- Composer: Josquin Desprez
- Period: Renaissance (1450-1599)
Review
Musical composers in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries often found themselves competing madly for the same high-paying posts. In one famous example, an agent for the Duke of Ferrara sounded out Heinrich Isaac and Josquin Desprez for a job leading the ducal chapel. In that case, the agent was able to make a recommendation based upon his personal observation of the candidates; at other times, the composers themselves had to consciously work on their reputations. The friendly (if high-stakes) competition between composers can provide one of the contexts for whole families of music written on the same tune -- just as later jazz musicians would demonstrate their musical prowess by more and more complex improvisation on the "standards," Renaissance musicians seem to have delighted in compositional one-upmanship. Secular ditties such as the well-known "L'homme armé" melody could become the basis for dozens of derivative works, each composer consciously outdoing his neighbor in compositional artifice. The most popular model of the entire century, however, was an unassuming little chanson called De tous biens plaine, written by Hayne van Ghizeghem.Josquin Desprez made at least two arrangements of De tous biens plaine, each showing a different side of his musical personality. For the first, a three-voiced version, he takes the uppermost voice of Ghizeghem's model as his structural voice. To this original melody he adds two new contrapuntal voice parts, in canon with one another. Though both of the newly composed voices begin with a palpable echo of Ghizeghem's opening motive, both canonic voices quickly move into much wider vocal ranges, and feature frequent melodic leaps. Josquin carefully flouts his own contrapuntal skills as the two new voices dance about the original cantus firmus.
The two new voices in Josquin's four-voiced setting of De tous biens plaine remain even more distinct from the original. For this piece, Josquin quotes both the superius and tenor voices of Ghizeghem's original chanson, and once again adds a canonic pair of new voices. In this instance, he chooses an even more challenging set of canonic parameters. He sets this canonic pair of voices at the unison (in the exact same vocal range), and at a much smaller temporal interval. The result is a much more sharply defined distinction between the leisurely and "proper" motion of Ghizeghem's melodies and the neverending flow of the new voices' nearly perpetual motion. ~ All Music Guide
