Josquin's Rome

In the late fifteenth century the newly built Sistine Chapel was home to a vigorous culture of musical composition and performance. Josquin des Prez stood at its center, singing and composing for the pope's private choir. Josquin's Rome offers a new reading of the composer's work in light of the repertory he and his fellow papal singers performed from the chapel's singers' box. Comprising the single largest surviving corpus of late fifteenth-century sacred music, these pieces served as a backdrop for elaborately choreographed liturgical ceremonies--a sonic analogue to the frescoes by Botticelli, Perugino, and their contemporaries that adorn the chapel's walls. Jesse Rodin uses a comparative approach to uncover this aesthetically and intellectually rich musical tradition. He confronts longstanding problems concerning the authenticity and chronology of Josquin's music while offering nuanced readings of scandalously understudied works by the composer's contemporaries. The book further contextualizes Josquin by locating intersections between his music and the wider soundscape of the Cappella Sistina. Central to Rodin's argument is the idea that these pieces lived in performance. The author puts his interpretations into practice through a series of exquisite recordings by his ensemble, Cut Circle (available both on the companion website and as a CD from Musique en Wallonie). Josquin's Rome is an essential resource for musicologists, scholars of the Italian Renaissance, and enthusiasts of early music.

Jesse Rodin is Assistant Professor of Music at Stanford University. He has published widely on music of the Renaissance. In 2010 Rodin received the Noah Greenberg Award in recognition of his work combining scholarship and performance. Rodin directs the Josquin Research Project, a digital humanities team developing tools for accessing and analyzing Renaissance music. Music from his ensemble Cut Circle is available from Musique en Wallonie.

Introduction Part I. Toward Josquin's Style Chapter 1. Methodological Minefields Chapter 2. An Obsessive Compositional Personality Part II. Surveying the Soundscape: The Cappella Sistina, ca. 1480-ca. 1500 Chapter 3. The Repertory Chapter 4. The Lingua Franca Chapter 5. A Maximalist Musical Mind: Marbrianus de Orto Part III. Josquin's Roman Music in Context Chapter 6. Super voces musicales and the L'homme armé Tradition Chapter 7. Intersections and Borrowings Appendix A. Repertory of the Cappella Sistina to ca. 1500 Appendix B. Related Repertories: VerBC 761, BarcOC 5, and VatSP B80 Appendix C. Three Anonymous Da pacem Motets Appendix D. Four Canonic Hymn Settings