Josquin des Prez (1450-1521), or Josquin as he is commonly known, was the greatest composer of his day. The Franco-Flemish musician is considered the first modern master of multi-voice polyphonic music and became recognized as the most famous European creator of the Renaissance.
His fame reached heights that only rock superstars reach today. And yet the details of his life are obscure. Although the authorship of up to 346 compositions is attributed to him, the reality is that none of his original scores are preserved. One of the few references found is his name written on a wall in the Sistine Chapel among the signatures of various singers.
To shed some light on the figure of Josquin, Stanford University professor Jesse Rodin undertook a long journey into the depths of his work to try to discover which ones he really wrote, based on the fact that copyists attributed anonymous compositions to him, Probably to increase sales.
Rodin identified a "core group" of musical pieces attributed to the artist by reliable sources before evaluating his style. Using this list as a reference, the researcher and his colleague Joshua Rifkin, an academic and conductor at Boston University, assigned confidence levels to the authorship of the remaining music supposedly written by Josquin.
"It's very easy to mechanically approach a data set. Say there are seven sources that put Josquin's name on this piece, so it must be his. But what if those seven sources depend on a 'parent' source little trustworthy and therefore have no independent authority?" asks Rodin, a specialist in 15th-century music.
The Stanford professor acknowledges that it is "difficult" to know what music Josquin wrote for several reasons. First because the compositions were not reliably labeled. Second, because various composers imitated his music. And lastly, and most importantly, the Renaissance artist became internationally famous just as the printing press was revolutionizing the circulation of music. That means almost two-thirds of the music bearing his name came into circulation after his death.
This is not the first attempt to clarify which works are Josquin's. Dutch musicologist Albert Smijers was commissioned to edit his pieces in the early 20th century, an effort that took decades to complete. Later, in the 1970s, an international team of scholars formed the New Josquin Edition committee which published up to 30 volumes attributed to the Franco-Flemish composer between 1986 and 2017.
It was Joshua Rifkin who questioned the methodology of this committee, considering that it was not rigorous enough. That is why he proposed that all the works analyzed should be considered "guilty until proven innocent." Or, what is the same, that they are not Josquin's until proven otherwise.
"It's understandable that some academics and music lovers feel robbed when one of their favorite pieces is removed from the Josquin canon," says Rodin. "When the authorship of a cherished work was questioned, the music community reeled, as if the music couldn't be good anymore if it wasn't Josquin's anymore," he adds.
Researchers have used new digital tools to "refine" their understanding of Josquin's musical style. They analyzed a group of 54 works that served as a reference. There were pieces like the short Domine, non secundum, which was copied from a Sistine Chapel choir book around 1490 while Josquin was singing and making music there. The composition is attributed to Judocus de pratis, the Latinized form of Josquin des Prez.
From the source and style comparison of this core group, Rodin and Rifkin assigned the remaining 292 pieces to one of three categories: provisionally attributable (49 works), problematic (35 works), and "the rest" ( 205, plus 3 lost compositions).
In total, the experts - who finished their compilation days before August 27, 2021, the 500th anniversary of the Franco-Flemish artist's death - indicate that Josquin composed around 103 of the 346 works attributed to him, compared to the 143 pieces considered safe by the New Josquin Edition committee.
"Josquin's compositions changed the course of music history in ways that continue to resonate today," says Rodin. "His music doesn't get played on the radio as often as Liszt's or Lizzo's, but that doesn't mean it doesn't matter," he concludes.
