Josquin des Prez
Franco-Flemish composer
Years: 1450 - 1521
Josquin des Prez ( c. 1450/1455 – August 27, 1521), often referred to simply as Josquin, is a Franco-Flemish composer of the Renaissance.
His original name is sometimes given as Josquin Lebloitte and his later name is given under a wide variety of spellings in French, Italian, and Latin, including Iosquinus Pratensis and Iodocus a Prato.
His motet Illibata Dei virgo nutrix includes an acrostic of his name, where he spells it "Josquin des Prez".
He is the most famous European composer between Guillaume Dufay and Palestrina, and is usually considered to be the central figure of the Franco-Flemish School.
Josquin is widely considered by music scholars to be the first master of the high Renaissance style of polyphonic vocal music that is emerging during his lifetime.
During the sixteenth century, Josquin gradually acquires the reputation as the greatest composer of the age, his mastery of technique and expression universally imitated and admired.
Writers as diverse as Baldassare Castiglione and Martin Luther write about his reputation and fame; theorists such as Heinrich Glarean and Gioseffo Zarlino hold his style as that best representing perfection.
He is so admired that many anonymous compositions are attributed to him by copyists, probably to increase their sales.
More than three hundred and seventy works are attributed to him; it will only be after the advent of modern analytical scholarship that some of these mistaken attributions will be challenged, on the basis of stylistic features and manuscript evidence.
Yet in spite of Josquin's colossal reputation, which endures until the beginning of the Baroque era and is revived in the twentieth century, his biography is shadowy, and next to nothing is known about his personality.
The only surviving work which may be in his own hand is a graffito on the wall of the Sistine Chapel, and only one contemporary mention of his character is known, in a letter to Duke Ercole I of Ferrara.
The lives of dozens of minor composers of the Renaissance are better documented than the life of Josquin.
Josquin writes both sacred and secular music, and in all of the significant vocal forms of the age, including masses, motets, chansons and frottole.
During the sixteenth century, he is praised for both his supreme melodic gift and his use of ingenious technical devices.
In modern times, scholars have attempted to ascertain the basic details of his biography, and have tried to define the key characteristics of his style to correct misattributions, a task that has proved difficult, as Josquin liked to solve compositional problems in different ways in successive compositions—sometimes he wrote in an austere style devoid of ornamentation, and at other times he wrote music requiring considerable virtuosity.
Heinrich Glarean wrote in 1547 that Josquin was not only a "magnificent virtuoso" (the Latin can be translated also as "showoff") but capable of being a "mocker", using satire effectively.
While the focus of scholarship in recent years has been to remove music from the "Josquin canon" (including some of his most famous pieces) and to reattribute it to his contemporaries, the remaining music represents some of the most famous and enduring of the Renaissance.
