EX. 13-16B Johannes Martini, J’ay pris amours, mm. 1–4Besides these, there is a J’ay pris amours setting by a minor contemporary of Martini and Josquin
named Jean Japart in which the original superius is actually performed as the bassus, transposed down a
twelfth and sung back to front (the rubric simply says Vade retro, Sathanas: “Get thee back[wards], O
Satan”). There is one by Busnoys, titled J’ay pris amours tout au rebours (“I have taken love the wrong
way round”), in which the original tenor is inverted, so that all its intervals are turned au rebours. There
is one by Obrecht, clearly meant to be the chanson arrangement to end all chanson arrangements, in which
the superius and tenor are each used as the cantus firmus twice, migrating systematically throughout a
four-part texture. There is even an anonymous arrangement in which the treble of J’ay pris amours is
shoehorned into counterpoint with the tenor of De tous biens plaine.
What was the purpose of all this beguiling ingenuity? Amusement for the composer? Yes, of course,
but not only for the composer. There was an audience to sustain it, a public audience that was soon to
become, in the classic economic sense, a “market.” The existence of that audience is attested by a new
kind of musical text-source called a partbook: a volume, or rather a set of volumes, each of which
contains a single part—superius, tenor, contratenor, etc.—from a polyphonic texture. The earliest set of
partbooks is the so-called Glogauer Liederbuch (“Songbook from Glogau”), a set of three books