As a result of archival discoveries that began in the 1990s, much of what we thought we knew about Josquin’s career has recently been upended. Among many other changes, documents indicating an extended period of service in Milan beginning in 1459—long considered the earliest record of the composer—have been shown to refer not to our Josquin, but rather to two other musicians called Juschinus/Judochus, whose careers in Milan can be traced in some detail. At a stroke some twenty years of the composer’s biography evaporated. This also called into question when and where Josquin composed many of his works, and, by extension, required a reassessment of his role in broader compositional developments that occurred in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

Coming to terms with this and other aspects of the new biographical picture is no mean feat. David Fallows deserves our gratitude and admiration for addressing these issues directly. At over 500 pages, his study of Josquin’s life and works makes a huge contribution. Fallows provides a persuasive narrative that takes account of the new documentary findings and their many implications.Footnote ¹ The obstacles are considerable. Despite Josquin’s stature as the most renowned composer of his time, there is what Fallows rightly calls ‘the desperately thin documentation of his life’, even including the recent discoveries. This is not just a matter of gaps in the record of his career, numerous and maddening as these are, but also the fact that so many of the documents we do possess are suggestive rather than explicit, and thus invite a range of (often conflicting) interpretations. Not unrelated to this paucity of biographical detail are ongoing debates about the chronology and authenticity of many of the works. The earliest surviving copies of Josquin’s music date from the 1480s and 1490s, decades that saw the beginnings of fundamental changes in polyphonic composition. The roots of those changes continue to be investigated, but they make the identification and chronology of Josquin’s works issues of central importance for our understanding of European music in the decades around 1500.

Matters of chronology figure prominently in Fallows’s book. His twelve chapters are essentially biographical in orientation, tracking Josquin from his origins in Hainaut through to his final years as provost at the collegiate church of Notre Dame in Condé, with each chapter organised around a place the composer is known (or is proposed) to have been active. Whereas in Fallows’s earlier book on Guillaume Du Fay there were chapters devoted to individual genres, here each chapter contains numerous subsections that interweave biographical and music analytical material. This structure allows him to zero in on specific works, and his perceptive comments often illuminate features that have previously gone unnoticed. It also allows him room, when needed, to make a case for dating a work to a particular period in Josquin’s career. A number of these datings will be controversial, and so it is helpful that Fallows has structured the book so that his chronological arguments are juxtaposed with discussions of the relevant contextual and documentary material.

In an article published in 1999 Fallows offered a first attempt at a new chronology of the works.Footnote ² Based on the biography as it then appeared, he posited a birthdate in the mid-1450s and a composing career of only about forty years (from the late 1470s to c. 1510–12), rather than sixty, as had previously seemed the case. He further proposed a division of the works that suggested Josquin had focused on particular genres at different points in his life, with many of the three- and four-voice songs, the famous Ave Maria . . . virgo serena and the Missa L’ami Baudichon all composed in the late 1470s; ‘almost all’ the long motets and motet cycles from the 1480s; the five masses published in Petrucci’s 1502 Misse Josquin from the 1490s, with the remaining masses being from ‘about 1502 to 1512’; and most all of the five- and six-voice motets (excepting the earlier Illibata Dei virgo nutrix and Nymphes des bois) composed in the first decade of the sixteenth century.

Much of this chronology is retained in the book. But a fascinating new document discovered since his 1999 article has now prompted him to move the beginnings of Josquin’s compositional activity back to the early 1470s. Of particular significance for Fallows’s narrative is that this document appears to establish the young Josquin’s connections to Cambrai and possibly to the circle around Du Fay. This document from the church of St-Géry in Cambrai mentions a payment in 1466 to one ‘Gossequin de Condet’ upon his ceasing to be an altarboy there. If this is a reference to the composer—and Fallows offers reasons for optimism, including Josquin’s later contacts with this church—then it places him during his teens in the same city as the elderly Du Fay, who was in residence at Cambrai Cathedral from 1457 until his death in 1474. There is at present no way of knowing how long Josquin may have been an altarboy at St-Géry, or whether he stayed on in Cambrai after 1466. The first secure reference to him appears nearly ten years later and places him roughly 1000 km from Cambrai, serving at the court of René d’Anjou in Aix-en-Provence. Still, Fallows believes the St-Géry document increases the likelihood that the ‘Des Pres’ mentioned in a list of musicians in the text of Loyset Compère’s motet Omnium bonorum plena (composed probably in the early 1470s, no later than 1474, possibly in connection with an event in Cambrai) is Josquin.Footnote ³

