Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

“A certain famous man said that Josquin produced more motets after his death than during his life.” So joked the German music publisher Georg Forster in 1540, nineteen years after the death of Josquin des Prez, the most celebrated composer the world had known. He had lived and died admired and respected, then as now. But loved? With reservations then, and with greater but different reservations now. The course of his extraordinary career and reputation, in this the five-hundredth anniversary year of his death, needs some unpacking. Josquin died on August 27, 1521. Since then he has been called the first musical superstar, and his influence likened to that of Beethoven; and, like Beethoven, he became the standard by which every subsequent composer in his tradition was judged, directly influencing most of them. So why is he not the household name that Palestrina and Tallis are? (There are such households.) Having just presided over a nine-disc set of Josquin’s eighteen mass settings with the Tallis Scholars, and having studied and recorded his music all my working life, I will attempt to provide an answer to this riddle. His music is sufficiently difficult to sing that modern choirs do well to think twice about trying it. Josquin was a composer who never settled down to an easily identifiable style. Like Tallis, but unlike Palestrina, he was interested in experimenting with everything that came his way, inventing new sonorities and methods as he went. This has deprived him of the kind of easy brand-like recognition which helps modern audiences feel at ease with composers from the more (and even less) distant past. Concertgoers have heard his name, but they do not know anything by him, which puts him in the rather unglamorous company of composers such as Telemann, Corelli, Dunstable, and Hindemith. At his death, certainly, there was no doubt about his status. Some of the most prominent thinkers of the time praised him. Luther, an experienced singer, wrote “Josquin is master of the notes, which must express what he desires; on the other hand, other composers must do what the notes dictate.” And his reputation endured: in 1567 the Florentine diplomat, philologist, mathematician, and humanist Cosimo Bartoli declared “Josquin may be said to have been, in music, a prodigy of nature, as our Michelangelo has been in architecture, painting, and sculpture; for, as there has not thus far been anybody who in his compositions approaches Josquin, so Michelangelo, among all those who have been active in the arts, is still alone and without peer.” His name, if not his music, continued to be cited in the intervening centuries, put on a pedestal to bring a proper sense of tradition to contemporary musicians. By far the most remarkable instance of this was his inclusion on a list drawn up in 1863 of composers to be petrified on the frieze of the Albert Memorial in London. This is the more remark-able in that the English musical establishment in those years seemed to have little interest in foreign composers from the distant past, preferring to wrap themselves in their own Byrd and Tallis. And yet there he is, sandwiched by a committee of mid-nineteenth century English gentlemen, between Grétry and Rossini, with Palestrina, Monteverdi, and Tallis nearby. Such widespread admiration brought its own troubles. For at least fifty years after Josquin’s death, minor composers and hopeful anthologists liked to claim that he had had a hand in their work, hence Forster’s words quoted above. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians  lists 315 works by Josquin, of which 136 are classified as being of doubtful authenticity; and this unstable list of compositions is rivalled by the number of composers who claim to have been taught by him, a number which was fueled by one of the most widely read poets of the day, Pierre de Ronsard. In a preface to the Livre de Meslanges, a collection of chansons published in 1560, he published a list of all the composers who had been Josquin’s pupil, mentioning Richafort, de Sermisy and Mouton, among many others. It seems more likely that the majority of these were influenced by him rather than actually taught by him, but in the case of Jean Richafort there certainly was a close connection. When Josquin died, a number of these men rallied round to write a succession of funeral motets in his honor, the Renaissance equivalent of a Festschrift. The most substantial of these was a six-voice Requiem in memoriam Josquin des Prez by Richafort, based on two chansons by Josquin himself; and it remains to this day one of those Renaissance blockbusters waiting to be recognized for the masterpiece that it is. On a lesser scale were the several settings of Musae Jovis, the most famous by Nicolas Gombert, whose text includes the words: Musae Jovis ter maximi Proles canora, plangite, Comas cypressus comprimat Iosquinus ille ille occidit. Ye Muses, melodious offspring of thrice-greatest Jupiter, make lamentation. The cypress draws in its leaves. The famous Josquin is dead. So far all the evidence for Josquin’s fame has come from men who lived and worked in Flanders, the world into which he was born. But the claim that he was the first musical superstar is based on his travels. In fact he was by no means the first composer to tread the route of fame from the north to the Italian Renaissance courts — Dufay at least had done this before him — but somehow Josquin has managed to steal all the limelight, not just from his contemporaries but also from his predecessors. Somehow he was irresistibly attractive to those several Italian princes who vied with each other in maintaining the most splendid courts. Although Dufay had written the motet Nuper rosarum flores that celebrated Brunelleschi’s completion of the dome to the Cathedral in Florence, which one might have thought would have put him on those pedestals alongside Josquin, he was soon replaced by the younger  man, both in reputation and