Peter Phillips - Performers Perspectives on Josquins Masses

peter phillips Heaven and earth: a performer’s guide to Josquin’s masses I am grateful to Rob C. Wegman, Kerry McCarthy and Timothy Symons for reading early drafts of this article.

1. The difficulty with determining the chronology of the masses of Josquin’s mature period is that ‘they explore different paths and solve different problems with nearly equal accomplishment’ (Jeremy Noble: ‘Josquin Desprez’, in Gustav Reese, Jeremy Noble et al.: The new Grove High Renaissance masters (New York & London, 1984), p.50.

2. Ottaviano Petrucci published three volumes dedicated entirely to the masses of Josquin: Misse Josquin (Venice, 1502), later reissued as Liber primus Missarum Josquin; Missarum Josquin Liber secundus (Venice, 1505); and Missarum Josquin Liber tertius (Fossombrone, 1514).

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ifficult to sing, difficult to interpret, impossible to categorise,1 yet outstanding at everything he turned his mind to, Josquin had no rivals in his lifetime, and has had very few since. With someone as overwhelming as this, it is fruitless to try to define him by characteristic fingerprints of composition, as one can do with a Gombert or even a Byrd.

He came up with so many individual ideas and procedures so regularly that one is soon reduced simply to acknowledging that here was a musical mind which was constantly looking for novelty, coupled to an astonishing certainty of thought. In this self-assured daring he has really only been rivalled by Bach, Wagner and Beethoven.

I became interested in Josquin’s masses as a set because I came to think that each one had its own method in its own soundworld, like Beethoven working through the possibilities of the symphony, a process which cul­ minated in the most sophisticated symphony written up to that time; and so concluded that it would be fascinating to follow a composer of Josquin’s genius on a similar journey. Of course the masses are only part of the story.

There are motets and secular pieces which, if anything, scale new, but different, heights. But in setting the text of the mass Ordinary repeatedly, it seemed that Josquin was trying to solve the same problems from different angles at different times in his career.

I am therefore keen to include in the set as many masses by Josquin as may be reasonably attributed to him. Put like that, this doesn’t have to be as complicated a task as many have made it. By far the most important sources for Josquin’s masses are three books dedicated solely to them by the Venetian printer Ottaviano Petrucci.2 They all appeared in the composer’s lifetime, in 1502, 1505 and 1514, and include every mass under discussion except the Missa Pange lingua, which may postdate the 1514 volume. Although the evidence provided by these volumes has been constantly questioned by scholars it suits my view to accept Petrucci’s belief that all the masses he published as being by Josquin were in fact by Josquin. I am prepared to accept that they form a complete oeuvre, which gives us the freedom to approach them as being the product of a single mind, rather than explaining their variety by trying to find several alternative minds. I accept of course that Petrucci might have been pulling the odd fast one, to boost sales, especially for the 1514 collection. But Josquin was still very much alive then, albeit far from the musical times Autumn 2018

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Heaven and earth: a performer’s guide to Josquin’s masses

3. Anthony Pryer, in the BBC Music Magazine, October 2016, p.90.

4. A further reason why Josquin may have felt able to experiment with compositional styles as the urge took him, rather than as his employers dictated, has been advanced by David Fallows ( Josquin (Turnhout), pp.105–06): that Josquin was independently wealthy. An inheritance from his aunt and uncle in 1483 seems to have been quite substantial enough for him ‘not to have needed to worry about employment.

That may help to explain some odd facts of his later life: the way in which he moved from place to place, his contacts with the rich and the mighty [...] It may also explain some of the details in the famous letter of 1502 in which Gian d’Artiganova outlined reasons not to employ Josquin at the court of Ferrara: that he composed only when he wanted to [...]

And it may well be that this wealth released him from the drudgery of composing full cycles of mass propers, as Isaac and Senfl were to do in the following years.

There are no coherent sets of music in Josquin’s work.

Fossombrone, and even then communication networks were not so bad that he couldn’t defend his property.

I suspect no one has the general knowledge to say categorically that any one of the doubted masses by Josquin is so like the music of one of the hundreds of talented contemporary Flemish composers that we need look no further; but to my ear there are no similarities, for example, with the music of de la Rue or Isaac, and very few with Obrecht. I take the point which Anthony Pryer made in the BBC Music Magazine, when reviewing a new disc of de la Rue’s music: ‘La Rue cannot match the ingenuity of his great contemporary Josquin des Prez (there is hardly a harmonic surprise anywhere), but recordings such as these allow us to ask the question: What can we know of Josquin if we only Josquin know?’3 To put it another way, what would the scholars of the future say on discovering, with only partial evidence, the output of Stravinsky? Would they conclude that all the differing styles which make up his music couldn’t be the work of a single person? If they did decide this it would then be incumbent on them to find the contemporary composers who in their opinion must have written it.

That would be their professional responsibility (and if they did it really well they might get tenure).4 Although the many writers on Josquin’s masses have failed to reach definitive answers on the questions of their authorship and dating, a consensus has been broadly reached. In the matter of dating, only three of the 18 are habitually described as being ‘late’: Sine nomine; the Kyrie, Sanctus and Agnus of De beata virgine; and Pange lingua, which is often spoken of as the last of the cycle. In fact I shall argue that Mater patris postdates them all. Many of the others, including some of the greatest ones, were written around the year 1500. Before that there are two or three obviously early and experimental works; and one or two which defy convenient placing, like Di dadi and Mater patris. (David Fallows is one of several recent writers to give a nuanced view.5 He also lists some of the disagreements that have sprung up in the scholarly community over the years in dating Josquin’s Of his Latin-texted music there is very little with a clear liturgical function apart from the mass ordinary cycles (which have their own musical agenda).’

5. ibid., p.267: ‘There is a lot of comfort in the old view of Josquin’s masses: that there are eighteen authentic cycles, of which all but one were printed in Petrucci’s three books of his masses;

and that Missa Pange lingua was composed after the third Petrucci book of 1514.

Moreover, that of these, Petrucci’s first book (1502) printed the best works he had available at the time, the second (1505) started with three new works, ending with three very early works, and the third book (1514) contained one new work (Missa De beata virgine) alongside an otherwise

mixed selection.’ After some refining Fallows goes on provisionally to conclude: ‘The new picture seems attractive. That the first five masses in Misse Josquin (1502) are all from the 1490s; that the three at the start of the Liber secundus (1505) are from the first years of the century; and that at least De beata virgine, Faysant regretz and Sine nomine are from after 1505.’

6. Fallows (ibid., p.65) identifies some of the more extreme disagreements in the dating of Josquin’s works: Ut Phebi radiis has been dated

by William F. Prizer to both 1501 and 1461 in separate articles; Jaap van Benthem dated it to 1479. By different writers Hercules Dux Ferrariae has been dated to 1480, 1484–92 and 1503–04.

Ave Maria... virgo serena has variously been said: to come from before 1476; to be an example of one of his earliest compositions from around 1484; and to be a characteristic middle-period work of 1497. To this list could be added the dating of the Missa Malheur me bat, which has come in at anything between the early 1480s and 1504.

7. See Wegman: ‘The other Josquin’, in Tijdschrift van de Koninklijke Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis vol.58 no.1 (2008), pp.33–68.

I regret not knowing of this possibility when I was putting together the Tallis Scholars’ Josquin mass cycle (on Gimell Records, to be completed on nine discs by 2021) and will hope to correct the omission in due course.

However, a recent recording has been made of it, as by Josquin, by Apollo5 on an album entitled The spirit like a dove, on VCM Records.

8. New Josquin Edition, vols.1–29 (Utrecht, 1987– 2016).

music more generally.6 (Bucking the current trend of taking masses away from Josquin, there has recently been an initiative to add one to the canon: the Missa Quem dicunt homines. This was not published in Petrucci, and was not accepted as being authentic by the editors of the New Josquin Edition (NJE), but is argued to be such by Rob C. Wegman on the grounds that its style closely resembles Josquin’s writing in the 1510s and the scribe of its only known source – Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, MS mus. E46 – attributes it to Josquin.7) The putative chronology of the masses is revealing. Josquin’s tussle with the mass texts seems to have occupied him largely in the first half of his career, from which we may conclude that he was learning as he went.

Keeping to four voices rather supports this: the motets for more than four were generally written after 1500; and with them he could choose his texts.

Four late settings (see p.68) seem to stand outside this narrative, of which Pange lingua is the most quoted example. All of them have the appearance of Josquin looking back and summing up. The fact that he still chose to do this almost exclusively with four voices, when he had by then plenty of experience in five and six, is an indicator.

The intrinsic variety of Josquin’s masses did not come from being separated widely in time, dotted through a long life. Once he had returned to Condé in 1504 he essentially turned to other challenges. Nor, surprisingly, did these challenges come from experimenting with different vocal scorings, which one might have expected, given that he travelled widely in the years in question and was certainly writing for (and singing in) different choirs in different parts of Europe. One must conclude that the basic make-up of choirs in mainland Europe was remarkably similar throughout this period: very few boys if any, but with adult head-voice specialists on top; a good supply of tenors and baritones – their ranges constantly overlap; and enough real basses to sing down to F, full-voice. It is at this point that one regrets he never came to England and heard the boys singing in choirs like the Chapel Royal.

Scoring and ranges; and their impact on modern concert performance Josquin’s remarkably similar vocal scorings deserve closer attention. Four of them do not fit the general pattern. Basing my conclusions on the pitches published in the New Josquin Edition,8 these four survive with relatively high superius parts in conjunction with relatively high bassus parts: Ave maris stella and De beata virgine (leaving out the problematic Credo) all have Bb as their lowest bass note, and were printed with a high-clef combination; Ad fugam and L’ami Baudichon have Bb and A respectively, but were printed the musical times Autumn 2018

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Heaven and earth: a performer’s guide to Josquin’s masses with lower-clef combinations. All the superius parts in these masses peak on G, except Ad fugam’s which peaks on Eb, giving it the narrowest range of all the 18 masses. The remaining 14 masses were written out at a lower pitch in the earliest sources, nine of them descending to low F; three (all probably written quite late) to low G; one to low E; and one to low D. None of the superius parts above these notes exceeds the F an octave and a fourth above middle C, and most only go up to the D a ninth above middle C. So if one were to transpose the four high-pitch masses down to the level of the other 14, one would end up with an unsuspected consistency of scoring across the set.

The evidence may be examined more carefully. None of Josquin’s 18 masses exceeds three octaves (or 22 notes) in overall range; and none has fewer than two octaves and a fourth (or 18 notes). Sixteen of the 18 lie within the 20, 21 and 22 range, the only exceptions being Ad fugam with 18, and Mater patris with 19. This compares interestingly with the contemporary Eton Choirbook repertoire, where there is a wider spectrum. Ordinary four-part pieces there might have a range of no more than 14 notes (as in Cornysh’s Gaude virgo mater Christi ), where the average five-part piece had 22 or 23 notes. Cornysh’s Magnificat has 26 notes, though that was exceptional. By English standards Josquin seems to have been deliberately working a particular four-voice soundworld, no matter where he was employed or how the choirs he was writing for were made up.

Compared with Josquin, the English liked to push out the boundaries of voice ranges both ways at once, which brings us to an interesting practical point – pitch. If you have an overall range of 23 notes in a composition the scope for transposing it for whatever reason – to suit the singers/the building/a theory about clef combinations/the supposed difference in pitch standard between those days and ours – is significantly reduced by comparison with a piece with 20 or 21 notes (which is what ten of Josquin’s masses have).

Even with bionic modern singers the extremes of the ranges can become impractical in a piece of 23 or more notes if the music is transposed more than a tone either way; whereas all of Josquin’s masses could be made to have the same ranges, by transposition of up to a fourth down from written pitch, giving in every case a bottom bassus note of F, and a top superius note of D (if 20 notes overall), Eb (if 21) or F (if three octaves). This is not quite to say that every Josquin mass would then be scored the same – there are small variations in the overall ranges between them – but perhaps it is surprising to discover that they all fall so nearly into the general pattern: Low soprano and/or Alto, Tenor 1, Tenor 2, Baritone/Bass in modern terminology.

If the English had a wider spectrum to work in than Josquin, this was not because they had wider ranges within the individual parts (it was because they had added a fifth voice range). In the matter of voice ranges Josquin

and the Flemish more generally were just as demanding as the English, especially in the middle parts, normally called ‘altus’ and ‘tenor’ in the sources. There are several cases of a part in a Josquin mass being asked to cover two octaves, and even, in Hercules Dux Ferrariae and Mater patris, two octaves and a tone (in the altus and bassus respectively). The tenor part in L’homme armé super voces musicales was reckoned by Petrucci to be such a stretch at two octaves that he gave it three different clefs in the course of the composition. In Fortuna desperata both the superius and the altus parts have two-octave ranges, which makes this a particularly difficult piece to perform in the modern situation.

Of course it makes no difference to the ambitus of a part which pitch it is sung at. Sooner or later all the notes have to be covered, and it is up to the performers to find the best way to manage them. It doesn’t help that many of the Flemish composers of this period – Obrecht in particular – would use wide ranges when it suited an imitative scheme, or a parade of motifs, yet for almost the entire setting the part was contained within the central octave. Josquin himself was capable of keeping to the central octave for long periods, but suddenly writing a short section where the part finds an extra fourth (it is usually a fourth) above or below it; he was also capable of requiring a part, often a canonic part, to keep using all of the notes of the wide range in question. As he gained more experience he found ways of using all the available notes more regularly and smoothly. This understanding will become more apparent as we work through his middleperiod settings.

As in the contemporary English repertoire, it is the altus singers who were most often asked by Josquin to make sorties into other ranges, often acting like the horns in a symphony orchestra, binding the upper part of the texture to the lower with their exceptional reach. How it was that ordinary rank-and-file singers were earmarked for this duty, internationally and across cultural lines, is a fascinating question; but clearly in both traditions there was a place for men who could manage both a wide range (probably using falsetto for the highest notes alongside baritone for the lowest), and ungrateful lines. It has long been assumed that in the English choral tradition the countertenors were the most talented musicians, keenest to undertake a technical challenge. In Josquin this is not quite so obvious, since the tenors were also sometimes asked to perform like the altos, the chant not necessarily being confined to any one part. If the tenor parts in the English repertoire were calmer and more ‘ordinary’ than the countertenor parts, it was because the English composers were generally less adventurous than the Flemish in how they disposed of the chant.

In what follows I have used the standard manuscript names for the voiceparts – superius, altus, tenor and bassus – so as to avoid any direct connection the musical times Autumn 2018

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Heaven and earth: a performer’s guide to Josquin’s masses with a modern voice-type. This does not mean that I am unconcerned with the practicalities of performance – the type of voice which might have sung these parts in the past, and who can sing them now, I believe may well be two different things. In talking about modern voices I am aware from long experience that exceptional singers can deliver exceptional notes on occasion, which muddies the waters when one is trying to lay down some parameters about who should sing what. This becomes especially ticklish when the difference between a part which is held either to be suitable for a modern voice-type, or to be out of its range, may be only a tone or even a semitone. Lines have to be drawn somewhere; and the argument that one might know someone who can easily and repeatedly sing a high or low note out of range is to enter the world of freaks.

On the modern concert stage the question is how high or low any given singer can perform the notes in his or her part whilst tuning and blending with the voices around them. Whether authentic or not, we are enormously concerned with blend and tuning nowadays. In both there is an absolute lower limit which the public will tolerate, and that intolerance is increasing as every year goes by. Regrettably a singer singing in their solo voice (the voice they employ for arias accompanied by an orchestra) may well not be suitable for ensemble work. Over the years of recording Josquin I have found the need to follow some not entirely self-evident rules. For example it is not part of my idea of the alto voice (whether male or female) that it should be asked to sing higher than the C above middle C. Certainly there are plenty of singers who can do it, but my experience is that, too often to be risked, the sound quality will not suit the music. Similarly tenors should not be asked to sing above a G; and Josquin standardly asked his bassus singers to be both baritones and basses, often in the same phrase, which will not suit many conservatoire-trained performers.

Josquin’s superius parts raise a similar question, since without exception they lie too low for the high range favoured by most of today’s sopranos. At the most (going up to F) they are what the English called ‘mean’, requiring a kind of second soprano voice which is unfashionable at the moment. Mezzosopranos would be the best option for these parts, if they can disentangle themselves from the mind-set of singing alto and manage the higher notes in a suitable timbre. (Interestingly the contralto voice, as opposed to the mezzo-soprano voice, has almost vanished from the profession, which also limits female alto participation on many of Josquin’s higher ‘altus’ parts.)

I stick to my contention that the vast majority of Josquin’s superius parts (peaking on E or F) are also unsuitable for cathedral-trained altos, whether male or female.

Unfortunately for modern choirs the middle two voices of almost all the masses under discussion – the altus and tenor – have to be sung by tenors, if

necessary mixed with baritones. The altus part may go up to Bb, but it equally may go down to the D a seventh below middle C as well. Sometimes the best answer for the widest ranging parts might be to mix a baritone with an alto and ask them to back off at each end; but for ease of reference these are tenor parts with some awkward notes. The same for the designated tenor, which tends not to go so high, because it is often carrying chant of restricted range, and probably will not go much lower than the altus. An example of Josquin’s early arrangement of voices is laid out in Une mousse de Biscaye (ex.1).

