by Aaron and practiced by Josquin, meant “the emancipation of the composer from the cantus firmus
technique.”^24 Not only that, but “the principle of imitation,” as it “gradually penetrated all the voices,”
was also an emancipating force, for “imitation was based on motives freely invented by the composer,
who could now obey fully the impulses and inspiration he received from the text.” Josquin’s late works,
of which Ave Maria ... Virgo serena was one, were “great musical structures freed from all the shackles
of the medieval tenor.”
We have, it seems, come back to the view of Josquin as a surrogate Beethoven: Beethoven as the
voice of the French revolution, who proclaimed liberty and equality and in so doing became “The Man
Who Freed Music,” to quote the subtitle of what was for a long time the standard popular biography of the
great composer (by Robert Schauffler, first published in 1929). But we return to the Josquin/Beethoven
nexus from a new perspective that allows us to see that the correspondence so often drawn between the
two legendary figures is not drawn so “simply on the basis of their greatness,” but reaches much farther
down into the stuff of the culture that does the drawing.
That culture—our culture—is one wedded to the ideal of personal liberation. That is a value that
arose alongside modern historiography itself in the nineteenth century. It expresses above all the
aspirations of a socially mobile, economically empowered, highly educated but nonpatrician segment of
the population: in short, the expanding and optimistic nineteenth and twentieth-century middle class. That
is the class that has mainly supplied the world with its professional historians, and so it is not surprising
that the stories professional historians have told express the values of that class, a class undreamed of in
Josquin’s day.
If, having been brought up in a middle-class culture that professes social justice and equality of
opportunity, we have learned to place a high value on political and personal freedom and on emancipation
from shackles and constraints of every kind, then we are liable to see manifestations of these values in all
areas of life, including art, as progressive, and will try to abet them. The converse of this tendency is the
tendency to see all sequent narratives, including the narrative of musical style-evolution, as metaphors for
the master narrative of progress and liberation.
If we are now becoming more acutely aware of this tendency and are taking steps (and alerting our
students and readers) to spot it and possibly avoid it, it is neither because we are suddenly wiser than
Lowinsky (as great a music historian as ever lived) and his contemporaries, or because our class-bred
values have necessarily changed, or because we are no longer wedded to high ideals, but because the
exponential increase in the amount of available (and often apparently contradictory) information, and the
occasionally dramatic consequences of that growth (such as the controversy surrounding the re-dating of
Ave Maria ... Virgo serena) have forced a confrontation with basic questions of epistemology—questions
of how we know what we know, and whether we really know it.
It is because commitment to high ideals, and the tendency to universalize them, can themselves shackle
empirical perception and impede rational inference that we try to bring them to full consciousness and
surmount them in our professional work. It betokens not the abandonment of emancipation as a goal but
rather its application at a higher conceptual level, the one that conditions our own beliefs and actions. It is
much easier to see how values become prejudices on the lower levels of scholarly work than at the higher
ones. If, therefore, we raise our conceptual sights higher than before, it is in hopes of being freed to
engage more directly with the perceptual materials of our trade (like manuscripts), and derive concepts
from them (like the dates of their contents) with more confidence.
That is why it has been thought valuable to devote so much space in a book like this to so relatively
dry and inconsequential a matter as the date of Josquin’s Ave Maria. Its ramifications are anything but
inconsequential. They can alert us to the dangers of looking for “good vibes” in history. When Lowinsky’s
excellent hypothesis was shown no longer “to fit the facts insofar as facts were known,” continued