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JEAN RICHAFORT
REQUIEM
TRIBUTES TO JOSQUIN DESPREZ
ARTIST NOTE
It is a great pleasure for us to present this
recording of music written to honour one of the
great composers of the Renaissance, Josquin
Desprez. Josquin’s sacred and secular works
have long been a part of our repertoire, thanks
largely to the fact that he scored so many works
for 5 or 6 voices, which suits our line-up.
Josquin’s influence on choral music in the years
after his death was huge. Throughout the 16th
century composers were still using material
from his motets as the basis for masses,
magnificats, and other motets. He forged a new
means of expression, and a new musical
vocabulary so rich in potential that hundreds
of other composers were able to build on the
style and use it to their own ends. Where today
accusations of plagiarism would be bandied
about, in the Renaissance composers openly
borrowed from each other’s works as a tribute
to their fellow musicians.
There was also a tradition of composing musical
tributes after the death of a significant
composer. Josquin penned a tribute to Johannes
Ockeghem, entitled
La déploration sur la mort
d’Ockeghem
setting Jean Molinet’s poem Nymphes
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Musae Jovis á 4
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Musae Jovis á 6
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Salve regina
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Dum vastos Adriae fluctus
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O mors inevitabilis
Requiem in Memoriam Josquin Desprez
(Missa pro defunctis)
Introitus
Kyrie
Graduale
Offertorium
Sanctus & Benedictus
Agnus Dei
Communio
Benedictus Appenzeller (c.1480-c.1558)
Nicolas Gombert (c.1495-c.1560)
Josquin Desprez (c.1450-1521)
Jacquet of Mantua (1483-1559)
Hieronymus Vinders (fl.1510-1550)
Jean Richafort (c.1480-c1550)
[5.47]
[5.31]
[4.37]
[7.52]
[2.51]
des Bois. Josquin’s own death inspired some
sublime works by Benedictus Appenzeller, Nicolas
Gombert, Jacquet of Mantua, Hieronymus Vinders
and Jean Richafort, whose
Requiem in Memoriam
Josquin Desprez
forms the backbone of this
recording. We are delighted to be presenting
these tributes alongside two of Josquin’s
own works in new editions prepared by Dr
David Skinner.
The King’s Singers would like to thank David
Skinner for his scholarship, and for his
enlightened approach to the performance of
this wonderful music. Thanks also must go to
Adrian Hunter for his skilled combination of the
roles of producer and engineer. As ever we are
indebted to everyone at Signum, and especially
to Steve and Matt. Last but not least our thanks
go to Claire and Rebecca at Music Productions.
The King’s Singers
6
7
8
9
0
q
w
[5.15]
[3.37]
[5.11]
[6.39]
[3.15]
[2.33]
[2.44]
Josquin Desprez
[2.26]
[58.22]
e
Nymphes, nappés
Total timings:
THE KING’S SINGERS
www.signumrecords.com
PROGRAMME NOTE
Few composers of any period have enjoyed the
widespread admiration and unanimous praise of
successive generations as Josquin Desprez. He
is considered to be the greatest creator and
innovator of musical composition during the
Renaissance, and for some half a millennium
his music has stood the test of time. Music
printing came about during Josquin’s lifetime,
and it is highly significant that Petrucci placed
the composer at the opening of each of the
first four motet anthologies, dating from 1502
to 1505. It was also in 1502 when Petrucci’s
Misse Josquin
was published, marking the
first collection ever to be devoted to a single
composer. Josquin was truly at the pinnacle of
his profession, famous throughout Europe, and
served as a model of exquisite beauty and
compositional prowess for generations to come.
Relatively little is known of Josquin before his
death in 1521, and, indeed, most reports date
from decades later. They do, however, point to
the fact that he must have been a perfectionist.
Commenting in 1547, more than two decades
after the composer’s death, the Swiss theorist,
poet and humanist Heinrich Glarean tells us
that Josquin ‘... published his works after much
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deliberation and with manifold corrections;
neither did he release a song to the public unless
he had kept it to himself for some years’.
The Lutheran humanist, Johannes Manlius
reported an anecdote concerning Josquin’s own
choir rehearsals: he was said to have walked
among the singers during a performance of
one of his works, and if something dissatisfied
him, the composer would say ‘Be silent; I will
change that’. Martin Luther himself greatly
admired Josquin, and, after singing the chanson
Nymphes, nappés,
proclaimed the now-famous
quote that ‘Josquin is the master of the
notes, which must do as he wishes while other
composers must follow what the notes dictate.’
Such was Josquin’s popularity that after his
death in 1521 other composers sought to
emulate his style; compositions were often
found to be reattributed to Josquin as they would
then become more respected and marketable.
In 1540 the German editor and composer
George Forster famously recalled hearing ‘... a
certain eminent man saying that, now that
Josquin is dead, he is putting out more works
than when he was alive!’
