what we know, than they do about Josquin. One of them is particularly rich in implications about the
relationship between perception and prejudice.
A MODEL MASTERPIECE
Ever since the sixteenth century, the motet Ave Maria ... Virgo serena has been not only Josquin’s most
famous work but also, in at least two senses, his exemplary opus. One meaning of “exemplary” is
representative. On this work, above all, generations of musicians, music students, and music lovers have
formed their idea of Josquin’s methods, his characteristics, and his excellence. Another meaning of
“exemplary” is example-setting. The whole “perfected art” of sixteenth century sacred music, it
sometimes seems, was formed on the example of this one supreme masterpiece. Its stylistic influence was
enormous and acknowledged. To a degree previously unapproached by any one composition, it was
regarded as a timeless standard of perfection, a classic.
This is the motet that Petrucci chose in 1502 to open his first motet collection, the earliest such printed
collection in history. In 1921 the Dutch Jesuit musicologist Albert Smijers chose Ave Maria ... Virgo
serena to open the inaugural volume in his pioneering edition of Josquin’s complete works. It is found in
almost two dozen manuscript sources from half a dozen different countries, including the present-day
Czech Republic and Poland. It was the basis for many later compositions. It was arranged for keyboard
instruments and for the lute. In our time, it has been recorded more times than any other work of Josquin,
to say nothing of his contemporaries. Except for Sumer is icumen in, perhaps, it is the piece of “early
music” today’s music-lovers or concertgoers are most likely to know.
The text is a pastiche of three different liturgical items: a votive antiphon to the Blessed Virgin Mary,
framed by a prefacing quatrain that quotes both the words and the music of the sequence for the Feast of
the Annunciation (commemorating the occasion at which the archangel Gabriel uttered the original “Hail,
Mary!”), and a closing couplet that voices a very common prayer formula of the day: