Josquin: Motets & Chansons I

Program: #24-31   Air Date: Jul 29, 2024

NOTE: All of the music on this program features the Cut Circle ensemble directed by our guest, Jesse Rodin. This is Musique en Wallonie CD MEW 2307. For complete information about this ensemble:

http://cutcircle.org

Josquin des Prez: the name evokes beautiful, brilliant, even magical music—but more than five centuries since he composed his last note, we are still discovering how to hear him.  In this album, originally conceived to mark the composer’s quincentenary in 2021, Cut Circle strives to treat Josquin not as a sleepy relic of the distant past but as a stylish,  sensitive, playful, ecstatic composer. We foreground his revolutionary precision and drive while embracing reactions to the music that are visceral and emotional.

Josquin composes through a kind of calculated perseveration: over and over he digs into a musical thought, usually in order to probe the text’s emotional content. His method is to repeat motives, short melodic-plus-rhythmic ideas that are passed from voice to voice in ingenious combinations, like a fast-paced basketball game with several balls in play. (Listen for example to how “progentibus ora” is tossed back and forth at tr. 2/5:00–5:14.) He also manipulates texture, changing how the voices relate to one another and how many voices are active at any given moment. Sharp contrasts between heterogenous motives and textures open up chasms between inward expressions of sadness, pleading, or pain and outward bursts of exuberance, anger, or silliness. Our ultimate goal is to cause roughly the same successions of sounds that he and his fellow musicians heard to elicit in us roughly the same range of feelings that he and his fellow musicians felt.

To do justice to the many facets of Josquin’s composing, Cut Circle has developed historically informed approaches to acoustics, tempo, rhythm, and other parameters. The key to unlocking what is most special about his music is ensuring that the individual voices are audible. To that end the ensemble assembles distinctive voices that are naturally clear, powerful, and flexible. Together we aim not for blend but for coherence and solidarity. The audibility of the voices depends equally on the overall sound world. We have therefore recreated the intimate acoustical environments that were available only to the luckiest of listeners: the king, the duchess, the pope, and their retinues, along with the singers themselves. Musicians performing motets might have huddled around a lectern in the side chapel of a cathedral (ill. 6), where sound-absorbing wall tapestries and physical proximity produced an immediacy that was tempered only by the more distant reverberation of the larger church. For the songs one can imagine spaces ranging from a great hall to a tent in the middle of a field to our choice here: a castle bedchamber. Still another key to unlocking Josquin’s sound is choosing historically appropriate tempos. The famous Ave Maria… virgo serena (tr. 1), for instance, has tended to be performed too slowly in modern times, save for a passage in triple meter (2:20–2:42) that is usually sung too fast (or, in some cases, too slowly) relative to the duplemeter music that surrounds it. These tempo relationships are not a matter of interpretation: they are clear in the choirbooks and printed editions from which Josquin and his fellow musicians sang this piece. Getting the overall tempo and the relationship between duple and triple right brings us closer to how fifteenth-century ears would have heard the flow of the music.

In Josquin’s hands the music flows vigorously, with independent melodic lines and often intricate rhythms that can only work when perfectly coordinated in time. Particularly because each singer read from one part without being able to see the others (see ill. 3), performers had to cultivate—revel in—rhythmic accuracy. This meant entraining to a steady beat and, in turn, entraining to one another. Here is where performance practice and emotional connection meet: in the shared feeling of pulse and groove that undergirds sung polyphony.

A direct way into this sound world is Parfons regretz (tr. 10), a song that uses minimal materials to call forth almost unbearable sadness. Technically the piece is a marvel, with opening imitation that conceals a strict canon between the last two voices to enter (0:13, 0:20). But it is the song’s affective journey that will catch you off guard: falling lines on “regretz” that seem to weep, rocking motion at “et lamentable joye” that calls to mind a lover in turmoil, sudden coordinations at “Venez a moy” and “Et vous hastez” that urge on painful feelings, and the desolate landscape of “Affin qu’en dueil” (1:31)—all this before a last phrase, repeated in several combinations of voices, that is perhaps the most moving setting of the word tears (“larmes”) there has ever been. With its moment-to-moment shifts in intensity and its explosive conclusion, this is music that wants to make you cry.

