the opposite direction was much rarer. The very act of converting the frottola repertory into a written
repertory like that of the oltremontani could of course be viewed as a crossover phenomenon; but frottole
actually composed by oltremontani were veritable hen’s teeth.
It is quite revealing of some stubborn biases of music historiography that these hen’s teeth—especially
the two items out of the six hundred or so in Petrucci’s collections that bear the name of “Josquin
Dascanio”—are now the most famous representatives of the genre. And very unrepresentative
representatives they are! This is especially true of the one frottola that every “early music” enthusiast is
likely to know: El Grillo (“The cricket”), from Petrucci’s third book (1504), of which the refrain is given
in Ex. 17-3.
Josquin Dascanio, if re-spelled with an apostrophe after the “D,” translates as “Ascanio’s Josquin”—
in other words, Josquin des Prez during his period of service to Ascanio Sforza, the bishop of Milan. It
would be too much to say that El Grillo would never have become famous were it not for the brand name
it bore; it is a delightfully amusing composition and deserves its popularity. And yet the fact remains that
it was not singled out for popularity in its own day. It is found only in the one source from which it is
quoted here, whereas many other frottole and related items (including the other Josquin Dascanio number
printed by Petrucci, a Latin-refrained but otherwise Italian lauda called In te Domine speravi) were
copied and recopied dozens of times.
And the fact also remains that the piece shows Josquin Dascanio to have been very much of an
outsider where the frottola was concerned, perhaps even a little “unclear on the concept.” Cara’s song
(Ex. 17-1), a typical frottola, is basically an elegant medium for the poem. It does not compete with the
words, so to speak, in rendering their meaning. It is not, to recall Haar’s useful distinction, a “literary”
song. Josquin’s setting is literary through and through. It was probably meant as a carnival song, to be
sung in costume, and with appropriate (not overly decorous) gestures.
The music corresponds in clear (and clearly intentional) ways with the semantics of the text: chi tiene
longo verso (“he holds out his verses long”) is illustrated by literally holding out the verse long; the
hockets and the patter on dale, beve grillo, canta (“go on, cricket, drink and sing”) is so clearly meant as
a literal imitation of the cricket’s actual “chirping” (or leg-rubbing) that we get the point even though the
imitation is far from literal or even in any way accurate. Such “imitations of nature” are delightfully
amusing. It will be well to keep in mind, though, when we come shortly to a later Italian repertory that
relied heavily on “musico-literary” imitations and illustrations, that no matter how seriously they may be
intended, such things operate, as they do in Josquin’s clever nonsense song, on mechanisms of wit—the
drawing of unexpected or unlikely correspondences—and are basically a form of humor.
EX. 17-3 “Josquin Dascanio,” El Grillo, mm. 1–21