Bump for a great composer.
I got a CD recently of the Hilliard Ensemble singing Motets and Chansons of Josquin Desprez. This is some extremely impressive music. In fact, I find it difficult to listen to in anything but a small dose, on account of the densely polyphonic beauty of it all. I don't think I'm ready to dive into his liturgical music—I think that hearing a full mass of his by the right ensemble would render me immobilized and speechless for an hour or so, and convinced that Josquin was the greatest composer to ever live.
Indeed, I recently read the testimony of a member on another board who claimed that Josquin's music was the culmination of an aesthetic that is superior to that of later music, something more attuned to a spiritual plane that we no longer fully have access to, or at least that we do not celebrate like we used to, or something along those lines. For whatever reason this comment stuck with me and I've been thinking about it a lot, and trying to understand Renaissance and Medieval polyphony for what it is. Listening to Josquin's music, I am inclined to agree.
But anyway, it's more than I can take at the present moment. I will stick with Dufay and Frye and Machaut and Pérotin for now. I am still able to get a glimpse of that same form and ideal from their music.
Anyone listening to Josquin lately? What are some essential discs of his music? I only have that Hilliard disc on Virgin Veritas, and an Archiv CD with the Missa "L'homme armé super voces musicales", which I have decided not to tackle just yet for reasons alluded to above.
Josquin was the most famous European composer between Guillaume Dufay and Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, and is usually considered to be the central figure of the Franco-Flemish School. Josquin is widely considered by music scholars to be the first master of the high Renaissance style of polyphonic vocal music that was emerging during his lifetime. (Wiki description)
Keep in mind that Josquin was born 150 years after Machaut and 50 years after Dufay, and Machaut was born 150 years after Leonin and 100 years after Perotin. We tend to conflate these composers into the Early Music category, but so much time separated them, their styles are fairly distinct.
During Machaut's time the writing was still thought of in a linear fashion, whereas by the time of Josquin, vertical harmonies took on their own meaning and were the beginnings of our tonal (major/minor) system. By the time of Palestrina (225 years after Machaut and 75 years after Josquin), tonality was on firm ground and which came to fruition with Bach.
Josquin was so famous that works were often attributed to him when there was no solid evidence to do so, only recently have works long thought to have been written by him to come into question. But that is not to say that even works of questionable attribution are not really good music. The composer Loyset Compère was long thought to have been influenced by Josquin, but because of new information his dates were recently pushed back a decade, leading to the opposite idea of who influenced whom, i.e. Josquin was influenced by Compère, to become accepted.
For myself, I prefer the earlier composers, Machaut and Dufay, and later ones like Palestrina, to Josquin. But like Wiki said, Josquin is considered the "master of the high Renaissance style".
Machaut was also very famous, and I would be surprised if Josquin did not know his music - but as for other composers, it would be hard to say. Much of this music was limited to a relatively small regional area.
