Josquin and Milan

Plainsong and Medieval Music, 5, 1, 69-80 © 1996 Cambridge University Press

Josquin and Milan DAVID FALLOWS

Writing in 1882, Edmond Vander Straeten was the first to argue that the name 'Juschino' among the singers of Galeazzo Maria Sforza's household chapel referred to the composer Josquin des Prez.1 Assuming a birthdate in the early 1450s, Vander Straeten found it easy to understand why the young Josquin was at the bottom of the salary scale in 1475, the date of the documents. Soon afterwards, Eugenio Motta provided new evidence to support that identification and stretch Josquin's Milanese career to 1479.2 Since then the years in Milan have had a fixed and central place in all studies of Josquin's life. The problems began in 1956, when Claudio Sartori revealed evidence that Josquin was a choirman at Milan Cathedral already from 1 July 1459, apparently moving from there to the ducal chapel in 1473.3 It seemed unlikely that he would obtain that cathedral position at a younger age than about nineteen, particularly since he was born far away in Picardy or Artois; so Josquin's birthdate was revised to c. 1440, ten years earlier than any previously suggested. Plainly this was a surprise. None of his music was known in sources then thought likely to be much earlier than the 1490s. So Gustave Reese, in the revised 1959 edition of his Music in the Renaissance, accepted Sartori's new documentation but offered a more cautious birthdate of c. 14454 - a date that is incompatible with the clear evidence that the Josquin who was a singer at 1

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E. Vander Straeten, La musique aux Pays-Bas avant le XIXe siecle, vol. 6 (Brussels, 1882), 20-1. Confusingly, this epoch-making discussion is in his essay on Gaspar van Weerbeke (pp. 1-68) and not even mentioned in the ensuing essay on Josquin (pp. 69-124). E. Motta, 'Musici alia corte degli Sforza: ricerche e documenti milanesi', Archivio storico lombardo, 2nd ser., 4 [anno 14] (1887), 29-64, 278-340 and 514-61: 527-8. C. Sartori, 'Josquin des Pr£s cantore del Duomo di Milano (1459-1472)', Annales musicologiques, 4 (1956), 55-83. As proposed by Suzanne Clercx in Revue beige de musicologie, 11 (1957), 157-8, where she reports the new findings and proposes that Josquin's slow progress could suggest that in 1459 his voice had only just broken, therefore that he could have been born as late as 1444-5. But it is hard to see that his lowly position in 1477 is made any easier to understand by his being only thirty-two years old rather than thirty-seven. Moreover, Sartori, 'Josquin des Pr£s', 58, gives convincing enough peripheral reasons to eliminate that possibility.

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Milan Cathedral was a mature man, a 'biscantor'.5 A strict interpretation of the Milan documents would be that he was born 'probably no later than' 1440, but that would have been even more uncomfortable. The note of caution sounded by Reese soon died away; all other statements about Josquin over the past forty years have given c. 1440 as his birthdate.6 Most particularly this date was built into the scrupulous broader picture of his life and works in Helmuth Osthoff's fundamental two-volume Josquin Desprez (Tutzing, 1962-5). Many scholars have informally expressed discomfort with that date, but only within the last few years has there been enough information to offer a serious challenge. What follows is an attempt to assemble the case for questioning the current biographical picture and for suggesting that the Josquin at Milan was not in fact the famous composer.7 The case cannot be proved in the present state of knowledge, but it is now strong enough to warrant outlining the arguments in its favour. Right or wrong, they are hard to ignore. It seems necessary to state them now both because of recent attempts to date more works to Josquin's Milanese years and because of new documents that appear to confirm his residence in Milan. Two preliminary points must be made about the documentation. First, the words 'Des Prez' have never been found in any Milanese document: the individual concerned is always just 'Jusquinus' or 'Judochus', usually qualified 'de Francia' and twice 'de Picardia'; and it is now clear enough that 'Josquin' was by no means a rare name. 8 Second, there seems no possibility of dividing up 5

