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The Apotheosis of Josquin des Prez and Other Mythologies of Musical GeniusReview by: Paula HigginsJournal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 57, No. 3 (Fall 2004), pp. 443-510Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the American Musicological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jams.2004.57.3.443 .

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The Apotheosis of Josquin des Prez and

Other Mythologies of Musical Genius

PAU LA H IG G INS

In the past thirty-odd years, the subject of Josquin des Prez has launched

at least five scholarly conferences and more than two hundred studies

published in three volumes of proceedings (totaling some 1,200 pages); in

dozens of scholarly journals, monographs, and Festschri ften;and most recentlyin the 700-page Josqui n Companion.1 An international editorial board,subvened by the musicological societies of two countries (the AMS and the

Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis), oversees the publication

of his (second) opera omnia. Standard reference works and popular Internet

Jour nal of the Ameri can Musicological Society, Vol. 57, Issue 3, pp. 443510, ISSN 0003-0139, electronic ISSN 1547-

3848. 2005 by the American Musicological Society. All rights reserved. P lease direct all requests for permission to

photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Presss Rights and Permissions Web site, at

www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.

This essay is a revised and expanded version of t he keynote address entit led In Q uest o f

Parnassus: Josquin and the C ultural Politics of Musical G enius, delivered at the InternationalConference: New D irections in Josqui n Scholar shipheld at Princeton U niversity, 2931 October1999. I wish to thank Rob C. Wegman for the invitation to speak at his conference. Versions of

the talk were also given at Yale University in April 2002 and the Newberry Library in Chicago in

February 2004. I am indebted to Teodoro G iuliani for serving as the patient and tireless inter-

locutor for the original talk; to Marsha D ubrow, Margaret Bent, Jeff Sklansky, C arolyn Eastman,

C lay Steinman, and D avid Rothenberg for their helpful comments on subsequent drafts; and

to D onald G reig and P hilip Weller for critical input in the final stages. Research and writing were

facilitated in part by the award of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship at the

Newberry Library in 20034.

I wish to dedicate this essay to Joseph Kerman in honor of his eightieth birthday, and to the

memory of two recently deceased scholars, Janet Levy and Philip Brett.1. The conferences include those in New York (1971), Cologne (1984), and U trecht (1986),

and at P rinceton U niversity (1999) and D uke U niversity (1999). The three conference proceed-

ings resulting therefrom are Josqui n des Prez: Proceedi ngs of the I nternat ional Josqui n Festival -Conference H eld at The Jui ll iard School at Lincoln Center in N ew York Ci ty, 2125 June 1971, ed.Edw ard E. Lowinsky in collaboration with Bonnie J. B lackburn (London: O xford U niversity

Press, 1976) (787 pp.) (hereafter referred to as Josquin Pr oceedi ngs); Proceedi ngs of the JosquinSymposium, Cologne, 1115 July 1984, ed. Willem Elders, vol. 35 of Ti jdschri ft van de Vereni gingvoor N eder landse Muziekgeschiedenis(1985) (193 pp.); and Proceedi ngs of the I nt ernat ionalJosqui n Symposium, U trecht 1986, ed. Willem Elders in collaboration with Frits de H aen (U trecht:Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis, 1991) (217 pp.). The Josquin Companion, ed.

Richard Sherr (Oxford and New York: Oxford U niversity Press, 2000) (691 pp.).

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444 Journal of the American Musicological Society

sources rout inely call him the greatest composer of the Renaissance and

even the greatest composer in the history of Western music. 2 Some rank

him as the fourth member, honor is causa, of the venerable triumvirate of ge-

nius composers tout cour t:Bach, Mozart, Beethovenand Josquin.3 H is per-sonality and career are so often compared with Beethovens that he is

popularly known as the Beethoven of his time. 4 H is Missa Pange lingua, asperformed by the Tallis Scholars, won the Gramophone Record of the Yearaward in 1987, the only time a recording of early music has garnered the cov-

eted prize.5 H is foregone status as musical genius is proclaimed not only in the

popular media and in music history textbooks, but also in the pages of JAMS: a creative personality already in essence fully formed . . . Josquin started as

Josquinand started at the top. 6 Like the goddess Athena, who burst forth

fully formed from the head of Zeus, Josquin des Prez now inhabits themythological realm of musical Parnassus.

H ow did a single composer come to tower over the intellectual and cultural

landscape of present-day musicology? H ow, when, and why did Josquin ac-

quire this status and celebrity as the incomparable composer to whom all

others must yield pride of place? Why Josquin and not, say, Palestrina, once

lionized as the savior of music, or perhaps Lasso or Gesualdo, once desig-

nated his fellow cohorts in Renaissance musical genius? On the basis of what

evaluative criteria has Josquins genius been deemed to surpass that of every

other composer of the period loosely described as the Renaissance ? Whatexactly is the critical justification for the apotheosis of Josquin des Prez in the

late twentieth century?

2. For example, from a standard introduction to music: Many musicolog ists consider

Josquin the greatest of all Renaissance composers (K. Marie Stolba, The Development of WesternMusic: A H istor y[D ubuq ue, Iowa: W. C . Brown, 1990], 196). Some examples from popularInt ernet sources: now considered the greatest [composer] of the Renaissance ( Josquin,

Bri tann ica Student Encyclopaedia[2004], Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, http://search.ed.com/ebi/article?tocld= 9275188); so famous that he is known merely by his first name. . . .

many people . . . consider Josquin the greatest composer in the history of Western music (Todd

McComb, Josquin D es Prez, http://www.classical.net/music/comp.lst/ josquin.html).

3. Perhaps you wonder why the work which before was done by one person . . . has to be

re-done by a large group of musicologists. The reasons should be clear and they hold, mutatis

mutandis, also for such composers as Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, whose music is now being

published in N eue Ausgaben (Willem Elders, Towards the New Josquin Edition, in Pro-ceedi ngs of the Josquin Symposium, Cologne, 38, at 3).

4. See, for example, H ere of a Sunday Morning, WBAI, New York, http://www.hoasm

.org/IVA/ D esPrez.html.

5. Tallis Scholars, Josquin Missa Pange Lingua, G imell 454 909-2 (1987). The recording alsoincludes the Missa La sol fa re mi .

6. Joshua Rifkin, Munich, Milan, and a Marian Motet: D ating JosquinsAve Maria . . . virgoserena, thisJournal 56 (2003): 239350, at 333. R ifkins assertion comes at the end of the arti-cle, following a long passage proclaiming Josquins genius via the agency of Schoenbergs com-

ments on the subject of talent versus genius.



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The Apotheosisof Josquin des Prez 445

~

The starting point of these reflections was usually a feeling of impatience at thesight of the naturalness with which newspapers, art and common sense con-

stantly dress up a reality which, even though it is the one we live in, is undoubt-

edly determined by history. I resented seeing Nature and H istory confused at

every turn, and I wanted to track dow n, in the decorative display of what-goes-without-saying, the ideological abuse which, in my view, is hidden there.

Roland Barthes, Mythologies7

Without wishing to slight Josquin, I am troubled by a prevailing what-

goes-without-saying (cela va de soi) attitude toward him, as if his gargantuan

stature in late twentieth-century music historiography were somehow preor-dained by Nature. I have wanted to unearth the ideological abuse that I sus-

pected of lurking beneath the genius-thinking and hero worship that still

characterize much musicological utterance about Josquin. Like its subject en-

shrined in the Parnassus of musical genius, Josquin historiography resides

largely in the realm of myth as defined and fi rst theorized in Roland

Barthess Myth Today, one o f the classic texts in the field of cultural

studies.8 In Barthess formulation, myth operates in such a way as to make re-

alities that are the product of highly complex and historically determined

processes seem natural :

Myth consists in overturning culture into nature or, at least, the social, the cul-

tural, the ideological, the historical into the natural. What is nothing but a

product of class division and its moral, cultural and aesthetic consequences is

presented (stated) as being a matter of course ; under the effect o f mythical

inversion, the quite contingent foundations of the utterance become Common

Sense, Right Reason, the Norm, G eneral Opinion, in short the doxa.9

7. Roland Barthes, preface to hisMythologies(1957), selected and trans. Annette Lavers (NewYork: H ill and Wang, 1972), 1112, at 11.

