Born for the Muses: The Life and Masses of Jacob Obrecht.

The tendency to single out all-surpassing masters who soar above their commonplace contemporaries has not benefitted the composer Jacob Obrecht, who had the mixed luck of sharing at least part of a lifetime with the celebrated Josquin des Prez. A little acrostic for struggling students of the musically rich Renaissance used to tell of the JAILCOB generation: Josquin, at the lead, followed by Agricola, Isaac, et. al., through Obrecht and Brumel. Josquin still stands at the lead in Reinhard Strohm's magisterial The Rise of European Music: 1380-1500; or, rather, he stands at the end, for that book's triumphant conclusion with Josquin would seem to have been predicted by its very title. Rob Wegman's book on Obrecht takes advantage of fruitful labors from musicologists past and present in crafting a comprehensive, thought-provoking and musically detailed review of a composer who deserves every word. Obrecht benefits from the relative wealth of detail about him that survives; we know far more about him than we know about Josquin, for example. There is even a recently discovered portrait. A book devoted to Obrecht's impressive collection of some thirty polyphonic settings of mass ordinary texts - "mass cycles," as they are known to musicologists - is a welcome book indeed.

The author presents a compelling narrative account of Obrecht's life. Some of the most engaging stretches of the book concern Obrecht's father, whose duties as city trumpeter for Ghent brought him frequently into the service of Charles the Bold and other Burgundian dignitaries. Wegman fleshes out what must have been a lucrative and prestigious career. He speculates on why the gifted son found an entirely different musical path. It was a harder path, perhaps, though it lead to fame among Italian patrons whose bidding wars had such steady impact on fifteenth-century musical developments. We see evidence of Obrecht's success at many turns, but there appear to have been too many turns: there are signs of controversy in the composer's frequent movements from cathedral to cathedral through the Low Countries. Institutional workings and the liturgical demands on polyphonic music are well described in this book. The composer's path intersected with those of musical greats - surely with the influential Antoine Busnoys, and probably with the even more prestigious Jean Okeghem. A mid-sixteenth-century legend has it that Obrecht taught music to Erasmus. Wegman makes good use of the "parallel career" of Pieter Bordon to imagine the lost details of Obrecht's early education. As it turns out, Bordon is identifiable as the composer of an important polyphonic setting of the epoch-defining tune L'homme arme, yielding one of the author's many discoveries and clarifications of the historical record.

And there is a great deal of writing about the music. Sometimes one feels a lack of context (might not Josquin and his Milanese colleagues have had some impact already on the young Obrecht by the early 1480s?), but with so much detail on Obrecht's music this seems like an unfair complaint. Wegman is not afraid to speculate about mysterious causes that may lie behind - and the equally mysterious meaning that may lie within - the neutral notes on the page. He is keenly interested in stylistic development, and he tries to make sense of stylistic plurality (not an unusual situation for the period). Even when one finds unlikely lines of analysis, one is happy for the opportunity to disagree with a skillful argument. And even when speculation rests on very thin evidence, one is happy to see developed topics that have been relatively neglected. As a rule, for music of this and many other periods, it is rarely possible to "recapture and understand creative 'moments' in the composer's life" from the distance of so many centuries (6). But this attempt shows that the effort is worthwhile.

THOMAS BROTHERS Duke University