Josquin des Prez: The First Great Composer in Western History

The Weight of a Name

Some composers were great in their own time and were gradually forgotten. Others were ignored during their lives and only rescued by posterity. And then there are a very few who were recognised as extraordinary by their own contemporaries — and whose reputation history has not had to correct, only confirm. Josquin des Prez belongs to this last group.

Martin Luther, who understood music and did not dispense praise lightly, put it with characteristic clarity: 'Josquin is the master of the notes; they do what he wants. Other composers do what the notes allow.' The Swiss theorist Heinrich Glarean, writing in 1547, called him without hesitation princeps musicorum — the prince of musicians. In an age when flattery was common currency, those words carried a different specific gravity.

What made Josquin so singular? It was not simply that he mastered the technique — others mastered it too. It was that in his hands, technique became invisible. Josquin's music does not sound like a contrapuntal exercise, even though it is built on counterpoint of formidable complexity. Above all, it sounds like something his predecessors had sought and not always found: it sounds inevitable.

A Man Difficult to Pin Down

Before speaking of his music, it is worth acknowledging something: Josquin des Prez is, biographically, an elusive figure. His birth dates vary between 1450 and 1455 depending on the source, probably somewhere in the Low Countries or northern France — Franco-Flemish territory, like the great masters who came before him. His surname, des Prez, suggests rural origins. Beyond that, we know very little about his childhood with certainty.

What we can trace is his adult career, which was that of a musician who was present in exactly the places where the history of music was happening. He worked in Milan, at the Sforza court. He was in Rome, singing in the Sistine Chapel during crucial years. He served Louis XII of France. At the end of his life, elderly and celebrated, he chose to retire to Condé-sur-l'Escaut in the Low Countries, where he died in 1521.

That trajectory — northern Europe, Italy, France, back to the north — is not merely a biography: it is a map of musical circulation in the Renaissance. Josquin was in those places for a reason; he was where the most advanced music was being thought, written, and performed. And in each of those places, he learned, absorbed, and transformed.

What He Inherited and What He Changed

As we saw in the previous post, the generation of Dufay and Binchois had established the foundations of the Renaissance musical language: consonant counterpoint, four-voice writing, imitation as a structural tool. The next generation — led by Johannes Ockeghem and Antoine Busnoys — took that technique to a near-vertiginous level of elaboration: masses built on secret mathematical ciphers, counterpoint of a density that still astonishes specialists today.

Josquin inherited all of that. He was a student — real or in spirit, the documents are not entirely clear — of Ockeghem, and was thoroughly versed in the technical arsenal that tradition had accumulated. But he made a decision that, in retrospect, seems simple and that at the time was almost radical: to subordinate technical complexity to the expression of the text.

That decision changes everything. In Josquin's music, words are not a pretext for writing counterpoint. Counterpoint exists to serve the words. When the text speaks of ascent, the melody rises. When it speaks of grief, the dissonances become sharper and the resolution slower, more painful. When a single syllable charged with meaning needs to be underlined, Josquin gives it to all voices at once, in a full chord that stops time for an instant.

This practice — which sixteenth-century theorists would call word-painting in its most literal form — is in Josquin something deeper than a rhetorical device. It is a compositional philosophy: music exists to amplify and transform the meaning of the words it carries.

The Ave Maria That Stopped Time

To understand what Josquin achieved, there is no better path than listening to his Ave Maria… virgo serena, a four-voice motet that probably dates from the 1480s or 1490s and that for a long time was considered — without exaggeration — the most copied and admired piece of the entire fifteenth century.

The piece opens with all four voices entering in successive imitation, each repeating the same opening motif with a slight delay from the one before. This is exactly the procedure we described in the previous post: the voices pursue one another, the same material multiplies and interweaves. But what Josquin does with that material differs from what his predecessors did: the motif is so simple, so directly linked to the natural inflection of the words Ave Maria, that the technical complexity dissolves into the transparency of the result.

