On the most worldly level (as forecast in chapter 12), Josquin was able to achieve an unprecedented
reputation thanks to newly available means of dissemination, through which his works achieved an
unprecedented circulation. He was the chief protagonist and beneficiary of the nascent “music biz,” the
dawn of commercial music printing. He was, in short, the first composer who made his reputation—and
especially his posthumous reputation—on the basis of publication. And as his reputation grew to
legendary proportions Josquin became the first musical object of commercial exploitation. One of the
chief tasks of modern Josquin scholarship has been to weed out the many spurious attributions made to
him by sixteenth-century music publishers in an endeavor to capitalize on what we would now call his
name-recognition. “Josquin” became a commercial brand name, music’s first. The section given over to
“Doubtful and Misattributed Works” in the catalogue that follows the article on the composer in the latest
edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the standard English-language music
encyclopedia, lists 14 Masses (as against 18 authenticated ones), 7 separate Mass sections (as against 7),
a whopping 117 motets (as against 59), and 36 secular songs or instrumental pieces (as against 72). Most
of the spurious items come from posthumous prints.
Yet that commercial exploitation was linked inextricably with the loftier aspects of the Josquin
legend. The lion’s share of the sixteenth-century Josquin trade took place in the German-speaking
countries, where the music business especially flourished, and where most of the doubtful attributions
were made. Sixteenth-century Germany was both a hotbed of humanistic thought and the cradle of the
Protestant reformation. Both were individualistic movements, and Protestantism placed a high value on
the achievement and expression of subjective religious faith.
Certain qualities of Josquin’s music—none of them qualities he invented but ones at which he
particularly excelled—were interpreted as personally expressive and communicative. Turning that
around, they were also interpreted as the inspired expression of a forceful personality. Martin Luther, the
founder of German Protestantism, famously declared that Josquin alone was “master of the notes: they
must do as he wills; as for other composers, they have to do as the notes will.”^2 The qualities humanist
thinkers valued so highly in Josquin were mainly qualities we have so far associated with Italy and with
the “lowering” of style—lucidity of texture, text-based form, clarity of declamation. As these qualities
were reinterpreted in the sixteenth century, Josquin became willy-nilly the protagonist of a new ordering
of esthetic values. Through the writings of German humanist theorists like Henricus Glareanus (Heinrich
Loris, 1488–1563), his most enthusiastic exponent, his works became the classics on which the new
esthetic rested. Glareanus went so far as to declare Josquin the creator of an ars perfecta: a “perfected
art” that could never be improved. That is exactly the definition of a classic.
When Josquin began his long career, sometime during the third quarter of the fifteenth century, music
was still traditionally ranked alongside arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy as part of the quadrivium, the
arts of measurement. By the time of his death in 1521, music was already more apt to be classed with the
arts of rhetoric. Glareanus, in 1547, asserted the new classification outright. He placed music among the
“arts dedicated to Minerva,” the Roman goddess of handicrafts and the creative arts. These included what
we now would call the fine arts, such as painting and sculpture, but also the arts of poetry and eloquence.
Music was now to be regarded as a branch of poetic eloquence, an art of persuasion and disclosure.
Although his works could be (and often were) cited as exemplifying it, Josquin was hardly responsible
for this change; it was a by-product of classical humanism, the rediscovery of old texts (particularly those
by Roman orators like Cicero and Quintilian) that stressed the correspondence between music and
heightened speech and defined its purpose as that of swaying the emotions of listeners. Josquin was,
however, immediately cast by the promulgators of musical rhetoric as the chief model for emulation.
The first unequivocal musical rhetorician, predictably enough, was a German humanist with Lutheran
leanings: Nikolaus Listenius, who in 1537 published a musical primer for use in German Latin schools.