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Reviewer: Barry
Brenesal
Both the Missa Di dadi
and the Missa Une mousse de Biscaye are included in The New
Josquin Edition. (Its 29th and final volume was just issued last year,
concluding a labor of love across 47 years.) Their authorship, however, is
doubted by some scholars, as is a fair amount of other music attributed to
the composer. Josquin’s popularity was considerable, and unscrupulous
publishers didn’t even wait for his death before blessing his name with
anonymous works and those written by other musicians. Not surprisingly, this
expanded enthusiastically after the composer’s death in 1521. It didn’t
abate for decades, so that 19 years later, the Nuremberg publisher Georg
Forster noted, “I remember a certain eminent man saying that, now that
Josquin is dead, he is putting out more works than when he was alive.”
Peter Phillips succinctly
expresses his concerns over both works’ authorship, mostly a matter of
important stylistic and procedural differences with Josquin’s confirmed
Masses, especially so in the case of the Missa Une mousse de Biscaye.
However, he inclines towards the view that they are very early works, and
pragmatically concludes that they are both are good enough to enjoy
regardless of whomever actually composed them.
Of the two Masses, attention
has focused to a greater extent on the Missa Di dadi. Its cantus
firmus derives from the tenor part of Robert Morton’s popular rondeau N’aray
je jamais mieulx que j’ay, which is a lover’s complaint about his lady’s mix
of cruelty and indifference. As the work’s title suggests, Josquin uses the
opening line (“Shall I never fare better than I do”) punningly, placing a
pair of dice to the side of each movement as an indication of the part’s
note values relative to the Mass’s other three voice parts. Pining courtly
love is thus transformed into a dicer’s lament about failing to win
big—hence its title, which in English is The Dice Mass.
If we accept Josquin as the
composer, the work could possibly date from the mid-to-late 1480s, which he
spent in the employ of the Sforzas of Milan. Dicing and cards, the primary
forms of gambling in Europe at the time, were considered sources of great
evil, leading to citywide bans—which, as with Prohibition in the 1920s, did
nothing more than drive the perceived problem underground. Milan was
renowned for its gambling dens at all levels of society, so the joke would
have been instantly understood by Josquin’s contemporaries, there.
However, Michael Long, who
published an article dwelling upon the Mass’s symbolism and ritual in the
spring 1989 issue of the Journal of the American Musicological Society, felt
that it also possessed a celebratory Eucharistic context, citing Aquinas’s
“corporeal metaphors of things spiritual,” and concluded that the work might
have been conceptually polytextual. This may sound needlessly complex—a love
poem parodied as a love of gambling, then treated as a symbolic contrafactum
depicting spiritual malaise and growth—but Occam’s Razor isn’t usually the
best tool to apply when analyzing the arts during the European Renaissance.
Writers and composers on sacred subjects in particular were enamored of
complex, multilayered meanings, and Josquin is known to have greatly enjoyed
literary and musical puzzles. At the very least it might explain why the
dice vanish after “Pleni sunt caeli” in the Sanctus, as the Hosanna
corresponds to the elevation of the Host. Dice as the World is transcended.
To the other side, however, is
the troubling lack of correspondence between dice and music that occurs
earlier in the Mass. The Kyrie and the Gloria work according to their
respective dice-based proportions (two-to-one in the former, four-to-one in
the latter), but the Credo is supposed to be six-to-one, and the proportion
is instead 12-to-one. Five-to-one in the Sanctus only works on the longer
notes. This creates a suspicion that the Mass’s composer might have simply
abandoned his gambling conceit as having run its course, rather than used it
in such an ingenious and spiritually appropriate fashion.
I cannot find a currently in
print commercial recording of the Misse Une mousse de Biscaye, nor a
previous review of it in Fanfare. By contrast, the Misse Di dadi was
reviewed in a recording that featured Peter and Timothy Davies and the
Medieval Ensemble of London, back in 1985 by J. F. Weber (deleted; Fanfare
8:6). That is my only point of comparison—in fact, I purchased it at the
time on the basis of Weber’s review. I have seen it offered as a download,
but can’t comment upon its quality as such. I have not heard René
Clemencic’s recording with the Vienna Boy’s Choir (Oehms 340).
The version by the Brothers
Davies holds up well, despite its age. Their singers are both stylish and
thoroughly rehearsed, though they are too by-the-bar at times. And despite a
good use of dynamics, Phillips makes far more of the inherent lyricism in
the Missa Di dadi’s melismatic passages, such as the Domine Deus, Rex
caelestis and Domine Fili unigenite sections of the Gloria. The flexibility
of his phrasing, and the clarity between the parts, brings a special
distinction to the Crucifixus section of the Credo, which places soloists
from the various voice parts in contrapuntal conversation with one another
for a substantial period of time. As much can be said of the Missa Une
mousse de Biscaye. These are performances of notable merit, both for
Philips, and his eight-voiced Tallis Scholars. They are, fortunately, seconded by sound of equal quality. The Chapel of Merton College is miked in such a way as thoroughly to catch the vocalists’ tonal qualities, with just enough bloom to add depth. The over-reverberance of the Early Music Cathedral Sound is completely avoided, and would in fact have been a death knell to music of this intimacy and subtlety.
In short,
this release is strongly recommended. Whether one concludes that Josquin is
the author of either of these Masses or not, there is no question that they
find a most persuasive advocate in Phillips.
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