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Reinhard Strohm reminds me (personal communication) that 'biscantor' simply means 'a singer of polyphony', so it is just possible that Josquin was still a boy with an unbroken voice, thus conceivably born in about 1450 and fitting with the biographical model outlined by Vander Straeten (n. 1 above). But pending any clear evidence of the word 'biscantor' being used for a boy, I leave to others the pursuit of that fascinating idea. Sartori, 'Josquin des Pr6s', 58, prudently adds the words 'forse anche prima' but then argues that his death in 1521 makes it hard to think he was born earlier than 1440, since somebody would surely have mentioned that he lived to an extraordinarily old age. I suggest that either eighty or eighty-five would equally have qualified as extremely old. In either case, as noted below, it is remarkable that the 1502 letter of Gian de Artiganova did not mention that Josquin was well over sixty at the time, if he really was. I wish to record here my gratitude for extended discussions of this matter with many scholars, especially Bonnie J. Blackburn, Joshua Rifkin, Reinhard Strohm and Rob C. Wegman - though they cannot be held in any way responsible for the views and errors here. Moreover I am particularly grateful to Patrick Macey, who reacted generously to my initial suggestions; the original stimulus for this essay was in fact his kind gift of an offprint of his article 'Some Thoughts on Josquin's lllibata Dei virgo nutrix and Galeazzo Maria Sforza', in A. Clement and E. Jas, eds., From Ciconia to Sweelinck: donum natalicium Willem Elders (Amsterdam, 1994), 111-24. This is made particularly clear in Joshua Rifkin's unpublished paper 'A Singer Named Josquin and Josquin D'Ascanio: Some Problems in the Biography of Josquin des Prez', which demonstrates that several later references cannot concern the composer Josquin des Prez, that the composer 'Josquin D'Ascanio' - he of El grillo and In te Domine speravi - is almost certainly somebody else and that Josquin des Prez cannot have been employed by Cardinal Ascanio Sforza. But the first hint of confusion was provided by Herbert Kellman in his 'Josquin and the Courts of the Netherlands and France: the Evidence of the Sources', in E. E. Lowinsky in collaboration with B. J. Blackburn, ed., Josquin des Prez: Proceedings of the International Josquin Festival-Congress . . .

1971 (London, 1976), 181-216: see 186-9, drawing attention to a document that plainly refers to


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the various Milanese documents concerning Josquin and suggesting that the cathedral singer was different from the ducal singer. Sartori's information had a gap of over eighteen months between the last cathedral document and the first at the court, but assiduous research over the years has reduced that gap to a mere twenty-seven days.9 It is now beyond reasonable doubt that the Josquin who is documented as a mature singer in the cathedral in 1459 was the same Josquin who continued there until December 1472 and had joined the ducal chapel by January 1473, staying at least until after Galeazzo Maria Sforza's assassination at the end of 1476. The last Milanese documents about him are from April 1479, almost twenty years after his first arrival there. Meanwhile, the earliest non-Milanese documents do in fact mention his full name: at the court of Rene of Anjou in 1477 and 1478 there are references to 'Josquinus Pratensis . . . clericus et cantor capelle' and to 'Jossequin des prez chantre'; at Conde" in 1483 there was a vin d'honneur for 'Gossequin des Pres' on his first return after the French wars, initiated in 1477.10 These documents were revealed only from 1981 to 1985; they could have been seen as a first real hint that something was wrong with the received picture, but that took a little longer. As often happens, they were simply added to his biography without anybody at first mentioning that they could cause problems; later it became obvious that there would be a need to explain the 1479 document at Milan if Josquin had been apparently established with Rene" of Anjou for the previous two years. Already Fe"tis had noted that it was a surprise not to find Josquin named in any of the treatises by Tinctoris written in Naples during the 1470s. Tinctoris mentions many composers, including even Obrecht, who, in the light of the information on the recently discovered portrait, was born in 1457-8:11 can it really be true that Obrecht was almost twenty years younger than Josquin? His reputation across Europe seems to have been established well before Josquin's, to judge from the surviving sources and letters. It is true, as Patrick Macey pointed out to me, that Tinctoris also fails to mention the remaining great composers at Milan: Compere, Martini and Weerbeke find no place in his another singer named Josquin. Written at around the same time is Lewis Lockwood's article ' "Messer Gossino" and Josquin Desprez', in R. L. Marshall, ed., Studies in Renaissance and Baroque Music in Honor of Arthur Mendel (Kassel, 1974), 15-24. ' Sartori's last payment at the cathedral was dated 23 December 1472 and his first payment at the ducal chapel was 15 July 1474. L. Matthews and P. A. Merkley, 'Josquin Desprez and his Milanese Patrons', The Journal of Musicology, 12 (1994), 434-63, quote (p. 440) a document of 18 January 1473 in which Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza describes Josquin as one of his singers. 10 Y. Esquieu and N. Coulet, 'La musique a la cour provencale du roi Rene1', Provence historique, 31 (1981), 299-312: see 301, 'Josquinus Pratensis, Camercensis diocesis, clericus et cantor capelle serenissimi', recording his presence there on 19 April 1477; F. Robin, 'Josquin des Pre^s au service de Ren6 d'Anjou', Revue de musicologie, 71 (1985), 180-1, noting an expectative for 7ossequin des prez chantre' to a prebend granted by Ren6, dated 26 March 1478 at Aix-en-Provence. For the Cond6 document, discovered by Herbert Kellman, see J. Noble, et al., The New Grove High Renaissance Masters (London, 1984), 6. 11 The fullest discussion of this is in the first chapter of R. C. Wegman, Bom for the Muses: the Life and Masses of Jacob Obrecht (Oxford, 1994).


