"The Apotheosis of Josquin des Prez and Other Mythologies of Musical Genius"

The Apotheosis of Josquin des Prez and Other Mythologies of Musical Genius Review by: Paula Higgins Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 57, No. 3 (Fall 2004), pp. 443-510 Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the American Musicological Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jams.2004.57.3.443 . Accessed: 24/05/2013 18:38 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

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T he Apotheos osiis of J os osqui quin n des Prez and and Other Mytholog thologiies of Musical Genius nius P AU AU L A H I G G I N S

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n the past past thirtyth irty-od odd d years years,, the subj subjec ectt of Jos Jo sq uin uin des P rez rez has launche launched d at least five scholarly conferences and more than two hundred studies published published in three volumes of proceeding proceedingss (tot aling aling some om e 1, 1, 200 pages); in dozens of scholarly journals, monographs, and Fes Fest schri hr i f t en ; and most recently in the 700-page Josqui n C om pan panii on .1 An international editorial board, subvened by the musicological societies of two countries (the AMS and the Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis), oversees the publication of his (second) opera omnia. Standard reference works and popular Internet

This essay essay is is a revis revised ed and expanded expanded versi version on of t he keynot keynot e add ress ress entit entit led “ I n Q uest uest o f P arnassus arnassus:: Jo squin and the C ultural P olitics of M usical usical G enius,” enius,” delive delivered red at the International rinceton U nivers niversity ity,, 29–31 Octob O ctob er C on f er en ce: N ew D i r ect i on s i n Jos Josqui n Sc Schol hol ar ship hi p held at P rinceton 1999. I wish to thank Rob C. Wegman for the invitation to speak at his conference. Versions of the th e talk were also given at Yale Yale U niversi niversity ty in April April 2002 and the th e Newberry New berry Library L ibrary in C hicago in February 2004. I am indebted indebt ed to t o Teodo ro G iuliani iuliani for servi serving ng as the patient and tirel tireles esss interinterlocutor locuto r for the original talk; to M arsha arsha D ubrow, M argaret B ent, Jeff J eff Sklans Sklansky ky,, C arolyn Eastman, C lay Steinman, and D avid avid Ro thenberg fo r their helpful helpful comments comm ents on subsequent subsequent drafts; d rafts; and to D onald G reig reig and P hilip hilip Welle ellerr for critical critical input input in the t he final fi nal stag stag es. es. R esearch esearch and w riting riting were facili facilitat tat ed in part part by the t he award of a N ational Endow End ow ment for th e H umanities Fellowship Fellowship at the th e Newberry Library in 2003–4. I wish to dedicate this essay to Joseph Kerman in honor of his eightieth birthday, and to the memory of two recently deceased scholars, Janet Levy and Philip Brett. 1. The conference conferencess include include those tho se in New York York (1971), (1971), Colog C olog ne (1984), (1984), and U trecht (1986), and at P rinceton rinceton U nivers niversity ity (1999) and D uke U nivers niversity ity (1999). The The three conference proceedproceedings resulting therefrom are Jos Josqui n de d es Pre Pr ez: Pro Pr oceedi n gs of t he I n t er n at i on al Jos Josqui n Fe F est i val- val - C onf er ence H eld at a t T he Jui ll i ar d Sc Schoo hool at L i ncoln ncoln C ent er i n N ew Yor Yor k Ci t y, 21–25 Jun Jun e 1971, ed. Edw ard E. L ow insk insky in in collaboration collaboration w ith Bo nnie J. B lack lackburn (Londo n: O xford U niver niverssity Press, 1976) (787 pp.) (hereafter referred to as Jos ); Pr oce Josqui qu i n Pr ocee ceedi n gs oceedi n gs of the t he Jos Josqui qu i n Sympos ymposi u m , Co C ol ogne gn e, 11–15 11–15 Jul Ju l y 198 1984, 4, ed. Willem Elders, vol. 35 of Ti j dsc dschri ft van de Ver Ver eni ging gin g voo voor N eder der l an dse dse M u zie zi ekges kgeschie hi eden den i s (1985) (193 pp.); and Pro Pr oceedi n gs of t he I nt er n ati at i onal na l Wille lem m Elder E lderss in in collaboration with Frits Frits de H aen (U trecht: Jos Josqui n Sympos Symposi u m , U t r echt 1986, 19 86, ed. Wil Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis, 1991) (217 pp.). T he Josqui n C ompani mpan i on, ed. Richard Sherr (Oxford and N ew York: York: O xford U nivers niversity ity Pres P ress, s, 2000) (691 pp.).

Jour Jour nal na l of the t he A meri can M usi usi cological cological So Soci et y, Vol. 57, Issue 3, pp. 443–510, ISSN 0003-0139, electronic ISSN 15473848. © 2005 by t he American American Musicolog ical Society. Society. All rights right s reserved. reserved. P lease lease direct all requests for permission permission to phot ocopy oco py or reprod reproduce uce article cont ent thro ugh the t he U niversity niversity of California P ress’s ress’s Rights and P ermissions ermissions Web site, site, at ww w.ucpres w.ucpress.e s.edu/ du/ journals/rights.htm. ournals/rights.htm.


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sources rout inely inely call call him the “ greates great estt composer co mposer of the t he Renaiss Renaissance” and even even “ the g reatest reatest compos compo ser in in the t he histo histo ry o f Wes Western tern music.” music.” 2 Some rank him as the fourth member, ho honn or i s cau aussa, of the venerable triumvirate of genius composers tout tout cour t: Bach, Mozart, Mo zart, Beethove Beethoven— n—and and J osquin. osquin. 3 H is pe perrsonality and career are so often compared with Beethoven’s that he is popularly popularly kno know w n as the “ B eeth eethoven oven of his time.” 4 H is M i ssa Pange Pan ge l i n gua, as performed by the Tallis Scholars, won the Gramophone “ Record of o f the Yea Year” r” award in 1987, the only time a recording of early music has garnered the coveted prize. 5 H is forego ne stat status us as musical musical genius is proclaimed proclaimed not n ot only on ly in in the t he popular media and in music history textbooks, but also in the pages of JAMS: “ a creativ creativee pers personality onality alre already ady in ess essence ence fully fully formed formed . . . J osquin started as Josquin—and started at the top.” 6 Like the goddess Athena, who burst forth “ full fully formed” formed” from the head head o f Z eu euss, Jo sq uin uin des P rez rez no w inhabits inhabits the mytholo myth ological gical realm realm of musical musical Parnass P arnassus us.. H ow did a sing single le compo ser come to tow to w er over the th e intelle intellectual ctual and cultural landscape landscape of present-day present-day musicolog musicology? y? H ow, when, w hen, and w hy did Jo sq uin acquire this status and celebrity as the incomparable composer to whom all others must yield pride of place? Why Josquin and not, say, Palestrina, once lion lionized ized as the th e “ savior avior of o f music,” music,” or perhaps perhaps Lasso Lasso or o r G esualdo, esualdo, once on ce desigdesignated his fellow cohorts in Renaissance musical genius? On the basis of what evaluative criteria has Josquin’s genius been deemed to surpass that of every other ot her compos compo ser of the t he period period loos loo sely ely described described as “ the Renais R enaisssance” ? What exactly is the critical justification for the apotheosis of Josquin des Prez in the late twentieth century?

2. For examp example le,, from a standard standard introd uction to music: music: “ Many musicol musicolog og ists ists consi consider der Jo sq uin the greatest of all Renaissanc Renaissance e composers” composers” (K. M arie arie Stolba, T he D evel vel opm pmeen t of Wes West er n W. C . Brow B row n, 1990], 196). Some example exampless from popular M usi usi c: A H isto istorr y [D ubuq ue, Io wa: W. Int ernet ernet sources: sources: “ now considered considered the greatest greatest [compo ser] ser] of the Renaiss Renaissance” ance” (“ Jo squin,” Bri Br i tann ta nn i ca St St ude ud ent Encyc Encyclopae lopaedi di a [2004], Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, http://search.ed .com/ ebi ebi/articl /article? e?tocld= tocld= 9275188); 9275188); “ so famous famous that he is is know n merel merelyy by his his first name. name. . . . many people people . . . consider consider Josquin the greates greatest composer in the his histor y of Western estern music music”” (Todd (Todd McC omb, “ Josquin D es Prez,” http://www.clas http://www.classical ical.net/musi .net/music/comp.ls c/comp.lst/ t/ josquin.html). osquin.html). 3. “ Perhaps Perhaps you you wo nder why the work which before before was done by one pers person on . . . has to be re-done by a large group of musicologists. The reasons should be clear and they hold, mutatis mutandis, also for such composers as Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, whose music is now being published in N eu e A u sgaben (Wille lem m Elders, Elders, “ Tow ards the New J osquin Edition, ” in Pro- gaben ” (Wil ceedi n gsof t he Jos Josqui qu i n Sympos ymposi u m , C ol ogne gn e, 3–8, at 3). 4. See, See, for examp example le,, “ H ere ere of a Sunday Sunday Morning,” WBAI, N ew York York,, htt p://w p://w ww.hoasm .org/ IVA IVA/ D esPrez.html. esPrez.html. 5. Tallis allis Scholars, Scholars, Josqui n M i ssa Pan ge L i n gua, G imell 454 909-2 (1987). The The recording also also includes the M i ssa L a so sol fa r e mi . 6. Joshua Joshua Rifk Rifkin, in, “ Munich, Munich, Milan, Milan, and a Marian Marian Motet: D ating ating Jo squin’s Ave M aria . . . virgo virgo this Jou ifkin’s asse assertion rtion comes at the end of t he arti Journal 56 (2003): 239–350, at 333. R ifkin’s ser en a,” this cle, following a long passage proclaiming Josquin’s genius via the agency of Schoenberg’s comments on the subject of talent versus genius.


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~ The starting point of these reflections was usually a feeling of impatience at the sight o f the “ naturalness” with w hich newspapers, art and common sense constantly dress up a reality which, even though it is the one we live in, is undoubtedly determined by history. I resented seeing N ature and H istory confused at every turn, and I want ed to track dow n, in the decorative display of what-goes- without-saying, the ideological abuse which, in my view, is hidden there. 7 —Roland B arthes, M ythologies

Without wishing to slight Josq uin, I am troubled by a prevailing “ whatgo es-witho ut-saying” (cela va de soi ) attitude toward him, as if his gargantuan stature in late twentieth-century music historiography were somehow preordained by Nature. I have want ed to unearth the “ ideological abuse” that I suspected of lurking beneath the genius-thinking and hero worship that still characterize much musicological utterance about Josquin. Like its subject enshrined in the Parnassus of musical genius, Josquin historiography resides largely in the realm of “ myth” as defi ned and fi rst t heorized in Ro land B arthes’s “ Myth Tod ay,” one o f th e classic texts in t he fi eld of cultural studies. 8 In Barthes’s formulation, myth operates in such a way as to make realities that are the product of highly complex and historically determined processes seem “ natural” : Myth consists in overturning culture into nature or, at least, the social, the cultural, the ideological, the historical into t he “ natural.” What is nothing b ut a product of class division and its moral, cultural and aesthetic consequences is presented (stated) as being a “ matter of course” ; under the effect o f mythical inversion, the quite contingent foundations of the utterance become Co mmon Sense, Right Reason, the No rm, G eneral O pinion, in short the doxa.9

7. Roland B arthes, preface to his M ythologies (1957), selected and trans. Annette Lavers (New York: H ill and Wang, 1972), 11–12, at 11. 8. Barthes, “ Myth Today,” in M ythologies, 109–59. “ Myth Today” is the postface, written in 1957, of the collected essays of M ythologies written between 1954 and 1956. It derives from the earlier, structuralist phase of Bart hes’s wo rk as “ mytho logist” or critic of ideolog y. B arbara Engh notes, “ Music itself has a special stat us in B arthes’ wo rk: w hen he is at w ork as a semiot ician, as an ideology critic, music is absent from his considerations. When he moves to a critique of those practices, music emerges as a privileged discourse.” See “ Loving It : Music and C riticism in R oland Barthes,” in M usicology and D ifference: Gender and Sexuality in M usic Scholarship, ed. Ruth A. Solie (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U niversity of California Press, 1993), 66–79, at 66. The conspicuous absence of discussions of music in his earlier critical project does not, however, preclude its appropriation for an ideological critique of music. For an excellent introduction to Barthes’s tho ught in general, see G raham Allan, R oland Bar thes (London and New York: Routledge, 2003); for t he central place of M ythologies in his critical trajectory, see especially pp. 33–52. 9. Roland B arthes, “ C hange the Object It self: Mythology Today,” in his I mage—M usic— Text, trans. Stephen H eath (New York: The Noond ay Press, 1977), 165–69, at 165. H ere I am

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D erived from the linguistically based science of signs known as semiology, myth, according to Barthes, is depoliticized speech conveyed by a discourse consisting of rhetoric, defi ned as “ a set of fi xed, regulated, insistent fi gures, according to which the varied forms of the mythical signifier arrange themselves.” 10 In other words, rhetoric is the language which normalizes or “ depoliticizes” the discourse of myth and makes it seem acceptable, commo nsensical, and ultimately complacent. These formulations then become conventional wisdom and as such tend to go unchallenged, thereby eliminating competing discourses which might enrich an otherwise impoverished cultural view. As others have noted, myth as here defined is virtually coterminous for Barthes with ideology. 11

using B arthes’s later theoretical formulation in 1971 o f his earlier position as set o ut in “ Myth Today,” 142–43. 10. A “ discourse” as Barthes defines it can include “ modes of writing o r of representations; not only written discourse, but also photography, cinema, reporting, sport, shows, publicity.” “ Political” is understo od “ in its deeper meaning, as describing the whole of human relations in their real, social structure, in their pow er of making the wo rld.” Barthes, “ Myth Today,” 109–10, 143, 150. 11. Allen, R oland Bar thes, 34. Terry Eagleto n’s defi nition might b e useful for understanding “ ideology” in relation t o B arthes the mythologist/ ideologist and to the present critique of g enius: “ A do minant pow er may legitimate itself by promoting beliefs and values congenial to it; naturalizing and universali zing such beliefs so as to render them self-evident and apparently inevitable; denigrating ideas which might challenge it; excluding rival forms of thought, perhaps by some unspoken but systematic logic; and obscuring social reality in ways convenient to itself. Such ‘mystification,’ as it is commo nly know n, freq uently takes the form o f masking o r suppressing social conflicts, from w hich arises the conception o f ideology as an imaginary resolution of real contradictions” (I deology: A n I nt roducti on [Londo n: Verso, 1991], 5–6; emphasis in original). H ere I have tried to confine my own usage of the term ideology to its specifically B arthesian sense, as “ the presentation of cultural phenomena (like ‘genius’) as if they were timeless, universal, and natural, rather than historically determined.” Barthes’s later poststructuralist criticism, d ating from t he late 1960s, w ould distance itself from t his oppositional rhetoric, as we shall see, but Eag leto n’s defi nition above also resonates with Barthes’s earlier intellectual project as a critic of ideology, as well as with t he current usage of the term in cultural studies. Anthropolog ist C lifford G eertz regretted that “ it is one of t he minor ironies of mo dern intellectual histo ry that the term ‘ideology’ has itself become thoroughly ideologized.” (See “ Id eolog y as a C ultural System,” in The I nt erpretation of [New York: Basic Boo ks, 1973], 193–223, at 193.) H e questioned whether “ having beCultures come an accusation, it can remain an analytic concept,” tainted as it is with the prevailing dictionary definitions linking it w ith the “ factitous propagandizing” of N azi “ ideology.” H e nevertheless attempted to “ defuse” the term, advocating a return to a more neutral understanding as a set o f intellectual propositions (ibid., 200). For an excellent b rief histo ry o f this often confusing term, w hich appeared in the late eight eenth century referring to a “ philosophy of mind” or the “ science of ideas,” and came, und er Napoleon B onaparte, to acquire its still largely pejorative meaning, see Raymond Williams, “ Id eology,” in his K eywords: A Vocabular y of Cul tur e and Society (1976; rev. ed., N ew York: O xford U niversity Press, 1985). I n musicolog y today, t he wo rd continues to be used in the tacitly Napoleonic sense as a term of derogation for leftist inspired, sociopolitical viewpoints of tho se (called “ ideologues” ) who se wo rk is indebted t o various “ isms,” usually of a feminist or neo-Marxist, or cultural materialist, stripe (and occasionally in reverse to



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Against the backdrop of Barthes’s theory of myth, then, as well as Janet Levy’s exploration of the “ covert and casual values” that inform conventional musicological wisdom,12 this essay seeks to expose the historical legitimation project through which the scholarly reception of Josquin des Prez came to replicate the mythmaking, universalizing rhetoric of genius that has long surrounded the figure of Ludwig van Beethoven. 13 The ideological refashioning of Josquin in the image of Beethoven has simultaneously shaped and derailed the intellectual trajectory of early music scholarship in the past thirty years by privileging a discourse of musical genius in the service of which, among other concerns, the composer’s canon is being decimated beyond historical recognition, and t he richness and complexity o f the musical culture of which he was a vital part risks being overshadowed and obfuscated by the disproportionate amount of attention invested in his singular accomplishments. 14 I offer these tho ughts in the interest of a resolute historicization of discourses of musical talent and creative endowment, countering the ongo ing hegemony of authentication studies in Josquin scholarship, and examining the imbrication of mythologies of musical genius in the suppression of certain kinds of music histo rical and critical inquiry. My project d irectly engages the disciplinary critiq ue of musicology begun in the 1960s with the Kerman-Lowinsky polemics conducted in the pages of JAMS and considers the complicity of musicological dispensations both “ old” and “ new” in the privileging of musical genius. 15 The starting point for these specific reflections, which form part of a larger critical project on issues of authorship, creative patrilineage, and musical genius, dates from nearly thirty years ago when, as a fledgling graduate student, I caught a visionary glimpse of the magnitude of t he “ Josq uin phenomenon.”

describe the denigrators of tho se viewpoints). I t is often accom panied b y the adjective “ fashionable,” as if to suggest that serious philosophical schoo ls of intellectual and critical thoug ht were somehow inappropriate or even inimical to certain kinds of musicological enterprise. 12. Janet Levy, “ C overt and C asual Values in Recent Writings Abo ut Music,” Jour nal of M usicology 5 (1987): 3–27; and B arthes, “ Myth Today.” 13. O n the processes of mythmaking surrounding B eethoven see Alessandra C omini, The Changin g I mage of Beethoven: A Stu dy in M ythmaki ng (New York: Rizzoli, 1987); Scott Burnham, Beethoven H ero (Princeton, N .J. : Princeton U niversity Press, 1995); and Tia D eNora, Beethoven and t he Constr ucti on of Genius: M usical Politics in Vi enn a, 1792–1803 (Berkeley and Lo s Angeles: U niversity of C alifornia Press, 1995). 14. I use the verb decimated with an understanding of its original derivation from the Latin decimare, meaning to eliminate “ one in ten,” a statistic in fact far low er than the ratio of wo rks that have been eliminated from the Josquin canon in the late twentieth century. The accomplishments of contemporaries of Beethoven, as well as those of other genius composers, have similarly been overshadowed. 15. The occasionally polemical tone o f this essay is in keeping with this spirited tradition, and I intend no disrespect toward musicologists of the past or present, who will be mentioned in due course, particularly Edward Lowinsky and Joseph Kerman to whose pioneering critical thought I plainly owe an incalculable intellectual and scholarly debt.


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A “Josquin” Epiphany: Firestone Library, Princeton University, Fall 1976 Epiphany . . . a) a moment of sudden intuitive understanding; flash of insight b) a scene, experience, etc. that occasions such a moment.

Excited voices pierce the silence of the subterranean music carrels. I peer out of my assigned cubicle to determine the cause of celebration: the arrival of a b oo k—a thick, cherry-red to me—“ Lo winsky’s Jo sq uin P roceedings.” The older graduate students who had attended the International Josquin Festival-C onference five years earlier had regaled us neophytes with reverential accounts of the momentous occasion; circumspectly, I had refrained from asking w ho “ Low insky” was. Nor did I confess that I hadn’t heard much about Josquin des Prez in my undergraduate days or that what little I did know about him owed to occasional chance exposure to a band of lute-toting students in flowing mumus and beaded headbands. Endowed with a rock-star first-name celebrity (and unlike “ classical composers” who are known by their last names), “ Josq uin” was uttered w ith a breathy, smugly self-import ant into nation.16 The most ardent among these students, a reluctant participant in the seminar on the Second Viennese School, would histrionically feign aural torture by planting her index fingers firmly in each ear whenever Schoenberg w as played in class. Sadly, I tho ught, these narrow-minded “ Jo sq uin” -lovers are obsessed with some Renaissance composer most people have never heard of, while I am preparing an honors thesis and piano recital on Robert Schumann, a composer whose claim to musical greatness is unassailable. 17 Or so I thought. From the moment I set foot in graduate school, I sensed with mounting trepidation that I had much to learn in short order. The 16. Some early music composers like Leonel (Po wer), Adriano (Willaert), and C ipriano (de Rore) were also referred to by their first names in manuscripts and prints during their own lifetimes. Only first names have survived for certain medieval composers like Notker, Leonin, and Perotin. In the present day, Josquin stands as the only canonic composer routinely referred to by first name alone (with the exception of “ H ildegard” of B ingen, depending on w hether or not o ne now considers her “ canonic” ). I shall elaborate on naming practices in connection with Fo ucault’ s “ autho r function” as it may relate to Jo squin, in an expanded form o f this essay. See Michel Foucault, “ What I s an Autho r?” in The Foucault R eader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Boo ks, 1984), 101–20, at 105–7. 17. O f interest are Barthes’s comments on Schumann from around t he same time: “ Is this why our period grants him what is doubtless an ‘honourable’ place (of course he is a ‘great composer’), but not a favored one (there are many Wagnerites, many Mahlerians, but the only Schumannians I know are G illes D eleuze, M arcel Beaufils, and myself )? O ur period, especially since the advent, by recordings, of mass music, wants splendid images of great conflicts (Beethoven, Mahler, Tchaikovsky). Loving Schumann . . . is in a way to assume a philosophy of No stalgia . . . it inevitably leads the subject who does so and says so to posit himself in his time according to the injunctions of his desire and not according to t hose of his sociality.” Roland Barthes, “ Loving Schumann” (1979), in The R esponsi bil i ty of Forms: Cr i ti cal Essays on M usi c, A r t, and Representation, trans. Richard H ow ard (B erkeley and Lo s Angeles: U niversity of C alifornia P ress, 1985), 293–98, at 298.



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earnest pronouncement that I “ loved Schumann” and intended to w rite my dissertation on him was met with sidelong glances conveying the subtle message that his thesis-worthiness was suspect, unless of course I was planning to work on his “ sketches or autog raphs.” 18 The composers of moment seemed to be Beethoven and (again) “ Josquin,” the latter standing on “ what-goeswitho ut-saying” equal footing with the former, to the point of meriting the deployment of a small army of graduate students (in w hich I wo uld soon fi nd myself happily enlisted) to encode his music on keypunch machines. 19 At the very least, I would need to revise my hierarchy of great composers, for this “ Josq uin” was proving to be a formidable musical force to reckon with.

The Apotheosis of Josquin des Prez: Lincoln Center, New York, June1971 Apotheosis: 1 the act of raising a person to the status of a god; deification 2 the g lorification of a person or thing 3 a glorified ideal.

