To analyze Josquin is to confront, head on, the incommensurability between analytical systems and true artistic greatness. There is a sense in which approaching him with modern tools of dissection is catching sand in a sieve; no tool of deeper analysis — of the sort favored by composers and theoreticians from the common practice period to the present — will ever yield an entirely satisfactory understanding of his music. The analysis may indeed provide insight into the less fundamental levels of a works’ structure: motivic parsing may yield a facile understanding of the linear building blocks of a work, and the study of fugal techniques might explain, simply enough, the manner of their deployment. But all of this is on the surface. At the basic, “skeletal” level, an ordinary structural analysis turns up strangely blank. When we ask the most important question—the question of what gives the work meaning, direction, unity—the answer proves opaque. The explanation why follows an obscure path outward, through questions that are technical, linguistic, and finally philosophical.
There are probably three fundamental paradigms through which the deeper structure of music can be approached. These I will term, for the sake of this argument, the Schenkerian, the Schoenbergian, and the architectonic. Each must be carefully turned over, its relevance to the music of the early Renaissance deciphered, and the rest, for the moment, thrown out. From the remnants, and from a largely unguided study of the score of Josquin’s Missa L’Homme Armé Super Voces Musicales, I will attempt to construct a method which is technically and philosophically coherent with Josquin’s music. This, hopefully, will itself provide further insight into the score.