The Josquin Companion.

Richard Sherr, ed. The Josquin Companion.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. xxix + 691 pp. + 1 pl. + CD. illus. bibl. $150. ISBN: 0-19-816335-2.

In recent years musicologists, by and large, have not been willing to write book-length studies--the traditional "life and works"--for composers of early music. It is striking that even a composer as important as Josquin des Prez (ca. 1450-1521) has never been the subject of a monograph in English; Helmuth Osthoff's two-volume Josquin Desprez (Tutzing, 1962-65), the only scholarly study published thus far, is out of date and was never translated into English. Instead of monographs, musicologists have opted for monumental collections of essays devoted to a single composer--for example, Antoine Busnoys: Method, Meaning, and Context in Late Medieval Music, ed. Paula Higgins (1998)--that typically grow out of conferences.

With no single-author "life and works" likely to be written anytime soon, The Josquin Companion serves an extremely useful function. It provides a comprehensive account, based on the latest scholarship, of the life and work of the composer whose name we now know to be "Jossequin Lebloitte dit Desprez"; it is aimed at both specialists in Renaissance musicology and students of music history generally (advanced undergraduates as well as graduate students).

The Josquin Companion benefits from the strengths of a multi-author approach: this well-chosen group of specialists commands a formidable array of knowledge. It also avoids a drawback of conference proceedings in that the editor, Richard Sherr, has shaped the volume in a systematic and comprehensive way by commissioning essays according to a specific plan: two for the biography and reception history, five for the Masses and Mass sections (Blackburn, Planchart, Bloxam, and Sherr), two for the motets (Finscher and Milsom), four for the other genres (Sherr, Litterick, and Bernstein), and three for essays illustrating analytic approaches to Josquin's music (Milsom, Macey, and Elders). These sixteen are framed by Sherr's own introduction and David Fallows's "Afterword: Thoughts for the Future." The volume concludes with two very useful appendices prepared by Peter Urquhart: a list of works and a discography. A CD enclosed with the volume offers good performances of a number of key compositions discussed in the volume, including those addressed by Milsom (Salve regina) and Macey (Miserere mei) in their analytic essays.

There are, however, drawbacks to this collaborative approach: for example, there has been no attempt to make the articles consistent with one another. A typical example can be seen in comments concerning the dating of Josquin's Missa Hercules dux Ferrariae in adjoining essays. Bonnie Blackburn concludes "Masses on Popular Songs and on Syllables" with a paragraph summarizing scholarly opinion concerning the dating of the Hercules mass, and offers a cautious view that it might be later than the Missa L'homme arme super voces musicales (87). Five pages later, Alejandro Planchart uses Lowinsky's dating of the Hercules mass (late 1480s) to date the Missa Gaudeamus to the early or middle 1480s (to be sure, with qualification: "If the Hercules mass originated in the late 1480s, as Lowinsky surmised," 92). Given the inevitable overlap between essays, the attentive reader will need to remember to use the index to see if more than one interpretation is offered.

Two major problems currently bedevil Josquin research. It is proving difficult to establish a canon of authentic compositions and to provide reliable dates for the music; these issues are ubiquitous in this volume. In his trenchant essay, "Who was Josquin?," Rob Wegman draws a useful analogy between Josquin scholarship and the search for the historical Jesus and reminds us that scholars have been, consciously or unconsciously, influenced by Josquin hagiography, the process of mythcreation that took place for several decades after his death. The task of Josquin scholarship will be to sort out the core Josquin "sayings" (that is, compositions) from the accretions added by his followers in the next three or four decades. Of course, the very format of a single-composer volume tends to encourage the treatment of Josquin as a hero. The "genius" label only complicates matters: a great composer must write sublime music and anything that seems flawed is either an early work or not by Josquin. Given the paucity of information about the circumstances under which Josquin's music was created, the challenge for Josquin studies is to get past the legend and to gain a better understanding of Josquin's place in his own world, in part by learning more about the work of his contemporaries.

JESSIE OWENS

Brandeis University