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writings; it is also true that his reference to Obrecht could well be a later addition.12 But there are several other writers of the 1480s who name composers but omit Josquin, among them Hothby and the anonymous Escorial theorist; the earliest mention of Josquin in any theoretical treatise is by Gaffurius, who names him among a list of nine composers in his Practica musice of 1496 (f. ee2) but not in any of his earlier writings. Again, the problem has been recognized for many years, but the Obrecht portrait became known only in 1991. This provided the first apparently secure birthdate for any of the great composers of the Josquin-Obrecht-Isaac generation; and, taken together with the recently discovered documents about Josquin at the court of Rene of Anjou, it added further force to existing doubts about Josquin having been born in 1440. A similar picture comes from the musical sources. There is no trace of Josquin's work in the Trent codices, though Trent 91 of the 1470s contains music by Compere and Martini - both of them singers in the ducal chapel at Milan during Josquin's years there. Nor is he found in the earliest Cappella Sistina choirbooks, CS 14 and CS 51, both from the mid-1470s and containing music by a wide range of composers. In fact the only appearance of his work in any source likely to be before 1480 is in the Bavarian State Library at Munich, Mus. ms. 3154, in sections on paper and in scribal hands that point to copying in 1476.13 This contains his Ave Maria . . . virgo serena and the song O Venus bant. Both are anonymous there, and O Venus bant is generally thought far more likely to be by Weerbeke.14 Moreover, the dating has been questioned, but it looks plausible. Most students of the subject now accept that Ave Maria . . . virgo serena was indeed copied into that choirbook around 1476. The next two dated sources are also slippery. Frank D'Accone has proposed that the Siena manuscript K.I.2 was copied in 1481, and it contains the Gloria of Josquin's Mass L'ami Baudichon, again anonymous. This has in any case always counted as one of Josquin's earliest works, though it is worth mentioning that some scholars have had difficulty in accepting D'Accone's date for that choirbook, preferring Agostino Ziino's earlier suggestion of c. 1500.15 12 13

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D. Fallows, "The Life of Johannes Regis, ca. 1425 to 1496', Revue beige de musicologie, 43 (1989), 143-72: see 169-70. That view is, however, modified in Wegman, Born for the Muses, 73 n. 10. T. L. Noblitt, 'Die Datierung der Handschrift Mus. ms. 3154 der Staatsbibliothek Munchen', Die Musikforschung, 27 (1974), 36-56. See J. van Benthem and H. M. Brown, Secular Works for Three Voices [New Josquin Edition, vol. 27]: Critical Commentary (Utrecht, 1991), 188-99, with the remark (p. 197) 'It is unlikely to have been written by Josquin'. See the summary in Wegman, Born for the Muses, 100 n. 12. Another possibly early source for the Mass L'ami Baudichon is PL-Pu 7022, described in M. Perz, 'The Lvov Fragments: a Source for Works by Dufay, Josquin, Petrus de Domarto and Petrus de Grudencz in 15th-century Poland', Tijdschrift van de Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis, 36 (1986), 26-51. Perz does note

(pp. 27-8) that Piccard's date for the watermark is 1454-62, but he is understandably reluctant to accept this date for a source containing Dufay's Mass Ave regina celorum, surely not composed before 1470. Since the fragments also contain Josquin's Mass L'homme armi sexti toni, on different paper but apparently in the same hand, it would be hard to suggest a date much before 1490.


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For the manuscript 2856 in the Biblioteca Casanatense, Rome, Lewis Lockwood has proposed a copying date of around 1480;16 this too is open to some question, and there are those who would prefer a date nearer 1490 (as the coat of arms on the first page would imply), though again let us for the moment accept Lockwood's date. That manuscript, copied at the court of Ferrara, contains five pieces ascribed to Josquin: Une musque de Biscaya, lie fantazies de Joskin, Que vous ma dame, En I'ombre d'ung buissonet (4w) and Adieu mes amours. By contrast with