8. Barthes, Myth Today, in Mythologies, 10959. Myth Today is the postface, written in1957, of the collected essays of Mythologieswritten between 1954 and 1956. It derives from theearlier, structuralist phase of Barthess work as mythologist or critic of ideology. Barbara Engh

notes, Music itself has a special status in Barthes work: when he is at work as a semiot ician, as an

ideology critic, music is absent from his considerations. When he moves to a critique of those

practices, music emerges as a privileged discourse. See Loving It : Music and C riticism in Roland

Barthes, in Musicology and D i fference: Gender and Sexual i ty in Music Scholarship, ed. Ruth A.Solie (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U niversity of California Press, 1993), 6679, at 66. The con-

spicuous absence of discussions of music in his earlier critical project does not, however, precludeits appropriation for an ideological critique of music. For an excellent introduction to Barthess

thought in general, see Graham Allan, Roland Bar thes(London and New York: Routledge,2003); for the central place of Mythologiesin his critical trajectory, see especially pp. 3352.

9. Roland B arthes, Change the Object It self: Mythology Today, in his ImageMusicText, trans. Stephen H eath (New York: The Noonday Press, 1977), 16569, at 165. H ere I am



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D erived from the linguistically based science of signs known as semiology,

myth, according to Barthes, is depoliticized speech conveyed by a discourse

consisting of rhetoric, defined as a set of fixed, regulated, insistent fi gures, ac-

cording to which the varied forms of the mythical signifier arrange them-selves. 10 In other words, rhetoric is the language which normalizes or

depoliticizes the discourse of myth and makes it seem acceptable, common-

sensical, and ultimately complacent. These formulations then become conven-

tional wisdom and as such tend to go unchallenged, thereby eliminating

competing discourses which might enrich an otherwise impoverished cultural

view. As others have noted, myth as here defined is virtually coterminous for

Barthes with ideology.11

using B arthess later theoretical formulation in 1971 of his earlier position as set out in Myth

Today, 14243.

10. A discourse as Barthes defines it can include modes of writing or of representations;

not only written discourse, but also photography, cinema, reporting, sport, shows, publicity.

Political is understood in its deeper meaning, as describing the whole of human relations in

their real, social structure, in their power of making the world. Barthes, Myth Today, 10910,

143, 150.

11. Allen, Roland Bar thes, 34. Terry Eagletons definition might be useful for understanding

ideology in relation to B arthes the mythologist/ ideologist and to the present critique of ge-nius: A dominant power may legitimate itself by promotingbeliefs and values congenial to it;naturalizingand universali zingsuch beliefs so as to render them self-evident and apparently in-evitable; denigratingideas which might challenge it; excludingrival forms of thought, perhaps bysome unspoken but systematic logic; and obscuringsocial reality in ways convenient to itself. Suchmystification, as it is commonly know n, frequently takes the form o f masking or suppressing so-

cial conflicts, from which arises the conception o f ideology as an imaginary resolution of real con-

tradictions (I deology: A n I nt roducti on[London: Verso, 1991], 56; emphasis in original). H ere Ihave tried to confine my own usage of the term ideologyto its specifically Barthesian sense, as thepresentation of cultural phenomena (like genius) as if they were timeless, universal, and natural,

rather than historically determined. Barthess later poststructuralist criticism, dating from the late

1960s, w ould distance itself from this oppositional rhetoric, as we shall see, but Eagletons defini-tion above also resonates with Barthess earlier intellectual project as a critic of ideology, as well as

with the current usage of the term in cultural studies. Anthropologist C lifford G eertz regretted

that it is one of the minor ironies of modern intellectual history that the term ideology has itself

become thoroughly ideologized. (See Ideology as a Cultural System, in The I nterpretation ofCultures[New York: Basic Books, 1973], 193223, at 193.) H e questioned whether having be-come an accusation, it can remain an analytic concept, tainted as it is with the prevailing dictio-

nary definitions linking it w ith the factitous propagandizing of Nazi ideology. H e

nevertheless attempted to defuse the term, advocating a return to a more neutral understand-

ing as a set of intellectual propositions (ibid., 200). For an excellent brief history of this often con-

fusing term, which appeared in the late eighteenth century referring to a philosophy of mind or

the science of ideas, and came, under Napoleon Bonaparte, to acquire its still largely pejorativemeaning, see Raymond Williams, Id eology, in his Keywords: A Vocabular y of Cul tur e andSociety(1976; rev. ed., New York: Oxford U niversity Press, 1985). I n musicology today, the wordcontinues to be used in the tacitly Napoleonic sense as a term of derogation for leftist inspired, so-

ciopolitical viewpoints of those (called ideologues ) whose work is indebted to various isms,

usually of a feminist or neo-Marxist, or cultural materialist, stripe (and occasionally in reverse to



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Against the backdrop of Barthess theory of myth, then, as well as Janet

Levys exploration of the covert and casual values that inform conventional

musicological wisdom,12 this essay seeks to expose the historical legitimation

project through which the scholarly reception of Josquin des Prez came toreplicate the mythmaking, universalizing rhetoric of genius that has long sur-

rounded the figure of Ludwig van Beethoven.13 The ideological refashioning

of Josquin in the image of Beethoven has simultaneously shaped and derailed

the intellectual trajectory of early music scholarship in the past thirty years by

privileging a discourse of musical genius in the service of which, among other

concerns, the composers canon is being decimated beyond historical recogni-

tion, and the richness and complexity of the musical culture of which he was a

vital part risks being overshadowed and obfuscated by the disproportionate

amount of attention invested in his singular accomplishments.14 I offer thesethoughts in the interest of a resolute historicization of discourses of musical

talent and creative endowment, countering the ongoing hegemony of authen-

tication studies in Josquin scholarship, and examining the imbrication of

mythologies of musical genius in the suppression of certain kinds of music his-

torical and critical inquiry. My project directly engages the disciplinary critique

of musicology begun in the 1960s with the Kerman-Lowinsky polemics con-

ducted in the pages of JAMSand considers the complicity of musicologicaldispensations both old and new in the privileging of musical genius.15 The

starting point for these specific reflections, which form part of a larger criticalproject on issues of authorship, creative patrilineage, and musical genius, dates

from nearly thirty years ago when, as a fledgling graduate student, I caught a

visionary glimpse of the magnitude of the Josquin phenomenon.

describe the denigrators of those viewpoints). I t is often accompanied by the adjective fashion-

able, as if to suggest that serious philosophical schools of intellectual and critical thought were

somehow inappropriate or even inimical to certain kinds of musicological enterprise.12. Janet Levy, Covert and C asual Values in Recent Writings About Music, Jour nal of

Musicology5 (1987): 327; and Barthes, Myth Today.13. On the processes of mythmaking surrounding B eethoven see Alessandra Comini, The

Changing Image of Beethoven: A Study in Mythmaki ng(New York: Rizzoli, 1987); ScottBurnham, Beethoven H ero(Princeton, N.J. : Princeton U niversity Press, 1995); and Tia D eNora,Beethoven and the Constructi on of Genius: Musical Poli t ics in Vienna, 17921803(Berkeley andLos Angeles: University of C alifornia Press, 1995).

14. I use the verb decimatedwith an understanding of its original derivation from the Latindecimare, meaning to eliminate one in ten, a statistic in fact far lower than the ratio of worksthat have been eliminated from the Josquin canon in the late twentieth century. The accomplish-

ments of contemporaries of Beethoven, as well as those of other genius composers, have similarlybeen overshadowed.

15. The occasionally polemical tone of this essay is in keeping with this spirited tradition, and

I intend no disrespect toward musicologists of the past or present, who will be mentioned in due

course, particularly Edward Lowinsky and Joseph Kerman to whose pioneering critical thought I

plainly owe an incalculable intellectual and scholarly debt.



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A Josquin Epiphany: Firestone Library,Princeton University, Fall 1976

Epiphany . . . a) a moment of sudden intuitive understanding; flash of insight

b) a scene, experience, etc. that occasions such a moment.

Excited voices pierce the silence of the subterranean music carrels. I peer out

of my assigned cubicle to determine the cause of celebration: the arrival of

a booka thick, cherry-red tome Lowinskys Josquin Proceedings.

