Canon fodder

Musical Times, Summer 2002 by Atlas, Allan W

The Josquin companion Edited by Richard Sherr Oxford UP (Oxford, 2000); xxix, 691pp; L95. ISBN 0 19 816335 5.

'AND THE CANON KEEPS SHRINKING' [my typography!]: though tucked away quietly at the end of a footnote in Ludwig Finscher's survey of Josquin's four-voice motets, this succinct, almost painfully-accurate observation could easily have served as the leitmotif of the book as a whole. I shall return to it presently, but first some context.

Fifteenth-century composers have been picking up 'companions' - even if not always in name - at a startling pace lately. Thus The Josquin companion follows hard on the heels of large-scale, multi-- author volumes devoted to the lives and works of Ockeghem, Busnoys and Binchois.1 The Companion, though, is a very different kind of book: (1) since it did not grow out of a conference (as did the other volumes just cited), the editor, Richard Sherr, was not faced with the always-difficult task of imposing a sense of order on the wide range of essays that invariably results from a conference's call-for-papers; rather, he determined the overall organisation in advance and then invited (assigned?) specific authors (always well chosen) to write equally specific chapters; (2) what might be called the central core of the Companion is devoted to survey-like essays that sweep through Josquin's works - at least what's left of them - one genre (and sub-genres within) after another, thus giving the volume an almost textbook-like quality at times; and (3) a number of chapters (and appendices) are unabashedly reference-like, to the extent of being heavily annotated outlines.

At the core of the Companion - eleven of its eighteen chapters (380 of its 578 pages) - is a series of essays organised by genre and pub-genre in the time-honored order of masses-motets-secular works (table 1). The core is immediately surrounded by a group of `free articles': it is preceded by a provocative essay by Rob Wegman, 'Who was Josquin', which questions many of the assumptions of what can fairly be called today's 'Josquin industry', and followed by John Milsom's `Analyzing Josquin', Patrick Macey's `Josquin and musical rhetoric: Miserere mei, Deus and other motets', Willem Elders's `Symbolism in the sacred music of Josquin', and David Fallows's `Afterword: thoughts for the future', the last of which provides a nice `big-picture' balance-- and not just in terms of its placement - to Wegman's contribution. Finally, these essays are themselves enclosed by the outermost layer of material: Richard Sherr's Introduction and outline-like `Chronology of Josquin's life and career' at the beginning, and Peter Urquhart's work list and annotated discography at the end. And though the difference in character - in terms of both style and intent - between the `free articles', on the one hand, and the survey-like essays and reference outlines, on the other, is somewhat jarring, the Companion is impressive in terms of its overall conception and organisation, and will, in the long run, probably prove more useful to more readers than its Ockeghem, Busnoys and Binchois relatives. (One note about its usefulness, however: it is hard to imagine just who the dust jackets unidentified `general reader' is and what he or she will derive from a book that has constant recourse to fairly technical musical analysis; or did someone think that the three-page `Index-glossary of technical terms' tucked in between the Bibliography and the Index would enlighten the non-musician?)

THERE are too many contributions to address each one individually, and I shall offer just a few general impressions before moving on to a more detailed look at what I have called the volume's leitmotif. In general, the genre-by-genre surveys are extremely informative. They do, however, suffer from a degree of sameness that becomes tedious at times, as the analytical-descriptive lens rarely changes focus. (Indeed, the longer I read, the more I looked forward to the change of pace offered by the numerous, often lengthy, and sometimes wonderfully hostile footnotes.) And the problem becomes more acute as the genre or sub-genre being surveyed has more pieces that must be considered. Thus whereas the piece-by-piece approach works well enough in a chapter such as Bonnie Blackburn's survey of the six masses based on popular songs or solmisation syllables, it is stretched to - perhaps even beyond - its limits in the account of the three- and four-part chansons, where Louise Litterick felt compelled to say something about more than forty works.

Of the chapters that deal with a large number of works the most successful, I think, are those by Milsom and Bernstein, both of whom treat their repertories 'thematically' and pose questions and introduce arguments in ways that go beyond the individual work and thoroughly engage the reader.

About the `free articles' there are no such generalisations to be made. Milsom, Macey and Elders follow familiar paths, and present us with the kind of good, solid scholarship that we have come to expect from them. Sherr's chronological outline of Josquin's biography is most useful, and Urquhart's discography is wonderful. (And if some find it too opinionated, I would respond by noting that some opinions are worth listening to.) Finally, both Wegman and Fallows take up issues that have to do with what I have referred to above as the 'Josquin industry', as they question current assumptions (especially Wegman) and offer suggestions about future directions. And it is to one aspect of this industry and these assumptions and suggestions that I wish to turn for the remainder of the review.