the sources mentioned so far, the Casanatense songbook does contain ascriptions, but they read, respectively: 'Josquin de pres', 'Joschin', 'Joskin', 'Bolkim' (over an erasure) and 'Jossim'. Those variants hardly suggest that Josquin was a well-known composer at the time of copying; nor do they suggest that he had so recently finished twenty years in Milan, with which the Ferrara court had close musical connections. After all, Johannes Martini, the composer best represented in this manuscript, was a senior member of the Ferrarese court chapel and had sung alongside the Milanese Josquin in the Sforza chapel as recently as 1474. Also probably from the early 1480s are: (i) MS 2356 of the Biblioteca Riccardiana, a Florentine manuscript that contains the strange four-voice Helas ma dame, ascribed to Josquin only in the later manuscript Florence 178 and listed as a work of doubtful authorship in the New Josquin Edition;17 (ii) MS 2794 in the same library, copied in France and containing Adieu mes amours (ascribed to 'Josequin') and the three-voice Entre je suis (ascribed to 'Josquin des pres'); (iii) the manuscript now divided between the Biblioteca Colombina, Seville (5-1-43), and the Bibliotheque nationale in Paris (n. a. fr. 4379, fols. 1-42), containing Une musque de Biscaya (anon.), Helas ma dame (anon.) and O Venus bant with its

evidently correct ascription to 'Gaspar'. Apart from these, there is no trace of Josquin in the musical sources until the 1490s.18 Then he begins to take a serious place in Florence 229, Florence 178, CS 35, CS 49 and CS 41 alongside several other manuscripts. From the late 1490s his representation in the sources is clear evidence that his prestige was enormous. But there are only ten works found in sources that can be earlier than the very late 1480s: for seven of these the early date has been challenged in recent literature, for two others Josquin's authorship is in serious doubt. Rephrasing that, the works likely to be by Josquin in sources before the 1490s are: Ave Maria . . . virgo serena copied into Munich 3154 apparently in 1476; the five songs in Casanatense 2856, currently dated around 1480; and Entre je suis 16 17 18

L. Lockwood, Music in Renaissance Ferrara 1400-1505 (Oxford, 1984), 224-6. See the remarks in Van Benthem and Brown, Secular Works for Three Voices, 97-8. The motet Domine non secundum appears with an ascription to Josquin in Rome, Vat. Lib., I-Rvat San Pietro B 80, for which the basic copying has been established as around 1475; but the Josquin piece is patently a very late addition, perhaps as late as 1500, see the summary in Census-Catalogue of Manuscript Sources of Polyphonic Music 1400-1550, TV (Neuhausen, 1988), 66-7. This is also the only Josquin piece in Cappella Sistina 35, of around 1490, with which it has closely synoptic readings.


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in Riccardiana 2794, perhaps of the mid-1480s. Even if we accept those dates, the picture looks a touch implausible for a composer who was fifty years old by 1490. Nobody would wish to suggest that the manuscripts contain only the most recent music; nor would anybody believe that the few surviving manuscripts are fully representative of the music that existed in the second half of the fifteenth century. But it does look decidedly odd that a musician who was active by 1459 does not appear in any surviving musical manuscript for another twenty years and fails to make any serious impact on the sources or the theorists for another thirty-five years, at which point he would have been almost sixty years old. There are, of course, other cases of composers appearing in the musical sources very late in their careers. Ockeghem was already master of the French royal chapel in 1454; and apart from two songs in Trent manuscripts of the 1450s his first real appearance is in the chansonnier Nivelle de la Chaussee of some ten years later. Regis, born (in my view) around 1425, has no ascribed music before the mid-1470s, when he suddenly appears in two chansonniers and two sacred choirbooks. But in both of those cases the explanation must lie in the desperate shortage of manuscripts from the areas in which they worked and of manuscripts with ascriptions in the 1440s and 1450s from anywhere. Similarly Agricola, reputedly born in 1446, first appears in the musical sources at about the same time as Josquin, albeit with more substantial works and more of them; this has been explained by his presence in Germany. Moreover, it may be pertinent to observe that Josquin was a most remarkable figure - one for whom the normal rules do not apply - so the possibility of late development cannot be eliminated. On the other hand, it seems imprudent to accept it without at least entertaining a far simpler hypothesis, namely that the Milan documents concern another man entirely and that the composer Josquin des Prez is the one first heard of in the entourage of Rene' of Anjou in 1477. Such a man could have been born in the late 1450s, at about the same time as Obrecht; his biography would then fit far more easily with the dates of his appearance in the musical sources and with the styles of his music. On the other hand, to suggest that Josquin was never in Milan may seem harder to square with the style of some of his music: the two presumed motetti missales cycles, the similarity of the apparently Milanese music by Compere and Weerbeke to his motets Ave Maria . . . virgo serena and Tu solus qui fads mirabilia, and indeed the presence of his music in the Gaffurius codices at Milan. But to view these matters in the light of the possibility that Josquin des Prez was never in Milan may be easier that it seems at first glance. The four Gaffurius codices in Milan Cathedral are later; but they are broadly believed to reflect, among other things, the Milanese repertory of the 1470s. They were prepared under Gaffurius's direction - some of the music was copied by him - and work was apparently begun soon after his appointment as maestro di cappella at Milan Cathedral in 1484. The first of the four codices (Librone 1) Downloaded from http:/www.cambridge.org/core. The University of Manchester Library, on 04 Oct 2016 at 16:58:48, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at http:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0961137100001078

