The bulk of Spataro’s theoretical works dates from the period immediately following Josquin’s death.
They constantly celebrate Josquin as the master of all masters. Spataro is best known, however, for his
letters, which are voluminous (his recently published collected correspondence running more than a
thousand pages), just as encyclopedic as his treatises, and very lively. In one letter, sent on 5 April 1529
to a Venetian musician named Giovanni del Lago, Spataro vividly summed up the quality or faculty to
which Listenius would shortly give a name: “The written rules,” Spataro wrote,
can well teach the first rudiments of counterpoint, but they will not make the good composer, inasmuch as the good
composers are born just as are the poets. Therefore, one needs divine help almost more than one needs the written rule;
and this is apparent every day, because the good composers (through natural instinct and a certain manner of grace which
can hardly be taught) bring at times such turns and figures in counterpoint and harmony as are not demonstrated in any
rule or precept of counterpoint.^5Utterly new as a philosophical thought, if not as a musical reality, was the idea of a music that cannot
be defined by rules (that is, by musica theoretica) yet is not therefore inferior (as Boethius, for example,
would have assumed) but actually superior to rule-determined craft. The gap between the rules and the
art, the part that requires “natural instinct,” “divine help,” even grace—that is, the free, unmerited favor
or love of God—that is what the term musica poetica was invented to cover. The idea of grace, of course,
is a Christian idea (and one to which Protestantism would give a whole new definition). But the idea of
genius is pre-Christian; it was genuinely an idea recovered from the ancients, and thereby qualifies as a
“Renaissance” idea. It is related to the Platonic notion that artists create not by virtue of rational decision
but because they are gifted with “poetic frenzy.” The ancient idea most precisely embodied in Spataro’s
letter is the idea that one is born to art. It is a knowing paraphrase of an aphorism attributed by tradition to
the Roman poet Horace: poeta nascitur non fit, “a poet is born not made.”^6 Josquin was the first “born”
composer in this new sense, the first composer “by grace of God.” He did not know that he was that, of
course. The terms, as well as the humanistic discourse or belief-system that undergirded them, arose in
his wake and were applied to him retrospectively, which is to say anachronistically. But that is just the
point. Because he was made retroactively, anachronistically, the emblem of the new discourse, Josquin
was able to have the posthumous historical influence that so conditioned the development of sixteenth-
century music. It was (as far as Josquin the man was concerned) a distinction entirely unasked-for and
unmerited. In that sense it was indeed a state of grace.
JOSQUIN AS THE SPIRIT OF A (LATER) AGE
With few exceptions, the many literary encomiums that form our idea of Josquin’s personality all date,
like Luther’s, from after the composer’s death and more likely reflect the ideas and values of the writers
than they do Josquin’s own. One exception is a jovial sonnet, “To Josquin, his Companion, Ascanio’s
musician,” by Serafino dall’Acquila, a poet who served alongside him in the entourage of Cardinal
Ascanio Sforza toward the end of the fifteenth century. It consists of some friendly advice to the composer
not to envy finely dressed courtiers, because he has something more valuable than they: namely his si
soblime ingegno, his “talent so sublime.”^7 That may give a hint of what later became more seriously
known as the “aristocracy of talent”—something, again, that we are apt to associate with the Beethoven
legend—but if so, it is a hint as slight as the mood is light.
The posthumous Josquin anecdotes embody a fully formed humanist ideology, and are therefore as
biographically suspect as they are culturally illuminating. One of them was retailed by a minor Flemish
composer and theorist named Adrian Petit Coclico, who claimed in the preface to his Compendium