PARODIES
And for that he was supremely valued by the humanist musicians of the sixteenth century, who were
inspired by Josquin’s example and propagated it zealously. Glareanus reproduced the whole motet in his
treatise, ostensibly as an illustration of the Ionian mode with its final on C, but in fact as an example to his
readers of “genius” at work. Its impact on Glareanus’s contemporaries was profound. Where Glareanus
verbally proclaimed the work an emblem of perfected style, his friend and colleague the Swiss composer
Ludwig Sennfl proclaimed it so by musical deed.
Sennfl (ca. 1486–1543) had been a pupil of Henricus Isaac, and succeeded his teacher as the court
chapel composer to the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I. His Ave Maria ... Virgo serena was
published at Nuremberg in 1537, by which time Sennfl had joined the court and chapel establishment of
Duke Wilhelm of Bavaria at Munich. In his Ave Maria motet, Sennfl did on a vast scale what we have
already observed in miniature on the level of carmina and chanson arrangements. It is a gigantic “parody”
or reworking of Josquin’s motet, in which the younger composer did everything in his considerable power
to monumentalize the work of the older composer, and with it, posthumously monumentalize its creator.
The texture is expanded from four voices to six; the length of the work is trebled by means of
overlapping imitative repetitions and transpositions of Josquin’s melodic motives; and most impressive of
all, the opening six-note chant-derived motto that carries Gabriel’s words “Ave Maria” is turned into a
motto that recurs like a clarion in the tenor part throughout the length of the piece. Josquin’s “Ave” had
been to Mary, but Sennfl’s, clearly, was to Josquin. The younger composer’s resourcefulness in exhausting
the contrapuntal potential of the motivic material bequeathed him by Josqin, and the finely wrought
textures that balance imitative polyphony with rich harmony, are clearly meant to display both Josquin’s
genius and his own. Sennfl not only admires Josquin’s legacy but claims it.