For the 250th anniversary of
Beethoven’s birth, the classical
music field pulled out all the stops last year, even in the midst of pandemic
performance cancellations around the world. But while 2021 brings its own
significant anniversary — in August it will be 500 years since the death of
Josquin des Prez, the most influential composer of his age — few listeners will
know it.
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At the center of his body of work are 18 grand, unaccompanied
choral masses — exactly the kind of music that will be largely forbidden for
some time yet, for fear of aerosol transmission of the virus. Those masses are
the major legacy of the man Peter Phillips, founder and director of the
renowned vocal ensemble The Tallis Scholars, called a “magician-mathematician”
in a recent interview.
Josquin indeed wedded the logic of math to the magic of melody,
and his compositions feel like they unfold with both perfect clarity and
atmospheric strangeness. Shining and austere, with the gentle radiance of a
shaft of sunlight beaming through a window, Josquin’s music weeded out
extraneous, extravagant ornamentation; he created textures of polyphonic
complexity that are still smooth and free.
His works feel unified because they are organized around small
melodic fragments that gradually develop as they are passed from voice to
voice. This might seem like a description of, well, all music. But the notion
of carrying a melodic “cell” through a whole work was unknown before Josquin’s
time, and he was one of the most gifted experimenters with the concept.
He was also one of the first celebrity composers and one of the
first to be known by the wide dissemination of his scores — possible because of
the newly developed technology of printing. The earliest surviving print of
music by a single composer is a book of Josquin’s masses made in Venice, Italy,
in 1502.
Little is known of his birth, which took place around the middle
of the 15th century, somewhere near the modern-day border between France and
Belgium. He eventually rose as a singer and composer, and by the late 1480s had
made his way to Italy, where he worked for the Sforza family, formed his mature
style and was for a period a member of the papal choir. (His only known
signature is carved into the wood of the Sistine Chapel’s choir loft.)
To discuss Josquin and his significance, Phillips, who has
recorded a full cycle of the masses with The Tallis Scholars and will lead them
in performing those works this summer at the Boulez Saal in Berlin, joined
composer
Nico Muhly, whose work is deeply informed by the choral music of the
Renaissance. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
Muhly: If someone asked you in the
street, “Oh, you’re Peter Phillips; I’ve always wondered who Josquin is,” what’s
your answer?
Phillips: He was the first
superstar in the history of music. He was the first composer who was desired
financially and artistically in the big places of the world at that time. He
charged a lot, but people wanted him because he was the guy who had the
reputation.
And the reason for that was, he mastered all the techniques of
his time, turned them into something better, and then passed them on to the
next generation of composers, who were all influenced by him. It’s like
Beethoven.
Muhly: What does it mean if a
composer, like Josquin, sets the exact same text 30 times over and over again?
Because I write a lot of choral music, I’ve done almost a dozen settings of the
Magnificat, but in the more traditional parts of contemporary music, you’re
kind of encouraged, if not expected, to be in a state of constant innovation.
Phillips: Well, that’s a very
Romantic, 19th-century approach. We have to go back to what it was like in the
15th century. The words of the mass were extremely well known, and Josquin set
them 18 times; you can’t expect anyone to make much of every single word, every
time, that often. And he didn’t; he took the words pretty well for granted.
Modern performers find that terribly hard to accept. They think
they’re missing out on the one absolutely crucial thing they ought to be
concentrating on — the words — when what they really ought to be concentrating
on is making a good sound, so the
music can come alive as music. They shouldn’t spend hours discussing the
meaning of “Kyrie eleison.” In the 15th century, everyone knew what that meant.
Muhly: Something that compositionally
I find so exciting about Josquin is that he is obsessively repetitive. Compared
to other music of that time and in the centuries afterward, he doesn’t take a
bit of music and then unspool it into this bigger thing that gets more and more
ornate. It actually kind of curves back around itself, the exact same things
happening.
Phillips: There are a lot of
passages where he keeps going back to the same note. And as you say, the music
doesn’t seem to advance; it just goes around. And it’s sort of a fascinating
circle. He keeps hitting that note. The Amen of the Creed of the “Missa Faysant
Regretz” is where he goes constantly, so constantly, back to a D, that one gets
completely mesmerized by it. I mean, you become sort of crazy.
Muhly: I wonder if you could talk
about what it means to have an entire body of work that’s based on previous
ideas. Josquin was constantly referencing existing tunes — which, again, in the
modern sense would register as being not particularly innovative.
Phillips: There are various
levels of taking an old thing and turning it into something new. My guess is that
he was keen to show he could master all the techniques that were in currency
when he started and take them to a higher level. One typically showoff example
of this is in the Hosanna of the “Missa Mater Patris.” He takes a motif of five
notes from his model and proceeds to quote it in every measure of the final
composition — 46 of them, at every modal pitch available to him. This sounds
incredibly modern, even jazzy, and it’s terrific fun to sing.
Muhly: Sometimes the original tune is,
like, buried inside. So it’s less about transformation and more about embedding
and kind of baking things into the cake.
Phillips: He did take some
very good tunes; that’s the first thing. So, in addition to his own good tunes,
he was basing his music on very good past material. But then he felt it was his
job to disguise the borrowing — embedding the original material in the
counterpoint, which can make it quite hard or even impossible to hear. And
sometimes he elongates the note lengths so, again, you can’t really follow them.
And sometimes he writes wacky canons so that the material gets all jumbled up.
I mean, he’s a mathematician at heart. A magician-mathematician.
Muhly: We’re used to thinking about
music of that time as being kind of austere and impenetrable. But you just peel
one layer back, and an enormous, enormous wealth of math turns into emotion.
Phillips: And the mathematics
produces atmosphere. I could go on about atmosphere because I’ve done all these
18 masses, and they all have a different atmosphere. And it’s done not by
expressing the text, which remains the same, but by very clever, purely musical
means with the voices, how they interact and create mood. Perhaps the most
perfect example of this is in the last movement of the “Missa L’Homme Armé
Sexti Toni,” where three canons overlap — one involving the “Armed Man” melody.
But forget the math and enjoy the atmosphere all that cleverness creates.
Muhly: I’m not a big fan of gossiping
about the dead, but I’m wondering if you could talk about Josquin as a kind of
a competitive composer?
Phillips: I think he was very
keen to show off when he wanted to. He was the sort of personality who needed
to say, “Look, I’m better than you. I’m the greatest.” The reports say he was a
difficult man, but these days I feel we’ve rather come to admire difficult, outrageously
talented people.
He was compared with
Heinrich Isaac, who was also a great
composer of that period but not quite as famous as Josquin. And one story has
someone saying that you want to employ Isaac because he will write when you
want him to — whereas Josquin will only write when he wants to and costs twice
as much.
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