This recording, however, does not focus on the
works of Josquin the Master, but on those
tributes to the Master created after his death
by his pupils and colleagues, who, themselves,
owed much of their skill and fame to
Josquin’s teachings. The centrepiece here is the
Missa pro defunctis
by the Flemish composer
Jean Richafort, who certainly knew Josquin and
may also have been taught by him. It was
published in 1532 (eleven years after Josquin’s
death) and is the most extensive memorial to
survive. Two of Josquin’s own compositional
devices are employed in the Mass: the
‘Circumdederunt me’ plainsong melody, in
canon, as it similarly appears in Josquin’s
Nymphes, nappés,
as well as the tune and text
of ‘C’est douleur non pareille’ from another
chanson
Faulte d’argente.
Richafort is thought to have been born in
Hainaut in around 1480, and was employed
at the collegiate church of St Rombout,
Mechelen, by 1507. In the following decade he
became associated with the French royal court,
and enjoyed the patronage of Ann of Brittany,
queen to Louis XII, and was later a singer in
the chapel of François I. By 1528 he is listed
as a
basse-contre
at Ardenburg near Bruges,
and in 1543 he took up the post of
zancmeester
and Chaplain at St Gilles in Bruges where
he seems to have been associated until his
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death in around 1550. The seven movements
of the
Missa pro defunctis
are all set for six
voices, providing a dense, dark texture
throughout apart from isolated verse passages.
It stands as one of the most substantial
settings of the Requiem to survive from the 16th
century, and, arguably, was not matched in
scale or success until Victoria’s famous
setting published in 1605. The cantus firmus
‘Circumdederunt me’ in canon at the fifth is
largely present throughout, but the movements
are grouped in different modes. The Introit and
Kyrie are in F, with a single flat in the signature,
while in the Graduale the flat is removed (though
still in F), which, along with the Offertory,
introduces the melody ‘C’est douleur non pareille’
(it is sorrow without equal). The Sanctus, Agnus
Dei and Communion continue with B naturals,
but the polyphony starts on A while the
cantus firmus remains in F. These changes in
modality, within a constant use of the canonic
cantus firmus, aptly demonstrates Richafort’s
skills as one of the finest composers of the
‘Post-Josquin’ generation, while the proliferation
of borrowed material from Josquin and elsewhere
makes this work a most fitting tribute to the
master composer of early polyphony.
A portrait of Josquin once hung in St Gudule,
Brussels (thought to have been lost in the 16th
century), and said to have included an epitaph
to the composer entitled
O Mors inevitabilis.
The relatively little-known Hieronymus Vinders,
who spent some time in Ghent in 1525-6, set
the text within a dense texture of seven
voices, two of which paraphrase the
Missa pro
defunctis
introit chant ‘Requiem aeternam’.
Other tributes include settings of the poem
Musae Jovis
by Gerard Avidius of Nijmegen, who
was a pupil of Josquin. This was modestly set
for four voices by Benedictus Appenzeller
(c.1480-c.1558), while a more extensive gesture
for six voices was set by Nicolas Gombert
(c.1495-c.1560), also said to have been a pupil
of Josquin. Stephen Rice notes that Gombert
rarely used cantus firmi in his compositions and
its use here highlights the unmistakable tribute
to Josquin. Here the ‘Circumdederunt me’ is
set in long sustained notes, within lusciously
crafted counterpoint, which again is in reference
to Josquin’s canonic use of the same melody
in
Nymphes, nappés.
Perhaps the most extraordinary tribute, and
one that is rarely performed today, is
Dum
vastos Adriae fluctus
by the French composer,
and yet another pupil of Josquin, Jacquet of
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Mantua (or Jacques Colebault, 1483-1559).
Jacquet was in later life active in Italy, and
enjoyed the patronage of Ercole Cardinal Gonzaga
(1505–63), Bishop of Mantua and papal legate
to Charles V. The composer was in Mantua
intermittently between 1527 and 1559, and
there is some circumstantial evidence to
suggest that he might have been the ‘Master
Jacquet’ who was employed at Magdalen
College, Oxford, as
Informator choristarum
(Instructor of the Choristers, though a position
regularly occupied by composers) at various
times in the 1530s. Certainly Jacquet’s famous
Aspice Domine
is one of only two foreign
works preserved in the so-called Peterhouse
Partbooks, thought to have been compiled from
the repertory of Magdalen College as it stood
in the early 1540s. Little is known of his
later movements, but Jacquet died in Mantua
on 2 October 1559.