These ranges can be found more or less repeated in many of Josquin’s compositions, and all the way through his career. Often the superius might be singing almost all the time within the octave C to C; the altus is often a low tenor part with the occasional high note; the tenor has a normal Renaissance tenor range, often defined by the range of the chant it quotes; and the bassus is bass and baritone rolled into one. The more extreme notes in the early masses tended to come in two standard situations: either in a reduced-voice section, when a soloist may well have been singing; or in passages of imitation between all four voices, when Josquin either wanted the superius to join in with the altus at the unison, or wanted the bassus to join in with the tenor and altus, also at the unison (as at the beginning of Agnus I in L’homme armé sexti toni).

Practically speaking it is those passages which visit a single note, or a single line of notes, suddenly and well out of range, that cause real difficulty.

Very often an extremely high or extremely low note is only touched on once, often for no more than a quaver in a running passage, with the approach notes also only rarely visited. The toughest ones are those where the extreme note cannot be hidden in a flurry of sound, or sung by someone else. A classic case is the low superius G at bar 23 in the Sanctus of Sine nomine, a note which is not used elsewhere, yet lasts four long beats, with all the other parts singing round it (ex.2). Indeed the fifth from middle D down to that G is hardly used elsewhere in the mass – only at the beginning of the Sanctus – which would lead a hopeful publisher to say that the part was ‘really’ only an octave, D to D, which it is all the rest of the time.

There are many more examples. One that is particularly unhelpful is in the superius part of Fortuna desperata, between bars 26 and 40 of the Gloria, discussed below. However, there are also examples of wide-ranging parts which use all the notes of a wide tessitura in all the voices. These might be identified as the typically mature Josquin scoring. Malheur me bat is a good example (ex.3).

Ex.1: Josquin: Missa Une mousse de Biscaye, voice ranges

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a performer’s Heaven and earth: guide to Josquin’s masses

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Ex.2: Josquin: Missa Sine nomine, Sanctus, bars 21–24

Ex.3: Josquin: Missa Malheur

me bat, voice ranges

9. One example is the veteran Chester Music edition, originally published in 1979. The blurb revealingly states: ‘For four voices, with piano accompaniment for rehearsal purposes. Edited and arranged for modern use

by Nigel Davison.’

Yet despite the wide ranges, there is a sense that Josquin has identified every note of every part as belonging to a specific timbre, useful from top to bottom (in which context it is interesting to remember that the altus and tenor singers have exactly the same ranges). And if this was a historical process towards rationalising timbres and ranges, the late Pange lingua seems to take it forwards, even though two of the ranges remain wide, and the lowest notes low, by later 16th-century standards. Having said that, it is worth pointing out that every modern edition of Pange lingua has transposed the music a minor third higher in the interests of trying to make the parts conform to the accepted modern SATB choral ranges.9 It is intriguing that Byrd, as late as his four-part mass and, even later, in his Gradualia, often maintained the Flemish mixing of the ‘altus’ and ‘tenor’ ranges, with constant overlaps of very low altus notes and high tenor notes. But he did not do this in his fivepart mass or elsewhere in much earlier pieces.

This modern approach to Pange lingua, which has also been a commercial one, raises the question of who was expected to sing such ranges in Josquin’s time, and who is expected to sing them now. We will never know the answer to the former, of course, though we can make some guesses, since every amateur musician nowadays surely sings something like their early Renaissance forebears. Projection was not an issue, since these pieces were rarely written for cathedral-size buildings, more for courtly chapels. It wouldn’t have occurred to them to sing as strongly as we do now, never being

required to sing over an orchestra, so engendering gentleness of delivery which would have helped them to find those extreme notes, unforced but strong enough in the context; and although scrupulous blend probably wasn’t their concern either, there must have been at least two singers on some of the parts under review – and perhaps all of them – since some of those parts are twinned in reduced-voice passages.

We have our own troubles with choral music written so long ago. In theory it would be possible to aim for something like an authentic sound, at least in the recording studio, where the perfomers only have to project as far as the microphone. But if modern groups want to communicate in concert with audiences today they have to make serious compromises with authenticity, which are helped rather than hindered by the contemporary way of training voices and understanding how they work. To sound feeble on a symphony-size stage is to ask for commercial failure, and the rapid closing down of any chance of promoting music of this kind. Whatever one thinks of the operatic foundations of current vocal training, at least they encourage projection. From there modern choral directors can work back, towards a group sound which both suits the music and can hit an audience filling a symphony hall between the ears.

There will inevitably be a series of compromises inherent in bringing voices trained like this into line with Josquin’s music, loss and gain. The potential loss is likely to be the sense of chamber-music-making which seems to underlie so many of the subtleties of this polyphony. Josquin’s few singers would have stood close to each other, able to react spontaneously to what they heard. It is possible for modern performances to achieve this intimacy, though the sheer volume of sound we have learnt to generate is surely something Josquin would have been astonished by. Perhaps he would have been equally astonished at how singers singing so strongly could have learnt to blend and tune so well together. We will never know whether blend and tuning was any of his concern – though surely something of them must have been – and he didn’t need sheer volume; but to me this strength of sound is a gain.

The problem of the wide ranges remains. No one is trained to deliver a range of two octaves, full-voice, on a symphony stage, while trying to blend with someone else and tune with a group. Fitting in with other people, while filling a large venue with sound, is a skill which takes years to acquire, but even then it is not possible to cover two octaves appropriately. The only way to do it is to mix different types of voice on the same part. This can either be done from the outset, for example by having an alto singing with a soprano, or a baritone with a tenor; or by asking a near-neighbour to ‘rove’ onto the part for as long as the out-of-range notes continue. The expected blend of the group as a whole would aid this process, and should hide the the musical times Autumn 2018

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Heaven and earth: a performer’s guide to Josquin’s masses loan. If the roving is managed sympathetically the loaned singer will taper off at the top (or the bottom, whichever it is) of the range, allowing his or her partner to dominate on notes which suit them. In this way all the notes of a two-octave range can be covered without distortion or heroics.

The different soundworlds I find in these 18 masses, therefore, would have come from quite a restricted pool of voice types, especially if one transposes the four masses which have high superius and bassus parts, identified above, down to conform with the other 14. Of course we don’t know how voices differed from one country to another, how they trained as solo singers or in a choir, or what was expected of them, but on the face of it Josquin kept to a narrow tradition. The differences within his writing come from other elements, which essentially boil down to how the four parts relate to each other in the polyphonic mix. This in turn is decided by some very subtle things: how the chant is disposed, whether there is canon, how the mode is used, how extremes of range are handled and how these relate to the surrounding material. These things may sound dry and academic, but when they are in action, live in a concert hall or church, they provide opportunities for interpretation. To take just two examples now (many others will be discussed under the individual mass headings): if one can hear the chant, or the borrowed material clearly, the impact of the music is instantly increased. For this reason I would always argue that the words ‘Hercules Dux Ferrariae’ be attached to the syllables set aside for them in the mass of that name; and I would recommend that in Malheur me bat the B§, which follows the Bb, in the altus part of the penultimate bar of the Credo be tuned so meanly that it is like biting into a lemon. There are conflicting modes to relish behind this moment.

Josquin’s use of pre-existing material What gives all these masses their distinctive characters is the way Josquin set about using the material on which they are based. Not a single one of them has no pre-existing material, even if, in the case of the two canonic masses, Josquin wrote it himself; and all the treatments are different. Josquin wrote nine masses based on chant or a pre-existing melody; five based on polyphonic models; two based on solmisation syllables; and two wrapped around original canonic melodies.

The diversity to be found in these 18 settings of the same text is one of the great proofs of Josquin’s genius. No one else came anywhere near to thinking up such variety, not even de la Rue, and there are many ways to codify the extremes in question. La sol fa re mi quotes the five notes of its title 250 times, so that these notes are always there, in every voice-part, forming the very essence of every phrase. In Faysant regretz he did something similar

with a four-voice ostinato, which is repeated over 200 times, but also quoted other phrases from other voice-parts of its model, which set him along the path of a full parody mass. The opposite procedure can be found in masses with long models, like Gaudeamus and Di dadi, where there is only space to quote the originals in their entirety once or twice, while the rest of the musical argument comes down to motivic work based on shorter phrases from the model. The most arcane form of long-note tenor quotation of the original melody, in conjunction with clever mathematics, is on display in the Credo of Une mousse de Biscaye, where Josquin quoted the chanson melody in four-times note-lengths, before inverting it, leading to a movement which takes up a third of the total running time of the mass. There is nothing else quite like this elsewhere in these masses, looking back as it does to medieval practice.

Despite the evidence of this Credo, Josquin didn’t really do completely straight tenor cantus firmus masses, apart from the early L’ami Baudichon and the faux antique L’homme armé super voces musicales. Once he had gained some experience, and allowed himself more elaborate scorings, he regularly toyed with the possibility of keeping the melody securely in the tenor, as so many Flemish composers of this period did, while never quite managing it.

In Di dadi the diced-up multiplications of the first phrase of the melody all occur in the tenor, until the Agnus III is reached. In Hercules Dux Ferrariae the pre-existing material – eight notes derived from the duke’s name – stays in the tenor for 43 of the 47 statements. De beata virgine is a special case, but from the Credo onwards the chant is always in (both) tenor parts; the Kyrie and Gloria behave more like the settings about to be discussed. And even in L’homme armé super voces musicales, despite the arcane procedural pattern which underlies the setting, Josquin didn’t manage to keep the melody in the tenor part (ignoring what some modern editions say) to the very end: in the final statement, in Agnus III, the range had become impossible, and the superius takes it over.

At the other end of the spectrum were the settings which show the pre-existing material constantly migrating between all the parts. A perfect example is L’homme armé sexti toni, which seems to have been designed to be as different from its namesake as possible. By embellishing the melody, as well as cutting up its phrases and distributing them about the polyphonic web, it becomes impossible to follow it as a coherent tune. The whole mass could be described as being a fantasia on a theme. Something of the same thing happens in the beautifully compact Ave maris stella, which ranks as the earliest attempt by Josquin to go for the fantasia approach – though here he still seems to be experimenting and the original melody is not so thoroughly lost sight of. The last essay in this form is by far the most sophisticated: Pange lingua, with all its advances towards creating a more Palestrinian the musical times Autumn 2018

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Heaven and earth: a performer’s guide to Josquin’s masses equal-handedness between the parts, finds Josquin up to all manner of subtleties with the contours of the chant.

By definition the masses which can be called parody (i.e. which are based on a polyphonic model, and borrow more than one part from the model from which to derive the voices of the mass) cannot figure in a discussion of tenor cantus firmus settings, since the borrowed material will automatically find its way into several parts at once. Of the five masses in question D’ung aultre amer is the earliest, showing parody technique at its simplest. In fact it comes close to being a tenor mass since the tenor of Ockeghem’s chanson is consistently quoted in Josquin’s tenor, though not always in the trademark long-notes of the traditional tenor mass, and not in the interpolated motet Tu solus qui facis, which stands in for the Benedictus. The only difference in method between this setting and L’ami Baudichon is that Ockeghem’s superius part also makes several appearances, in conjunction with its tenor, giving the very simple music a rather special flavour (see below). In a sense there is not much difference between the method in D’ung aultre amer and Faysant regretz, the latter also relying for almost all its material on just one voice-part of the model, and dipping into another briefly, though the results are astonishingly different, as we shall see. With the other three parody masses – Fortuna desperata, Malheur me bat and Mater patris – all the voices of their three-part polyphonic models are quoted by Josquin, in contrasting and innovative ways, between them launching the history of the parody mass. Perhaps Josquin’s most astonishing decision was to quote Brumel’s three-voice motet Mater patris complete in the third Agnus, sandwiched between two extra parts of his own composition.

Josquin’s use of canon This brings us to the two canonic masses – Ad fugam and Sine nomine – and to canon more generally. Canon was an essential means of expression for Josquin, as it was for every Flemish composer who had been trained in what was thought to be the cosmic beauty of music founded in mathematics – the most elevated way to contemplate God – and in these two masses Josquin put all his skill into the mix. Unsurprisingly there is a wide variety of types of canon on offer, giving a textbook overview of the art at that time.

Twelve of Josquin’s 18 masses involve canon at some point, but only these two use it as a constructional principle in every movement. (De beata virgine does so only in the Credo, Sanctus and Agnus.) It seems that they came from different ends of Josquin’s career; and it seems that Josquin wrote the melodies which are treated canonically himself. In a narrow sense Ad fugam – the earlier of the two – may be considered a tenor cantus firmus mass, since the comes (the part which follows) is always in the tenor; but then one

might just as well consider it a superius cantus firmus mass, since the dux (the leading canonic voice) is always in that part, making this the strictest structure shown by Josquin in any of his masses (the only movement not to be canonic is the Benedictus). By the time he came to compose Sine nomine, possibly as much as 30 years later, the subtlety of his part-writing allowed him to disguise the canon so that one scarcely notices it. In fact this mass is still relatively strict: as in Ad fugam two of the voices are always in canon, but here each of the four voices is subjected to canonic treatment in turn, and their material is extended to the non-canonic parts in imitation.

The mass which comes next nearest to having canon in every movement is De beata virgine. The theory is that Josquin wrote the Gloria and Credo separately and earlier than the other movements, and then wrote a Kyrie to go with the Gloria, and a Sanctus and Agnus to go with the Credo. Since the Credo was in five parts and canonic, so are the following movements; the Kyrie, like the Gloria, is for four voices and not canonic. Unlike the masses just reviewed the canonic parts in the last three movements here are not original compositions, but embellished chant melodies; and indeed it is the precise sequence of chant melodies which Josquin chose throughout the mass – the Kyrie and Gloria also have them underpinning the imitation (see ex.28) – which makes this mass a unity, though a liturgical one rather than a thematic one.

The use of five voices of course is very unusual in Josquin’s masses – every other movement he wrote, apart from four remarkable Agnus IIIs, only has four voices. In fact all the fifth voice does in De beata virgine is act as a canonic partner, the canon always being played out between the same two voices, called tenor primus and tenor secundus. Although they take it in turns to be the dux and the comes, the tenor secundus is always a fifth below the tenor primus. This ensures that the tenor primus isn’t really a tenor part at all, being inevitably too high, and indeed the actual altus part is generally below the tenor primus. There is a confusion in the sources about which pitch to sing the Credo at, since if the movements are kept at written pitch the make-up of the choir fundamentally changes, whereas upward transposition of a fourth helps to bring the voices back in line with the remainder of the mass. Even so the results are not conclusive (see below).

Josquin’s canons come in different sizes and complexities. Apart from the three masses just described the remaining canons only take up part of movements, the majority in one or other of the Agnus Deis. This brings us to the three Agnus IIIs where Josquin scored up to six voices, and in doing so conceived some of the greatest music written in the Renaissance period.

It is interesting that as time went by he increasingly seems to have wanted the last Agnus to be a culmination of everything that had gone before. In his early masses, and often in the music that went before him, the idea of the musical times Autumn 2018

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Heaven and earth: a performer’s guide to Josquin’s masses a grand signing-off wasn’t current. In the early Une mousse de Biscaye, for example, the Agnus is simply a repeat of the Kyrie. But by the significantly later L’homme armé sexti toni, Hercules Dux Ferrariae and Malheur me bat Josquin was in a mood to test himself, and for this he reckoned he needed canon. The descriptions of what he actually did can be found below under the individual mass titles, but one notices how beautifully – almost artlessly – the music in these movements fits together, the method of L’homme armé sexti toni and Malheur me bat being very similar. One can imagine Josquin working out the counterpoint required to bring these canons off much as Bach must have planned his stretti in the big organ fugues.

From these tours de force we come to canons which create sonorities of a different kind: intimate number-music, over 20 of them, almost all scored as duets. For some reason Josquin thought it desirable to delay these until later in the service – most of them are in the Pleni, Benedictus and Agnus II, and the majority of these are in Agnus II. Why not the Christe; or sections of the Gloria and Credo where a composer like Lassus often wrote duets? Some are straightforward unison canons, like Agnus II in Gaudeamus (where the superius part is simply twinned); or Agnus II of Mater patris. Some are not so straightforward unison canons – like the three Benedictus duets of L’homme armé super voces musicales which are pithy mensuration canons. But it seems that Josquin’s real delight was in writing duet-canons at the second. There are four of these – two in Mater patris (Benedictus and Pleni), one in Malheur me bat (Agnus II), and one in Sine nomine (Agnus II) – all of them quite similar, and all hauntingly beautiful. Some of the longer duets, whether canonic or not, have been criticised for aimless wandering; but it is just this capacity to wander articulately that makes these sections so moving. The Agnus II canon in Malheur me bat is riveting from start to finish, for example, but runs for over 50 bars. Here is the music of the spheres.

