The French composer Josquin des Prez wrote masses, motets, chansons, and a handful of instrumental works. Much of his output comprises sacred polyphony.
Contents
- Masses
- Mass sections
- Motets
- Song–motets
- Songs
- Instrumental or apparently instrumental works
- References
- Sources
- External links
In recent years the Josquin canon has come into better focus. Ongoing research [1] has made it possible to identify a corpus of approximately 102 securely attributed works, comprising a core group of 54 pieces alongside another 48 that are provisionally attributable. About three dozen works are problematic; another 208, including three lost compositions, are spurious. The total number of pieces somewhere attributed to Josquin is 346.
Before the 1980s the seriousness of the problem was not adequately appreciated, owing to uncertainty about the dating and provenance of many central manuscripts as well as an undeveloped sense of how Josquin's musical style relates to that of his contemporaries and to the generation of composers who came after him. The enormous number of misattributions in the surviving sources reflects Josquin's unprecedented posthumous fame, above all in German-speaking lands. In 1540 the German editor Georg Forster summed up the situation: "I remember a certain eminent man saying that now that Josquin is dead he is putting out more works than when he was alive." [2] The New Josquin Edition (NJE), published between 1987 and 2017, classifies as spurious—and therefore does not print—approximately 158 works; the actual number of inauthentic compositions is probably considerably higher. Scores of every piece somewhere attributed to Josquin can be accessed through the Josquin Research Project.