As the motet progresses, Josquin varies the texture with a freedom and intuition that remain astonishing: passages of dense imitative writing alternate with moments where all voices move together in homorhythmic chords — meaning they share the same rhythm simultaneously — creating an effect of solemnity and weight that contrasts with the lightness of the imitative sections. The listener, without needing any technical knowledge, feels those shifts as what they are: variations of light and shadow, tension and repose.

The motet's ending is one of the most extraordinary moments in all of Renaissance music: Josquin closes with a phrase — O Mater Dei, memento mei ('O Mother of God, remember me') — in which all four voices settle on a sustained chord of an almost painful simplicity. It is as if the music, after all its unfolding, falls to its knees.

Humour and Complaint: A Man of His Time

Josquin was not only the composer of sublime sacred music that history tends to remember. He was also a man thoroughly at home in his era, with a sense of humour, earthly ambitions, and a capacity for complaint that feels almost modern.

There is an anecdote — of uncertain historical accuracy but undeniable symbolic power — that shows him waiting months for King Louis XII of France to grant an ecclesiastical benefice he had promised. Josquin, tired of waiting, composed the motet Memor esto verbi tui ('Remember thy word'), based on a psalm about divine faithfulness to promises made. The king, who understood the message perfectly, granted the benefice. Shortly after, Josquin composed Bonitatem fecisti ('Thou hast dealt well'), by way of thanks.

He also composed chansons — secular songs in French — of a vivacity and grace that contrast with the solemnity of his masses and motets. El grillo (Il grillo è buon cantore), a light piece about a singing cricket, takes imitation to an almost comic game: the voices literally imitate the sound of the insect, a wink to the listener that shows the same man capable of the gravity of the Ave Maria could also, without any effort, make an audience laugh.

Why It Matters to Call Him 'The First'

The title of this post — the first great composer in Western history — calls for justification, because it is a strong claim and might seem unfair to Dufay, to Ockeghem, to Machaut. The reason is not that Josquin was technically superior to all his predecessors — that would be debatable. The reason is that Josquin was the first in whom a specific combination of factors appears that defines what we mean today by 'great composer': a body of work broad and diverse enough to be studied as a whole; a recognisable artistic personality running through all of it; a direct and documented influence on subsequent generations; and an explicit recognition by his contemporaries that went beyond technical admiration, pointing toward something harder to name — that quality of inevitability we mentioned at the outset.

Josquin was also the first composer whose work spread widely through the printing press — a technological revolution we will explore in detail later, which changed forever the way music circulated through the world. That his name reached Luther in Germany, theorists in Switzerland, and singers in Spain was possible because Petrucci, the first great music printer in history, included his works in his collections from 1501 onward.

All of this together makes Josquin something no previous composer had been: a canonical figure during his own lifetime.

The Perfect Moment and What Comes After

The question we left open at the end of the previous post — can music achieve perfection? — had, in the sixteenth century, a provisional answer: yes, and its name is Josquin. But that answer immediately opened a new, more uncomfortable question. If perfection had already been reached, what were the composers who came after supposed to do? Imitate the master — and risk being no more than shadows of his genius — or look for other paths?

The history of Renaissance music after Josquin is, in large part, the history of how his successors answered that question. Some looked toward poetic text with a new intensity, pushing the relationship between music and word further than Josquin had taken it. They found their ideal territory not in the mass or the motet, but in a new, intimate, passionate genre born in Italy — one that would take musical expression into territory the Renaissance had never fully explored. It was called the madrigal. And its story begins in the next post.

"Other composers do what the notes allow. Josquin does what he wants." — Martin Luther, Tischreden (Table Talk), ca. 1538

Listening Suggestions

• Ave Maria… virgo serena — Josquin des Prez · the essential starting point; four voices that seem to breathe as one
• Mille regretz — Josquin des Prez · a chanson of perfect melancholy; said to have been the favourite song of Emperor Charles V
• El grillo — Josquin des Prez · the other face of genius: lightness, humour and virtuosity turned into play
• Stabat Mater — Josquin des Prez · to hear how grief can be beautiful without being sentimental