The three-part canons are perforce even cleverer, though rather bumpier in effect. Agnus II in L’homme armé super voces musicales is a mensuration canon, all three parts singing the same melody, beginning together, but setting off at different speeds (ex.4). (It is hard to sing this exactly the same way twice, which makes it difficult to record across several takes.) This, like many other details in these masses, may well be a homage to Ockeghem, as represented in his Missa Prolationem.

Throughout his career as a composer, and especially after his return to Condé, Josquin made many appreciative references to Ockeghem in his music, while showing himself to be rather more competitive towards everyone else. Perhaps this is to misjudge him. He certainly treated Brumel’s Mater patris with respect, and there is no saying that just because he trumped all the other composers who had set the L’homme armé melody, he didn’t have some fellow feeling for them.

Ex.4: Josquin: Missa L’homme armé super voces musicales, Agnus II, complete

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Heaven and earth: a performer’s guide to Josquin’s masses The problem of the three-voice canon in Agnus II of Hercules Dux Ferrariae is described below. Otherwise Josquin’s use of canon employs all four of the voices present, more in passing and not so easy to hear. In these passages it becomes much more of a secret art. Perhaps the overlapping phrases in the Hosanna of Faysant regretz can be followed if one knows they are there; but the writing in the Sanctus of L’homme armé sexti toni is such that it vanishes into the texture. This is just as true of the canon between the lower two parts in the Hosanna which follows. The mastery of all the elements here reminds one of the late sophistications of Sine nomine.

However, the partial canon in the Agnus II duet of Pange lingua is perhaps the most deftly managed of all, canonic writing coming and going without warning in the middle of freer activity.

Josquin’s habit of writing duets and trios in the later stages of his masses slowly became a feature of them, culminating in the three very substantial duets in his late setting, Pange lingua – in the Pleni (70 bars), Benedictus (47 bars) and Agnus II (54 bars). These numbers significantly change the balance of the five standard movements over those in more traditional settings, for which no liturgical explanation has been found.

But these duets didn’t all have to be lengthy. Josquin had also developed a much pithier type of Benedictus duet, which became one of his hallmarks and can be found in more than half of his settings. The technique is to write two or three compact phrases, usually for different combinations of pairings from the four voices on offer, almost in the spirit of a throwaway sample.

These phrases rarely last more than 16 bars (and in performance can be sung without pausing at the final cadences, so they run into each other); and range from some very guileless phrases based on the pre-existing melody (L’ami Baudichon, Faysant regretz (if you add some barlines), Hercules Dux Ferrariae, Malheur me bat (ex.5), Sine nomine), to the briefest and most audible of canons or quasi-canons (Ad fugam in the later version, Ave maris stella, Gaudeamus, L’homme armé sexti toni) and the tiny mensuration canons of L’homme armé super voces musicales.

This method doesn’t appear anywhere other than in the Benedictus, which, with the Agnus II canons and Agnus III culminations, reinforces the impression that Josquin increasingly gave thought as how best to end his mass-settings. Several of these ten titles run the full Benedictus, Agnus II, Agnus III sequence as described, and just about all of them can be said to be among his maturer settings. When he hit on this precise formula for the Benedictus is not known. Its presence in L’ami Baudichon is surprising, given its supposed early date of composition. Its presence in the reworking of Ad fugam is not so surprising, given that no one knows when this rewrite was undertaken. Its absence from Pange lingua can be explained by the fact that the Benedictus here is a uniquely beautiful composition, a dialogue

Ex.5: Josquin: Missa Malheur me bat, Benedictus, complete

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Heaven and earth: a performer’s guide to Josquin’s masses between two voices of such logic and simplicity that one may see in it a refinement of the method just described. In some of the remaining masses the Benedictus is sung as an extended trio, a foil to the Pleni which also may be a trio. When it is sung by all four voices as if it were just another standard movement surrounded by fully scored Hosannas, as in De beata virgine or Une mousse de Biscaye, the informed listener may miss the breaths of fresh air which the duets can bring.

Agnus IIIs and Amens There was one further way Josquin could sum up what had gone before in the final pages: quote the pre-existing melody complete there, having not done so before. This is another reason why his settings may elongate in the Sanctus and Agnus. The classic case, once again, is Pange lingua.

Although the whole melody has in this case been heard in the Kyrie, only a few phrases are deployed in the Gloria, Credo and Sanctus, preparing the ground for a final complete statement in Agnus III: the first phrase is heard in long notes soon after the start of the movement – one of the early sources gives these notes the Pange lingua text – the rest in elaboration. The way Josquin turned the final six notes of the chant into the haunting ‘dona nobis pacem’ phrase remains one of the miracles of this repertoire.

Mater patris must rank as having the most comprehensive final quotation of any model in its Agnus III – by stating a complete three-part motet while wrapping it up in new counterpoint. The Faysant regretz Agnus III also has an exceptional summing-up: the top part sings the superius melody from the model complete for the first time in the mass, while below it the tenor sings the main motif of the mass (FDED) 25 times in succession at the same time as the altus, for the first time in the mass, sings a new motif, derived from a different part of the model (DDED) 24 times.

Other examples are less spectacular, but show the same desire to bring the musical arguments to a conclusion. In Di dadi the only time the complete melody is stated outside the tenor part is in Agnus III. In Hercules Dux Ferrariae the only time the theme is heard starting on the A a sixth above middle C is in the superius part in Agnus III; otherwise it starts, throughout the rest of the mass, successively on the D a seventh below middle C, the A a third below, and the D a tone above. In Sine nomine, Agnus III is the only time the canonic activity is heard at the octave – other intervals are used throughout the rest of the mass. The only time the complete chant melody in Ave maris stella is heard in its entirety is in the tenor part of the Hosanna. This unusual decision is also true of Di dadi, though here Josquin also quotes it again in Agnus I and in Agnus III, in the latter for the first and only time down a fourth (the original pitch of the chanson) in the bass part.

Finally there is the extraordinary Agnus III of L’homme armé super voces musicales which, true to form, is as different from the (now) more famous Agnus III of its namesake as it could possibly be. In this case the music is so difficult to sing, because it has no rests, that one writer has suggested that Josquin might have intended it to be played on a shawm.10 I suggest using two or more singers, and asking them to stagger their breaths. Here the L’homme armé melody, which has been heard complete throughout the mass in the tenor part, is quoted for the first time in the superius in double augmentation, lasting 124 bars. Perhaps to warn the performers that they are in for a tough time the movement carries the rubric: ‘Clama, ne cesses’ – Cry, cease not (Isaiah 58:1).

Josquin’s Agnus IIIs can be the high-points of his art, which he often prepared for carefully through the preceding movements. Other highpoints are perhaps less predicted, but can set a concert hall alight if enjoyed for what they are. In this category come some of his ‘Amens’, a word which is only available at the end of the Gloria and Credo.

The most effective ones are either thematically interesting in themselves – a kind of compressed contrapuntal workout – or are set up in advance by the preceding motifs. Both methods find phrases which can prove unstoppable in performance. Of the first kind the Gloria ‘Amen’ in Ave maris stella shows Josquin working through the possibilities of a short motif in miniature (ex.6). It is hard to throw the kitchen sink at this one, since everything is so brief and carefully placed, but the logic of it brings its own intellectual rewards.

The Gloria ‘Amen’ of Hercules Dux Ferrariae is similar. Similar also, but given more space to develop and crescendo, is the Gloria ‘Amen’ in De beata

10. ‘As for the performance of this voice, we cannot know for sure what the composer had in mind.

Could he have aimed at an instrumental rendering, for example by a shawm, an instrument that allows for circular breathing?’: Willem Elders: Josquin des Prez and his musical legacy (Leuven, 2013), p.108.

Ex.6: Josquin: Missa Ave maris stella, Gloria, bars 98–106

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Heaven and earth: a performer’s guide to Josquin’s masses Ex.6 continued

virgine. But perhaps the most effective of all in this category is the Credo ‘Amen’ of La sol fa re mi, where the final statements of the five-note ostinato are turned into an irresistible sequence, the underpinning bass behaving with impeccable baroque sequential logic (ex.7).

Josquin found sequences to be a good way to go in these ‘Amens’ – the two extended ones in L’homme armé sexti toni both rely on densely packed motivic work, delivering some tight harmonic corners. The bass sequence in the Credo ‘Amen’ of Malheur me bat helps to power this one through, while the Gloria ‘Amen’ of the same mass is one of the classic examples of the second type of conclusion, where the preceding words, ‘in gloria Dei Patris’, are made part of the whole experience. Beginning at bar 139 Josquin sets up a harmonic pattern, requiring the basses several times to insist on a pedal C, an isolated

Ex.7: Josquin: Missa La sol fa re mi, Credo, bars 229–42

note, building the tension until the ‘Amen’ melisma is finally unleashed. For controlled architecture in music there is little better than this.

One or two of the ‘Amens’ are in triple time: that of the Gloria of Gaudeamus, and those in the Credos of Sine nomine and Une mousse de Biscaye, for example. Some seem to come in two halves, so there is a moment of gathering before the final burst: the Gloria ‘Amen’ of L’homme armé sexti toni has a notable example of this, as do Fortuna desperata (Gloria) and Gaudeamus (Gloria). But my prize for sheerly powerful counterpoint, which spins its own logic, is the ‘Amen’ to the Credo of Faysant regretz (ex.8). One of Josquin’s later hallmarks was to become obsessive both with harmony and melody as the mood took him, often with the two together. Here he spun a superius melody which revolves around the note D, supported in this the musical times Autumn 2018 23

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Heaven and earth: a performer’s guide to Josquin’s masses Ex.8: Josquin: Missa Faysant regretz, Credo, bars 144–57

11. Edgar H. Sparks: The music of Noel Bauldeweyn, American Musicological Society Studies and Documents, 6 (New York, 1972), pp.34–98.

12. The most referenced writer on the reception of this mass is the 19thcentury Austrian composer and musicologist August Wilhelm Ambros, who wrote in his Geschichte der Musik: ‘Die Messe Da pacem ist über den vielbenutzten Kirchengesang componirt, der sich als Tenor durchzieht und im ersten und zweiten Agnus, und zwar jedesmal unter ganz verschiedenen Bedingungen, zum Canon gestaltet. Aber nicht diese sinnreiche Combination gibt der Messe ihren hohen Werth, vielmehr gibt ihr ihn das eigenthümlich Kräftige und warme Colorit, der so lebensvolle und doch so massvolle Gang der Stimmen, der Ausdruck einer innigen und dabei mannhaften Frömmigkeit.

Das “Incarnatus” hebt sich zu einer Grösse, die kein Meister alter oder neuer Zeit, heisse er wie er wolle, überboten hat. Die Kühnsten, gewaltigsten, wundervollsten Harmoniefolgen brechen wie Sonnenblitze eine nach der andern hervor, die Schauer einer unbekannsten Geisterwelt wehen darin’ (1st edition (Leipzig, 1868), vol.3, p.222). (The mass Da pacem is composed on the well-known plainsong, which runs through it as the tenor and is arranged as a canon in the first and second Agnus, each time under different conditions. Yet it is not this ingenious combination that gives the mass its high value, but rather the idiosyncratic power and warm

by the bassus part. The contours of the superius are fascinating, not least because his obsession caused him to keep going, far beyond symmetry.

Josquin’s use of his models and how this creates the individual soundworlds of his masses Since the individual soundworlds of Josquin's masses were not created by varying their scoring, it is necessary to examine the individual and varied ways in which Josquin used his models. I shall list them according to a putative chronology; but it is instructive to begin with Bauldweyn’s Missa Da pacem.

Missa Da pacem The story of Bauldeweyn’s Missa Da pacem is an unusual one. Long thought to be by Josquin – there is some manuscript justification for a misleading attribution, as there is for so much of his music – in 1972 Edgar Sparks showed conclusively that it was by the little-known Noel Bauldeweyn (b. c.1480–fl.1509–13).11 If I had wanted to include in this survey a coeval mass-setting which would throw useful light, by comparison, on Josquin’s technique, I would have done better to choose one of the great versions

by Obrecht, de la Rue or Isaac. But for many years, until quite recently, distinguished scholars thought that this music by Bauldeweyn – not music by a great contemporary – represented the pinnacle of Josquin’s art. I wanted to find out why.12 Having worked closely with Bauldeweyn’s setting I came to three conclusions: there is one passage in it which is as good as anything by Josquin, or by anyone else from that period; one in particular which is memorable; and many passages which Josquin, even when very young, would never have written. The average standard across all the movements is not as high as in Josquin’s weakest mass-setting.

Taken in order: the passage of genius is the ‘Et incarnatus est’; and the Agnus III (which scores up to six voices) is the memorable one.

Other exciting sections may be discussed, but these two are sufficiently outstanding to sustain an attribution to Josquin. If this were admitted then atmosphere, the action of the voices, so lively and yet so restrained, the expression of a heartfelt and yet virile piety. The ‘Incarnatus’ rises to a greatness which no old or new master, whatever his name might be, has surpassed. The most bold,

tremendous, marvellous harmonic progressions break out one after another like flashes of sun; the awe of a most unknown spiritual realm wafts in them (trans.

McCarthy).) Richard Sherr more recently added some spice to the argument

when he wrote: ‘However, scholarly tastes change.

Maybe a champion for the Missa Da pacem will one day appear’ (‘Missa Da pacem and Missa Allez regretz’, in The Josquin companion, ed. Richard Sherr (Oxford, 2000), p.243).

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13. Dual authorship would help to explain some of the mixed attributions in the sources, and could be the answer behind a number of inconsistent compositional corners. No current thinking discusses it; yet we know how many of the leading painters of the time had workshops, in which the master would contribute the most telling details – faces in particular – and leave the broader work to his students. The ‘Et incarnatus’ and Agnus III might qualify as sufficiently telling moments to attract someone of Josquin’s standing to a collaboration if the conditions were right.

One might think that he was too grand to join in with someone else ’s project, but then one might think that of Titian too.

we would have to agree on dual authorship for the mass as a whole, which technically must have been possible, though modern scholarship has come up with almost no examples of it.13 We shall never know, but the chords of the ‘Et incarnatus est’ are so much more perfectly managed than anything else in the setting – so much more dramatic – that one can only wonder how Bauldeweyn could so suddenly have upped his game. Perhaps, as our Victorian composers discovered, effective chords are easier to conceive than effective counterpoint. The canon in Agnus III is less remarkable than these chords and such a rigid framework – three parts at three different octaves, eight minim beats apart, following each other exactly, with three other parts filling in, sometimes barely avoiding consecutive octaves (bars 103–05) – cannot be found elsewhere in Josquin; and to make such a feature of the harmonic tritone (constant As against Ebs) is not to be found with this intensity even in his early work. Neither of these caveats automatically excludes Josquin. It is a clever canon, lacking suppleness perhaps, but with exceptional sonorities. By extending the bass part downwards, and doubling it, we have entered a newly expressive sonority. It is the doubled low bass part which thrills most of all, low bass thirds being taboo in most Renaissance polyphony.

The weaknesses in Bauldeweyn’s mass are much more numerous. The most egregious is the habit of ending several of the main sections with a tame sequence, which is immediately repeated note-for-note. The sequence might just pass unremarked, the repetition does not. The writing is just not interesting enough. No leading composer of the period would have done this once in the course of a setting of the Ordinary, let alone seven times (Kyries I and II; ‘descendit de caelis’ and ‘Et exspecto’ in the Credo; ‘gloria tua’, ‘in excelsis’ and ‘in nomine Domini’ in the Sanctus). It is true that Josquin used quite a lot of exact repetition in Mater patris; but the comparison is a useful one, since in Mater patris, where the phrases are pithy and telling, Josquin showed how it could be done well. Equally unsatisfactory, both in content and placing, are the duets. These dull almost-canons several times interrupt the flow of the movement as a whole, but none so unfortunately as at ‘Crucifixus’ and ‘Et resurrexit’. One other unusual compositional decision may also be mentioned: at bar 29 of the Credo the composer abruptly curtailed his highly elaborate statement of the first third of the chant (in augmentation by nine) in order to let everyone briefly loose on one of the most stock-in-trade overlapping sequences in the rule-book – a sequence which survived at least as far as Gombert’s third-tone Magnificat (where it is treated with respect and sounds glorious). The sudden change of texture in this case is bewildering and unconvincing.

The point about maintaining a consistent average throughout a long composition is an important one. If one were to go to a blind listening of

this mass, one might conclude that Agnus III had been written by a good composer, Agnus I and II by one punching above his weight, the Gloria by a boring one, and the rest of it (barring the ‘Et incarnatus est’) by someone who had a style of his own but was uninspired. This kind of trussing-up cannot be made of a single one of the 18 masses included here as being by Josquin; they all have a consistent language from start to finish, whatever the experts may think of it in relation to the languages employed in the other 17 masses. It would be dangerous to say that Josquin was the only composer capable of such consistency in this period, but across a whole corpus of settings it was extremely rare. Bauldeweyn is just one useful example of how it might well not happen.

