15th-century French composer and singer Josquin des Prez, or “Josquin,” as he’s known, achieved Renaissance equivalent rock star status. Despite his fame, many details about Josquin’s life and career are obscure, and the great mystery of early music is that most of the several hundred pieces of music known as Josquin were actually written by him, according to Stanford musician Jesse Rodin.
Jesse Rodin (Photo credit: Mark Nye)
Rodin, associate professor of music in the School of Humanities and Sciences, recently evaluated the authorship of the 346 pieces of music attributed to Josquin (1450-1521) using a method that combines the psychology of art and humanities. As part of this ambitious project, Rodin created the Josquin Research Project, a searchable, online database of music written by Josquin and his peers.
Rodin identified a “core group” of musical pieces attributed to Josquin from reliable sources before evaluating Josquin’s musical style. Using this core group as a reference, Rodin and his friend Joshua Rifkin, a scholar and director of Boston University, assigned authorship levels of confidence to the remaining musical works attributed to Josquin. Rodin completed the project with the Josquin Canon’s 500 sheet music and Rodin’s work on Josquin was recently featured in The New Yorker.
“It is very easy to treat this or any other piece of information mechanically – to say that there are seven sources that put Josquin’s name in this piece, so it must be him,” Rodin said. “But what if those seven sources are all dependent on an unreliable ‘parent’ source and therefore do not carry independent authority?”
At the heart of the project “is the use of evidence, and how tricky it is for any discipline—the humanities or the sciences—to weigh evidence in a way that is not rigid or blind to context, circumstances, and history,” he said.
Josquin’s mysterious life and career
Rodin devoted much of his career to the study of 15th-century music, particularly the work of Josquin, who is widely regarded as the first modern master of polyphonic, polyphonic music. To see also : Story: Father of country music has ties to Sugar Hill.
Cut to the circle of drama (Photo: Ovan Ameijde)
In addition to leading the Josquin Research Project, Rodin runs Cut Circle, a vocal group that performs the music of Josquin and his colleagues. As a scholar, Rodin has published extensively in this field, including the book Josquin’s Rome (Oxford University Press, 2012).
It is difficult to know what music Josquin wrote for several reasons, Rodin explained. First, Josquin’s compositions are not reliably labeled. Second, several composers imitated Josquin’s music. Finally – and most importantly – Josquin became internationally famous as the publication revolutionized the music circuit. Therefore, almost two-thirds of Josquin’s songs entered circulation only after his death.
“Some of the errors seem to be the result of wishful thinking: Now, people wanted to believe that it is composed of a given element,” Rodin said.
‘What’s in a name?’
Many attempts have been made to justify Josquin’s composition. Dutch musicologist Albert Smijers was commissioned to edit Josquin’s works in the early 1900s – an effort that took decades to complete. This may interest you : What the Theme ‘Control Your Enthusiasm’ Means in Music NFTs. Then, in the 1970s, an international group of scholars formed the Josquin New Edition committee: Over thirty years (1986-2017), they published 30 musics known as Josquin.
But as the project progressed, Rifkin called into question the underlying methodology, suggesting that the committee failed to adopt rigorous enough criteria for assessing the reliability of sources. Rifkin suggested that scholars consider Josquin’s works “guilty until proven innocent” – that is, not Josquin until proven otherwise.
At the time, Rifkin’s proposal was considered extreme. For centuries, early music writers assumed that Josquin composed most of the pieces attributed to him. Also, the timing couldn’t be better – Josquin’s New Press is about to publish its first volume.
“Understandably, some scholars and music-lovers feel robbed when a beloved piece is dropped from Josquin’s canon,” said Rodin. “When the authorship of a beloved piece is called into question, the musical community will recoil – as if the music could not be better without Josquin now.”
The Josquin Research Project
While editing the volume of L’homme armé masses for the New Josquin Edition (2014), Rodin began collaborating with Rifkin to explore how a guilt-until-proven-innocence approach could be applied to Josquin’s music. On the same subject : Here are the 19 biggest Prime Day deals for music makers at Amazon right now.
Kyrie from the Missa de Beata virgine by Josquin des Prez in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Ms. Cappella Sistina 45, folios 1v-2r. (Image: Wikimedia)
“Our intention is not to ignore the vast body of scholarship and popular knowledge about Josquin,” Rodin said, “We ask: ‘What does the most reliable evidence tell us?’ How do we manage that evidence, and manage the uncertainty, without letting unreliable information in the door or succumbing to wishful thinking or circular logic?’”
In 2010, Rodin created the Josquin Research Project in collaboration with Craig Sapp, an associate professor at Stanford’s Center for Human Computer Assisted Research. Putting new digital tools to use, they began to refine our understanding of Josquin’s musical style, or as Rodin puts it, what “Josquin tended to do and not do” in his music, by analyzing pieces of source evidence that only makes Josquin the author almost certain. This core group of 54 works was important because it served as a reference that helped the group identify Josquin’s other music.
A short sacred piece Domine, non secundum peccata is part of the primary group. It was copied in the Sistine Chapel choir around 1490 when Josquin was singing and composing music there. Attributed to “Judocus de pratis,” a Latinized version by Josquin des Prez, on the first page of Cappella Sistina 35 on folio 5v.
“If this author did not know what Josquin, very much no one did. So on the testimony of one manuscript, we can feel a lot of confidence in the authorship of the work,” Rodin wrote in Early Music.
Adopting a comparative method of source- and structural evidence, Rodin and Rifkin assigned the remaining 292 pieces that were not included in the core group to one of three categories: provisionally countable (49 works); “The problem, ranging from ‘fat chance’ to ‘could be’ – but are there good reasons to believe that it is?” (35 jobs); and “the rest” (205, plus 3 lost compositions). In all, Rodin and Rifkin believe that Josquin contains 103 of the 346 works attributed to him – compared to 143 compositions considered to have survived in the New Josquin edition.
Days before August 27, 2021 – the 500th anniversary of Josquin’s death – the team completed tracking, writing, and uploading the Josquin Research Project to a fully searchable, online collection of every surviving text attributed to him. Josquin. Rodin marked the anniversary and the completion of the project with a series of exhibitions by Cut Circle which were filmed in Florence and Arezzo, Italy, cities close to where Josquin worked.
Rodin and Sapp have been developing new analysis tools and expanding the Josquin Research Project data to include music by other composers.
Rodin’s next essay explores the issues of musical style as divided by Josquin and his contemporaries. He is also co-editing a book, tentatively named “It is a pleasure to finally be in a place to examine the works of Josquin and compare his style of music with other music without worrying that the results will be covered problems of expression,” said Rodin.
“Josquin’s music changed the course of music history in ways that continue today,” he added. His music doesn’t get the same airplay on American radio as Liszt or Lizzo, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter.”
This research was supported by funding from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and Stanford University, with in-kind support from the Center for Computer-Assisted Research in the Humanities (CCARH).
