DESCRIPTION:
Mille regretz de vous abandoner
et d'eslonger vostre fache amoureuse.
Jay si grand dueil et paine douloureuse,
Qu'on me verra brief mes jours definer.
-Jean Lemaire de Belges

A thousand regrets for abandoning you
and for sending away your lovely face.
I feel such sorrow and painful grief
That it seems my days will soon dwindle away.

Josquin des Prez was a legend in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. His artistic genius made him the first celebrity composer, and the first to build a reputation based on publication. Josquin's seventy-one years of life saw a tremendous evolution in music composition away from the use of strict formal rules (formes fixes) toward a heightened form of rhetorical expression, with greater emphasis on expressing the meaning and emotion of the text in order to sway the hearts of listeners. Humanists believed that composers could not learn how to express in this way, but must be born with this ability, reflecting the Renaissance conception of innate genius.
Josquin's career began in Aix-en-Provence in the mid-1470s. Like many composers, he crossed the Alps and arrived in Italy in 1484. Here he was inspired by his contemporaries, such as his Roman colleague and fellow singer in the Sistine Chapel choir, Marbrianus de Orto.
Josquin was also influenced by his French contemporaries, whose chanson style suppressed declamation and rhythmic repetition in order to indulge a more linear elegance. While Josquin observed the formes fixes, the French poetic and musical forms with a set order of verses and a refrain, in his earlier works, he later preferred to compose with pre-existing musical material and often drew on popular music of the time.
The chanson Mille regretz is not based on pre-existing material, but it maintains Josquin's style characteristic of paired imitation: a duet is answered by a complementary duet as it reaches cadence. We hear this on the text "et paine douloreuse." Mille regretz is in E Phrygian. Josquin typically used 'mi' modes (today know as tonal center of E) for texts of lamentation and sorrow.
Josquin took a rhetorical approach to form; he composed his music to vivify the text. Congruent with a humanist rhetorician's ideals of clarity and power of expression, Josquin closely shaped his music to fit the contour of the words. In Mille regretz accented syllables in the text are on longer note values. A musical rhetorical technique Josquin uses is repetition and imitation for emphasis, which we hear at the end on "brief mes jours definer" ("my days will soon dwindle away"), which Josquin repeats three times in a contrapuntal texture. This phrase is especially poignant as a year after Mille regretz was published, Josquin died.
Compositional philosophies shifted during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries from hierarchical stratification with a foundational tenor part toward a full integration of musical space in which all parts were functionally equal. Parts function as equals in Mille regretz, but Josquin reminds us of compositional hierarchy of the past by elevating the tenor part in several ways. The tenor is the only part to not begin the piece and is the first part to sing the ending motif ("brief mes jours definer"). It is also the only voice to break the canon on the text "Qu'on me verra" by beginning on a note other than E.

-Lydia Lane Stout