Welcome to The Music of Josquin Desprez! While individual Josquin motets and chansons and occasionally masses find their way into programs of Renaissance music, concerts and recordings devoted entirely to Josquin are rare.. This is odd, since Josquin is widely acknowledged as the quintessential composer of the Renaissance, a cosmopolitan artist who lived and worked in many of the important cultural centers of France and Italy, and whose music, within his lifetime and ever more thereafter, was spread throughout Europe in manuscript and printed form.
In attempting to rectify this gap, we have chosen to present a broad array of the genres in which Josquin worked. On this CD, you will hear some of Josquin's most famous pieces, and some obscure; you will hear motets, frottole, chansons, and a mass; you will hear pieces structured upon secular songs, upon canons, and upon Gregorian chant; you will hear the profoundly sacred and the rather naughty; and you will, we hope, end up with a strong sense the artistry and versatility of this profound artist, who stands in the eyes of many with Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and the other greats of the Western canon.
Marian Motets: We open with what is perhaps Josquin's best-known work, the 4-voice Ave Maria. This piece demonstrates many of the typical qualities of Josquin's work: successive duets; occasional blossoming into full-ensemble; carefully constructed imitative themes; special care for the text; and the use of canon (in the triple-time section). It closes with a memorable homophonic passage, which focuses all of the previous celebration of the events of Mary's life into a moving and personal prayer.
The 4-voice Salve Regina is a double-canon based upon the chant antiphon, which the women sing for you before we begin the motet. Josquin uses the chant in a subtle manner, paraphrasing it in the alto, trailed by the soprano up a fourth, and supporting these principal voices with a separate canon, also at the fourth, between the tenor and bass. The resulting texture is a swirl of voices rising and falling with the contour of the chant.
Ut Phoebi is a rarely heard motet in which Josquin uses solfege puns throughout. The text is constructed so that each line begins with an ever-augmenting sequence of solfege syllables. (For this to be comprehensible to the modern listener, one must know that ut was only later replaced by the modern do). The women sing the full text, while the men extract the initial solfege syllables, performing them on the prescribed pitches, but jogged off from each other by two beats (in time), and by a perfect fourth (in pitch). When the entire 6-tone ascending scale has been achieved, the process is inverted, the bass and tenor now descending through the scale. The amazing thing is that, while strictly maintaining this take-no-prisoners left-brained structure, Josquin manages to write profoundly expressive music; in this sense he reminds one of Bach.
Italian Songs: Although he was prolific in many genres, only three Italian songs survive which are thought to be by Josquin; we perform all three for you tonight. Scaramella is based upon a secular sopng celebrating the exploits of fictional character who goes off to war, with many alarms and excursions and a great many borombos. In te Domine speravi is a piece which lends itself to either a sacred or secular interpretation; in any case, the speaker is lamenting loss and deprivation, and is now bereft of hope. Josquin supplies plangent music to express this poem, full of suspensions and drawn-out, longing lines. El grillo refers to the cricket, who sings for love and not money. There is a (possibly apocryphal) tale that one of the singers at the court where Josquin was working at the time he wrote this piece was named Carlo Grillo. Since the duke was notoriously tight with money, Grillo was often in fact forced to sing only for love (no cash).
Chansons: We present for you an array of Josquin's many chansons, progressing from three voices to six. Si j'ay perdu mon amy was a well-known monophonic song, upon which Josquin constructed two different settings. Tonight, our women perform the unadorned song, followed by the men on the 3-voice piece, which uses a variant of the song in the tenor, with some imitation in the other voices. In the distinctive final section, where the melody falls in fast notes, all voices imitate to create a 'waterfall' effect. We follow this with the 4-voice setting, more succinct and perhaps even more expressive, which again places the melody in the top voice, and involves the other three voices in a tight imitative structure. Here the waterfall is harmonized note-for-note.
Baisés moy is a typical Renaissance love dialog, again based upon a previous melody. Here we have the young man pleading for love (or whatever), and the young woman declining, in this case because her mother wouldn't approve. Josquin cleverly uses the tune against itself at different pitch levels, creating a web of cadences and repeated pleas.
Faulte d'argent is a tightly constructed piece which shares many of the characteristics of a motet. There is a literal canon (at the fifth) between two of the voices, while the other three participate in the same melodic material. As the piece laments the lack of cash, it builds to a plaintive pitch, before recapitulating the opening material.
In the moving lament, Plaine de dueil, cast in a woman's voice, Josquin writes an exact canon between the top two voices, and, as in Faulte d'argent, gives imitative lines to the other voices. A special feature of this piece is the fact that the canon has rests at the end of each phrase, giving the bottom voices a chance to stretch and 'exhaust' the material until the canon collects enough strength to continue.
Our final chanson, Petite camusette, is a saucy ditty about Robin and Marion, who go into the woods to (ahem) fall asleep. The structure here is strikingly lucid: In the center of the 6-voice texture, a perfect canon between Alto 2 and Tenor, accompanied by two additional near-perfect canons between (respectively) upper voices and lower voices. The effect is spry and wry and delightful.
Missa Pange lingua: This mass is one of Josquin's most famous compositions. It is based upon a Corpus Christi hymn written by Thomas Aquinas. Although the chant is occasionally used as a near-literal cantus firmus (in the Kyrie 1 and Agnus 3), Josquin more often treats it as a source for motives. Particularly striking is the four-note Phrygian motive E-E-F-E, which opens the chant and every major section of the mass, and somehow defines the ethos of the piece.
As in all his music, in the Missa Pange lingua Josquin is wonderfully sensitive
to the expressive demands of the text, making sound worlds which are in every
case peculiarly appropriate to express the relevant text. Among many passages,
we have been particularly struck by the swirling 'spiral' close to the Kyrie;
by the alternately celebratory and prayerful Gloria; by the special mood of
the Crucifixus; by the party-down feel of the Hosanna; and by the amazing finish
to the last movement, with its descending and diminishing cries of 'Grant us
peace'.