This Companion presents the most complete discussion ever published in English on the music of the greatest composer of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. A collaborative effort by a team of distinguished scholars, the volume provides a basic survey of Josquin's music and the many problems that attend it. Taking account of the most recent research, the book also includes a sampler CD of Josquin's works specially recorded by The Clerk's Group.

Josquin des Prez and His Musical Legacy is the most up-to-date contribution to the research on one of the most important and internationally famous composers of the Renaissance. This monograph offers factual information on the composer as well as insights into his 16th-century and modern reception, a survey of the sources of his music, and a discussion of the thorny issue of authorship. Willem Elders, one of the most distinguished scholars of Josquin's music, also discusses the influence of Gregorian chant as a source of inspiration and explains the various aspects of Josquin's symbolic language. Each individual work (including some of those in the old Josquin edition now considered inauthentic) receives a short discussion of relevant contextual aspects and interesting musical features. Ranges and lengths are given for each work. The style is adapted to the professional musicologist as well as to the 'music lover' and performer. Includes 45 figures and 90 musical examples

Fra Girolamo Savonarola had a profound effect on the political and moral life of Florence in the 1490s, and his legacy lived on during the century after his execution in 1498, not just in Florence but in Ferrara and beyond the Alps, as far as Paris, Munich, and London. This study reconstructscontexts and musical settings for the popular tradition of sacred laude that were sung during the Savonarolan carnivals in 1496, 1497, and 1498. It further examines a broad network of patronage for the courtly tradition of Latin motets that provided elaborate musical settings for Savonarola'smeditations on Psalms 30 and 50. The friar's success in Florence can be partially attributed to his adoption of sacred laude (and the tunes of bawdy carnival songs) that had been promoted by Lorenzo de' Medici. The texts of the old carnival songs were suppressed, but the music was adapted to laudewith texts that proclaim the friar's prophecy of castigation and renewal. The citizens could thus internalize Savonarola's message by singing it. Savonarola himself wrote several lauda texts, and their musical settings are reconstructed here, as well as those for an underground tradition of laudewritten to venerate him after his execution. Part II turns to the courtly tradition and the Latin motet. Several Catholic patrons, scattered from Ferrara to France to England, were drawn to the friar's prison meditation on Psalms 30 and 50, and they commissioned elaborate musical settings of the opening words of both. A dozen motets on thefriar's psalm meditations can be traced from composes such as Willaert, Rore, Le Jeune, Lassus, and Byrd. Savonarola's highly personal texts inspired some of the most moving musical setings of the sixteenth century, in spite of the Church's unfavourable attitude toward the friar's disruptiveexample, which had set a precedent for Protestant reformers such as Martin Luther.

Josquin's Rome offers a new reading of the works composed by Josquin des Prez during his time as a singer and composer for the pope's private choir.

The study of music from the early Middle Ages to end of the seventeenth century.