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is dated 1490, when it was apparently completed. This manuscript contains almost fifty pieces by Gaffurius himself, but there are also twenty-five pieces by Compere, nineteen by Weerbeke and two by Martini, all of them members of the court chapel during those last years of Galeazzo Maria Sforza's life in the 1470s. Like most other manuscripts copied before 1490, Librone 1 contains not a note of Josquin. Nor is there any Josquin in the second Gaffurius choirbook, though again there are works by Compere, Weerbeke and Martini, now alongside Obrecht, Isaac and Brumel - all three probably born in the 1450s, and none of them in any way connected with Milan. So it is not until the third and fourth of Gaffurius's choirbooks that we find Josquin's work: among over 150 works in these two choirbooks there are just ten by Josquin. It is obviously pertinent to ask what those works are. In Librone 3 there are three of his most famous Masses: Ave maris Stella (known from some fifteen other copies, among them CS 41), Hercules dux Ferrarie (composed in honour of a duke who was in fierce artistic competition with Galeazzo Maria Sforza) and L'homme arme sexti toni. None of these has any obvious association with Milan, and none of them is surprising in a choirbook of the late 1490s.19 The other two works are the famous Alma redemptoris mater, already found in Cappella Sistina 15, and Salve sancta fades, here anonymous and ascribed to Josquin only in the much later Bologna Q20.20 In Librone 4 - all but lost in a fire of 1906 - there are five motets.21 One of them is Ave Maria . . . virgo serena, one of the most widely copied of all Josquin's works (in any case it is known from the section of the Munich manuscript 3154 apparently copied in 1476). The other four, presented together, are pieces from the Vultum tuum motet cycle found in Petrucci's fourth book of motets (1505); 19

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In fact it must date from after 1502, at least in part. Joshua Rifkin privately pointed out to m e that the Mass L'homme armi sexti toni in Librone 3 is copied directly from Petrucci's first book of Misse Josquin, published in that year. Rifkin particularly mentioned identity of ligatures, in which Petrucci's practice is to be unusually sparing, and near identity of text underlay; but even a glance at the commentary of the Smijers edition will show that there are no variants between the two sources - especially if one adds that Smijers omitted to mention under Milan the variants listed for Petrucci under Altus in Gloria, bar 90, and the strange discrepancy of mensuration signs in Credo bar 237 for Altus and Bassus. The other two Josquin Masses in Librone 3 were copied by the same hand but show no direct relationship to Petrucci's versions in his Missarum Josquin liber secundus (1505). This copyist (who did not copy the two Josquin motets into Librone 3) also wrote the whole of the frottola collection Florence, Biblioteca del Conservatorio, Basevi 2441, see J. Rifkin, 'Scribal Concordances in some Renaissance Manuscripts in Florentine Libraries', Journal of the American Musicological Society, 2 6 (1973), 3 0 5 - 2 6 : s e e 306. It is discussed in H. M. Brown, 'On Veronica and Josquin', in New Perspectives on Music: Essays in Honor of Eileen Southern, ed. J. Wright with S. A. Floyd, Jr. (Warren, Mich., 1992), 49-61. Brown argues very cautiously in favour of its being by Josquin, but he firmly resists the temptation to suggest that it is early or composed for Milan. Details of this manuscript and its contents appear in L. H. Ward, 'The Motetti Missales Repertory Reconsidered', Journal of the American Musciological Society, 39 (1986), 491-523. I can see no clear evidence for the general belief that this is the latest of the Gaffurius codices, though it is hue, as Ward notes, p. 496, that the main hand there is found otherwise only in Librone 3.


