Fêtes de Notre Dame, which originated in the dioceses of the Burgundian Netherlands, near Josquin’s
native turf, wherein each of these feasts was recalled, and where this antiphon would have been
especially appropriate.
Entirely in keeping with the humanist rhetoricians’ ideals of clarity and force of expression, Josquin’s
music is shaped closely around the words of the antiphon. The shaping process may be observed and
described at three distinct levels. The most concrete is that of declamation, the fit between notes and
syllables. Then there is the level of overall structure or syntax, the ways in which the various parts of the
text and those of the music relate to each other and to the whole. Finally, there is the level of textual
illustration, ways in which the shape of the music or the manner of its unfolding can be made to parallel or
underscore the semantic content of the words.
All three aspects of the new text-music relationship are vividly exemplified by the setting of the
opening prefatory quatrain. It is based not only on the text of the Gregorian sequence for the Annunciation,
but on its melody, too, as set forth over the polyphony in Ex. 14-6a. The preexisting tune is not treated as a
traditional cantus firmus, borne by the tenor. Neither is it paraphrased by the superius in cantilena style.
Instead, just as in Josquin’s very late Missa Pange lingua, the four phrases of the paraphrased chant
melody are each made in turn the basis for a lucid, airy point of imitation, so that the texture is fully
penetrated and integrated by shared melodic material, and the voices are made functionally equal.
Relatively little fifteenth-century music unfolds in this way, but in the sixteenth century it became the
absolute norm.
EX. 14-6A Josquin des Prez, Ave Maria ... Virgo serena, mm. 1–8