One may learn one or two other things about Josquin’s art from this comparison. Given Bauldeweyn’s dates, this setting would probably have to be placed after all but two or three of Josquin’s. In one way this is not obvious since the music doesn’t suggest maturity, but it becomes more obvious if one goes through the individual phrases, the building bricks of the music, to see how long they are and how frequently they cadence. What one finds is relatively short phrases cadencing relatively often, possible indications of inexperience on the part of the composer. The disappointment in the Gloria is that many of the melodic units are two- (or sometimes four-) bar syllabically set phrases, which never build into anything memorable. The whole movement is restricted by this technique, but it is at its most vulnerable in the final bars. Josquin’s phrases as a rule spin on into unpredictable lengths and patterns, but when he did use short phrases he was a master at wrapping them into each other, like a jigsaw with very small pieces that fit each other perfectly. The Gloria ‘Amen’ of the relatively ‘late’ Missa De beata virgine is a classic example.

The early masses (1) Missa Une mousse de Biscaye (Una musque de buscaya) Josquin’s Missa Une mousse de Biscaye is based on a monophonic ballad of eight phrases (ex.9), which are incorporated in all the movements complete except the Sanctus. Since this setting, alongside the Missa L’ami Baudichon, is probably the earliest that Josquin wrote (perhaps 1473–75), one might expect some trial and error, and some anonymity. Neither need threaten the ascription to Josquin, if one accepts that he was looking to push out the barriers, even in his earliest works.

The sound of Une mousse de Biscaye is based on the scoring which lies behind all of Josquin’s mass settings – Low soprano and/or Alto, Tenor 1, Tenor 2, Baritone/Bass. This always tended to produce a compact web, in the musical times Autumn 2018 27

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Heaven and earth: a performer’s guide to Josquin’s masses Ex.9: Una musque de buscaya, the monophonic ballad on which Josquin’s Missa Une mousse de Biscaye is based

!

!

which all four voices can overlap with each other, the impression of density often underlined by Josquin breaking up the constituent parts of his chosen melody into snip­pets, dividing them between all the voices, and extending their melodic con­tours at will (the only movement in Une mousse de Biscaye to keep the cantus firmus in the tenor throughout is the Credo). The listener will surely lose a sense of the model in this writing, something which has the effect of in­ten­sifying the impact of the counterpoint, since an audible and recognisable tune would always be in the limelight, unbalancing the polyphonic con­versation. What we have in Une mousse de Biscaye was an early try at contra­puntal balance.

The scoring and the treatment of the cantus firmus melody in Une mousse de Biscaye are not particularly distinctive. What sets its soundworld apart is the modal uncertainty, extreme in this setting; and the very long notes of the chant in the Credo. E§s have to coexist with Bbs, Ebs with As. Repeatedly there are melodies which sport these, most audible in the Credo. This kind of awkwardness is customarily held to be a sign of immaturity by scholars.

As a performer, I can vouch for how effective it can be, for example the entry of the altos at bar 64 of the Sanctus at ‘Pleni sunt caeli’ on an E§. It sounds edgy in the context, and is difficult to tune well, but has real frisson.

The fourfold augmentation and inversion of the tune in the tenor part of the Credo not only create a unique texture in Josquin, they also create real problems for the singers, who have to sing both low as a result of the

inversion, and are not supposed to breathe for minutes on end. However, it produces a memorable effect – a drone low in the texture, sombre and attenuated in mood, often beneath the bass part. Also in the Credo is the least expert part-writing in all these masses. Josquin has not yet learnt how to fit a fourth voice – the altus – into his web, creating a raft of consecutives around bars 132 to 139 (see note 15 for Lassus’s view of writing an altus part).

In places (especially the Credo) this is clearly an apprentice work, but equally there is a fluency in sections of the Sanctus which suggests the hand of a master; and nowhere is the music so uninspired that it can be called second-rate. The Credo, despite its faults, is a fascinating achievement, setting the scene for the advance which the composer made in the Credo of L’ami Baudichon. They are both colossal (269 and 283 bars respectively); but this one is so because Josquin probably decided to challenge his peers and write as involved a mathematical scheme as he could manage. This tilting with his colleagues/rivals (while always paying homage to Ockeghem) would become a feature of his career, and this particular example looks very much like the work of a self-possessed young man having fun (though in fact the mathematics behind it are not so very clever, the challenge being to write interesting counterpoint around the resulting long notes). The scribe, following tradition, flirts with the idea of leaving the singers to work out what is needed and not notate it. He says in Latin: ‘Singer, if you wish to perform this well, do it inversely’; but then gets cold feet and writes it out anyway: ‘Singers that are not yet grown up should perform it as it stands here.’ There is something of the condescension that has been ascribed to Josquin himself in that remark.

The anonymity also remains. Whole sections of the writing are in a slightly insistent, undifferentiated four-part texture which was very much the usual fare at the time. Here it comes over best in the Sanctus. All five sections (the Hosanna coming twice) contribute to an overall sense of form, which culminates in the slow triple-time passage of the Benedictus, ending in a beautiful soprano sequence, back in duple-time, sounding almost as though it is unfolding in slow motion: a two-bar unit rising by step.

(2) Missa L’ami Baudichon There is an anomaly in the sonorities of Missa L’ami Baudichon. Anyone listening to it would rightly say that it has unusually bright, C major sonorities, which create an uncomplicated, positive mood. I have noted above that this is one of the four masses scored high and could be transposed down, but although downward transposition might rob it of some of its élan, it wouldn’t alter the fact that the top part here at times likes to perform the musical times Autumn 2018 29

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Heaven and earth: a performer’s guide to Josquin’s masses higher above the next part down than was usual. The anomaly is that the four contributing parts in this mass at times overlap to the extent of a fourth: B below middle C to the E a third above it. (The four voices of Une mousse de Biscaye, which leave a denser impression, only share one note –middle Bb. This would suggest wider spacing than in L’ami Baudichon, but it isn’t the case.) The overall range of this top part is an octave and a minor sixth, which is nothing exceptional for the period. The distinctive aspect of it is where the middle of its range is pitched, which is quite high. The most brilliant moments of its dancing are right at the end of the Gloria (bar 148), where the superius sings an octave and a fifth above the altus; and at the end of the first (and third) Agnus, where the interval between them is the same.

Such spacing is of the kind to be found in contemporary English music, not as a rule in Josquin.

The typical clarity and openness of sound in this mass comes from diverse elements. The voices wander over their gambits widely – the superius can go as far below the altus as it goes high above it (bar 6 of the Sanctus). But the brilliance one hears is a combination of open scoring and the use of the L’ami Baudichon melody (ex.10). This melody is also a one-off, and in a number of respects. But the essential detail is that it is very simple, trenchantly major-key triadic, and lies relatively high. With its uncanny similarity to ‘Three blind mice’, it would be difficult to make it sound sad. In fact it is surprising that Josquin used it at all. Quite apart from its lack of promise for development, the original text contains a reference to female genitalia. Nonetheless, this setting appears in a Vatican source for liturgical use.

Josquin treats the melody in a straightforward way, which could be put down both to immaturity and to the nature of the melody. Immaturity certainly played a part in the continuing problem of the altus part as Josquin tried to fit it around a tenor cantus firmus which lies inconveniently high, constantly invading the space where the altus would normally be. In a way Josquin’s technique is less developed here than in Une mousse de Biscaye, Ex.10: The ballad on which Josquin’s Missa L’ami Baudichon is based

holding the melody almost entirely in the tenor, and giving each movement exactly the same head-motif: his sense of adventure would soon take him away from these constrictions. There are as yet no strict canons in Josquin’s armoury; and he preferred at this stage to write duets rather than trios – there are many of the former, including one at ‘Et incarnatus est’, which was unusual; but only one trio, the Agnus II. Throughout his career Josquin favoured sections entirely given over to duets – there are substantial examples as late as Pange lingua – and in the early years he experimented with them, feeling his way towards strict canon. For the moment he was satisfied with quasi-canon.

The head-motif revolves around a downward scale in the superius, which in its predictability comes over almost as a tease by the end. The high-lying nature of the tenor cantus firmus causes everyone some problems, the singers as much as Josquin, and not least at the end of the Credo where they are asked to sing a high G for 14 bars without break. In places this tessitura forces the altus to sing below the bassus, and even to sing in imitation with them at pitch (at ‘per quem omnia’ in the Credo) – very difficult to balance well, for all that scrupulous balance between the parts in performance is probably only a modern concern.

None of this prepares the listener for the genius of the Credo as a whole.

This may proceed from the experiments made in the Credo of Une mousse de Biscaye, in overall length and in playing around with the note-lengths of the tune which, although not quoted in anything as extreme as four-times, is quoted in inversion in the first half, and is then used as a sequence in the second half. This second half, beginning at ‘Et resurrexit’ and running to the very end, is one of the most exciting passages in all of Josquin. It is long, but brilliantly controlled by the melodic sequence just mentioned, which very simply descends through a succession of thirds, starting on high G until it reaches low G. The 14 bars of high G at the end is sheer cheek, piling on the pressure at the end of what has been a slow but relentless build-up over 157 bars. It is underpinned by a striding bass part and a superius part whose tessitura in the closing stages is an octave above that of the altus.

(3) Missa Ad fugam

14. Jena 31. This version also includes amendments of the Kyrie and Gloria; and Josquin’s Credo was replaced with one by Compère.

The Missa Ad fugam (ex.11) is unusual among Josquin’s masses for its basic sound. Only Sine nomine, and perhaps Faysant regretz, are sonically so compact and rigidly controlled; and by the time he came to write those he had learnt more about how to write strict canons and vary textures. The later Sanctus and Agnus rewrites associated with a transcription of Ad fugam in one source,14 assumed to be later thoughts by Josquin himself, do not add anything new to the sonorities, though they do show greater flexibility of composition. the musical times Autumn 2018

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Heaven and earth: a performer’s guide to Josquin’s masses Ex.11: Josquin: Missa Ad fugam, bars 1–10 of the first Kyrie soprano, which provide the openings of all the movements of the mass, including the two in the later, revised versions of the Sanctus and Agnus Dei

15. ‘After I had published many compositions of all sorts in various parts of the world, certain of my pious and honest friends began to urge strongly that what I had rather often ere now published in songs of more numerous voices, I should not refuse to attempt for three voices. Since often indeed those who gather to refresh themselves do not have precise knowledge of the art of music, they thought that I would do a thing welcome to many if I should thus compose songs so that they might conveniently be sung sometimes even by a few people. Wishing to satisfy their desire and will, I readily let myself be prevailed upon to write in these songs some easier music. And because I have deliberately omitted that part that often makes trouble for singers, I have clearly persuaded myself that the remaining parts will offer not only no difficulty but also very much pleasure.’ There follow compositions for cantus, tenor and bassus only.

(Preface to Orlandus Lassus: Liber mottetarum trium vocum, Munich, 1575).

The reason for this compactness is the range of the canonic parts, which essentially amounts to an octave. This takes care of two of the four voices, the superius and the tenor; the other two are free, though the bassus anyway manages little more than an octave and a major third. The odd part out, as so often in music of this period because probably composed last, is the altus, which ranges over an octave and a minor sixth (low D to high Bb), obviously filling in. With more experience Josquin would learn to accommodate this fourth voice more evenly, which didn’t stop Lassus, a century later, pointing out how troublesome this voice could be.15 The result is that the overall tessitura of the mass is 18 notes – the narrowest of all.

There is compositional density too. Every movement, and every sub­ section of every movement apart from the Benedictus, has the same canonic formula: the superius starts and the tenor takes up the melody a fifth lower, at varying distances, often four beats. At the beginning of every movement this melody is the same, which means there is a reliable head-motif linking all their starts. In the later replacement movements this head-motif is retained as far as it goes, after which Josquin continued with fresh melodies for canonic elaboration (which nonetheless still involves tenor at the lower fifth after the soprano).

Along with the uncertain alto part and the use of a consistent head-motif, Ad fugam inherited something else from Une mousse de Biscaye – uncertain modality. There is a key-signature of one flat in all four voice-parts in the manuscript, which means the leading voice is in transposed Dorian (starting G). When this is quoted down a fifth by the tenors, as it is without variation throughout the setting, the scribes give no help about how to treat the third degree of its scale – the E. Since Josquin seemed to be setting himself the task of being really strict, we should ideally flatten this E, as the imitated B is by the key-signature, wherever it comes. However, the question of whether to do this in all cases is a minefield of ficta debate, one which could have been reduced if the scribe had given a partial key-signature of two flats in the tenor part – but he didn’t; and sometimes the E simply cannot be flattened. The problem affects the two other parts as well, resulting in uncomfortable chord-progressions from start to finish. The first of these

comes in the first bar of every movement, where the basses should perhaps sing an Eb to avoid the tritone.

Canonic masses on free material, as opposed to those on pre-existing melodies, were almost unknown early in Josquin’s career. Once again there is a sense of him experimenting and, to make the point, doing it strictly. The relentlessness of texture is not necessarily a drawback in performance: the restricted nature of it becomes mesmerising over a long span, and there is a confidence to much of the part-writing which is attractive.

A nice twist to the story of this composition may explain the existence of the later Sanctus and Agnus movements. The manuscript which contains them (Jena 31) allows the conclusion that they were improvements made by a later hand (possibly Josquin’s), intended to update the work of a less mature writer. Maybe the original setting had become a regular part of the work of the Sistine Chapel choir before Josquin joined it, and that when he did, and came to perform it himself, he was disappointed with aspects of his original composition. Some years later Carpentras had exactly the same opportunity with his iconic set of Lamentations, when he rejoined the Papal choir in 1523.

(4) Missa Di dadi In some ways Josquin’s famous gambling mass belongs securely in the world of the three just discussed, and can be seen to build on the nuts and bolts of them. There is a strict head-motif at the start of all the movements except the Agnus; the foundation melody is quoted without embellishment almost entirely in the tenor part; the momentum generated in the second half of the Credo is almost as impressive as that of L’ami Baudichon; and the Benedictus and Agnus II duets have become so elaborate that they now have more than a single section.

But perhaps the most telling comparison is with their soundworlds. Like Ad fugam, but very unlike L’ami Baudichon, the top part of this mass regularly delves into the territory of the altus part, rarely going into proper superius territory – there is just one D. In the end it has quite a wide overall range – an octave and a fifth – yet always sounds modest. It is almost as if Josquin solved his problem with the altus part by conceiving the altus and superius from the start of composition as a foil to each other. And then below them is the tenor which, apart from the Benedictus, is restricted to the octave range of the model. This method of twinning the two top parts was new writing, and it called for a new kind of support from the basses who range widely over their allotted space, providing a more designedly harmonic support to the texture. This comes to glorious fruition in Agnus III, where the foundation melody, which up to that point has always been quoted in the tenor starting on G, is here sung complete by the basses starting on D. the musical times Autumn 2018 33

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Heaven and earth: a performer’s guide to Josquin’s masses In writing like this one senses that Josquin was searching for ever fuller sonorities, and that he was content to find them in ever closer-packed textures. This is not a contradiction in terms: resonance does not necessarily have to proceed from widely spaced triads. Close chords can ring and hum just as well, and can be easier to tune in performance – and to underline the point he divided the altus part within the existing spread of notes at the end of the Gloria and Credo to produce five voice-parts in their final cadences. In fact he had flagged up this possibility already in the final chord of the Hosanna in Une mousse de Biscaye. He didn’t follow up the potential inherent in these scored-up final chords later in his career, turning away from the technique which a composer of Sheppard’s stamp, hell-bent on sonority, would take to an extreme in the final chords of pieces like Verbum caro. Josquin would find other ways of generating sonority; but there is no mistaking that the impact of this mass is affected by these occasional fivevoice chords.

The foundation melody is the tenor part of Robert Morton’s fourpart chanson N’auray je jamais, after which the mass is sometimes named (ex.12). The symbolism behind the choice of this chanson, alongside the appearance of dice in Petrucci’s printed source of 1514 before the start of every movement up to and including the first section of the Sanctus, has led to a flurry of interpretations, of which the most thorough is Michael Long’s ‘Symbol and ritual in Josquin’s “Missa Di dadi” ’.16 The reason behind the appearance of the dice is not arcane in itself, since all they do is indicate the

16. Michael Long: ‘Symbol and ritual in Josquin’s “Missa Di Dadi”’, in Journal of the American Musicological Society vol.42 no.1 (Spring 1989), pp.1–22.

Ex.12: The tenor of Robert Morton’s four-part chanson N’auray je jamais

factor by which the note values of the tenor of the chanson should in theory be multiplied by the tenors who are singing it in the mass. For example the Kyrie is preceded by a pair of dice showing two and one, which tells the singers that the note-lengths in the chanson need to be doubled, in order to fit with Josquin’s other three voice-parts in the mass. In the Gloria the dice read four and one before both the ‘et in terra pax’ section, and the ‘Qui tollis’, requiring the notes of the chanson to be quadrupled in length. Before sections of the Credo the dice indicate six to one. In the Sanctus it is five to one.

