“Echoes of Josquin: Counterpoint, Similarity, and the Digital Ear”

Richard Freedman (Haverford College) rfreedma@haverford.edu

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5550-3674

Abstract

How were Josquin’s works heard and reworked by his contemporaries and followers? And how (at a distance of some 500 years) can digital tools help us to understand the fabric of those adaptations? Focussing on the Imitation (or Parody) Mass of the 16th century, Citations: The Renaissance Imitation Mass (CRIM) (https://crimproject.org) has been investigating these and other questions, building a systematic set of vocabularies for analysis (http://bit.ly/363wItb), and assembling a database of thousands of human observations about modeling in dozens of pairs of Masses and models (including several based on works by Josquin des Prez). If counterpoint is a craft of combinations, then the Imitation Mass involves the art of recombination on a massive scale. These works offer an unparalleled way to learn how composers heard (and understood) each other’s music, variously echoing, revising, and modernizing compositional choices for new generations of listeners.

Thanks to a major new grant from the American Council of Learned Societies (through 2022) CRIM is now in a new phase of work that will put the insights of musicologists and data scientists into counterpoint with each other, modeling human expertise in terms that can be used to teach machines to help us listen for patterns of transformation, and presenting the results of automated score-reading in forms that scholars can interrogate and refine. Using motets by Josquin (including pieces like Ave maria, Mente tota, and Benedicta es) and their reworkings by successive generations of his imitators (from Antoine de Févin to Adrian Willaert, and from Cristóbal de Morales to Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina) as focal points, we can begin to tell the story of those workings with both new precision and new scope. No less importantly, we can see how digital tools invite us to consider new notions of musical similarity, and new modes of scholarly communication.

Slides and Video

• View the Video Presentation here

• View the Slides from the Presentation here

Scores and Documents

You might find it helpful to download and/or print the following selected scores (PDF format) in advance of the session. Note that the CRIM project includes MP3 versions of all pieces, so you can listen to them, too.

We will focus on the following sections of the pieces listed below:

View and Listen

• Josquin, Ave Maria (focus on pages 1-3 of the PDF Excerpt, @ Letters A, B)

• Févin, Missa Ave Maria (focus on pages 1-7 of the Kyrie PDF Excerpt), at Letters, M, N, O, P, Q

• Notker Balbulus, Benedicta es (focus on the second melodic phrase of the chant PDF Excerpt, at Letter A)

• Josquin, Benedicta es (focus on pages 8-10 of the PDF Excerpt, at Letters H, I)

• Mouton, Benedicta es (focus on pages 3-4 of the PDF Excerpt, at Letters C, D)

• Morales, Missa Benedicta es, with focus on

  • Kyrie pages 3-4 of the PDF Excerpt, at Letters T, U, V

  • Gloria pages 2, 5, and 7 of the PDF Excerpt, at Letters W, X, Y

  • Credo page 5 of the PDF Excerpt, at Letter AA

• Palestrina, Missa Benedicta es , with focus on

  • Kyrie pages 6-7 of the PDF Excerpt, at Letters K, L

  • Gloria pages 7-8 and 15-17 of the PDF Excerpt at Letters P, Q

Some CRIM Relationships of Interest

CRIM Relationships are paired Observations--a musical type in the Model and a musical type in the Derivative (Mass), with annotated scores and comments that describe the kind of quotation or transformation.

• CRIM Search for Josquin as Model (in Ave maria, Mente tota, and Benedicta es and their derivatives by Févin, Willaert, Morales, and Palestrina)

• List of Relationships (with links) for discussion.

Digital Tools

• Launch the CRIM Intervals Notebook here.