facts were known (or at least believed), and also fit in with, and supported, an inventive and intellectually
fertile assessment of the culture that produced it.
FIG. 14-5 The tomb of Cardinal Ascanio Maria Sforza, Josquin’s employer (1509; in Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome).
Imagine both the excitement and the consternation, then, when a young American scholar named
Thomas Noblitt asserted—in an article written in German and published in 1974, mainly consisting of a
detailed physical description of a German manuscript that was one of the motet’s remoter sources—that
Ave Maria ... Virgo serena had reached Germany and was copied there no later than 1476.^22 All at once
the work went from being the very paradigm of Josquin’s ripest and most “humanistic” style to being his
very earliest datable work. It now predated, in some cases by decades, all the developments it had
formerly exemplified: musical humanism, “simultaneous conception,” the tabula compositoria, the
“northern Renaissance” itself. The innocent redating of a source turned into a threat—to some, an
intolerable threat—to the Josquin legend.
One reaction to the shattering news was denial. The article on Josquin des Prez in the 1980 edition of
the New Grove Dictionary, the one that followed Noblitt’s report, dismissed his claim out of hand (as
resting on unspecified “questionable assumptions”) and proceeded to argue on purely stylistic grounds
that the famous motet “can hardly have been composed much more than 15 years earlier” than its
publication by Petrucci, who had accorded it the place of honor.^23 “In fact,” the venerable dictionary
declared, Josquin’s Ave Maria self-evidently typified “the motet style of Josquin’s middle years,” namely
“the mid-1480s.” The conclusion, and the evident premise on which the dating relied, was that “the
musical form precisely mirrors that of the text, yet without any sense of constraint.” Of course, to base
conclusions on premises is the very definition of circular reasoning. And the introduction into the
argument of the inescapably value-laden concept of “constraint” and its overcoming gives considerable
insight into the way myths arise and how they function. It begins to suggest what may have really been at
stake, and what sort of a culture hero Josquin had really become.
Lowinsky, too, had charged his discussion of musical space and its changing conceptualization with
matters of high cultural and ethical (not to say political) import. “Simultaneous conception,” as preached