musices of 1552 that he had studied composition with the master himself. The claim is generally written
off as braggadocio, not only because of its self-congratulatory implications but also (and mainly) because
it is a classic application of the new, three-pronged, conceptualization of music as an art that was first
propounded by Listenius in 1537. According to Coclico, Josquin taught musica theoretica along with
musica practica to one and all; but only the elect were worthy of instruction in musica poetica.
“Josquin,” he wrote,” did not judge everyone capable of the demands of composition. He felt that it
should be taught only to those who were driven by an unusual force of their nature to this most beautiful
art.”
From an even later source, a “commonplace book” (a collection for writers of miscellaneous items
for quotation) issued in 1562 by a Swiss humanist who wrote under the Roman patrician name of Manlius,
we get another revealing glimpse of “Josquin”—revealing, that is, of humanists rather than of Josquin. In
this story he supposedly takes a singer roughly to task for having had the temerity to add ornaments to one
of his compositions in performance: “Tu asine!” Manlius has him shout, “You ass! Why do you decorate
my music? Had I wanted embellishments, I’d have written them myself. If you wish to improve upon well-
made compositions, compose a piece yourself and leave mine alone!”^8
This, no doubt, was the kind of thing sixteenth-century choirmasters and composers did shout at their
singers, under the influence of humanist ideals of eloquence as implying “divine simplicity.” Putting the
thought in Josquin’s mouth lent it authority, and publishing it in a commonplace book made that authority
available to all who wished to invoke it. But one may doubt whether Josquin ever said it, especially since
the attitude it embodies toward the sanctity of the literal text is obviously beholden both to “print culture”
and to Protestant fundamentalism—both of them cultural phenomena that rose to prominence and eventual
dominance only after Josquin’s time.
RECYCLING THE LEGEND BACK INTO MUSIC
The greatest popularizer of the Josquin legend, however, was someone who was also concerned to
popularize (or repopularize) Josquin’s music. This was Glareanus, the author of a great treatise that
circulated piecemeal in manuscript for decades and was finally published in 1547 under the title
Dodekachordon. Glareanus was a different sort of theorist from most of those whom we have
encountered. He was neither a composer nor a practical musician but rather an all-round scholar of the
purest humanistic type, a disciple of Desiderius Erasmus and a professor at the University of Freiburg im
Briesgau in what is now the southwest corner of Germany, where he held chairs not in music but in poetry
and theology. As a music theorist he consciously modeled himself on Boethius, the classical prototype of
the encyclopedic humanist. But his actual musical views differed radically from everything Boethius had
stood for.
Glareanus’s main theoretical innovation, reflected in the pseudo-Greeky title of his book (“The
Twelve-Stringed Lyre”), lay in the recognition of four additional modes beyond the eight modes
established by the Frankish theorists of Gregorian chant. These modes, which Glareanus christened Ionian
and Aeolian (together with their plagal or “hypo-” forms), had their respective finals on C and A, and
hence corresponded to what we now know as the major and minor scales. Neither was a necessary
invention. Through the use of B-flat, a fully accredited tone in the gamut since at least the eleventh century,
the Lydian had long since provided the theoretical model for the major and the Dorian for the minor. But
Glareanus’s terminology made it unnecessary to account for the use of C and A as finals by calling them
transpositions of other finals. Very typically for a humanist, Glareanus sought to represent his innovation
as a return to authentic Greek practice. It was anything but that.