All day, as I have bustled about, working up Josquin (as we say in the academic circles we professional types usually run in), I have had a vague sense of malaise, occasioned by the combination of an incipient cold (a Christmas gift from my spouse) and a feeling of deja vu (Gallic phrase meaning generally that one has been there before). Eventually I turned out a typically witty, perceptive, and learned piece. Five minutes later I encountered a record entitled Ars Perfecta and realized that I had said it all before. Of course Ernie Hemingway got away for nigh-on forty years with repeating his fable about the he-man who found his masculinity wanting, but I probably lack his machismo or charisma or whatever it takes (besides a good press).
Josquin des Prez seems to have been what he called himself though that probability appears not to faze writers of modern reference books: Grove's lists him under "J" for "Josquin des Pres"), Baker's and Schwann under "D" (for "Des Prez"), and Hughes offers "Depres." However it's spelled, the name translates as “Little Joe from the Meadowlands," which fact makes me envision him in one of those fifteenth century millefleurs tapestries, all surrounded with birds, buttercups, and bunnies, but which may cause others to see him as a scatback with the Giants. In those days, plain folk didn't bother much with family names, so that "des Prez" probably means he was born in the countryside, most likely under the big skies of northwest France, which was then Burgundy, apparently about a decade after Joan of Arc rendered up her soul in the marketplace at Rouen, a few miles to the south. "Josquin" is, however, almost certainly a Frenchified spelling of the Flemish '' Jossekin,'' and it is conceivable that if he had not gone international he might have been known as Jossekin van der Weyden.
But he did go international and served kings, princes, prelates, and popes as chapel musician and composer. And he moved in such lofty company because it was recognized--as we have had to learn to recognize again--that he represented the full flowering of the great Renaissance polyphonic tradition. We do not know whether, as is rumored, he actually studied with Ockhegem, yet there is no question that he built on Ockhegem's work. But if Josquin is the pinnacle of polyphony, he is also pivotal, for his late compositions are often chordal and concerned with emotion rather than with mathemati-perfection.
Josquin obviously lavished his greatest efforts on his masses, seventeen of which were printed in his lifetime by Ottaviano dei Petrucci, and two more (including the present example) appeared in 1539, twenty-eight years after he died at around eighty. According to Andre Pirro, others have proved "difficult of access so far." Covering much of his productive life, they provide a living textbook for solving the most difficult of contrapuntal problems; yet Josquin always made sure that they were both singable and listenable. The late masses, of which "Da Pacem" is one, move always in the direction of purity, clarity, and expression. Over his lifetime he learned to treat the cantus firmus in new ways, progressing from the common statement of it in the tenor in long notes to breaking it up in phrases and motifs worked through the whole fabric. The cantus firmus here is the antiphon "Give us peace," often used in wartime, though in other masses Josquin, in the style of the day, used popular songs. The Missa "Da Pacem" is regarded as doubtfully Josquin's by some musicologists, but none argue that it is not a towering masterpiece. The use of instruments in such masses is, by the way, correct practice.
I note in the Harvard Dictionary that the baroque use of a ground bass or "ground" is not to be confused with cantus firmus use in an earlier era. Thus there is properly no Missa on a Cold Cold Ground.
