sound together for the first time at the cadence. All of these effects, so carefully and subtly planned, serve
to mark off the prefatory quatrain from what follows. It is an ideal instance of the way in which the shape
of the text “humanistically” governs, and is reflected by, the shape and syntax of the music.
Every succeeding textual unit is marked off cadentially in similar, but never identical, fashion. And
each one is purposefully shaped around its words, often by artful “scoring” devices. The first stanza of the
votive antiphon (“Ave, cujus conceptio,” Ex. 14-6b) begins with a homorhythmic superius/altus duo that
is immediately imitated by the complementary tenor/bassus pair in what we have already seen to be
typical Josquin fashion. After the first two notes, however, the altus slyly joins them in a mock-
fauxbourdon texture, so that there is not only a “paired” repetition of the opening phrase but also an
increment from two voices to three, preparing for the emphatically homorhythmic four-voice tutti on
“solemni plena gaudio,” which just happens to coincide with the first “affective” or emotion-laden word
in the text. All three levels of textual shaping have been cunningly made to work in harness to produce a
simple, “natural” rhetorical effect. The tutti having been achieved, it is maintained through the full-
textured syncopated sequences that dramatize the word “filled” and achieve cadential release at a
melodic high point coinciding with the next affective word, “laetitia.” The stanza beginning “Ave, cujus
nativitas” opens with another pair of duos that introduce close imitation at the fifth rather than the octave
or unison, and the new, harmonically richer contrapuntal combination persists through the next tutti (“Ut
lucifer”), the superius/tenor and altus/bassus pairs here operating internally at the octave and reciprocally
at the fifth. The third stanza of the votive antiphon (“Ave pia humilitas,” Ex. 14-6c) is foreshortened by
splitting the text between rigorously maintained high and low voice-pairs, setting off the total integration
of the lilting fourth stanza, which moves in dancelike trochees and chordal homorhythm throughout.
But not quite. Closer examination by eye reveals what the ear perceives with delicious immediacy:
within the seeming rhythmic unanimity, the superius and tenor are actually engaged in a canon at the fifth,
at a mere semibreve’s interval, and a “triplet” semibreve at that. Where all the other voices have
trochees, the tenor has iambs (or perhaps better, considering the words, displaced trochees). This fourth