So far, so good. But there are problems. In the Credo the proportion has to be twelve to one, not six, or the notes don’t fit. In the Sanctus the five to one stipulation doesn’t work across all the notes of the original, only the longer ones. And there are suddenly no dice featured at all after the Pleni, for the remainder of the setting. Fortunately for the first performers of this setting the printer, Petrucci, anticipating trouble, wrote out a resolution of the tenor parts. Nonetheless, even though the dice are thus rendered redundant, Petrucci still thought it important to include them in the final print, which suggests that they could represent something more than just temporal relationships. Theories about this have extended from dismissing the whole thing as a prank to confuse the earliest singers, to finding hidden meanings in the words of the chanson and the mass itself.

There is one further detail. In the sections where the dice are present Josquin only quotes the first six bars of Morton’s tenor. When we get to the Hosanna (and also in the Agnus Dei) he quotes the whole of Morton’s chanson tenor – a total of 23 bars – which explains why these movements are suddenly so much more substantial than the preceding ones.

(5) Missa D’ung aultre amer By far Josquin’s shortest mass, D’ung aultre amer is less than half the length of several of the others (364 bars to De beata virgine’s 882, for example).

This compactness comes from its syllabic style, which in turn affects its sonorities, rarely being given the chance to take wing – in the Gloria and Credo, for example, there is little imitation between the voices. These movements are the most curtailed, both telescoping their texts which simply overlap and thus lending the part-writing a rather hectic character. In the Kyrie, Sanctus and Agnus there is greater freedom, though the phrases are short: the Kyrie is the most elaborate movement, longer than the Gloria.

The syllabic style, which has a more matter of fact, blunt impact than that in the only other Josquin mass to use it at any length – Mater patris – probably comes from the polyphonic lauda current in the Ambrosian rite of Milan at this time, which also had the characteristic of substituting a motet for the the musical times Autumn 2018

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Heaven and earth: a performer’s guide to Josquin’s masses Benedictus and second Hosanna, missing here and replaced by Tu solus qui facis. Josquin worked in Milan on and off during the 1480s.

The setting lacks the space to indulge in polyphonic elaboration or sonic display. There are no duets (all three Agnus settings are both very brief and full; the Christe is full; and the Benedictus has become a motet) or canons or scorings up. Nonetheless the voice ranges are wide: the superius runs over an octave and a seventh, often concentrating either on the upper half or, more often, on the lower half of this range, rarely going from one to the other in a single phrase. All the other voices have an ambit of at least an octave and a fourth. One might expect something different from such wide ranges - they would be put to more sonorous use in other settings – but then despite its brevity D’ung aultre amer is not sombre or sonically dull.

Perhaps it really is easier to write effective chordal music than to con­ ceive polyphonic spans, which may explain why one comes across such passages more readily in early rather than late Josquin (pace Mater patris), and in more minor composers. Yet they are so well managed here that they become hauntingly memorable. One keeps hearing echoes of them elsewhere: in Josquin (‘Et homo factus est’ in Une mousse de Biscaye); and in other composers (the ‘Et incarnatus est’ of Bauldeweyn’s Missa Da pacem, as previously discussed). The beauty of Tu solus qui facis is based in understatement, yet there is time for a hint of word-painting at ‘suspiria’. In this motet Josquin reached a peak of one aspect of his craft.

Missa D’ung aultre amer is based on Ockeghem’s chanson of the same name (ex.13). The tenor is quoted in its original form (with slight embellishment) once in each movement, except in the Credo where it comes twice. Also in the Kyrie, Sanctus, and second half of Tu solus the first four bars of the superius part are identical to those in the chanson, accompanied by the chanson’s tenor part. Josquin never ceased to remember Ockeghem as his (probable) teacher and ‘bon père’.

Ex.13: The chanson by Ockeghem on which Josquin based his Missa D’ung aultre amer. In the Sanctus and Agnus Dei the quotations from the chanson are combined in the altus with the relevant chants of the Ordinary Cycle XVIII in the Liber Usualis.

Ex.13 continued

The middle-period masses (6) Missa Gaudeamus With the Missa Gaudeamus we come to the first setting of Josquin’s maturity.

Everything is more spacious: the chant melody is the longest he used for a cantus firmus, over 100 notes (ex.14); at 768 bars and with an overall compass of three octaves the setting is amongst the most substantial; the voice ranges are all uncommonly wide (the superius, altus and tenor all have an octave and a sixth, the bassus an octave and a seventh); there is now a structurally important trio in the middle of the Credo, and Josquin’s duet technique has advanced to the point of producing probably the earliest manifestation of the musical times Autumn 2018 37

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Heaven and earth: a performer’s guide to Josquin’s masses

Ex.14: The complete Gaudeamus chant. Most of Josquin’s Missa Gaudeamus makes use of the first six notes only.

the kind of ‘Benedictus’ settings he would come to favour later in life; and the motivic work overall has made a significant advance. There are also passages of sheer irresponsible exuberance in a quite new style.

The wide vocal ranges result in a new balance between the voices. This is the first mass-setting where Josquin wrote wide ranges while using all the available notes equally. No longer do the voices have the effective range of about an octave with the occasional suicidal dash to an extreme so often seen in the early settings. His evenhandedness is especially noticeable in the behaviour of the top two parts, which spend much of the setting singing close together, and unusually high (the opening bars of the first Kyrie show this). Indeed the altus writing comes as near to supplying a sustainable modern alto part than any in the oeuvre. Of course this style gives such passages a brightness which is not usual; and it is especially evident when the superius sings the motif made up of the opening six notes of the chant model, rising to high E and F. Unfortunately for modern choirs these two parts also at times contribute to textures which are much lower, reminiscent of the textures of the two canonic masses. It opens with its most spacious piece of writing – an almostHigh Renaissance world, with exact imitation, which seems to establish the individual perspectives of the four voices until one notices that instead of the usual later procedure of quoting the point at pitches beginning on the final and fifth in strict alternation, giving all the voices their own sonic spaces, Josquin brought his first three voices in on the same note (the final) before he made use of the fifth, which in effect is much more bunched up (ex.15).

Ex.15: Josquin: Missa Gaudeamus, Kyrie, bars 1–9

Still, it is not so far off later practice. Compare this with the more old-fashioned, protean world of the Gaudeamus Gloria, built on buried statements of the motto, surrounded by largely free material, where the voice ranges are so jumbled up that one loses all sense of which is which.

To choose a chant melody of over 100 notes long was not something Josquin decided to do again in his masses. As a result of its length he only the musical times Autumn 2018 39

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Heaven and earth: a performer’s guide to Josquin’s masses quoted it complete (and only in the tenor when complete) in the Gloria and Credo which, in the Gloria at least, cramped his style. But he made a virtue of necessity elsewhere by taking the first six notes only of the chant and disposing them about the texture in sophisticated ways, just as he would with similarly malleable motifs in Faysant regretz, Hercules Dux Ferrariae and La sol fa re mi. There is a sure method here which would inform these middleperiod masses, similar to what may be found in Obrecht, for example, but generally much more tightly argued.

These six opening notes appear 61 times in all, distributed throughout the four voices and the music as a whole, culminating in the third Agnus.

This Agnus moves on significantly from what had been achieved in the final Agnus of Di dadi, which itself was an advance on its predecessors; and there would be further advances. Here he deployed the motto in all the voices in what has rightly been described as a ‘vertiginous series of transpositions’.17 Initially the music proceeds in a way we recognise from previous movements. But soon we become aware that Josquin has worked out that the six notes of the snippet can be made to overlap at a number of interconnecting pitches. The tenor and bass parts start a dialogue which falls by a third at each repetition, leading the bass finally to reach bottom F. This low bass F is the only time the note is used in the whole setting, powerfully heralding a coda and the final close.

This is preceded by the Agnus II duet – in English parlance a ‘gimell’ (since there is only one soprano part otherwise and here it is twinned, implying incidentally that there must have been at least two singers on the soprano line, and presumably not just in this movement) – which is a canon at the unison. In some ways this is the most High Renaissance writing in the mass – the Spanish, and Victoria in particular, would later relish these soprano canons at the unison. The only difference is the greater length of this one.

The wild exuberances are quite outstanding, unique in style to this mass.

There are two in particular: at ‘Confiteor’ in the Credo, going on to include ‘Et exspecto’; and at ‘gloria tua’ in the Sanctus. These are astonishing passages, the former using the same motif to seven different words (so not imitation in the classic sense); the latter an extreme example of fitting tiny pieces of a jigsaw rapidly together.

(7) Missa La sol fa re mi

17. Elders: Josquin des Prez, p.102.

Three of Josquin’s masses are based on what is known as a soggetto ostinato, a very short, constantly repeating motif: La sol fa re mi, Hercules Dux Ferrariae and Faysant regretz. For two of these – La sol fa re mi and Hercules Dux Ferrariae – the terminology can be made more precise: the soggetto

ostinato is also a soggetto cavato, indicating that the notes of the ostinato are derived from the vowels of the title according to the Guidonian solmisation syllables, a technique which Josquin pioneered (ex.16). Since the use of the first six notes of the Gaudeamus chant effectively puts that setting into the same category as the ostinato three – and they can all be classed as middleperiod works – it is convenient to bracket them together for an examination of their similar techniques. It is probable that La sol fa re mi is the earliest of the three listed above since it is more prolix in its working-out, less advanced in its mathematics; and the repeat of the first Agnus as the third is certainly not a feature of Josquin’s more mature masses. The intense use of their motifs creates a similar soundworld between them.

The ostinato in La sol fa re mi is derived from the notes of the medieval scale which carry these names, and which in Continental European music still stand for AGFDE. This motif is quoted 250 times, if one includes the repeat of the first Agnus, which in turn creates a newly obsessive texture – this is the first time in this survey that Josquin is seen to have hit upon a feature which would become increasingly important to him: the repetition of small units of material. As time went by these units would come to centre more and more on a single note: in Faysant regretz on the D in a fournote unit, in Sine nomine on whichever note Josquin chose to be obsessive about from his own original (see ex.29). Here the method is not quite so condensed, perhaps showing an earlier stage; but even here the five notes turn round on themselves.

The overall range of the parts is three octaves – as wide as any – though the ranges of those parts individually are relatively constrained. Within this the altus part is uncommonly low – lower than any other part called ‘altus’ in Josquin’s masses. As a result it is regularly lower than the tenor, and at times as much as an octave and a fifth below the superius. Although the superius is also not a high part there is an imbalance in the sound which is fascinating.

Part of the reason is that the tenor tends to quote the motif beginning on an E, occupying the middle ground and forcing Josquin to go below it as well as above with his altus. He had the same problem in L’ami Baudichon, trying to solve it by putting the superius above the mix but leaving the altus to struggle, as we have seen. La sol fa re mi has a chunkier but better balanced texture, and a more insistent one. This insistence is brilliantly on display in the two (different) Hosannas, where the motif (in the tenor) is particularly audible. This is the only mass where Josquin’s invention led him to write two Hosannas.

Ex.16: The five solmisation syllables on which the Missa La sol fa re mi is based. The Gloria also quotes Gloria XV of the Liber Usualis up to bar 17; and the Credo also quotes Credo I from the Liber throughout the movement.

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Heaven and earth: a performer’s guide to Josquin’s masses By choosing a model so brief, as opposed to a chant melody which can be of indefinite length, Josquin opened up a new world of referencing.

These five notes make no trouble when they are quoted in augmentation, diminution, upside down, back to front, in different rhythms at once, overlapping and in different hexachords. And because it is only five notes in question even the long-note old-fashioned cantus firmus-style tenor setting in the Credo doesn’t delay the unfolding of the music, as happens in other, earlier Credos of this type.

A good example of what may be done with these five notes comes at the beginning of Agnus I (and therefore III) where the five notes are quoted in imitation at two pitches in three of the voices at three different speeds (ex.17). The two at different pitches start at the same time, which introduces a neat touch of prolation composition, though with only five notes to worry Ex.17: Josquin: Missa La sol fa re mi, Agnus I, bars 1–10

about this is nowhere near the conundrum that Josquin’s hero, Ockeghem, set himself in his Missa Prolationum.

More generally the notes occur in all the voice-parts at times, though mostly in the tenor. Predictability is avoided by quoting them in different rhythms, filled out with repeated notes and added notes of free material.

Predictability is also avoided by quoting the notes in essentially two different tonal areas – beginning A and beginning E, often running one into the other. This can be heard as early as the Christe, where Josquin is already spinning his web: the superius states the theme beginning on A, and the altus states it beginning on E in canon at the distance of one note. This constant reference to A and then E also helps fix the soundworld of the mass as a whole within a narrow span – only two As and two Es are used for these statements: the soprano never states the motif beginning on the E an octave and a third above middle C, which in theory it could have done.

(8) Missa Hercules Dux Ferrariae

18. Fallows: Josquin, p.259.

In La sol fa re mi Josquin quoted his motto in all the voices; in Hercules Dux Ferrariae he was more rigid in giving this motto (ex.18) almost uniquely to the tenors. This means that the tenor part has essentially the same music throughout the mass, an old-fashioned procedure and one which has led commentators to ask why Josquin, at this stage in his career, should want to undo the advances he is presumed to have made elsewhere by this time.

One answer is that the mass’s dedicatee, Ercole I d’Este of Ferrara, liked to hear his name often, loud and clear. At any rate this scheme gave Josquin the cue to write one of his most transparent pieces of music. As Fallows put it, Hercules Dux Ferrariae ‘is without parallel in the polyphonic repertory for the clarity of its purely musical design. The sections with and without tenor, alongside the increased tension as the tenor sings the same melody at higher pitches, not only helps the listener to hear the design but also builds an increase of excitement into the sections.’18 This is dramatically audible in the Hosanna, where the tenor finally punches out the eight notes in diminution – the D, A and upper D entries tumbling into each other (ex.19).

The best reason for considering this to be a mid-period setting, rather than an early one, is the quality and inventiveness of the counterpoints which surround the motto notes, the detail of which would make a study all by itself. Throughout this mass Josquin was peerless with them, using

Ex.18: The eight notes derived from the title of Josquin’s Missa Hercules Dux Ferrariae

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Heaven and earth: a performer’s guide to Josquin’s masses Ex.19: Josquin: Missa Hercules Dux Ferrariae, Hosanna, bars 61–88

Ex.19 continued

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19. Edward Stam: ‘Eine “Fuga trium vocum” von Josquin Desprez’, in Musikforschung, vol.13 no.1 (January/March 1960), pp.28–33.

imitation more than usual, essentially creating a three-voice composition, fascinating in itself, which the ostinato periodically joins, instantly broadening the perspective of the writing when it does. But in a sense there is no need for it: the three-voice texture is as self-sufficient as a Bach chorale prelude even before the theme enters. Now Josquin seems untroubled by giving the tenors long high notes, sometimes entering as high as the D a tone above middle C and going from there up to F; and now the placing of the altus part around these high notes is more assured, for all that the answer is to make it the widest ranging part in all of the masses and mostly group it low to function as the otherwise-engaged tenor – two octaves and a tone if one includes its range in the final Agnus. The soundworld, with its canons for two, three and finally six voices, is as varied as it is airy and transparent: a real step towards High Renaissance method, admittedly achieved with voice ranges Palestrina would never have countenanced. Still, one notices the unusual daring of the final note for the superius, in the Agnus III – a sustained high D for four bars, at the top of the range and at the end of the breath.

The eight notes of the ostinato occur 47 times in the tenor part, four times in retrograde, always in long notes compared with the other voices, and almost always preceded by the same number of rests as the next statement of the notes themselves will last (this breaks down a little in the Sanctus and Agnus where diminution of the long notes occurs, but even here the number of surrounding rests also tends to appear in the same diminution).

So in effect for much of the mass the ostinato is a 16-bar unit.

The canons in this setting are also a step up from those in works I have presented here as being earlier. The clincher is the six-voice final Agnus, in which Josquin began to experiment with the notion that this movement should raise everything that had gone before up to new heights, preparing us for the marvels of the Agnus IIIs in Malheur me bat and L’homme armé sexti toni, also for six voices. Here the interest in this Agnus, unlike the two others mentioned, is not in the canon but in the surrounding counterpoints.

In fact the ‘canonic’ parts don’t overlap, and so are not properly canons.

These parts are the soprano (primus) and the tenor, the soprano statements being the only time the motto leaves the tenor, allowing it uniquely to start on the A a sixth above middle C. But Josquin had just put all his skill into the canon of Agnus II – the first canon for three voices of the oeuvre. Unfortunately its transmission has caused a great deal of confusion. One of the earliest sources only gives a single line of melody, expecting the singers to work out the riddle. Another one, disinclined to grapple with the problem, leaves it out altogether.

Petrucci printed a resolution but got it wrong, which led every subsequent editor to do the same until 1960, when Edward Stam finally nailed it.19 The

essential difficulty is in deciding which voices should follow the given part, and at which pitch. The given part should in fact form the superius voice, which has to come in first. Petrucci incorrectly decided that it was the altus part, which led to very extreme ranges in the two parts which then followed (superius and bassus). Nonetheless, there are recordings of Petrucci’s solution, in which it is evident that the ranges do not match those in the remainder of the mass.

