“more sociable” and “composes new things more quickly,” while Josquin, though he “composes better,”
does so “only when he pleases not when he is requested to, and has demanded 200 ducats in salary, while
Isaac is content with 120.”^14
Court payment records from June 1503 to April 1504 show that the Duke ignored his scout’s advice
and hired Josquin. Duke Ercole has received much praise from historians for showing such keen artistic
judgment, but he was probably acting on less lofty impulses. For one, there was the lure of conspicuous
consumption—the same impulse that motivates the purchase of expensive designer jeans or luxury cars.
Indeed, a rival scout had recommended Josquin to the Duke a month earlier, advising him that “there is
neither lord nor king who will now have a better chapel than yours if Your Lordship sends for Josquin,”
and that “by having Josquin in our chapel I want to place a crown upon this chapel of ours.”^15 Lewis
Lockwood, a scholar who did extensive research on the rich musical establishment at Ferrara, comments
that Josquin was being touted to the Duke as “a crowning figure, and the implication is that, by hiring him,
Ercole can aspire to higher status than most dukes can claim.” Very shrewdly, Lockwood noted a further
implication: “the musician of great reputation can confer upon a patron the same measure of reflected
glory that had traditionally been attributed to poets and painters.”^16 This represented a new level of
prestige for music itself, and Josquin was its protagonist. The Josquin legend had been born, and was
already doing its historical work.
The most immediate evidence of that work was a Mass in which Josquin kept the implied promise to
memorialize his patron the same way poets and painters had traditionally done it. One of his most famous
and widely disseminated works, both in his own day and in ours, it bore the title Missa Hercules Dux
Ferrariae (“The Mass of Hercules, Duke of Ferrara”) and was published by Petrucci in his second
volume of Josquin Masses (1505), when—assuming dangerously for the moment that it was actually
composed at Ferrara—the work was almost brand new. The Mass continued to circulate, in whole or in
part, in manuscripts and prints until the 1590s. Since Josquin’s rediscovery by music historians, it has had
several modern editions and many recordings. More than anything else, perhaps, this Mass has served to
keep alive the name of Hercules, the Duke of Ferrara.
One of the reasons for the Mass’s popularity is the clever way in which Josquin fashioned its cantus
firmus out of his patron’s name and title. It is an abstract series of pitches, usually presented in the tenor in
long notes of equal value, arrived at by matching voces musicales (that is, solmization syllables) to the
vowels (or vocali) in the phrase Hercules, Dux Ferrari(a)e, thus:
HER-CU-LES DUX FER-RA-RI-E = rE-Ut-rE-Ut-rE-fA-mI-rEorEX. 14-3 “Hercules, Dux Ferrari(a)e” in musical notation