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Music

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Edward E. Lowinsky*
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
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Extract

The first volume of Helmut Osthoff's work on Josquin Desprez (ca. 1440–1521) dealing with the Netherlandish master's biography and his Mass compositions marks an epoch in Josquin research. It is the first monograph devoted to the greatest musical figure of the Renaissance.

Josquin's genius was mighty enough to encompass both old and new worlds of music, the old world of masterly contrapuntal construction and of mathematical symbolism of Netherlandish vintage, and the new world of euphonious harmony and of musical expression of Italian and of humanistic origin. As an artistic personality Josquin is a novelty in the world of music: he is the first composer in Western history of whom we can form some picture of personality and of whom we have a goodly number of anecdotes, all of which show him to be endowed with a penetrating sense of his artistic mission and a vast, almost condescending, yet at times melancholy, sense of humor toward the great patrons who commanded his services.

Type
Scholarship in the Renaissance
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1963

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References

1 Tutzing, 1962. One can congratulate the new publisher Hans Schneider on the beauty of the book, its typographical perfection, the clarity of the music examples, and the high quality of the 31 plates of persons and places in Josquin's life.

2 See ch. 3, pp. 45 ff. and notes 17, 19, 20; and ch. 4, p. 53 and note 15.

3 Jean Perréal offers to the art historian a puzzle, no less painful than, but precisely opposed to, the one posed by Josquin Desprez for the music historian: there is an enviably rich record of biographical information, but not a single authenticated painting.

4 In an obvious slip of the pen the author speaks of Antoine de Luxembourg, a brother of Louis. The dates and data that she provides relate clearly to Louis.

5 I am indebted to Dr. Finscher for his kindness in sending me at my request a copy of the typescript of his dissertation. The main contents of the chapter in question have been published in the third instalment of the author's ‘Loyset Compère and his Works' with the subtitle ‘The Motetti Missales’ in Musica Disciplina, xiv (i960), 131-157.

6 See Jeppesen, K., ‘Die 3 Gafurius-Kodizes der Fabbrica del Duomo’, Acta Musicologica, in (1931), 1428.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 But not entirely. See Sartori, C.: ‘Il Quarto Codice di GafFurio Non E Del Tutto Scomparso’, Collectanea Historiae Musicae, 1 (1953), 2544.Google Scholar

8 Jeppesen, who was the first scholar to give a full and accurate description of the Milanese manuscripts (op. cit.) did raise the question whether the substitute Masses were composed as such or only adapted. He decided in favor of the former possibility, because ‘they were all written by one master and stand in one and the same mode,’ and because the single movements ‘manifest frequently thematic relationships and are almost without exception written in the same clefs’ (ibid., p. 16). But all of these arguments applyjust as well, if we assume that the works were originally conceived as motet cycles.

9 Loyset Compere, Opera Omnia, II (American Institute of Musicology, 1959), I, n. 4.

10 That liturgical observance was not Gafori's chief concern may be seen from his own Masses. Of one dozen Mass compositions only four follow the Ambrosian rite in which Kyrie and Agnus dei are omitted, while a fifth omits the Agnus but includes the Kyrie. The majority of Gafori's Masses follow the Gregorian rite.

11 See K. Jeppesen's admirable edition Die Mehrstimmige Italienische Laude um 1500, Leipzig, 1935. Jeppesen has shown (see pp. xxi-xxv) that all lauda compositions from the second half of the fifteenth century in Italian manuscripts show a much more simple, not to say primitive, style, and that they are mostly written for two and three parts.

12 Among the composers of laude of whose lives we possess information we list the following with the pertinent data: Cara (at the Court of Mantua from 1495 to 1525); Tromboncino (first mentioned in archives in 1487 at the same court, d. after 1535); Laurentius Bergomotius (born ca. 1480, appears as singer in 1506 at the Duomo of Modena, according to recent researches by Herman-Walther Frey, ‘Regesten zur päpstlichen Kapelle unter Leo X,’ Musikforschung, viii, 4, 432 ff.); Giovanni Spataro (ca. 1460-1541, appears 1505 as singer at San Petronio in Bologna); Jac. Foglianus (1473-1548); Zesso (named in a letter of del Lago of 1533 as his teacher); Ludovico Milanese (canon and organist in Lucca 1514-37); Filippo de Lurano (Rubsamen deduces from his authorship of text and music of a Latin epithahmium on a Roman wedding in 1508 and other evidence that he was in Rome during that time, see article in MGG); Pietro Capretto, alias Hedus (Jeppesen notes that in the MSS of Udine and Paris lauda compositions of this master appear with dates of 1493, 1494, 1495, and 1501, see op. cit., pp. lxi-lxiii). We are handicapped by the complete lack of biographic data concerning the author of the first book of laude of 1508, who is to be credited with approximately one-third of the surviving lauda repertory, Innocentius Dammonis. But for our purposes enough information is provided in the dedication letter which proves (a) that Dammonis himself was alive in 1508 and responsible for the edition; (b) that his work must have been composed rather recently, for he speaks oilaudes quasdam subitario quodam calore a me aeditas, i.e., of ‘a number of laude composed by myself in a sort of sudden heat.’ This is the way one speaks of a recent opus rather than one that has had decades of time to cool in the author's drawer.

13 Motetti B (see Jeppesen, , op. cit., p. lx Google Scholar).

14 Florence, Bibl. Naz. MS. Panciatichi 27 (ibid.). It might be mentioned in passing that the ‘modern’ character of the lauda style is further confirmed by the painters of the time. Lo Spagna, in ca. 1504, and Carpaccio, in ca. 1505, present four-part laude in some of their paintings that agree well with the style of the Petrucci laude. One may assume that these painters availed themselves of music from the current repertory (for Lo Spagna see Dent, Edward, ‘The Laudi Spirituali in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, Proceedings of the Musical Association, 1916-1917, London, 1917, pp. 63 ff.Google Scholar; for Carpaccio see Edward E. Lowinsky, ‘The Music in “St. Jerome's Study” ’, The Art Bulletin, XLI [Dec. 1959\, 4, 298 ff. I may add that Jeppesen had noticed the two compositions on Carpaccio's painting [op. tit., p. xiv, n. 2], but had overlooked the strong contrast between the three-part composition of unquestionably secular origin and the four-part religious piece, when he termed both of them laude.)

15 Even were we to presume for one moment that the tradition of substitute Masses originated in Milan around 1470, would this rule out the possibility that Josquin, who in regard to the freedom of his working methods has no equal, substituted a motet for the Benedictus of one Mass long after having left Milan?