There is one other teasing decision to be made, and for which there are no contemporary guidelines: if you decide to sing the motto theme with its original syllables rather than the words of the Ordinary – which is advisable since they show more clearly how the music is constructed – what do you sing when it is being quoted backwards?

(9) Missa Faysant regretz If the motto theme in Hercules Dux Ferrariae stands out boldly and audibly from its surroundings, here the motto is so short and unmemorable in itself that the listener could easily miss most of the statements. This is not in itself a drawback; but the very brevity of this one makes the music more closely written than any of Josquin’s other masses, especially the earlier ones, intellectually tougher, protean yet with an advanced technical vocabulary.

The listener is forced to listen into the texture to understand what generates music which immediately establishes itself as being sophisticated but opaque.

In string quartet terms this is reminiscent of Bartók’s method; and like no.3, the closest argued and briefest of them, Faysant regretz is the shortest of the Josquin set, if one excepts the maverick D’ung aultre amer. And this closeness of argument led Josquin to keep more than ever to four voices, perhaps for the same reasons as Bartók. What duetting there is comes as an integral part of four-part writing. The only section reserved exclusively for reduced voices is the trio at ‘Pleni sunt caeli’.

The ranges of the voice-parts are relatively narrow, keeping to 20 notes in total, with the superius in particular operating all over its range more or less equally. This creates a different sonority from those many masses where Josquin kept his superius singers to an alto range with the occasional dart upwards. As in the unusual L’ami Baudichon the superius gives the texture a brightness which is often missing in the other masses, most tellingly on display towards the end of the Credo. But its impact is modified by the intensity of the musical argument. What one really hears is the fluency of the part-writing, promoted by the lack of definition in the motto, which gave Josquin greater freedom in deciding where the different parts might fit in the overall sonic perspective. There is no scaffolding for them to bump into or have to avoid. the musical times Autumn 2018 47

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Heaven and earth: a performer’s guide to Josquin’s masses The Missa Faysant regretz is based on three elements from the rondeau Tout a par moy by Walter Frye (or possibly Gilles Binchois) (ex.20). The first is the four-note motif FDED, which in the rondeau carries the words ‘Faysant regretz’, and is heard over 200 times in the mass, almost without interruption in one or more voices, at different pitches and in different rhythmic shapes. This is the ostinato which holds the piece together. The remaining two elements appear only in the Agnus III where the top part sings the complete superius melody of the rondeau; the altus is constructed wholly from the first four notes of the tenor of the rondeau in various transpositions – DDED - sung 24 times; while the tenor sings the FDED motif 25 times. It is this quoting from the rest of the model in Agnus III which distinguishes Faysant regretz from La sol fa re mi and Hercules Dux Ferrariae. In two ways, then, the Agnus III represents a summation and a challenge at the end of the composition: at last the quoting of elements taken from every voice of the model; and the subtleties involved in working with two motifs – FDED and DDED – which are so similar and brief that most composers wouldn’t think to bother with them as separate items, all worked out under the complete superius melody.

Like other Agnus IIIs in this set, but not in the same way, this one is really operating at a technical extreme.

Ex.20: The rondeau Tout a par moy by Walter Frye (or Gilles Binchois). Josquin borrowed material from all three voices in his Missa Faysant regretz. In addition the plainsong Kyrie XI and Credo I from the Liber Usualis are drawn upon in the superius of the Kyrie, Gloria and Credo.

Ex.20 continued

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a performer’s and

Ex.20 continued

The quick-fire opportunities inherent in the motto of Faysant regretz fitted well with Josquin’s increasing interest in obsessive repetition. Some of this repeating involves sequences in the traditional sense of a harmonic block being recycled at different pitches (and the one which suddenly breaks out in the Christe is extraordinary), but at its most exciting the harmony gets stuck and the melody seems to chase its tail. One of the most original passages in all of Josquin comes with the last ten bars of the Credo. This is partly attributable to the tenor singing the FDED motif over and over, but the genius is in the superius part (see ex.8 above). Josquin’s constant return to the high D with little rhythmic predictability is a master stroke. There is nothing in the rondeau model to suggest this constant return to a single high note in a phrase, but there is a sense of building to it throughout the preceding music: at ‘Domine Deus, Agnus Dei’ in the Gloria; and from ‘ante omnia’ to ‘de Deo vero’ in the Credo to mention the most obvious examples. But a really careful listening will show that Josquin’s obsession lies just under much of the surface.

(10) Missa Ave maris stella The composition of Missa Ave maris stella probably predates the three based on soggetti ostinati just discussed, even if it almost certainly post-

dates Gaudeamus: I place it here because I wanted to group the four quasiostinato masses together. Two aspects of Ave maris stella deserve mention: the setting of plainchant, building on what was achieved in Gaudeamus; and its brevity, allied to relatively narrow ranges both of the individual voiceparts and overall, which shows it may be a precursor of Faysant regretz.

As in Gaudeamus, Josquin chose a relatively long plainchant melody for Ave maris stella – long relative to the models in the soggetti ostinati masses at least – and in both cases organised his material into convenient units for quotation and development (ex.21). For most of Gaudeamus he decided to rely on the first six notes of its chant, as we have seen; for Ave maris stella the chant supplied four short and convenient phrases which provide the framework for all five movements and are elaborated in all the voice-parts.

The melody is only sung in its entirety once – in the Hosanna by the tenor.

Only the Pleni, Benedictus and Agnus II are free of the chant melody.

But the texture of Ave maris stella is closer to that of Faysant regretz than of Gaudeamus: narrow ranges, a high superius part which moves easily through its entire range, and a compact, closely argued texture. This is one of the four Josquin masses which has come down to us at a higher pitch than most – the lowest bass note is Bb (not F) and the highest superius note is G (not E). At this pitch it inevitably sounds brighter than Faysant regretz, but if they were aligned it would not be unreasonable to pair them sonically.

By any reckoning the bassus part is high here – rarely reaching down to its lowest note (Bb) and often being used as a third tenor part (as for example at the opening of Agnus III, which is difficult to sing in the approved modern, balanced way).

The impression left by Ave maris stella is one of control, neatness of phrasing and easiness in the part-writing. The three canons in the three Agnus movements show this to perfection. There is nothing showy or even dramatic about them; in fact one could miss the Agnus I and III examples altogether. Gone is the sense of cleverness generated by the difficult intervals and prolations which Josquin sometimes chose; here they are at the upper fourth (Agnus I and II) and unison (Agnus III). The disposition of the chant notes as a cantus firmus is also unobtrusively managed, suggesting that Ex.21: The chant on which Josquin based his Missa Ave maris stella

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Heaven and earth: a performer’s guide to Josquin’s masses Josquin was summing up all he knew about chant disposition at this point in his career, before moving on to significantly more complex treatments after this – settings which are more developed, but always searching for greater polyphonic clarity. Ave maris stella can be seen as being halfway on the journey from Une mousse de Biscaye, where Josquin had trouble finding space for all four of the voice-parts, to the naturalness with which all the voice-parts contribute to Pange lingua and Sine nomine.

The neatness of the phrases is rewarding, as the voices react to and combine with each other. A perfect example is the ‘Amen’ of the Gloria, which is only nine bars long yet has the space to make use of a tiny motif which fits hand-in-glove, first in two parts, then three, then four (see ex.6). Exactly the same finesse is on display at ‘Domine Deus, Agnus Dei, Filius Patris’ in the Gloria. The clarity of the part-writing brings the same contentment, on most obvious display at the beginning of each movement.

The first Kyrie is a model of this, but the music is more purely beautiful at the beginning of the first Agnus. Just once Josquin goes on the wild side, in the Hosanna, where he may have felt challenged by the decision to quote the whole of the chant melody for the first and only time in the setting. Buried inside it is triple-time writing, mostly for the basses, which is one of the most fiendish passages to get together anywhere in Josquin. Malheur me bat has a difficult Hosanna for similar reasons, but at least there the triple time bars are clearly demarked in all the voices at the same time.

(11) Missa Fortuna desperata In his Missa D’ung aultre amer Josquin only made use of the tenor and soprano voices from the three-voice model he had chosen; in the Missa Faysant regretz his borrowings (from all three voices) do not amount to full parody. In the Missa Fortuna desperata he properly developed material from all three voices of the chosen model (ex.22), making it one of the earliest examples of full parody technique. Despite this, little of Busnois’s soundworld is left in Josquin’s intensive reworking of it. Here we have the widest overall ranges of any Josquin mass: both the superius and altus run to two octaves, the tenor and bassus each to an octave and a sixth. And here we must confront some serious scoring problems.

They are all related to extremes of range, notes which may be only used once or twice, but still have to be sung by someone. Perhaps the most difficult of these problems is the question of what to do with the superius part between bars 26 and 40 of the Gloria, where it ascends repeatedly to the F an octave and a fourth above middle C, but nowhere else in the setting goes above D. There is obviously no disguising these high notes; and the minor third difference between them and the rest of the superius

Ex.22: Busnois’s three-part chanson Fortuna desperata

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Heaven and earth: a performer’s guide to Josquin’s masses part (which also goes down to the F a fifth below middle C, see ex.23) makes it effectively impossible for it to be sung in its entirety by voices of the same type, while achieving the kind of blend which modern perform­ ance requires. The decision will come down to either adding a soprano to a group of altos, or an alto/tenor to a group of low sopranos. In this case, be­cause there are more low notes than there are high ones in the setting overall, the former option is likely to be the more practical – in addition to the high Fs in the Gloria, there is this passage in the third Agnus where the superius is singing, and balancing with, the altus a full octave above them (ex.23).

The other parts deal their singers similar problems. Who is to sing the high Bb in the altus part at the beginning of the second Kyrie, and the Bb two octaves lower shown above and make a good balance with the surrounding voices? And how many basses can sing the consistently low-lying and very sustained bassus part in the final Agnus, when previously these voices have had to sing a controlled top D? The tenors have a less challenging task, though a held high A in the Credo (at ‘genitum non factum’) to a low C is not easy. I accept that there are modern singers who can just about manage these extremes, almost certainly with some distortion, and Josquin must have had them too; but Josquin’s singers didn’t have to sing into symphony halls, to thousands of listeners.

Despite the high notes just mentioned, the most distinctive aspect of the soundworld in Fortuna desperata is the low tessituras. This is summed up at the very end (see ex.23) where the bass part is low and the three voices above it are operating in the same range as each other – here there is little sense of a superius part, only three alto/tenors; and by the final cadence all four voices are singing just about as low as they can. But this remarkable ending concludes two equally striking Agnus movements – unusually there are only two, though it is true that these two complement each other so well that there is little room for a third, both methodically exploring low textures.

For sections of the first Agnus the three upper parts revolve around each other as though they are of the same sort, with imitation between them at the unison. In addition the bass is not so low as in the final movement – that was a special effect, reserved for the occasion – so that some sections in the first Agnus are contained within little more than an octave.

The stylistically in-between writing in this mass is shown on the one hand by the way Josquin still hasn’t sorted out how to avoid the tritone; and on the other by his increasing confidence in using imitation. Unlike in Ad fugam, Josquin’s tritones are not caused here by canon but by sequence, and are especially prevalent in the two Agnuses. In both Josquin played with the suggested harmonies by deploying the cantus firmus as long bass notes, something which took him into more or less uncharted waters while

Ex.23: Josquin: Missa Fortuna desperata, Agnus III, bar 104–22

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Heaven and earth: a performer’s guide to Josquin’s masses generating the most beautiful patterns. Within these harmonies he spun sequences which will test the ficta policy of every editor (and remind the well-informed listener of the music of Philip Glass). But essentially the tritone problem is lurking throughout the setting, wherever an E in the bass cannot reasonably be flattened to accommodate a Bb above it (ex.24 gives some idea of how extensive this process has to be).

But there is a perceptible step up in Josquin’s use of imitation, an advance on what was already there in Gaudeamus. One version of it is to start out with three voices (bassus, then altus, then superius) and then introduce the cantus firmus (in the tenor) after the imitation has run its course: Gloria bar 58 ‘qui tollis’; Gloria bar 122 ‘Cum Sancto Spiritu’. Much of the Pleni, and especially its opening, is heavily reliant on (rather extended) imitative points. Josquin’s penchant for experiment was pushing in this direction too.

Ex.24: Josquin: Missa Fortuna desperata, Agnus, bar 33–50

Ex.24 continued

(12) Missa L’homme armé super voces musicales With his two L’homme armé masses Josquin was trying more testingly than ever to extend the boundaries of composition, by taking further techniques associated with the old and the new ways of setting a (very famous) preexisting melody. Whether he wrote them at the same time is not known, though on the face of it Super voces musicales would have come before Sexti toni. In doing this it seems likely that he wanted to show all the other composers who had ever set this tune that he could outwit them, in whichever format they preferred. His two are as different as he could make them, exaggerating the typical features of the different methods. Petrucci recognised this when he put the older-style Super voces musicales at the beginning of his 1502 print, and the more modern-sounding Sexti toni at the end of it. The concept is not much different from Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespers publication, with its prima prattica Missa In illo tempore sitting alongside the seconda prattica Vespers proper.

It also seems very likely that in this setting Josquin wanted to pay homage to Ockeghem, building on his achievement most obviously in the prolation canon in Agnus II. Maybe he deliberately turned the L’homme armé melody into 64 notes, which is how the name Ockeghem is spelt in the gematria system, whereby letters of the alphabet become numbers. At any rate it does have 64 notes, thanks, amongst other small changes, to a consistently retained small flourish just before the cadence of the first refrain, which replaces the last four notes of the traditional refrain (see exx.25a and 25b).

This setting is old-fashioned in concentrating on the traditional Flemish virtues of strict cantus firmus technique – the melody quoted unembellished (apart from the small elements noted above) in the tenor – and elsewhere on the most complex of mathematical tricks with no recourse to homophony. the musical times Autumn 2018

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Heaven and earth: a performer’s guide to Josquin’s masses Ex.25a: The refrain and burden of the melody L’homme armé

Ex.25b: The melody as adapted by Josquin, to make 64 notes. His added notes, which appear in every statement throughout the setting, are starred.

But even in quoting the melody strictly in the tenor, Josquin did it in a special way: it doesn’t just get quoted in its own mode, but in all six modes of the Guidonean hexachord – the ‘voces’ stated in the title – meaning that the melody starts on every degree of the natural hexachord – C (ut) Kyrie; D (re) Gloria; E (mi) Credo; F (fa) Sanctus; G (sol) Agnus I; A (la) Agnus III – the result being that the tune is performed in a different mode in every movement, in each a step higher than in the previous one. In addition there are four proportion canons: in the three sections of the Kyrie a canon between the tenor and one of the other voices, with the note-values of the comes (the part which is derived from the main melody in the tenor) proportionally augmented. The Benedictus consists of three 2 ex 1 canons; the three voices of the Agnus II form a proportion canon. In the second section of the Gloria, and at ‘Et incarnatus est’ in the Credo, the melody is sung in retrograde.

The canonic scheme plays havoc with the vocal ranges. If the sequence is kept in the tenor part (as the sources suggest) it means that the L’homme armé melody, which has an overall range of an octave and a tone, is stated

six times in the course of the mass, each beginning a step higher. The first statement begins on a C, with the highest note of that statement the D a ninth above. Since the sixth and last statement, beginning A, is not given to the tenors, the last tenor statement begins on a G and ascends to a high A. This gives the part a range of an octave and a sixth just when it is singing the melody. But in Agnus III, when at last it has become a free agent, Josquin sends it down to written A, giving it an overall range of two octaves. The problem of this part even bothered Petrucci, who gave it three different clefs in the course of the mass to encompass it.

The Agnus II prolation canon (see ex.4) is the most advanced of its type in Josquin. Agnus III is of a quite different sort. Here the melody is sung by the superius, consistently low and so sustained it has been thought to be unsingable (see note 10). The quotation of the melody in this movement has been misreported. It starts with all the notes of the original being doubled in length, and the rests of the original retained, up to the end of the verse section. For the repeat of the refrain some of the notes, but not all, are increased in length in the ratio of 1:6; and now there are no rests. The significance of the lack of rests is that the superius singers have to negotiate almost exactly 100 bars without a break.

The joys of this crowning movement are the counterpoints which surround the melody: throughout the mass Josquin had been busy inventing short motifs to accompany it. These come to roost in Agnus III where once again he predicted the idiom of the modern minimalists with mesmerising textures.

The part-writing here is whimsical, long-breathed, patterned, with plenty of time for the harmony to turn and turn again. The music is always going somewhere, but it is getting there more slowly and by more byways than one might have thought possible in a cappella writing. Josquin’s concentration throughout the mass on motifs, rather than on developing the notes of the L’homme armé melody itself, means that the music is argued in a different way from those masses, like the soggetto ostinato ones, where the much shorter motifs tend to wander about the texture at will. In many ways this is an oldfashioned tenor mass; and the unequal burden between the voices indeed makes it sound old-fashioned – which was just what Josquin wanted.

