Master of Musicians:
Songs and Instrumental music by Josquin des Pres

Musica Antiqua of London

Philip Thorby (director),
Alison Crum
John Bryan
Jacob Heringman
Roy Marks
Rebecca Miles

Jennie Cassidy
Belinda Sykes
John Potter
Robert Evans

Programme Notes

When Duke Ercole I d’Este was seeking a new maestro di cappella for his musical establishment at Ferrara in 1502 he sent his courtiers out head-hunting. One such agent reported back in a letter that compared two of the most famous composers of their day: ‘Isaac gets on better with his colleagues and composes new pieces more quickly. It is true that Josquin composes better, but he does it when it suits him and not when you wish him to, and he is asking for a salary of 200 ducats while Isaac will come for 120, but Your Lordship will decide what should be done’.

Duke Ercole took the riskier and more expensive option and for the next year had at his disposal the musical services of one of renaissance Europe’s greatest creative geniuses, a man likened by his contemporaries to Raphael and Michelangelo. But the cult of the genius can lead to misconceptions: many pieces attributed to Josquin by copyists and printers in the 16th century have been proven to be spurious, and musicologists continue to debate the authenticity of many of ‘his’ pieces. Nevertheless Josquin’s music was certainly in great demand during his own lifetime. His motets, settings of the Ordinary of the Mass and songs using both French and Italian texts crop up in literally hundreds of sources from the time. Josquin’s reputation was also spread widely through the new technology of the printing press, his pieces occurring in many 16th-century anthologies, while the first book of masses published by Petrucci in Venice in 1502 was devoted entirely to settings by Josquin. His music continued to appear in print throughout the century, well after his death, a circumstance which was not only unusual but reinforces his position as a musical figurehead.

Although Josquin was such a famous and sought-after composer, we have tantalisingly few solid facts concerning his life. Until quite recently it was thought that his early career was spent as an adult singer in Milan cathedral, where he was appointed in 1459, from which his birth-date was reckoned to have been around 1440. But we now know that this singer was a quite different musician with the same name. Our Josquin must actually have been born around 1455 in Picardy and is first recorded working at the court of King René of Anjou in the mid-1470s, and may then have joined the Sainte-Chapelle of Louis XI in Paris. Although there are many years in his life for which no documentary evidence has been found, Josquin certainly spent time in Italy and was associated with Cardinal Ascanio Sforza of Milan in 1484. From 1489 to at least 1495 Josquin was a member of the Papal chapel in Rome, possibly returning to the French court of Louis XII before his appointment in Ferrara. After 1504 Josquin returned to Flanders to become provost of the collegiate church of Notre Dame in Condé, a position he maintained until his death in 1521. During these last years he continued to compose church music, as well as some of the later chansons that may have been intended for the melancholic Marguerite of Austria.

What is it about Josquin’s music that led to its acclaim by his contemporaries, and do the same features continue to affect us as performers and listeners centuries later? An answer might be found in the succinct comment by Martin Luther that ‘Josquin is master of the notes, which must express what he desires, while other composers have to do what the notes dictate’. Josquin’s ability to set texts with an expressive suppleness of melodic line is rarely equalled by his contemporaries: the finely judged rise and fall of his lines and the subtle flexibility of his rhythms support the words with an artful naturalness that looks forward to the motet and madrigal writers of the high Renaissance. Josquin’s mastery of texture and counterpoint underpins these lines to create structures that sound beautifully proportioned and inevitable, whether by using strict canon in which one part follows another exactly, or by a freer imitative style such as that of Mille regretz, a chanson that must date from towards the end of his career. Here Josquin contrasts pairs of high and low voices or joins all four together in an ever-changing texture, sometimes weaving independent strands, at other times making them work as a team, emphasising the shifts of mood in the poem being set. 