In 1999, after well over a decade of immersion in feminist epistemologies and other critical theory, 20 I found myself rereading the printed account of the opening session of the 1971 Josquin Festival-Conference (the official historical record, as it were) in preparation for the spoken address that occasioned the original version of this essay. It was astonishing to confront the Otherness of the hallowed text I once knew as a graduate student. Whereas my previous readings had been informed by an awe-inspired reverence for universal truths about Josquin, no w I was struck at every turn by the historical contingency of the event and the extent to which it seemed a classic embod iment of the intellectual preoccupations of a bygone era, musicology wie es eigentlich gewesen in 1971.21 H ow did I fail to notice the sheer extravagance, the pageantry, the 18. Bruno N ettl speaks of musicolog ists’ elusive criteria for greatness being a case of “ je ne sais q uoi.” “ C omplexity” and “ magnitude” are of major importance, while music of “ outright popularity (for instance, the composers represented in ‘pops’ concerts)” is avoided: “ until quite recently, t hey proudly stayed aw ay from t he likes of Tchaikovsky, O ffenbach, and G rieg” (“ The Institutionalization of Musicology: Perspectives of a N ort h American Et hnomusicologist,” in R ethinking M usic, ed. Nicholas Co ok and Mark Everist [Oxford and New York: Oxford U niversity Press, 1999], 287–310, at 306–7). Few would disagree that these broadly evaluative criteria of greatness tacitly held sway in most citadels of graduate musicology in the late 1970s. 19. The Princeto n Josquin Project was a pioneering attempt to apply nascent computer technology to the task of developing objective criteria (incidences of parallel fifths, leaps, triadic sonorities, etc.) for analysis of J osquin’s masses and motets, w ith the go al of establishing chronolog y and authenticity. See Arthur M endel, “ Tow ards Ob jective C riteria for Establishing C hronolog y and Authenticity: What H elp Can t he Co mputer G ive?” in Josquin Pr oceedi ngs, 297–308. 20. See in particular Paula H iggins, “ Women in Music, Feminist C riticism, and G uerrilla Musicology: Reflections on Recent Polemics,” 19th-Cent ur y M usic 17 (1993): 174–92. 21. “ The O pening Session,” in Josquin Pr oceedi ngs, 1–17. This appears to be an edited transcript of the opening ceremonies of the Festival-Conference. In the absence of a given author, names indicated in citations below refer to remarks of individual speakers.


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self-conscious sense of histo rical moment that marked the occasion, indeed its mythic proportions? Increasingly resistant, I found myself approaching the text with a hermeneutics of suspicion. 22 The festivities opened with a Renaissance fanfare—Josquin’s Vi ve le roy, performed by the New York Pro Musica Wind Ensemble. Once concluded, Claude Palisca, then president of the American Musicological Society, stepped to the podium. D esignated as “ presiding” over the opening session, P alisca set the tone of encomiastic grandiloquence that would mark the introductory speeches. The word great surfaces repeatedly in the opening pages of the text: the occasion as an “ homage to the great composer,” the “ most international of the great composers” ; the venue as a “ great citadel of the performing arts,” a “ great institution” ; the historical context as “ that great event around his 50th year that was to expand the world he knew,” an expedition facilitated by “ those great patrons of music, Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon.” 23 After recounting conference organizer Edward Lo winsky’s extensive preparations for the event, Palisca introduced five additional distinguished guests, each of w hom then addressed the assembly. 24 The last to speak was William S. Newman, president of the American Musicological Society during the two years Lowinsky was planning the festival, who had, “ through o ne of the many instances of secret d iplomacy in this project,” we are to ld, “ reserved th e honor” of introducing Edw ard Low insky for himself.25 At last the “ distinguished procreator” of the event, as Newman d escribed him, stepped forward to address the assembly, and further encomia ensued. Lowinsky lauded the “ heroic dimension o f [Albert] Smijers’ work” in completing t he Josquin edition, and the “ historic moment” when the board of the D utch Musicological Society decided to sponsor it. 26 H e called upon Ludwig Finscher, representing the International Musicological Society, to read the text of a cablegram sent to salute H elmuth O sthoff, “ a great Josq uin scholar,” unable to attend ow ing to illness, and praised Friedrich B lume, “ one of the greatest musical scholars of o ur time,” for risking his health to make the trip. 27 Sumptuous gifts— presentation copies of facsimiles of Canti B and Petrucci’s second book of 22. A term coined in the 1970s by the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur for a method of interpretation whose purpose is to read beyond the literal, surface-level meaning of a text in order to unmask the political interests it serves. 23. “ Opening Session,” in Josquin Pr oceedi ngs, 3, 4, 5. 24. The speakers included P eter Mennin, president o f The Juilliard School; D r. William R. Emerson, d irector of Research and Publications of the Nat ional Endow ment for the H umanities (he is not listed in the official conference program); Ludwig Finscher, representative of the In ternational M usicolog ical Society; G ustave Reese, president of the R enaissance Society of America; and William S. Newman. “ O pening Session,” in Josquin Pr oceedings, 4–10. See also the Int ernational Josquin Festival-C onference program for Monday, 21 June, p. 5. 25. Newman, in “ O pening Session,” in Josquin Pr oceedi ngs, 8–9. 26. Low insky, in ibid., 14. 27. Ib id., 12–13. Blume had “ come all the way from G ermany to New York notw ithstanding his doctor’s warnings that the trip might be a hazard to his health.”



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masses—had been bestowed upon the foreign guests and conference speakers. 28 And as if the gods of Parnassus themselves were smiling down upon the gathering in anticipation of the imminent apotheosis of their newest confrere, a previously unknown copy of the fi rst print of Petrucci’s Odhecaton had resurfaced comme par mi racle in the New York Public Library. 29 By the end of the address, even the spectators had morphed into “ this great audience.” 30 A conference report by a C olumbia U niversity graduate student—one Richard Taruskin—subsequently published in Cur rent M usicology, chronicled an event of breathtaking scholarly excitement and enthusiasm, of such powerful intellectual voltage that speakers were running back to their rooms at night to revise their as-yet-to-be-delivered papers in light of new evidence that kept emerging each day. “ It w as thrilling,” Taruskin wrot e, “ to see the state of know ledge of Josquin’s life and w ork change before one’s very eyes.” 31 A media event extraordinaire, the N ew York Ti mes reviewed all four sold-out concerts at Alice Tully H all. 32 By all accounts, the Josquin Festival-Conference was a triumph and a testimonial to the indefatigable energy and entrepreneurial genius of possibly the most brilliant cultural historian the field of musicolog y has ever known. There never was before, and probably will never be again, another musicological blockbuster to rival it.33 Reflecting on my renewed acquaintance with the text of the opening events, I found it difficult to resist—even in the most skeptical, myth-busting mode—an overwhelming sense of nostalgia for the magnificence and splendor of a bygone era—in musicology, as well as the world in general. The early 1970s were still a time when stories of the decisive actions of great men and dramatic human events filled the newspapers and, more importantly, the 28. The facsimile edition o f P etrucci’s second b oo k of Jo squin’s masses was specially printed by t he Antiq uae Musicae It alicae Studiosi at the initiative of the g roup’s then president, G iuseppe Vecchi, and copies of H elen H ewitt’ s edition o f Petrucci’s Canti B were presented by decision of the E xecutive B oard of the American M usicological Society. I bid., 13–14. 29. Ibid., 13. 30. Ibid., 11. 31. Richard Taruskin, “ Report from L incoln C enter: The International Josquin FestivalConference, 21–25 June 1971,” Cur rent M usi cology 14 (1972): 47–64, at 47. The essay is reprinted in Richard Taruskin, Text and A ct: Essays on M usic and Per formance (New York and O xford: O xford U niversity Press, 1995), 322–43, at 323. 32. Raymond Ericson, “ H omage Is Paid to Josquin des Prez,” N ew York T imes, 23 June 1971, 55; D onal H enahan, “ Prague Group in D ebut,” N ew York Ti mes, 24 June 1971, 32; ibid., “ Stutt gart Ensemble Performs Josq uin in A C appella Version,” N ew York T imes, 26 June 1971, 20; and Allen H ughes, “ Josquin Festival Ends on P ure Not e: Ruhland Leads Ensemble of Munich C apella Antiq ua,” N ew York Ti mes, 27 June 1971, 45. 33. With respect t o t he further historical contingency of the occasion, it could also b e said that such an event on such a scale wo uld have been impossible anywhere other than in the U nited Stat es: “ I n welchem anderen Land hät ten die gleichen fi nanz iellen und technischen Mitt el bereitgestanden, um einen derartig perfekt organisierten Spezialistenkongreß ablaufen lassen zu können?” See Winfried Kirsch, “ International J osquin Festival C onference New York,” D ie M usikforschung 24 (1971): 441–43, at 441.


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television screen, when recent memories of great human achievement still lingered in the American dream: “ O ne small step for [a] man, one giant step for mankind.” G iants and d warves. That w as the way it was in musicology as well. These were our great men, our very best scholars and leaders. They had the right to conduct the business of our great musicological enterprise in any way they so pleased; any discussion, much less criticism, of their modus operandi was unthinkable, at least for us dw arves. And yet, these were also years of colossal social upheaval and political unrest. By the time Lowinsky launched full-scale preparations for the Josquin Festival-Conference in 1969, the American dream had transmogrified into a nightmare. In the previous year alone, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy had shocked the nation, as had the riots and police brutality at the D emocratic convention in C hicago. A devastating and humiliating foreign war in Vietnam w as in full throt tle. U nruly mobs of dissenting voices reverberated all over America in the form of civil rights marches, antiwar demonstrations, and public bra-burnings by angry women called “ feminists” who d emanded equal right s. G iven the widespread turmoil and political upheaval in America at the time, it may seem astonishing, in retrospect, that such an extravagant fuss could be made over someone who was, at least in the greater scheme of things, a rather obscure Renaissance composer.

Fashioning Genius: Kerman, Lowinsky, and the “Beethoven of His Time” A Beethovian [si c ] biography is born (one ought to be able to say a biomythology), the artist is brought forward as a complete hero, endowed with a discourse (a rare occurrence for a musician), a legend (a good ten or so anecdotes), an iconography, a race (that of the Titans of Art: Michelangelo, Balzac) and a fatal malady (the deafness of he who creates for the pleasure of our ears). —Roland B arthes, M usica Practi ca (1970)34

From a hermeneutically suspicious standpoint, the pomp and panoply of the International Jo squin Festival-C onference appears to have served a much larger, and specifically ideological, purpose. Something was at stake in the staging of this conference cum gargantuan princely Renaissance extravaganza, and I suspect that it was the formal legitimation of Edward Lowinsky’s own paradigm—his personal scholarly agenda—for the Renaissance musicological enterprise itself. Much of the rheto ric of t he opening session—“ reconnaissance,” “ negotiations,” “ allies,” “ cooperation,” “ headquarters,” “ machinery,” “ ministries,” “ delegations,” “ secret diplomacy,” “ recruit[ment],” “ conspir[acy]” —conjures up nefarious scenarios of espionage and militar y counterintelligence. Tellingly, the o nly word absent from t his sea of C old War 34. Roland Barthes, “ Musica Practica,” in I mage—M usic—Text, 149–54, at 151.



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rhetoric is “ enemy,” as if he were lurking silent and unseen in the wings, primed to launch a sneak attack. And if not exactly hidden behind the curtains, a genius loci may well have been inhabiting the Josquin proceedings: possibly, I suggest, in the form of the young Joseph Kerman. H ow ever tacit the political agenda of the Josq uin Festival-C onference, Lowinsky had quite publicly proclaimed his ambitions for the future of musicology, not long before the conference preparations began, in a volatile and vituperative exchange of ideological manifestos with Kerman in JAMS. Kerman’s “ Profi le for American Musicology” had launched the first of many frontal assaults to come, against w hat he would later label the “ positivist paradigm” of musicology, tho ugh here it is called “ the true objective path . . . of the great G erman tradition.” “ That tradition,” Kerman wrote, “ was not dictated by objective truths of nature, it arose out of a certain national current of tho ught at a certain point it its history.” 35 A key target of his propo sal, implicit in 1965 and more explicitly articulated in his Cont emplati ng M usic of 1985, was what he characterized as the kind of unthinking “ collecting of information” that musicologists often engage in at the expense of his preferred mo de of “ criticism.” O ne ostensibly passing comment in Kerman’s modest ninepage tract proved to be incendiary: For reasons of time and timidity, I pass over the trivia that occupy good minds while Beethoven’s sketches remain unanalyzed (the G ermans are on ly tr anscr ibing them) and spurious works lurk scandalously in the Josquin canon. 36 [italics original; add ed emphasis in bold]

The latter statement about Josquin goaded Lowinsky to an impassioned defense: Professor Kerman is scandalized by the fact that “spur ious works lurk . . . in the Josquin canon.” H ow valid is such a complaint in view of the hard and stubb orn fact that as yet we have neither the complete works of Josquin nor of any of the signi ficant master s of his envi ronment? . . . how can we, at the present state of Jo sq uin research, even talk of a “ canon” of his works? H ow can we expect to distinguish Josquin’s style from that of his many great and small contemporaries if we do not study the smaller masters wi th the same car e as the great ones — “ there should be more wo rk on t he great masters,” demands Professor Kerman, when the simple truth is: there should be more work on both great and small master s and—the two should go together. 37 [emphasis add ed]

35. Joseph Kerman, “ A Pro file for American Musicology,” this Journal 18 (1965): 61–69, at 67. 36. Ibid., 66. 37. Edw ard E. L ow insky, “ C haracter and Purposes of American Musicology: A Reply to Joseph Kerman,” this Journal 18 (1965): 222–34, at 227–28. Reprinted in Ed ward E. Lowinsky, M usic in the Culture of the R enai ssance and Other Essays, ed. Bonnie J. Blackburn (Chicago and Londo n: U niversity of C hicago P ress, 1989), 2:958–64. Kerman responded briefly, in a subseq uent C omm unication, wherein he seems taken aback by the “ animus” of Lo winsky’s “ shrill


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While there is no doubt as to where Lo winsky stands with respect to J osquin’s stature, or indeed with respect to the self-evidence of a hierarchical qualitative distinction between composers (great versus small), what seems remarkable about this paragraph written in 1965 is that there is no hint that Josquin should necessar i ly warrant special treatment in the quality and quantity of scholarly work devoted to him as opposed to other composers. H ere we find an exhortation to the simultaneous study of masters both great and small — as if to suggest the contingency of the study of one upon the other. Somewhat paradoxically, Lowinsky had published just the year before an article that at tempted t o t race the intellectual lineage of the idea of musical genius. I n t he four decades since its original publication, “ Musical G enius: Evolution and O rigins of a C oncept,” like its subject, attracted scant attention until only recently. 38 Briefly stated, Lowinsky’s thesis held that around 1500, when composers abandoned compositional procedures based on preexisting sacred and secular melodies in favor of freely composed polyphony, there arose a concomitant awareness of the composer as a peculiarly gifted creative artist who se exceptional musical gifts were paired with an “ artistic,” read “ diffi cult,” personality. In this subtle mixture of talent and temperament, Lowinsky saw the fermentation of the modern notion of musical genius. 39 I shall address my concerns with Lowinsky’s formulation at greater length below. For now, suffice it to say that Josquin, rather than being a precocious prototype of Romantic genius, emerges as Lowinsky’s own intellectual construct, heavily indebted, to be sure, to nineteenth-century G erman discourses of musical genius promulgated mainly by August Wilhelm Ambros (1816– 1876). As for so many other areas of musicology, Ambros’s pioneering work laid the ideological bedrock of modern Josquin scholarship and provided the cultural filter through w hich Lo winsky and others of his generation viewed

Reply” (characterized as a “ Panzer attack” ) and drew att ention t o their common g round, saying, “ I should much rather hug him to my breast as an ally” (this Journal 18 [1965]: 426–27). 38. Edw ard E. Low insky, “ Musical G enius: Evolution and O rigins of a C oncept,” Musical Quarterly 50 (1964): 321–40 and 476–95; reprinted with additions in Lowinsky, M usic in the Cult ure of t he R enaissance 1:40–66. References here are to the original publication. The article originated as a paper read at a symposium on creativity held at the Eastman School of Music, 4 May 1962. 39. A similar argument advanced around the same time in a classic art histo rical study aimed to demonstrate that Albert D ürer’s engraving M elencolia I “ bo re witness to the genesis of the modern concept of genius and that the artist’s own writings expressed precocious ideas of inner creativity and inspiration that w ere only to reach maturity in the Romantic period.” See Mart in Kemp, “ The ‘Super-Artist’ as G enius: The Sixteenth-C entury View,” in Geni us: The H istor y of an I dea, ed. Penelope Murray (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 32–54, at 34. The study in question is Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Satur n and M elan choly: Studi es in the H istor y of N atu ral Philosophy, R eli gion, an d A r t (London: Nelson, 1964). For cautionary remarks from subsequent art historians against reading the modern notion of genius into this engraving, see the bibliography in Kemp, “ The ‘Super-Artist,’ ” 50 n. 6.



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the opinions of Josquin’s sixteenth-century enthusiasts. 40 Nevertheless, it seems doubtful that Ambrosian discourse on Josquin would have sustained its scholarly longevity without the intervention at a pivotal moment in later twentieth-century music historiography of powerful scholarly agendas and personalities. 41 A quick perusal, for example, of the bibliography on Josquin printed in the second edition of The N ew Gr ove D i cti onar y of M usi c and M usicians reveals relatively few isolated studies of the composer, and only two articles in English, prior to 1961. Writing in 1941, Alfred Einstein had characterized the music of Josquin, among other composers of early music, as being in a state of “ petrification,” in that it could no longer “ make a direct appeal to the popular mind.” 42 Even as late as 1967, C arl D ahlhaus again described the music of Jo sq uin (along w ith that o f Machaut and M ont everdi) as “ petrified,” and any att empts to revive it as “ futile.” 43 Such a statement would have seemed ludicrous five years later. Rather than being viewed as the unmediated, belated legacy and inevitable culmination of Ambros’s sustained attention to the composer a century earlier, the late twentieth-century apotheosis of Josquin, I wo uld suggest, arose from a confluence of highly contingent musical and historical circumstances involving the impending completion of the opera omnia in the 1960s, the publication of O sthoff ’s Josquin monograph of 1962–65, L ow insky’s “ G enius” article of 1964, the Kerman-Lowinsky debates of 1965, and above all, the International Josquin Festival-Conference of 1971, which, I would further suggest, appropriated Josquin des Prez as Renaissance musicology’s very own genius, ahistorically refashioned in Beethovenian guise.44 40. Philipp Ot to Naegele, “ August Wilhelm Ambros: H is H istorical and C ritical Thought ” (Ph.D . diss., P rinceton U niversity, 1954); Paula H iggins, “ Anto ine Busnois and Musical C ulture in Late Fifteenth-Century France and B urgundy” (Ph.D . diss., P rinceton U niversity, 1987), 322– 25; D on H arrán, “ Burney and Ambros as Editors of Josquin’s Music,” in Josquin Pr oceedi ngs, 148–77, esp. his annotated list of Ambros’s transcriptions of 87 Josquin pieces (19 masses, 48 motets, 15 French chansons, 3 I talian secular wo rks, and 2 instrumental canons), 172–77; and most recently Andrew Kirkman, “ From H umanism to Enlightenment: Reinventing Josquin,” Jour nal of M usicology 17 (1999): 441–58, at 452–58. 41. D aniel Leech-Wilkinson has drawn at tention t o t he largely unacknow ledg ed roles that reputation and personality play in evaluating the success or failure of individual scholarly endeavors. See his M oder n I nvention of M edi eval M usic: Scholar ship, I deology, Per formance (Cambridge: C ambridge U niversity Press, 2002), 239–42. 42. Alfred Einstein, Gr eat ness i n M usi c, trans. César Saerchinger (New York: Oxford U niversity Press, 1941; reprint, New York: D a C apo, 1976), 9. 43. C arl D ahlhaus, Estheti cs of M usi c, trans. William W. Austin (C ambridge: C amb ridge U niversity P ress, 1982), 98–99. O riginally published in G erman in 1967 as M usikästhetik. 44. In the opening session, C laude Palisca credited G ustave Reese, and specifically the some one-hundred-page chapter “ Jo squin and H is C ont emporaries” in M usic in the R enai ssance, with a “ large share of credit for t he J osquin renaissance that succeeded the P alestrina renaissance” (“ O pening Session,” in Josquin Pr oceedi ngs, 7). Reese’s text twice refers to Josquin’s possession of genius (“ Jo squin needed the large variety of t ext, available to the mo tet co mposers to express the many-sidedness of his genius” and “ he wrote canon as readily as Bach w rote fugue . . . each man


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It is worth bearing in mind that Kerman’s incendiary comment in 1965 paired Beethoven’s sketches and “ spurious works lurk[ing] scandalously in the Jo sq uin canon” as egregious examples of the deficiencies in then-existing scholarship. And without wishing to impute a necessarily causal relationship (the 1971 conference was ostensibly a celebration of the 450th anniversary of Josquin’s death in 1521), one cannot help but notice the timing—coincidental or not—of the International Josquin Festival-Conference in June 1971, short ly after the monumental commemorative celebrations of Beethoven’s Bicentennial, which had been enacted scarcely six months earlier in no fewer than three major international conferences in Bonn, Berlin, and Vienna. 45 C oming fast on the heels of the B eetho ven-Jahr, the 1971 Josquin conference was perhaps not surprisingly awash in allusions to Jo squin’s “ genius.” Ludwig Finscher, in the opening session, extolled “ the unique genius” of Josq uin, calling him “ one of the first and one of t he greatest incarnations of creative musical genius.” 46 Myroslav Antonowycz later referred to Josquin’s creative mind as belonging “ among the greatest o f the great in the cultural histo ry o f Europe.” D on H arrán’s paper invoked Ambros’s opinion t hat Jo sq uin was the first composer that “ strikes one, predominantly, with the impression of genius.” 47 Jitka Snízˇková’s article opens with a reference to “ Jo sq uin—this ‘g enius of sparkling musical ideas and o verfl ow ing musicality.’ ” 48 Two papers drew explicit comparisons between Josquin and

merely employed a technical medium particularly suited to his genius” ), but never to his “ being” a genius, and his text is largely devoid of the lionizing discourse that would become typical of Josquin scholarship in the decade leading up t o t he 1971 conference. 45. See the three conference proceedings: Ber i cht über den i nt er nati onalen musi kwi s- senschaf tli chen K ongress: Bonn 1970, ed. C arl D ahlhaus, H ans-Joachim Marx, Magda M arxWeber, and G unther Massenkeil (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1971); Ber icht über den I nt er nati onalen Beethoven-K ongress 10.–12. D ezember 1970 in Berlin, ed. H einz Alfred Brockhaus and Ko nrad Niemann (Berlin: Neue Musik, 1971); and Beethoven-Symposion Wien 1970: Bericht, ed. Erich Schenk, Veroffentlichung der Staatlichen Instituts für Musikforschung Preussische Kulturbesitz Berlin 12 (Vienna: B öhlau, 1971). 46. “ Opening Session,” in Josquin Pr oceedi ngs, 6. 47. Myroslaw Antonowycz, “ ‘I llibata D ei Virgo’: A Melodic Self-Po rtrait o f Josquin des Prez,” in Josquin Pr oceedi ngs, 545–59, at 558; H arrán, “ B urney and Ambros,” 148. 48. The quote is credited to H einrich G larean (D odecachordon, 1547), but as we shall see below, it is based on a questionable translation of the term ingenium. Jitka Snízˇková, “ Jo squin in C zech Sources of the Second H alf of the Sixteenth Century,” in Josquin Pr oceedi ngs, 279–84, at 279, quot ing H ellmuth C hristian Wolff, D ie M usik der alt en N iederländer (Leipzig, 1956), 58, and G larean (see the passage in q uestion in my Appendix C, Ex. 2, below). Snízˇková’s contribution was one of three essays not delivered at the conference itself. See Lowinsky, preface to Josquin Pr oceedi ngs, v. According to the citations in Snízˇková’ s foot note, this appears to be a freely embellished t ranslation from Wolff ’s G erman “ Ausschweifung eines übersprudelnden G enies” (my translation w ould be something like: “ the extravagance of his overflowing g enius” ), which in turn is a direct translation from t he Latin “ lasciuientis ingenii impetus.” Among many points that could be made here, I shall confi ne myself for now to tw o. First, neither the Latin nor the G erman original refers to Jo squin as “ this genius” (i.e., a genius persona); Wolff ’s use of the genitive clearly



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Beethoven, as well as Bach and Mozart. 49 Sprinkled throughout the FestivalConference program were eight quotations ranging chronologically from Martin L uther to H elmuth O sthoff (see Appendix A, Exx. 1–8), presumably reflecting the unanimous, transhistorical testimony to Josquin’s genius and greatness, but attesting simultaneously (and unwittingly) to the gradual inflation of Josquin’s genius status over time. 50 But the most remarkable comments of all came from Lowinsky himself: “ And of the greatest musicians of any ag e, Josq uin des Prez is a fi gure so towering that his name cannot be left out of any enumeration of great composers, however small the number of them might happen to be.” 51 The impact o f that last breathtaking remark doesn’t fully register until one takes Lowinsky literally at his word and does the math. What happened to the pluralistic Lowinsky of 1965 who advocated an all-embracing scholarly approach to composers “ both g reat and small” ? While in the “ G enius” article of 1964, Low insky had described J osquin as being “ to the Renaissance musician the very incarnation of musical genius,” 52 even there, Jo squin figures as a member of a triumvirate: Jo squin, Lasso, G esualdo, h ow ever different th ey were in character and as artists, share one essential quality: they are musical geniuses whose extraordinary gifts are matched by an extraordinary personality; they exhibit immense strength of feeling, spontaneity, originality, independence as human beings and in social intercourse with others; they are great individuals, and each one of

indicates possession (i.e., “ Josquin’s genius,” not “ Jo sq uin, this genius” ). Second, G larean’s passage is one of several that criticize the transgressive “ excess” of Josq uin’s imagination. Wolff q uot es G larean in the context of a discussion of such chastising comments, whereas Snízˇková, by t aking Wolff ’s quo tation out of cont ext, has transformed G larean’s negative statement into one of unq ualified praise, and has further exagg erated its meaning by t acitly switching G larean’s and Wolff ’s genitives of possession (“ of his talent” /“ of his genius” ) into a nominative (“ Josquin—this genius” ). Miller, on the other hand, rather blandly translates this key passage as “ the impetuosity of a lively talent.” This and several ot her passages like it fo rm clear examples of a kind of censorship or “ sanitizing” of g enius, which I shall discuss in a fort hcoming study. 49. “ In cont rast w ith Beethoven, who to t his day is more honoured on paper than in performances throughout the Peninsula, Josquin completely captivated Spain and Portugal from the moment P etrucci’s prints first began circulating abroad ” (Robert St evenson, “ Jo squin in the Music of Spain and Po rtugal,” in Josquin Pr oceedi ngs, 217–46, at 217); “ Jo squin was a professional singer and o bviously an excellent one. H e was a singer-composer, whereas the great composers of later times, such as Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, had their own practical experience primarily in instrumental music” (Walter Wiora, “ The Structure of Wide-Spanned M elodic Lines in Earlier and Later Works of Jo squin,” in Josquin Pr oceedi ngs, 309–16, at 309). 50. The quot ation from C harles Burney (Appendix A, no. 5), who I believe was the first to acknow ledg e Josquin as a “ genius persona” in the modern sense of the word, is emblematic of “ the eighteenth-century Eng lish preoccupation w ith origins of all sort s, and especially, o n the literary front, of the fi gure of the ‘original genius.’ ” See G lenn Wright, “ G eoffrey the U nbarbarous: C haucerian ‘G enius’ and E ighteenth-C entury Antimedievalism,” Engli sh Studi es 82 (2001): 193–202, at 193. 51. “ Opening Session,” in Josquin Pr oceedi ngs, 12. 52. Low insky, “ Musical G enius,” M usical Quar terly, 491.


