YEARBOOK OF THE ALAMIRE FOUNDATION

FROM VARIETY TO REPETITION:
THE BIRTH OF IMITATIVE POLYPHONY *
Julie E. Cumming
McGill University
The emergence of pervasive imitation in polyphonic music in the decades leading up
to 1500 marks a major change in musical style. The kind of imitation developed in
the Josquin era dominated musical composition for the rest of the Renaissance in
almost every genre. In spite of its importance, however, there has been surprisingly
little discussion of how pervasive imitation evolved. I looked for a discussion of this
issue in all the major Renaissance text books (Reese, Brown, Atlas, Perkins, Sparks,
Strohm). 1 While all of them say that imitation emerged in the late fifteenth century,
and some say that it emerged first in Milan in the 1470s, none of them say how it
developed. 2 I am trying to trace the origins and development of pervasive imitation
in the decades before 1500, especially in the motet. 3 This article is a first stab at the
issues, and presents some hypotheses on the mechanisms involved.
What is pervasive imitation? It is imitation as used in the late fifteenth- and the
sixteenth-century motet, called pervasive because it pervades all the voices and the
structure of the work. Let us see how it functions at the beginning of a late fifteenthcentury
piece that achieved archetypal status in the sixteenth and twentieth centuries:
* Versions of this paper were presented at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, on November 2,
2001, and at McGill University, Montréal, on June 8, 2003, as well as at the 17th International Congress
of the International Musicological Society (IMS) in Leuven, August 2, 2002. I would like to extend my
thanks to the people who made it possible to present the paper in these various venues, and who provided
valuable inspiration and feedback, especially Thomas Brothers (Duke University) and Peter
Schubert (McGill University).
1 G. REESE, Music in the Renaissance, New York, 1959; H.M. BROWN, Music in the Renaissance,
Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1976, 2nd ed., with L.K. STEIN, 1999; A. ATLAS, Renaissance Music:
Music in Western Europe, 1400-1600, New York, 1998; L. PERKINS, Music in the Age of the Renaissance,
New York, 1999; E.H. SPARKS, Cantus firmus in Mass and Motet, 1420–1520, Berkeley, 1963;
R. STROHM, The Rise of European Music, 1380–1500, Cambridge, 1993.
2 See PERKINS, Music in the Age of the Renaissance, p. 514; and ATLAS, Renaissance Music, p. 252.
For some preliminary reflections on how imitation developed, see R. WEXLER, Simultaneous Conception
and Compositional Process in the Late Fifteenth Century, in P. HIGGINS ed., Antoine Busnoys:
Method, Meaning, and Context in Late Medieval Music, Oxford, 1999, pp. 389–398; and L. FINSCHER,
Zum Verhältnis von Imitationstechnik und Textbehandlung im Zeitalter Josquins, in Renaissance-Studien
Helmuth Osthoff zum 80. Geburtstag, (L. FINSCHER ed., Frankfurter Beiträge zur Musikwissenschaft,
11), Tutzing, 1979, pp. 57–72.
3 I am working on this with my McGill colleague Peter Schubert; we have a grant funded by the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. See also the work on imitation in the Mass by
Mary Natvig: M. NATVIG, Investigating Imitation in the 15th-Century Mass Ordinary, paper presented
at the conference Josquin and His Models: The Emergence of Pervasive Imitation, June 7–8, 2003,
McGill University, Montréal.
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