The early 16th century was a great age of musical adaptation and arrangement: more modern concepts of originality had yet to assert themselves over the medieval idea of the authority of existing material. By taking an already extant piece and adding to it, either by improvising embellishments upon it, or by deconstructing it and using certain old elements in combination with new ones, performers or composers could not only show their own expertise, but could build upon and honour the work of their predecessors. So while Josquin’s hauntingly beautiful Mille regretz developed motifs from the anonymous Plusieurs regretz, it was itself in turn slimmed down to a three-part version published in Antwerp by Tielman Susato, who also arranged it into a pavan, and it was intabulated for lute with delicate idiomatic decorations by the Nuremberg lute-maker, theorist and composer Hans Gerle.

Elsewhere the connections are less easy to trace: Susato’s basse-danse Bergeret sans roche, played here on a ‘great’ consort of crumhorns, bears more than a passing resemblance to melodies heard in Josquin’s Bergerotte savoysienne. Three songs from very different traditions all share the popular tune known as La Triquotée: in the apparently innocent anonymous rondeau Belle, tenes moi la promesse, it appears as the tenor part, circling repetitiously, and then recurs as the upper voice at the start of Alonso’s altogether more ribald piece from the Spanish Cancionero Musical de Palacio. In Josquin’s Je me complains it makes an oblique appearance just as the chanson is drawing to a conclusion with the approach of Vespers, preceded by some of the composer’s most lucid counterpoint based on a vocal canon, two free-wheeling instrumental lines and a supporting bass.

The contrast between strictly canonic lines and those that have an improvisatory freedom lies at the heart of many of Josquin’s songs. In Comment peult avoir joye the tenor follows the superius exactly at the lower octave, while two viols scurry joyfully around them. Heinrich Isaac outdoes Josquin by treating the same tune as a three-part canon at the unison in the Agnus Dei from his Missa Wohlauf gesell von hinnen and combining it with two independent parts, one of which exhibits an unusually enormous range. Elsewhere Josquin’s ingenuity stretches to the double canon of Recordans de mia segnora where the two written parts yield a further two to produce a delicate but compact miniature. Recordans shares its melody with Se congié prens, heard here in Josquin’s vigorous and complex six-part setting as well as in simpler versions by Johannes Japart and Alexander Agricola. Japart, like Josquin, was Flemish by birth, and also worked for several years around 1480 for Duke Ercole I in Ferrara; Agricola came from the previous generation and tends to use more stereotypical ornamental lines than Josquin.

The starting point for many of Josquin’s chansons was cantus prius factus: a tune that already existed. Often this was a popular song such as the gently rustic Petite camusette or the catchy Si j’ay perdu mon amy. One of Josquin’s great attributes was his ability to match the direct and simple tunefulness of these popular songs even when his setting of them used sophisticated imitative or canonic devices: as with fine jewellery the setting enhances rather than overwhelms the gem. In other cases Josquin’s starting point is an ‘art’ melody by another composer. Hayne van Ghizeghem’s De tous biens pleine was treated to all manner of adaptations by his contemporaries and followers: Josquin’s three-part version takes van Ghizeghem’s superius and adds two lower parts in close canon, while the four-part setting is a compositional tour de force in which both tenor and superius of the original song are retained, with the addition of a canon at the unison for two bass parts, the second of which chases the first after only one quick beat, like the disciples Peter and John running to Christ’s empty tomb, as the Latin rubric has it.

If Josquin was well aware of his own worth when he demanded a higher salary than Isaac, it may not come as a surprise to find that several of his songs hinge on financial matters. Adieu mes amours, its two lower parts starting canonically but then becoming more independent, was treated to a lute intabulation by the Italian virtuoso Francesco Spinacino in 1507, and is possibly one of his earliest songs. El grillo stands apart from the majority of Josquin’s other songs, not only through its use of an Italian poem, but in its mostly homophonic style and earthy directness. Josquin’s five-part setting of Faulte d’argent, full of rhythmic wit and vitality, is based on a canon at the fifth, which leads to some tension between the two competing tonal centres. The same melody was used by several other composers, including Antoine de Févin (who, like Josquin, was associated with the French court of Louis XII), and Adrian Willaert (who belonged to a later generation, but whose career followed in Josquin’s footsteps). Born in Flanders, Willaert too worked at the Ferrarese court, before becoming one of the most influential northern composers in Italy in his role as maestro di cappella at the basilica of San Marco in Venice.