As Parfons regretz begins to show, for Josquin contrast is not just a local phenomenon. He often prepares climaxes over long spans, pulling back before initiating an intensification propelled by repetition and patterning. Especially striking are moments of calm or relative calm that lead, sometimes considerably later, to bursts of energy, as in the way Stabat mater builds up to the words “Vidit suum dulcem natum morientem desolatum” (1:44–3:00). Other text-driven examples that begin with a hush can be heard in Miserere (1:01, 2:12, 6:11, 9:27, 11:51), Ut Phebi radiis (1:31), Pater noster (2:38), Si j’ay perdu (1:12), En l’ombre (0:43), and Nimphes, nappées (1:07).

This album confines itself to music we can be confident this composer composed. Long-standing uncertainty about the canon has led to many renditions of wonderful pieces by “Josquin” that were in fact written by other composers—music that merits performing and reperforming, only not with his name attached. Research recently published in Early Music (“The Josquin Canon at 500”) has made it possible to offer here a collection of motets and songs from three to six voices that gives a sense of the variety of Josquin’s oeuvre and his development across his career.

Although the album does not proceed chronologically, the motet section begins with the first surviving piece attributed to him (Ave Maria, copied ca. 1485; see ill. 1) and ends with what was probably his last work: the six-voice Pater noster, composed in 1520, that he specified should be sung outside his house for all church processions in perpetuity. The songs, too, are bookended with pieces from early and late in his career. Taken as a whole, the album presents music that was composed or that first entered circulation in the 1480s (tr. 1, 8); in the years 1490–1503, above all in France around 1500 (tr. 3, 5–6, 9, 12–13, 15); in his 1503–4 Ferrara year (tr. 2, 4); and in 1504–21 in Condé-sur-l’Escaut (tr. 7, 10–11, 14, 16). From the moment we first glimpse his music in the surviving sources, we find a composer who was fully realized. And yet his later works show continual development in both technical prowess and esthetic sensibility.

A coherent list of works makes it easier to appreciate the breadth of Josquin’s compositional starting points. Ave Maria stands out for its freedom: after an opening built on chant, the motet proceeds without a ground plan save for continual shifts in texture, beginning with phrases in four-voice imitation (0:00, 0:11, 0:23, and 0:36) before introducing a pair of duets (0:46), four-voice homorhythm (0:59), a four-voice ascending sequence (1:05), and so on. In Ave verum corpus the music of the opening section is repeated exactly, but with an added contratenor that darts around the upper voices (0:45); this procedure is repeated in the next two sections. The tenor of the Miserere famously sings nothing but a pleading mantra (“Miserere mei, deus”), with each successive entrance beginning a note below—or, in the second section, above—the last (ill. 2). In Stabat mater the tenor quotes a song voice by Binchoys (d. 1460) at quarter speed, creating a marked disparity between the pervasive, slow-moving cantus firmus and the other, text-heavy voices. In two otherwise dissimilar chansons (tr. 9, 13), the tenor and superius take turns singing a popular song melody against a freer contratenor. And in Scaramella the tenor sings a simple popular tune beginning first on c’, then on f amid dense polyphony in the other voices (ill. 5).

All of the nine remaining tracks incorporate a canon between two voices, but Josquin varies how the canonic voices relate in time (they enter anywhere from one to six beats apart) and space (they begin a fourth, fifth, or octave apart, or at the unison); in one case four voices are generated from just two notated lines (tr. 12). As Joshua Rifkin has noted, in Josquin’s later music he tends to embed the canonic pair in a field of imitative writing, concealing from the ear, if not the eye, the two voices that are fully identical. In Pater noster, for instance, four out of six voices begin with the same music, making it virtually impossible to know that it is the two tenor voices, entering a fifth apart at 0:06 and 0:12, that will be chained to one another for the duration of the piece.

The motets featured here are mostly in praise of Mary or Christ, but the texts vary widely. Whereas Ave Maria offers loving praise to the Virgin, Virgo salutiferi characterizes Mary as mother of the “thundering God,” an idea to which Josquin responds by setting in motion three virtuosic voices (ill. 3) that charge almost constantly forward (e.g., 0:42, 3:24, 3:45, 5:21). Ut Phebi radiis lauds both Mary and Christ, with a strange and hard-to-translate text constrained by the underlying puns on the solmization syllables ut, ut re, ut re mi, and so on. In the cases of Ave verum corpus, Pater noster, and Stabat mater, Josquin was the first or among the first to set texts that later composers would turn to again and again. The Miserere stands alone in setting a penitential psalm without explicit reference to the New Testament.