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them was hailed in his time as the foremost representative of an expressive style of music. 53

Tellingly, in Lowinsky’s description o f these three Renaissance “ geniuses” we find a virtual compendium of Romantic genius criteria superimposed upon the testimo ny of sixteenth-century witnesses: “ extrao rdinar y person ality,” “ immense strength of feeling,” “ spontaneity,” “ originality,” “ independence.” 54 But even here, Josquin has yet to emerge as the towering giant of Renaissance music historiography, and this more tempered view reflected the current state of musicological opinion, in which Josquin was still, as promulgated most widely in G ustave Reese’s M usic in the R enai ssance ( 1954), “ one of the two or three greatest composers of the . . . Renaissance.” And Reese qualified this even further, specifying that this status owed primarily to Josquin’s motets. Indeed, the chapter “ Josq uin des Prez and H is C ontemporaries,” while singling o ut J osquin, seems relatively evenhanded in its evaluation o f the broader musical context: No one man could alone have been responsible for all the characteristic qualities of t he new music. H istorical forces comb ined to mould t hem. B ut t hese forces were able to find particularly brilliant expression because a large g roup of singularly gifted composers were all vigorously active at about the same time. Obrecht, Agricola, Isaac, Compere, Josquin, Brumel, Pierre de la Rue, and Mouton were the brightest lights in an especially luminous constellation. And Josquin was a star of the first magnitude. 55

The constructed image of Josquin as Renaissance musical genius, it would seem, derives in large part from a tendency to read the letters and casual anecdotes of his sixteenth-century contemporaries through a lens strongly filtered by the Romantic discourse of genius that has permeated Beethoven reception history. Three of these in particular have contributed significantly to the mythopoesis of Josquin in seeming to attribute to him the highly idiosyncratic

53. Ibid., 486. 54. “ The qualities with which the t erm ‘genius’ h as been invested ever since the mideighteenth century, such as spontaneity, outstanding originality, and exceptional creativity were not implied in the Latin ingenium and the Italian ingegno, meaning natural disposition, i.e. talent” (Rudo lf Wittkow er, “ G enius: I ndividualism in Art and Artists,” in D i cti onar y of t he H istor y of I deas: Studi es of Selected Pi votal I deas, ed. Philip Wiener [New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973], 2:297–312, at 305). Also: “ The Genieperiode, the [literary] Romantic Movements, both in G ermany and France, were times of ang ry enthusiasm and o f wild revolt; [with] ecstatic emphasis laid upon the freedom, the spontaneity, and the originality of the creative genius” (Logan Pearsall Smith, Four Words: R omanti c, Or iginali ty, Cr eati ve, Geni us, Society for Pure Eng lish, Tract 17 [Oxford: C larendo n, 1924], 36; cited in H ans Lenneberg, “ The First ‘U nappreciated’ G enius,” Jour nal of M usicological R esear ch 4 [1982]: 145–57, at 155). 55. G ustave Reese, M usic in the R enaissance (New York: W. W. Norto n, 1954), 184. For Reese, Jo squin’s only rival in the realm of mot et composition w as Palestrina, “ due to the widely held and no d oubt co rrect o pinion t hat his music is more suitable for devot ional purposes.” But he felt t hat P alestrina “ must yield fi rst place to Josquin as a histo rical figure and must admit him to a place at least of co mpanionship on purely musical gro unds” (ibid., 246).



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and temperamental personality of Beethoven. The first is the famous letter to D uke Ercole d’Este of Ferrara (1502) by his agent G ian de Artiganova, in which he discouraged the duke from hiring Josquin because he was difficult to get along with and “ composes when he wants to, and not when one wants him to.” 56 The second is the story of Johannes Manlius (1562), dating from four decades after Josquin’s death, in which an irascible, petulant Josquin called one of his singers “ You ass!” and publicly berated him for add ing ornaments that he had not written into the piece, 57 an incident uncannily echoed in a well-known q uote of Beethoven’s: “ I refuse to allow another, whoever he may be, to alter my compositions.” 58 While the notion of a temperamental Renaissance artist is itself a trope of some venerability, and was certainly a trait attributed to artists like Michelangelo, one does wonder whether these particular letters and anecdotes would have figured so prominently in Josquin studies in the absence of a Beethovenian historical framework. 59 The third example is the eq ually famous testimo ny of the Swiss humanist H einrich G larean (1488–1563), a near contemporary of Josquin and a knowledgeable musical authority: Those who knew him say that he published his works after much deliberation and with manifold corrections; neither did he release a song to the public unless he had kept it to himself for some years, the opposite of what Jacob Obrecht appears to have done. 60 56. Among the numerous citations and discussions of this letter, the ones most pertinent to the subject at hand are Lo winsky, “ Musical G enius,” M usical Quar terly, 484–85; and Rob C. Wegman, “ From M aker to C omposer: Improvisation and Musical Autho rship in t he Lo w C ountries, 1450–1500,” this Journal 49 (1996): 409–79, at 466–67. 57. “ You ass, w hy do you add o rnamentation? If it had pleased me, I would have inserted it myself. If you wish to amend properly composed songs, make your own, but leave mine unamended!” Q uoted in Rob C . Wegman, “ ‘And Josquin Laughed . . .’: Josquin and the C omposer’s Anecdote in the Sixteenth C entury,” Jour nal of M usicology 17 (1999): 319–57, at 322. 58. See Nicholas C oo k, “ The Other Beethoven: H eroism, the C anon, and t he Works of 1813–14,” 19th-Cent ur y M usic 27 (2003): 3–24, at 6. 59. The idea of being a “ diffi cult” creative personality may have been something of a trope in this period, which saw the rise of an elite group of exceptionally talented artists in Italian courts that req uired “ more deference than w as due to mere craftsmen” (Kemp, “ The ‘Super-Artist,’ ” 37). Like Josquin, the artist Andrea Mantegna, for example, working for Isabella d’Este at the nearby Gonz aga court in Mantua, “ was regarded as a diffi cult character, q uick to t ake offence and slow to meet obligations” (ibid.). I n the Renaissance, the concept of artistic temperament had t o do with humoral medicine and the Saturnine disposition that gave rise to melancholy, with the presumably greatest creative artists being the victims most seriously afflicted with the condition. See the classic studies by Rudolf Wittkower and Margot Wittkower, Bor n U nder Satur n: The

Character and Conduct of A r ti sts. A D ocument ed H istor y fr om A nt iquity to the French R evolu ti on (New York and Lo ndo n: W. W. Norto n, 1963); and Klibansky, P anofsky, and Saxl, Satur n and M elancholy. For a deeper exploration of melancholy as it relates specifically to Josquin, his personality, and contemporaneous anecdotes about him, see Wegman, “ ‘And J osquin Laughed,’ ” 338–57. 60. G larean, H einr ich Glarean D odecachordon, ed. and trans. Clement A. Miller ([Rome]: American Institute of Musicology, 1965), 2:265. See Appendix C, Ex. 3, below for the original Latin.


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The powerful resonance of this comment in the late twentieth century lies, I suspect, in its tacit evocation of t he “ struggling artist” genius trope and, more specifically, of Beethoven, the embod iment of heroic striving, the indefatigable genius, laboriously reworking his compositions in sketch after sketch after sketch. In a revised version of his “ G enius” article, published in the D icti onar y of the H istor y of I deas (1973), Lowinsky himself linked Josquin and Beethoven with explicit reference to the aforementioned G larean anecdote. A comparison of the earlier (1964) and later (1973) versions of the article reveals that Lo winsky added a new section o n B eetho ven as the quintessential “ representative of musical genius, . . . both as a man and as an artist.” Mo re importantly, Lowinsky pairs Josquin and Beethoven in connection with Nietzsche’s reaction to Beethoven’s sketches: “ All great artists and thinkers were great workers, indefatigable not only in inventing, but also in rejecting, sifting, transforming, ordering” (H uman A ll Too H uman, 1878). H e continues with a comparison of the two composers’ personalities: It was Nietzsche who, following Beethoven’s example, discovered an element of musical genius often overlooked by writers from the Renaissance through romanticism: endless patience and infinite striving (Streben ) or effort. One of the few w riters remarking upon this was G lareanus, wh en he spoke abo ut Josquin des Prez. And, indeed, there is a peculiar affinity between the personalities and the creative characteristics of the great genius of the fifteenth century who came out of the Middle Ages and moved toward the new world of the Renaissance, and the composer of the eighteenth century who moved from classicism to romanticism, creating in the process a musical amalgam of an utterly unique character. 61

The source of Lowinsky’s comparison happens to be the 1960 edition of Donald Jay Grout’s H istor y of Wester n M usic, as duly cited in a footnote. 62 G rout’s widely circulating music histo ry textbo ok predated the original version o f Lo winsky’s “ G enius” essay by several years; and yet it w as only in the 1973 revised version of the essay, written in the aftermath of the 1965 61. Edward E. Lo winsky, “ Musical Genius,” in D icti onar y of t he H istor y of I deas, ed. Wiener, 2:312–26, at 325. The passage from Nietzsche mentioning Beetho ven’s sketches had in fact been quo ted in the 1964 “ G enius” article, b ut in the context of a discussion of R oger No rth’s views on genius (Lowinsky, “ Musical G enius,” M usical Quar terly, 333). H ere, Lo winsky does not discuss Beethoven further, beyond mentioning in the corresponding footnote Nietzsche’s remarkable recog nition o f the import ance of B eethoven’s sketchboo ks. The discussion in the 1973 “ G enius” article about B eetho ven and Jo squin is not found in the earlier version. 62. Low insky based his comments on t he follow ing excerpt: “ Josquin and B eethoven resemble each other in many ways. In both, the strong impulse of personal utterance struggled against the limits of t he musical languag e of t heir time. B ot h were tormented by the creative process, and worked slowly and with numerous revisions. Both had a sense of humor: both, because of their independent attitude, had trouble with their patrons. Both, in their best works, achieved that combination of intensity and order, individuality and universality, which is the mark of genius” (Do nald Jay Grout, A H istory of Wester n M usic [New York: W. W. N orto n, 1960], 183).



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Kerman-Lowinsky exchange and the 1971 Josquin Festival-Conference, that the additions conjoining Josquin and Beethoven as kindred geniuses appear, along w ith the added phrase labeling Jo sq uin “ the great genius of the fifteenth century.” The point here is not to establish the intellectual primacy or “ origins” of the Josquin-Beetho ven paradigm, which might w ell prove an exercise in futility.63 Rather it is to show brief ideological freeze-frames of Lowinsky’s gradually changing thinking about Josquin. The invocation of a Josquin-Beethoven paradigm assumes a universal, transhistorical understanding of the characteristics of musical genius. While G larean’s remarks about Jo sq uin’s painstaking, time-consuming creative process have often been interpreted as implicitly devaluing the comparative facility of Jacob O brecht (c. 1458–1505), G larean elsewhere famously praises O brecht fo r his astonishing “ fertility of invention” and seems amazed that he had composed a mass in one night. I n ot her words, G larean clearly admires and admits the viability of both creative models, whereas his comments have been retrospectively viewed through a Beethovenian lens as necessarily preferential of Josquin’s belabored approach. O thers besides G larean similarly regarded the ease and rapidity of execution typical of Obrecht and also of H einrich I saac (c. 1450–1517) as signs of exceptional creativity. The aforementioned Artiganova, in attempting to dissuade Ercole d’Este from hiring the unreliable Josquin, tellingly marvels that Isaac had composed a motet in tw o days: “ From this one can only judge that he is very rapid in the art of composition.” 64 In matters of artistic production around the same time, “ pedantic, slow, labo rious execution smacked of the artisan’s craft,” and by the mid-sixteenth century, most theorists were “ insisting on facility of execution, on a manner of painting that would give the impression of rapid work and effortless skill hiding the toil that had gone into the making of the work of art.” 65 Michelangelo’ s comments on the subject are fairly typical of the period: “ Works are not to be judg ed by the amount of useless labo r spent on them but by the worth of t he skill and mastery of their author.” 66 63. For example, Albert Smijers, in a lecture to the [R oyal] Musical Association o n 26 April 1927, discussed t he aforementioned passage from G larean and asked, “ D oes not this make us compare Josquin with Beethoven, who in a similar way often was busy with the ideas for a new wo rk, making improvements from time to time until it received a definite form?” (Albert Smijers, “ Josquin des Prez,” Pr oceedi ngs of the M usical A ssociat ion 53 [1926–27]: 95–116, at 104). The temperamental association between the two continues even in more recent literature on B eethoven: “ We have only to read t he account of an early sixteenth-centur y critic like G larean to see the enormous emot ional impact of t he music of J osquin, w ho reduced his listeners to tears, and who, fu r ther mor e, was known for his ar r ogant and temper ament al r efu sal to wr i te mu si c when commi ssi oned except when he felt li ke i t ” (emphasis added). See C harles Rosen, “ D id B eethoven H ave All the Luck?” review of Beethoven an d t he Constr ucti on of Genius, by Tia D eNora, The N ew York R evi ew of Books, 14 No vember 1996, 57–64, at 58. 64. Quoted in Wegman, “ ‘And Josquin Laughed,’ ” 334. 65. Wittkow er, “ G enius: I ndividualism in Art and Artists,” sec. 4, “ Art and G enius,” 2:305. 66. Quoted in ibid.


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In other wo rds, it is q uestionable whether “ painstaking effort” necessarily carried the aesthetic value that has been retrospectively attributed to it, for methodical Beethovenesque compositional process has not necessarily conferred present-day genius status upon all Renaissance composers. Adrian Willaert, to give but one example, had a similar reputation in the Renaissance for being slow to produce, according to his student Zarlino. 67 H ailed in his day as “ divino Adriano” and as a “ new P ythago ras,” Willaert was regarded by many as the unrivaled heir apparent to Josquin. 68 H is six-voice mot et Verbum bonum et suave had even been sung under Josquin’s name in the papal chapel choir. 69 And yet for a variety of historical and historiographical reasons, Willaert’s present-day reception history has been dwarfed by that o f Jo sq uin. O wing largely to the influence of G larean’s comments about Josquin’s working habits, it often seems as if a covert assumption operative in Josquin scholarship is that the only surviving attributed works that can truly be authentic are the pieces that J osquin wo uld presumably have “ corrected carefully” before he “ released” them “ to the public” and that happen to conform to late twentieth-century, historically constrained notions of compositional perfection. Even if there is some truth t o G larean’s testimony (and w e must at least acknowledge the possibility that there isn’t), it fails to take into account the possibility of the composer’s works (say, his working drafts) being circulated without his permission (a number of viable hypothetical scenarios leap to mind, including unscrupulous pilfering, whether during his ow n lifetime or o f his posthumous creative estate). 70 Mo reover, even in the cases of those purport edly “ carefully corrected” wo rks he “ released to the public” —and it is doubtful that Josq uin and his contemporaries would have understood those phrases as we do today—there is no guarantee of musical perfection by early twenty-first-century standards. Their alleged release for public consumption says nothing about anyone else’s aesthetic taste or musical judgment beyond Josquin’s own. Further, the music printing process in its nascent years would hardly have ensured the accurate 67. Lewis Lockwood and G iulio O ngaro, “ Willaert, Adrian,” sec. 2, “ Willaert in Venice,” in The N ew Gr ove D icti onar y of M usic and M usicians, 2d ed. (2001), 27:389, 390. 68. Jessie Ann Ow ens, “ Music H istoriography and the D efinition of ‘Renaissance,’ ” N otes 47 (1990): 305–30, at 312. 69. The anecdote comes from Z arlino, who recounts that w hen Willaert pointed out t hat the motet was in fact his own, the singers never wanted to sing it again. One is inclined to ask, along with Ro b Wegman, “ whether we may not b e dealing with a phenomenon o f mass psychology,” rather than musical judg ment (“ Who Was Josquin?” in The Josqui n Companion, ed. Sherr, 21–50, at 25). 70. This of course begs the question posed by Foucault, “ H ow can one define a wo rk amid the millions of traces left by someone after his death?” particularly in the absence of a “ theor y of the work” for this period. Mo re import antly, such a question impinges directly on Josquin’s stat us as an “ author,” or his “ author function,” bot h then and now. See Foucault, “ What Is an Author?” 103–4. I address these questions in a forthcoming monograph on authorship and creative patrilineage.



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reproduction of every last detail of a composition, much less guarantee total authorial control over the final product. “ We must remind ourselves that w e deal with the beginnings of printing and t hat editorial methods and standards that cry out for improvement in the twentieth century were certainly far from perfect in Petrucci’s time,” as Low insky himself cautioned thirty years ago . 71 Palestrina and Victoria, who published several decades later, were exceptional among their contemporaries, according to Ludovico Zacconi, in having had the opport unity to supervise carefully the publication of their work.72 It seems to be assumed, in part because of G larean’s remarks, that Josquin would have benefited from similar authorial supervision, but whatever quality control Josquin may have exercised in the creative process, it seems more likely that it went more or less out the window once the piece left his hands. 73 In other words, broadly stated, there is an urgent need in Josquin studies to engage in a more historically grounded theorizing about epistemological questions of aesthetics, authorship, music production, and the status of t he wo rk as they relate specifically to the pre-modern period. Aspects of Josquin’s reception history resonate so strongly and retrospectively with B arthes’s “ bio-mythology” of B eetho ven, as outlined in the epigraph at the opening of this section, that they tend to blur and even dissolve the vast chronological and epistemological boundaries that separate the two composers. One almost seems to imagine their historical consubstantiation. Bedecked in Beethovenian rhetoric as a struggling hero, Josquin is endowed with a discourse (of genius), a legend (multiple mythologizing anecdotes), a race of Titans (rubbing shoulders in the same sentences—and possibly during his lifetime—with Michelangelo and Leonardo), and an iconography (the austere, turbaned Josquin of the Opmeer woodcut striking a pose not unlike the cool, distant regards characteristic of icons of the heroic Beethoven). Jo sq uin lacks only a “ fatal malady” comparable to Beethoven’s deafness. And the paradigm extends still further in the widespread adoption of Ambros’s division of Josquin’s canon into a tripartite Beethovenian early-middle-late chronolog y, in the B eethovenizing rhetoric that ascribes to Josq uin t he “ liberation” of R enaissance music from the shackles of cantus firmus treatment, in

71. Elders, “ Report of t he First Jo squin Meeting,” 28. 72. James H aar, “ A Sixteenth-Century Attempt at Music C riticism,” this Journal 36 (1983): 191–209, at 196, citing Ludovico Zacconi, Prat ti ca di musica (Venice, 1592). 73. Johannes Ott hints at t his possibility in the preface to the mot et collection N ovum et i n- signe opus musicum of 1537: “ outside of the fact that w e were forced to make use of the services of men who do not understand the art [of music], there is also great danger that we have used manuscripts in which many features have been purposely corrupted by certain persons and in which many things have been either omitted or changed thro ugh negligence.” Edg ar H . Sparks, The M usic of N oel Bauldeweyn (New York: G alaxy Music, 1972), 94–95. This remark, while often cited to justify suspicion surrounding the authenticity of the pieces transmitted in this and other late manuscripts of G erman provenance, might just as well attest to post-authorial contamination of a wo rk that encount ered unt old vicissitudes in transit to print.


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the B eetho ven-like proliferation of recordings of his uncont ested “ masterpieces” (one now enjoys the luxury of opting for the recorded authority of the “ Phillips” or the “ Peres” Pange li ngua in the same way that we speak of t he “ von Karajan” or “ Norrington” Ninth),74 and even in a small coterie of scholars who wo rk on both composers. 75 Just as Beethoven scholarship, in the aftermath of the Beethoven-Jahr conferences, saw a proliferation of sketch studies and publications of autograph facsimiles, 76 so Josquin research (in the absence of sketches and autographs) turned its attention t o the paleographical scrutiny of scribal hands, manuscript variants, and archival documents in the service of dating and authenticating Josquin’s canon. 77 Though chronologically disparate enterprises, Josquin authentication studies and Beethoven sketch and autograph studies derive from the same impetus to sacralize the artistic productions of genius composers of the past; and each participates in a kind of perfection-aesthetics driven by a desire to isolate tho se incontestably authentic products of musical genius.

Fetishizing Genius Bishop H ugh o f Lincoln (later canonized) was one of the most assiduous practitioners of fu r ta sacr a [sacred theft]. Allowed to handle the arm of Mary Magd alene at a rival shrine, he surreptitiously bit off a finger and took it back to his parish, w here it remains today. B ishop H ugh, with his good teeth and opportunistic gnawing at the sacred, was a precursor of our modern museum curators, who also seek out and acquire, usually by less macabre means, the artworks that serve as contemporary equivalents of the sacred, though instead of the bones of the saint they present for veneration the personal creations of the

74. Adorno’ s commentar y on the fetishistic character of musical life, and “ commo dity listening,” resonat es broad ly for genius-composer studies, particularly his thoug hts on t he “ to talitarian” nature of t he “ star principle,” to which even musical works are susceptible: “ A pantheon o f best-sellers builds up” and “ the most familiar is the most successful and t herefore played ag ain and again and made still more familiar” (Theodo r W. Adorno, “ O n the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening, ” in A r t and I ts Signi ficance: A n A nt hology of A esthetic Theor y, ed. Stephen D avid Ro ss, 2d ed. [Albany: Stat e U niversity of New York Press, 1987], 540–49, at 541). 75. Joseph Kerman some time ago drew att ention t o the phenomenon of musicologists flocking from the study of Renaissance music to that of the nineteenth century ( Contemplating M usic: Challenges to Musicology [C ambridge: H arvard U niversity Press, 1985], 144). I would amplify this ob servation t o include scholars such as C arl Dah lhaus, L ewis Lo ckwo od , Lud wig Finscher, Martin Staehelin, Christopher Reynolds, and doubtless others, who have published on bot h Jo sq uin and B eethoven. 76. While Beetho ven studies saw, if not a steady stream, at least a regular trickle of publications of sketches and auto graphs spanning the century from G ustav No tt ebohm’s pioneering studies until 1970, one need only peruse the b ibliog raphy in t he second edition o f The N ew Gr ove to see the extent t o which they have proliferated in the past thirty years. 77. Kerman saw tremendo us potential for the kind of true criticism he soug ht for musicolog y in the study o f B eethoven sketches and auto graphs (Contemplati ng M usic, 134–42).