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of its seven motets, Librone 4 presents only four, in the order 6, 3, 4, 5. For all of these there are several further sources. The point here is not just that of the 345 works in the four Gaffurius codices there are only ten by Josquin, as against forty-two by Compere and thirty-two by Weerbeke,22 but that these ten Josquin pieces include three of his most famous Masses and two of his most famous motets; moreover, they were all copied well after Josquin had become a major figure, in the late 1490s. There is nothing here to suggest any Milanese connection for Josquin, unless it be the four motets of the Vultum tuum cycle, to which I shall return; and, to recall, it happens that the earliest theorist even to mention Josquin is that same Gaffurius, in 1496 (and in none of his many earlier writings). Compere was in Milan for two-and-a-half years; Weerbeke for about seven (though he returned to Milan in 1489-95); the Milanese court singer Josquin for almost twenty. Nothing here makes any sense. But it is worth turning the focus aside to Compere, who spent two-and-a-half years in Milan and is represented by forty-two pieces in the Gaffurius codices. There is much yet to be understood about Compere's life and career, but he died in 1518 and seems to have been active from the 1460s until well after 1500. Obviously it would be unwise to suggest that so much of his known sacred output was composed in his very brief stay in Milan, but part of the case for Josquin des Prez having been in Milan depends on the notion of a Milanese motet style of the 1470s, represented by Compere and Weerbeke, most particularly in their motetti missales cycles. It was Edward Lowinsky who, in 1963, gave what still seems to be - in broad terms if not in all its details - a very plausible reading of the situation. Reviewing the first volume of Helmuth Osthoff's Josquin Desprez, he fired a substantial broadside at what remains to this day the accepted view of the Milanese motet.23 Briefly, he suggested that the Weerbeke motetti missales cycles must date from his return to Milan in 1489 under Lodovico il Moro, that the Compere motetti missales cycles can hardly date from the 1470s since the Italian homophonic style 22

23

In any case, those figures are slightly misleading, taken as they are from a simple totting up of the numbers presented in the Census-Catalogue, IV, 438-9. Individual items in motetti missales cycles are individually counted, but not those of Mass Ordinary cycles; and there are also several duplicates between the four choirbooks. If we count individual movements and eliminate duplications the figures would seem to be: Compere forty-one, Weerbeke twenty-nine, Josquin eighteen. That includes as being by Compare the three movements of the Mass De tous biens plaine in Librone 3, fols. 73v-78r, ascribed t o Compere in the Berlin manuscript 40634 but to a certain Johannes Notens in Vienna, Nationalbibl. 11883. M. Steib, 'Loyset Compere and his Recently Rediscovered Missa De tous biens plaine', The Journal of Musicology, 11 (1993), 437-54, argues that the cycle is indeed by Compere; but too much hangs on his assertion of stylistic similarity (which eludes me) between the cycle and Compere's motet Omnium bonorum plena on the same tenor. Reprinted in E. E. Lowinsky, ed. B. J. Blackburn, Music in the Culture of the Renaissance and other Essays (Chicago, 1989), 531-4; it was originally published as 'Scholarship in Renaissance Music', Renaissance News, 16 (1963), 255-62.


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does not otherwise appear in his work until much later,24 that several of the motetti missales cycles in the Gaffurius codices are adaptations of existing motet cycles, and most particularly that it was mistaken to date Josquin's Mass D'ung aultre amer to the 1470s purely on the basis of its having a motet substituted for the Benedictus.25 It is true, as Joshua Rifkin maintains in an unpublished article,26 that this motet, Tu solus qui fads mirabilia, has features in common with the substitute cycles of Compere and Weerbeke, but it is not true that Josquin would need to have been in Milan to have borrowed stylistic features from two such eminent composers.27 He could well have done this at the court of Rene of Anjou, an avid collector of Italian pictures and admirer of Italian culture. Nothing seems more natural than that a young composer at Rene's court in Aix-en-Provence should have emulated the music of the famous Milanese choir.28 It would take us too far out of our way to explore the historical implications of Lowinsky's remarks, but there are a few comments that need to be made about the suggestion that the Qui velatus facie and Vultum tuum cycles are in fact sets of motetti missales composed in Milan. First, the complete sequence in both cases appears only in Petrucci's printed collections of 1503 and 1505. Second, these are just two of several motet-sequences by Josquin; evidently he 24

25

Strangely, Lowinsky does not actually mention Compere's Missa Galeazesca by name; but the title need not necessarily mean that it was composed in Galeazzo Maria Sforza's lifetime. So far as I can see, this happens only once in the Gaffurius codices: the isolated Sanctus in Librone 2, fols. 35v-36r, and Librone 4, fols. 66v-67r. But Ward, "The Mottetti Missales Repertory Reconsidered', 508-15, shows that this may well be part of a motetti missales cycle by Compere, a matter that would even further qualify the implications of the Benedictus substitute in Josquin's Mass D'ung aultre amer.

