Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century

FIG.    15-4    St. Mark’s  Cathedral,  Venice.

And yet Willaert’s preeminence did depend at least in equal part on the specific qualities of his music.
His secret, the thing that made him, rather than Gombert or Clemens, the true “classic” of his time, and the
arbiter supreme of established excellence, was his stylistic moderation and lack of idiosyncrasy.
Moderation, and a certain impersonalism, are traits commonly correlated with classicism. Willaert
possessed them, one might almost say, to an extravagant and individualizing degree.

He achieved the extraordinary balance, clarity, and refinement identified with perfection by avoiding
Gombert’s density and Clemens’s conceits. In effect, he leapfrogged backwards over the achievements of
his “post-Josquin” contemporaries and deliberately restored some basic elements of Josquin’s own style,
as idealized and propagated by the humanists. The result was a leaner, cleaner idiom that Zarlino could
more easily codify and that could then become a true lingua franca, a medium of international commerce.
Thus it was Willaert, above all, who made Josquin (or rather, “Josquin”) a truly representative sixteenth-
century composer.

The process can be most keenly illustrated by a motet of Willaert’s that parallels a motet of Josquin’s
with which we are familiar. His Benedicta es, coelorum regina, published by Gardane in 1545 (Ex. 15-
5 ), draws its melodic material from the same Gregorian sequence that had previously served as motet
source both for Josquin (see Ex. 14-9) and for Mouton, Willaert’s teacher. The two settings, Josquin’s and
Willaert’s, would thus seem related in a direct line of succession. And yet they are actually quite
dissimilar. Josquin’s setting observes a radical functional distinction between the cantus firmus voices
and the “free” ones, each group treated separately, if equally, in imitation. In Willaert’s motet the chant
material is thoroughly absorbed into the imitative texture, and there are no essential functional distinctions
among the voices.

EX. 15-5A   Adrian  Willaert,   Benedicta   es, coelorum    regina, mm. 1–15

EX. 15-5B   Adrian  Willaert,   Benedicta   es, coelorum    regina, mm. 24–31