目录

专辑简介

Josquin is known as the most adventurous composer of his time—the one who could turn his hand to any challenge. This restless, searching intellect is on display in every one of his Mass settings, yet few offer as great a contrast as Missa Gaudeamus and Missa L’ami Baudichon.
Missa Gaudeamus represents Renaissance artistry at its most intense. Largely based on the first six notes of a substantial chant melody, it deploys mathematics in a number of clever, but rewardingly audible ways. Written for the Feast of All Saints, this is high art. By contrast Missa L’ami Baudichon represents Renaissance artistry at its most skittish. Based on just three notes, which sound to an English ear distractingly like the opening of Three Blind Mice, it makes few demands on the listener outside enjoying a luminous C major sonority. This comes close to low art—a vulgar reference to female genitals comes twice in the French-language text originally attached to its very secular model.

Missa Gaudeamus seems to have come from the very middle of Josquin’s Mass-writing career. It was possibly the ninth of the eighteen settings standardly attributed to him; and was possibly written twenty years after his earliest examples and twenty years before his last. By contrast Missa L’ami Baudichon was one of the earliest settings he wrote, arguably the very first. In both the signs of experiment are to be found, but they are very different. In Gaudeamus Josquin only quoted the whole of the complete chant melody twice, once in the Gloria and once in the Credo, always in the tenor and usually in long notes, with a considerable degree of embellishment to its contours. It is unlikely that the average listener will be able to hear this as a coherent melody. However, in the remaining movements, he con centrated on the first six notes of the chant only, which he quotes sixty-one times in total. These snippets can almost always be heard, and hold the whole structure most satisfyingly together.

Prominent examples of this snippet come at the start of the Kyrie, Gloria and Hosanna, where all four voices enter with it, though in every case Josquin has filled in the leap of a fifth between the third and fourth notes in the chant with a scale. At the start of the Gloria the tenor, which comes last to the imitative scheme, once started sings nothing other than this phrase as an ostinato up to the first full cadence, forty-five bars later. In the Sanctus the snippet is sung only by the sopranos, dramatically high and sustained so that a new sonority, trumpet-like, is introduced.

However the real mathematical fireworks in this setting, as so often in Josquin’s Masses, are in the final Agnus. Here the snippet is quoted in every part in what has been described (by Willem Elders) as ‘a vertiginous series of transpositions’. The tenor starts the process with two straight statements (starting G), which lead to answers in the bass (starting D), the soprano (starting G) and alto (starting C). So far, so normal. However at this point the bass and tenor parts take over, unleashing a rapid series of quotations and canons, which are indeed dizzying. Josquin worked out that the six notes of the snippet can be made to overlap at a number of inter-connecting pitches, which cause the statements to fall by a third at each repetition (the bass proceeds from a statement starting on C, to one on A, to one on low F, while the overlapping tenor proceeds from G, to E, to low C). This low bass F is the only time the note is used in the whole setting, powerfully heralding a coda and the final close.

Other compositional highlights in this setting are the madnesses in the part-writing which suddenly break out at ‘Confiteor’ at the end of the Credo; and a similar rush of blood between the three solo parts at ‘gloria tua’ in the Pleni. And then there is the canon at the unison between two soprano parts—a gimell in all but name—in the second Agnus (track 17, at 1’11”). Josquin wrote more complicated canonic duets, for example at the second, but never one more beautiful.

The Missa L’ami Baudichon was probably written in France around 1475. The vulgarity of the original song makes it an unusual starting-point for a sacred work, yet despite this it survives in one of the Vatican choirbooks, where presumably it was sung as part of the liturgy. In the only source of the song to give the text, now in Verona, the rude word is simply omitted, though there is no doubt what it should be, since the song itself was often mentioned in contemporary poems about dance and the theatre. Its popularity may have stemmed from the extraordinary popularity of the name ‘Baudichon’, which is recorded in over eighty different spellings throughout Europe. Of pre-seventh-century French origin, it is derived from the word ‘baud’, meaning ‘joyful’, and was probably given as a nickname for a ‘lusty and swaggering youth’—fitting the context here rather well.

Missa L’ami Baudichon, like most of Missa Gaudeamus, is also based on a handful of notes, though in this case Josquin did little with them, except elongate them, transpose them (very occasionally), and turn them upside down. Josquin took a folk tune of surpassing simplicity, which originally was in triple-time and had the most obvious tripartite structure. The three fundamental notes are always repeated, either starting C or G; and just once—in the Credo—they are inverted, so the music seems to rise, where in the rest of the setting it inevitably seems to fall. They are almost always quoted in the tenor, very rarely giving rise to any counterpoints with the other voices, which is strange given how malleable these three notes could be made to be. The impression is one of a young composer keeping to a strict programme, just to see what can be made of it, for a kind of fun. Many luminous passages are the result, but perhaps the most remarkable—because unexpected—is the whole of the final section of the Credo, starting at ‘Et resurrexit’ (track 28) and covering 157 bars without break. The music never falters. Even though the tenor is always in long notes (and ends on an outrageous long-held high G), the surrounding phrases build and build to one of the most exciting ‘Amens’ in the repertoire.