The Renaissance equivalent of rock star status was achieved by the 15th-century French composer and singer Josquin des Prez. A big mystery of early music is how many of the hundreds of compositions attributed to Josquin were actually written by him.
An approach that blends scientific rigor with methods from the arts and humanities has been used by an associate professor of music in the School of Humanities and Sciences. The Josquin Research Project was created by Rodin as part of the massive undertaking.
Rodin was able to identify a core group of musical pieces attributed to Josquin by reliable sources. Using this core group as a reference, Rodin and his colleague Joshua Rifkin assigned confidence levels to the authors of the remaining musical works. The New Yorker featured Rodin's work on the project in a recent issue.
It is easy to say that there are seven sources that put his name on this piece, so it must be his. If those seven sources all depend on an unreliable 'parent' source, what would they do?
He said that the project is about the use of evidence and how difficult it is in any discipline to weigh evidence in a way that is not blind to context, circumstance and history.
His life and career are shrouded in mystery.
Much of Rodin's career has been devoted to the study of music from the 15th century, particularly to the work of the first modern master of multi- voice, polyphonic music.
Rodin is the director of Cut Circle, a vocal ensemble that performs music by other people. The book "Josquin's Rome" was published by Rodin as a scholar.
According to Rodin, it is difficult to know what music was written by Josquin. The compositions weren't labeled correctly. Several composers used the same music. Josquin became famous just as printing changed the way music is sold. The majority of the music bearing his name entered circulation after he died.
Rodin said that some of the misattributions were the result of people believing he composed a piece.
What is in a name?
There have been many attempts to bring clarity to the compositions. An effort that took decades to complete was the work of the Dutch musicologist Albert Smijers. The New Josquin Edition committee published 30 volumes of music over the course of thirty years.
The underlying methodology was called into question by Rifkin as the project got going. Rifkin suggested that scholars shouldn't consider works by Josquin until proven innocent.
The proposal by Rifkin was considered extreme. Most of the pieces attributed to him have been assumed to have been written by him. The New Josquin Edition was about to publish its first volume.
Rodin said that some scholars and music lovers feel robbed when a favorite piece is dropped. The musical community would reel if the author of a beloved piece was called into question.
There is a research project.
Rodin and Rifkin worked together to explore how a guilty-until-proven-innocent approach might be applied to the music.
Rodin said that the aim was not to ignore the vast body of scholarship and popular knowledge. How do we keep that evidence and uncertainty out of the door and out of our heads?
The Josquin Research Project was created in 2010 by Rodin and Craig Sapp of the Center for Computer assisted research in the humanities. By using new digital tools, they began refining our understanding of what "Josquin tends to do and not do" in his music. The team was helped by the 54 works in this core group.
The Domine piece is part of the core group. Around 1490, it was copied into a choir book. It is said to be from the first page of the Cappella Sistina 35.
"If this writer didn't know what he was talking about, no one would have done anything." On the testimony of one manuscript, we can feel very safe about the work's author.
Taking a comparative approach to source and style-based evidence, Rodin and Rifkin assigned the remaining 292 pieces not in the core group to one of three categories. Rodin and Rifkin think that about 103 of the works attributed to him were composed by him.
The team finished uploading the surviving notes to the online collection before the 500th anniversary of his death. The anniversary and the project's completion were marked by Rodin with a series of performances by Cut Circle that were recorded in Italy.
New analytical tools have been developed and the database of music by other composers has been expanded.
Rodin will be publishing a monograph on issues of musical form. He is co-editing a book that will feature essays by scholars for the first time. Rodin said it's exciting to finally be in a position to investigate the works and compare them to music by other composers.
He said that Josquin's compositions changed the course of music history. His music is not played on American radio with the same Frequency as that of Lizzo, but that doesn't mean it isn't important.
More information: John Milsom, Discerning Josquin, Early Music (2021). DOI: 10.1093/em/caab070www.newyorker.com/magazine/ 202... mysteries-of-josquin
There is a research project atstanford.edu.
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