Josquin could be inspired by great literature as well as by popular song or the works of earlier composers, as is shown in his two settings from Virgil’s Aeneid. These foreshadow the close relationship between words and music that was to obsess later 16th-century composers and theorists. Fama malum opens with clarion calls, since Fame’s attribute in humanistic symbolism was her trumpet, while Dulces exuviae sets Dido’s dying lament with the utmost sensitivity, capturing both her despair and resignation with equal immediacy.

Upon Josquin’s own death a number of composers wrote musical epitaphs, witness to the high esteem in which he was held within his own profession. The Flemish composer Hieronymus Vinders combines the weighty words O mors inevitabilis with sections of text and chant from the Requiem Mass in a sonorous seven-part texture. It is preceded here by Le villain, a four-part ‘song without words’ from a German manuscript, which lends itself beautifully to the plangent sound-world of renaissance viols. Le villain shares material with Pleine de deuil, a masterful example of Josquin’s economic counterpoint, in which every note matters, from the opening bell-tolling motif to the final insistence on the minor mode. It is pieces such as this, in which words, melodies and structure have such organic integrity, that perhaps explain why Duke Ercole d’Este of Ferrara admired Josquin’s music so highly and why this distant genius continues to affect us so powerfully to this day. 

John Bryan, February 2000

Texts and Translations

[2] & [3] Comment peult avoir joye

Comment peult avoir joye,
Qui Fortune contient?
L’oysiau qui pert sa proye
De jeusne lui souvient :
Au boys sur la verdure
N’a point tout son desir :
De chanter il n’a cure
Qui vit en desplaisir.

How can he be joyful,
who is constrained by fortune?
The bird which loses its prey
thinks of fasting:
in the green woods
it has not its desire.
He cares not to sing
who lives in disappointment.

[4] & [7] Se congié prens 

Se congié prens de mes belles amours
Vray amoureulx ne m’en veullez blasmer.
J’en ay souffer de plus griefves douleurs
Quel ne font ceulx qui naigent en la mer.
Car tant l’aymer m’est toujours tant amer,
Qu’avoir ne puis d’elle ung tout seul regard,
Fors que rigeur pour mon cueur entamer
Qui prens congié avant qu’il soit plus tard.

If I say farewell to my beautiful loves
true lovers would not blame me.
I have suffered more grievous sorrows
that there are those that dwell in the sea.
For to love greatly always causes me great bitterness.
To have no longer anything from love,
except a determination to break my heart
which is saying farewell before it is too late.

[8] Si j’avoye Marion

Si j’avoye Marion, helas,
du tout a mon plaisir,
La belle au corps mignon, helas,
que mon cueur a choisi;
Au bois je la merroye dancer ung tourdion, et ho!
Et puis la remerroye tout droit en sa maison.

If I had Marion, alas!
entirely for my pleasure,
the beautiful lady with her delectable body,
alas! that my heart has chosen,
to the woods I would lead her, to dance a tourdion, and ho!
And then I would take her directly back home.

[10] Petite camusette

Petite camusette, a la mort m'avez mis
Robin et Marion s’en vont au bois joly,
Ilz s'en vont bras a bras, ilz se sont endormis,
Petite camusette, a la mort m’avez mis.

Little Camusette drove me to my death.
Robin and Marion went off to the pretty wood,
they went off arm in arm, they fell asleep.
Little Camusette drove me to my death.

[11] Fama malum

Fama malum qua non aliud velocius ullum:
Mobilitate viget viresque adquirit eundo:
Parva metu primo,
Mox sese attollit in auras
Ingrediturque solo
Et caput inter nubila condit.

Rumour is of all the pests the swiftest.
In her freedom of movement lies her power,
and she gathers strength from her going.
She begins as a small and timorous creature, and though she walks on the ground, she hides her head in the clouds.