26

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'Josquin in Context: Toward a Chronology of the Motets', paper delivered at the 1978 Annual Congress of the American Musicological Society at Minneapolis and kindly made available to me by the author. Rifkin also discusses the apparently Milanese stylistic affiliations of Ave Maria . . . virgo serena and the motet cycle Qui velatus facie fuisti. My remarks below obviously apply equally to these. Lowinsky, Music in the Culture of the Renaissance, 534, adds the following footnote: '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 freedom of his working methods has no equal, substituted a motet for the Benedictus of the Mass long after having left Milan?' On which, see my remarks in note 25 above. After 1471 Rene1 definitively left his northern home at Anjou to live in the south, mainly at Aix-en-Provence, where he died in 1480; see the Ttin^raire du roi Ren£' printed in A. Lecoy de la Marche, Le roi Rend: so vie, son administration, ses travaux artistiques et littiraires, 2 vols. (Paris,

1875), II, 437-97. Among his many Italian interests were his patronage of the sculptors Pietro da Milano and Francesco Laurana as well as commissioning a massive three-metre medallion from Luca della Robbia to go on the facade of his palace in Aix; and he continued to style himself King of Sicily to the end of his life. See also F. Robin, La cour d'Anjou-Provence: la vie artistique sous le regne de Rent (Paris, 1985), but note also the modifications to her views expressed in C. de Me'rindol, Le roi Reni el la seconde maison d'Anjou: embUmatique, art, histoire (Paris, 1987), 388.

For his visit to the Milanese ducal library at Pavia in 1453 to see the manuscripts and other artistic treasures, see de Merindol, Le roi Rend, 172. His employment in 1449 of the former Milan Cathedral maestro di cappella Beltrame Feragut as evidence of Italian interests is treated with a certain caution in L. Allinson, 'Two Accounts for the Chapel of Rene1 of Anjou (1449-45)', RMA Research Chronicle, 26 (1993), 59-93: see 60.


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was interested in creating extended polyphonic forms in this way. Third, explaining them in terms of the Milanese motetti missales repertory has involved some extremely complicated manipulations, including, in the case of Vultum tuum, the addition of other pieces.29 Fourth, not a note of Qui velatus facie appears in Milan; even of the Vultum tuum cycle Milan has only four of the seven movements, and these in the wrong order - whether in terms of Petrucci's publication or of Patrick Macey's nine-movement liturgical reconstruction. So the Gaffurius codices quite specifically endorse the picture derived from the other sources: that Josquin was an almost unknown composer before about 1490 and became famous only in the late 1490s. Moreover, they offer no support for the view that Josquin was ever in Milan. This may be the moment to recall a short article by Jacquelyn A. Mattfeld, published in Edward Lowinsky's famous 1976 volume of Josquin FestivalConference proceedings but not much discussed since. Its title says it all: 'An Unsolved Riddle - The Apparent Absence of Ambrosian Melodies in the Works of Josquin des Prez'.30 The composer is supposed to have spent twenty years in Milan, certainly singing the Ambrosian liturgy daily for thirteen years at the cathedral, perhaps doing so in the Sforza household chapel, but not a trace of an Ambrosian melody or even of Ambrosian variants has been identified in his many chant-based works.31 At least my proposal offers a fairly easy solution to Dr Mattfeld's riddle. What, then, of the documentation in Milan? Briefly, almost everything points to a minor singer of no special importance, even after almost twenty years' service. Edward Lowinsky thought he had struck gold when he found that Galeazzo Maria procured a benefice for Josquin in 1473, writing in 1976 that This document changes at a stroke the whole biographical picture', since it showed Josquin earning considerably more than the pittance he received as a singer.32 But it soon became clear that the duke was in fact attempting to do the same for all his singers, using it to attract singers from elsewhere;33 it is by no means clear that the singer Josquin was enjoying any special privilege. Moreover, in 1993 Evelyn Welch produced the damning evidence of the stabling records of 1476: they showed that Weerbeke shared four horses with one other singer, Compere shared three, but Josquin shared only two.34 Welch remarked on this: 'Scholars have correctly noted that, as singers often relied on benefices, 29

30 31

32 33 34

See P. Macey, 'Josquin's "Little" Ave Maria', Tijdschrift van de Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis, 39 (1989), 38-53. Lowinsky in collaboration with Blackburn, ed., ]osquin des Prez (see n. 8), 360-6. That they may also be lacking in the music of Weerbeke, Compere and Martini is beside the point; they sang only in the court chapel, which seems not to have used the Ambrosian liturgy; they were there for far fewer years; and they were all mature, experienced composers when they arrived. Reprinted in Music in the Culture, 543. Matthews and Merkley, 'Josquin Desprez and his Milanese Patrons', 446. E. S. Welch, 'Sight, Sound and Ceremony in the Chapel of Galeazzo Maria Sforza', Early Music History, 12 (1993), 151-90.


