chords as autonomous harmonic units that may be described and crafted individually. The theorist devotes
much attention to matters of spacing and doubling in four parts, and to making cadences—in short, to what
is still taught today in “harmony class.” The ideal of integrated musical texture or “space,” and the ideal
of compositional freedom and mastery in tandem, have seemed to many influential modern scholars to be
closely allied to notions we now associate with the “Renaissance” mentality, especially as contrasted
with that of the “Middle Ages.” In an ingenious and seminal article of 1941, Edward Lowinsky radically
opposed the “medieval view of space” (as solidly layered and bounded) to the “Renaissance concept of
space” (as free, wide open, yet “organically” integrated and harmoniously proportioned) and claimed that
the transition from the one to the other had taken place around the time of the Copernican revolution in
astronomy, suggesting a time-frame of 1480 to 1520. At the beginning of this period, Lowinsky
maintained, the medieval view of space and the world was unquestioned; by the end, it had been
decisively overthrown.
The “exact parallel” to the Copernican revolution, on this view, was the modification in
compositional method that Aaron described near the end of the period of cosmological transformation.
“Of all the changes in the manner of composition since the emergence of polyphony,” Lowinsky
concluded, this was “the most vital and the most fateful one.”^20 Josquin, in Aaron’s account as interpreted
by Lowinsky, assumed truly colossal stature as a culture hero, becoming a veritable musical Copernicus.
And Ave Maria ... Virgo serena acquired a renewed—indeed, a magnified—emblematic status as the
prime musical embodiment of its Zeitgeist, to use a word common in discussions of the “history of ideas”
to denote the essential spirit of a time.
It became customary to link up Josquin’s motet with Aaron’s description of “simultaneous conception”
and to assume their chronological proximity. And that automatically made Josquin’s motet a relatively late
work, one that demonstrated the composer’s “perfect technical mastery, stylistic maturity, and profundity
of expression,” in Lowinsky’s eloquent words. So obviously did it exemplify Josquin’s “mature motet
style,” as Lowinsky put it in another study, that the historian allowed himself a categorical assertion.^21
The work had to be written, he contended, after the change Aaron had described was essentially
completed, and when composers had begun relying on what the German humanist Lampadius of Lüneburg,
writing (like Listenius and Heyden) in the vintage year of 1537, called the tabula compositoria—a
preliminary draft in full score that preceded the copying of the individual parts in choirbooks.
“A glance at this music,” Lowinsky wrote of the Ave Maria, “will be enough to suggest how greatly
the conception of such a piece must have been facilitated by the introduction of the score.” Even more
strongly, he claimed that “a polyphonic texture of this density can scarcely be manipulated without the aid
of a score.” Since Lampadius implied that the use of scores had begun around 1500, and since an archival
search yielded no full scores that could be dated much earlier than that, the turn of the century became by
extension the presumed date of Josquin’s motet.
A highly erudite and resourceful scholar, Lowinsky refined the date still further, and even managed to
infer the exact occasion for which Ave Maria ... Virgo serena had been composed. He suggested that it
was written for a votive service held on 23 September 1497 at the Church of the Blessed Virgin in Loreto
(a shrine near Rome much favored by pilgrims), at the behest of Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, then Josquin’s
patron, who had just recovered from a prolonged and serious illness, in fulfillment of a sickbed vow
(voto, whence “votive”).
This was an admirably crafted hypothesis. The proposed date fell within the time frame stipulated by
the “Copernican revolution” the motet was held to typify; it came close to the origins of the tabula
compositoria as described by Lampadius; it was just early enough to account for the motet’s earliest
sources, yet late enough to qualify as the work of Josquin’s full maturity. (According to his then
extrapolated birth date, the composer would have been nearing sixty.) The proposal fit the facts insofar as