The older graduate students who had attended the International Josquin

Festival-Conference five years earlier had regaled us neophytes with reverential

accounts of the momentous occasion; circumspectly, I had refrained from ask-

ing who Lowinsky was. Nor did I confess that I hadnt heard much aboutJosquin des Prez in my undergraduate days or that what little I did know

about him owed to occasional chance exposure to a band of lute-toting stu-

dents in flowing mumus and beaded headbands. Endowed with a rock-star

first-name celebrity (and unlike classical composers who are known by their

lastnames), Josquin was uttered w ith a breathy, smugly self-important into-nation.16 The most ardent among these students, a reluctant participant in the

seminar on the Second Viennese School, would histrionically feign aural tor-

ture by planting her index fingers firmly in each ear whenever Schoenberg was

played in class. Sadly, I thought, these narrow-minded Josquin -lovers areobsessed with some Renaissance composer most people have never heard of,

while I am preparing an honors thesis and piano recital on Robert Schumann,

a composer whose claim to musical greatness is unassailable.17

Or so I thought. From the moment I set foot in graduate school, I sensed

with mounting trepidation that I had much to learn in short order. The

16. Some early music composers like Leonel (Power), Adriano (Willaert), and C ipriano (de

Rore) were also referred to by their first names in manuscripts and prints during their own life-

times. Only first names have survived for certain medieval composers like Notker, Leonin, andPerotin. In the present day, Josquin stands as the only canonic composer routinely referred to by

first name alone (with the exception of H ildegard of B ingen, depending on whether or not one

now considers her canonic ). I shall elaborate on naming practices in connection with Foucaults

author function as it may relate to Josquin, in an expanded form of this essay. See Michel

Foucault, What Is an Author? in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: PantheonBooks, 1984), 10120, at 1057.

17. Of interest are Barthess comments on Schumann from around the same time: Is this

why our period grants him what is doubtless an honourable place (of course he is a great com-

poser), but not a favored one (there are many Wagnerites, many Mahlerians, but the only Schu-

mannians I know are G illes D eleuze, Marcel Beaufils, and myself )? Our period, especially since

the advent, by recordings, of mass music, wants splendid images of great conflicts (Beethoven,

Mahler, Tchaikovsky). Loving Schumann . . . is in a way to assume a philosophy of Nostalgia . . . it

inevitably leads the subject who does so and says so to posit himself in his time according to the

injunctions of his desire and not according to those of his sociality. Roland Barthes, Loving

Schumann (1979), in The Responsibil i ty of Forms: Cr i t i cal Essays on M usi c, A r t, andRepresentation, trans. Richard H oward (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U niversity of C alifornia Press,1985), 29398, at 298.



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earnest pronouncement that I loved Schumann and intended to write my

dissertation on him was met with sidelong glances conveying the subtle mes-

sage that his thesis-worthiness was suspect, unless of course I was planning to

work on his sketches or autographs. 18 The composers of moment seemedto be Beethoven and (again) Josquin, the latter standing on what-goes-

without-saying equal footing with the former, to the point of meriting the

deployment of a small army of graduate students (in which I would soon find

myself happily enlisted) to encode his music on keypunch machines.19 At the

very least, I would need to revise my hierarchy of great composers, for this

Josquin was proving to be a formidable musical force to reckon with.

The Apotheosis of Josquin des Prez: Lincoln Center,New York, June 1971

Apotheosis: 1 the act of raising a person to the status of a god; deification 2the glorification of a person or thing 3 a glorified ideal.

In 1999, after well over a decade of immersion in feminist epistemologies and

other critical theory,20 I found myself rereading the printed account of the

opening session of the 1971 Josquin Festival-Conference (the official histori-

cal record, as it were) in preparation for the spoken address that occasioned

the original version of this essay. It was astonishing to confront the Otherness

of the hallowed text I once knew as a graduate student. Whereas my previous

readings had been informed by an awe-inspired reverence for universal truths

about Josquin, now I was struck at every turn by the historical contingency of

the event and the extent to which it seemed a classic embodiment of the intel-

lectual preoccupations of a bygone era, musicology wie es eigentlich gewesenin1971.21 H ow did I fail to notice the sheer extravagance, the pageantry, the

18. Bruno Nettl speaks of musicologists elusive criteria for greatness being a case of je nesais quoi. Complexity and magnitude are of major importance, while music of outright

popularity (for instance, the composers represented in pops concerts) is avoided: until quite

recently, they proudly stayed away from the likes of Tchaikovsky, O ffenbach, and G rieg ( The

Institutionalization of Musicology: Perspectives of a North American Ethnomusicologist, in

Rethinking Music, ed. Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist [Oxford and New York: Oxford U ni-versity Press, 1999], 287310, at 3067). Few would disagree that these broadly evaluative crite-

ria of greatness tacitly held sway in most citadels of graduate musicology in the late 1970s.

19. The Princeton Josquin Project was a pioneering attempt to apply nascent computer tech-

nology to the task of developing objective criteria (incidences of parallel fifths, leaps, triadic

sonorities, etc.) for analysis of Josquins masses and motets, with the goal of establishing chronol-

ogy and authenticity. See Arthur Mendel, Towards Objective Criteria for Establishing C hro-

nology and Authenticity: What H elp Can the Computer Give? in Josquin Proceedi ngs, 297308.20. See in particular Paula H iggins, Women in Music, Feminist C riticism, and G uerrilla

Musicology: Reflections on Recent Polemics, 19th-Centur y Music17 (1993): 17492.21. The Opening Session, in Josquin Proceedi ngs, 117. This appears to be an edited tran-

script of the opening ceremonies of the Festival-Conference. In the absence of a given author,

names indicated in citations below refer to remarks of individual speakers.



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self-conscious sense of historical moment that marked the occasion, indeed its

mythic proportions? Increasingly resistant, I found myself approaching the

text with a hermeneutics of suspicion.22

The festivities opened with a Renaissance fanfareJosquins Vi ve le roy,performed by the New York Pro Musica Wind Ensemble. Once concluded,

Claude Palisca, then president of the American Musicological Society, stepped

to the podium. D esignated as presiding over the opening session, P alisca set

the tone of encomiastic grandiloquence that would mark the introductory

speeches. The word greatsurfaces repeatedly in the opening pages of the text:the occasion as an homage to the greatcomposer, the most internationalof the greatcomposers ; the venue as a greatcitadel of the performing arts,a greatinstitution ; the historical context as that greatevent around his

50th year that was to expand the world he knew, an expedition facilitated by those greatpatrons of music, Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon. 23

After recounting conference organizer Edward Lowinskys extensive prepa-

rations for the event, Palisca introduced five additional distinguished guests,

each of whom then addressed the assembly.24 The last to speak was William S.

Newman, president of the American Musicological Society during the two

years Lowinsky was planning the festival, who had, through one of the many

instances of secret d iplomacy in this project, we are to ld, reserved the

honor of introducing Edward Lowinsky for himself.25 At last the distin-

guished procreator of the event, as Newman described him, stepped forwardto address the assembly, and further encomia ensued. Lowinsky lauded the

heroic dimension of [Albert] Smijers work in completing the Josquin edi-

tion, and the historic moment when the board of the D utch Musicological

Society decided to sponsor it.26 H e called upon Ludwig Finscher, representing

the International Musicological Society, to read the text of a cablegram sent to

salute Helmuth O sthoff, a greatJosquin scholar, unable to at tend owingto illness, and praised Friedrich Blume, one of the greatestmusical scholarsof our time, for risking his health to make the trip.27 Sumptuous gifts

presentation copies of facsimiles of Canti B and Petruccis second book of

22. A term coined in the 1970s by the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur for a method of in-

terpretation whose purpose is to read beyond the literal, surface-level meaning of a text in order to

unmask the political interests it serves.

23. Opening Session, in Josquin Proceedi ngs, 3, 4, 5.24. The speakers included P eter Mennin, president of The Juilliard School; D r. William R.

Emerson, director of Research and Publications of the National Endow ment for the H umanities

(he is not listed in the official conference program); Ludwig Finscher, representative of the

International M usicological Society; G ustave Reese, president of the R enaissance Society of

America; and William S. Newman. Opening Session, in Josquin Proceedings, 410. See also theInternational Josquin Festival-Conference program for Monday, 21 June, p. 5.

