His revolutionary sound defined the Renaissance era. So how did we forget this Copernicus of music?
15 April 2021 • 5:00am
Every aristocrat and king wanted a piece of Renaissance composer Josquin Desprez
Five hundred years ago, the first great composer in classical music died. His name? Josquin, or possibly Gosse, or Gossequin, or Desprez, or de Prato, or a dozen other candidates. Like so many other things about this wonderful composer, even Josquin’s name is uncertain. We don’t even know when he was born – it may have been as early as 1440, somewhere near St Quentin in the Burgundian empire, or it might have been in the 1450s. What we do know is that he died in 1521, by which time he’d been provost for 17 years of a big church near where he was born. It was a final period of stability after a lifetime of travels in the service of the great and good of Europe.