Symbol and Ritual in Josquin's Missa Di Dadi

Abstract

The author examines one of Josquin's earliest cantus firmus Masses, the Missa Di dadi, composed on a tenor drawn from Robert Morton's rondeau, N'aray je jamais mieulx que j'ay. Surviving only in Petrucci's third book of Josquin Masses, the work is distinguished by its use of pictures of dice as proportional canons in the Tenor voice. This study demonstrates that the dice images and the original chanson text associated with the cantus firmus melody form a metaphorical ground plan for the composition, and are linked to contemporary liturgical ritual and to fifteenth-century readings of the Mass text. Musical relationships between Di dadi and the later Missa Pange lingua establish the authenticity of the early work, and illuminate the evolution of Josquin's musical personality and style over some thirty to forty years.

Beautiful Monsters: Imagining the Classic in Musical Media. By Michael Long. Berkeley, LA and London, UK: University of California Press, 2008. 311 pp. ISBN: 978-0-520-22897-9 (cloth); ISBN: 978-0-520-25720-7 (pbk)

“…Having written much about hybrid music between ‘high’ (sacred) and ‘low’ (secular) forms of that era (e.g. Long 1989), Long effectively incorporates his musicological methods into this book. Beautiful Monsters is thus doubly significant; it not only problematises the boundary between popular music and classical music, but also questions the disciplinary boundary between popular music studies and musicology.…”