25. Newman, in Opening Session, in Josquin Proceedi ngs, 89.26. Lowinsky, in ibid., 14.

27. Ibid., 1213. Blume had come all the way from G ermany to New York notwithstanding

his doctors warnings that the trip might be a hazard to his health.



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masseshad been bestowed upon the foreign guests and conference speak-

ers.28 And as if the gods of Parnassus themselves were smiling down upon the

gathering in anticipation of the imminent apotheosis of their newest confrere,

a previously unknown copy of the first print of Petruccis Odhecatonhad resur-faced comme par mi raclein the New York Public Library.29 By the end of theaddress, even the spectators had morphed into this greataudience. 30

A conference report by a C olumbia U niversity graduate studentone

Richard Taruskinsubsequently published in Current Musicology, chronicledan event of breathtaking scholarly excitement and enthusiasm, of such power-

ful intellectual voltage that speakers were running back to their rooms at night

to revise their as-yet-to-be-delivered papers in light of new evidence that kept

emerging each day. I t was thrilling, Taruskin wrote, to see the state of

knowledge of Josquins life and work change before ones very eyes. 31 A me-dia event extraordinaire, the New York Timesreviewed all four sold-out con-certs at Alice Tully H all.32 By all accounts, the Josquin Festival-Conference

was a triumph and a testimonial to the indefatigable energy and entrepreneur-

ial genius of possibly the most brilliant cultural historian the field of musicol-

ogy has ever known. There never was before, and probably will never be again,

another musicological blockbuster to rival it.33

Reflecting on my renewed acquaintance with the text of the opening

events, I found it difficult to resisteven in the most skeptical, myth-busting

modean overwhelming sense of nostalgia for the magnificence and splendorof a bygone erain musicology, as well as the world in general. The early

1970s were still a time when stories of the decisive actions of great men and

dramatic human events filled the newspapers and, more importantly, the

28. The facsimile edition o f Petruccis second book of Josquins masses was specially printed

by the Antiquae Musicae Italicae Studiosi at the initiative of the g roups then president, G iuseppe

Vecchi, and copies of H elen H ewitt s edition of Petruccis Canti Bwere presented by decision ofthe Executive Board of the American Musicological Society. I bid., 1314.

29. Ibid., 13.30. Ibid., 11.

31. Richard Taruskin, Report from Lincoln Center: The International Josquin Festival-

Conference, 2125 June 1971, Cur rent Musicology14 (1972): 4764, at 47. The essay isreprinted in Richard Taruskin, Text and A ct: Essays on Music and Per formance(New York andOxford: O xford U niversity Press, 1995), 32243, at 323.

32. Raymond Ericson, H omage Is Paid to Josquin des Prez, New York Times, 23 June1971, 55; D onal H enahan, Prague Group in D ebut, New York Times, 24 June 1971, 32; ibid., Stuttgart Ensemble Performs Josquin in A Cappella Version, New York Times, 26 June 1971,20; and Allen H ughes, Josquin Festival Ends on P ure Note: Ruhland Leads Ensemble of

Munich C apella Antiqua, New York Times, 27 June 1971, 45.

33. With respect to the further historical contingency of the occasion, it could also be saidthat such an event on such a scale would have been impossible anywhere other than in the U nited

States: In welchem anderen Land ht ten die gleichen finanziellen und technischen Mittel

bereitgestanden, um einen derartig perfekt organisierten Spezialistenkongre ablaufen lassen

zu knnen? See Winfried Kirsch, International Josquin Festival Conference New York, DieMusikforschung24 (1971): 44143, at 441.



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television screen, when recent memories of great human achievement still

lingered in the American dream: One small step for [a] man, one giant step

for mankind. G iants and dwarves. That was the way it was in musicology as

well. These were ourgreat men, our very best scholars and leaders. They hadthe right to conduct the business of our great musicological enterprise in any

way they so pleased; any discussion, much less criticism, of their modusoperandiwas unthinkable, at least for us dwarves.

And yet, these were also years of colossal social upheaval and political un-

rest. By the time Lowinsky launched full-scale preparations for the Josquin

Festival-Conference in 1969, the American dream had transmogrified into a

nightmare. In the previous year alone, the assassinations of Martin Luther

King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy had shocked the nation, as had the riots and

police brutality at the D emocratic convention in Chicago. A devastating andhumiliating foreign war in Vietnam was in full throt tle. U nruly mobs of dis-

senting voices reverberated all over America in the form of civil rights marches,

antiwar demonstrations, and public bra-burnings by angry women called

feminists who demanded equal rights. G iven the widespread turmoil and

political upheaval in America at the time, it may seem astonishing, in retro-

spect, that such an extravagant fuss could be made over someone who was, at

least in the greater scheme of things, a rather obscure Renaissance composer.

Fashioning Genius: Kerman, Lowinsky, and theBeethoven of His Time

A Beethovian [sic] biography is born (one ought to be able to say a bio-mythology), the artist is brought forward as a complete hero, endowed with a

discourse (a rare occurrence for a musician), a legend (a good ten or so anec-

dotes), an iconography, a race (that of the Titans of Art: Michelangelo, Balzac)

and a fatal malady (the deafness of he who creates for the pleasure of our ears).

Roland Barthes, Musica Practi ca(1970)34

From a hermeneutically suspicious standpoint, the pomp and panoply of the

International Josquin Festival-C onference appears to have served a much

larger, and specifically ideological, purpose. Something was at stake in the

staging of this conference cum gargantuan princely Renaissance extravaganza,

and I suspect that it was the formal legitimation of Edward Lowinskys own

paradigmhis personal scholarly agendafor the Renaissance musicological

enterprise itself. Much of the rhetoric of the opening session reconnais-

sance, negotiations, allies, cooperation, headquarters, machin-

ery, ministries, delegations, secret diplomacy, recruit[ment], conspir[acy] conjures up nefarious scenarios of espionage and military

counterintelligence. Tellingly, the only word absent from this sea of Cold War

34. Roland Barthes, Musica Practica, in ImageMusicText, 14954, at 151.



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rhetoric is enemy, as if he were lurking silent and unseen in the wings,

primed to launch a sneak attack. And if not exactly hidden behind the cur-

tains, a genius locimay well have been inhabiting the Josquin proceedings:

possibly, I suggest, in the form of the young Joseph Kerman.H ow ever tacit the political agenda of the Josquin Festival-C onference,

Lowinsky had quite publicly proclaimed his ambitions for the future of musi-

cology, not long before the conference preparations began, in a volatile and

vituperative exchange of ideological manifestos with Kerman in JAMS.Kermans Profi le for American Musicology had launched the first of many

frontal assaults to come, against what he would later label the positivist para-

digm of musicology, though here it is called the true objective path . . . of

the great G erman tradition. That tradition, Kerman wrote, was not dic-

tated by objective truths of nature, it arose out of a certain national current ofthought at a certain point it its history. 35 A key target of his proposal, implicit

in 1965 and more explicitly articulated in his Contemplati ng Musicof 1985,was what he characterized as the kind of unthinking collecting of informa-

tion that musicologists often engage in at the expense of his preferred mode

of criticism. One ostensibly passing comment in Kermans modest nine-

page tract proved to be incendiary:

For reasons of time and timidity, I pass over the trivia that occupy good minds

while Beethovens sketches remain unanalyzed (the G ermans are onlytr anscr ibingthem) and spurious works lurk scandalously in the Josquincanon.36 [italics original; added emphasis in bold]

The latter statement about Josquin goaded Lowinsky to an impassioned

defense:

Professor Kerman is scandalized by the fact that spur ious works lurk . . . in theJosquin canon.H ow valid is such a complaint in view of the hard and stubbornfact that as yet we have neither the complete works of Josquin nor of any ofthe significant masters of his envi ronment?. . . how can we, at the present state

of Josquin research, even talk of a canon of his works? H ow can we expect todistinguish Josquins style from that of his many great and smallcontempo-raries i f we do not study the smal ler masters wi th the same care as the great ones there should be more wo rk on t he great masters, demands Professor

Kerman, when the simple truth is: there should be more work on both great andsmal l mastersandthe two should go together.37 [emphasis added]

35. Joseph Kerman, A Profile for American Musicology, thisJournal 18 (1965): 6169,

at 67.