Dum vastos
never made it into the composer’s
collected works, published in the 1970s and
‘80s, though it appears in a set of partbooks
published in Venice in 1554 by the Scotto Press
(Motetti
del Laberinto, a cinque voci libro quarto)
and has been especially prepared for this
recording. In the first part of this tribute motet
Jacquet places himself at the edge of a
tempestuous Adriatic Sea, the waters unsettled
and churning as he recalls the virtues of his
deceased master; here the polyphony is dense
and offers a haunting feeling of the ebb and
flow of rough waters. In the second part,
Jacquet sings, as if to the sea, ‘artful verses
with a antique sound’. It begins ‘Let us recount,
ye Muses, Josquin’s ancient loves’. Here Jacquet
pays homage by embedding sections of five of
Josquin’s most popular works into the polyphony:
1
&
2
Musae Jovis
Cantus firmus (track
2)
Circumdederunt me gemitus mortis
Dolores inferni circumdederunt me.
Musae Jovis ter maximi
Proles, canora plangite,
Comas cypressus comprimat:
Josquinus ille occidit,
Templorum decus
Et vestrum decus.
Saevera mors et improba,
Quae templa dulcibus sonis privat,
et aulas principum,
Malum tibi quod imprecer
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Praeter rerum seriem, Stabat mater, Inviolata
integra et casta es, Salve regina
(which is
included on this CD) and
Miserere mei Deus.
The
work ends in triple time, ‘the rustling reeds
repeating everything’ as if assessing Jacquet’s
musical discourse, and the waters then ‘nod
approval’ and become still, as so beautifully
expressed in the final cadence.
© 2012, David Skinner
The sorrows of death and the pains of hell
have compassed me round about.
Muses, offspring of
thrice-almighty Jove, Wail in laments,
Let the cypress pull together its strands:
Josquin has passed away,
The ornament of temples,
And your pride.
Harsh and wicked death,
Who deprives the church and
the princely palaces of their sweet sounds,
I wish evil upon you
Tollenti bonos,
Parcenti malis.
Apollo sed neccem tibi
Minatur, heus mors pessima
Musas hortatur addere
Et laurum comis
Et aurum comis.
Josquinus inquit optimo
Et maximo gratus Jovi,
Triumphat inter caelites
Et dulce carmen concinit,
Templorum decus,
Musarum decus.
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Salve Regina
Salve, Regina, Mater misericordiæ,
vita, dulcedo, et spes nostra salve.
Ad te clamamus exsules filii Evae,
Ad te suspiramus, gementes et flentes
in hac lacrymarum valle. Eja, ergo,
Advocata nostra, illos tuos
misericordes oculos ad nos converte;
Et Jesum, benedictum fructum ventris tui,
nobis post hoc exsilium ostende.
O clemens, O pia, O dulcis Virgo Maria.
taking away the good,
And sparing the evil.
Yet Apollo threatens you
with destruction, o most terrible death
encourages the Muses to
put laurel and gold
in their hair.
“Josquin, so dear to Jove
Supreme and Almighty
now triumphs among heaven-dwellers
and strikes up sweet music,
the ornament of temples
and pride of the Muses”.
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Dum vastos Adriae fluctus
Dum vastos Adriae fluctus,
rabiemque furentis gurgitis,
atque imis stagna agitatas vadis,
Scyllamque et rapidas Syrtes miratur
Iacchus monstraque non ullus cognita temporibus,
candida pampinea redimitus tempora fronde,
haec cecinit prisco carmina docta sono:
Iosquini antiquos, Musae, memoremus amores,
quorum iussa facit magna
regnator Olympi aeternam
prater seriem et moderamina rerum,
dum stabat mater miserans
natumque decoris inviolata
manens lacrimis plorabat
iniquo iudicio extinctum.
Salve, o sanctissima, salve regina,
et tu, summe Deus, miserere,
quotannis cui vitulo
et certis cumulabo altaria donis.
Dixerat. Argutae referebant
omnia cannae,
Mincius et liquidis annuit
amnis aquis.
While Iacchus wondered at the Adriatic’s vast waves,
and the rage of the furious whirlpool,
and the waters churned up from the deep sea-bed,
and Scylla, and the quicksands of Syrtes,
and monsters unknown in any age,
with a vine-frond girt about his fair temples,
sang these artful verses with an antique sound:
Let us recount, ye Muses, Josquin’s ancient loves,
whose bidding the ruler of great Olympus did,
outwith the eternal course
and governance of the world,
as the Mother stood pitying and,
remaining inviolate, bewailed with
seemly tears her Son,
slain by an unjust judgement.
Hail, O Most Holy One, Hail Queen;
and Thou, highest God, have pity,
to whom every year I shall heap up the altars
with a calf and regular gifts.
He finished. The rustling reeds
repeated everything,
and the river Mincio nodded approval
with his clear waters.
Hail, holy Queen, Mother of Mercy,
our life, our sweetness and our hope.
To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve;
to thee do we send up our sighs,
mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.
Turn then, most gracious advocate,
thine eyes of mercy toward us;
And after this our exile, show unto us
the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary.
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