Few stories that have emerged from the pandemic are an invitation to put yourself in the shoes of those who centuries ago suffered the consequences of the plague like this biography that the essayist, poet and music scholar Ramón Andrés has drawn following the vital trail of a rock star. of the Renaissance: the Franco-Flemish Josquin Desprez (1455-1521) –or Des Prez, Des Prés and other variants–, the so-called prince of polyphony who, in Europe in the 15th century and the beginning of the 16th, when the Morales and Victory of the Spanish golden age, it brought to the top the art of combining different voices, each one with its own rhythm and melody.
The Vault and the Voices is one of those leisurely readings that reconstructs the history of Europe through art and its patrons –the Church and the courts–, but without failing to return to the present. Which allows us to daily perceive the perception of an avant-garde artist from more than 500 years ago and feel him as a contemporary of Rosalía. The man was so successful that many took the opportunity to attribute works to him and sell them better, "although in the case of a musician of his category, his attributions usually correspond to valuable compositions," Andrés warns La Vanguardia.
“The composers of his time are a heritage of musicology, of the academy. It was, then, about bringing the figure of an extraordinary teacher closer to the public, the Bach of his time. One way of offering it to the non-specialized reader was to build this fiction, my journey through time, taking me back to the days of Josquin”, points out the author of Filosofía y consolación de la música (National Essay Award 2021) and many volumes. now by Monteverdi, now by Bach or Mozart.
“I feel a great affinity with the figure of Josquin, with his way of being in the world, his sense of solitude, his meticulous dedication to work, his slow living. I started the book months before the pandemic, but isolation found me in the middle of writing and that caused its pages to have some parentheses and a special silence spread”.
Silence and vivid parallels, since from his refuge in Elizondo the author follows the macabre events of the 2020 confinement on a daily basis while delving into the plague that his hero had to live through, that “lonely spirit touched by a light miraculous”. At that time, many renowned composers traveled throughout Europe. And on those trips in search of training and sustenance, they stopped at cultural enclaves... Flanders, Paris, Burgundy, Milan, Rome... or the court of Ferrara, whose prince, Hercules I, embraces humanism and the arts.
Josquin arrives in Ferrara feeling that he can finally settle down. “A splendid salary, favorable treatment and the consequent possibility of working and composing in privileged conditions”, writes Andrés. But two months later an outbreak of plague broke out in Europe, which in 1503 raged against Italy, especially in the north, for which the musician took refuge in Comacchio, in the salubrious delta of the Po, open to the Adriatic. Rich and humble alike succumb. The plague takes Hercules himself, Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto... And a good friend of Josquin's, Marbrianus of Orto, and Obrecht, his successor at the court of Ferrara.
Andrés also puts himself in Josquin's shoes talking about children's choirs and the militarism that pervaded all aspects of childhood life. “In his time, that rigor came from ecclesiastical intransigence, which became unbearable. It is normal that in the schools of the chapels there were desertions and all kinds of tricks to escape from that regime that was difficult to bear. Sometimes, one thinks that such sublime art, so 'from another world', invited to flee in its resonance. What was militarism is what was experienced in the classrooms of Francoism. I was born in 1955 and my generation still suffered violence and humiliation. Perhaps one day I will write about this matter, which marked me so much”.
Josquin's historical context is also that of the peninsular courts, in close contact with Flanders. In the times of the unfortunate Juana de Castilla and her husband Felipe el Hermoso, this link was crucial, Andrés acknowledges. And the Crown of Aragon received a happy influence from this advanced polyphonic art, because the exchanges of musicians were common. Many ended up in Naples, like the Flemish Johannes Tinctoris, before Josquin. The history lesson is endless, but what can polyphony do for today's youth?
“Give amplitude, learn to listen, not to stay with a melody, but to discover that there are many that sound at the same time, and that enriches, widens intelligence and teaches the complexity of the world, a world that in this music becomes kaleidoscopic and imaginative”, he answers. The study of ancient music, moreover, has managed to return crucial names that were buried: Hildegarda de Bingen, Machaut, Ockeghem, Morales, Gesualdo, Froberger. "They have incredibly enriched the catalog for the listener and that should be celebrated."