[12] Dulces exuviae

Dulces exuviae,
Dum fata deusque sinebat,
Accipite hanc animam
Meque his exsolvite curis.
Vixi et quem dederat cursum fortuna
Peregi, et nunc magna mei
Sub terras ibit imago.

Sweet relics,
sweet as long as God and destiny allowed,
now receive my lifebreath,
and set me free from this suffering.
I have lived my life and finished the course which fortune allocated me.
Now my wraith shall pass to the world below.

[15] Belle, tenes moy la promesse

Belle, tenes moy la promesse,
Que vous me feistes pieca
Car jamais mon cuer ne fera,
Nouvelle amour n’autre maistresse.
Se j’ay du mal j’aray léesse,
Toutes les fois qu’il vous plaira.
Belle tenés moy la promesse,
Que vous me feistes pieca
Et s’aucune dolour me blesse,
Douls penser me confortera,
Et seul de vouloir me donra,
Pour plus honour et de noblesse.

Sweetheart, keep the promise
that you made me long ago,
because my heart will never choose
any other love or mistress.
If you hurt me I’ll be joyful
just as often as it pleases you.
Sweetheart, keep the promise
that you made me long ago,
and if I am stuck with any sorrow,
sweet thoughts will comfort me,
and make me only want to
honour you more.

[16] Je me complains

Je me complains de mon amy
Qui me souloit tant venir veoir
La fresche matinée,
Or est il prime, et c’est midi,
Et si n’oy nouvelle de luy,
S’aproche la vesprée,
La tricoton, la tricoton, la belle tricotée.

I complain of my love
who is so late coming to see me
this morning.
Now it is prime, now midday,
and if I hear no news of him, 
it will soon be vespers.
The maid, the maid, the fair maid.

[17] La tricotea

La tricotea,
Sa Martin la vea.
Abres un poc al agua y senalea.
La bota senbru tuleta,
La señal d’un chapiré.
Ge que te gus per mundo spesa.
La botilla plena,
Dama, qui maina,
Cerrali la vena,
Orli, cerli, trun, madama,
Cerlicer, cerrarliben,
Botr’ ami contrari ben.
Niqui, niquidon, formagidon, formagidon.
Yo so monarchea de grande nobrea.
Dama, por amor,
Dama, bel se vea,
Dama, yo la vea.

Blessed Martin make it three;
or up it 
and call a six for me.
The butt is swinging,
curse the biggots.
Go where you will
carry your fill.
Lady, it’s leaking,
Close the spigot.
A one, a two, a many,
Stop it Lady, in case you spill it.
Your friend feels cheated
dainty, dainty, cheese Sir Cheese.
The king am I, of noble line.
Lady, if you please,
Lady, show it,
Lady, let me see.

[18] Bergerotte savoysienne

Bergerotte savoysienne
Qui garde moutons aux praz
Dy moy se vieulx setre mienne
Je te donray uns soulas
Et ung petit chaperon
Dy moy se tu m’aymeras
Ou par la merande ou non.

Shepherdess from Savoy
who keeps sheep in the fields,
tell me if you want to be mine.
I will give you happiness
and a little hook.
Tell me if you will love me,
whether I am deserving or not.

[24] Mille regretz

Mille regretz de vous habandonner
Et d’eslonger vostre fach amoureuse.
J’ay si grand deuil et paine douloureuse
Quon me vera brief mes jours deffiner.

A thousand regrets at leaving you
and going so far from your loving face.
I have such great and painful suffering
that my days will soon be seen to end.

[28] Pleine de deuil

Pleine de deuil,
Et de melancolie,
Voyant mon mal
Qui toujours multiplie,
Et qu’en la fin
Pluz ne le puis porter,
Constrainte suis
Pour me reconforter
Me rendre a toy
Le surplus de ma vie.
Je te requiers et humblement supplie,
Pour les douleurs de quoy je suis ramplie,
Ne me vouloir jamais abandonner.
Puisqu’a vous suis la reste de ma vie.

