Josquin des Prez (1 gen 1450 anni – 1 gen 1521 anni)

Descrizione:

French composer of polyphony. "...[he] set the standard for a new musical aesthetic based on clear imitative texture, lucid text declamation, and rhetorical expression. Josquin's achievement was seen as representing an "ars perfecta", a perfect art. His most famous work, the motet "Ave Maria...Virgo serena" (Hail Mary, serene virgin), presents distinctive features of his style, as do many of his Masses. Composers in the next generation who were influenced by him include Adrian Willaert, Nicolas Gombert, and Jacobus Clemens non Papa. This generation also saw the rising importance of notated instrumental music,

Became music's first "big brand name", due to printing of his works.

"Josquin was the first composer to interest his contemporaries and posterity as a personality. By the end of his life he was the subject of gossip and anecdote. The picture that emerges again resembles the popular conception of Beethoven: a cantankerous, arrogant, distracted man, difficult in social situations but excused by grace of his transcendent artistic gifts. In fact, Josquin was looked on with awe as one separated from others by divine inspiration--a status formerly reserved for prophets and saints. Among "musicians", the role had been reserved for Pope Gregory alone. This divine inspiration is the kernel of our popular conception of musical genius to this day. Ths humanistic sensibility that elevated Josquin and the Romantic one that elevated Beethoven had an important component in common: a high appreciation of individualism. In each case this stemmed on the one hand from cultural and social conditions and on the other from economic and commerical ones. A similar humanistic celebration of individualism in the work of the great visual artists of the time


Humanism! Switch from Music as a form of measurement to music as a form of rhetoric. Josquin is not the originator of this change but he did become the poster boy for it. (Classical) Humanism was a renewd interest in the study of ancient texts that informed the ideals of the Renaissance. The rediscovery of old texts, particualrly those by Roman orators like Cicero and Quintilian, stressed the relationship between music and heightened speech and defined its purpose as that of swaying the emotions of listeners.

The qualities humanist thinkers valued so highly in Josquin's music were mainly ones we have so far associated with Italy and with the "lowering"of style, such as lucidity of texture, text-based form, and clarity of declamation.

Humanists looked to classical antiquity for models of how to think and communicate forcefully, persuasively, and clearly. As these qualities were reinterpreted in the sixteenth century, Josquin represented a new ordering of aesthetic values.

Henricus Glareanus declared Josquin the creator of an ars perfecta: a perfected art that could never be improved, "to which nothing can be added, after which nothing but decline is to be expected." That is exactly the definition of a classic.

Aggiunto al nastro di tempo:

Data: