Renaissance - Josquin des Prez 1440-1521

Josquin des Prez was somewhat like Beethoven  independent, creative, slow-writing, and a bridge between two musical periods. Born 1440 in Hainaut, hired by Sforza family of Milano, he managed to compose at least 18 Masses, 100 motets, 70 chansons and other secular works.

   Masses are the works that contain most old influences, and they use secular tunes as cantus firmus, transposed to different keys for different movements of the Mass. Josquin des Prez wrote many so-called parody Masses (not pejorative) originating in older compositions, where all voices are exploited and subjected to free alterations during the Mass, at one time or another. These voices were mostly put in tenor, as cantus firmus, and combined contrapuntally with other voices. So here we had a composer that introduced secular melodies into sacral masses. Why did he and other do it? For fun? That is possible, because the joy of getting away with it, especially as the melody in tenor was concealed, made the procedure funny. The clergy were unfamiliar with secular tunes, and seemingly never recognized them in the masses they sung in the church. At the same time, some congregation members might have felt lucky to recognize some familiar melodies in the music they had to sing or listen to.

   Josquin des Prez was a prolific motet writer. Some of them had phrases carrying their own motives presented with imitation in the other voices and coming to a phrase cadence; just to start with a new phrase with its own new motive. In order to get some variation into this groundwork of composition, des Prez used repetition of phrases, divided works into sections, or cadences with varying harmonic rhythm. A cadence could be prolonged by a pedal point in some voice(s), while the other were moving for a while before the final rest. Here, we also see the first appearances of more prominent dominant-tonic relationship.

   Josquin was one of the first composers that cared about putting text and music in nice relation to each other. Setting of the words often follows their natural rhythm, grammatical accent, and if possible, emotional influence. So, for example a word like heavy  could be sung with longer notes, and the word like dancing  by shorter, moving notes. Music introduced chromaticism, ornaments and more harmonic freedom to be a kind of stalwart to the words.

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