Full of grief
and melancholy,
seeing that my sickness
is ever increasing,
and that in the end
I can bear it no more, 
I am constrained
in order to sustain myself
to render to thee
the rest of my life.
I beseech and humbly beg you,
Because of the many woes I bear,
Never abandon me,
Since I am yours for the rest of my life.

[29] Pauper sum ego

Pauper sum ego
et in laboribus
a juventute mea
exaltatus autem
humiliatus sum
et conturbatus.

I have been poor
and in travail
since my youth;
I have been raised up,
brought low,
and thrown into confusion.

[30] Faulte d’argent

Faulte d’argent c’est douleur non pareille
Sy je le dis, las je scay bien pourquoy
Sans de quibus il se fault tenir quoy,
Le temps le doit, ce n’est pas de merveille.
Je suis aymé d’une fille tant belle,
Je l’ayme bien aussi fait elle moy.
Marry je suis quant point je ne la voy.
En ce pays n’en y a point d’autelle.

Lack of money’s the worst pain of all.
When I say that, I know what I’m saying:
If you haven’t got it you have to keep quiet; the times make it necessary and it’s no wonder.
I’m loved by a beautiful girl.
I love her and she loves me.
I’m very grieved when I can’t see her.
In all this land there’s no-one like her.

[31] Faulte d’argent

Mes compaignons, a tous je vous conseille
Que ne prenez femme s’el n’a de quoy.
Raison pourquoy? las, je la vous diray :
Quant elle dort, pour l’argent on l’esveille.

Friends, I give you my advice.
Don’t take a wife if she’s got no money.
Why? I’ll tell you:
When she’s asleep you have to wake her up to earn some cash.

[32] Faulte d’argent

Se povre suis, ce n’est pas de merveille,
Car mon argent g’ya ay tout despendu.
Il ne m’en chault, je n’ay pas tout perdu :
Car j’ay acquis vostre amour non pareille.

If I’m penniless it’s not surprising, for I’ve spent all I’ve got [on love];
I don’t really mind - I’ve not lost everything:
I’ve won your wonderful love.

[33] Adieu mes amours

Adieu mes amours, a Dieu vous command,
Adieu je vous dy jusquez au printemps
Je suis en souci de quoy je vivray
La raison pour quoy je le vous diray :
Je n’ay plus d’argent, vivray je du vent,
Se l’argent du roy ne vient plus souvent.

Farewell my loves, to God I commend you.
Farewell I say until the Spring.
I am worried about what I shall live on. 
The reason why? I will tell you:
I have no more money. Shall I live on air, if the king’s money does not come more often?

[35] El grillo

El grillo, el grillo è buon cantore,
Che tiene lungo verso.
Dale beve grillo canta,
El grillo, el grillo è buon cantore.
Ma non fa come gli altri ucelli,
Come li han cantato un poco,
Van de fatto in altro loco:
Sempre el grillo sta pur saldo,
Quando l'a maggior el caldo
Alhor canta sol per amore.

The cricket is a good singer
who sings a long note.
The cricket sings of drinking. 
The cricket is a good singer
but he does not do like other birds:
when they have sung a little,
they go off elsewhere.
The cricket stands firm:
when it is hotter weather
then he sings for love.

[37] Lamentatio super mortem Josquin

O mors inevitabilis,
Mors amara, mors crudelis,
Josquin des Pres dum necasti,
Illum nobis abstulisti,
Qui suam per harmoniam,
Illustravit eccleasiam 
Propterea tu musicae,
Dic requiescat in pace.
Requiem aeternam
Dona ei Domine,
Et lux perpetua luceat ei
Propterea tu musicae,
Dic requiescat in pace.

O inevitable death,
O bitter death, O cruel death.
In slaying Josquin des Pres
you have deprived us of him who,
through his harmony,
brought glory to the Church.
Therefore say to music
‘May he rest in peace’.
Give him eternal rest
O Lord,
and let light perpetual shine on him.
Therefore say to music
‘May he rest in peace’.