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artist. Like Medieval priests, curators are also concerned to demonstrate that the objects they have accumulated are originals, not forgeries, and therefore truly worthy of devotion. 78

Once Josquin had been apotheosized and refashioned as the Renaissance musical genius par excellence, his reception history began to accumulate the ideological residue of genius tropes that have fueled the mythologizing of Beethoven H ero, 79 and the music attributed to him became subject to the ever more assiduous curatorial fervor of musicological high priests seeking to enshrine a canon o f works “ truly wo rthy of devotion.” For want of space, I shall focus here only on the tendency to privilege, even fetishize, attribution and chronolog y studies.80 My concern is not to disparage attribution scholarship per se, but rather to consider its arguably totalizing and oppressive effects. While questions of authenticity had figured to some extent in Josquin scholarship well before 1971, largely in connection with the completion o f the opera omnia then in progress (but also dating back to the work of Ambros), the major intellectual legacy of Lowinsky’s conference was to establish the hegemony of authenticity and chronology studies as the si ne qua non of future progress in the fi eld. 81 Indeed, Lowinsky hinted as much in his opening address: Musicians must learn that unless they keep conversant with current scholarship they may not even know whether what they perform as Josquin is in fact by Josquin. A number of works that n ow ar e par t of t he Josqui n edi ti on will not appear in a t r ul y cr itical second edi tion . 82 [emphasis added] 78. C harles Lindholm, “ Authenticity, Anthro pology, and the Sacred,” A nthropologi cal Quarterly 75 (2002): 331–38, at 332. 79. Scott B urnham has compared the mythological fig ures of H ector and Achilles, human hero and demigod , respectively, as tho se thro ugh which “ we may discern the difference between Beethoven’s H ero and B eethoven H ero. D oing so may make us more pointedly aware of the ironic interaction between the values instantiated by Beethoven’s heroic style and the way in which Beethoven has been installed, through the implicit tenets of our reigning analytical methodologies, as the godlike hero of Western art music, a force of history whose will becomes musical necessity” (Beethoven H ero, 157). 80. As H ayden White notes, w hile there is nothing intrinsically wrong with a fetish, it is important to establish its effect on a g iven culture: “ The social scientist is much mo re interested in how a given fetishistic practice functions in a given culture, individual or group, whether it is oppressive or therapeutically effi cacious, t han in exposing the error of logic o r rationality that underlies it” (“ The No ble Savage Theme as Fetish,” in his Tr opics of D iscourse: Essays in C ultur al Cr iti cism [Baltimore and Lond on: J ohns H opkins U niversity Press, 1985], 183–96, at 184). 81. In his review of the Josquin Pr oceedi ngs, Antho ny N ewcomb similarly notes that the essays in the first tw o sections of the volume directly confront the “ tw o fundamental areas” of authenticity and chrono logy of life and wo rks, and formed t he “ core of excellence around which the volume is built” (M usical Quar terly 63 [1977]: 549–55, at 550). 82. “ Opening Session,” in Josquin Pr oceedi ngs, 16. Moments earlier, Lowinsky had explicitly stated t he need for a new edition that wo uld b e produced with “ international cooperation.” As he said, “ No w that t he first edition has been completed, nothing would be more beneficial than . . . well-planned international working conferences in which all aspects of a new edition would be


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Shortly thereafter, in his keynote address, Friedrich Blume alluded in uncannily Kermanesq ue terms to “ a considerable number of works of dubious authenticity, even spur iousworks, [that] have beclouded the tradition” (emphasis added). 83 H e then proceeded to devote virtually the entire address (its subtitle “ The Man and the Music” not withstanding) to establishing the priority of authenticity studies for future Josquin scholarship: Further progress in Josquin research and in the study of the music of the whole age will largely depend on detai led i nqui r y int o the catalogue of the authent i c works of the master. This will probably be the most burning problem, for how should the scholar pursue serious studies of Josquin’s music, and how should the amateur find an approach to this outstanding musician, unless they know that t he composition in their hands is really by Josq uin. . . . It will, therefore, remain a constant challenge to Josquin research to set up an invent or y of i ndu- bitably authentic works and to eli mi nate all dubious and spur i ous wor ks handed down erroneously under his name. 84 [emphasis added]

The virtually uncontested hegemony of authenticity studies in Josquin research some thirty years later is clear from a recent review of the Josqui n Companion, in which Allan Atlas noted, “ In all, the problem of ‘authenticity’ and the apparent desire to trim the canon have become something of an obsession, one that can be seen on virtually every page of the Companion.” 85 The statistics, as he says, are indeed “ startling—even alarming” : The N ew Josqui n Edi tion (N JE ) accounts for twenty-nine mass cycles attributed to Josquin in one source or another; while Smijers included twenty in his “ old” Josquin edition, No ble accepted only eighteen in his 1980 N ew Gr ove worklist, and there are tho se who w ould now cut the number to a d ozen or so; likewise, of the 161 motets with attributions to Josquin (according to the N JE ), Smijers published 110, No ble accepted seventy-eight, while the current consensus would trim the list to no more than about fifty. And needless to say, each revisionary wave is certain that it has it right! 86

subjected to dispassionate, thorough, many-sided scrutiny and from which, without haste, might emerge t he guidelines for a new edition” (ibid.). The Vereniging voor N ederlandse Muz iekgeschiedenis (VNM ) had already anno unced, in t he fi nal supplement to the fi rst edition published in 1969, plans for a second Jo squin edition. E lders, “ Report o f the First Jo squin Meeting,” 20; and “ O pening Session,” in Josquin Pr oceedi ngs, 15. 83. Friedrich Blume, “ Josquin des Prez: The Man and the Music,” in Josquin Pr oceedi ngs, 18–27, at 19–20. 84. Ibid., 21–22. 85. Allan W. Atlas, “ C anon Fodder,” review of The Josqui n Companion, ed. Richard Sherr, The M usical Ti mes 143 (2002): 62–65, at 63. 86. Ib id., 63, paraphrasing D avid Fallows, “ Afterword: Thought s for the Future,” in The Josqui n C ompanion, ed. Sherr, 569–78, at 571. Fallows acknow ledges, “ But t he pattern seems to suggest that Josquin is getting smaller and smaller; and it may just be time for a little more generosity.”



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O ne explanation for the “ ob session” with authenticating Josquin is the post-1971 proliferation of a genius trope that absolves him from the sin of technical error—whether of counterpoint, part-writing, or text setting—via a presumptive endowment with creative perfection or infallibility. Josquin qua G enius can no longer be seen to have written a no te of less-than-perfect— technically and otherwise—music, music that is deemed “ wo rthy o f him” in the parlance of the inner sanctum. As Rob Wegman assesses the current state of affairs, “ Josq uin’s works must, in all circumstances, be seen to represent the pinnacle of musical achievement. Yet this opinion is no longer based on firmly attested works; on the contrary: it has become self-fulfilling in dictating which works we should accept and which we should reject.” 87 In other words, proceeding from the a pr iori assumption of J osquin’s genius, the trope of creative “ perfection” becomes the overriding criterion for making “ objective” determinations about the authenticity of a given piece; authenticity and perfection thus become mutually constitutive. Forty years ago, it was still possible to acknowledge the existence of “ flaw ed” Josq uin wo rks, albeit so long as they were depicted as “ fledgling” efforts. H elmuth O sthoff, for example, readily accepted the authenticity of six “ Satzfehler mot ets,” 88 whose “ archaic style and many technical defects” were telltale signs of apprentice works from Josquin’s early career; indeed, as he said, it w ould be “ unthinkable” to place them elsewhere in the chronological spectrum, once his authorship is accepted. 89 (Once fully mature, it seems, Josq uin w ould never again be capable of a “ technical defect.” ) In a now -classic paper entitled “ Authenticity Problems in Josquin’s Motets,” presented at the 1971 conference, Edgar Sparks proceeded to reject every one of the same six mot ets in a tho roughg oing demolition of O stho ff ’s arguments. H e concluded: “ O ne can hardly expect Josquin to write a masterpiece every time he sets pen to paper; nor can one expect him to write without stylistic variation. But how dull a work, and how much variation from the norm can one accept?” 90 No table here is the “ what-go es-witho ut-saying” assumption that the “ norm” is so w holly self-evident as to need no further elucidation. Sparks’s disclaimer notwithstanding, one can d iscern in his lengthy defense of J osquin against t he cont amination of “ Satzfehler” a reluctance to see Josquin—even in his youth—as capable of the occasional technical imperfection. Examples of this kind of aesthetic rescue operation saturate the Josquin literature. A similar case involved t he M issa U ne mousse de Bi scaye:

87. Wegman, “ Who Was Josquin?” 32. 88. The “ Satzfehler motets” are characterized b y a particular “ compositional error” that involves the dominant cadence with leading no te and leading-note suspension sounding simultaneously in different voices. 89. Osthoff, Josquin D esprez 1:19 and 2:28. 90. Edg ar H . Sparks, “ Prob lems of Authenticity in Josquin’s Mot ets,” in Josquin Pr oceedi ngs, 345–59, at 359.


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Any attempt to regard this as mature richness of invention is contradicted by cr udities of par t-wr iti ng and di ssonan ce treatment , that are more frequent here than in any of Josquin’s other masses. If this mass is by him, it must be early; and if it is early it reveals a quite different aspect of his character from L’ami Baudichon.91 [emphasis added]

Perhaps the best-known casualty o f the infallible Josquin genius trope is the M issa D a pacem, long regarded by Ambros, B lume, and O sthoff as a “ masterpiece.” Ambros considered its Credo in particular to be an unrivaled achievement “ that no master of the past or present, no matter what his name, has surpassed.” 92 Nevertheless, in a mo nograph published o ne year after the 1971 Jo sq uin Festival-C onference, Edgar Sparks found the wo rk full of “ thick” counterpoint and “ awkward, even incorrect dissonance treatment as well as forbidden parallels,” and argued what many now consider to be the definitive case for the authorship of the obscure sixteenth-century composer Noel Bauldeweyn.93 The implicit assumption that compositional “ perfection” is a prerequisite of “ greatness” is itself a product of the Romantic notion of the heroic, “ flaw less” genius. And yet, as D ahlhaus noted, “ perfection” could just as well be seen to be the “ counterpole” to the idea of g reatness: “ Some work of art flawed from the point of view of perfection may be significant from the point of view of greatness.” 94 We need more reasoned creative negotiations of this kind in the aftermath o f Josq uin’s apotheosis. 95 The authenticity fetish has reached the point where any matter-of-fact assertion of “ part-writing errors” —as Patrick Macey makes in the case of the motet M iser icordi as D omi ni , an early and, until only recently, unchallenged

91. Jaap van Benthem, “ Was ‘U ne mousse de Biscaye’ R eally Appreciated by L’ Ami Baudichon?” M uziek & Wetenschap 1 (1991): 175–94, at 188. 92. Richard Sherr, “ M issa D a pacem and M issa A ll ez regretz,” in The Josqui n Companion, ed. Sherr, 240, q uot ing and translating from August Wilhelm Ambros, Geschichte der M usik, 3d ed., ed. O tto Kade (Leipzig: F. E. C . Leuckart, 1891), 3:222. 93. Ib id., 241–42, paraphrasing Sparks, The M usic of N oel Bauldeweyn, 43. 94. D ahlhaus, Estheticsof M usic, 88–89. 95. There are some refreshing signs that t he pendulum has begun to swing back in the direction of a more careful reconsideration of the criteria for the previous ejection of this piece, if not others as well. Richard Sherr attempts at least t o rehabilitate (if not reattribute out right) the M issa D a pacem. H e rightly points out the highly subjective nature of the “ qualitative” criteria Edgar Sparks used to eject the mass from t he Josq uin canon, no ting, “ It w ould seem that Sparks has clinched the matter in favour of Bauldeweyn, but the work itself has not changed. If Ambros, Blume, and O sthoff tho ught the w ork a masterpiece, surely there is still a bit of a masterpiece left in it” (“ M issa D a pacem and M issa A llez regretz,” 242). Alejandro Planchart go es even further, suggesting that “ Sparks indulges in a bit of critical overkill in dealing with the work, most likely because he was bucking a well-established scholarly tradition that considered Josquin as the author and was influenced by the heroic mythologizing of Josquin promoted by Lowinsky. The fact remains that, no matter who the author is, D a pacem is a beautiful and well-written wo rk, o ne well wort h studying and performing” (“ Masses on P lainsong C antus Firmi,” in The Josqui n Com- panion, ed. Sherr, 89–150, at 89 n. 2).



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work96—risks not only incrimination of the piece on grounds of suspect authenticity but almost certain canonic annihilation as well. In the present purgative climate, any such “ errors” will be assailed by ano ther Josquin scholar as merely the most egregious of a hitherto overlooked legion of compositional “ errors.” Thus, in M isericordi as D omi ni , Finscher finds “ excessive text repetition and overuse of one motif,” “ too many emphatic cadences in which the music seems to stop altogether,” and an imitation that “ irritatingly starts with a ‘w rong’ motif in the superius.” While sto pping short o f ejecting the piece from the cano n entirely, he remains skeptical: “ All in all, the piece looks as if the composer is experimenting and is not quite sure of himself, but it is difficult to see how Josquin could be in such a situation at any time after A ve Maria.” 97 And so yet another of Josq uin’s “ most powerful works” proceeds inexorably down the road to disattribution, its premature demise now all but certain after Joshua Rifkin’s recent indictment of it as a piece that “ bristles with contrapuntal solecisms to a degree unmatched by any motet with a more obviously trustworthy attribution to Josquin.” 98 Particularly vulnerable to the genius trope of creative infallibility are pieces with conflicting attribution wherein the argument for disattribution, as for problematic works of otherwise uncontested attribution (like the aforementioned), almost invariably proceeds from a perception o f some “ flaw,” “ deficiency,” “ weakness,” or “ anomaly.” P erhaps it is time to g ive serious tho ught to the dubious generosity of the att ributive process by which “ gifts” of Josquin’s musical detritus are bestowed upon his distinguished but lesserknown contemporaries, because an unforeseen phenomenon, a by-product of the authenticity problem, has arisen in the form of the double (or even multiple) misattribution. Once Josquin’s canon is safely purged of a now-suspect work, the piece then risks sullying the reputation of the unlucky composer

96. Patrick Macey, “ Josquin’s M isericordi as D omi ni and Louis XI,” Early M usic 19 (1991): 163–77. Alejandro Planchart prefers to explain these “ errors” as “ deliberate archaisms” : “ I fi nd Macey’s arguments for the date and authenticity of the motet convincing but do not agree with what he calls part-writing errors. To me these are deliberate archaisms, similar to those of Okeghem’s Requiem, and very much part of the work’s affective world. This is one of Josquin’s most powerful works” (“ Masses on P lainsong C antus Firmi,” 136 n. 87). The assumption of “ deliberate archaisms” is a common critical strategy ado pted in d efense of the authenticity of pieces who se “ perfection” is somehow perceived t o b e compromised. Friedrich B lume, for example, defended the M issa D a pacem on the grounds that t he “ archaisms were deliberate on Jo squin’s part.” See Sherr, “ M issa D a pacem and M issa A ll ez regretz,” 240, citing Josquin desPr es, M issa D a Pacem, ed. Friedrich Blume (1932; 2d ed ., Wolfenbütt el: Möseler Verlag, 1950), 3. Interesting ly, Nicholas Cook finds the systematic use in Beethoven scholarship of similarly apologetic discursive strategies. See note 110 below. 97. Ludwig Finscher, “ Four-Voice Mo tets,” in The Josqui n Companion, ed. Sherr, 249–79, at 274. 98. Rifkin, “ Munich, Milan, and a Marian Mot et,” 328 and 328–29 n. 195. Rifkin cites in particular the “ sheer quantity” of parallel intervals, and “ bald parallel fifths by leap into a strong beat.”


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to whom it is by default assigned, usually the one involved in the conflicting attribution. This leaves the scholar who has staked his or her career on unveiling this default composer’s unappreciated genius little choice but to rush to the rescue with a defensive declaration that the flawed work is worthy of neither composer, as in the case of the five-voice motet M issus est an gelusGabriel: In his edition of FlorL666, Lowinsky has rejected Josquin’s authorship for many reasons, and I totally agree with him. . . . B ut Low insky’s next step is incomprehensible. H e says: “ B ut t he wo rk q ualifi es as a composition of Mo uton’ s mature period.” . . . Thus Lowinsky has laid all the weaknesses of M i ssus est an gelus Gabriel at M outo n’s doo r. I n his view these are: “ a uniform texture, plodding and unadventurous rhythm favoring accent on the regular beat, and using syncopation only to embellish a fundamental regularity, the slugg ish declamation.” . . . In my opinion, we have encountered a double misattribution in the sources of this opus dubi um .99

H ere we fi nd an example of one of the most regrettable repercussions of the Josq uin authenticity fetish: upho lding J osquin’s infallibility at all costs req uires the compensatory denigration of the reputation of Jean Mouton, an outstanding composer of dazzling contrapuntal virtuosity, a favorite of Pope Leo X and of several kings and queens of France. 100 Not only does this process of decontamination questionably recategorize and reattribute these works; it also further decontextualizes them by orienting Renaissance musicology to specific genius-personalities, like Josquin, rather than to the broader community of musicians of which he was but one, albeit vital, representative. C onfronted at every turn with w hat D ahlhaus called the “ refuse left behind by source criticism,” 101 I have yet to see a cottage industry of scholars springing up to salvage the musical viability, not to mention the recordability, marketability, and programmability, of the “ rejects” from the erstw hile Jo squin canon.102 And though not nearly as economically devastating as doubtful 99. Ton B raas, “ The Five-Part M otet M i ssus est an gelus Gabri el and Its Conflicting Attributions,” in Proceedi ngsof the I nt er national Josqui n Symposium , U trecht, ed. Elders, 171–83, at 181. 100. Praised by G larean, M outo n was described by R onsard as a pupil of J osquin and by Folengo as a composer who se music wo uld be “ mistaken for Josquin’s,” a comment perhaps corroborated by no fewer than ten conflicting attributions his works share with those of Josquin. And yet present-day scholarship finds Mout on wanting: H e was “ probably not a student of Josquin,” and his “ melodic contours themselves tend to be rather short-spanned. . . . [H e] was often indifferent to go od text declamation: his music is filled with incorrect accentuations and other infelicities in the way he combines words and notes, a trait indicating that he was more interested in purely musical design than in expression” (H ow ard Mayer Bro wn and Thomas G. M acC racken, “ Mouton [de H olluigue], Jean,” in The N ew Gr ove D icti onar y of M usic and M usicians, 2d ed. [2001]: 17:241). 101. Carl D ahlhaus, Foun dations of M usic H istor y, trans. J. B. Robinson (Cambridge: Cambridge U niversity P ress, 1983), 164. 102. O ne remarkable exception is a recent recording by Andrew Kirkman and t he Binchois Consort, Josquin and H is Cont emporar ies (London, H yperion, C D A 67183 [2001]), consisting



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authenticity in the art w orld, 103 conflicting attributions in Josquin do have certain economic ramifications in the recording industry. 104 In the three decades following the 1971 Josquin conference, the reception histories of Josquin’s designated cohorts in musical genius, Lasso and G esualdo, have been overshadowed by a disproportionate amount of attention to Josquin, as has that of

entirely of wo rks of confl icting att ribution and who se stated purpose is to provide the listener with “ the chance to judge for [him]self.” 103. Following the “ disattribution” of the famous Rembrandt painting “ Man with a G olden H elmet,” a Berlin curator tried to assure the press that the painting was “ an independent o riginal in its own right, w ith its own independent wo rth. ” See Svetlana Alpers, R embrandt’s Enterpri se: The Studi o and the M ar ket (C hicago: U niversity of C hicago P ress, 1988), 2. According t o Alpers, “ It is hard to value a painting which is not t he product o f a particular artist’ s hand. ‘ This is an authentic work by “ x” ’ has been central to the marketing, t o t he study, and even to the definition of pictures” (ibid.). Earlier versions of the present essay included an extensive discussion of the ro le of R embrandt scholarship as a paradigm fo r Jo squin authentication studies. Summarized as briefly as possible: The I nternational J osquin Symposium held in U trecht in 1986 focused critical attention on a number of pieces with conflicting attributions involving Josquin and some of his outstanding contemporaries, particularly Mouton, LaRue, Verdelot, and Brumel, whose works had been comparatively neglected b y modern scholarship. A paper by Jo shua Rifkin drew att ention t o the Rembrandt Research Project (RRP), founded by a group of D utch scholars with t he purpose of “ subject[ing] every single Rembrandt attribution, no matt er how universally accepted, t o a searching and, so far as possible, unprejudiced inquiry.” Rifkin advocated a redirection of authenticity studies on Jo sq uin follow ing the mod el of the RR P, one that wo uld interrogate “ the attribution of all the works known to us under Josquin’s name—even the most obvious attributions of the most o bvious works,” including, he add ed, the M issa Pange li ngua ” (Joshua Rifkin, “ Problems of Authorship: So me I mpolitic Observations. With a P ostscript on A bsalon, fili mi ,” in Pro- ceedi ngs of the I nter nat ional Josqui n Symposium, U trecht, ed. Elders, 45–52, at 46–47). This initiative, which gave rise to several of the more controversial mises en doute of the past fifteen years, may have further fueled the authentication fetish. Without recounting the complex and embittered history of the RRP, suffice it to say that by the mid 1990s, Rembrandt connoisseurship had become so mired in confusion that two curators collaborating on t he 1995 exhibition “ Rembrandt/N ot Rembrandt in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Aspects of C onno isseurship” ended up disagreeing so fundamentally on t he autho rship of twenty of the forty-two purported Rembrandt paintings that each resorted to writing his own exhibition catalogue. Meanwhile, technological advancements in the areas of autoradiography, w hich show s the distribution o f specific pigments, and dend rochrono logy, which permits the dating o f wo od, have yielded dramatic results. The painting Stu dy H ead of an Old M an, for example, thought definitively to be an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century imitation, was shown to have been painted on wood from a tree felled between 1626 and 1632, in the middle of Rembrandt’s lifetime. See G ary Schwartz , “ Truth in Labeling, ” A r t i n A meri ca 83 (1995): 52 and 56; and H enry Adams, “ In Search of Rembrandt,” Smithsonian 26 (1995): 86. Paradoxically, the impetus to apply ever more rigorous standards of authentication in Rembrandt studies, born perhaps of a potent anti-Romanticism, ended up imposing genius-laden evaluative criteria that reinscribed the very ideolog y it wished to eradicate. 104. First, t here is the phenomenon, mentioned earlier, of Adorno ’s “ pantheon of bestsellers,” namely, the recording ad infini tum of presumed “ authentic” masterpieces, at the expense of those less stunning (or even potentially dubious) works that might afford a better handle on what “ quot idian Josquin” (if one can be permitt ed to t hink such a thoug ht) sounded like. This was already problematic in 1971: “ interpreters often choo se the same wo rks, some of w hich have


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the once towering and unassailable giant of Renaissance composers, P alestrina, himself long mythologized as the “ savior of music.” O f the post-1967 scholarship included in RILM Abstracts, an admittedly somewhat crude but reasonably approximate measure, there are 292 entries for Josquin, 188 for Lassus, and 58 for G esualdo; Willaert has 47 and R ore 32. The “ singularly gifted composers” active during Jo sq uin’s lifetime have elicited still fewer: O brecht has 42, La Rue 34, Senfl 15, C ompere 12, Brumel 8, and Mo uton 6. Entries on Palestrina are somewhat more numerous (330), but many of them concern H ans Pfitzner’s opera on the composer. The extent to which the late twentieth-century reception of Josquin could compete with, much less eclipse, the reputation of Palestrina seems all the more remarkable in light of the following comment contrasting him with Josquin: Palestrina’s historical reputation resembles that of no other composer in musical history. While Josquin had remained a celebrated figure in the 16th century, his star then waned in the light of changing tastes and styles and has only been revived in the 20th century. With Palestrina, however, a concatenation of historical developments combined to maintain his prestige at an ever higher level for 200 years after his death, while most of his predecessors and contemporaries were virtually lost to view. 105

The relative decline of Palestrina with comparison to Jo squin is to some extent a counterreaction to the post-Romantic mythologizing of that composer, particularly in the century follow ing the publication of G iuseppe B aini’s Palestrina in 1829. P aul H enry Lang, praising the second edition o f Karl G ustav Fellerer’s Palestrina (1960) for its myth-debunking objectivity, described the “ romantic haze” formerly surrounding the composer’s image and

become positive warhorses, w hile many masterpieces are yet to be heard” (Nanie Bridgman, “ O n the D iscog raphy of Jo squin and the Int erpretation of H is Music in Recordings,” in Josquin Pr oceedi ngs, 633–41, at 633). For the mo st recent discography see Peter U rquhart’ s appendix in The Josqui n Companion, ed. Sherr, 597–639. H is list reveals twelve CD recordings of M issa Pange lingua, thirteen of N ymphes des bois, and fifteen of A ve M aria . . . Vir go serena. Meanwhile, there appear to be no C D recordings available of the masses A d fugam, A llez regretz, D’un g aultr e amer, For tun a desperata, and U ne mousse de Bi scaye, the authenticity of at least three of which has been questioned either formally or informally, not to mention dozens of motets and songs still considered authentic. Second, the disproportionate attention to Josquin in general comes at the expense of his exceedingly gifted if lesser-known contemporaries, Obrecht, Isaac, LaRue, Mouton, Compere, and Brumel, some of whose works have been edited for decades but are, even now, not readily available on recordings, thus depriving us of an audible basis for comparison, and further widening the “ genius gap” between Josquin and other composers. 105. Lewis Lockwood and Jessie Ann O wens, “ G iovanni Pierluigi da P alestrina,” in The N ew Gr ove H igh R enai ssance M asters: Josqui n, Palestrina, Lassus, Byrd, Vi ctoria, ed. St anley Sadie (New York and Lo ndon: W. W. Norto n, 1984), 130–31. The observation is reprinted in the second edition of the N ew Gr ove (2001).