Some earlier writers had already noted the possible influence of Du Fay on the Missa L’ami Baudichon. Fallows actually finds a closer connection between this mass and the first of the six anonymous L’homme armé masses in the Naples manuscript VI.E.40. But where he does see evidence of Du Fay’s influence is in Josquin’s Alma redemptoris mater/Ave regina caelorum, a work more often cited for the similarity between its opening measures and those of Ockeghem’s Alma redemptoris mater. Fallows observes that any similarity between the two ends there, and that instead Josquin’s ‘chant treatment and formal layout’ recall Du Fay’s late four-voice Ave regina caelorum. Fallows cites a passage in Josquin’s work (p. 39, Example 6) that contains a long descending sequence of a sort unlike anything in Du Fay, or indeed in the music of Ockeghem and his contemporaries; the dating he proposes in the early 1470s invites considerable rethinking.

As he has done previously with Du Fay, Ciconia and Regis, Fallows masterfully draws together disparate bits of documentary evidence relating to Josquin, finding order in them in ways that intuitively make sense. He is able to link up the composer’s service at the court of René d’Anjou (c. 1475–8; perhaps until 1480) with his possible service at the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris during the reign of Louis XI (perhaps 1480–3). While for the latter there is no direct evidence, Fallows is surely right to suspect that a benefice Josquin held in the parish of St-Aubin in the diocese of Bourges was the result of contact with the French king. Here as elsewhere in the book he revisits anecdotes about Josquin recounted by later writers, in part for any clues these might hold to the dating of specific works. One is the famous story of Josquin composing a setting of the psalm Memor esto verbi tui servo tuo as a way of reminding the king of France of his unfulfilled promise of a benefice. Fallows, noting Glareanus’s description of the event as having taken place before Josquin had become generally known, suggests the king in question was not, as Glarean has it, Louis XII (whose reign began in 1498, by which time Josquin was presumably very well known), but rather Louis XI. This in turn leads him to propose a date for Memor esto of 1480–1. Here again, Fallows throws down the gauntlet: technical and stylistic features of the work may cause some to reject such an early dating, especially in the light of Joshua Rifkin’s recent observation that the use of paired duos and transposed imitation (both present in Memor esto) is comparatively rare until near the end of the fifteenth century.Footnote ⁴

Fallows acknowledges his debt to Rifkin by dedicating the volume to him. Rifkin’s work on Josquin looms large, particularly his recent article on the dating of Ave Maria . . . virgo serena, in which he discusses the sources and authenticity of works Fallows assigns to about 1480 or earlier.Footnote ⁵ Fallows is candid about the many points on which they disagree. One of these concerns the Casanatense songbook (Rome, Biblioteca Casanatense, MS 2856), copied in Ferrara and containing four works ascribed to Josquin, as well as two more with ascriptions that have been read as garbled versions of the composer’s name. The sticking point is the date of the manuscript. Fallows continues to favour c. 1480, Rifkin c. 1490, with no consensus in sight. Much hinges on this. A date of around 1480 would make this the earliest source for any of Josquin’s music. It would also lend support to Fallows’s suggestion that Josquin, while serving at René’s court in the late 1470s, was already composing canonic songs such as Une musque de Biscaye ‘as part of a series of experiments to explore what could be done about imitation as a structural device’ (p. 73).

With Josquin’s arrival in Italy now traceable no earlier than 1484, when he is named as a member of the household of Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, Milan has faded in significance as an element in the composer’s biography (in part because Ascanio spent most of the following few years in Rome). This raises questions about Josquin’s motet cycles Vultum tuum and Qui velatus facie, which previously seemed to link him to the Milanese practice of motetti missales. While admitting the two cycles show an awareness of what Compère and Weerbeke were writing in Milan in the 1470s, Fallows sees no justification for insisting that Josquin composed these works specifically for Milan. As part of his broader argument that after composing the Missa L’ami Baudichon Josquin effectively abandoned the cyclic mass for nearly twenty years, Fallows views Vultum tuum and Qui velatus facie as evidence of his interest in finding ‘new ways of creating an extended musical design’ (p. 119).

