EX. 13-19B Josquin des Prez, Ile fantazies de Joskin, mm. 1–12The significance of the title is in the use of the word fantazie (fantasia). The word has had several
musical meanings. The earliest one was a textless musical theme or idea, something produced out of
imagination rather than on the basis of an earlier authority like a cantus firmus. Later the word came to
denote an instrumental composition in a systematically imitative style. (Still later it came to denote a
demonstratively “free-form” composition, ruled by imagination rather than strict formal procedure.)
Josquin’s little piece, probably composed around 1480, links the first meaning with the second. The
transfer of imitative texture to the instrumental medium was the real signal of its ascendancy. It was now
polyphony’s basic modus operandi, and so it would remain throughout the sixteenth century, which might
appropriately be called the century of imitative polyphony. In any case, as we are about to see, the