36. Ibid., 66.37. Edw ard E. Lowinsky, Character and Purposes of American Musicology: A Reply to

Joseph Kerman, thisJournal 18 (1965): 22234, at 22728. Reprinted in Edward E. Lowinsky,

Music in the Culture of the Renai ssance and Other Essays, ed. Bonnie J. Blackburn (Chicago andLondon: U niversity of C hicago P ress, 1989), 2:95864. Kerman responded briefly, in a subse-

quent Communication, wherein he seems taken aback by the animus of Lowinskys shrill



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While there is no doubt as to where Lowinsky stands with respect to Josquins

stature, or indeed with respect to the self-evidence of a hierarchical qualitative

distinction between composers (great versus small), what seems remarkable

about this paragraph written in 1965 is that there is no hint that Josquinshould necessar i lywarrant special treatment in the quality and quantity ofscholarly work devoted to him as opposed to other composers. H ere we find

an exhortation to the simultaneous study of masters both great and smal las if to suggest the contingency of the study of one upon the other.

Somewhat paradoxically, Lowinsky had published just the year before an

article that at tempted to t race the intellectual lineage of the idea of musical ge-

nius. I n the four decades since its original publication, Musical G enius:

Evolution and O rigins of a C oncept, like its subject, attracted scant attention

until only recently.38 Briefly stated, Lowinskys thesis held that around 1500,when composers abandoned compositional procedures based on preexisting

sacred and secular melodies in favor of freely composed polyphony, there arose

a concomitant awareness of the composer as a peculiarly gifted creative artist

whose exceptional musical gifts were paired with an artistic, read difficult,

personality. In this subtle mixture of talent and temperament, Lowinsky saw

the fermentation of the modern notion of musical genius. 39

I shall address my concerns with Lowinskys formulation at greater length

below. For now, suffice it to say that Josquin, rather than being a precocious

prototype of Romantic genius, emerges as Lowinskys own intellectual con-struct, heavily indebted, to be sure, to nineteenth-century G erman discourses

of musical genius promulgated mainly by August Wilhelm Ambros (1816

1876). As for so many other areas of musicology, Ambross pioneering work

laid the ideological bedrock of modern Josquin scholarship and provided the

cultural filter through which Lowinsky and others of his generation viewed

Reply (characterized as a Panzer attack ) and drew att ention to their common g round, saying, I should much rather hug him to my breast as an ally (thisJournal 18 [1965]: 42627).

38. Edward E. Lowinsky, Musical G enius: Evolution and Origins of a Concept, MusicalQuarterly50 (1964): 32140 and 47695; reprinted with additions in Lowinsky, Music in theCulture of t he Renaissance1:4066. References here are to the original publication. The articleoriginated as a paper read at a symposium on creativity held at the Eastman School of Music,

4 May 1962.

39. A similar argument advanced around the same time in a classic art historical study aimed

to demonstrate that Albert D rers engraving Melencolia I bore witness to the genesis of themodern concept of genius and that the artists own writings expressed precocious ideas of inner

creativity and inspiration that were only to reach maturity in the Romantic period. See Mart in

Kemp, The Super-Artist as Genius: The Sixteenth-Century View, in Geni us: The H istor y of anI dea, ed. Penelope Murray (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 3254, at 34. The study in questionis Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Satur n and Melancholy: Studi es in theH istor y of N atural Phi losophy, Reli gion, and A r t(London: Nelson, 1964). For cautionary remarksfrom subsequent art historians against reading the modern notion of genius into this engraving,

see the bibliography in Kemp, The Super-Artist, 50 n. 6.



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the opinions of Josquins sixteenth-century enthusiasts.40 Nevertheless, it

seems doubtful that Ambrosian discourse on Josquin would have sustained its

scholarly longevity without the intervention at a pivotal moment in later

twentieth-century music historiography of powerful scholarly agendas andpersonalities.41 A quick perusal, for example, of the bibliography on Josquin

printed in the second edition of The N ew Grove D ictionar y of M usic andMusiciansreveals relatively few isolated studies of the composer, and only twoarticles in English, prior to 1961. Writing in 1941, Alfred Einstein had charac-

terized the music of Josquin, among other composers of early music, as being

in a state of petrification, in that it could no longer make a direct appeal to

the popular mind. 42 Even as late as 1967, C arl Dahlhaus again described the

music of Josquin (along with that o f Machaut and Monteverdi) as petrified,

and any attempts to revive it as futile. 43 Such a statement would haveseemed ludicrous five years later. Rather than being viewed as the unmediated,

belated legacy and inevitable culmination of Ambross sustained attention to

the composer a century earlier, the late twentieth-century apotheosis of

Josquin, I would suggest, arose from a confluence of highly contingent musi-

cal and historical circumstances involving the impending completion of the

opera omnia in the 1960s, the publication of O sthoff s Josquinmonographof 196265, Lowinskys G enius article of 1964, the Kerman-Lowinsky de-

bates of 1965, and above all, the International Josquin Festival-Conference of

1971, which, I would further suggest, appropriated Josquin des Prez asRenaissance musicologys very own genius, ahistorically refashioned in

Beethovenian guise.44

40. Philipp Ot to Naegele, August Wilhelm Ambros: H is H istorical and C ritical Thought

(Ph.D . diss., P rinceton U niversity, 1954); Paula H iggins, Antoine Busnois and Musical Culture

in Late Fifteenth-Century France and Burgundy (Ph.D . diss., Princeton U niversity, 1987), 322

25; D on H arrn, Burney and Ambros as Editors of Josquins Music, in Josquin Proceedi ngs,14877, esp. his annotated list of Ambross transcriptions of 87 Josquin pieces (19 masses,

48 motets, 15 French chansons, 3 I talian secular works, and 2 instrumental canons), 17277; andmost recently Andrew Kirkman, From H umanism to Enlightenment: Reinventing Josquin,

Jour nal of M usicology17 (1999): 44158, at 45258.41. D aniel Leech-Wilkinson has drawn at tention to the largely unacknowledged roles that

reputation and personality play in evaluating the success or failure of individual scholarly endeav-

ors. See his Modern I nvention of Medieval Music: Scholarship, I deology, Per formance(Cambridge:Cambridge U niversity Press, 2002), 23942.

42. Alfred Einstein, Greatness in Music, trans. Csar Saerchinger (New York: OxfordU niversity Press, 1941; reprint, New York: D a C apo, 1976), 9.

43. C arl D ahlhaus, Estheti cs of Music, trans. William W. Austin (Cambridge: CambridgeU niversity Press, 1982), 9899. O riginally published in G erman in 1967 as Musiksthetik.

44. In the opening session, C laude Palisca credited G ustave Reese, and specifically the someone-hundred-page chapter Josquin and His Contemporaries in Music in the Renai ssance, with a large share of credit for the Josquin renaissance that succeeded the Palestrina renaissance

( Opening Session, in Josquin Proceedi ngs, 7). Reeses text twice refers to Josquins possession ofgenius ( Josquin needed the large variety of text, available to the motet composers to express the

many-sidedness of his genius and he wrote canon as readily as Bach wrote fugue . . . each man



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It is worth bearing in mind that Kermans incendiary comment in 1965

paired Beethovens sketches and spurious works lurk[ing] scandalously in the

Josquin canon as egregious examples of the deficiencies in then-existing

scholarship. And without wishing to impute a necessarily causal relationship(the 1971 conference was ostensibly a celebration of the 450th anniversary of

Josquins death in 1521), one cannot help but notice the timingcoincidental

or notof the International Josquin Festival-Conference in June 1971,

short ly after the monumental commemorative celebrations of Beethovens

Bicentennial, which had been enacted scarcely six months earlier in no fewer

than three major international conferences in Bonn, Berlin, and Vienna.45

Coming fast on the heels of the Beethoven-Jahr, the 1971 Josquin confer-

ence was perhaps not surprisingly awash in allusions to Josquins genius.

