Josquin's Rome Hearing and Composing in the Sistine Chapel

In the late 15th century the newly built Sistine Chapel was home to a vigorous culture of musical composition and performance. Josquin des Prez stood at its center, singing and composing for the pope's private choir.Josquin's Romeoffers a new reading of the composer's work in light of the repertory he and his fellow papal singers performed from the chapel's singers' box. Comprising the single largest surviving corpus of late 15th-century sacred music, these pieces served as a backdrop for elaborately choreographed liturgical ceremonies--a sonic analogue to the frescoes by Botticelli, Perugino, and their contemporaries that adorn the chapel's walls. Author Jesse Rodin uses a comparative approach to uncover this aesthetically and intellectually rich musical tradition. Confronting longstanding problems concerning the authenticity and chronology of Josquin's music while also offering nuanced readings of understudied works by his contemporaries, the book contextualizes Josquin by locating intersections between his music and the wider soundscape of the Cappella Sistina. Central to Rodin's argument is the idea that these pieces lived in performance, and the author demonstrates the interpretations of the music prevalent at the time in which it was composed through a series of exquisitely produced recordings on the companion website.Josquin's Romeis an essential resource for musicologists, scholars of the Italian Renaissance, and enthusiasts of early music in general.

Jesse Rodin is Assistant Professor of Music at Stanford University. He has published widely on music of the Renaissance. In 2010 Rodin received the Noah Greenberg Award in recognition of his work combining scholarship and performance. Rodin directs the Josquin Research Project, a digital humanities team developing tools for accessing and analyzing Renaissance music. Music from his ensemble Cut Circle is available from Musique en Wallonie.

Introduction

Part I. Toward Josquin's Style
Chapter 1. Methodological Minefields
Chapter 2. An Obsessive Compositional Personality

Part II. Surveying the Soundscape: The Cappella Sistina, ca. 1480-ca. 1500
Chapter 3. The Repertory
Chapter 4. The Lingua Franca
Chapter 5. A Maximalist Musical Mind: Marbrianus de Orto

Part III. Josquin's Roman Music in Context
Chapter 6. Super voces musicales and the L'homme armé Tradition
Chapter 7. Intersections and Borrowings

Appendix A. Repertory of the Cappella Sistina to ca. 1500
Appendix B. Related Repertories: VerBC 761, BarcOC 5, and VatSP B80
Appendix C. Three Anonymous Da pacem Motets
Appendix D. Four Canonic Hymn Settings