Josquin's Rome: Hearing and Composing in the Sistine Chapel

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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 arme 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

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In the late fifteenth 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 Rome offers 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 fifteenth-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. He confronts longstanding problems concerning the authenticity and chronology of Josquin's music while offering nuanced readings of scandalously understudied works by the composer's contemporaries. The book further 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. The author puts his interpretations into practice through a series of exquisite recordings by his ensemble, Cut Circle (available both on the companion website and as a CD from Musique en Wallonie). Josquin's Rome is an essential resource for musicologists, scholars of the Italian Renaissance, and enthusiasts of early music.

Reviews

Rodin's approach has considerable merit and allows us to see, and to hear, Josquin in a refreshingly new light. He does so with a readable writing style, a generous helping of tables...and almost 90 musical examples. A feature that adds immeasurably to the value and usefulness of the book is that companion recordings of many of the works discussed in the text can be accessed on a dedicated companion website (username and password provided in the book)

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