DESPREZ, JOSQUIN. - The greatest composer of the Low Countries, active in the second half of the 15th century, born around 1450 in Hainaut, died on 27 August 1521 at Condé-sur-Escaut, canon and dean of the Cathedral Chapter. He was a puer cantus at the collegiate church of St-Quentin and then a pupil of J. Ockeghem, for whom he wrote a funeral eulogy (La déploration de J. Ockegem, 1495) and, in a broader sense, also a disciple of Dufay (v.: Cambrai 1465-70). As a very young man he came to Italy, where he carried on his principal activity, giving his art a character of melodic clarity, exquisitely Italian in the admirable balance of expressive relationships between word and sound, with which he resolved the contrapuntal complexity that derived from the artistic tradition of the Low Countries.
He is found first in Milan, at the court of Duke Galeazzo M. Sforza (1475), then in Rome as a singer in the Sistine Chapel during the pontificate 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". In the meantime 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). In the early 1500s he returned to Burgundy and settled at Condé-sur-Escaut, where he died. He was buried in the Cathedral, where his epitaph is preserved.
He composed masses, motets, chansons françaises, etc., uniting in his art the stylistic peculiarities of the two currents, Flemish and Italian, in a compositional technique that ranges from the most complex architecture to the clearest and most melodic homophonic texture of the parts.
With D. vocal polyphony continues its emancipation from instruments, which until then, in the two preceding centuries, had substituted for or accompanied the voices, so as to become ever more the classic and pure a cappella vocal polyphony of the glorious Italian 16th century.
His vast production of sacred music is scattered in manuscripts of Rome (Vatican Library), Munich, Cambrai, the Major Seminary of Aosta, etc., and in prints of the period. Eight motets were published in Petrucci's Harmonicae musices Odbacatae (Venice 1501) and others in other collections; his masses, first printed with Petrucci's type (ibid. 1502, 1505, 1514), were later reprinted in Rome by Giunta (1526). Among modern editions, besides some fragments printed in various collections by Commer, Choron, Schering, Blum, etc., the edition of the complete works undertaken in 1921 by A. Smijers in Amsterdam, under the auspices of the Verening voor Nederlandsche Muziekgeschiedenis, is of fundamental importance.