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The Transmission of Some Josquin Motets
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
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In classifying primary musical documents from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, we are dependent upon a variety of techniques of music-historical research – analysis of watermarks, repertory, concordances, the cultural and historical contexts – which furnish the means for evaluating the authority of the sources, ‘the degree of presumptive similarity to the lost … autograph’. One of the principal points in attempting to establish the credentials of the primary sources for the Josquin motets is that they contain alternative readings that condition our perception of the pieces. The choice of readings will inevitably depend on our ability to identify those sources that preserve more authoritative redactions for a given work. A number of techniques are ordinarily used for assessing these sources: (1) that a source is taken prima facie as representing the best tradition that we can discern is an assumption based on its time and place of origin; (2) details of filiation as documented in the variants themselves can suggest lines of transmission and the relative plausibility of sets of readings; and (3) some sources may assume greater importance because they preserve redactions that conform to convictions about Josquin's style. While each of these techniques has something to recommend it, the last assumes considerably more refined criteria than we now possess for describing Josquin's compositional practices, and a considerably broader and deeper knowledge of his whole oeuvre than most of us possess. For, as has been pointed out, ‘the textual critic must often choose, on the basis of his knowledge of such things as the style of the author or the scribal practices of the period, those variants upon which he wishes to base his stemma. Classical philologists have centuries of experience and a multitude of examples to draw upon when confronted with choices between anomalous readings; music historians have no such storehouse of knowledge.‘ Since many of the variant readings in question are equally plausible, very often the choices are not between versions that are manifestly erroneous, on the one hand, and those that are not, on the other, but between equally acceptable versions, each of which is musically permissible. The first two of the techniques referred to above afford a more systematic and objective means at this time for ranking the primary source material, and a basis on which to advance tentative hypotheses of plausible content that suggest ways of determining what an authoritative version of a piece would look like.
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References
Different versions of sections of this paper were read at meetings of the Greater New York Chapter of the American Musicological Society on 7 April 1979 and 17 February 1983. I am grateful to Dr Peter Urquhart for reading a draft and suggesting a number of improvements. For a key to the manuscript and print sigla used in this article, see Appendix.Google Scholar
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5 Ibid.Google Scholar
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9 Ibid., i, 47. The term ‘lectional’ was suggested by Arthur Mendel.Google Scholar
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19 See the two papers by Lockwood cited in note 17 and the documents there concerning Josquin's French connections; also Helmuth Osthoff, Josquin Desprez, 2 vols. (Tutzing, 1962), i, 45, 51, 53 and 211–12, and Clytus Gottwald, Johannes Ghiselin-Johannes Verbonnet (Wiesbaden, 1962), 14–15, for the texts of the documents that suggest Josquin's presence at the French court and elsewhere in France.Google Scholar
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25 Louise Litterick's dissertation, ‘The Manuscript Royal 20. A. XVI of the British Library’ (Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1976), furnishes complete information on the date and provenance of LonBLR 20. A.xvi and the most current information on CambriP 1760. In a number of publications, Edward Lowinsky suggested English provenance for the manuscript LonRC 1070: see ‘Ms 1070 of the Royal College of Music in London’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 96 (1969–70), 1–28; ‘A Music Book for Anne Boleyn’, Florilegium historiale: Essays Presented to Wallace K. Ferguson, ed. John G. Rowe and William H. Stockdale (Toronto and Buffalo. 1971). 160–235; The Medici Codex of 1518: A Choirbook of Motets Dedicated to Lorenzo de' Medici, Duke of Urbino, 3 vols., Monuments of Renaissance Music, 3–5 (Chicago, 1968), i, 115–16. While his thesis is not implausible, a number of features point to French origin. The paper and script are French (on the watermarks, see Lowinsky, ‘A Music Book for Anne Boleyn’, 166–7). Moreover, the manuscript contains an exclusively Franco-Netherlandish repertory from the end of Louis XII's reign, preserving motets and chansons of Josquin, Mouton, Brumel, Therache, Fevin, Compère, Obrecht and Claudin de Sermisy. Apart from British Library Additional MS 31922, ‘King Henry VIII's Manuscript’, which accurately reflects English taste, few indisputably English sources until the Dunkeld partbooks from Scotland in the 1540s contain music by continental composers; and a manuscript as late as the Peterhouse partbooks (c. 1540–7) manifests a continuing commitment to insular traditions, almost to the exclusion of continental ones. See Lockwood, Lewis, ‘A Continental Mass and Motet in a Tudor Manuscript’, Music and Letters, 42 (1961), 336–47, and, on Additional MS 31922, Music at the Court of Henry VIII, ed. John Stevens, Musica Britannica, 18 (London, 1962). Fevin's setting of the political motet text ‘Adiutorium nostrum’ suggests a tentative dating before 1514 for the manuscript. See also James Braithewaite, ‘The Introduction of Franco-Netherlandish Manuscripts to Early Tudor England; The Motet Repertory’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Boston University, 1967), 40–50. On BrusBR 9126, see Kellman, ‘Josquin and the Courts of the Netherlands and France’, 196.Google Scholar
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29 Crocker, Richard, ‘Some Ninth-Century Sequences’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 20 (1967), 367–402. The Josquin Project at Princeton University prepared recension material in the 1970s on eight of the motets. My discussion here of the Josquin works incorporates complete documentation on the recension of these four motets. For a number of reasons, I have felt it necessary to include all the melodic-rhythmic variants cited that are found in the sources, even though this compels a considerably expanded format. As has been pointed out, the characterization of variants as significant or insignificant is open to question (see Richard Sherr's review of Atlas, The Cappella Giulia Chansonnier, in Joumal of the American Musicological Society, 31 (1978), 510–16); a complete collation of variants affords the reader the option of choosing between them and developing his own theories of permissible content. More to the point, as Richard Crocker remarked in another connection, ‘[we] have not lived with any readings of particular [pieces] long enough to have developed convictions about which are good and which are not; lacking even bad or tentative editions …, we lack the basis for a stylistically informed approach’ (The Early Medieval Sequence, 8). Although for the Josquin motets Crocker's remarks are not fully applicable, it is true that many of these works exist in a single modern edition that reflects Smijers's assessment of the value of the source on which he chose to base the text. Our perceptions of these pieces have been shaped accordingly by a single redaction, in the absence of alternative editions or exhaustive collations of readings. For these reasons, one ought to make available the accumulated evidence on which the evaluation of the sources and the readings they contain is based.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
30 Because these first four motets in the cycle of five (which also includes Ecce Maria genuit) suggest identical lines of transmission, it appears that the cycle was transmitted as such and that details of filiation indicated by the four are applicable to all five pieces.Google Scholar
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