(13) Missa L’homme armé sexti toni The more ‘modern’ L’homme armé setting has gained its reputation for good reasons. Where Super voces musicales quoted the famous melody unaltered for the most part in the same voice, in Sexti toni we find it broken into often unrecognisable fragments, dispersed among all four voices. Where Super voces musicales maintained a solid, four-voice texture much of the time, Sexti toni is filled with duets, and its vocal texture kept light and informal the musical times Autumn 2018 59

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Heaven and earth: a performer’s guide to Josquin’s masses through the use of sequences and imitation. Where Super voces musicales had canons which impress by their learning, Sexti toni has canons which give the impression of being easy-going, especially the one in the sublime six-voice Agnus III. In addition Josquin here quoted the tune in a major mode, which again lightens the overall impression. Almost all the previous settings – Dufay’s and Busnois’s most notably – used minor modes (Super voces musicales, by changing modes between each movement, has both major and minor statements). This setting is like a fantasia on the theme of the armed man; the other more like a through-composed exercise on a given theme.

Musical composition had not yet shaken off the density of medieval practice with the lightness of texture which was to come in the High Renaissance, through short phrases sung by voices evenly spaced apart. But in Sexti toni Josquin went a long way towards predicting it. The canons are cases in point: one might miss them, but the Sanctus, Pleni, Hosanna, the outer sections of the Benedictus and the Agnus II all contain canonic writing between two of the contributing voices. But instead of mathematical rigour they tend to be made up of short snippets which artlessly spin off into sequences. This happens early on in the Sanctus (where the middle parts are in canon, but the others join in with some of the material); and especially in the Pleni and Benedictus, where all the phrases seem to be neat two- or four-bar units.

Other techniques also contribute to this sense of a luminous texture. Short phrases in sequence could quickly lead to imitation between the voices, and indeed this can be heard immediately in the opening bars of the first Kyrie.

The sequences themselves often have an almost baroque harmonic clarity.

The second Kyrie ends with a long and harmonically strict one; the Sanctus moves into one; the last 14 bars of Agnus I are taken up with a pattern which almost knows no end (though the whole movement is only 26 bars in total).

And then there are the constantly recycled sequences of Agnus III. The duets, of which there are an unprecedented number, are unusually dependent on imitation, sequence, canon and quasi-canon. This constant conversation between the contributing parts also lightens the mood and the texture. Four of the sources carry a rubric adapted from Isaiah 6:2–3 concerning the Seraphim: ‘Duo seraphim clamabant alter ad alterum’ (Two seraphim cried out, the one calling to the other). This is clearly intended to personify these canons for two voices, and must help to explain why there are so many of them. The image of the two seraphim calling to each other also seems to extend to the six-voice Agnus III, where there are two pairs of voices in two-part canon.

The canons which make up Agnus III are of a special order, but even they give the feeling of ease of gesture. In Super voces musicales the Agnus III

is characterised by a lack of rests, of a block of constantly turning sound.

Here the music actually stops in the middle of itself, as if to take breath before resuming. Josquin let the scaffolding show its bare bones, instead of covering it over. A number of composers before Josquin had worked on how to quote the L’homme armé melody in hidden ways: Dufay had given it backwards, Busnois had inverted it, the Naples settings and Obrecht had used it in retrograde-inversion. However, Josquin seems to have been the first to notice that parts of the armed man melody could be quoted in their original form and in retrograde at the same time (assuming note-lengths, rests and ficta between the phrases were a bit malleable). This is what the lowest two voices of his Agnus III are doing, though exactly what they are doing has been misunderstood. The tenor is singing only the music of the verse throughout, while the bassus is singing only the refrain, so Josquin in fact was making two different, if related, melodies fit together.

It works like this: in the first half of the piece the tenor sings the whole of the verse in long notes. At the same time (more or less) the bassus sings the whole of the refrain in long notes in retrograde. At the halfway point they cross over: the tenor now sings the whole of the verse in retrograde to the end, and the bassus sings the whole of the refrain in its original form to the end. The music that they have created before the halfway point is exactly repeated in the second half, but backwards. So the first bar is the same as the last bar, the second bar the same as the second-to-last, and so on.

The four voices above the tenor and bass are working on a much shorter routine, stopping and starting as they please, with no reference at all to the layout of the canon beneath them. And this lack of controlling symmetry is the genius of the piece, an aspect of its modernity. There has been no straightjacketing, either in the two lower voices or in the four upper ones; and in the upper ones, which consist of two separate if related canons for two voices at the unison, the phrases are so compact that it was easy either to curtail them, or to run them on a little further, as the whim took him. The way they react to each other is another aspect of the genius in the writing.

(14) Missa Malheur me bat

20. M. Jennifer Bloxam: ‘Masses based on polyphonic songs and canonic masses’, in The Josquin companion, pp.177–78.

The many subtleties of the Missa Malheur me bat may come once again from Josquin’s instinct for outdoing the competition. He had done it with the most famous tune of the day – L’homme armé – and here he did it with one of its most admired polyphonic chansons, taking its three parts to pieces in the kind of artful and inventive ways only he could manage. The chanson Malheur me bat is now held not to be by Ockeghem or Martini as pre­ viously thought, but by Albertinus (?) Malcort,20 being used as a model by Obrecht, Agricola and several others around the time that Josquin took the musical times Autumn 2018 61

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Heaven and earth: a performer’s guide to Josquin’s masses it up (ex.26). In this sense Josquin’s Missa Malheur me bat is linked to his two L’homme armé masses; and if one notices the close similarities between the Agnus III of this mass and that of L’homme armé sexti toni one might be inclined to say that they are coeval. (Current scholarship is at its most indecisive over the dating of Malheur me bat: see note 6.)

This remaking of a model results in one of Josquin’s most substantial mass-settings: the second-longest after De beata virgine; one of the few with an overall range of 22 notes or three octaves; and one with an unusually low bass note at written pitch – an E (only a single D in the Credo of L’homme Ex.26: The chanson Malheur me bat by Malcort. The original text is lost. (For The Tallis Scholars per­ formance at the 2008 Proms, the poet Jacques Darras was asked to extend the title into a complete poem.)

Ex.26 continued

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Ex.26 continued

armé sexti toni is lower). All the four contributing voices have an overall range of an octave and a sixth, all ranging widely within themselves but not as a rule into the extremities of their ranges. The result is that they cohere in a conversation which involves them all equally, none standing out, and there is little dazzle in purely sonorous terms. In this setting Josquin would have said that the dazzle was in how he transformed his model.

How the final movements of L’homme armé sexti toni and Malheur me bat relate to each other in the Josquin timeline is obviously not clear; but they certainly relate to each other in terms of compositional technique. The similarities are that they are two of only three movements in the whole cycle of Josquin’s masses to be for six voices, scoring up from the four of the preceding writing; and that they twin two of the voices from those preceding movements while linking the other two in long-note canons. The voices chosen to be twinned are different: in Malheur me bat it is the altus and bassus, in L’homme armé sexti toni the superius and altus. In both masses the twinned parts are given very close canons in their pairs at the unison, which in Malheur me bat sound against the long notes of the superius and tenor, based on the tenor and superius melodies of the model, divided into eight segments.

In Malheur me bat there are no subtleties like retrograde, but Josquin has discovered that this time he can write real canon, with the statements of the

tenor (which starts) and the superius overlapping, very audible in the opening bars. But what identifies these two Agnus IIIs as outstanding achievements is the way the four voices in close canon continuously and suddenly start and stop, revealing the bare bones of the cantus firmus canon when they stop, and the sense of timelessness this gives (ex.27).

It would be a complex task to unearth all the different ways that Josquin referred to his model throughout this mass. He was building on the technique of parody he had already advanced: in Di dadi he had kept his references just to the tenor part, in D’ung aultre amer, Faysant regretz and Fortuna desperata he had begun to explore the possibilities of making use of all the voices. Here he took that possibility a stage further by cutting the melodies taken from the Malcort into segments of different lengths. Briefly, the superius of the chanson acts as the superius in the Credo of the mass, the melody cut into 11 segments. It reappears in the Agnus III, where it is likewise stated in the superius, now divided into eight segments. The tenor of the chanson turns up as the tenor of the mass in the Kyrie, Gloria, Agnus I and III. In Agnus III this tenor melody is also divided like the superius but into eight segments. The altus of the chanson appears in each of the four sections of the Sanctus in Josquin’s altus part; in the Hosanna it is divided into 12 segments in an alternating binary and ternary mensuration. This kind of parodying sounds complicated when put into words, but in effect it Ex.27: Josquin: Missa Malheur me bat, Agnus III, bars 131–45

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is a kind of fantasia, transforming themes in a method not dissimilar from that used by Liszt in his tone poems.

One of the more specialist challenges in this setting is getting the end of the Credo in tune. The problem is caused by the sequence which Josquin embarked on just in the last six bars. For all that it sounds like a close copy of the ecstatic last bars of Isaac’s Optime pastor, Josquin introduced a Bb into the motif and kept it there for as long as he dared. To cadence in E, as he must, he wrote a chord of Bb major right next to one of E minor. The altus singers are required to sing a B§ immediately after a bass Bb. In mean-tone tuning this is a hard note to find, especially as Josquin precedes it with a leap of a major sixth (from a low D). But if found the effect is bracing. And it is the culmination of an irresistible sequence – a rare moment of raw exuberance in this setting.

The last word in this mass properly goes to Agnus III. However, Agnus II, as in L’homme armé super voces musicales, is a worthy, if more intimate, warm-up act. This is a canon at the second (for altus and tenor on free material). Josquin only ventured into this kind of territory – canons at the second or ninth below – four times, and never tried its alter ego, a canon at the seventh. The other three examples, significantly, are probably later (the Agnus II of the Missa Sine nomine, and the Benedictus and Pleni from the Missa Mater patris). This movement looks like the prototype of a method which Josquin later refined, above all in the Missa Sine nomine. the musical times Autumn 2018 67

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The last masses (15) Missa De beata virgine But before we can approach the Missa Sine nomine it is necessary to consider the strange case of the Missa De beata virgine. The strangeness resides in these facts: it is the only mass by Josquin, so far as is known, to have been written at two quite different periods and stitched together; and it is the only mass by Josquin to use more than four voices standardly outside the third Agnus: the Kyrie and Gloria have four voices, but all the others have five.

In addition, of all Josquin’s masses this one is the longest (916 bars with the Hosanna repeat); the one which survives in the most sources (54 – so by this calculation at least the most popular of them all); and the one which was still being talked about longer after Josquin’s death than any other (the cross-rhythms at ‘Qui cum Patre’ were still being quoted by theorists in the middle of the 18th century).

The Missa De beata virgine is a cycle of five individual mass movements in which the Gloria and Credo were written first, probably before 1507, and the other movements added later, maybe around 1510. In effect Josquin took the Gloria and later wrote a Kyrie to go with it; and took the Credo and later wrote a Sanctus and Agnus to go with that. The earliest source containing the complete mass is in the Sistine library, dated between 1511 and 1514. Unlike the other Josquin masses based on chant (where a single source underpins an entire setting), each movement of this one is built on a separate chant, one appropriate to that particular portion of the Ordinary and associated with a special feast of the ecclesiastical year (ex.28). It has been suggested that Petrucci put the different elements together for his 1514 Ex.28: Liber Usualis: Mass IX, Kyrie and Gloria; Mass I, Credo; Mass IV, Sanctus and Agnus

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publication; but the consensus now is that the way the chants are made to hang together with such coherence, despite the movements having been written at different times, must show Josquin’s controlling hand behind them all. The case is not dissimilar to Bach’s B minor Mass, except in that instance we not only know for certain that Bach wrote all the music, but that later in life he put all the movements together himself. The chosen chants of this setting are all associated with the Virgin, but the Gloria goes a stage further in including six short tropes – extra words – in honour of the Virgin and Jesus Christ. These words are added to the normal mass text and can be clearly heard, since Josquin set them slightly apart and wrote special music for them (‘Spiritus et alme’ in the Gloria is the first). These tropes were removed from the liturgy in 1563 by the Council of Trent, and the extra the musical times Autumn 2018

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Heaven and earth: a performer’s guide to Josquin’s masses words were subsequently erased from some of the later sources of Josquin’s mass.

Despite not having been written at the same time, the Kyrie and Gloria are in a style which is consistent in itself, and reminiscent of other, later four-voice settings by Josquin. The five-voice movements are rather less consistent, each being based on a (different) canon in which the relevant chant forms the basis of the canonic melody. In all three movements the canon is between two voices called ‘tenor’ in the manuscripts, but since the Sanctus and Agnus have the comes (the voice which follows) transposed up a fifth from an already quite high original part, the ensemble in effect gains an extra superius part in these movements. The overall scoring for this diverse setting at manuscript pitch apart from the Credo, would therefore be: SATBar (Kyrie and Gloria), SATTBar (transposed Credo), SSATBar (Sanctus and Agnus).

I considered whether four of Josquin’s masses shouldn’t be transposed down in their entirety; questions have also been raised about the performing pitch of the Credo (only) in De beata virgine, since it already seems to be a fourth too low for the rest of the mass. There is real doubt about this, since at either pitch the Credo doesn’t fit with the other movements ideally – at transposed pitch the superius goes up to high A, which is a note otherwise unknown in Josquin’s masses, while the other parts tend to fit better with themselves if the Credo is transposed, especially the bassus which in an untransposed Credo has to add a third to the bottom of its range. The argument that in making this cycle Josquin found an independent Gloria and Credo he had previously composed in different modes, and wrote new movements to both, making the Sanctus and Agnus fit the scheme but neglecting to include the pre-existing Credo in it, has some force since in compositional terms the Credo does seem to stand apart from the rest of the setting. Josquin, or his scribe, may not have thought the inconsistency important enough to correct. Or we only have partial evidence of what originally was intended. But the question of what the performing pitch of the Credo should be is an important one, since the impact of the mass is changed by it.

This is probably the earliest of Josquin’s three final masses, though admirers of the beautifully crafted Gloria will compare it favourably with Pange lingua. The subtlety of the conversation between the voices in this movement is on a par with anything of the period, perhaps at its most memorable as Josquin cranked up the excitement in the ‘Amen’. This is a classic example of how to start proceedings with brief alternating duets before going headlong into a daring sequence which, counter-intuitively, heads downwards as it approaches its summation. Especially beautiful are the troped phrases. The first one, ‘Spiritus et alme’, has already been noted,

but perhaps even lovelier are the chords on ‘Mariam coronans [Jesu Christe]’.

Clearly Josquin never lost his way with simple chords, first noticed in the replacement motet Tu solus qui facis of the Missa D’ung aultre amer of many years earlier.

Then comes the completely different acoustical world of the Credo, which presents a more complete interruption in style than consecutive movements in any other Josquin mass. Four voices become five; the mode is audibly different; the superius, at any pitch, plays higher than ever above the other voices, sporting some mesmerising archaic triple-time rhythms as it goes. The whole of the Credo’s final passage is also in a slow triple-time, a world away from the forceful brevity of the equivalent passage in the Gloria. But perhaps the most beautiful moment of all is at the very end of the final Agnus, where the superius embellishes the final cadence with four extra notes. It is the simple gesture of maturity.

(16) Missa Sine nomine With this extraordinary setting Josquin’s compositional style became confident and sophisticated in advance of almost everything else he wrote in any format. This is unhelpful to historians who look for smooth progress, since this style is rooted in the atavistic method of canon: the advance here is only in one direction – towards a refined dialectic between the parts – while in every other direction there is nothing more than greater simplicity.

One could argue that such simplicity came from immaturity, but it clearly isn’t true. In this mass Josquin has arrived at the same place as Bach when he came to write some of the more pared-down movements of The art of fugue. It seems likely that Josquin wrote it after 1504, after he had retired to Condé.

The obvious comparison is with the Missa Ad fugam. Both masses are based on canonic melodies which Josquin wrote himself (hence the title Sine nomine), and both were published by Petrucci in 1514. They both maintain a dense texture, with narrow individual ranges – almost all of this superius part operates within one octave – and a narrow overall range of 20 notes, which militates against dramatic flourishes. The difference is that the canons in this mass are more subtle than in Ad fugam, as one might expect from a composer who was revisiting a technique he had pioneered 30 years earlier. One might wonder why he wanted to do this: the answer must be bound up with his desire to keep experimenting in every direction available to him.

The influence of Ockeghem has become evident again, perhaps en­ couraged by Josquin’s return home. There are two references to him: Josquin’s setting of the words ‘Ex Maria virgine’ quotes the passage in his the musical times Autumn 2018 73

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Heaven and earth: a performer’s guide to Josquin’s masses own lament Nymphes des bois where he gave the names of all the composers mourning the death of their ‘bon père’. It is also probable that the prolation canon in the first duet of the Benedictus is a nod to Ockeghem’s Missa Prolationem. More generally if the rigid structure of Ad fugam is reminsicent of the music of Obrecht, the freer arrangement of the canons here has more of Ockeghem’s method.

