ceci n'est pas un Josquin

I’m frequently drawn to questions of attributions and misattribution, and hope some of my findings will make it here eventually. Last Sunday I was singing a six-part Regina Caeli by “Josquin?”—this is how it is written in some editions, like the Yale Spizzwinks(?).

Evidently the owner of my copy disagreed about Josquin, for he or she wrote “not very likely” on the cover and “hardly, as if” on the title page. (The correction on the dates is probably correct, though). Examining other copies, I saw she was not alone; the director seems to have made a big point about the piece not being Josquin, and one chorister had even re-attributed it to "Zenfl." [These question-mark-free editions, incidentally, are the work of one Jon Dixon, sometime civil servant in the Ministry of Agriculture, who took early retirement to devote himself to editing polyphony.]

 

It seems the choir was told that the piece was in fact by Senfl, and that it, like Senfl's Ave Maria, was an elaboration of some earlier, four-part piece. This raised my eyebrows, for several reasons: first, I have a hard time seeing how the piece could be a rewrite of something in fewer parts, because the voices interrelate very tightly and two of them are in a strict canon. Secondly—Senfl? My only real knowledge of Senfl are some amusing German madrigals; I had never thought of him as a motet composer of the first order, that one might ever risk confusing with Josquin. But whatever the director said must have left quite an impression, for I found about four or five other copies insisting on “correcting” the cover of the piece. (I might note here that there are several considerably more spurious pieces in the choir library, none of which are quite so vehemently protested against in their markings.) I decided to look up the matter and summarize, for the benefit of those without JSTOR at their fingertips.

 This motet received its first modern edition only comparatively recently, in 1971, thanks to the work of Jeremy Noble (himself a fascinating character, if his obit is anything to go by.) Noble was nosing about in the music manuscripts of the Vatican library, an intriguing but frustrating resource: intriguing, because it contains much of the music written for and sung by the Papal Chapel, one of the most important musical institutions in Western Christendom. Frustrating, because a great number of the manuscripts got incompetently rebound in the eighteenth century and lost most of their titles and author names. Fortunately, Noble was able to find a catalog of the library’s holdings, dating from around 1685, before the eighteenth-century re-binders got their hands on everything. Unfortunately, almost everything in the library has been re-numbered since then. Fortunately (such is the see-saw of academic life) one can without too much difficulty use the catalog to work out what the old numbering system must have been. Unfortunately, some books have gone missing since then…and one also discovers that Panuzzi, the cataloguer, took some shortcuts here and there, like saying that a certain manuscript contains “eight Magnificats” (by whom?) or “several other hymns”. He also, faced with a not inconsiderable amount of music to index, made a fair number of obvious mistakes, naming somebody we know not to be the composer for a certain thing, or one who is not even the person named in the manuscript he is supposedly indexing, or failing to count the number of parts in a piece, and so on.

 All that said, the catalog mentions a series of four Regina Caeli antiphons in what is now Cappella Sistina MS 46, with the third one by “Jusquin”. MS 46 does indeed contain four Reginas Caeli, and all but the third have a legible attribution that matches the one given it by Petruzzi; the third, though, has had the name sliced off, although is is possible, but only just, that the bottoms of the letters that remain could be part of “Josquin.” It is not necessary, of course, and so this historical evidence is circumstantial at best. Stylistically…well, Josquin is stylistically hard to define, as he had a long and wide-ranging career; moreover, much of our dating of his work has had to be "stylistic," which in turn relies on having a date on which to hang that "style": famously, his Ave Maria motet was long thought to be composed for a very specific occasion in 1497, because it so exemplified a "humanistic" style that it simply had to be a late piece--only for scholars to discover that the piece was already known in Germany in 1476 and so was in fact one of his earlier works. In the case of the Regina Caeli, it isn't obvious--says Noble--that it couldn’t possibly be Josquin, and many of its distinctive features have analogues in other works by Josquin. Yet, it does feel a bit late, a sixteenth century piece rather than a fifteenth century one. Josquin’s work with the Papal Chapel, though, was from about 1486-1494 or so. So: why would a piece Josquin wrote while retired in France in the sixteenth century exist only in a singular copy in Italy, without achieving wider circulation?
Perhaps it isn't Josquin at all--Josquin, well, feels more modal, more prone to spare duets and trios, more harmonically rich. This was Noble’s revised opinion in 1991, walking back his earlier attribution. (After our compline, a man I had never met marched up to me to announce --despite not knowing the edition, reading the annotations about the manuscript, or even knowing it was a unicum--"that piece isn't Josquin, by the way." Everyone's an expert, I guess.) Yet one gets the sense that Noble still wasn't quite willing to give up his earlier attribution; as somebody who works with manuscripts, I can vividly imagine seeing the remnant of that cut-off name and trying to match it to the letters in "Josquin," and can't quite bring myself to believe that he merely imagined that aspect of his discovery.

Whatever the piece, it isn’t the work of a hack, though—it is a skillfully written piece, and at some level it doesn’t matter if it was Josquin or a younger successor. (One name floated about is that of Constanto Festa, who had a long career with the Sistine chapel and was very fond of Regina Caeli settings). But in *that* case, why would the piece be ascribed to Josquin both in the 1687 inventory and—perhaps?—in the manuscript before it was cut up? (Certainly, if there are descenders in the cut-off name, it is not “Senfl”, and I have no idea where this idea comes from.) The evidence that the piece is Josquin may be weak, but at least it's evidence, while there's no evidence for it being anybody else--certainly not Senfl, a through-and-through German sometimes considered a Protestant sympathizer, unlikely to have been preserved uniquely at the Vatican.

In other words, who bears the burden of proof: those who go against the places (such as they are) where the composer is named? or those who side with an attribution that is (at best) geographically and (at worst) stylistically/historically improbable? It doesn’t matter, ultimately, who wrote the piece, as long as it is good—which it is;  and perhaps we should thank the inept cataloguer for bringing the piece to our attention with his attribution, where it might otherwise have sat in anonymous obscurity.