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not ed that a “ cool, reasoned, scholarly examination of this prodigious Satz- kunst ” had been “ largely inhibited by the wo rship of the legendary hero ‘ who saved church music ’ ” (emphasis in original).106 For centuries, many beloved and attributed pieces—the masses D a pacem,

A llez regretz, Une mousse de Biscaye, L’ami Baudi chon, D i dadi , D ’ung aultre amer, M ater patr is; motets A bsalon fili mi, M isericordi as D omini, O bone et dulcissime Jesu, Planxit autem D avid, I nviolata, i ntegra, et casta es; chansons M ille regretz, Cueur desolez, A llé gez moy— whose canonicity now hovers under an ominous cloud of suspicion or has already “ bit the dust of inauthenticity,” were counted among Josquin’s works and in several cases must surely have contributed to the reputation he enjoyed during and especially after his own lifetime.107 But in light of post-apotheosis scholarship, it would appear that, despite possessing a staggering and virtually unparalleled knowledge of the total corpus of attributed works, numerous Josquin scholars—including Ambros, Blume, Osthoff, and Lowinsky, along with three editors of the first Josquin edition (Smijers, Elders, and Antonowycz)—must now be regarded as being in some sense blind or tone-deaf, for they failed to notice that so many of the composer’s attributed wo rks suffered from appalling “ crudities of partwriting and dissonance treatment” or egregious stylistic anomalies. C an it be that so many have been so wrong for so long? Or has something else perhaps gone awry? One possible explanation might be that Josquin’s dissonance treatment has yet to be suffi ciently historicized and contextualized, bo th within his own oeu- vre and in comparison with that of his predecessors, contemporaries, and successors, including Palestrina. I n t he ab sence of t ho roug hg oing , com parative investigations of the contrapuntal practices of many different composers, music written around 1500—at a time when contrapuntal concerns were perhaps more fluid and far less orthodox than would become typical of the later sixteenth century—has tended to be judged b y the anachro nistic stand ard o f a P alestrina-style purity o f dissonan ce treatment. Indeed, D ahlhaus’s cautionar y remarks urging a revisionist approach to dissonance

106. Paul H enry Lang, “ Palestrina Across the Centuries,” in Festschri ft K ar l Gustav Fellerer zum Sechzigsten Gebur tstag am 7 Jul i 1962, ed. H einrich H üschen (Regensburg: G ustav Bosse Verlag, 1962), 294–302, at 294. The work of Noel O’Regan and Jessie Ann Owens in the late 1980s and 1990s has helped to revitalize a more nuanced and critical scholarship on the composer, as has the recent mo nog raph by James G arratt, Palestr ina and the Ger man R omanti c I magi- nat ion: I nt erpreti ng H istori cism in N ineteent h-Centur y M usic (Camb ridge: C ambridge U niversity Press, 2002). 107. I refer here to pieces that have been attributed to Josquin since the sixteenth century and that, as Rob Wegman reminds us, certainly formed part of the repertory his contemporaries assumed to be by Jo squin. H ence, many of these newly “ inauthentic” pieces may nevertheless have signifi cantly shaped his out standing reputatio n as a compo ser. Wegman , “ Who Was Josquin?” 34.


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treatment in Josquin and an assessment of it on its own terms seem to have fallen largely on deaf ears in the ensuing thirty years. 108 A second possibility lies in the venerable tradition of music historiography that tends to view the genius-composer’s creative trajectory as a strictly linear progression from the unskilled w orks of youth to those of consummate artistic maturity. For Mozart and Beethoven, we at least have concrete datable evidence attesting to t heir far-from-flawless effo rts as budding geniuses, althoug h these tend to be safely tucked away in complete editions and selectively retrieved on special anniversary o ccasions as precocious receptacles of the composer’s “ golden nugget.” 109 In Beethoven’s case, we have a number of indisputably authentic mature works that have become sources of embarrassment, “ hardly . . . w orthy of B eethoven’s genius.” 110 Would that the “ Beetho ven of the Renaissance” merited the same “ pass” for an occasional substandard work: in Josquin’s case, it often seems as if any stylistically problematic or contrapuntally imperfect work finds itself relegated to some nebulously defined “ early” period of his career or, more often than no t, summarily tossed out of the canon altogether. As one Josquin scholar has recently admit108. “ The view o f Josq uin’s count erpoint as a Palestrina style with archaic residues and imperfections needs revision. The treatment of dissonance in the period around 1500 must be measured by its own standards. M any dissonant figur es that Palestrina bani shed f rom the ‘r eine Satz’ appear wi th great regular ity in Josqui n’ s motets, whether late or ear ly. They have the air of selfevidence. Far from forming deviations from a norm that Josquin supposedly shared with Palestrina, they carry their norm in themselves” (C arl D ahlhaus, “ O n the Treatment of D issonance in the M otets of J osquin des Prez,” in Josquin Pr oceedi ngs, 334–44, at 336; emphasis added). Jo shua Rifkin invokes D ahlhaus’s article as if to suggest that he questioned the authenticity of M i ser i cordi as D omi ni (“ Munich, M ilan, and a M arian Mo tet,” 328 n. 195). In fact, D ahlhaus cites the mo tet as one of many examples of Jo squin’s systematic use of d issonance treatment that would much later come to be banished in the pure Palestrina style. A comprehensive history of counterpoint in the pre-Palestrina era, which in addition to Josquin would ideally focus serious attention on dissonance treatment in the music of O ckeghem, B usnoys, and their contemporaries, has yet to be written. For a recent comparison of t he practices of J osquin and O ckeghem see Anne-Emmanuelle Ceulemans, “ U ne étude comparative du traitement d e la mélodie et d e la dissonance chez O ckeghem et chez Josquin D esprez,” in Johannes Ockeghem: A ctes du X Le Colloque inter nat ional d’ é tudes human istes, Tours, 3–8 fé vr ier 1997, ed. Philippe Vendrix (n.p.: Klincksieck, 1998), 707–53. 109. O n the “ go lden-nugget theory of genius,” as it impinges on the histor y of art and on the histo rical reception o f wo men artists, see Linda N ochlin, “ Why H ave There Been No G reat Women Artists?” in A r t an d Sexual Poli ti cs: Women’ s Liberation, Women A r tists, and A r t H istory, ed. Thomas B. H ess and Elizabeth C . B aker (New York and Lond on: Macmillan, 1971), 1–43, at 7–8. The “ go lden nugg et” in No chlin’s formulation refers to “ a mysterious essence, rather like the go lden nugget in Mrs. G rass’s chicken soup, called G enius” (p. 7). 110. C oo k, “ The Ot her Beethoven,” 3, 9, citing Ernest Walker. The pieces in q uestion, Wellingtons Sieg, Op. 91 (1813), and D ie glor reiche A ugenblick, Op. 136 (1814), generally discredited as “ potb oilers,” have become subject to a number of “ apologetic strategies” that seek to explain why in such works, according to Schindler, “ the genius of the compo ser does not att ain its usual height s” (ibid., 7). C oo k’s article is a model of the kind of critically informed, histo ricizing wo rk which might assist in t he rehabilitation of pieces att ributed to the historical Jo squin des Prez and which have been marginalized or disenfranchised on grounds of suspect authenticity.



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ted, this tendency often arises out of a “ sense of protectionism of the great man; we simply do not want to believe that occasionally he could have had a really bad day and produced a mediocre work.” 111 Third, it is not clear to what extent and o n w hat b asis “ compositional errors” can be alleged for the music of this period. Litt le if any evidence from Josquin or his contemporaries survives that would speak to, much less settle, the q uestion o f their adherence to theoretical proscriptions of “ crudities of part-writing,” parallel fifths, and dissonance treatment. 112 If a composer like Felix Mendelssohn, working more than three hundred years after Josquin, could be preoccupied with concerns about “ fifths” and “ counterpoint” on the verge of a work’s publication, it seems possible that such issues may have been perceived as lesser problems of grammatical syntax subject to last-minute correction. 113 Why then should we expect pieces of Josquin, who could hardly have enjoyed the autho rial cont rol over the publication process typical of later composers, to be spotlessly error-free, particularly when it is questionable whether such “ errors” (if indeed t hey were regarded as such) constitute a serious challenge to the aesthetic quality of the work overall. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, concerns with alleged compositional error often seem to be matters of covert and casual values and aesthetic taste concerning the kind of music a “ genius” like Josquin “ should” have written and which masq uerade as objective “ fact” via the heavily freighted rheto ric— or “ force of opinion” —of a critical authority.114 Force-of-opinion scholarship creates an illusion o f empirical, factual “ ob jectivity” that circumvents the need

111. Richard Sherr, introduction to The Josqui n Companion, ed. Sherr, 1–10, at 8. 112. For studies of Jo squin’s dissonance treatment see D ahlhaus, “ O n the Treatment of D issonance.” For a study dealing with o ne composer’s compositional practice with respect to theoretical prescription see Bonnie J. Blackburn, “ D id O ckeghem Listen to Tincto ris?” in Johannes Ockeghem, ed. Vendrix, 597–640. 113. Mendelssohn oft en relied o n his sister Fanny to assist him in the tedious wo rk of scrutinizing his pieces for “ fifths” and “ counterpoint” : “ Neither in this letter nor in your former one, do you say one word about ‘St. Paul’ or ‘Melusina,’ as one colleague should write to another— that is, remarks on fifths, rhythm and motion of the par ts, on concepti on, counterpoint, et coetera ani- malia. You ought to have done so, however, and should do so still, for you know the value I attach to it, and as ‘St. Paul’ is shor tly to be sent to the publisher, a few strictures fr om you would come just at the r ight moment ” (letter to Fanny H ensel of 30 January 1836, in Felix Mendelssohn: Letters, ed. G isella Selden-G ot h [N ew York: Vienna H ouse, 1973], 255; emphasis added). 114. Rob Wegman recently drew attention to the phenomenon of “ the force of opinion,” so dubbed by Castiglione in connection with a famous Josquin anecdote wherein a piece performed at t he court of I sabella d’Este G onzag a was reported to have “ pleased no o ne” until someone ascribed it to Jo squin, whereupon its musical sto ck instant ly soared. Wegman defines the “ force of opinion” as “ a deeply-rooted but ultimately unsupported and subjective conviction” and fi nds the phenomenon at wo rk as much in the tw enty-fi rst century as in J osquin’s day (“ Who Was Jo squin?” 33). I t can be readily seen, for example, in t he latest N ew Gr ove wo rklist, w herein many individual pieces carry annotations (under “ Remarks” ) concerning t he status of t heir authenticity, for example: “ questioned b y X, defended by Y” where X and Y are names of individual Jo squin scholars and/or the N ew Josquin Edi ti on .


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to resort to stylistic evaluation as a criterion for authenticity. We have already seen the perils of style criticism at work (in the aforementioned case of Sparks and O stho ff, who arrived at diametrically opposed conclusions about not one, but six motets). The proscription of stylistic evaluation that continues to hold sway over Josquin scholarship is a by-product of what B arbara H errnstein Smith has called a “ politics of evaluative criticism” : “ O ne of the major effects of prohibiting or inhibiting explicit evaluation is to forestall the exhibition and obviate the possible acknowledgment of divergent systems of value and thus to ratify, by default, established evaluative authority.” 115 The fetishizing of authentication studies itself seems an inevitable byproduct of a longstanding disciplinary privileging, among what Bruno Nettl calls musicolog y’s “ shared beliefs,” of the biography and masterwo rks of individual composers: [H isto rical musicolog ists] have tend ed t o participate in major ritualistic activities, such as the publication of a composer’s opera omnia or the performance of a composer’s entire corpus of works. . . . [they] have used the musical work, especially the master-work, as the principal focus for research and presentation. Other shared beliefs involve the integrity of periods, the insights one can gain from biography, the overwhelming validity of chronological approaches, and the significance of using the works of a single composer (rather than, to give an artificial example, the works written or performed in one city during one year) as units of study. 116

Such author-centric metho dologies, as G ary Tomlinson reminds us, “ [maintain] the modernist myths of genius and inspired, empowered, heroic individualism and [support] the reflection of these myths in the omniscient critic,” therefore bot h affirming a sense of the “ omniscience” of t he musicologist b ut simultaneously restricting our scope of inquiry. 117 Indeed, part of the reason that q uestions of musical authorship have at times become so totalizing is precisely because the “ masterwork” of the composer/author, contextualized as such, is inextricably bound up in what B arthes has called “ a process of fi liation” :

115. Barbara H errnstein Smith, Cont ingencies of Value: A lt er native Perspectives for Critical Theor y (C ambridge: H arvard U niversity Press, 1988), 24. I w ish to t hank D rue Fergeson, w ho first drew my attention to this import ant boo k while she was still a graduate student at D uke U niversity in the late 1980s. I t has significantly influenced my thinking thro ugho ut t his essay. Evaluative style criticism has long been eschewed in the editorial policy of the NJE, as the remarks of Martin Staehelin demonstrate: “ In view of the diffi culty of yielding an uneq uivocal identification in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries on the basis of stylistic judgment alone, I have restricted myself to procedu res based upon pure sour ceresear ch, procedures that do not necessitat e stylistic reasoning, or if so, then only for purposes of contro l” (Martin Staehelin, q uot ed in Elders, “ Report o f the First Josquin Meeting, ” 24; emphasis in original). 116. Nettl, “ Institutionalization of Musicology,” 308. 117. G ary Tomlinson, “ Musical P asts and Po stmodern Musicologies: A Response to Lawrence Kramer,” in A pproaches to the D iscipli ne, ed. Edmund G oehring, vol. 53 of Current M usicology (1992): 18–24, at 22.



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Are postulated: a determination of the work by the world (by race, then by H istory), a consecution of works amongst themselves, and a conformity of the work to the author. The author is reputed the father and the owner of his work: literary science therefore teaches respect for the manuscript and the author’s declared intentions, while society asserts the legality of the relation of author to work. 118

Like the “ conceptual and metho do logical confi nement” that H errnstein Smith identifi ed in the critical work of Frye and ot hers, which “ exhibits a severely limited conception of the potential domain of literary study and of the sorts of problems and phenomena with which it could or should deal,” 119 Josquin research has long privileged an exceedingly restrictive focus on philological and factual questions of authenticity, biography, and chronology. 120 Some scholars would regard the hegemony of such composer-centric metho dologies, how ever significant and valuable such studies are deemed to be, as impeding the exploration of “ myriad situations we as historians might construct around a musical utterance and the plurality of meanings the music might thus engage.” 121 In this respect, it would be useful for Josquin studies to immerse itself in a process of methodological and theoretical self-examination that would, among other things, reassess the intellectual and disciplinary costs of persisting in an

118. Roland Barthes, “ From Work to Text” (1971), in I mage—M usic—Text, 155–64, at 160. 119. H errnstein Smith, Contingenciesof Val ue, 25. 120. As Richard Sherr acknow ledg es, “ Authenticity is still very much a mod ern subject o f debate; in fact, along with the details of Josquin’s early biography, it sometimes appears to be the only subject o f debate” (introduction t o The Josqui n Companion, 9). The publication, in 2003, of Jo shua Rifkin’s monumental 112-page JAMS article, devoted to postdating by eight years the first known copy of Josquin’s A veM ari a, suggests that issues of chronolog y and aut henticity continue to stand at the forefront of Josquin studies. Bruno N ettl’s allusion to t he “ overwhelming validity of chronological approaches,” mentioned abo ve, echoes C arl D ahlhaus’s comments on “ the significance attached to chronological frameworks cobbled together from dates of composition (as though the historical significance of a work depended solely on the moment that it was created rather than on its lifespan within a musical culture)” (D ahlhaus, Foun dations of M usic H istory, 132). As the first Josquin motet historically “ antho logized” in print, and q uite possibly the most widely anthologized piece in all Renaissance music, A ve M aria . . . Vir go serena offers a musical paradigm of what Barbara H errnstein Smith referred to as “ cultural-histo rical dynamics of endurance,” that is, a process by which an art ifact seen by an interpretive community t o b e in some way exemplary—“ the best of its kind” —often has “ an immediate survival advantage” because of its greater chances for cultural reproduct ion. I t w ill thus be “ more frequently read or recited, copied or reprinted, translated, imitated, cited, co mmented upon” and so forth. O nce an exemplary art ifact has acquired such status for several generations, “ it w ill also begin t o perform certain characteristic cultural functions by virtue of t he very fact that it has endured—that is, the function s of a canonical wo rk as such—and be valued and preserved accordingly” (H errnstein Smith, Contingencies of Val ue, 48, 50). With a “ lifespan within a musical culture” spanning multiple centuries, this motet would make an excellent subject for an individual reception history similar to that undertaken for M agnusest tu , D omi ne by C ristle C ollins Judd; see not e 122 below. 121. Tomlinson, “ Musical Pasts and P ostmodern Musicologies,” 22.


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ultimately futile quest for absolute right/wrong, yes/no answers about the problematic authorship of individual works, and encourage the expansion of its intellectual horizons into areas of more broadly historical, cultural anthropological, or critical theoretical concern that would facilitate dialogue and interaction across disciplinary borders. A model of the kind of unforeseen historical and hermeneutic vistas that open up when questions of authorship and authenticity are decentered, marginalized, or simply side-stepped altogether, is Cristle Collins Judd’s fascinating study of the reception history from the sixteenth century to the present of a single piece, the “ dubious” motet M agnus es tu, D omine/ Tu pauper um refugium, attributed to bot h Jo sq uin and H einrich Finck.122 In the broader context of Renaissance studies, Martha Feldman’s recent work on print culture explores the madrigal reperto ry from a Foucauldian perspective of discursive formations and their circulation in a given culture. She sidelines the traditionally central question of “ who wrote what and why,” seeks instead to explore “ how practices of naming functioned in the cont ext of mass circulation,” 123 challenges the venerable assumption (still prevalent in Josquin scholarship) that all pieces were duly attributed unless the composer was not known, 124 and demonstrates why publishers might have preferred anonymity in certain cases.125 As the author of the first collection of printed music devot ed to a single composer, Josquin is a major figure in the transitional period around 1500 that witnessed a shift from the dissemination of music via manuscript to the production of print anthologies and single-author editions, and during which attitudes toward musical authorship were dramatically shifting. By virtue of what econo mic, cultural, and historical processes did the music of

122. C ristle C ollins Judd, “ Exempli grat ia: A Reception H isto ry of M agnus es tu D omi ne / Tu pauperum r efugium ,” chapter 9 of her R eadi ng Renaissance M usic Theor y: H ear ing wi th the Eyes (New York and C ambridge: C ambridge U niversity Press, 2000), 265–317. 123. “ Much bibliographical evidence within printed production needs to be understoo d in the broadest sense to ask not just who wrote what and why, but how practices of naming functioned in the context of mass circulation and what tendencies and tensions were introduced into naming practices by t he accelerated commerce of sixteenth-century I taly.” See Martha Feldman, “ Auth ors and Ano nyms: Recovering t he Ano nymo us Subject in C inq uecento Vernacular O bjects,” in M usic and the Cu lt ur es of Pri nt , ed. Kate van Orden (New York and London: G arland, 2000), 163–99, at 167. 124. This is the default assumption w ith respect t o many pieces att ributed uniquely in late posthumous prints and transmitted anonymously during Josquin’s entire lifetime. As Allan Atlas has asked: “ Why do we assume that they—pieces and/ or attributions—were born o nly a generation after Josquin’s death, either as honest mistakes or as a result of a publisher’s intent to deceive (and what a cynical assumption that is!)? And why use anonymous transmission during Josquin’s lifetime as negative evidence when we really know so little about why a piece bears an ascription in one source but not in another?” (“ C anon Fodder,” 64). 125. “ Even if printers preferred non-anonymous production, all things being equal, they seem nevertheless to have regarded certain pi eces, certain kinds of pieces, and most likely pieces by certain kinds of authors as being catego rically ‘anonymous’ in character” (Feldman, “ Autho rs and Anonyms,” 168–69).



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Josquin, more so than that of any of his gifted musical contemporaries, come to play such a pivotal ro le in t hat transformative process?126 A more radical possibility for rethinking questions of authorship and attribution would be to relinquish—or at least to consider less categorical approaches to—the sacrosanct not ion o f a single-autho red creative “ wo rk,” whose epistemological legitimacy in this period is in any case open to question, and to begin seriously to entertain notions of collaborative or collective authorship and creativity. D uring this period o f musical histo ry in which the nascent not ion of the “ composer” was in the process of crystallizing, many musicians still saw themselves first and foremost as men of the cloth and servants of the church. Because the myth of the solitary genius is arguably more prevalent in music than in any other of the creative arts, it may take time to consider collaborative authorship seriously in the same way that it has gradually come to be recognized (however reluctantly) that Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and other great artists had workshops full of assistants. 127 While collective authorship is perhaps more difficult to imagine in music than in painting or sculpture, a Renaissance mass could easily have been the product of creative collaboration facilitated by t he material circumstances of the everyday lives of Josquin and other musicians of his day. Most of these men were members of highly interactive social, religious, courtly, or professional communities (guilds and confraternities; choir schools of collegiate churches and cathedrals; musical chapels and private households of princes, prelates, and popes; and so forth) who gathered together multiple times a day for liturgical celebrations of Mass and D ivine Offi ce or for various kinds of public and private music-making. The Romantic image of the “ genius [composer] in the garret,” wo rking in solitude and isolation (and promulgated in popular films like Amadeus and The I mmor tal Beloved ), wo uld be difficult to reconcile with the largely communal social and professional realities of Renaissance musicians. 128 A more flexible and historically grounded view of authorship in this 126. O n the changing role of the “ composer” in the early mod ern era see Lo winsky, “ Musical G enius” ; P aula H iggins, “ Musical ‘P arents’ and Their ‘P rogeny’: The D iscourse of C reative Patriarchy in Early Mod ern Europe,” in M usic in R enai ssance Cities and Cour ts: Studies in H onor of Lewi s Lockwood, ed. Jessie Ann Owens and Anthony M. Cummings (Warren, Mich.: H armonie Park Press, 1997), 169–86; and especially Wegman, “ From M aker to C omposer.” 127. O n the “ myth of solitary genius” see the study by Jack Stillinger, M ulti ple A uthorship and the M yth of Soli tar y Geni us (New York: O xford U niversity Press, 1991). I n the world of art connoisseurship, Svetlana Alpers report s that “ a surprising number of wo rks are proving t o be not by Rembrand t’ s hand, but instead by those students, assistant s, and imitators” (Alpers, Rem- brandt’s Enterprise, 11). The idea of collaborative authorship is faring less well in Shakespeare studies, w here, according to Marjorie G arber, “ some of the resistance to t he idea that Shakespeare wrote his plays in collaboration with other playwrights and even actors in his company comes from our residual, occasionally desperate, need to retain this ideal notion of the individual genius” (“ O ur G enius Pro blem,” The A tlanti c M onthly 290, no. 5 [D ecember 2002]: 65–72, at 65). 128. Witho ut ad dressing th e possibility of co llaborative autho rship, Philip Weller notes that “ polyphony was by definition a collective enterprise” and draw s attention to the inherent


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period might well explain the wide disparity in musical styles or even technical competence exhibited within pieces deemed to be of “ uneven” or “ inconsistent” q uality (the M issa D a pacem, for example, which must otherwise fall victim to a categorical “ Josquin/not Josquin” antinomy).129 Such major epistemological, conceptual, and methodological reorientations require self-conscious reflexivity and theoretical awareness of the extent to which a priori expectations often dictate what we set out to find, as well as our critical response. When the G erman critic Ludw ig Rellstab visited B eethoven in 1825, for example, he found that “ the man didn’ t match the myth.” H aving expected the “ powerful, g enial savagery” depicted in portraits of the composer, he w as especially surprised to fi nd that “ there was nothing expressing that brusqueness, that tempestuous, unshackled quality which has been lent his physiognomy in order to bring it into conformity with his works.” 130 Conversely, in the process of remaking Josquin in the image of Beetho ven, the canon of musical wo rks “ properly” bearing his name has had to be reconfi gured to ensure its conformity to the expectations of “ musical perfection” fashioned from the myths of the man that have nourished his historical reception.

