Few stories arising from the pandemic are an invitation to put ourselves 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 traced following the vital imprint of a renaissance rock star: the Franco-Flemish Josquin Desprez (1455-1521) – or Des Prez, Des Prés and variants –, the so-called prince of polyphony who in Europe in the 15th and early 16th centuries , when the Morales and Victorias of the Spanish Golden Age were to arrive, brought to the top the art of combining voices, each with its own rhythm and melody.
La bóveda y las voces is one of those leisurely readings that reconstruct the history of Europe through art and its patrons – the church and the courts – without ceasing to return again and again to the present. Which makes it possible to everyday the perception of an avant-garde artist of more than five centuries ago and to feel him as if he were a contemporary of Rosalía. Someone with such resounding success that many took the opportunity to attribute works to him and sell them better, "although when it comes to a musician in his category, the attributions usually correspond to valuable compositions", explains Andrés.
"Josquin is a lonely spirit touched by a miraculous light", he says to La Vanguardia. "The composers of their time are a heritage of musicology, of academia. So it was about bringing the figure of an extraordinary teacher, the Bach of his time, closer to the public. I thought that one way to offer it to the non-specialist reader was to build this fiction, that is, my journey in time, to move to the days of Josquin", says the author of Filosofía y consuelo de la música (National Essay Award 2021) and so many volumes, whether by Monteverdi, Bach or Mozart.
"I feel a great affinity with the figure of Josquin, with the 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 the isolation found me in the middle of writing and this made the pages have something of a parenthesis and a special silence".
Silence and vivid parallels, because from his refuge in Elizondo, the author follows the macabre events of the confinement of 2020 as a diary, while delving into the plague that his hero had to live through. At that time there were many renowned composers who traveled through Europe. And in the constant journeys in search of training and support, they stopped in cultural enclaves... Flanders, Paris, Burgundy, Milan, Rome... or the court of Ferrara, where Prince Hercules I delirious to embrace the 'humanism and the arts.
Josquin arrives in Ferrara feeling that he can finally settle down. "A splendid salary, a favorable treatment and the consequent possibility to work and compose under privileged conditions", writes Andrés. But two months later, an outbreak of the plague broke out in Europe, which in 1503 ravaged Italy, especially in the north, so the musician took refuge in Comacchio, in the healthier Po delta, open to the Adriatic. Rich and humble alike succumb. The plague took Hercules, Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto... And a good friend of Josquin, Marbrianus d'Orto. And Obrecht, his successor at the court of Ferrara...!
Andrés also puts himself in Josquin's place, talking about children's choirs and that militarism that permeated all aspects of children's lives. "In Josquin's 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 difficult regime. Sometimes, one thinks that this excellent art, so 'from another world', invites you to flee in its resonance. What was indeed militarism is what was experienced in Franco's classrooms. I was born in 1955 and my generation still suffered violence and humiliation. Maybe 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. At the time of the ill-fated Joan of Castile and Philip the Fair, the bond was crucial, Andrés acknowledges. And the Crown of Aragon received a happy influence from this advanced polyphonic art, because exchanges of musicians were common. Many came to Naples, such as the Flemish Johannes Tinctoris, before Josquin.
The lesson of history is endless, but what can polyphony do for today's youth? " To give breadth, to learn to listen, not to stay with one melody, but to discover that there are many that sound at the same time, and this enriches, broadens the intelligence and teaches the complexity of the world, a world that in this music is it becomes kaleidoscopic and imaginative," he replies. The study of early music has also managed to rescue crucial names: Hildegard of Bingen, Machaut, Ockeghem, Morales, Gesualdo, Froberger. "They've enriched the catalog in an incredible way for the listener, and that's something to celebrate."
