Josquin Desprez from the Renaissance to Silicon Valley

At Stanford University, in the heart of Silicon Valley, California, musicologist Jesse Rodin, in technical collaboration with Professor Craig Sapp, created the Josquin Research Project (JRP), a vast open-access database devoted to Renaissance music from roughly 1420 to 1520. The website does more than simply bring together digitized scores: it also allows users to compare them, listen to them, analyze them, and observe in concrete terms the way the voices interact in the motets, masses, and chansons of the Franco-Flemish composers. By combining traditional methods of musical analysis with digital tools, the JRP offers a new way of entering into the polyphony of the fifteenth century, both through the details of the writing and through an overarching view of the repertories. This dual approach runs throughout Jesse Rodin’s career, as both a scholar and a performer. In this interview, he looks back on his discovery of Franco-Flemish polyphony, his attachment to Josquin Desprez, the creation of his ensemble Cut Circle, and the research that continues, even today, to renew our understanding of the “Michelangelo” of musical art.

When and how did you discover Franco-Flemish polyphony?

Jesse Rodin: The story goes back to my childhood, when I sang in small choirs from the age of seven in New York. At first, because I am Jewish, I sang in small synagogue choirs, performing pieces that had absolutely nothing to do with the Renaissance, but which made me fall in love with choral music—a form of polyphonic music. It was only toward the end of high school that I discovered something that bore a distant resemblance to what one might call Renaissance polyphony. These were the Hebrew motets of Salamone Rossi, an Italian composer of the early seventeenth century, who notably wrote a collection of synagogue music for three to eight voices, fairly simple, yet still closely related to what we would call Renaissance polyphony. That is how I ended up studying at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia—or UPenn, as it is known—where there was a very strong early music program. I began singing with an ensemble called Ancient Voices, which I found very amusing. Then, by chance, in the spring of my freshman year, the ensemble was performing one of Ockeghem’s monumental works, the Missa “De plus en plus”, and I was assigned to the bass part without having the slightest idea what I was doing. Everything was very new to me and very difficult. The notation and the rhythms were difficult, everything was difficult and unfamiliar, and I had never sung a mass before. That was my first glimpse of this repertory.

After Ockeghem, it was Josquin who particularly captured your attention, eventually becoming one of your favourite subjects of study.

J. R.: Over the years, I became interested in many composers, and I wrote extensively about the music of what one might call the long fifteenth century, especially Dufay, whose music I have also recorded. Ockeghem remains a great love. But Josquin was the one who truly gave me my momentum afterward. I would say there are several reasons for that. I took a course with Lawrence Bernstein, a leading specialist in Josquin’s music and perhaps the most brilliant teacher I have ever encountered. He conveyed a kind of modern historiography that goes back to the great scholar Gustave Reese, author of Music in the Renaissance (1959), a foundational work to which we still refer today. At the time, I was still very ignorant. There was much that I did not understand about the way this music functioned, but there is, in Josquin’s writing, a directness and a simplicity. There is also a powerful rhetorical force, something new in the final decades of the fifteenth century, that struck me like a bolt from the blue.

You then moved elsewhere in the United States and continued studying the world of Franco-Flemish polyphony, but you also founded your own ensemble, devoted primarily to performing Josquin’s music.

J. R.: I was very fortunate. I completed my studies at the University of Pennsylvania and was then admitted to Harvard’s doctoral program. The department regularly invited leading scholars to give seminars: Peter Urquhart, David Fallows, Rob Beckman, James Haar, and Joshua Rifkin, who became, along with others, a very important mentor. So I was surrounded by these experts, or at least I had access to many of them. At the beginning of my fourth year of graduate study, I founded an ensemble. We had just attended an extracurricular seminar on the problematic sign of the “cut circle,” the circle crossed by a vertical line, and its meaning. We had read all the literature on the subject, and we all thought we understood what it meant, namely that it is a tempo indication, whereas modern ensembles tend not to pay much attention to these signs. In fact, they are extremely important, not only for establishing the meter of a piece—which we all recognize—but also for providing information about tempo and the relationships between tempos. It was on that basis that I named the ensemble Cut Circle.