpiece. Its editor Harry Elzinga4 determined that it was not ‘authentic’ Josquin but struggled to find a good enough composer to whom he might attribute it, in view of its quality and the unique density of its quotations from the source motet which are “ingenious and at times wilful”. Unable to find a name, he had to leave it anonymous. While anonymity is not a synonym for ‘inferiority’, it remains true that unattributed compositions must fight harder to be heard and recorded than those whose composers we can name. The motet on which the Mass is based is by Jean Richafort, perhaps Josquin’s pupil although his music is typically ‘post-Josquin’ with denser textures, fewer rests for the singers, and a flirtation with dissonance if not 2 yet a full-blooded embrace of it. But we should note that these ‘postJosquin’ fingerprints date to the 1510s, when Josquin was still alive! Nine imitative masses survive based on Richafort’s motet, from the early settings by Mouton and Divitis to one by Palestrina from just before 1600. Its popularity as a source owes much to the way Richafort matched the short phrases of his text with short, easily-recognised musical motifs which provided a rich source of material for re-deployment in larger-scale mass settings. As Prof Wegman notes, the earlier settings come from a group of composers who knew each other, and probably each other’s Quem dicunt mass settings. Elzinga5 has shown that our mass, much more so than the others on the motet, uses its model very intensely: he identifies 43 motifs which recur in the mass, far more than in any other early parody mass. These motifs are built into an imitative pattern where voices often pick up one another’s themes at very short range – half a dozen notes or so. If Josquin had an obsession, it was repeating short-range imitative motifs6, often developed into canonic writing: might this be an indication of authorship? Another interesting detail lies in the Sanctus: it contains a separate motet, Adoramus te, for the moment of the Elevation of the Host – a practice we can parallel in Josquin (the Sanctus ‘d’ung aultre amer’ for instance) but rarely elsewhere, and which may be associated with the Milanese court. That the manuscript lives in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan is no coincidence. A Milanese link, though, brings us to the dating question. The parody mass evolved at the French court, and Lockwood and others5 have attractively proposed that two of the earliest Quem dicunt masses, by Mouton and Divitis, may have been written in competition and for the same occasion – the meeting of Francis I of France and Pope Leo X at Bologna in 1515. Josquin’s emulative instinct could have been aroused by so public a ‘competition’ between composers, perhaps, but by this time he was in genteel retirement, nominally running the musical establishment at Condé-sur-l’Escault. We know of no links at this time of his life to Milan, though a specific Italian (Milanese) commission cannot be ruled out. Whoever wrote the mass clearly designed its obsessive re-use of motifs from the motet as a showy way of out-performing previous composers. That fits Josquin, as does the quality of the music – which is outstanding. Our composer writes confidently, expressively, inventively and with a strong structural sense. There is considerable virtuosity in his seamless integration of Richafort’s motifs into a piece which is stronger and more unified than the motet; and a proudly competitive spirit in developing the early models of Mouton and Divitis so ambitiously. It is high-quality and daring music-making exploring new possibilities and new technical challenges. But the parody technique, and much of the writing, sounds 3 more like the 1520s or 1530s than the 1510s when Josquin would have been writing. With the exception of the famous Pange lingua mass, Josquin’s acknowledged oeuvre takes practically no account of stylistic developments after about 1510; either he stopped composing, or he deliberately chose to write in a conservative, even outdated style. But perhaps the ‘other’ Josquin who taught and worked with Mouton, Richafort and others may not have been such a die-hard conservative. If many features of the music are what we think of as ‘post-Josquin’, don’t we really mean they are later than his ‘middle’ or ‘classic’ period? Should we allow the elderly Josquin (in his 60s by the late 1510s) a continued curiosity and excitement about music-making and stylistic development? At the very least, listening to this mass opens up the possibility of there being ‘another’ Josquin who was not determinedly old-fashioned in the 1510s, but is still in touch with – and influencing – the stylistic development of polyphonic writing in his seventh decade. The motet Factum est autem shows a different kind of Josquinian otherness: that between famous and widely-copied works, and their neglected siblings. There is no doubt that this is authentic Josquin; it was written as a pair with the much more famous Liber generationis Jesu Christi, and like that piece is an astonishing setting of one of the Biblical genealogies of Christ. Factum est autem sets the family tree recorded by Luke, Liber generationis the version offered by Matthew. As such, the text is essentially a succession of exotic names – 76 of them one after another in what risks becoming a tedious list. Other composers have largely left this sort of bravura task alone: a modern exception is Arvo Pärt (… which was the son of …), but the only other early setting of either text appears to be one of Factum est by Johannes Prioris who, like his slightly-older contemporary Josquin, was not afraid to innovate and to challenge himself. Both of the Josquin genealogy motets have a relatively limited and lowpitched range, effectively ATBarB, though Factum est is slightly lower and narrower in range (only two-and-a-half octaves compared to nearly three in Liber generationis). Josquin weaves a flow of beautiful and varied polyphony in both motets, but the result in Factum est sounds rather different partly because the phrases are shorter. A typical phrase in Liber generationis consists of “et autem genuit (name)”, averaging around 10 syllables; in Factum est the average phrase-length – “qui fuit (name)” – is only about half that, so in place of the relatively expansive phrasing of the more famous motet this one moves in shorter melodic motifs. The overall effect is also more hurried, as the ‘list’ which fills all three parts of Liber generationis is confined to the last two parts of Factum est: the opening part tells the story of the dove descending on Jesus as he is baptised, 4 accompanied by a voice from heaven. The list therefore runs for only about three-quarters of the time Josquin gives himself in Liber generationis. Perhaps because of these limitations, Factum est has never been recorded, while its sister motet has become almost notorious. Hopefully this recording will help to restore – or perhaps bestow - a degree of currency for this ‘alternative’ genealogy motet and its eloquent solution to some different compositional problems. Sources of the music: Josquin, Missa Quem dicunt homines – Milan E46 inf (ed. Theodor Dumitrescu, CMME.org) Josquin, Factum est autem – ed. Martin Just, New Josquin Edition vol.19 (www.kvnm.nl) Richafort, Quem dicunt homines – Treviso I-TVd 7 (ed. Jorge Martin, Ars Subtilior editions - www.arsubtilior.com) Thanks to Dr Willem Elders for waiving the NJE’s performing royalties; and to Drs. Wegman and Elzinga for their interest in this project. 1 as recorded by Zarlino, Le istitutioni harmoniche (Venice 1558) 2 jrp.ccarh.org Rob C Wegman “The other Josquin” in Tijdschrift van de Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis (2008) 3 Harry Elzinga Johannes Richafort, opera omnia, vol. IV (Tres Missae super “Quem dicunt homines”) (2006) 4 Harry Elzinga “Josquin's Missa Quem dicunt homines: A Reexamination” in Tijdschrift van de Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis (1998) 5 6 Jesse Rodin “Josquin's Rome: Hearing and Composing in the Sistine Chapel”, (2012), p.41 5