DESPREZ, JOSQUIN. — The foremost composer of the Netherlands, who lived in the second half of the 15th century, b. around 1450 in Hainaut, d. on 27 Aug. 1521 at Condé-sur-Escaut, canon and dean of the Cathedral Chapter. He was puer cantus in the collegiate church of St-Quintin and subsequently a pupil of J. Ockeghem, for whom he wrote a funeral lament (La déploration de J. Ockegem, 1495) and, in a broader sense, also a disciple of Dufay (v. : Cambrai 1465-70). At a very young age he went to Italy, where he carried out his principal activity, giving his art a character of melodic clarity, exquisitely Italian because of the admirable height of the expressive relations between word and sound, through which he resolved the contrapuntal complexity deriving from the artistic tradition of the Netherlands.
He is first found in Milan, at the court of Duke Galeazzo M. Sforza (1475), then in Rome as a singer in the Sistine Chapel during the pontificates of Innocent VIII and Alexander VI (1486-94), and thereafter 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). At the beginning of the 1500s he returned to Burgundy and settled in Condé-sur-Escaut, where he died. He was buried in the Cathedral, where his epitaph is preserved.
He composed Masses, motets, chansons françaises, etc., bringing together 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, throughout the two preceding centuries, had replaced or accompanied the voices, so as to become increasingly the classical and pure vocal polyphony a cappella of the glorious Italian 16th century.
His extensive production of sacred music is scattered among manuscripts in 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 by Petrucci (ibid. 1502, 1505, 1514), were subsequently reprinted in Rome by Giunta (1526). In modern editions, besides several 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.