The Josquin Companion by Richard SherrReview by: Jessie OwensRenaissance Quarterly, Vol. 57, No. 1 (Spring, 2004), pp. 322-323Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Renaissance Society of AmericaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1262468 .Accessed: 16/03/2014 09:34

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322 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY

This edition should be considered a valuable addition to our growing list of Renaissance theoretical works being made more readily available to scholars. It will be a helpful source for experts, certainly, and those who have an interest in Dressler can gain much, not only from this treatise, but also from its solid accompanying commentary. DANE HEUCHEMER

Kenyon College

Richard Sherr, ed. The Joaquin Companion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. xxix + 691 pp. + I pl. + CD. illus. bibl. $150. ISBN: 0-19-816335-2.

In recent years musicologists, by and large, have not been willing to write book-

length studies - the traditional "life and works" - for composers of early music. It is striking that even a composer as important as Josquin des Prez (ca. 1450-1521) has never been the subject of a monograph in English; Helmuth Osthoff's two- volume Josquin Desprez (Tutzing, 1962-65), the only scholarly study published thus far, is out of date and was never translated into English. Instead of monographs, musicologists have opted for monumental collections of essays devoted to a single composer - for example, Antoine Busnoys: Method, Meaning, and Context in Late MedievalMusic, ed. Paula Higgins (I 998) - that typically grow out of conferences.

With no single-author "life and works" likely to be written anytime soon, The

Josquin Companion serves an extremely useful function. It provides a comprehensive account, based on the latest scholarship, of the life and work of the composer whose name we now know to be "Jossequin Lebloitte dit Desprez"; it is aimed at both spe- cialists in Renaissance musicology and students of music history generally (advanced undergraduates as well as graduate students).

TheJosquin Companion benefits from the strengths of a multi-author approach: this well-chosen group of specialists commands a formidable array of knowledge. It also avoids a drawback of conference proceedings in that the editor, Richard Sherr, has shaped the volume in a systematic and comprehensive way by commissioning essays according to a specific plan: two for the biography and reception history, five for the Masses and Mass sections (Blackburn, Planchart, Bloxam, and Sherr), two for the motets (Finscher and Milsom), four for the other genres (Sherr, Litterick, and Bernstein), and three for essays illustrating analytic approaches to Josquin's music (Milsom, Macey, and Elders). These sixteen are framed by Sherr's own intro- duction and David Fallows's "Afterword: Thoughts for the Future." The volume concludes with two very useful appendices prepared by Peter Urquhart: a list of works and a discography. A CD enclosed with the volume offers good performances of a number of key compositions discussed in the volume, including those addressed

by Milsom (Salve regina) and Macey (Miserere mei) in their analytic essays. There are, however, drawbacks to this collaborative approach: for example,

there has been no attempt to make the articles consistent with one another. A typical example can be seen in comments concerning the dating of Josquin's Missa Hercules

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REVIEWS 323

dux Ferrariae in adjoining essays. Bonnie Blackburn concludes "Masses on Popular Songs and on Syllables" with a paragraph summarizing scholarly opinion concern- ing the dating of the Hercules mass, and offers a cautious view that it might be later than the Missa Lhomme arme'super voces musicales (87). Five pages later, Alejandro Planchart uses Lowinskys dating of the Hercules mass (late 1480s) to date the Missa Gaudeamus to the early or middle 1480s (to be sure, with qualification: "If the Her- cules mass originated in the late 1480s, as Lowinsky surmised," 92). Given the inevitable overlap between essays, the attentive reader will need to remember to use the index to see if more than one interpretation is offered.

Two major problems currently bedevil Josquin research. It is proving difficult to establish a canon of authentic compositions and to provide reliable dates for the music; these issues are ubiquitous in this volume. In his trenchant essay, "Who was Josquin?," Rob Wegman draws a useful analogy between Josquin scholarship and the search for the historical Jesus and reminds us that scholars have been, con- sciously or unconsciously, influenced by Josquin hagiography, the process of myth- creation that took place for several decades after his death. The task ofJosquin schol- arship will be to sort out the core Josquin "sayings" (that is, compositions) from the accretions added by his followers in the next three or four decades. Of course, the very format of a single-composer volume tends to encourage the treatment of Jos- quin as a hero. The "genius" label only complicates matters: a great composer must write sublime music and anything that seems flawed is either an early work or not by Josquin. Given the paucity of information about the circumstances under which Josquin's music was created, the challenge for Josquin studies is to get past the legend and to gain a better understanding of Josquin's place in his own world, in part by learning more about the work of his contemporaries. JESSIE OWENS Brandeis University

James Tyler and Paul Sparks. The Guitar and Its Music: From the Renaissance to the Classical Era. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. xxvi + 322 pp. index. append. illus. tb1s. bibl. $90. ISBN: 0-19-816713-X.

Between the appearance of the earliest dated works for the four-course Renaissance guitar, contained in Alonso Mudarra's 1546 print from Seville, and the

emergence of the modern six-string instrument, also in Spain during the late

eighteenth century, the "early" guitar played an important and, at times crucial, role as a solo, accompanying, and ensemble instrument in France, Italy, the Iberian Peninsula, and England. Moreover, the cross-cultural itineraries and diverse

demographic coverage of the instrument testify to its remarkable adaptability to

changing styles and contexts, which, in turn, allowed the guitar to assume a major role in transmitting throughout Europe many popular and even New World

repertories. The large cultural and stylistic breadth of the instrument has not made it easy for musicology to digest. This situation is exacerbated by the enormous size of

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Article Contentsp. 322p. 323

Issue Table of ContentsRenaissance Quarterly, Vol. 57, No. 1 (Spring, 2004), pp. 1-437Front MatterCorrigenda: Raphael's Portrait: Leo X with Cardinals Giulio de' Medici and Luigi de' Rossi: A Religious Interpretation [pp. -]The 2003 Josephine Waters Bennett LectureThe Universities of the Renaissance and Reformation [pp. 1-42]Creating Canons in Fifteenth-Century Ferrara: Angelo Decembrio's "De politia litteraria," 1.10 [pp. 43-98]The Beauties of the Land: Bale's Books, Aske's Abbeys, and the Aesthetics of Nationhood [pp. 99-125]On the Evolution of Toads in the French Renaissance [pp. 126-164]

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Books Received [pp. 399-417]Back Matter [pp. 418-437]