Retrofitting Genius To Plato and his followers Socrates was an exceptional individual, remarkable both for his unique personality and for his total dedication to the life of philosophy, but they wo uld not have called him a genius. Similarly H omer, tho ugh traditionally regarded as divinely inspired, the source not only of all poetry and

“ sociability” of early modern musical culture, in which a “ commo nwealth of composers” manifested a “ gro wing awareness of their collective identity and status.” See his “ C haracterising Jo sq uin: Style-citicism, H isto rical Memory, and the Rhetoric of P raise and B lame,” paper read at the I nt er national C onf erence: N ew D irections in Josqui n Scholar ship, Princeton U niversity, 29–31 O ctober 1999. 129. As Edgar Sparks remarked: “ P ossibly the most noticeable peculiarity of t he M issa D a pacem, in its relation to Jo squin, is the uneven q uality o f the music. The superbly eloq uent Et in- carnatus, praised by Ambros and quoted as a musical example by Osthoff, is counterbalanced by the stagnant Agnus II I . . . t he largely non-imitative, non-declamatory counterpoints, and t he short, stiff phrases of the canon of Agnus III of D a pacem sound unb elievably antiquated. The addition of the charge of ineptitude, an accusation that D a pacem must face and which can be directed against no compositions that can defi nitely be classified as late works of Josquin’s, makes it impossible to b ring this movement into any plausible connection w ith them” (The M usic of N oel Bauldeweyn, 37 and 42). 130. Alessandra C omini, “ The Visual Beethoven: Whence, Why, and Whither the Scowl?” in Beethoven and H is World, ed. Scott Burnham and Michael P. Steinberg (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton U niversity Press, 2000), 286–312, at 293, q uoting Rellstab. C omini’s fascinating study traces the gradual transformation in iconic representations of Beethoven over the course of the nineteenth century from images of a “ Promethean strugg ler” to that o f a “ triumphant demi-go d.”



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eloquence but also of wisdom and knowledge, did not become a genius until the eighteenth century. For it was only then that the modern idea of genius as an extraordinary creative power in man was first formulated. 131

Several recent studies seeking to investigate aspects of Josquin’s reputation have closely linked his preeminence in Renaissance musicology with the widespread attribution to him of “ genius status” in the sixteenth century. 132 Proceeding from these important points of departure, I wish to explore the possibility that even the anecdotal and archival evidence testifying to his sixteenth-century reputation has tended to be read and evaluated in terms more universalizing and monolithic than may be warranted, owing in part to covertly genius-laden ideological perspectives inherited from the nineteenth century. Can the randomly surviving sixteenth-century assessments of Josquin’s musical talent and creative endowment necessar ily bear the overwhelming w eight of t he transhistorical notions of “ musical genius” that have long been att ributed t o them? O r, has the idea of the Ro mantic “ genius persona” been ideologically “ retrofi tted” to earlier historical periods?133 To what extent, for example, can Low insky’s assertion that J osquin was “ to the Renaissance musician the very incarnation of musical genius” withstand closer histo rical scrutiny? Like Socrates (to paraphrase the quotation opening this section), Josquin was an “ exceptional individual remarkable for his uniq ue personality,” and

131. Penelope Murray, “ Po etic G enius and It s C lassical O rigins,” in Geni us: The H istor y of an I dea, ed. M urray, 9–31, at 28. 132. H oney Meconi, “ Josquin and Musical Reputation,” in Essays on M usic and Cult ure in H onor of H er ber t K ellm an, ed. B arbara H agg h (Paris and Tours: Minerve, 2001), 280–97; Wegman, “ Who Was Josquin?” ; St ephanie Schlagel, “ The Liber selectar um cant ionu m and the ‘G erman Josquin Renaissance,’ ” The Jour nal of M usi cology 19 [2002]: 564–615; Kirkman, “ From H umanism to Enlightenment” ; and Jessie Ann O wens, “ H ow J osquin Became Josquin: Reflections on H istoriography and Reception,” in M usic in R enaissance Cities and Cour ts, ed. Owens and Cummings, 271–80. 133. H ere my concerns resonate w ith those of Andrew Kirkman, w ho suggests that “ our perceptions of Josquin are to be sought not so much in how the sixteenth century rationalized its recent musical past as in how the eighteenth chose to interpret that view” (“ From H umanism to Enlightenment,” 444). My reading of Kirkman’s evidence would suggest that nineteenth-century views of musical genius—particularly those of Forkel, Kiesewetter, and Ambros, who perceived Josquin’s reception through their own Romantic lens—are perhaps even more fundamental than those of the eighteenth century, which Kirkman’s analysis shows were quite critical and uncomprehending of the composer. (See also Andrew Kirkman, “ U nder Such H eavy C hains” : The D iscovery and E valuation o f Lat e Medieval Music B efore Ambro s,” 19th-Cent ur y M usi c 24 [1999]: 89–112.) Forkel’s 1801 view of Jo squin as “ a true g enius [ein wahres Genie ], even perhaps in the same sense that one is accusto med to in our times” (quot ed in Kirkman, “ From H umanism to Enlightenment, ” 446), strikes me as acutely conscious of the construction of the “ genius persona” in his ow n day. As stated earlier, though, I question w hether the genius-imbued views of nineteenth-century scholars, including Ambros, would have guaranteed Josquin’s present-day reputation in the absence of the late twentieth-century critical mediation of Edward Lowinsky and the J osquin Festival-C onference of 1971.


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though “ traditionally regarded as divinely inspired,” “ he did not become a genius until the [late] eighteenth century.” As I have outlined elsewhere, Lowinsky’s “ G enius” essay inadeq uately histo ricizes sixteenth-century rhetoric of creative endowment. 134 The concept of “ being” a genius, in the universalizing sense commonly understood today, did not exist in the discursive practices of the sixteenth century. I ndeed, no wo rd for the present concept of a “ genius” as persona existed until the mid t o late eighteenth century. 135 The Latin word genius carries no meaning of talent o r creativity; the word translated as “ ge-

134. Lowinsky’s “ G enius” essay is the only study in the history of music to treat the subject of musical genius from its earliest manifestations to the mid-twentieth century. It is a pathbreaking essay of extraordinary erudition and remarkable breadth—a model of historical contextualization that is rarely found in musicology even today. Lowinsky was well aware of the shifting discursive formations on creative endo wment and genius over the co urse of several millennia. H e recognized that t he earliest art iculations of a “ genius persona” are generally situated in t he eight eenth century. And yet, while he does not frame his project as being necessarily iconoclastic of received wisdom in ot her fields (histo ry, philosophy, art histo ry, literature, etc.), L ow insky does emphasize that existing histories of genius rarely included discussions of music, and pointed to the absence of music even from the standard work on genius, that of Edgar Zilsel (see n. 135 below), which remains to t his day t he histo rical benchmark (“ Musical G enius,” M usical Quar terly, 322–23 and n. 6). Lowinsky’s implicit argument seems to be that a precocious notion of genius in music was already anticipated in the Renaissance, several centuries earlier than in o ther fields. H e sees important facets of t he “ genius persona” as being already present in the discussions of G larean and ot hers, particularly C oclico. Lowinsky’s interpretat ions of G larean and ot her early mod ern writers and theorists were far more imbued with the Romantic worldview of genius—and could not help but be so—than has heretofore been recognized, beyond my own preliminary critique (set forth briefly in “ Musical ‘P arents,’ ” 170–71, of w hich I consider the present essay in some respects to be the logical continuation). 135. The Latin genius in the Renaissance referred to “ a superior spirit inspiring a human being in the tradition of Socrates’ d emon o r in that o f astrology (astral spirit)” (G iorgio Tonelli, “ G enius from the Renaissance to 1770,” in D i cti onar y of t he H i stor y of I deas, ed. Wiener, 2:293–97, at 293). The essence of the Latin genius is its spiritual, d ivine aspect, w hich “ inhabits” not only human beings but places as well, as in geniusloci. The most thoroug hgoing histor y of the concept of genius is Edgar Zilsel, D i e Entstehun g des Geni ebegri ffes: Ei n Beitr ag zur I deengeschichte der A nti ke und des Fr ühkapi tali smu s (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1926; reprint, H ildesheim and New York: G eorg O lms Verlag, 1972). See also Murray, “ P oetic G enius” ; Wittkow er, “ G enius: Individualism in Art and Artists” ; and P eter Kivy, The Possessor and the Possessed: H andel, M ozar t, Beethoven, an d t he I dea of M usical Genius (New H aven and Londo n: Yale U niversity Press, 2001), 9–14. Kivy’s study, t houg h in no way t o be construed as a histo ry of genius, observes that Plato and Longinus, the tw o ancient writers most closely associated w ith notions of “ genius,” in fact had no concept of it (ibid., 12). As Kivy further notes, “ Like Plato, Longinus had no word for genius, and where both his early and modern translators use that term, which they consistently do, the literal translation is more like ‘g reatness of mind.’ Althoug h, how ever, Longinus did not have the word, he does seem to have had something close to one modern concept of the thing. And I shall, therefore, follow his translators in using the term for what Longinus was talking abo ut.” H is analysis of genius, then, is based on “ what the translators render as ‘g enius’ ” (ibid., 14). For a study of genius in the eight eenth century in relation to the emergence of the “ author” and copyright law, see Martha Woo dmansee, “ The G enius and the C opyright : Econo mic and Legal Co nditions of the Emergence of the ‘Author,’ ” Eighteenth- Cent ur y Stu dies 17 (1984): 425–48.



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nius” (and sprinkled t hroughout H einrich G larean’s D odecachordon, particularly in the famous encomium of Josquin) is the Latin ingenium (“ natural disposition, o r talent” ), which does not correspond to the English wo rd “ genius” and t he meanings that accrued t o it b eginning in the eight eenth century. 136 Present-day claims of Josquin’s sixteenth-century “ genius status,” accordingly, need to be reevaluated to accommodate a more nuanced understanding of how the word ingenium and its Italian counterpart ingegno were used and understood by Josquin’s contemporaries. Advocating much closer scrutiny of Renaissance terminology used to describe artistic productivity, for example, art historian Martin Kemp emphasizes the need for caution, lest “ later stances precondition our response” : “ We should certainly not assume that the relevant terms, ingenium or ingegno and genio (or genius in its Latin form) should be translated or interpreted as ‘genius’ in the romantic or modern sense.” 137 G iven the parallels between the dramatically chang ing roles of bo th visual and musical artists in early modern Europe, music historians, like their art historical counterparts, must more assiduously historicize the technical vocabulary used to describe musical talent and creativity. As in the domain of the visual arts, which saw the emergence in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries of an array of supremely talented artists besides Michelangelo— Mant egna, Raphael, Perugino, D ürer, among others—so too the domain of music witnessed a number of exceptionally gifted composers besides Josquin. U nder the rubric D e I ngenio Symphonetar um, in book 3, chapter 26 of the D odecachordon, G larean systematically uses the word ingenium to describe the creative gifts of Antoine Brumel, G regor y Meyer, Joh annes O ckeghem, H einrich Isaac, Ludw ig Senfl, Jacob O brecht, and Anto ine Fevin, as well as Josquin. 138 In every case, the translator elected to render the word ingenium as “ talent” or “ skill” for these composers (see Appendix B, Exx. 1–8, below), whereas for Jo sq uin, “ genius” is often substituted (Appendix C , Exx. 2–4). 136. Wittkower, “ G enius: Individualism in Art and Artists,” 305; see note 54 above. See also Mart in Kemp, “ From ‘M imesis’ to ‘ Fantasia’: The Q uattro cento Vocabulary of C reation, Inspiration, and G enius in the Visual Arts,” Vi ator: Medi eval and R enaissance Studi es 8 (1977): 347–98; and idem, “ The ‘Super-Artist,’ ” 36. For an exemplary interdisciplinary collection o f essays which contextualize genius as a historically determined concept see Murray, ed., Geni us: The

H istor y of an I dea. 137. Kemp, “ The ‘Super-Artist,’ ” 35–36. Kemp also no tes that “ less obvious words, such as virtù o r divino, might have carried some of t he modern conn ot ations of genius.” See also Wegman, “ ‘And Josquin Laughed, ’ ” for still further words specifically associated with creative personalities, including bizzar ria, fant asia, and melancholia . 138. C lement Miller, Eng lish translator o f the D odecachordon, renders the L atin ingenium in this particular phrase as “ skill” : “ C oncerning the Skill of Symphonetae.” See D odecachordon, ed. Miller, 2:271. H is earlier G erman counterpart, P eter Bohn, t ranslated ingenium as the G erman Genie or “ genius.” See Glareani D odecachordon Basileae M D X LVI I , ed. and trans. Peter Bohn, Publikation alterer praktischer und theo retischer Musikwerke 16 (Leipzig: B reitkopf und H ärtel, 1888).


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To be sure, this may have been the translator’s way of emphasizing the high esteem in which G larean held the composer—which G larean himself acknowledges as a personal bias that others may not share. 139 But given that G larean used the word ingenium in praise of all the composers he mentioned, it seems important to underscore that Josquin’s reputation alone enjoys the fortified stat us tacitly accorded b y selective translation. H ere, the subtle inflection of meaning rendered into English from a Latin theoretical treatise retrospectively shapes a Renaissance composer’s sixteenth-century reception history, just as, conversely, the late twentieth-century reception of Josquin vis-à-vis the other composers might have influenced the disparity in translation in the first place. H ere we have a paradigmatic example of how a preestablished critical distinction undergirds the construction of genius. 140 In G larean’s references to “ natural talent,” in his apparent valorization of music that was “ newly composed” over music based o n “ preexisting” material, and in his description of certain of Josquin’s personality traits, Lowinsky perceived the presence of nascent notions of the eighteenth-century idea of “ original genius.” 141 The idea of natural endowment with talent also emerges to some extent in G iorgio Vasari’s Lives of t he A r tists,142 but as art historians, again, have noted, Vasari’s understanding of art and artistic technique is decid139. See for example Appendix C , Exx. 1 and 2: “ in my opinion” ; “ unless I am mistaken in my affection.” See also “ this is my opinion, and the reader is free (as we everywhere suggest) to judge as he wishes” (D odecachordon, ed. Miller, 2:294); and “ my judgment . . . is corrupted by too great a sympathy toward Josquin, since I am accustomed to place him above the uncertainty of the ot hers” (ibid., 2:249). 140. Rob C . Wegman has drawn attention to the extent to which the hero wo rship evident in Josquin historiography has tended to eclipse the equally important career and musical works of Jacob Obrecht. See his Born f or the M uses: The Li fe an d M asses of Jacob Obrecht (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). 141. Low insky claims that “ only in the Renaissance did it [ingenium ] assume the meaning o f outstanding talent,” and that it was so used b y Albert, L eonardo, and “ countless other” writers of the period. It is critical to point out, however, that ingenium in this period is never used in any sense ot her than human possession (i.e., “ his genius,” never “ he is a genius” ). Lo winsky, in effect, sidesteps what is to my mind the most crucial question, namely, the precise meaning of ingenium as used by G larean and others, with the assertion: “ the weight of G lareanus’ stat ement rests not on the interpretation of ingenium, but on his distinction b etween extraordinary natural talent and craftsmanship, and on his insistence that the former far exceeds the latter in importance” (“ Musical G enius,” in D ictionar y of theH istory of I deas 2:317). 142. C arl Pletsch, “ Anticipations of the Theory of G enius in Vasari’s Lives ?” in The I mage of

Technology in Literat ure, the M edi a, and Society: Selected Papers from t he 1994 Conference [ of the] Soci ety for the I nt erdi sci pli nar y Study of Soci al I mager y, ed. Will Wright and Steven Kaplan (Colorado Springs: The Society, 1994), 211–14. Like other art historians, Pletsch notes that Vasari’s “ understanding o f art, artistic techniq ue, and the art ist are all clearly pre-mod ern.” What Pletsch finds more important about Vasari’s contribution to nascent notions of genius is that he wrote biog raphies, and some of the conventions he employed did “ cont ribute to making b iography a g enre suitable for memo rializing innovation in the lives of individual artists” (ibid., 213). This might be said of G larean as well, whose brief vignett es of Renaissance composers, not to mention his lengthy encomium o f Jo squin, constitute early examples of music biography.



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edly premodern. And bo th G larean’s and Vasari’s views are centuries away from the Romantic notion of the genius persona, or even that earlier formulated by D iderot, who is generally acknow ledged as the first to distinguish “ being” a genius ê ( tre un gé nie ) from “ having/ possessing genius” (avoir du gé nie ).143 Nor was G larean’s preference for the “ newly composed” a universally shared value; some thirty years later, in 1577, Spanish theorist Francisco de Salinas praised precisely the opposite phenomenon: works based on preexisting material deserved to be held in higher esteem than freely composed works “ since to the songs that have been used for centuries in the church and are familiar to all, the intertwining of many parts was added.” 144 More importantly, ingenium, as widely understood in the Renaissance and whatever its nuances of meaning, could not be realized w ithout the benefit of learning and discipline that only an exemplary teacher could provide to harness and cultivate the gifts of his student. 145 Conversely, the Romantic cult of genius had little use for t eachers—the genius was by definition self-taug ht and sui generis; 146 if he had a creative “ father” he fought to shake him off and expunge any trace of his “ influence” from his music. H e would certainly never admit to “ imitating” him. 147 G larean’s painstaking effort to report the names

143. D iderot (1713–1784) is acknow ledg ed by Lowinsky as the first philosopher to chang e the concept of genius from that of avoir du gé nie to ê tr e un gé ni e, and the first to regard the genius as a “ type of person” (Low insky, “ Musical G enius,” M usical Quar terly, 335 and n. 42, citing H erbert D ieckmann, “ D iderot’ s C onception of G enius,” Jour nal of the H istory of I deas 2 [1941]: 151–82, at 152). Kineret Jaffe, upholding D ieckmann’ s argument that D iderot “ represents a turning point in the eight eenth-century discussion of genius,” has set D iderot’s individual cont ribution against the context of the prevailing majority of French philosophers to show how and why D iderot’s concept came to d ominate t he thinking of t he French Ro mantics. As she argues, “ O nly by examining the eighteenth-century’s changing view of imitation, invention, creation, and imagination will we be able to trace the evolution of the nineteenth-century conception of genius.” See Kineret S. Jaffe, “ The C oncept o f G enius: I ts C hanging Role in Eighteenth-Century French Aesthetics,” Jour nal of the H istor y of I deas 41 (1980): 579–99, at 579. On the other hand, it seems clear that early eighteenth-century British writers like Shaftesbury (1711), for who m “ a genius is considered as a second d eity, or as a P romethus,” and Addison (1711), w ho distinguished betw een “ natural” genius (H omer, Shakespeare) and “ learned” genius (Plato, Virgil, Bacon, M ilto n), were also beginning to t heorize the “ genius persona.” See Tonelli, “ G enius from the Renaissance to 1770,” 294–95. 144. Stevenson, “ Josquin in the Music of Spain and Po rtugal,” 236–37. 145. H iggins, “ Musical ‘Parents,’ ” 170–71. I do not w ish to suggest that a single, monolithic defi nition of the w ord existed, but rather to underscore its inherent instability of meaning at a time when notions of creative endowment w ere in constant flux. 146. “ All musical geniuses are self-taught, for the fire that animates them carries them away irresistibly to seek their own flight orbit” (C hristian Friedrich Schubart, Vom musikalischen Genie, 1784–85; cited in Low insky, “ Musical G enius,” M usical Quar ter ly, 325–26, and in H iggins, “ Musical ‘P arents,’ ” 170 n. 10). 147. “ Everyone agrees that g enius must be opposed completely to the spirit of imitation” (“ D arin ist Jedermann einig, d ass G enie dem Nachahmungsgeiste gänzlich entgegenzusetz en sey” ) (Immanuel Kant, K ri ti k der U r theil skraft; cited in Lo winsky, “ Musical G enius,” Musical Quarterly, 328 and n. 25, and in H iggins, “ Musical ‘P arents,’ ” 170–71 n. 11).


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of many teachers of sixteenth-century composers, including Josquin, situates him solidly within the pedagog ical discourse of creative patrilineage and a premodern understanding of creative talent which, however naturally or exceptionally endowed, still needed a teacher to bring it to fruition. In short, the Romantic concept of musical genius, which places the student in agonistic psychological warfare with his teachers and other predecessors, bears little resemblance to Renaissance ideas of creative musical talent, precisely because Renaissance writers fully embraced the notion that a master was indispensable to the student’s creative development. 148 In order to apprehend the extent to which an ahistorical model of Romantic genius has been retrofi tted for Josquin, w e need to engage systematically in a more subtly nuanced and historicized interrogation of the aesthetic terminology used by sixteenth-century contemporaries to d escribe bo th Josquin and his contemporaries during their own lifetimes—an exercise that wo uld likely temper the more extravagant claims made by scholars around t he time of the 1971 Josq uin apotheosis. M odernist scholarly preoccupations with musical genius and great composers throughout the twentieth century have stacked the deck heavily in favor o f Josq uin. The problem w ith respect to Jo sq uin’s reputation resembles that w hich Tia D eNo ra has articulated fo r Beethoven: “ [H is reputat ion] consists of retrospective account s that isolate the quality of Beethoven’s works as the cause of his recognition.” 149 This observation resonates strongly with that of Jessie Ann Owens, who reminds us that the reputation of the Josquin we know from the modern edition and from the contemporaneous tributes and anecdot es that have come down to us “ reflects a series of happenstances” and is not necessarily the Josq uin experienced at different times in various parts of E urope: Ironically, it is precisely because [Josquin] does seem to loom so large that it has been tempting to create a composite picture consisting on the one hand of the many tributes he received during his own time and in the decades after his death and on the other of all of the compositions he is thought to have composed. The result is another sort of historiographical distort ion. . . . To understand his place in history requires replacing the composite picture of modern historiography with a series of images specific to particular times and places. 150

In other wo rds, the “ historiographical distortion,” or historical construct, reflected in this “ composite picture” of Josq uin overloo ks the role that contin148. H iggins, “ Musical ‘P arents,’ ” 171. Kant’ s earliest formulations of genius from 1770– 80 still suggest that genius req uires instruction (Tonelli, “ G enius from t he Renaissance to 1770,” 206). 149. DeNora, Beethoven and the Constr ucti on of Geni us, 5. D eNora cites the work on scientific “ geniuses” of sociologist Michael Mulkay, who has show n that such accounts, despite being “ socially accumulated” over long periods of t ime, have a tendency to b e “ interpretively projected backwards upo n earlier events.” Michael Mulkay, The Wor d an d t he Wor ld: Explor ati ons i n Sociological A nalysis (New York: Routledge, Chapman and H all, 1986), 173. 150. Ow ens, “ H ow Josquin Became Josquin,” 274–75.