The songs, too, are remarkably heterogeneous in subject matter and poetic register. At one end of the spectrum we find rustic scenes, such as the eyebrow-raising Une musque de Biscaye. None of the surviving sources includes the full text of even a single verse, which could indicate that Josquin conceived the piece instrumentally. Whatever the case, in the monophonic songbook that preserves the complete poem the last line seems—it is not easy to render a translation—to indicate the maiden’s rejection of her increasingly aggressive admirer. The music apparently supports this interpretation, inasmuch as the concluding phrase (0:46) yanks the tonal center to an unexpected area.

In the sweeter and soberer Baisiez moy, the maiden blames her mother for forcing her to turn down a kiss (0:41). En l’ombre d’ung buissonet (ill. 4) ends with the shepherdess feigning ignorance at Robin’s advances (“Robin, what do you mean?”). And in the euphemistic Petite camusette, Robin and Marion go off into the woods and “fall asleep.”

Outside the rustic sphere but still fairly lowbrow we find Faulte d’argent, which complains bitterly about a subject to which we can all relate; the last line (1:14) introduces an amusing, if to our modern ears misogynistic, twist. Scaramella, probably Josquin’s only Italian composition, pokes fun at the war-mongering title figure through a series of nonsense syllables. Far more serious is Si j’ay perdu mon amy, a tale of bitter regret told from the woman’s perspective—and the target is God, at whom the speaker hurls the angry “qu’en voullez vous dire” (what are you going to say about it/me) in rapid-fire imitation (1:40).

In the tragic five- and six-voice songs written late in his life in Condé-sur-l’Escaut, Josquin achieves new heights in the apparently conflicting realms of contrapuntal complexity, melodic and rhythmic simplicity, and musical eloquence. Equal to Parfons regretz in its emotional depth is Nimphes, nappées, which begins by asking nymphs to weep. The last line, “sontplus mort que malades,” is set to dense, swirling polyphony that underlines a sense of despair through a repeating cycle of sonorities. The swirl is potent enough—but on the word “malades” the altus twice interrupts the flow of the counterpoint with a heart-wrenching octave leap (1:46, 2:02).

Heart-wrenching moments such as these can’t help but make us ask: who was Josquin? Considering that he is arguably the most important composer before Bach, we know remarkably little about him as a person. Still, recent discoveries by Herbert Kellman offer tantalizing hints, especially about his origins. His father was a certain Gossard Lebloitte, a crooked cop who was once jailed for making an arrest outside his jurisdiction, and who for reasons unknown—but they can’t have been good—was fined when a woman sued him for trying to marry someone else. At an early age Josquin was sent to live with his wealthy aunt and uncle in another town (Condé-sur-l’Escaut), then evidently shipped off to still another town (Cambrai) to become a choirboy. Was he uprooted from his birthplace (perhaps Saint Sauveur, in modern Belgium) as a result of Gossard’s shenanigans? Probably. If nothing else it seems likely that Josquin did not have an easy start in life.

As an adult Josquin sailed from one top job to another, where he was usually hired not as a composer but, as was customary in his day, a singer. What was it like to be his colleague—to sit across from him at dinner, to watch him compose, and to stand next to him in front of a choirbook and sing his latest motet? Again we possess only hints, such as technical feats in some of his pieces that could indicate he was driven by a sense of competition with his fellow musicians. When in 1503 the court of Ferrara tried to recruit him he agreed to come (ill. 7), but only for a salary 67% higher than his contemporary Heinrich Isaac was asking. And then there are the stories from after Josquin’s death, when his fame was at its height: wild, in some cases impossible stories that give the impression that he knew he was good and didn’t mind showing it, as with tales of him berating a fellow singer for ornamenting one of his compositions or laughing at a musician who had failed to understand a bit of his obscure notation. None of this rests on particularly solid ground. But it’s harder to dismiss the (also posthumous) claim that he held onto pieces for a long time before releasing them to the public. Competitive or not, this was someone who cared deeply about the details of his compositions and their effects on listeners.

Those details add up to an endlessly creative music that harnesses motivic repetition and textural variety to create unexpectedly modern-sounding, rhetorically charged esthetic experiences. Josquin’s melodies press forward. Against a strict underlying pulse, individual voices act and react. Whispering duos crash into powerful tuttis. Independent voices suddenly come together for deep expressions of feeling. His music can be chiseled and muscular, but also plaintive, sorrowful, and rowdy. It can make you smile, sigh, sit up straight, or fight off tears. Indeed Josquin is a composer who can also bring down the house. Music doesn’t get much better than this.

Jesse RODIN