Laudat Autem David: Fallows on Josquin

When I first read David Fallows’s Josquin (before I was asked to review it), I couldn’t put it down (not, I’m afraid, my usual reaction to musicological tomes).¹ I also couldn’t lift it up, but that is a different matter. Nothing is more enjoyable than reading a beautifully written, occasionally witty, highly polemical, and totally opinionated work by a scholar who knows what he is doing, particularly one that is a reasonable length (the book is not as long as it looks, since there are ample margins and a great deal of empty white space). It is always fun to read put-downs, to see the careful opinions of established scholars labelled ‘wrong’ or, in some cases, ‘quite wrong’:² the word ‘wrong’ appears about fifty times or on average once every seven pages. This is always entertaining in a Schadenfreude kind of way, whether or not you are one of the people who are ‘wrong’; in my case, I was dispensed with rather early on. In actual fact, Fallows accepts one of my theories, and I have my own abbreviation, Sherr J, for The Josquin Companion (Oxford, 2000) of which I am, I hasten to add, the editor, not the author.³ I really can’t complain, but I am going to anyway.⁴

I have since read the book two more times. It hasn’t become any lighter, but my opinion has not changed. This is essential reading for anybody interested in the life and music of Josquin des Prez. It is the only extended discussion of Josquin in English by one person guided by his own vision. It ends with a series of excellent Appendices, which are a gold mine of information about Josquin and his contemporaries. Fallows further seems to have read everything written about Josquin, no matter how early or how obscure. His pithy discussions of Josquin’s major works (I think we can all agree with Fallows’s selection) are full of insight. One can only admire him for having completed this monumental task, especially since he takes the currently untrendy position that Josquin really was a great composer, not the creation of media hype, as others have tried to show. He proceeds to treat the composer in the equally old-fashioned Master Narrative of life and works, during the course of which he proposes a chronological canon of acceptable works. No doubt some reviewers will complain, but I am not one of them. Nowadays it takes courage to be old-fashioned and few people can get away with it (Fallows is one, and Joshua Rifkin, to whom the book is dedicated, is another). But one thing about Master Narratives is that they are not neutral: this is very much Fallows’s Josquin.

Biography

This book is the first in English (or any language) that deals comprehensively with all the new material about Josquin’s life that has become available since the late 1990s, discoveries that have shown that he was born c.1450, and that he spent his early career in the Low Countries and France, not in Italy. Fallows was one of the earliest (perhaps the first in print) to question whether the Josquin in Milan was Josquin des Prez and to doubt the long-accepted birth date of the 1440s. He has since been vindicated by the discoveries of Paul and Lora Merkley, the only other living people to receive their own abbreviation in his book (MerkleyM),⁵ and is aware of everything new that has been found probably up to the day, hour, minute, and second he finished correcting the final proofs.⁶ Summaries and excerpts of all relevant documents are presented in Appendix A of his volume, which completely supersedes the chronological outline in Sherr J.⁷ But even with the amazing discoveries of the last decades, there still are gaps in our knowledge of Josquin’s life and career, and Fallows feels obliged to opine about this as well. He is on fairly solid ground, it seems to me, in arguing that Josquin was one of the singers of René of...