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gencies of time and place have played in assessments of the composer’s reputation. “ Each epoch has its own laws, its ow n taste,” as Luscinius remarked in his M usurgia of 1536, and according to O wens, “ its own hero” : “ Thus, over the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, writers single out as heroes at least fi ve different composers: D unstable, Jo sq uin, Willaert, Ro re, and Lasso. Each generation, in effect, creates its own hero, either a contemporary composer or one whose feats were still vivid enough to be remembered.” 151 H ero-oriented h isto riog raphy replicates itself in present -day Renaissance scholarship,152 illustrating once again what Bruno Nettl earlier described as musicology’s institutional fostering of particular methods and practices. 153 One is tempted to consider, in turn, the ways in which the largely unspoken “ institutional fostering” of individual musical genius, retrofitted to histo rical periods and persons to which such ideas were foreign, has fundmentally shaped Renaissance music historiography.

Theologizing Genius Learning we thank, G enius we revere; That gives us pleasure, This gives us rapture; That informs, This inspires; and is itself inspired for genius is from heaven, learning from man. 154 From the vantage point of a hard-won cultural relativism, a self-centered decentering that directs attention, as it should and must, to subject positions, object relations, abjects, race-class-and-gender, there is still this tug of nostalgia, the determinedly secularized b ut not yet fully agno sticized d esire to believe. To believe in something, in someone, all-know ing and immutable. I f not G od, then Shakespeare, who amounts to a version of the same thing.155

And if not Shakespeare, t hen Josq uin, who amounts to “ a version of the same thing” in Renaissance musicology. B ut w hereas the theme of ad ulation in Shakespeare studies has become the subject of significant political and ideological criticism,156 Josquin still seems to be enveloped in a mantle of genius that renders him all but impervious to the seismic paradigm shifts effected 151. O wens, “ Music H istoriography,” 313. 152. In the last decade, for example, there have been numerous publications of mono graphs and co nference proceedings devot ed to the music of O brecht, D ufay, B inchois, O ckeghem, Busnoys, LaRue, Lassus, M orales, and Palestrina, and doubtless ot hers. 153. Nettl, “ Institutionalization of Musicology,” 308. 154. Edward Young, Conjectures on Or igin al Composition (1759), cited in Jonathan Bate, “ Shakespeare and Original Genius,” in Geni us: The H istor y of an I dea, ed. M urray, 76–97, at 88. 155. Marjorie G arber, “ Shakespeare as Fetish,” Shakespear e Qu ar terly 41 (1990): 242–50, at 243. 156. O utside of musicology, some of the mo st compelling cultural criticism—new histo ricism as well as various kinds of political criticism (cultural materialism, feminism, gay studies, postcolonialism)—has been carried on in art and literature of the early modern period, and


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by the “ cultural turn” elsewhere in the academy. 157 The complacency and resistance to critical theory still evident in certain q uarters of musicology continues to lure evangelists of genius who rail against those who wo uld “ cast a baleful eye on the whole genius thing,” bemoan t he fact that “ genius has been getting a bad press,” 158 and pine for the days of “ commonsense genius” : According to the commonsense view of Beethoven’s genius, then, Beethoven was, fr om t he star t, a man apart. H e was gifted with a pre-eminent g enius that began to express itself early in life. In Vienna, his genius str uggled for recognition; man misunderstood it, but many came to appreciate it as well. And to make the power of his genius all the more remarkable, it triumphed over the worst affliction under which a composer can labor: impairment of hearing and, ultimately, a nearly total loss, which, nevertheless, did not prevent him from writing musical masterpieces that are the wonder of the world. So says common sense about the transcendent genius of B eethoven. 159 [emphasis added]

Saturated with the heroic themes of “ struggling” and “ triumph” over life’s vicissitudes encountered throug hout this study, philosopher P eter Kivy’s characterization of B eetho ven as “ from the start, a man apart” (i.e., a natural, solitary genius) resonates uncannily with that o f the creatively deracinated Josquin who earlier was proclaimed to have “ started as Josquin—and started at the to p.” Like Kivy’s tract, which dismisses the serious scholarly critiques of genius by feminist philosopher C hristine Battersby and sociologist Tia D eNora,160 other recent manifestations of “ genius anxiety” (a symptom, perhaps, of what Philip Brett called the “ castration anxiety” prevalent “ in our deviant profession” ?) similarly undercut tho se who w ould “ reduce” or “ diminish” the notion of genius. 161 C uriously, those who insist on the necessity of genius are not

now here more dramat ically so than in Shakespeare studies, beginning with the co llection Political Shakespear e: N ew Essaysin Cul tural M aterialism, ed. Jo nathan D ollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester: Manchester U niversity P ress, 1985). See also D ollimore’s more recent “ Shakespeare at the Limits of Po litical Criticism,” in his Sex, L iteratur e, an d C ensorship (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 124–44. 157. A recent article by Judith Peraino similarly not es “ fissures” betw een medieval and postmod ern musicolog ists and “ explores reasons and methods for co mbining histo rical research in medieval music and postmo dern critical theories” (“ Re-Placing Medieval Music,” this Journal 54 [2001]: 209–64). 158. Kivy, The Possessor and the Possessed, 218. 159. Ibid., 184. 160. C hristine Battersby, Gender and Geni us: Towards a Femi nist A esthetics (Bloomington and I ndianapolis: I ndiana U niversity Press, 1989); and D eNora, Beethoven and the Constr uction of Genius. For Kivy’s extensive commentary on each see The Possessor and the Possessed, 181–217 (D eNora) and 227–37 (Bat tersby). 161. In addition to Kivy’s book, who se central concern is “ reduction” or “ deflation” of genius, see H arold Bloom, Geni us: A M osaic of One H un dred Exemplar y Cr eative M inds (New York: Warner Books, 2002), 2 and 7. Still another ideologist of genius derides the attacks on it as a “ mytho logy, an att empt to grasp the ungraspable by dimini shin g it, r educing it .” See Edward



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alone in attempting to silence pesky dissidents who would question its relevance or usefulness; the same trend is evident in the insouciance of the postmod ern intellectual who wo uld posit “ we have long ago mo ved beyond all that .” But have we really? Even if the ideology of genius has lost its cachet in certain corners of academe, it seems unlikely that the venerable and cherished notion will disappear from music historical discourse anytime soon, to judge from the nearly seven hundred RI LM entries that have the wo rd “ genius” in their titles, abstracts, or subject lines. Some of them concern the handful of uncontested geniuses tout cour t like Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven; more often than not, though, they deal with composers whose putative, and hence more fragile, status as a genius persona must be cushioned with protective adjectives like “ gentle,” “ forgotten,” “ depressed,” “ conservative,” “ pedantic,” “ revolutionary,” “ rustic,” “ dramatic,” “ ignored,” “ unappreciated,” “ suffering,” “ misunderstood ,” “ multi-dimensional,” “ flamboyant,” “ invisible,” and, as if to fortify the word’s built-in hyperbole, “ exceptional.” That is, of course, unless they are women who, being notoriously devoid of genius, must perforce content themselves with basking vicariously in the afterglow of reflected genius as the nurturing “ shadow s,” “ wives,” and “ mothers” of—or on occasion more ambitiously as “ muses to” —the men they consorted w ith. C ontemporary culture is so steeped in genius-talk and genius-thinking that Marjorie G arber has dubb ed the phenomenon “ our ‘genius problem’: a longing for genius, a genius worship that might be described as messianic.” 162 So deeply embedded in the disciplinary consciousness is an absolute, transhistorical, unproblematic notion of musical genius that its tremendously complex

Rot hstein, “ Myths About G enius,” N ew York Ti mes, 5 January 2002, 11(B). Rothstein’s targets include the explicitly named aforementioned books by Christine Battersby and Tia D eNora, as well as unnamed authors of “ various historical and musicological papers” which have dealt w ith genius and “ cultural politics,” presumably including myself. See the o pening not e abo ve. Similarly, L ow insky’s “ G enius” article sought to reaffirm the historical legitimacy of musical genius in express response to “ a deflat ion of the idea of g enius” in the late twentieth century (Lo winsky, “ Musical G enius,” M usical Quar terly, 321). According t o P hilip B rett, “ the immense investment by musical scholarship and by certain types of composition in competitiveness, rigor, masterfulness, and those qualities that reveal the castration anxiety that is so strong in our deviant profession.” See his “ Musicality, Essentialism, and the C loset,” in Queering the Pitch: The N ew Gay and Lesbian M usicology, ed. Philip Brett et al. (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 9–26, at 18. 162. G arber, “ O ur G enius Problem,” 72. The original version of my essay, w ritten in 1999 to address a prescribed conference agenda, and taking its point of departure from scholarly talks on gender and g enius given at D uke, the U niversity of C alifornia at B erkeley, O xford, P rinceton, and C U NY G raduate Center betw een 1989 and 1998, substantially antedated t he publication of G arber’s essay. My focus is more narrow ly circumscribed to the scholarly phenomenon of geniusthinking along with its perceived collateral damag e, but I share G arber’s broader cultural concerns with its inflationary aspects. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the saturation level of today’s print, electronic, and broad cast media has reached the po int t hat a day rarely passes without hearing the word at least once.


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intellectual history has never prompted formal entries in the N ew Gr ove D ictionar y, D ie M usik in Geschichte und Gegenwar t, or many other standard music dictionaries. 163 The almost deafening silence of acquiescence surrounding the reification of musical genius might well be explained by the “ noteworthy co rrelation of validity w ith silence” that H errnstein Smith fi nds in Northrop Frye’s proscription of evaluative criticism: “ C omparative estimates of value are really inferences, most valid when silent ones, from critical practice” (emphasis added). 164 Consequently, when tacit, long-accepted critical norms and values meet with unforeseen challenges to their cultural hegemony, it is not surprising that ardent defenses of the “ ob jective” validity of such norms are mounted, for it is characteristic of objectivist thoug ht to conclude that “ in the absence of its own conceptualizations, there could not be a world, or any thought at all.” 165 The virulence of attacks on D eNora’s “ sociopolitical view” marks her alternative conceptualization of Beethoven’s genius status as particularly dangerous to “ commo nsense” genius-thinking, in which mystifi cation and hero wo rship serve to sustain the status quo . 166 When an individual or group makes a claim as to the “ objective necessity or propriety” of their own social, political, and mo ral view o f the world, and thus denies “ the contingency of the conditions and perspectives from w hich tho se judgments and actions proceed,” as H errnstein Smith concludes: it must be—and always is—simultaneously a move to assign dominant status to the particular conditions and perspectives that happen to be relevant to or favored by that person, group, or class; it must be—and always is—simultaneously a move to deny t he existence and relevance, and to suppress the claims, of other conditions and perspectives. 167

163. Low insky, no ting that the idea of musical genius “ is inseparable from t he histor y of music and the concept o f the musician as it developed from G reek antiquity,” also co mments on t he absence of the concept from standard reference works (“ Musical G enius,” in D icti onar y of the H istory of I deas 2:312–26, at 312). 164. H errnstein Smith, Contingencies of Val ue, 24, quoting Frye, A natomy of Cr iti cism. As I not ed elsewhere, “ the curious silence surrounding [Lowinsky’s “ G enius” ] article resembles a halo of sanctification” (“ Musical ‘P arents,’ ” 170). 165. H errnstein Smith, Contingenciesof Val ue, 153. 166. Within the world of traditional Bach scholarship, for example, Susan McC lary famously encountered strong resistance in attempting to “ resituat[e] B ach in his social, political, and ideological cont ext.” See her essay “ The Blasphemy of Talking P olitics D uring B ach Year,” in M usic and Society: T he Politics of Composition, Per formance, and R ecepti on, ed. Richard Leppert and Susan McC lary (C ambridge and N ew York: C ambridge U niversity Press, 1987), 13–62, at 14. And her bold critique of the violence of certain passages in Beethoven’s Ninth sent shock waves surging througho ut t he field of musicology. See “ G etting D ow n O ff the B eanstalk: The Presence of a Woman’s Voice in J anika Vandervelde’s Genesis I I ,” in her Femi ni ne Endi ngs: M usic, Gender, and Sexual ity (Minneapolis: U niversity of M innesot a P ress, 1991), 112–31. 167. H errnstein Smith, Contingenciesof Valu e, 181.



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D iscourses of musical genius function exactly as myth/ ideolog y in Barthes’s theoretical formulation. In this context, it is diffi cult not to read the rhetoric of tho se who yearn for a return to “ commo nsense” understandings of genius as the masking in “ natural” and “ universalizing” terms of an ideology that seeks to maintain existing pow er relations in contemporary culture. While one can empathize with the Romantic nostalgia for a monumental cultural past that moves certain critics to defend their objects of veneration, and to “ shield t heir eyes from the challenge of multiplicity and contingency,” such an ideological stance, as anthropolog ist C harles Lindho lm observes, “ now involves a willful ignorance and an uncomfortable denial of the ambiguity of a heterogeneous present.” 168 The historically gendered and racially inflected aspects of genius make gratuitous invocations of the wo rd politically problematic. H ence, it is diffi cult for some not to regard genius-talk and genius-thinking as a provocative challenge to “ political correctness” (now a code word for “ threat to business as usual” ), a ringing endorsement of the perpetuation in eter nam of upper-class, white patriarchal values and modes of thoug ht, whether in musical scholarship or elsewhere. O ne speaks in Shakespeare stud ies of t he “ massive collateral dam age wroug ht b y Shakespeare’s genius” upon B ritish th eater. 169 I n

168. Lindholm, “ Authenticity, Anthropology, and the Sacred,” 335. It also suggests a powerful resistance to the infiltration of critical and cultural theory into the sanctified domain of Renaissance musicology. In a recent publication, I consigned to a contextualizing footnote references to Barthes and Foucault on postmod ern concerns abo ut aut horship. This was characterized by one reviewer as “ a self-conscious apologia . . . sometimes disintegrat[ing] into a kind of flaunting of postmodern terminology that detracts from what could have been a first-class effort to ” (Susan Forscher Weiss, review of A ntoine Busnoys: M ethod, M eaning, bri ng to li ght a lost geni us and Context i n L ate M edi eval M usic, ed. P aula H iggins, N otes 57 [2001]: 888–91, at 890; emphasis added). See my intro duction to the reviewed volume, “ C elebrating Transgression and Excess: Busnoys and the B oundaries of Late M edieval Musical Culture,” in A ntoine Busnoys, ed. H iggins, 1–20. I wo uld no t w ish the present essay to be seen as implictly self-exculpato ry o f my ow n count less sins of complicity with certain of the author-centric scholarly agendas I seek to problematize here; nevertheless, as a scholar of avowedly feminist orientation, I have always, and indeed “ self-consciously,” avoided the assignment of “ genius” status to Busnoys (or to any other Renaissance composer), beyond referring to him as an “ ingenious composer.” 169. Jonathan D ollimore decried the fostering in B ritish t heater of an “ embarrassingly tamed Shakespeare” commercially sanitized for the masses and drew attention to the co ntro versy raised by acto r Ian M cKellan “ when he not ed the absence of black faces in the audience at t he National Theatre and left Londo n for provincial Leeds.” See Do llimore, Sex, L iteratur e, and Censorship, 155–56. Marjorie G arber offers a brilliant cautionar y example of the “ dang er of fetishizing Shakespeare” in Maya Angelou’s comment that “ Shakespeare was a black wo man,” and considers it emblematic of the insidious power of universalizing d iscourses that “ Shakespeare speaks for her [Angelou], at the cost of acknowledging vestiges of racism, sexism, and classism in his own wo rks.” G arber asks “ what w ould happen if it were ‘in fact’ discovered,” by some “ feat of archival research,” that Shakespeare reall y was a black woman, and co ncludes that such a revelation would launch “ a massive campaign of disavowal” (G arber, “ Shakespeare as Fetish,” 250).


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America, the Bard now finds himself a recent conscript of the militaryindustrial complex by way of a multimillion-dollar National Endowment for the Arts project w hose mission is to bring “ art of indisputable excellence to all Americans.” 170 It is not exclusively a function o f its allegedly “ universal appeal” and “ timelessness for all ages” that Shakespeare’s theologized body of literature is often marshaled in the promulgation of neoconservative cultural agendas. The idolatry o f genius is rarely naive and always politically suspect. O ne hardly needs reminding of how the music of certain g enius composers has been misappropriated in the interests of unsavory nationalist agendas. 171 It might seem inappropriate, if not absurd, to raise such concerns in a discussion of a Renaissance composer whose immunity to cultural politics has traditionally fallen into the category of “ what-go es-witho ut-saying.” And yet the historical Josquin des Prez was constituted by and constitutive of the powerful social, cultural, political, and religious ideologies of his ow n d ay. Too often the cultural authority of music historical witnesses is invoked without apparent concern for lingering residue of covert ideological interests. Casual evaluative statements, plucked from their broader rhetorical contexts (such as those of G erman and Swiss humanists, publishers, and theologians), are cited as catego rical testimony to Jo sq uin’s “ genius,” as if their interest in the composer was fueled purely by the aesthetic concerns of present-day musicolog y. B ut as Sarah Fuller reminds us, G larean lived and taught in Basel in a time of fierce religious antagonism and bloody political upheaval; music was deeply implicated in these reformative religious agendas. In a climate of ideologically heightened tensions, wherein criticism of the Catholic Church could meet with charges of subversion, it is probably not by coincidence, as Fuller sugg ests, that G larean defended G regorian chant and t he ecclesiastical modes, and dedicated his D odecachordon to a powerful cardinal. Nor, I would further sugg est, is it likely to be coincidental that the music of a composer with impec-

170. Michael P hillips, “ NE A Should Cultivate Art of Future,” Chicago Tr ibune, Sunday, 19 O ctober 2003, sec. 7, p. 16. The NE A “ Shakespeare in American C ommunities” project and a related D epartment o f D efense subsidized project w ill bring Shakespeare to small towns and stateside military bases. This will almost surely involve the kind of “ embarrassingly tamed Shakespeare” that D ollimore cautions against: “ to become a benign force and take a central place in a liberal education, art, especially literature, has to be tamed and censored” (Sex, Literatur e, and Censorship, 157). In the aftermath of the polemics surrounding Robert Mapplethorpe and other controversial artists, “ the NE A . . . is trying t o g et right with the Right . And in fallback position, who ’s more unassailable than Shakespeare” (Phillips, “ NE A Should C ultivate Art of Future” ). Beethoven, perhaps? As Adorno wrot e, “ Beethoven’s pathos of humanity . . . can be debased into a ritual celebration o f the stat us q uo” (Theodo r W. Ado rno, “ C lasses and Strata,” trans. E. B . Ashton, in German Essays on M usi c, ed. Jo st H ermand and Michael G ilbert [N ew York: C ontinuum, 1994], 214–29, at 228). 171. As Ado rno no ted, “ The stamp that political movements put upon musical ones has often nothing t o d o w ith the music and its content” (“ C lasses and Strata,” 224). Similarly, B arthes described “ the bliss which can erupt, across the centuries, o ut o f certain texts that were nonetheless written t o t he glory o f the dreariest, of the most sinister philosphy” (Roland B arthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard M iller [New York: H ill and Wang, 1975], 39).



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cable Catholic credentials and well-documented associations with the papal chapel occupies such an astonishingly privileged place of eminence therein. 172 To say that G larean’s use of Josquin might have been politically or theolog ically compromised is not to deny the likelihood o f G larean’s genuine aesthetic appreciation of the music he thought to be by the historical Josquin. And while it would seem heretical even to hint at the appropriation of Josquin’s music in the service of more sinister cultural agendas, perhaps it is time for a heartier skepticism and a more hermeneutically suspicious attitude toward the testimony of our historical interlocutors, as well as a greater sensitivity and attentiveness to the ideologies and rhetorical strategies that shaped their own historically situated musical enterprises. 173 In this postmodern era, the ubiquitous phenomenon of genius has become inefficacious, arguably pernicious, and so invested with hyperbole as to render it an almost meaningless category of thought. 174 D o we really want to saddle Josquin (or any other artist) with a label so intellectually bankrupt that it is now more often linked in the popular imagination with gridiron celebrity than with astonishing creative achievement?175 I f seeing Josquin as a “ genius” means eradicating all signs of H isto ry—of his own musical and cultural past— and regarding him as some infallible, timeless, mythical force of Nature; if it means imposing ahistorical standards of perfection on pieces historically attributed to him; if it means perpetuating in eter nam the current fetish with authentication studies and thereby consigning some of the most breathtaking music ever written to the dustbin; if it means misappropriating “ Jo sq uin” in the commodification of stereotypes of gender, race, class, and sexuality, then for the sake of the disservice it does to the historical body of musical texts surviving under his name, I would not only deny but, more importantly, spare him the ignominy of genius status. 172. Sarah Fuller, “ D efending t he D odecachordon: Id eological C urrents in G larean’s Mod al Theory,” this Journal 49 (1996): 191–224, at 193. Cristle Collins Judd underscores the importance of G larean’s theolo gical agenda to the polyphony, as well as to the plainsong, of th e D odecachordon . See Judd, R eading Renai ssance M usic Theor y, 147–49. 173. Especially ripe for demystification is the frequency of mod ern scholarly validation o f Jo squin as the “ favorite composer of M artin Lut her.” While Luther’s virulent antisemitism, promulgated in his tract Von den Juden un d i hren Lügen (The Jew s and Their Lies) of 1543, as well as in earlier letters dating from 1514–16, has become a topic of discussion in Bach scholarship, its potential implications for Josquin’s reception histo ry has, to my knowledge, as yet t o be explored in Renaissance musicolog y. 174. I recently attended an opera performance at t he Lyric Opera in C hicago who se program notes, as if to validate my project, described the stage director as “ one of the foremost geniuses [plural] of t heatrical design in the late tw entieth century” (emphasis added). 175. Marjorie G arber not es that in the wake of the 2002 Super Bow l a computer had matched the word “ genius” with the New E ngland Patriots’ coach, Bill Belichick, more than tw o hundred t imes (“ O ur G enius Problem,” 65). Richard Lederer’s Bride of A nguished Engli sh ([New York: St. M artin’ s P ress, 2000], 42) includes the following anecdote: “ Washingt on R edskins quarterback-turned-announcer Joe Theismann once commented on the penchant of football commentato rs like him to label coaches ‘geniuses’: ‘N obod y in foot ball should b e called a g enius. A genius is a guy like Norman [ sic ] Einstein.’ ”


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Loving “Josquin” H ow do we as both critics and caretakers of a musicolog ical past nego tiate the tension between the need for a demystification of mythologies of musical genius on the one hand, and for a sense of historical responsibility toward musical creators and their creations on t he other? The musical legacy of “ Josq uin” grows inexorably more vulnerable to the curatorial zeal of musicology’s high priests of authentication who would smot her it in the ideological debris of musical genius. The ominous cloud of disattribution hovers over even the most time-honored pieces: N ymphesdesbois, M issa Pan ge lingua, and Planxi t autem David.176 H ow can we go o n “ loving ‘J osquin’ ” if there is nothing left to love? If the present trend continues, the name of the princeps musicor um will have to be replaced with a defiant g lyph signifying “ The Composer formerly known as ‘Jo squin.’ ” 177 And yet, w ho exactly is this “ prince” of musicians, the historical Josquin des Prez, if we do not know –or attempt to determine–which pieces he actually wrote? Is there a way out of this critical impasse? One promising route of evacuation would be to engage in a process of critical extenuation that w ould disentangle the “ filiation of the work” from the historical composer/author/deity Josquin des Prez. In that way, as Barthes suggests, “ no vital ‘respect’ is due to the Text . . . ; it can be read w ithout the guarantee of its father.” 178 For even in the absence of an imprimatur, N ymphes des bois wo uld remain for many one of “ Josq uin’s” most powerfully stirring and deeply expressive texts. Bereft of its creative patrilineage, any musical text of “ Josq uin” —whether a product of the historical composer/autho r Josquin des Prez or of any other of the extraordinary composers whose music has been compromised by the Josquin authenticity fetish—can become a methodological field of critical play as well as a source of pleasure, even without any guarantee of its musical paternity. 179

176. The case for the possible inauthenticity of Planxit autem D avid has been laid out in Finscher, “ Four-Voice Mot ets,” 268–72, and reiterated in Rifkin, “ Munich, M ilan, and a Marian Mo tet, ” 278 n. 77. (An earlier version o f the present essay included a lengthy discussion o f Planxit autem D avid —along with further reflections on Todd Borgerding’s discussion of its homoerotic dimensions—which I hope to publish in another venue.) Rifkin raised the spectre of the inauthenticity of the M issa Pange li ngua, citing Finscher, in Rifkin, “ Problems of Authorship,” 47. Finally, hints of suspicion surrounding N ymphesdesbois have apparently been aroused (but not yet published) by D avid Fallows. 177. The glyph used by (The Artist formerly known as) Prince from 1993 to 1999 was a selfconsciously political act to protest his commodifi cation b y Warner Brothers. H is fi rst album, who se existence he reportedly fails to acknow ledge, w as M inn eapoli s Geni us (1977), and his most recent, M usicology (2004). 178. Barthes, “ From Work to Text,” 161. 179. This discussion could w ell be reformulated w ith respect to the characteristic traits of Foucault’s “ author function” (“ What I s an Author?” 108–13), not to mention B arthes’s own “ D eath of t he Autho r,” but I prefer to address these q uestions in a more expansive forum.