Ludwig Finscher, in the opening session, extolled the unique genius ofJosquin, calling him one of the first and one of the greatest incarnations of

creative musical genius. 46 Myroslav Antonowycz later referred to Josquins

creative mind as belonging among the greatest o f the great in the cultural

history of Europe. D on H arrns paper invoked Ambross opinion that

Josquin was the first composer that strikes one, predominantly, with the

impression of genius. 47 Jitka Snz kovs article opens with a reference to

Josquinthis g enius of sparkling musical ideas and overflow ing musi-

cality. 48 Two papers drew explicit comparisons between Josquin and

merely employed a technical medium particularly suited to his genius ), but never to his being

a genius, and his text is largely devoid of the lionizing discourse that would become typical of

Josquin scholarship in the decade leading up to the 1971 conference.

45. See the three conference proceedings: Ber icht ber den i nt ernat ionalen musikwi s-senschaf tli chen K ongress: Bonn 1970, ed. C arl D ahlhaus, H ans-Joachim Marx, Magda M arx-Weber, and G unther Massenkeil (Kassel: Brenreiter, 1971); Ber icht ber den I nternati onalenBeethoven-K ongress 10.12. Dezember 1970 in Ber lin, ed. H einz Alfred Brockhaus and KonradNiemann (Berlin: Neue Musik, 1971); and Beethoven-Symposion Wien 1970: Ber icht, ed. Erich

Schenk, Veroffentlichung der Staatlichen Instituts fr Musikforschung Preussische KulturbesitzBerlin 12 (Vienna: Bhlau, 1971).

46. Opening Session, in Josquin Proceedi ngs, 6.47. Myroslaw Antonowycz, I llibata D ei Virgo: A Melodic Self-Portrait o f Josquin des

Prez, in Josquin Proceedi ngs, 54559, at 558; Harrn, Burney and Ambros, 148.48. The quote is credited to H einrich Glarean (Dodecachordon, 1547), but as we shall see be-

low, it is based on a questionable translation of the term ingenium. Jitka Snzkov, Josquin inCzech Sources of the Second H alf of the Sixteenth Century, in Josquin Proceedi ngs, 27984, at279, quoting H ellmuth Christian Wolff, Die Musik der alt en N ieder lnder(Leipzig, 1956), 58,and G larean (see the passage in question in my Appendix C, Ex. 2, below). Snzkovs contribu-

tion was one of three essays not delivered at the conference itself. See Lowinsky, preface to Josquin

Proceedi ngs, v. According to the citations in Snzkovs footnote, this appears to be a freely embell-ished t ranslation from Wolff s G erman Ausschweifung eines bersprudelnden G enies (my

translation would be something like: the extravagance of his overflowing genius ), which in turn

is a direct translation from the Latin lasciuientis ingenii impetus. Among many points that could

be made here, I shall confine myself for now to two. First, neither the Latin nor the G erman origi-

nal refers to Josquin as this genius (i.e., a genius persona); Wolff s use of the genitive clearly



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Beethoven, as well as Bach and Mozart.49 Sprinkled throughout the Festival-

Conference program were eight quotations ranging chronologically from

Martin Luther to H elmuth O sthoff (see Appendix A, Exx. 18), presumably

reflecting the unanimous, transhistorical testimony to Josquins genius andgreatness, but attesting simultaneously (and unwittingly) to the gradual infla-

tion of Josquins genius status over time.50

But the most remarkable comments of all came from Lowinsky himself:

And of the greatest musicians of any age, Josquin des Prez is a figure so tow-

ering that his name cannot be left out of any enumeration of great composers,

however small the number of them might happen to be. 51 The impact o f that

last breathtaking remark doesnt fully register until one takes Lowinsky literally

at his word and does the math. What happened to the pluralistic Lowinsky

of 1965 who advocated an all-embracing scholarly approach to composers both great and small ? While in the G enius article of 1964, Lowinsky had

described Josquin as being to the Renaissance musician the very incarnation

of musical genius, 52 even there, Josquin figures as a member of a triumvirate:

Josquin, Lasso, G esualdo, however different they were in character and as

artists, share one essential quality: they are musical geniuses whose extraordi-

nary gifts are matched by an extraordinary personality; they exhibit immense

strength of feeling, spontaneity, originality, independence as human beings and

in social intercourse with others; they are great individuals, and each one of

indicates possession (i.e., Josquins genius, not Josquin, this genius ). Second, G lareans pas-

sage is one of several that criticize the transgressive excess of Josquins imagination. Wolff q uotes

G larean in the context of a discussion of such chastising comments, whereas Snzkov, by taking

Wolff s quotation out of context, has transformed G lareans negative statement into one of un-

qualified praise, and has further exaggerated its meaning by tacitly switching G lareans and Wolff s

genitives of possession ( of his talent / of his genius ) into a nominative ( Josquinthis ge-

nius ). Miller, on the other hand, rather blandly translates this key passage as the impetuosity of a

lively talent. This and several other passages like it form clear examples of a kind of censorship or

sanitizing of genius, which I shall discuss in a forthcoming study.49. In contrast with Beethoven, who to this day is more honoured on paper than in perfor-

mances throughout the Peninsula, Josquin completely captivated Spain and Portugal from the

moment P etruccis prints first began circulating abroad (Robert Stevenson, Josquin in the

Music of Spain and Portugal, in Josquin Proceedi ngs, 21746, at 217); Josquin was a profes-sional singer and obviously an excellent one. H e was a singer-composer, whereas the great com-

posers of later times, such as Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, had their own practical experience

primarily in instrumental music (Walter Wiora, The Structure of Wide-Spanned M elodic Lines

in Earlier and Later Works of Josquin, in Josquin Proceedi ngs, 30916, at 309).50. The quot ation from C harles Burney (Appendix A, no. 5), who I believe was the first to

acknow ledge Josquin as a genius persona in the modern sense of the word, is emblematic of

the eighteenth-century English preoccupation w ith origins of all sorts, and especially, on the lit-erary front, of the figure of the original genius. See Glenn Wright, G eoffrey the U nbarbarous:

C haucerian G enius and E ighteenth-Century Antimedievalism, Engli sh Studi es82 (2001):193202, at 193.

51. Opening Session, in Josquin Proceedi ngs, 12.52. Lowinsky, Musical G enius, Musical Quar ter ly, 491.



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them was hailed in his time as the foremost representative of an expressive style

of music.53

Tellingly, in Lowinskys description of these three Renaissance geniuses we

find a virtual compendium of Romantic genius criteria superimposed upon

the testimony of sixteenth-century witnesses: extraordinary personality,

immense strength of feeling, spontaneity, originality, independence. 54

But even here, Josquin has yet to emerge as the towering giant of Renaissance

music historiography, and this more tempered view reflected the current state

of musicological opinion, in which Josquin was still, as promulgated most

widely in G ustave Reeses Music in the Renaissance(1954), one of the two orthree greatest composers of the . . . Renaissance. And Reese qualified this

even further, specifying that this status owed primarily to Josquins motets.

Indeed, the chapter Josquin des Prez and H is Contemporaries, while sin-

gling out Josquin, seems relatively evenhanded in its evaluation of the broader

musical context:

No one man could alone have been responsible for all the characteristic quali-

ties of the new music. H istorical forces combined to mould them. But these

forces were able to find particularly brilliant expression because a large g roup of

singularly gifted composers were all vigorously active at about the same time.

Obrecht, Agricola, Isaac, Compere, Josquin, Brumel, Pierre de la Rue, and

Mouton were the brightest lights in an especially luminous constellation. AndJosquin was a star of the first magnitude.55

The constructed image of Josquin as Renaissance musical genius, it would

seem, derives in large part from a tendency to read the letters and casual anec-

dotes of his sixteenth-century contemporaries through a lens strongly filtered

by the Romantic discourse of genius that has permeated Beethoven reception

history. Three of these in particular have contributed significantly to the

mythopoesis of Josquin in seeming to attribute to him the highly idiosyncratic

53. Ibid., 486.

54. The qualities with which the t erm genius has been invested ever since the mid-

eighteenth century, such as spontaneity, outstanding originality, and exceptional creativity were

not implied in the Latin ingeniumand the Italian ingegno, meaning natural disposition, i.e.talent (Rudolf Wittkower, G enius: Individualism in Art and Artists, in D icti onar y of t heH istor y of I deas: Studi es of Selected Pi votal I deas, ed. Philip Wiener [New York: Charles ScribnersSons, 1973], 2:297312, at 305). Also: The Genieperiode, the [literary] Romantic Movements,both in G ermany and France, were times of angry enthusiasm and of wild revolt; [with] ecstatic

emphasis laid upon the freedom, the spontaneity, and the originality of the creative genius

(Logan Pearsall Smith, Four Words: Romanti c, Or iginali ty, Creati ve, Geni us, Society for PureEnglish, Tract 17 [Oxford: C larendon, 1924], 36; cited in H ans Lenneberg, The First U n-

appreciated G enius, Journal of Musicological Research4 [1982]: 14557, at 155).55. G ustave Reese, Music in the Renaissance(New York: W. W. Norton, 1954), 184. For

Reese, Josquins only rival in the realm of motet composition w as Palestrina, due to the widely

held and no doubt correct opinion that his music is more suitable for devotional purposes. But

he felt that P alestrina must yield fi rst place to Josquin as a historical figure and must admit him

to a place at least of companionship on purely musical grounds (ibid., 246).



