Josquin (review)

Nearly ten years ago I wrote in this space: "[A]n extended narrative of Josquin's oeuvre would indeed be a foolish undertaking at this point in time" (review of The Josquin Companion, ed. Richard Sherr [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000], Notes 58, no. 4 [June 2002]: 822). Musicologists were deep into the project of reediting Josquin's complete output and had called into question the authenticity of some of his most beloved works when newly discovered biographical facts turned the entire enterprise on its head. Josquin the composer was teased apart from several doppelgänger and we learned his full legal name, Josquin Lebloitte dit Desprez. Armed with this information, archival researchers (notably Lora Matthews and Paul Merkely, among others) were able to document his early whereabouts more thoroughly, revise our understanding of his service to the Milanese cardinal Ascanio Sforza, and establish the dates of his tenure at the Papal Chapel. Most significantly, the discoveries enabled us to escape the uncomfortable but difficult-to-refute extrapolation that he had been born in the early 1440s. In sum, by 2000, all scholarship concerning Josquin's career before 1489 became wrong.

A solid biography as well as important details of Josquin's employment, procurement of benefices, and sojourns is now firmly established. Though gaps remain and significant disagreement concerning the authenticity and chronology of some major works continues, the picture has stabilized enough to merit a reconsideration of Josquin's development as a composer in light of archival research, manuscript studies, and style-critical debates (many unpublished) that have emerged at a dizzying pace within the last ten years. David Fallows takes on the task in the first major monograph on Josquin since Helmuth Osthoff's two-volume study (Josquin Desprez [Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1965-67]), and the first ever in English.

Following the traditional life-and-works model, in each chapter Fallows first considers the evidence establishing Josquin's place of employment in a given period, then discusses repertory he assigns to that time. Fallows goes beyond summarizing his own or others' findings, instead creating a narrative out of disparate primary and secondary sources and elegantly filling gaps: where Josquin received his earliest training; where he was between the appointments to René d'Anjou and Ascanio Sforza; when he departed the Papal chapel, and where he was from then until 1503. He explains inconsistencies in both familiar and newly discovered documents. Case by case, he considers claimed sightings of Josquin in locations that seem to conflict with this framework by logically explaining them or dismissing them as references to people other than our Josquin: thus, Josquin Desprez could not have been the Josquin who was transporting dogs between the Gonzaga family and Ascanio Sforza in 1498 and 1499, but it is physically possible for our guy to have travelled from Ferrara to Condé in eleven days. There may be truth to Heinrich Glarean's stories of how Josquin came to write Memor esto verbi tui and Guillaume se va chauffer; this is a matter not of confused Josquins but rather of misidentified kings (Louis XI and Louis XII).

Most exciting is Fallows's assertion concerning Josquin's training prior to entering the service of René d'Anjou. Fallows rejects anecdotes naming Josquin as a choirboy and later master of music at St. Quentin (though he did at one time hold a canonry there). Instead, he connects several documents that together establish him as an altar boy until 1466 in Cambrai—not at the cathedral, but at the collegiate church of St. Géry—putting the young musician in direct contact with Guillaume Du Fay. Generally Fallows avoids issues of authenticity, reserving analysis for confidently accepted works (p. 100), and he is cautious about deriving biographical details from the music. But placing Josquin in Cambrai at the same time as Du Fay reopens the case of Missa L'ami baudichon, the attribution of which has been doubted in recent years because, among other reasons, its writing (with its...