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. 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.

This book collects twelve of the papers given at a conference held at the Library of Congress, Washington D.C., on 1-3 April 1993, in conjunction with the exhibition `Rome Reborn: The Vatican Library and Renaissance Culture'. A group of distinguished scholars considered music in medieval and Renaissance Rome. The volume presents a series of wide-ranging and original treatments of music written for and performed in the papal court from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. New discoveries are offered which force a radical reevaluation of the Italian papal court as a musical centre during the Great Schism. A series of motets for various popes are subject to close analysis. New interpretations and information are offered concerning the repertory of the papal chapel in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the institutional life of the papal singers, and the individual biographies of singers and composers. Thought-provoking, even controversial, evaluations of the music of composers connected with, or thought to be connected with, Rome and the papal court, such as Ninot le Petit, Josquin, and Palestrina round out the volume.

This Companion presents the most complete discussion ever published in English on the music of the greatest composer of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. A collaborative effort by a team of distinguished scholars, the volume provides a basic survey of Josquin's music and the many problems that attend it. Taking account of the most recent research, the book also includes a sampler CD of Josquin's works specially recorded by The Clerk's Group.

The essays in this volume offer diverse, innovative approaches to medieval music and culture.

This volume constitutes the report of the 1971 International Josquin Festival Conference held at the Julliard School of Music in New York City. The papers assembled this collection are an elegant tribute to the study of Josquin and address biographical information, source studies, style and analysis, studies on genres, individual works, performance practice, performance and interpretation, and problems in editing Josquin's music.

A great deal of research over the past forty years has had an impact Josquin's music: most of his works are now available in high-quality recordings that make them easily familiar to any researcher, and the main sources have been far more thoroughly explored. Furthermore, new biographical findings, particularly within the last ten years, have shown that much of what was written about Josquin's life was based on documents that concerned other people entirely. For example, Josquin's birthdate has been advanced by more than ten years, with major consequences for our view not only of his music and its chronology, but also of most other music of the time. This book assembles and assesses the newly available material. It builds the main works into the narrative of Josquin's life. Appendices include a critical listing of the documents about Josquin, a summary of later literary references to him, summaries of the relevant information about the main figures mentioned in the book, a list of other musicians at the time named 'Josquin' or something similar (35 of them ), and much more.