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and temperamental personality of Beethoven. The first is the famous letter to

D uke Ercole dEste of Ferrara (1502) by his agent G ian de Artiganova, in

which he discouraged the duke from hiring Josquin because he was difficult to

get along with and composes when he wants to, and not when one wantshim to. 56 The second is the story of Johannes Manlius (1562), dating from

four decades after Josquins death, in which an irascible, petulant Josquin

called one of his singers You ass! and publicly berated him for adding orna-

ments that he had not written into the piece,57 an incident uncannily echoed

in a well-known quote of Beethovens: I refuse to allow another, whoever he

may be, to alter my compositions. 58 While the notion of a temperamental

Renaissance artist is itself a trope of some venerability, and was certainly a trait

attributed to artists like Michelangelo, one does wonder whether these partic-

ular letters and anecdotes would have figured so prominently in Josquin stud-ies in the absence of a Beethovenian historical framework.59 The third example

is the equally famous testimony of the Swiss humanist H einrich G larean

(14881563), a near contemporary of Josquin and a knowledgeable musical

authority:

Those who knew him say that he published his works after much deliberation

and with manifold corrections; neither did he release a song to the public un-

less he had kept it to himself for some years, the opposite of what Jacob

Obrecht appears to have done.60

56. Among the numerous citations and discussions of this letter, the ones most pertinent to

the subject at hand are Lowinsky, Musical Genius, Musical Quar ter ly, 48485; and Rob C.Wegman, From M aker to C omposer: Improvisation and Musical Authorship in the Low

Countries, 14501500, thisJournal 49 (1996): 40979, at 46667.

57. You ass, why do you add ornamentation? If it had pleased me, I would have inserted

it myself. If you wish to amend properly composed songs, make your own, but leave mine un-

amended! Quoted in Rob C . Wegman, And Josquin Laughed . . .: Josquin and the Com-

posers Anecdote in the Sixteenth C entury, Journal of M usicology17 (1999): 31957, at 322.58. See Nicholas Cook, The Other Beethoven: Heroism, the Canon, and the Works of

181314, 19th-Centur y Music27 (2003): 324, at 6.59. The idea of being a difficult creative personality may have been something of a trope in

this period, which saw the rise of an elite group of exceptionally talented artists in Italian courts

that required more deference than was due to mere craftsmen (Kemp, The Super-Artist,

37). Like Josquin, the artist Andrea Mantegna, for example, working for Isabella dEste at the

nearby Gonzaga court in Mantua, was regarded as a difficult character, quick to t ake offence and

slow to meet obligations (ibid.). I n the Renaissance, the concept of artistic temperament had to

do with humoral medicine and the Saturnine disposition that gave rise to melancholy, with the

presumably greatest creative artists being the victims most seriously afflicted with the condition.

See the classic studies by Rudolf Wittkower and Margot Wittkower, Born U nder Satur n: TheCharacter and Conduct of Ar ti sts. A Documented H istor y fr om Ant iqui ty to the French Revolu ti on(New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1963); and Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl, Satur n andMelancholy. For a deeper exploration of melancholy as it relates specifically to Josquin, his person-ality, and contemporaneous anecdotes about him, see Wegman, And Josquin Laughed,

33857.

60. G larean, H einr ich Glarean Dodecachordon, ed. and trans. Clement A. Miller ([Rome]:American Institute of Musicology, 1965), 2:265. See Appendix C, Ex. 3, below for the original

Latin.



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The powerful resonance of this comment in the late twentieth century lies, I

suspect, in its tacit evocation of the struggling artist genius trope and, more

specifically, of Beethoven, the embodiment of heroic striving, the indefatigable

genius, laboriously reworking his compositions in sketch after sketch aftersketch.

In a revised version of his G enius article, published in the Dicti onar y ofthe H istor y of I deas(1973), Lowinsky himself linked Josquin and Beethovenwith explicit reference to the aforementioned G larean anecdote. A comparison

of the earlier (1964) and later (1973) versions of the article reveals that

Lowinsky added a new section on Beethoven as the quintessential represen-

tative of musical genius, . . . both as a man and as an artist. More importantly,

Lowinsky pairs Josquin and Beethoven in connection with Nietzsches reac-

tion to Beethovens sketches: All great artists and thinkers were great work-ers, indefatigable not only in inventing, but also in rejecting, sifting,

transforming, ordering (H uman A ll Too H uman, 1878). H e continues witha comparison of the two composers personalities:

It was Nietzsche who, following Beethovens example, discovered an element

of musical genius often overlooked by writers from the Renaissance through

romanticism: endless patience and infinite striving (Streben) or effort. One ofthe few w riters remarking upon this was G lareanus, when he spoke about

Josquin des Prez. And, indeed, there is a peculiar affinity between the personal-

ities and the creative characteristics of the great genius of the fifteenth century

who came out of the Middle Ages and moved toward the new world of the

Renaissance, and the composer of the eighteenth century who moved from

classicism to romanticism, creating in the process a musical amalgam of an ut-

terly unique character.61

The source of Lowinskys comparison happens to be the 1960 edition of

Donald Jay Grouts H istor y of Western Music, as duly cited in a footnote.62

G routs widely circulating music history textbook predated the original ver-

sion of Lowinskys G enius essay by several years; and yet it was only in the

1973 revised version of the essay, written in the aftermath of the 1965

61. Edward E. Lowinsky, Musical Genius, in Dicti onar y of t he H istor y of I deas, ed. Wiener,2:31226, at 325. The passage from Nietzsche mentioning Beethovens sketches had in fact been

quoted in the 1964 G enius article, but in the context of a discussion of Roger Norths views on

genius (Lowinsky, Musical G enius, Musical Quar ter ly, 333). H ere, Lowinsky does not discussBeethoven further, beyond mentioning in the corresponding footnote Nietzsches remarkable

recognition of the importance of Beethovens sketchbooks. The discussion in the 1973 G enius

article about B eethoven and Josquin is not found in the earlier version.

62. Lowinsky based his comments on the following excerpt: Josquin and B eethoven resem-

ble each other in many ways. In both, the strong impulse of personal utterance struggled againstthe limits of the musical language of their time. Both were tormented by the creative process, and

worked slowly and with numerous revisions. Both had a sense of humor: both, because of their

independent attitude, had trouble with their patrons. Both, in their best works, achieved that

combination of intensity and order, individuality and universality, which is the mark of genius

(Donald Jay Grout, A H istory of Western Music[New York: W. W. Norton, 1960], 183).



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Kerman-Lowinsky exchange and the 1971 Josquin Festival-Conference, that

the additions conjoining Josquin and Beethoven as kindred geniuses appear,

along with the added phrase labeling Josquin the great genius of the fifteenth

century. The point here is not to establish the intellectual primacy or ori-gins of the Josquin-Beethoven paradigm, which might well prove an exercise

in futility.63 Rather it is to show brief ideological freeze-frames of Lowinskys

gradually changing thinking about Josquin.

