fortified town in northernmost France, right across the river from Belgium. This deed, first reported by the
Canadian archivists Lora Matthews and Paul Merkley in 1998, gives the future composer’s name as
Jossequin Lebloitte dit Desprez.^11 Only since then has even so basic a fact as his original family name,
Lebloitte, been known to modern scholarship.
The first documents to mention Josquin as a musician place him, from 1475, at the opposite end of
France: in Aix-en-Provence near the Mediterranean coast, where he served in the chapel choir of René,
King of Sicily and Duke of Anjou, who was then living in semi-retirement and devoting himself to artistic
pursuits. “Good King René” died in 1480. The last document placing Josquin in Aix is dated 4 August
- In February 1483 he reappears in Condé to claim the land bequeathed to him in 1466. The next
year, as noted above, he entered the service of Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, a Milanese aristocrat and
churchman who made many trips to Rome accompanied by his full entourage.
For a period of about 40 years it was thought by modern scholars that Josquin had been at Milan much
earlier than 1484. In 1956, the Italian musical bibliographer Claudio Sartori published an article in which
he reported a document that attested to the arrival of “Iudochus de Picardia” as a biscantor, or singer of
polyphony, at the Cathedral of Milan in 1459.^12 This Iudochus (sometimes called Ioschinus in the
documents) went from the cathedral to the personal chapel of Galeazzo Maria Sforza, the duke of Milan
(and Ascanio’s brother) in 1474. Inasmuch as there was an already established connection between
Josquin des Prez and Ascanio, the assumption that Galeazzo’s Iudochus—who hailed, like the famous
composer, from Picardy—was in fact the same man was irresistibly attractive, for it managed to fill in a
decade and a half of the composer’s early biography.
To make it possible for Josquin to have been a biscantor in 1459, Sartori postulated a birth date for
him around 1440. There was no document to preclude the new birth date and it became an accepted fact,
even though it introduced an unexplained anomaly into his biography: namely, that the works of the most
famous composer of his time only began to appear in the extant sources when he was in his forties,
normally the point at which a composer’s “late” period, in those days, began. It was not until 1998 that
Mathews and Merkley were able to produce documents showing conclusively that Jossequin Lebloitte dit
Desprez and Sartori’s Iudochus de Picardia (known to be active in Milan until 1479) had different fathers,
and therefore had to be different men. (They also discovered documents attesting to the death of Iudochus
in 1498.) Josquin’s birth date was duly re-emended to ca. 1450–55, just where the Belgian musicologist
Edmund vander Straeten, the first modern scholar to attempt a reconstruction of the composer’s biography,
had located it in 1882.^13
That would put Josquin in his mid-to-late thirties when, as a document dated June 1489 attests, he
joined the papal chapel choir in Rome. It was here, as a member of the most prestigious musical
establishment in western Christendom, that he began to make his mark as a composer and his music began
to circulate, most conspicuously in the output of Ottaviano Petrucci, the pioneering Venetian music printer.
Petrucci’s initial offering, the Odhecaton, was issued in May 1501 and contained six carmina attributed to
Josquin. In February 1502, the first printed music book devoted to a single composer (Liber primus
missarum Josquini, “The first book of masses by Josquin”) came off Petrucci’s presses, followed in May
by Motetti A numero cinquanta (“First book of motets, numbering fifty”), in which a motet by Josquin
was given pride of place.
At this point Josquin seems to have left the papal service. In April, 1503, a document lists
“Jusquino/Joschino cantore” as a member of the choirs attending Louis XII of France and Philip the Fair,
Duke of Burgundy (and later King of Spain), at Lyons. That is the only literary evidence (besides
Glareanus’s anecdotes) of Josquin’s possible service to the French royal court. Meanwhile, in September
1502, an agent from the court of Ercole (Hercules) d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara, advised his employer, in a
letter that has become famous, to hire Isaac as Maistro della cappella rather than Josquin, since Isaac is