The “post-Josquin” style at its most seamless and luxuriant can be sampled in the work of the Fleming
Nicolas Gombert (ca. 1495–ca. 1560). Gombert, too, was reputed to have been Josquin’s pupil, but the
information comes from a late, remote observer—a German theorist named Hermann Finck, writing in
1556—and is very likely just another use of “Josquin” as a brand name.^10 Finck probably drew an
erroneous conclusion from Gombert’s humanistic elegy for Josquin (Musae Jovis, “O Muses of Jove!”)
that had been commissioned in 1545 by the Antwerp publisher Tylman Susato to adorn a book of
Josquin’s chansons.
In fact, Gombert was a member of the élite chapel choir of Charles V, the greatest of the latter-day
Holy Roman Emperors, and from 1529 the master of the choirboys. In 1540 he was dismissed from his
post for sexually abusing one of the boys in his charge and spent some time thereafter in penal servitude
as a galley slave on the high seas. He seems to have retired afterward to the Belgian cathedral town of
Tournai as a canon of the same church of Notre Dame where the famous composite Mass Ordinary now
known as the “Mass of Tournai” had been sung a couple of centuries earlier (see chapter 9). During this
final period of relative calm and modest material security he was something like a freelance composer
specializing in motets. More than 160 survive from his pen, of which more than half evidently date from
after 1540.
One such is In illo tempore loquente Jesu ad turbas (“While Jesus was speaking to the crowd”), a
six-voice gospel motet that was first published in Antwerp in 1556. Example 15-2 contains its opening
point of imitation, and the beginning of the next. To speak of pervading imitation here would be an
understatement. The texture is woven out of motives (fantazies) of the composer’s invention, but there is
no longer any correspondence (as there had been in Busnoys or Josquin) between the number of voices
and the number of imitative entries. The music proceeds deliberately, in great wavelike sections. Each is
woven out of countless entries large and small, and all entries begin recognizably (though not literally)
alike. Zarlino’s term for this kind of highly redundant approximate imitation with free continuation was
fuga sciolta, which might be translated as “free imitation,” as opposed to what he called fuga legata
(what we would call canon).
The musical phrase associated with “in illo tempore” enters sixteen times, as shown. The next phrase,
on “loquente Jesu ad turbas,” will have fourteen entries in all, more closely spaced in time. The number
of statements of a given motif and their rate of entry are Gombert’s primary means of both formal
articulation and rhetorical emphasis. Varying them, often quite markedly and asymmetrically, allows the
composer to monitor and control the shape of the composition without resorting to stark contrasts of
texture. Rhetoric remains as a shaping force, but within new limits defined by a proud emphasis on
craftsmanship. Expression is sublimated into “finish.”
EX. 15-2 Nicolas Gombert, In illo tempore, mm. 1–23