FIG. 15-3 Adrian Willaert, in a woodcut that served as frontispiece to Musica nova (Venice, 1540), a collection of ricercars for
organ or instrumental ensemble by Willaert and several of his Italian disciples.
Born around 1490 in West Flanders (now Belgium), either at Bruges or in a smaller town to the south,
Willaert was the last in the line of Flemings and Frenchmen who dominated Italian court and chapel music
since the early fifteenth century. In a way he was Josquin’s creative grandchild, for his primary teacher
was Jean Mouton (ca. 1459–1522), a member of the French royal chapel under Louis XII and Francis I
and an important composer of motets. The poet Ronsard, writing in 1560, called Mouton Josquin’s best
pupil.^8 Other writers, too, called attention to their special affinity.
It is unlikely, though, that Mouton could actually have studied with Josquin. He could have known the
older man only in the period of his own relative maturity—and even at that, only if Josquin really was in
residence at the French court, for which there is no clear evidence. It is certain, however, that association
with Josquin, the greatest luminary of the day, was as good for Mouton’s reputation as it would be for
anyone else’s, and that Mouton consciously emulated Josquin’s motets in his own. The style
characteristics he educed from Josquin—paired imitation, clear declamation, a rhetorical approach to
form—he passed on to Willaert in turn.
He also passed on what Glareanus, who admired Mouton the most of all the composers of the
immediate post-Josquin generation, called his facili fluentem filo cantum: his “leisurely flow of
melody,”^9 the result of a studied regularity of rhythmic motion and a sophisticated technique for evading
or eliding cadences, an important development about which there will be more to say in connection with
Willaert and Zarlino. Willaert was by no means its only inheritor, or (by that token) Josquin’s only
creative grandchild. Before looking closely at his work, we can create a context for it by briefly
inspecting that of his two most important contemporaries, both slightly younger than Willaert but shorter-
lived. Between them, they succeeded in developing Mouton’s leisurely flow into a majestic sound-river,
in which the various component voices, no longer functionally distinguished in any obvious way,
constantly enter and leave, contributing their individual, elegantly shaped lines to a generous yet
impervious texture that leads a seemingly inexhaustible life of its own.