Recent archival findings have shortened Josquin’s service in the papal chapel by three years, but it remains clear he was in Rome from 1489 until at least 1494 (the relevant records are missing for the years 1495–1500, after which time his name no longer appears). One consequence of this revision to the biography, according to Fallows, is that we should now ‘resist seeing the time in the papal chapel as quite so central to his career and output’ (p. 10). This view stems partly perhaps from Fallows’s belief that Josquin spent part of the years 1485–8 at the royal court of Hungary. Yet by his own account the 1490s must have been years of extraordinary productivity, resulting in the five complex mass cycles that Petrucci would publish a few years later in his first book of masses, as well as his setting of the tract Domine non secundum peccata, a work that all agree must have been composed specifically for the papal chapel. Less certain now is whether the five-voice tenor motet Illibata Dei virgo nutrix, with the composer’s name embedded as an acrostic, dates from these years. The earlier of its two sources is the papal manuscript Cappella Sistina 15, copied in the mid-1490s, which also includes comparable five-voice motets by Johannes Regis (the much earlier Clangat plebs flores) and Weerbeke (Dulcis amica Dei, almost certainly from 1486, when the composer was in the papal chapel). From this it has been reasonably inferred that in the 1480s and 1490s there was a special interest in such motets at the papal chapel. Fallows notes, however, that the new biography opens up possibilities beyond assigning the motet to Josquin’s time in either Milan or Rome, and it is true that Illibata reveals a strong awareness of Regis’s motets of the 1470s (Clangat plebs flores in particular). Nevertheless the stylistic and technical features of Illibata do not suggest a date as early as the late 1470s. I am inclined still to place it among his Roman works and to see it as an example of Josquin responding to a specific musical environment.

The period 1494–1503—that is, from the last available documentation of him in the papal chapel to his arrival in Ferrara as a member of Ercole d’Este’s chapel—is the last in Josquin’s life about which there is genuine uncertainty concerning his whereabouts. After his year in Ferrara (1503–4) he appears to have gone more or less immediately to Condé to take up the provostship at the church of Notre Dame, a post he held until his death in 1521. If there are disappointingly few documents from the last seventeen years of his life, the responsibilities and residency requirements of the provostship effectively guarantee that, except for occasional short trips, he was in Condé throughout this period. But part of the frustration of the late 1490s is that there are numerous scattered records that might or might not refer to the composer. Fallows weighs the reliability of these in turn. On the basis of documents recently discovered by Rob Wegman that mention ‘ung chantre nommé Josquin des Prez’ being given wine by the chapter of Troyes Cathedral during visits there in 1499 and 1501, Fallows makes an attractive case for Josquin having been involved somehow with Louis XII of France in these years.

With fewer biographical and archival knots to untangle for Josquin’s years in Ferrara and Condé, Fallows is able to devote nearly half of the final hundred pages of his main text to discussing aspects of specific works. These include some of the most famous pieces of the early sixteenth century, but again and again his comments include fresh observations that highlight the works’ salient features. Questions of dating and attribution do not vanish altogether. He advocates for Josquin’s authorship of Mille regretz and offers a relatively early dating of the Missa Pange lingua (‘from around 1510’) as part of a broader claim that Josquin’s last years were ‘devoted largely to exploring small forms, particularly in five voices’ (p. 323).

Backing away from the details of his career, does the new documentation of Josquin’s life provide us with a clearer picture of the composer himself? Some of the surviving anecdotes suggest a wilful, perhaps even difficult and arrogant man. Fallows refines this image by noting that the land and property Josquin inherited from his aunt and uncle in 1483 made him ‘a rich man, certainly rich enough not to have needed to worry about employment. That may help to explain some odd facts of his later life: the way in which he moved from place to place, his contacts with the rich and mighty, the ease with which he seems later to have slipped into his position as provost at Condé’ (p. 106). It is an appealing observation. Many court musicians must have chafed at being treated like servants; Josquin may at times have enjoyed the luxury of not having to serve at all if he did not wish to.

Fallows’s book is in every way a remarkable achievement. As with so much of his published research it is also designed to be of maximum utility to other scholars. Here one must take special note of its 115 pages of appendices, which offer (a) an annotated list of the relevant documents; (b) a long list of references to Josquin in musical, theoretical and literary texts covering the period c. 1470–1777; (c) a detailed list of personalia; (d) an annotated list of musicians called Josquin; and (e) another list of people called Desprez or similar. Simply put, these appendices alone constitute a major contribution to Josquin studies. The book as a whole is elegant, both visually and intellectually, and the depth of Fallows’s scholarship ensures that it will occupy a central place in all future research on the composer and his music.