YEARBOOK OF THE ALAMIRE FOUNDATION

ANEW KIND OF PATRON
FROM VARIETY TO REPETITION: THE BIRTH OF IMITATIVE POLYPHONY
The reasons for an aesthetic change such as the shift from variety to repetition described
here are very difficult to establish. But perhaps we can connect it to changing
forms of music patronage in the second half of the fifteenth century.
Most of the leading mid-fifteenth-century composers of the generation of
Ockeghem and Busnoys lived and worked in northern France and the Low Countries.
They were trained in Northern choir schools, and were employed either by cathedrals
and collegiate churches, or by the King of France or the Duke of Burgundy,
patrons with vast amounts of power and few direct competitors. The arbiters of
musical taste in sacred music were churchmen and other musicians. Musicians
working in France and the Netherlands were therefore free to develop a highly complex
style of great beauty that is perhaps deliberately mysterious, or self-consciously
arcane: a music that valued varietas over repetition. Complex, difficult music in this
context could have been a sign of power and authority.
Most musicians of the Josquin generation, in contrast, spent much of their adult
lives working in Italy for Italian princes such as the Dukes of Ferrara and Milan.
These princes were in immediate competition with a substantial peer group. 32 In contrast
to the King of France or the Duke of Burgundy, the Italian princes had relatively
small holdings and sometimes tenuous claims to power and authority. They sought
to win people over, cultivate support, and make alliances. They may have wanted
motets that were easy for courtiers and envoys to understand and enjoy: music that
was more like the French chansons found in so many Italian manuscripts of the midto
late fifteenth century.
Music characterized by repetition is easier for a lay audience to process, and
easier to remember. As Leonard Meyer observes, “in music the existence of redundancy
… facilitates perception and comprehension”. 33 Ave Maria is much easier to
32 See STROHM, The Rise of European Music, p. 602 and ff., on the “three young rulers [who] must
have planned long beforehand to establish themselves in the great series of musical patrons”, Lorenzo
de’ Medici of Florence, Galeazzo Maria Sforza, duke of Milan, and Ercole I d’Este, duke of Ferrara.
On the competition between Ferrara and Milan see L. LOCKWOOD, Strategies of Musical Patronage
in the Fifteenth Century: The Cappella of Ercole I d’Este, in I. FENLON ed., Music in Medieval and
Early Modern Europe: Patronage, Sources, and Texts, Cambridge, 1981, pp. 227–248. The literature
on the Italian patrons is now vast; major studies include L. LOCKWOOD, Music In Renaissance
Ferrara 1400–1505, Oxford, 1984; P. MERKLEY and L.M. MERKLEY, Music and Patronage in the
Sforza Court, Turnhout, 1999; W. PRIZER, Music at the Court of the Sforza: The Birth and Death of
a Musical Center, in Musica disciplina, 43 (1989), pp. 141–193; A. ATLAS, Music at the Aragonese
Court of Naples, Cambridge, 1985; F. D’ACCONE, The Singers of San Giovanni in Florence during
the 15th Century, in Journal of the American Musicological Society, 14 (1961), pp. 307–358.
33 L. MEYER, A Universe of Universals, in The Spheres of Music: A Gathering of Essays, Chicago, 2000,
p. 292.
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