The impact of this setting is not dissimilar from that of Ad fugam – compact if not quite so dense. The overall range here is two notes wider, which occasionally causes the superius to go higher than the Ad fugam superius and the bassus to go lower. But the peculiar density of this setting comes in large part from Josquin’s ever increasing interest in repetition. Just in the first Kyrie the melody he chose for the canon – stated at the outset in the superius – quickly comes round to repeating the tiny cell AGBbA. This is then of course taken up by the canonic voice – the altus – a fourth lower. But throughout the mass all the lines can be heard setting out and then turning back on themselves in the obsessive way which, as we have seen, became increasingly part of his thinking. To this end he chose all the different melodies to be repeated in canon carefully. Ex.29 shows some examples.

Ex.29: Josquin: Missa Sine nomine (a): Kyrie I, bars 1–8 (superius only)

(b): Christe, bars 16–28 (superius only)

(c): Gloria, bars 24–35 (bassus only)

(d): Credo, bars 185–94 (altus only)

(e): Sanctus, bars 7–10 (altus only)

In Ad fugam the canons were always set in the same two voice-parts – the superius and the tenor. Here every part except the tenor has its turn in leading the canon (the dux); and every part except the superius has its turn in following the leading voice (the comes). The relationship between these voices is made clear in the sources by the comes not being written out, but referred to by a Latin tag. In the Kyrie for example the altus singers, who are given no music, are invited to ‘Quaere in Suprano. In diatessaron’ or seek their line in the superius part and sing it a fourth lower. In the Gloria the tenor is told to follow the bassus. In the Credo the altus is told to follow the superius, though here interestingly the altus part actually starts the movement, ahead of its dux. In the Sanctus the tenor is to follow the altus until the Hosanna when it is to follow the bassus. In Agnus I the tenor is to follow the bassus, and in Agnus III the tenor is to follow the superius.

All these canons in a four-voice texture are at the fourth or fifth, apart from the last one which is at the octave. So the intervals are kept relatively straightforward. Perhaps this was to clear a space for the special canons in the Benedictus and the Agnus II, the latter at the second. The first duet in the Benedictus is a prolation canon (the two parts start together and sing the same melody, but proceed at different speeds), the two subsequent duets in the Benedictus use the lower part of the prolation canon as one of their voices, with free material in the other voice.

How was Josquin settling into older age? The remarkable achievement in this mass is that the canons are incorporated so smoothly into what is only a four-voice texture that even the informed listener could miss them. The impact of the music seems to side-step the very thing which has brought it into being, and still have meaning. This burying of the framework is partly managed by involving the two free voices in close imitation with the two canonic voices, creating the perfect feint. The best examples of this the musical times Autumn 2018

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Heaven and earth: a performer’s guide to Josquin’s masses are at ‘Qui tollis’, ‘Crucifixus’, and especially at ‘Et in Spiritum’. All the movements are characterised by this sleight of hand, which can take the place of the more usual Josquin ways of presenting the texts. Nonetheless, having said this, it is noteworthy how, despite the intensified and pareddown counterpoint, Josquin does maintain many of the features we have come to recognise as his, albeit in miniature. The Agnus II canon at the second is 18 bars long; the one in Malheur me bat is 50. The Benedictus is made up of three duets, the same as so often in his later masses. The Gloria and Credo culminate in lively ‘Amens’ (involving slow triple-times). The ‘Et incarnatus est’ is set to simple chords. The unusual aspect of all this is the pervading brevity, which comes from the canons.

The brevity is served by the note-lengths of the music. Never did Josquin restrict himself so much rhythmically. Whole sections of the setting move in essentially two note-lengths – the crotchet and the minim in halved modern transcription. There may be the occasional quaver, and more likely the occasional semibreve, but for example the second Kyrie at halved note values has only crotchets and minims, and the very occasional quaver, until the final two bars. It does suggest that Josquin, in older age, was testing himself (ex.30).

The voice ranges are generally compact and kept within reasonable bounds, except for one moment of extraordinary aberration. At the end of the Sanctus the superius, which spends 98% of its time singing between D and D, is suddenly required to go down to the G a fourth below middle C and stay there for six beats, before singing the G an octave higher for six more beats (see ex.2). This is where Josquin can prove so frustrating to modern choirs, though one has to assume that his singers took it in their stride. Why did he write this? Because he had run out of alternatives and wasn’t going to spoil a good phrase?

Ex.30: Josquin: Missa Sine nomine, Kyrie II, bars 42–57

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(17) Missa Pange lingua With the Missa Pange lingua we finally come to a setting which has united rather than divided its commentators. Everyone agrees that it is a late work, quite possibly Josquin’s last mass, and in many ways his finest. It sums up some of the things he was striving to perfect in his earlier settings, while advancing his compositional language towards the methods of the mid-16th century (by which is customarily meant assimilation of the chant, imitation in the voice-leading, and homogeneity between the parts). In particular it is admired for taking a plainchant hymn (ex.31, written by Thomas Aquinas for the feast of Corpus Christi – the only setting of the period to be based on this famous melody) and dividing its six short phrases so straightforwardly among all four voice-parts. The following remark from Elders is typical: the musical times Autumn 2018 77

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Ex.31: the first verse of the hymn Pange lingua

21. Elders: Josquin des Prez, p.104.

22. Fallows: Josquin, p.323.

this mass ‘may be seen as an early high-point in the development towards a greater homogeneity of the voice-parts in a polyphonic complex, and its fully balanced imitation technique paves the way for the Palestrina style.

This homogeneity is revealed by the occurrence of the chant motifs in all four voices.’21 The preferred date of composition has been after 1514, which was the year of Petrucci’s last book of Josquin’s masses, where it doesn’t appear.

However, given that by this time Josquin was in Condé, a long way from Fossombrone where Petrucci was based by this time, it is quite possible that he wrote the mass earlier than 1514 and Petrucci didn’t know about it until later. The fact that it suddenly appears in seven sources throughout Europe around 1515, all originating a long way from where Josquin was, might suggest an earlier date of composition – Fallows prefers 1510.22 Nonetheless, apart possibly from Mater patris, we are still referring to Josquin’s last mass, written when he was over 60. After Pange lingua he finally turned away from this genre and began to concentrate on smaller forms in more than four voices.

Not all the ‘last-work, historically-advanced’ clichés are con­vincing.

Certainly the Kyrie and Gloria are economically conceived, showing the ‘modern’ way of writing imitation – two voices on the final, two on the fifth – both movements start that way. But the Credo is 215 bars long (compared with 159 in Hercules Dux Ferrariae; and 214 in Malheur me bat, which is a longer setting overall). In addition the three whopping duets in the Sanctus and Agnus are just about the least compact settings of their texts in the repertoire. We ’ll never know why Josquin decided to extend these movements in this way, but performers measuring out their task by looking at the Kyrie and Gloria are in for a rude surprise. And the case for Josquin’s use of more modern imitation doesn’t hold into the later movements either.

The Kyrie and Gloria may start in the approved Palestrinian manner of unisons and fifths, but the Agnus I and Agnus III both start with unison and octave statements only.

The soundworld of this setting is determined by the vocal ranges, which finally come closer to the modern practice of SATB, especially if the music is

transposed up a minor third, which it standardly has been in recent decades.

The middle parts still constantly overlap, but although they both have the same lowest note (C an octave below middle C at written pitch), there is a crucial difference of a third in their top notes (A in the altus, F in the tenor, at written pitch). This difference really does help to define this piece – in all the other masses, even the late ones, these parts either peak on the same note – usually A – or within a note of each other.

And this openness of scoring is unhindered by strict canon or clever mathematics of any kind. Pange lingua is more like Malheur me bat than Sine nomine, with the model – here monophonic – subsumed into the prevailing texture with all the sophistication shown in Malheur me bat, and arguably quite a bit more. For example the first nine bars of the first Kyrie are based on the first phrase of the hymn; its second phrase is used in the next section; phrases three and four appear in the Christe; and phrases five and six in the second Kyrie. After that only a few quotations of the hymn are heard in the Gloria, Credo and Sanctus, though the entire melody is quoted in Agnus III. This slow abandonment of the chant as a starting-point for the middle movements is also unique. Josquin was heading for the wide open spaces as he concluded his mass career.

Apart from the long duets at ‘Pleni sunt caeli’ and Agnus II (which both seem like canons at times but are not strict), the most arresting writing comes in the Benedictus, Hosanna and Agnus III. The Benedictus is truly a bold conception, taking the now-customary method of conjoined duets a stage further by having just two voices answering each other in the gentlest of conversations. This is the kind of simplicity that may inspire a composer who has tried it all. The Hosanna is also extraordinary, with its deliberate change from duple to triple time. In other Hosannas (Ave maris stella, Malheur me bat) he swopped between them quickly, or even had them both going at the same time; but here the sections are substantial and demarked.

The Agnus III is one of those crowning glory movements, summing up what has gone before, though this time Josquin did his summing without canon and with four voices only. Nowhere in the mass did Josquin quote the hymn melody complete note-for-note. In the Kyrie all its notes are present in embellished lines, used as the start of imitative schemes; in the Agnus the superius, having spent 24 bars stating the first phrase in old-fashioned longnotes, becomes embellished and shared round. Towards the end its last six notes are transformed into a peaceful motif that turns the closing passage into an insistent prayer, similar to the closing bars of Byrd’s four-part mass.

One may wonder whether Byrd knew this piece since, unlike his other two masses, his four-part has the same crossing over of the middle voices, so that at times the roles of alto and tenor become confused. And his setting of ‘dona nobis pacem’ is uncannily similar. the musical times Autumn 2018 79

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Heaven and earth: a performer’s guide to Josquin’s masses The ease of the part-writing is the feature of this setting: relaxed, confident, back in the world of the fantasia rather than the fugue. Every phrase has this beauty: the Agnus III is no exception, and the ‘dona nobis pacem’ most beautiful of all. The ‘Amens’ at the end of the Gloria and Credo – from the earliest settings dazzle-points in Josquin’s armoury – here show the change of emphasis inherent in a compact style. They still dazzle; but the sequences are so brief in both cases that the balance of these movements is subtly changed. The resulting powerful, abrupt finishes are much more like the method of a Lassus than an Obrecht or de la Rue. (18) Missa Mater patris

23. ibid.

24. Bloxam: ‘Masses’, p.194 25. Gramophone, July 1994, p.99, reviewing a recording

by Chanticleer. Fallows also referred to the sound of the setting as being ‘bizarrely improbable ’. The word ‘bizarre ’ keeps cropping up in discussion of this mass, though it wouldn’t have occurred to me to use it.

If one accepts Fallows’s reckoning and believes that Pange lingua was written as early as 1510,23 there is a case to be made for Josquin’s Missa Mater patris to be his last mass-setting. Certainly its confident, pithy style does nothing to disprove the idea. This mass can be seen as just another example of Josquin trying out new methods in old age; and as such is uniquely fascinating, since his style here is so simple.

The precise reason for putting Mater patris forward as the ‘last mass’ is that Brumel died in 1512, and that Josquin was writing a lament for an esteemed colleague. This would explain the consistently sombre tone of the writing, as well as the very evident use of the model, not least in Agnus III where the entire motet (ex.32) is quoted, wrapped up in extra polyphony by Josquin. The literalness of the head-motif would also support this theory. Many scholars have questioned whether it is by Josquin at all, citing many of the usual doubts which standardly appear in these discussions if one wants to restrict Josquin’s thought to narrow guidelines. Those voiced in this case may be summarised as follows: the peculiar, sombre four-voice chord successions in the Kyrie, Credo and Hosanna; the amount of homophonic writing; an unusual choice of model in that it is sacred and comes from the same generation as Josquin; an unusually confined overall tessitura; the unimaginative opposition of twovoice polyphony and four-voice homophony; the deployment of the model within the mass, as well as certain contrapuntal and chord formations, being unlike anything else by Josquin in his masses on polyphonic models; a lack of Josquin’s typically organic procedure; more literal repetition (for example in the Hosanna) than normal; the literal head-motif and rhythmically dull and long-winded Benedictus, suggesting an early date of composition; the difficulty of reconciling ‘the bizarre character of the Missa Mater patris with the perfection of what are generally held to be masses from his last years, such as the Missae Pange lingua or Sine nomine’ .24 Not everyone has followed this line of thought: Fallows wrote that it is ‘a kind of experiment that needs Josquin’s courage’.25

Ex.32: The chanson Mater patris by Brumel

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Heaven and earth: a performer’s guide to Josquin’s masses My own view is that this is one of Josquin’s very greatest settings, with more telling, more emotive material than in much earlier work, amounting to a kind of playful refinement of well-tried techniques from the past, discovered in later life. And there is much that can be found elsewhere in his mass writing to justify the attribution: the duets of L’homme armé sexti toni; the homophony of D’ung aultre amer ; the narrow overall range of settings like Ad fugam; plenty of literal head-motifs; and the enthralling Benedictus being just another of the sections which wraps the listener into the special soundworld of the piece. The several canons are as standard; which is also true of the many quasi-canonic duets to be heard during the course of the longer movements. Ironically the one movement which doesn’t ring entirely true to me (partly because of the chaotic voice-ranges), is the one which is cleverest, and therefore arguably most like him – Agnus III. But overall the spell cast by the concentration of thought in this setting, the teasing way he condensed those elements of the model which interested him, suggest an experienced composer of mature years enjoying himself.

As its detractors imply, this is essentially a simple setting, with just two basic methods of composition throughout, though these somehow act as the perfect foil to each other: the highly imitative duets, mostly sung by the two middle parts (if one rescores sections of the bassus part to the second tenor as suggested below); and the solemn block-chords which so often round off the duets. Outside the final Agnus there isn’t much else to report, apart from the canons. There are three of these, all duets: the Pleni (at the second above); the Benedictus (at the second below); and Agnus II at the unison. These are fairly standard Josquin fare, quite long-winded thanks to the repeated sequences inside them. In fact repetition is more generally a characteristic of this setting, much of it derived from the Brumel model as can be clearly heard. But overlaying this is Josquin’s increasing interest in returning to a favoured note. The Brumel (particularly at ‘Maria propter Filium, Confer nobis remedium’) gave him his cue, and he took it enthusiastically.

For the most part this setting is kept within narrow and low vocal ranges.

With the bassus normally descending to G there is no part for sopranos to sing at the top of the texture, the regular highest note in the written superius being the Bb a seventh above middle C (there is one C, on ‘lumen’, in the Credo), which makes this the lowest superius part in all of Josquin’s settings (Di dadi and L’homme armé sexti toni come closest, peaking more regularly on C). This in turn compresses the superius, altus and tenor parts into a small space, which would be more audible if the style of the writing were more contrapuntal – in fact the open stance of the constant duetting and simple block-chord four-part writing creates airy, light-weight phrases.

Nowhere is this more apparent or attractive than in the Hosanna, which is unexpectedly extended by repeating the ‘exaudi’ motif from the motet

in every bar of the 46 in question, at every modal pitch. This movement not only has the stamp of genius, but it sounds modern, even for 1512 (ex.33).

Ex.33: Josquin: Missa Mater patris, Hosanna, bars 123–32

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Heaven and earth: a performer’s guide to Josquin’s masses However, these remarks do not apply to the bassus part which, if taken in its entirety at manuscript pitch, has a range of two octaves and a tone.

One can only speculate to what extent Petrucci’s transcription – the only complete one – reflects Josquin’s intentions. The problem is at its most acute in the opening duets of the three central movements, and in one or two internal ones, where the bassus has to duet with the altus in the same range while the second tenors stand silent. The solution is obvious; and it is easy enough to make the swop,26 something which is not needed anywhere in the four-voice sections. But this problem returns with a vengeance in the Agnus III where in the opening phrase the bassus has to ascend to the G a fifth above middle C, uniquely high for a bassus part (ex.34). This extreme seems to result from Josquin’s determination to quote the Brumel motet more or less exactly as written (the only places where he deviated from it were in the two block-chord phrases to the words ‘Audi nos suspiria’ and ‘Bone Jesu, Fili Dei’). It is possible to swop the given parts around again, so that a tenor sings this note, but to do that modifies Josquin’s design of encasing the motet in his own free parts. The Brumel motet is scored for ATT/Bar to which Josquin wanted to add two extra parts, essentially one above and one below the existing three. The added top part works well, mingling with Brumel’s top part and ascending to Bb just once to cap the whole texture. Josquin had more trouble with the added part below the texture, reflecting the uncertain role this part has played in the rest of the mass, deciding whether it is a tenor part, a bass part or both. When it is being a real bass part in this Agnus,

26. Such swopping is not unknown in modern musicology: for example the wide-ranging tenor part of L’homme armé super voces musicales was divided between the surrounding voices by Smijers in his edition of 1957 (Josquin Desprez: Werken, edd. A. Smijers et al. (Amsterdam, 1957)).

Ex.34: Josquin: Missa Mater Patris, Agnus III, bars 66–77, as originally notated

Ex.34 continued

going down to G and even F, it is adding something important. But in order to make the harmony work in the opening bars Josquin felt it necessary to send it above Brumel’s bottom part. If sung as Josquin scored it this great Agnus starts off with the most tremendous vocal challenge.

the musical times Autumn 2018 87

Phillips, Peter, "Heaven and earth: A performer’s guide to Josquin’s masses", The musical times 159/1944 (Berkhamsted, United Kingdom: autumn 2018), 3-87.

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