Josquin and Milan

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Josquin's low salary did not necessarily indicate a lower estimation of his talents. But in this impartial indicator, Josquin was still down at the bottom of the list.' Most recently, Lora Matthews and Paul A. Merkley have discovered a group of exciting new documents about this singer.35 Two of these are relevant to the present enquiry. One states that Josquin was a cleric of the diocese of Cambrai, which was also true of Josquin des Prez, according to a later papal document; but then Josquin was a common enough name in that part of France: it would be unwise to claim that an enormous diocese like Cambrai had only one cleric called Josquin in those years. The other is the letter of 1473 in which the duke complains to Toschino Cantori': 'We hear that you are spending your time writing something other than the work that we have commissioned from you che tu attendi ad scrivere altro ch'a 1'opera quale te havemo data - and you have set aside our business to serve others'. There are several ways of interpreting this document. The most obvious would be that the task was music copying: two years later, in 1475, there is a document instructing that the singer Josquin be given twenty quaternions of paper to prepare a choirbook for the chapel;36 moreover, 'scrivere' seems not normally to have been a word used for composition, which is more often 'fare' or something of the kind.37 But another interpretation would certainly be to suggest that the 'writing' concerned is in fact musical composition - that Josquin was composing a work for another patron despite being paid to compose something for Galeazzo Maria Sforza. Moreover, as Matthews and Merkley are quick to observe, this apparently rebellious behaviour fits magically with the famous letter of 1502 in which Gian de Artiganova warned Ercole D'Este that Josquin 'composes when he wants to, and not when one wants him to'.38 It is worth stressing that this letter was written thirty years later. It is also worth emphasizing one further detail about Gian's letter. Lewis Lockwood was the first to show that its main function is to respond to a letter written just over two weeks earlier by Girolamo da Sestola, known as Coglia, in support of Josquin's appointment.39 Gian's letter openly stresses Isaac's virtues and Josquin's disadvantages. But the one point he does not make is to say that Josquin is a very old man: if he was really born by 1440 he would have been well over sixty in 1502. As yet, there is no direct documentary contradiction between the Milanese documents and any others, so it is not impossible to argue that the singer in Milan was the composer Josquin des Prez. Such an argument would need to 35 36 37 38

39

Matthews and Merkley, 'Josquin Desprez and his Milanese Patrons'. For the document, first printed by Vander Straeten, see H. Osthoff, Josquin Desprez, I (Tutzing, 1962), 203. I am grateful to Rob C. Wegman for this observation. This letter has been printed many times, but for an edition with discussion and related documents, see M. Staehelin, Die Messen Heinrich Isaacs (Bern and Stuttgart, 1977), II, 56-9. Lockwood, 'Josquin at Ferrara', in Lowinsky in collaboration with Blackburn, ed., Josquin des Prez, 103-37: see 113-14. The arguments are also available in Lockwood, Music in Renaissance Ferrara, 203-5.


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accept that Josquin was a late starter. That does not readily accord with Galeazzo Maria Sforza's eagerness for Josquin to finish his task if it was really composition. It may seem to fit a little better with Glareanus's much later remark about Josquin (Dodekachordon, 1547, Book III, chapter 24):40 Those who knew him say that he published his works after much deliberation and with manifold corrections; neither did he release a song to the public unless he had kept it to himself for some years, the opposite of what Jacob Obrecht appears to have done . . .

But Obrecht does make his impact on the sources far earlier than Josquin. And it is noticeable how the same few works of Josquin keep recurring in the sources before about 1500, as though he had let out only a small number of pieces, perhaps (like Dowland a century later) regretting the way they became garbled in transmission. Moreover, even for a late starter, the absence of any hint of Ambrosian melodies in his work is remarkable if his twenty formative years were spent in Milan. The bizarrely varied ascriptions in the Casanatense songbook hardly warrant the view that this was a famous musician who had just finished twenty years in nearby Milan. The lack of any reference to his age in Gian de Artiganova's letter of 1502 makes it unlikely that he was over sixty at the time. Without the words 'Des Prez' in any Milanese document, without the slightest hint from the Gaffurius codices that the composer was in Milan, without any clear evidence that the Milanese Josquin was anyone other than a singer of minor importance who did a little music copying, the case for identifying that singer as the great composer looks precarious. Nobody should underplay the importance of the new Milanese discovery, coming to light just at the moment when it looked impossible to see any case for Josquin des Prez having been in Milan. But it remains important to balance that one detail - frustratingly ambiguous at the crucial point, albeit apparently endorsed by a remark made thirty years later and by this Josquin also being from the diocese of Cambrai - against the rest of the case. Even taking account of the dangers in ex vacuo arguments and the necessary cautions of a discussion based on the sources that happen to survive, the remaining evidence indicates a man who started composing in the late 1470s, began to make an impact in the mid-1480s and was accepted as a major figure by the late 1490s. That is to say that it perfectly fits a man born in the late 1450s and first heard of at the court of Rene of Anjou in 1477, not somebody twenty years older. There seems a good chance that such a hypothesis will help simplify the questions of chronology and stylistic influence that have so stubbornly resisted solution. University of Manchester 40

The translation is that of Clement L. Miller (1965).
