The Josquin Companion by Richard Sherr

Review by: Jessie Owens

Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 57, No. 1 (Spring, 2004), pp. 322-323
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Renaissance Society of America
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1262468 .
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RENAISSANCE

322

QUARTERLY

Thiseditionshouldbe considered
a valuableadditionto ourgrowing
listof
Renaissance
theoretical
worksbeingmademorereadily
availableto scholars.
Itwill
be a helpful
sourceforexperts,
in Dressler
andthosewhohavean interest
certainly,
can gainmuch,notonlyfromthistreatise,
butalsofromitssolidaccompanying
commentary.
DANE

HEUCHEMER

KenyonCollege
RichardSherr,ed. TheJoaquinCompanion.

Oxford:OxfordUniversity
Press,2000. xxix+ 691 pp. + I pl. + CD. illus.bibl. $150. ISBN:
0-19-816335-2.
In recentyears musicologists, by and large, have not been willing to write book- the traditional "life and works" - for
composers of earlymusic. It
length studies
is strikingthat 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 scholarlystudy 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far,is out of date and was never translated into English.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
- for
example, Antoine Busnoys:Method, Meaning, and Context in Late
composer
MedievalMusic, ed. Paula Higgins (I 998) - that typicallygrow out of conferences.
With no single-author "life and works" likely to be writtenanytime soon, The
Josquin Companion serves an extremelyuseful 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 historygenerally(advanced

undergraduates as well as graduate students).

TheJosquin Companion benefitsfromthe strengthsof a multi-author approach:
this well-chosen group of specialists commands a formidable arrayof 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 offersgood performances
of a number of key compositions discussed in the volume, including those addressed
by Milsom (Salve regina) and Macey (Misereremei) in their analytic essays.
There are, however, drawbacks to this collaborative approach: for example,
therehas 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

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REVIEWS

323

"Masseson Popular
inadjoiningessays.BonnieBlackburn
concludes
duxFerrariae
witha paragraph
scholarly
opinionconcernsummarizing
Songsandon Syllables"
a cautiousviewthatitmightbe later
ingthedatingoftheHerculesmass,andoffers
vocesmusicales
thantheMissaLhomme
(87). Fivepageslater,
Alejandro
arme'super
Planchart
usesLowinskys
datingoftheHerculesmass(late1480s)todatetheMissa
"IftheHerGaudeamus
totheearlyormiddle1480s(tobe sure,withqualification:
in thelate 1480s,as Lowinsky
culesmassoriginated
surmised,"
92). Giventhe
theattentive
willneedto remember
to use
inevitable
between
reader
essays,
overlap
is offered.
theindextoseeifmorethanoneinterpretation
research.
Itisproving
to
Twomajorproblems
bedevil
difficult
currently
Josquin
a canonofauthentic
for
establish
and
to
reliable
dates
the
compositions
provide
in thisvolume.In histrenchant
"Whowas
music;theseissuesareubiquitous
essay,
a
Rob
draws
useful
between
and
Josquin?," Wegman
Josquinscholarship
analogy
us
that
scholars
have
thesearchforthehistorical
and
reminds
conbeen,
Jesus
orunconsciously,
theprocessofmythinfluenced
byJosquin
sciously
hagiography,
hisdeath.The taskofJosquin
creation
thattookplaceforseveral
scholdecadesafter
will
to
sort
the
core
from
be
out
is,
(that compositions) the
Josquin
arship
"sayings"
in thenextthreeorfourdecades.Of course,the
accretions
addedbyhisfollowers
ofa single-composer
volumetendsto encourage
thetreatment
ofJosveryformat
a
a
hero.
The
label
matters:
must
as
quin
"genius" onlycomplicates
greatcomposer
iseither
anearly
writesublime
thatseemsflawed
workornotby
musicandanything
aboutthecircumstances
underwhich
Josquin.Giventhepaucityofinformation
was
the
for
is
to
music
studies
created,
Josquin's
challenge Josquin
getpastthelegend
ofJosquin's
in
his
own
and to gaina betterunderstanding
world,in partby
place
about
the
work
of
his
more
learning
contemporaries.
JESSIE OWENS

Brandeis
University

JamesTylerand Paul Sparks.The Guitarand ItsMusic:FromtheRenaissance

to theClassicalEra.
Oxfordand New York:OxfordUniversityPress,2002. xxvi+ 322 pp. index. append. illus.
tb1s.bibl. $90. ISBN: 0-19-816713-X.
Between the appearance of the earliest dated works for the four-course
Renaissance guitar,contained in Alonso Mudarra's 1546 print from Seville, and the
emergence of the modern six-string instrument, also in Spain during the late
eighteenth century,the "early" guitar played an important and, at times crucial, role
as a solo, accompanying, and ensemble instrument in France, Italy, the Iberian
Peninsula, and England. Moreover, the cross-cultural itineraries and diverse
demographic coverage of the instrument testifyto its remarkable adaptability to
changing styles and contexts, which, in turn, allowed the guitar to assume a major
role in transmitting throughout Europe many popular and even New World
repertories.The large cultural and stylisticbreadth of the instrument has not made
it easy formusicology to digest. This situation is exacerbated by the enormous size of

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