FIG. 14-3 Josquin, Vive le roy, from Canti C numero cento cinquanta (Venice: Petrucci, 1504), fols. 131 v–132.
UIUE (L)E (R)OI = Ut-mI-Ut-rE rE sOl-mI = C E C D D G E
(or G B G A A D B depending
on the hexachord)This bit of fluff is actually the only evidence we have, beyond the single document and Glareanus’s
gossip, to place Josquin at the court of Louis XII, the only patron he is supposed to have served whom one
would have greeted with the words of this soggetto. But of course there is no reason why the king so
greeted had to be the composer’s patron. The evidence is no “harder” than the stories.
By May 1504, Josquin is listed as provost, or head canon, of the collegiate church of Notre Dame in
his ancestral home town of Condé-sur-l’Escaut. There he died on August 27, 1521, probably aged about
seventy. Josquin had done as many aging musicians of eminence, like Machaut and Du Fay, had done
before him: he retired to a clerical sinecure, where he continued to compose on commission up to the end
of his life.
At the very end, again like Du Fay, he also composed for himself. His will, discovered by the
musicologist Herbert Kellman in the French government archives at Lille and first described in 1976,
contains a provision that after his death the Notre Dame choir was to stop before his house during all
festival processions and sing his polyphonic setting of the Lord’s Prayer in his memory.^18 The beginning
of that eloquent piece, composed in six tightly woven parts and found only in sources that were copied or
printed after the composer’s death, is shown in Ex. 14-5. It may be fairly taken as his swan song and dated
around 1520.
Thus Josquin’s professional career spanned some 45 busily creative years and yielded a preserved
output that dwarfed that of any earlier composer (plus an attributed output, as we have seen, that dwarfed
the preserved one). The hugely, exasperatingly ironical fact is that, with only a tiny number of exceptions
or possible exceptions like the ones discussed above, we cannot correlate Josquin’s enormous musical