The little book, straightforwardly called Musica, was very popular and influential. In less than fifty years
it went through more than forty editions. Basically a method for training choirboys, it contained dozens of
short musical illustrations, mostly cast in the form of little duets called bicinia, either specially composed
or extracted from the works of famous masters. (Though a Latin word, the term bicinium, along with its
three-voice counterpart, tricinium, was coined by German pedagogues like Listenius in the sixteenth
century to specify a piece devised or culled for use at singing schools.)
Listenius’s bicinia were mostly of his own composition, but the same year as his Musica appeared,
another German singing master, Seybald Heyden, published a competing text called Artis canendi (“On
the art of singing”), in which the illustrations were duos “sought out with especial care,” as the author put
it, “from the best musicians,” with Josquin in pride of place.^3 Beginning in 1545, the early German music
publisher Georg Rhau issued several books of bicinia for the Lutheran Latin schools, and he was
followed by many competitors, whose books kept coming out in quantity until the second decade of the
seventeenth century. Thanks to all these publications, the music of Josquin remained on the lips of
choristers and in the minds of composers (who trained as choristers) throughout the sixteenth century and
beyond. They circulated well beyond the borders of Germany, moreover, crossing back into the countries
where Josquin had actually lived and helping to assure his immortality there as well. The age of printing
made such cross-fertilizations easy and normal.
As a pedagogical aid, Listenius’s primer was one among many, albeit one of the first and perhaps the
foremost. Its unique distinction, and its enduring importance in music history, lay in its humanistic
revision of musical values. This was a side issue for Listenius, who was mainly concerned simply with
teaching boys how to sing. He could not possibly have attached anything like as much significance to it as
we are about to do. But then, authors are not always the best predictors where the import of their works is
concerned.
In his prefatory chapter, Listenius divided the realm of music not into the traditional two branches
—musica theoretica (rules and generalizations) and musica practica (performance)—but into three. The
third item, the humanistic novelty, he called musica poetica, a term borrowed from Aristotle, for whom
poetics was the art of constructing or making things. Musica poetica could be translated simply as
musical composition (or, more literally, as “making music”), but that would not capture its special import.
Composition, after all, had been going on for centuries without any special name. It had been regarded as
the application of musica theoretica and the arbiter of musica practica. In a sense it was the nexus
between the two, at least within the literate practice of music. Within that practice it could be taken for
granted.
But once music was taken to be a form of rhetorical expression—of a text, of emotion, or of a
composer’s unique spirit or “genius” (which originally meant exactly that: spirit, whence “inspiration”)—
it could no longer be regarded simply as the application or the result of rules and regulations. There had
to be something more in a composition that moved its hearers—something put there by a faculty that (as
experience certainly attested) went beyond what could be learned by anyone. And that, of course, is our
familiar definition of talent or genius—something essentially unteachable yet developable through
education. It is a notion that we owe to the humanists.
Josquin was the main protagonist of this new idea from the moment of its earliest formulation, albeit
posthumously. One of the earliest musicians to put the thought in writing was Giovanni Spataro (c. 1460–
1541), the choirmaster of the Cathedral of San Petronio in Bologna. Like Tinctoris, whom we met in
chapter 12, he was a minor composer but an encyclopedic theorist, described by one writer as “the
epitome of the experienced and informed Renaissance musician.”^4 And indeed, his work does sum up the
musical attitudes to which the idea of “The Renaissance” can be most fruitfully applied, if only
retrospectively.