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Thomas Schmidt-Beste, Hearing Josquin, Early Music, Volume 42, Issue 1, February 2014, Pages 120–122, https://doi.org/10.1093/em/cau001
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‘Why Josquin?’. ‘Why Rome?’. Jesse Rodin, as the introduction to his book indicates, is well aware of the ideological minefield he is entering by writing a book with this title. The ‘great centres’ narrative has been as much under attack in the past few decades as the ‘great composer’ narrative; and no Renaissance composer has stood at the centre of this debate more than Josquin. It is clear that Rodin does consider Josquin to be the greatest composer of his age, even setting aside the (partly fictional) myths which started to spring up around his person already in the early 16th century; he sets out to demonstrate via analytical means the inventiveness, versatility and ultimately the genius of Josquin’s compositional activity during his Roman years.
Regardless of whether one shares Rodin’s aesthetic judgements (more on that below), this is where the importance and indeed greatness of this book lies. The analysis of music around 1500 is not a terribly well-tilled field (the work of Joshua Rifkin, Rob Wegman, John Milsom, Fabrice Fitch and Sean Gallagher being notable exceptions), and the depth as well as breadth of the author’s insights into how this music works melodically, contrapuntally, mensurally and structurally is nothing short of breath-taking, both with regard to Josquin’s own work and that of his contemporaries—primarily Gaspar van Weerbeke, Marbrianus de Orto and Bertrandus Vaqueras—who receive similarly close attention. Rodin focuses, in his own words, less on overarching structural aspects (based on cantus firmus disposition and treatment) than on the ‘analysis of contrapuntal surfaces’, at times ‘microscopically’ picking apart the tiniest motivic building blocks, their juxtaposition and repetition. In doing so, he brilliantly succeeds in identifying in the first section of the book a Josquinian idiom based on an ‘obsessive compositional personality’. This idiom is clearly distinguishable from the compositions of his contemporaries and predecessors (analysed in section 2 and compared with Josquin’s work in section 3) in which similar devices do appear, but with far less consistency and regularity. Section 3 in particular is a tour de force in comparative analysis at the highest level, identifying compositional principles or individual devices either linking pieces by Josquin to those by others or setting them apart, with the two L’homme armé settings as (predictably) particularly fertile intertextual ground. The examination of text setting takes a back seat—not because the author deems it to be unimportant as a matter of principle, but because at the level of motivic counterpoint, which is the topic of this book, the fabric of the music does appear to be text-generated only in the most basic sense.
