mentioned in Glareanus’s story are entered side by side. And who was Tschudi? A pupil and disciple of
Glareanus.
The whole story begins to look fishy. Having noticed the textual relationship between a motet of
Josquin’s and a motet of Carpentras, Glareanus (or some member of his immediate circle) probably
invented the tale that linked them so symmetrically around Josquin and the King, in the process fabricating
the second attribution to Josquin as well. It is another case, and a very telling one, of se non èvero, è ben
trovato (“not true, perhaps, but well made up”), and what it reveals, precisely, is how the Josquin legend
was constructed: when, and why, and by whom.
WHAT JOSQUIN WAS REALLY LIKE
But is the story wholly false? Even if the attribution to Josquin of Bonitatem fecisti is obviously an
embellishment, the authenticity of Memor esto (Ex. 14-1) is well attested. It is a prime example of
Josquin’s characteristic “paired imitation” style, in which an opening imitative duo (here the tenor and
bassus) is answered, when it reaches its cadence, by a complementary duo (here the superius and altus),
and is entirely typical of his psalm motets, just as its high degree of “motivicity” (to use an ugly but handy
word coined by Joshua Rifkin to denote the building up of long melodies and dense textures out of
repetitions and transpositions of a tiny—here, a four-note—phrase) is generally typical of Josquin’s
mature style. Can the motet’s connection with Louis XII and his forgotten promise be confirmed or, more
decisively, disproved?
Not really. There is no documentary corroboration that Josquin wrote the motet during his period of
presumed service at the French court, somewhere between 1494 and April 1503. The only guide we have
to dating the work is the age of its sources, always a rough and potentially treacherous criterion. The
oldest manuscript containing Memor esto is a Sistine Chapel choirbook of uncertain but (for our present
purpose) uselessly late date. It was copied during the reign of the Medici pope, Leo X, who ascended the
papal throne in 1513 and who died in 1521, which is also the year of Josquin’s death. The manuscript
contains the work of several members of a distinctly younger generation—Jean Mouton, Antoine de
Févin, Adrian Willaert—whose relationship to Josquin was confessedly discipular. And it contains
Josquin’s last Mass, the famous Missa Pange lingua on the venerable Phrygian hymn melody we have
known since chapter 2 (see Ex. 2-7b), which was presumably written too late for inclusion in Petrucci’s
third and last volume of Josquin Masses, which came out in 1514.
That classic work is worth a parenthetical quote at this point (Ex. 14-2), since it is so securely
associated with Josquin’s latest period, and therefore exemplifies his latest technique: that of subjecting a
chant paraphrase to the same paired imitation technique we have just observed in Memor esto. The Missa
Pange lingua takes the paraphrase technique a step further than the point where we left it: the chant
paraphrase is no longer confined to the “cantus” voice alone, but through imitation suffuses the entire
texture.
EX. 14-1 Josquin des Prez, Memor esto, mm. 1–14