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In the wake of his own ideological skirmishes on the battleground of “ old and new” critical dispensations, Barthes eventually came to understand that, just as ideology masks itself in universalizing myth, so ideological systems become fictions when associated with a “ consistency of language” that has “ jelled exceptionally and finds a sacerdo tal class (priests, intellectuals, artists) to speak it generally and to circulate it.” 180 As Barthes the mythologist and critic of ideology reinvented himself as Barthes the narratologist and poststructuralist, he distanced himself from his earlier polarizing position. Seeking solace in pleasure, in the realm of the sensorium, Barthes thus circumvented the critical imperative of resolving existing tensions in his work—in his case, the need to choose between classical (old) and avant-garde (new) texts: That word [ pleasure ] appeared in what I would call a tactical fashion. I felt that today’s intellectual language was submitting too easily to moralizing imperatives that eliminated all notion of enjoyment, of bliss. In reaction, I wanted therefore to reintroduce this word within my personal range, to lift its censorship, to unblock it, to un-repress it. 181

Barthes came to recog nize demands for “ clarity,” and the impositions of “ language taboo s” (against “ jargon,” for instance), as verbal weapons in a “ small war among intellectual castes,” 182 which is a by-product of language itself as a “ warrior topos.” 183 The pleasure of the text, on the other hand, is “ atopic ” or neutral. It does not prefer one ideology to another. “ C an it be,” asks Barthes in characteristically ludic spirit, “ that the Text makes us objective? ” 184 If it is true, as Ado rno claimed, t hat the end o f music as an ideology “ will have to await the end of antagonistic society,” 185 Barthes’s aesthetic theory of the text can nevertheless provide an oasis of neutrality wherein pleasure offers a safe haven incapable of being colonized by any collectivity or ideological system, a refuge that resists the encroachment of orthodoxies whether of right

180. Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text , 28. 181. Allen, R olan d Bar thes, 101, citing Roland Barthes, The Gr ai n of the Voice: I nt er views (1962–1980) , trans. Linda C overdale (New York: H ill and Wang, 1985), 205. 182. The critical concerns Barthes articulated in his polemical manifesto Cr it icism and Tru th, published in 1966, resonate uncannily not only with t hose of t he Kerman-Lowsinky polemics of a year earlier, but also with those encountered repeatedly in the late 1980s and early 1990s among various proponents of the old/ new musicolog ies. Barthes’s comments on “ jargo n” are particularly useful, considering its widespread pejorative use by opponents of postmodern critical theory: “ ‘Jargo n’ is the language which the other uses; t he Ot her (and not O thers) is that w hich is not yourself; this is why we find another’s way of speaking painful. As soon as a language is no longer that of our own community we judge it to be useless, empty, raving, used for reasons which are not serious but t rivial and b ase (snobb ery, complacency). . . . Why not say thi ngsmore simply? H ow many times have we heard t hat phrase?” (Bart hes, Cr it icism and Tr uth, 48–50). 183. Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text , 28. 184. Ibid., 32. 185. Adorno, “ C lasses and Strata,” 229.


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or left, old or new. For “ between two onslaught s of words, between two imposing systematic presences, the pleasure of the text is always possible.” 186 At forty years’ distance, the progenitors of the “ war of fi ctions” that arguably spawned t he “ old” and “ new” musicologies emerge as strange bedfellows. In 1965, Kerman, who some two decades later would become the fons et or igo of the “ new” musicolog y, reads more like an elitist proponent of the traditional canon, wherein “ great” masters are deemed more wo rthy of our time than “ lesser” ones. Lo winsky, w hose posthumous legacy has been tarred with the brush of “ positivism” (“ old” musicology), loo ks in 1965 like the prescient advocate of a contextual musicology grounded in cultural and intellectual history and embracing the study o f composers “ both great and small” —concerns that dominate the interdisciplinary postmo dern academy today. As neither could have foreseen at the time, the two have perhaps ended up as “ allies” of sorts, bo th complicit in the promulgation of canons of greatness: Kerman, in the promoting of Beethoven and other composers “ truly wort hy of devotion,” and Lo winsky, in the “ geniusing” of Jo sq uin des Prez. 187 And in their “ meta-scholarly” proselytizing for more overarching profiles for American musicology—historically contextual and critically oriented, respectively—they were also united in the desire for an interdisciplinary and more urbane musicology that reached beyond the confines of academe. In the spirit o f this belated alliance, then, of ending t he “ war of fi ctions” that has calcified into “ tw o imposing systematic presences” (of the old/ new musicologies) and of healing the disciplinary antagonism it has engendered, perhaps it is time (whether in Josquin studies or elsewhere) to contemplate a program of cross-fertilization: a more critically hospitable empirical musicolog y, a more empirically grounded critical musicology, and a proliferation of hybrid musicologies, of profi le as yet unfo reseen.

186. Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 30. 187. As I have said elsewhere, Kerman’s critiq ue of t he positivist agenda as later elaborated in Contemplat ing M usicology has been distort ed and d econtextualized. H e did not suggest that the scholarly endeavors associated with positivism (edition-making, archival studies, and so forth) should be banished from musicology (beyond expressing relief at the waning hegemony of notation courses), but that they should be the means to a larger historical or critical understanding of music and its context, rather than ends in themselves (Paula H iggins, “ From the Ivory Tow er to the M arketplace: Early Music, M usicolog y, and the M ass Media,” in A pproaches to the D iscipli ne, ed. Edmund G oehring, vol. 53 of Cur rent M usicology [1993]: 109–23, at 112 and 120 n. 11).



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Appendix A Quotes About Josquin as Printed in the Program of the 1971 International Josquin Festival-C onference188 1. Isaac is very facile in the art of composition, and besides, he is a fine man and easy to get along with. True, Josquin composes better, but he does it when it suits him, not when one wishes him to. Moreover, he demands 200 ducats in payment, whereas Isaac would settle for 120. Letter to D uke H ercules I of Ferrara from his Secretary (undated; beginning of 1500s) 2. Josquin is the master of the notes, he made them do what he wanted; the other composers had t o do w hat the notes wanted. Martin Luther [16th century] 3. Now in this class of authors and in this great crowd of the ingenious there stands out as by far pre-eminent in temperament, conscientiousness, and industry (or I am mistaken in my feeling) Jodocus a Prato, whom people playfully call in his Belgian mother-tongue Josquin, as though they were to say ‘Little Jodocus’. No one has more effectively expressed the passions of the soul in music than this composer, no one has been able to compete in grace and facility on an eq ual footing with him, just as there is no Latin poet superior in the epic to Virgil. For just as Virgil, with his natural facility, was accustomed to adapt his poem to his subject so as to set weighty matters before the eyes of his readers with close-packed spondees, fleeting ones with unmixed dactyls, to use words suited to his every subject, in short, to undertake not hing inappropriately, so o ur Josquin, where his matter requires it, now advances with impetuous and precipitate notes, now intones his subject in long -drawn tones, and, to sum up, has brought forth nothing that was not delightful to the ear and approved as ingenious by the learned, nothing, in short, that was not acceptable and pleasing, even when it seemed less erudite, to those who listened to it with judgment. H enricus G lareanus (1547), translation by O liver Strunk 4. I am well aware that in his day O ckeghem was as it were the fi rst to rediscover music, t hen as goo d as dead, just as Donat ello discovered sculpture in his; and that of Josquin, O ckeghem’s pupil, one may say that he was a natural prodigy in music, just as our own Michelangelo Buonarotti has been in architecture, painting, and sculpture; for just as Josquin has still to be surpassed in his compositions, so Michelangelo stands alone and without a peer among all who have practiced his arts; and the one and t he other have opened t he eyes of all who delight in these arts, now and in the future. C osimo de B artoli (1567) 5. It will perhaps be thoug ht, t hat t oo much notice has been taken of this old Composer, Josquin, and his works but, as he is the Type of all Musical excellence at the time in which he lived, the less need be said of his contemporaries, who in general appear to have been but his imitators. And, indeed, it seems as if only one 188. C onference program, 10, 18, and 16.


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or iginal geni us of the same kind, could ever burst out at a time in any art or nation. Indeed, I have never seen, among all his productions that I have scored, a single movement which is not stamped with some mark of the great master. There is such a manifest superiority in his powers, such a simple majesty in his ideas, and such dignity of design, as wholly justify the homage he received. C harles Burney (1782) 6. A young man with a tw inkle in his eye plots a musical revolution. Such a man was Josquin des Pres, who, with his new works, overnight became the idol of Europe. There is no longer taste for others, only for Josquin. Nothing seems beautiful anymore, unless it be a work of Josquin. Only Josquin is sung in all the chapels in existence: only Josq uin in I taly, only Josquin in France, only Josquin in G ermany, in Flanders, in H ungary, in B ohemia, and even in Spain it is only Josquin. G iuseppe Baini (1828) 7. With Josquin de Près, for the first time an artist enters the history of music who prevailingly makes the impression of genius. August Wilhelm Ambros (1868) 8. Josquin’s influence on t he music of the sixteenth century was so profound t hat it seems impossible to isolate a special ‘school of Josquin’. H e has created the musical languag e of his age to an extent far exceeding that o f any other composer. H is music had the impact of an epochal event. H elmuth O sthoff (1958)

Appendix B Some U ses of Ingenium Re: Josquin’s C ont emporaries in Glarean’s D odecachordon, Together with Translations 189

Example 1 Antoine Brumel

Maxime uero Antonius Brumel ac Iodocus hic noster Pratensis, uterque iam ad extremam uergentes aetatem. In quo cantu Brumel de artificio cantoribus ostende(n)do nihil prorsus omisit, imo intentis omnibus ingenij neruis indolis suaespecimen posteris relinquere annisus est. Sed uicit longe, mea quidem sententia, Iodocus Naturae ui ac ingenij acrimonia, ac ita se gessit in hac contentione, ut mihi uideatur omnium parens natura, perinde atque ex quatuor elementis perfectissimum corpus constituere uoluerit, extremas exercuisse uireis, nec inueniri meliorem cantum posse. [366] Especially Antoine Brumel and our Josquin des Prez, both already approaching extreme old age. In this song Brumel has omitted absolutely nothing in displaying his skill to singers, b ut rather with all the intensevigor of his talent he has taken pains to leave posterity a proof of his ability. Yet in my own opinion

189. H enricus G lareanus, D odecachordon: A Facsimile of t he 1547 Basel Edi tion (New York: Bro ude B rothers, 1967); and idem, H einr ich Glarean D odecachordon, ed. and trans. Clement A. Miller ([Rome]: American Institute of Musicology, 1965). Boldface emphasis added; page citations are given in brackets after each excerpt.


T he Apo Apothe theosiso is of J osquin de des Prez

499 499

ntellect, and Josquin Jo squin has ha s by far excell excelled ed him h im in natural nat ural ability ability and keenness of inte has borne himself this rivalry in such a way that nature, the mother of all, as if wishing to create a most perfect structure from the four elements, seems to me to have exerted her utmost strength so that a better song could not be invented. [2:268] rego ry Meyer Meyer Example 2 G rego

enixe enixe oraui Eximium Eximium uirum D . G regorium M eyer eyer, q ui Ecclesi Ecclesiae ae Salod Salod orensi in helvetijs cum magna laude ab organis est, ut Thema hoc, qua est ingenij dexteritate, digne tractaret, tum in sua sede, tum utrinque diatessaron proprijs illis, & cum co rpo re C an t io nis huius n at is. [366] I have h ave earnestly earnestly ent entreated reated the th e disting distinguis uished hed G regory regor y Meyer, Meyer, whom w hom w e have have often mentioned elsewhere and who is held in great esteem as organist of the church church at Solothurn in Switz erland, erland, to t o treat this th is theme worthily wo rthily in in accordance his natural ski skilll, not only on its own tonic but also with both of the with his fo ur urt hs hs pro pe per t o, o, an and id id ent ifi ifi ed ed wi w it h t he he b od od y o f t hi his so ng ng . [2: 268] Example 3 Johannes Ockeghem

H aec hactenus de Iod I od oco satis superque. superque. Ant Antiquior iquior aliq aliq uanto uant o fuit O kenheim kenheim et ipse Belga, qui ingenio omneis excelluisse dicitur. Quippe quem constat triginta sex uocibus garritum quemdam instituisse. Eum nos non uidimus. Certe nij acrimonia ad m irab ilis fuit . inuentione et ingenij [ 45 4 ] This is enough now concerning Josquin. A somewhat older composer was Ockeghem, also a Belgian, who is said to have excelled everyone in skill. Namely, he is known to have composed a certain chattering song in 36 voices. nness of We have not seen seen it. H e was indeed ad mirable in in invention an d keennes skill. [2:276–77] Example 4 H einric einrich h Isaac

Sequitur haud imerito Symphonetas iam dictos et arte et ingenio H enric enrichus hus I saac G ermanus. Q ui et et erudite erud ite et copiose innumera composuisse composuisse dicitur. dicitur. H ic maxime Ecclesiasticum ornauit cantum uidelicet in quo uiderat maiestatem ac naturalem naturalem uim, no n paulo super superantem antem no strae aetatis inuenta inuenta [themata]. [t hemata]. [460] The G ermanic H einric einrich h I saac follows very justly justly the aforementioned composers both in art and in talent. H e also also is said said to t o have h ave com compose posed d innumerable innum erable composition com positions, s, learnedly learnedly and pro lifically. lifically. H e emb embell ellis ished hed church chu rch song especi especially; ally; namely, namely, he h e had seen seen a maje m ajesty sty and a nat ural streng strength th in it w hich surpas surpasse sess by far t he t hem es inven t ed in o ur t im e. [2: 278] Example 5 Ludwig Senfl Senfl

I n huius h uiuscemodi cemodi sane Symphonijs, Symphonijs, ut libere libere dicam q uae sentio, sentio, magis mag is est est ingenij ostentatio quam auditum reficiens adeo iucunditas, quale et hoc ciuis nostri L ut ui uich i Sen fl ij ij Tig ur urin i, d o ct i n o st ra aet at e Sym ph o net ae. [444]


500

J ourna ournal of the the Ame America rican Mus Musicolog icologica ical Society iety

Certainly in compositions of this kind [i.e., canons], to say frankly what I bedisplay of skill skill than there is enjoyment which truly relieve, there is more dis freshes the hearing; of such a kind also is the following example (102) by our countryman, countryman, Ludw ig Senfl Senfl of Z uri urich, a learne learned d composer composer of our time. time. [2:274] [2:274] Example 6 Jacob Obrecht

Tertius in in hac ha c classe classe haud dubius dub ius est est I acobus acob us H obrechth ob rechth et ipse ipse B elga, elga, q uippe uippe q ui D . E rasmo rasmo Rot erodamo P raece raeceptor ptor fuit, C uius uius iudici iudicium um de d e eo in AEo AEoli lio o nij celerita ritate te ac inuentionis retulimus. retulimus. H unc praeterea praeterea fama est, est, t anta ant a ingenij copia uiguiss uiguisse, e, ut per unam no ctem, egregiam, eg regiam, et q uae doct is admirationi adm irationi esse esset, t, Missam componeret. Omnia huius uiri monumenta miram quandam habent maiestatem et mediocritatis uenam. Ipse hercules non tam amans raritatis, ngenij q uidem atque Iodocus fuit. I nge uidem o stentator tentat or sed sed absque fuco, q uasi uasi auditoris auditoris iudicium expectare expectare maluerit q uam se ipse ipse efferre. [456] The third man in this class undoubtedly is Jacob Obrecht, and he is also a B elgian, elgian, who w ho in fact was the teacher teacher of D . Erasmus of Ro tt erdam, erdam, who se opinopinion of Obrecht we have reported in the Aeolian. Moreover, it is said that he quickness of device viceand fertility of invention, that, in a sinworked with such quickne gle night he composed an excellent Mass, and one which was also admired by learned men. All the monuments of this man have a certain wonderful majesty and an innate quality quality of moder mod eration. ation. H e certainl certainlyy was not such a lover lover of the th e unusual as was Josquin. Indeed, he did display his skill but without ostentation, as if he may have preferred to await the judgment of the listener rather than to exalt h im self. [2: 277–78] nt oine Fevin Fevin Example 7 Antoine

Iodocus Pratensis Aue Maria ad eum instituit Modum doctissime sane ac iucundissime non emota sua sede harmonia. Quam eximius ille adolescens, et felix Iodoci aemulator Antonius Feum [ si c ] postea ita miratus, ut Missam ad ingenio, nio, summa modestia, qua uix uidi quicquam eam instituerit, summo inge co m po sit ius. [ 3 54 ] Josquin des Prez has composed the Ave Maria according to this mode, truly very very learnedly and pleasi pleasing ngly ly,, and an d w ithout itho ut removi remo ving ng the th e harmony harmon y from its base. Antoine Févin, a distinguished young man and a successful rival of Josquin, highest skil kill and the utmost later admired it so much, that he, showing the highe moderation, composed according to it a Mass which is as skillful as any I have ever seen . [ 2: 2 6 3 ] Example 8 Multiple composers

Scio multam nos illis alijs quoque debere gratiam, qui apud me in magna sunt nij acrimoniam rimoniam, tum ob non proletariam Musicae existimatione, cum ob ingenij rei rei eruditi eruditionem, onem, q uod d e Okenhemi Okenhemio, o, H obrechtho, I saaco, P etro P latens latensi, i, Brumelio, atque alijs, quos enumerare longum esset, hoc in libro saepe testati sum us. [ 2 43 ]


T he Apo Apothe theosiso is of J osquin de des Prez

501 501

I know that we also owe much gratitude to the others who are held in great high degree of talent, but also beveneration by me, not only because of a high cause of an uncommon erudition in musical matters, which we have often declared in this book concerning Okeghem, Obrecht, Isaac, Pierre de la Rue, B rru um el an d ot ot hers w h o m itit wo wo uld ta take lo n g to t o en en um erat e. e. [2: 249]

Appendix ndix C G lare larean’s an’s U se of Ingenium Regarding Josquin, and Translations Thereof 190 Example 1

Sed libet rursus ad Iodoci Pratensis exempla, ut doctiora ac animo meo semper arridentia defugere, Quae haud scio studione ita instituerit, an casu, ut magnis illis ingenijssaepiuscule accid ere so let . [220] But I should like to hasten again to the examples of Josquin des Prez, as they are more learned and are always pleasing in my opinion; I know not whether he has composed them in this way by intention or by accident, as is accustomed to with the these great ta talents. nts. happen rather freq freq uently with [2:240] Example 2

niorum um turba turba,, multo Porro in hac authorum classe, atque magna ingenior maxime, nisi affectu fallar, eminet ingenio, cura ac industria Iodocus a Prato, quem uulgus Belgica lingua in qua natus erat, [hupokoristikos] Iusquinum uocat, quasi dicas Iodoculum. Cui uiro, si de duodecim Modis ac uera ratione musica, musica, no ticia contigis contig isse sett ad natiuam n atiuam illam illam indolem, ind olem, et ingenij, qua uiguit, acrimoniam, nihil natura augustius in hac arte, nihil magnificentius producere potuisset. potuisset. I ta in omnia om nia uersatile uersatile ingenium erat, ita naturae acumine ac ui armatum, ut nihil in hoc negocio ille non potuisset. Sed defuit in plaerisque modus, ciuientis ntis inge ingenij nij impe mpetus, aliquot et cum eruditione iudicium. Itaque lasciuie suarum cantionum locis non sane, ut debuit, repressit, sed condonetur hoc uit ium m ed io cre o b d o t es alias uiri in co m parab iles. [362] great crowd crowd of tale talente nted men, there Moreover, in this class of symphonetae and gre stands out most particularly in talent, conscientiousness, and industry (unless I am mistaken in my affection), Jodocus a Prato, whom in his native Belgian language the ordinary people endearingly call Josquin, just as one would say Jodoculus. If the knowledge of twelve modes and of a true musical system had his natura tural genius nius and the acuteness fallen to the lot of this man, considering his of intellect through which he became esteemed, nature could have produced nothing more AUGUST, nothing more magnificent in this art. H is talent was so versatile in every way, so equipped by a natural acumen and vigor, that there was nothing in this field which he could not do. But in many instances he lacked lacked a proper measure measure and a judg ment b ased ased o n knowle know ledg dg e and t hus in in some places in his songs he did not fully restrain as he ought to have, the impetuosity of a live lively talent, although this ordinary fault fault may be con doned don ed because because of t he o t h er w ise in co m parab le g ift s o f t he m an . [2: 264] 190. 190. G lare arean, an, D odec illerr. B oldface decachor achor don: A Facsi m i l e; and idem, D odecacho decachorr don, trans. M ille emphasis added; page citations in brackets.


502


Example 3

Porro cum ingenium eius inenarrabile sit, magisque mirari possimus, quam digne explicare, non solo tamen ingenio caeteris praeferendus uidetur, sed diligentia quoque emendationis. Aiunt enim qui nouerunt, multa cunctatione, multifariaque correctione sua edidisse, nec, nisi aliquot annis apud se detinuisset, ullum in publicum emisisse cantum, cont ra atq ue Iacob us H obrecht, ut in superioribus diximus, fecisse fertur. Vnde et quidam non inepte, alterum Virgilio, alterum Ouidio comparari merito posse contendunt. Quod si admittimus, Petrum Platensem, mirum in modum iucundum modulatorem cui potius quam H oratio comparabimus? ita Isaacum fort assis Lucano , Feum [sic ] Claudiano, Brumelium Statio, sed ineptus haud immerito uidear, de ijs tam ieiune pronuntiare. . . . [363] Moreover, although his genius is indescribable and we can be amazed at it more than we can treat it worthily, it also seems that not only in genius should he be placed above others, but also in the carefulness of his emendations. For those who knew him say that he published his works after much deliberation and with manifold corrections; neither did he release a song to the public unless he had kept it to himself for some years, the opposite of what Jacob O brecht appears to have done, as we have previously said. From t his some aptly maintain that the one could justly be compared to Vergil, the other to Ovid. But if we allow this, to whom shall we compare Pierre de la Rue, a wonderfully pleasing composer, other than to H orace? So perhaps Isaac to Lucan, Févin to Claudian, Brumel to Statius; but I may seem truly inept to speak about them so sketchily. . . . [2:265] Example 4

Singulae hic uoces dignum aliquid notatu habent, ut Tenor stabilitatem, Basis grauitatem miram Quanquam haud scio quam omnibus placeat quod in Basi ita insurgat in uerbo G alilaea: Q uod q uidem ingenij lasciuia prolatum, ut inficias ire nequimus, ita cum gratia additum fateri oportet. Cantus sapit antiquitatem, cuius septima a fine notula, obticentibus omnibus alijs uocibus, sola auditur. Sed haec sunt nimis tenuia pro huius uiri ingenio. [364] The individual voices have a noteworthy quality in this song, as the stability of the tenor and the wonderful dignity of the bass, although I do not know whether it will please everyone that he rises so far in the bass at the word Galilaea; but just as we cannot deny that this results from the undue freedom of his genius, so also one should acknowledge that it was added gracefully. The cantus savors of antiquity; its seventh note from the end is heard alone, all other voices being silent. But these remarks are much too trifling for the geniusof this man. [2:266]

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Abstract Within the theoretical framework of Roland Barthes’s writings on myth and ideology, this essay seeks to expose the historical legitimation project through which the mythmaking, universalizing rhetoric of musical genius that has long


"The Apotheosis of Josquin des Prez and Other Mythologies of Musical Genius"

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