The revisions to the biography of Josquin des Prez that followed new archival discoveries in the late 1990s has encouraged critical reappraisal of much of Josquin’s life and works, especially his periods of service in Milan (mid-1480s), Rome (1489 – ca. 1494/95), and Ferrara (1503-4). Yet the period of his life between his departure from Rome and arrival at Ferrara remains a lacuna as regards both his biographical details and his compositional activities. We can be relatively certain that he lived and worked in the orbit of the French royal court of King Louis XII (r. 1498-1515) during some of this time, although exactly when and in what capacity remains unclear.
Alongside the gap in Josquin’s biography lies a gap in our understanding of certain consequential developments in style and genre of European sacred polyphony during these years. Early in the sixteenth century, a new iteration of the motet supplanted the polyphonic mass setting as the most widely-transmitted musical genre. The prolix cantus firmus-based motets on neoclassical devotional texts of the fifteenth century were replaced by more transparent and repetitive settings of liturgical and scriptural texts, rarely integrating a cantus firmus at all. Doubtlessly due to their new accessibility, multi-functionality, and the rise of music printing, these motets began to appear in many sources, often with a composer’s name attached—a distinct shift from the one or two often anonymous extant sources for most motets in the second half of the fifteenth century.
It has already been suggested that these trends originated early in the century at the French royal court, where court singer-composers such as Jean Mouton, Antoine de Févin, Denis Prioris, and others appear to have played a central role in the development of this new motet style. Josquin, too, contributed to the genre, as a handful of motets in French court sources from ca. 1505-15 attest. This dissertation investigates these questions that follow: (1) When and in what capacity might Josquin have lived and worked in the orbit of the French royal court? (2) What might he have composed during these years, and how does the stylistic profile of that music compare to the music he had written earlier, in Milan and Rome? (3) How does Josquin’s French-court music relate to the music written by his colleagues and immediate successors there?
In approaching the music at hand, I analyze motets by Josquin and his French-court contemporaries through the lens of form. We do not talk much about form in this period, insofar as it lacks the regulated conventions that we typically associate with the term as it applies to music from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Rather, I use the concept of form to describe how Josquin and others organized their motets globally—i.e., in horizontal space from start to finish—vis à vis the texts being set and, when applicable, a long-note cantus firmus. In this dissertation, I demonstrate how Josquin displayed a particular interest in the repetition of text and music—in the form of what I call text-music elements—which manifested itself in various ways for the duration of his career. Second, I examine how Josquin’s particular deployment of this principle manifested itself in the form of literally-repeated paired duos in motets that were circulating at the French royal court in the first decade of the sixteenth century and, as I further argue, were likely composed during his association with the court ca. 1499-1503. Finally, I contextualize these motets of Josquin with those by his peers at the French court chapel, such as Loyset Compere, Jean Mouton, and Antoine de Févin—suggesting that Josquin may have brought to the court an underlying repetitive impulse that led to the coalescence of the consequential “French-court motet.”
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/47081 |
| Date | 11 October 2023 |
| Creators | Kostrzewski, Brett Andrew |
| Contributors | Rifkin, Joshua |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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