JOSQUIN
In the course of history, talent of one kind or another crops up all over the place, nourished by an international culture that ignores frontiers. However, it occasionally happens that a particular kind of talent flourishes with exceptional strength in just one place. The famous example, in antiquity, is the extraordinary dominance of Athens as home of tragic and comic theatre. In modern times, during the nineteen-twenties, the world of long-distance running was absolutely dominated by Finland. And during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the world of musical performance and composition was similarly dominated by singers and composers from the adjoining territories of Hainault and Picardy, land that now belongs to south-west Belgium and north-west France; back then, before the invention of the nation-state, it was a close-knit area of common language and background, without divisive borders. A little to the north, and a couple of generations later, the Dutch and Flemish painters had an equally important flowering, though not as dominant a one: Italian masters were still notable.
There can be no slick explanation of such phenomena, for their sources are both complex and varied. However, their content and value are generally agreed on. No one, for example, will dispute that Nurmi was the greatest distance-runner of his time, or probably any time; and everyone has long recognized that Josquin Desprez (commonly known by his first name only) was the greatest composer of his.
Josquin was also, and significantly, a singer. In those years, the important branch of music was liturgical music for choirs, and the important venue for its performance was Italy, where there was a vital tradition of support for it in the major churches and in the ducal courts. Competing for talent, the various impresarios, both ecclesiastical and aristocratic, recruited the best singers available; and these singers, in large numbers, hailed from Hainault and Picardy, where there had developed, at this time, a strong vocal culture. One of these singers was Josquin, who was hired by Milan cathedral, and who worked subsequently in Rome, Florence, and Ferrara. He ended his career back where he started, in Condé, just on the French side of the Belgian frontier. But wherever he was, he composed. His enormous output is not wholly sacred: there are secular chansons, to French texts, of purely local interest; but the liturgical works, all in Latin, had international appeal throughout Roman Catholic Europe and were widely used.
It is interesting to compare Josquin’s Europe of 1508, or thereabouts, with the European Community of 2008. If a magic time-machine could transport him from then to now, he would doubtless feel bewildered by all the modern innovations — but doubtless also dismayed by the state of modern music, with its relegation of serious music to the sidelines and its elevation of drivel to fame and fortune. In one respect, though, he would probably feel at home: in the disappearance of frontiers, and in the new-found sense of cultural reciprocity. During the intervening centuries, nation-states had been at loggerheads with each other, severally and patriotically enclosed within the confines of their own ethnic traditions: literature, of all the arts, had been most confined in this way, for linguistic reasons, and music much less so; but even music had suffered from the limiting effects of nationalism. Nowadays, in Europe, there is a freer and more harmonious exchange of ideas and practices, uncluttered by the intervention of customs officers and visa inspectors. On a modest level, for instance, a journeyman instrumentalist can ply his trade anywhere in the Union, without needing a work-permit; and on a loftier scale, composers can address a continent-wide audience unhampered by a narrowly national identity. This was exactly the kind of world in which Josquin operated.
During his lifetime, of course, not all was sweetness and light. For a hundred years there had been religious wars, and wars of empire and territorial ambition. Indeed so prevalent was the weather of strife and danger that a widely popular song throughout Europe, “L’homme armé”, reflects the anxiety felt by a populace constantly under threat from the military campaigns of power-hungry popes and princes. The text speaks, with trepidation, of armed men everywhere infesting the land with their hatreds and their weapons; and it urges the citizenry to do whatever is necessary for self-defence, equipping themselves, if possible, with chain-mail. The words were apposite to the time, but they alone would probably not have attained universal currency: they were carried to that peak on the back of a very catchy tune. And that was not just of the memorable and appealing kind that has always made a song into a hit: more than that, it had a shape and structure that made it apt for borrowed use by serious composers. It became, in fact, the thematic basis for many motets and no fewer than thirty-one masses composed during that period, two of them by Josquin.
The technical basis for such compositions was quite straightforward. The borrowed tune was slowly, almost unrecognizably, sung to extremely long notes, usually by tenors, and around it other voices weaved a pattern of complex counterpoint at a much faster tempo. In lesser hands, this could become a dull exercise of academic skill. In Josquin’s hands, contrapuntal work of that kind was magisterial. It was an ephemeral genre, though: within fifty years of his death, composers were making their music more accessible, less abstract; and they stopped incorporating pop-songs into liturgical work. Occasionally, a popular idiom is adopted today: there have been a couple of so-called “folk masses”, which are no more genuine folk-music than the ditties are which self-styled folk-artists create, who have a larger sense of their own importance than of linguistic accuracy; and there has been at least one first-rate jazz mass, though curiously it did not originate in America, the home of jazz, but in Moravia. These, however, are exercises in borrowed idiom, not superstructures built on borrowed notes. What Josquin did was statistically consistent, for the melody of “L’homme armé” lent itself fittingly to the compositional language of his time. The same would not be the case today. It would be hard to imagine a serious composer of our time doing a Nativity mass centring on the slithery chromaticism of “I’m dreaming of a White Christmas”, or a Marian motet centring on the derivative glucose of “You are so beautiful”.
The reverse process, of course, is not uncommon. Beethoven’s “Ode to joy” has been shamelessly bowdlerized by pop-singers. The slow movement of a Borodin string quartet became a Broadway hit when transformed, some might say vulgarized, into “Some enchanted evening”. And one of Elvis Presley’s top hits was a straight theft, suitably schmaltzed, from the eighteenth-century arietta, “Plaisir d’amour”.
Josquin’s “L’homme armé” mass is in a different league altogether.
