Josquin's Rome

Hearing and Composing in the Sistine Chapel

Jesse Rodin

AMS Studies in Music

Analytical framework deeply rooted in the acts of singing and listening.
Companion website features recordings produced by the author.
New comparative methodology places Josquin des Prez in context of his contemporaries.
Locates intersections between Josquin's music and the wider soundscape of the Cappella Sistina.

Josquin's Rome

Hearing and Composing in the Sistine Chapel

Jesse Rodin

Description

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.

Josquin's Rome

Hearing and Composing in the Sistine Chapel

Jesse Rodin

AMS Studies in Music

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

Josquin's Rome

Hearing and Composing in the Sistine Chapel

Jesse Rodin

AMS Studies in Music

Author Information

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.

Josquin's Rome

Hearing and Composing in the Sistine Chapel

Jesse Rodin

AMS Studies in Music

Reviews and Awards

"[Rodin] sets out to demonstrate via analytical means the inventiveness, versatility and ultimately the genius of Josquin's compositional activity during his Roman years. Regardless of whether one shares Rodin's aesthetic judgements, this is where the importance and indeed greatness of this book lies. The analysis of music around 1500 is not a terribly well-tilled field, and the depth as well as breadth of the author's insights into how this music works melodically, contrapuntally, mensurally and structurally is nothing short of breath-taking." --Early Music

"A masterful and musically insightful exposition of the music of Josquin's early maturity and that of a generation of composers that changed the course of European music. Rodin's writing invites comparison with that of the best music writers of the last century, Cone, Pirrotta, or Tovey." --Alejandro Enrique Planchart, Emeritus Professor of Music, University of California, Santa Barbara

"Josquin's Rome vividly recreates the artistic world of a great composer at a key point in his career, shedding new light on both the title figure and some notable colleagues. No one interested in Renaissance music should miss this book."-Joshua Rifkin, Director, The Bach Ensemble; Professor of Music and Fellow of the University Professors, Boston University

"A book that lovers of Josquin should not miss. Given the momentousness of Josquin's work and ways in which it changed the direction of Western music, it'll be useful and welcome for music lovers more generally. For a comparative approach which successfully encapsulates one crucial essence of the Renaissance, it has wider appeal still." --Classical.net

"Rodin's approach has considerable merit and allows us to see, and to hear, Josquin in a refreshingly new light. He does so with a readable writing style, a generous helping of tables...and almost 90 musical examples. A feature that adds immeasurably to the value and usefulness of the book is that companion recordings of many of the works discussed in the text can be accessed on a dedicated companion website (username and password provided in the book)." --Early Music America

Josquin's Rome

Hearing and Composing in the Sistine Chapel

Jesse Rodin

AMS Studies in Music

From Our Blog

Josquin des Prez

By Jesse Rodin No figure in Western music poses a greater challenge to the writing of history than Josquin des Prez (ca. 1450'1521). That's because there is no composer of comparative fame -- musicians regularly speak Josquin's name in the same breath as Bach, Beethoven, or Brahms -- about whom so very little is known.

Posted on August 27, 2012

Read the blog post