The invocation of a Josquin-Beethoven paradigm assumes a universal,

transhistorical understanding of the characteristics of musical genius. While

G lareans remarks about Josquins painstaking, time-consuming creative

process have often been interpreted as implicitly devaluing the comparative

facility of Jacob Obrecht (c. 14581505), G larean elsewhere famously praises

Obrecht for his astonishing fertility of invention and seems amazed that hehad composed a mass in one night. In other words, G larean clearly admires

and admits the viability of both creative models, whereas his comments have

been retrospectively viewed through a Beethovenian lens as necessarily prefer-

ential of Josquins belabored approach. O thers besides G larean similarly re-

garded the ease and rapidity of execution typical of Obrecht and also of

H einrich Isaac (c. 14501517) as signs of exceptional creativity. The afore-

mentioned Artiganova, in attempting to dissuade Ercole dEste from hiring

the unreliable Josquin, tellingly marvels that Isaac had composed a motet in

two days: From this one can only judge that he is very rapid in the art ofcomposition. 64 In matters of artistic production around the same time,

pedantic, slow, laborious execution smacked of the artisans craft, and by

the mid-sixteenth century, most theorists were insisting on facility of execu-

tion, on a manner of painting that would give the impression of rapid work

and effortless skill hiding the toil that had gone into the making of the work of

art. 65 Michelangelos comments on the subject are fairly typical of the period:

Works are not to be judged by the amount of useless labor spent on them

but by the worth of the skill and mastery of their author. 66

63. For example, Albert Smijers, in a lecture to the [Royal] Musical Association on 26 April

1927, discussed the aforementioned passage from G larean and asked, D oes not this make us

compare Josquin with Beethoven, who in a similar way often was busy with the ideas for a new

work, making improvements from time to time until it received a definite form? (Albert Smijers,

Josquin des Prez, Proceedi ngs of the Musical A ssociat ion53 [192627]: 95116, at 104). Thetemperamental association between the two continues even in more recent literature on

Beethoven: We have only to read the account of an early sixteenth-centur y critic like

G larean to see the enormous emot ional impact of t he music of Josquin, w ho reduced his lis-

teners to tears, and who, fu r thermore, was known for his ar rogant and temperamental refusal

to wr i te musi c when commi ssioned except when he fel t l i ke i t (emphasis added). See C harlesRosen, D id B eethoven H ave All the Luck? review of Beethoven and the Constr uct ion ofGenius, by Tia DeNora, The N ew York Revi ew of Books, 14 November 1996, 5764, at 58.

64. Quoted in Wegman, And Josquin Laughed, 334.

65. Wittkower, G enius: Individualism in Art and Artists, sec. 4, Art and G enius, 2:305.

66. Quoted in ibid.



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In other words, it is questionable whether painstaking effort necessarily

carried the aesthetic value that has been retrospectively attributed to it, for

methodical Beethovenesque compositional process has not necessarily con-

ferred present-day genius status upon all Renaissance composers. AdrianWillaert, to give but one example, had a similar reputation in the Renaissance

for being slow to produce, according to his student Zarlino. 67 H ailed in his

day as divino Adriano and as a new Pythagoras, Willaert was regarded by

many as the unrivaled heir apparent to Josquin.68 H is six-voice motet Verbumbonum et suavehad even been sung under Josquins name in the papal chapelchoir.69 And yet for a variety of historical and historiographical reasons,

Willaerts present-day reception history has been dwarfed by that o f Josquin.

Owing largely to the influence of G lareans comments about Josquins

working habits, it often seems as if a covert assumption operative in Josquinscholarship is that the onlysurviving attributed works that can trulybe authen-tic are the pieces that Josquin would presumably have corrected carefully

before he released them to the public and that happen to conform to late

twentieth-century, historically constrained notions of compositional perfec-

tion. Even if there is some truth to G lareans testimony (and we must at least

acknowledge the possibility that there isnt), it fails to take into account the

possibility of the composers works (say, his working drafts) being circulated

withouthis permission (a number of viable hypothetical scenarios leap to

mind, including unscrupulous pilfering, whether during his own lifetime or ofhis posthumous creative estate).70

Moreover, even in the cases of those purportedly carefully corrected

works he released to the public and it is doubtful that Josquin and his

contemporaries would have understood those phrases as we do todaythere

is no guarantee of musical perfection by early twenty-first-century standards.

Their alleged release for public consumption says nothing about anyone elses

aesthetic taste or musical judgment beyond Josquins own. Further, the music

printing process in its nascent years would hardly have ensured the accurate

67. Lewis Lockwood and G iulio O ngaro, Willaert, Adrian, sec. 2, Willaert in Venice, in

The New Grove D icti onar y of M usic and Musicians, 2d ed. (2001), 27:389, 390.68. Jessie Ann Ow ens, Music H istoriography and the Definition of Renaissance, Notes

47 (1990): 30530, at 312.

69. The anecdote comes from Z arlino, who recounts that when Willaert pointed out that the

motet was in fact his own, the singers never wanted to sing it again. One is inclined to ask, along

with Rob Wegman, whether we may not be dealing with a phenomenon of mass psychology,

rather than musical judgment ( Who Was Josquin? in The Josquin Companion, ed. Sherr, 2150,at 25).

70. This of course begs the question posed by Foucault, H ow can one define a work amidthe millions of traces left by someone after his death? particularly in the absence of a theory of

the work for this period. More importantly, such a question impinges directly on Josquins status

as an author, or his author function, both then and now. See Foucault, What Is an Author?

1034. I address these questions in a forthcoming monograph on authorship and creative

patrilineage.



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reproduction of every last detail of a composition, much less guarantee total

authorial control over the final product. We must remind ourselves that we

deal with the beginnings of printing and that editorial methods and standards

that cry out for improvement in the twentieth century were certainly far fromperfect in Petruccis time, as Lowinsky himself cautioned thirty years ago .71

Palestrina and Victoria, who published several decades later, were exceptional

among their contemporaries, according to Ludovico Zacconi, in having had

the opportunity to supervise carefully the publication of their work.72 It seems

to be assumed, in part because of G lareans remarks, that Josquin would have

benefited from similar authorial supervision, but whatever quality control

Josquin may have exercised in the creative process, it seems more likely that it

went more or less out the window once the piece left his hands.73 In other

words, broadly stated, there is an urgent need in Josquin studies to engage in amore historically grounded theorizing about epistemological questions of aes-

thetics, authorship, music production, and the status of the work as they relate

specifically to the pre-modern period.

Aspects of Josquins reception history resonate so strongly and retrospec-

tively with B arthess bio-mythology of Beethoven, as outlined in the epi-

graph at the opening of this section, that they tend to blur and even dissolve

the vast chronological and epistemological boundaries that separate the two

composers. One almost seems to imagine their historical consubstantiation.

Bedecked in Beethovenian rhetoric as a struggling hero, Josquin is endowedwith a discourse (of genius), a legend (multiple mythologizing anecdotes),

a race of Titans (rubbing shoulders in the same sentencesand possibly dur-

ing his lifetimewith Michelangelo and Leonardo), and an iconography (the

austere, turbaned Josquin of the Opmeer woodcut striking a pose not unlike

the cool, distant regards characteristic of icons of the heroic Beethoven).

Josquin lacks only a fatal malady comparable to Beethovens deafness. And

the paradigm extends still further in the widespread adoption of Ambross di-

vision of Josquins canon into a tripartite Beethovenian early-middle-late

chronology, in the Beethovenizing rhetoric that ascribes to Josquin the liber-ation of Renaissance music from the shackles of cantus firmus treatment, in

71. Elders, Report of the First Josquin Meeting, 28.

72. James H aar, A Sixteenth-Century Attempt at Music Criticism, thisJournal 36 (1983):

191209, at 196, citing Ludovico Zacconi, Prat ti ca di musica(Venice, 1592).73. Johannes Ott hints at this possibility in the preface to the motet collection Novum et i n-

signe opus musicumof 1537: outside of the fact that w e were forced to make use of the services ofmen who do not understand the art [of music], there is also great danger that we have used man-

uscripts in which many features have been purposely corrupted by certain persons and in whichmany things have been either omitted or changed through negligence. Edgar H . Sparks, TheMusic of N oel Bauldeweyn(New York: G alaxy Music, 1972), 9495. This remark, while oftencited to justify suspicion surrounding the authenticity of the pieces transmitted in this and other

late manuscripts of G erman provenance, might just as well attest to post-authorial contamination

of a work that encountered untold vicissitudes in transit to print.

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