JOSQUIN DES PREZ. - The greatest composer of the Low Countries, who lived in the second half of the 15th century, was born around 1450 in Hainaut and died on 27 August 1521 at Condé-sur-Escaut, where he was dean of the cathedral chapter. He was a choirboy at the collegiate church of St Quentin and then a pupil of J. Ockeghem, for whom he wrote a funeral elegy (La déploration de J. Ockegem, 1495), and, in a broader sense, a disciple also of Dufay (v. Cambrai 1465-70). He came to Italy at a very young age, where he developed his principal activity, giving his art a character of melodic clarity, exquisitely Italian in the wonderful elevation of the expressive relationship between word and sound, with which he resolved the contrapuntal complexity deriving from the artistic tradition of the Low Countries.
He is first found in Milan, at the court of Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza (1475), then in Rome as a singer in the Sistine Chapel during the pontificates of Innocent VIII and Alexander VI (1486-94), then in Florence, Modena (1499) and Ferrara (1503), for whose Este court he composed the famous mass "Hercules Dux Ferrariae." Meanwhile, he had also been in Cambrai as director of the cathedral choir (1495-99) and in Paris in the service of King Louis XII (1500). At the beginning of the 16th century he returned to Burgundy and settled in Condé-sur-Escaut, where he died. He was buried in the cathedral, where his epitaph was preserved.
He composed masses, motets, French chansons, etc., uniting in his art the stylistic peculiarities of the Flemish and Italian currents in a compositional technique ranging from the most complex architecture to the clearest and most melodic homophonic texture of the parts.
With D. vocal polyphony continued its emancipation from instruments, which until then, in the two preceding centuries, had replaced or accompanied the voices, to become ever more the classical and pure a cappella vocal polyphony of the glorious 16th-century Italian tradition.
His vast output of sacred music is scattered in manuscripts from Rome (Vatican Library), Munich, Cambrai, the Major Seminary of Aosta, etc., and in contemporary prints. Eight motets were published in the Harmonica musica and Odeaton of Petrucci (Venice 1501), and others in other collections; his masses, first printed by Petrucci (there 1502, 1505, 1514), were later reprinted in Rome by Giunta (1526). In modern editions, besides some fragments printed in various collections by Commer, Choron, Schering, Blum, etc., of fundamental importance is the edition of the complete works begun in 1921 by A. Smijers in Amsterdam under the auspices of the Vereeniging voor Nederlandsche Muziekgeschiedenis.