Josquin des Prez

Josquin Lebloitte dit des Prez (c. 1450 – 1455 – 27 August 1521) was a composer of Renaissance music, who is variously described as French or Franco-Flemish. Considered one of the greatest composers of the Renaissance, he was a central figure of the Franco-Flemish School and had a profound influence on the music of 16th-century Europe. Building on the work of his predecessors like Johannes Ockeghem, he developed a complex style of expressive—and often imitative—movement between independent voices (polyphony) which informs much of his work. He further emphasized the relationship between text and music, and departed from the early Renaissance tendency towards lengthy melismatic lines on a single syllable, preferring to use shorter, repeated motifs between voices. Josquin was a singer, and his compositions are mainly vocal. They include masses, motets and secular chansons.

Josquin's biography has been continually revised by modern scholarship. He was born somewhere in what is now northeastern France or Belgium and by 1477 he was in the choir of René of Anjou, later probably serving under Louis XI of France. In the 1480s Josquin traveled Italy with the Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, may have worked in Vienna for the Hungarian king Matthias Corvinus, and wrote the motet Ave Maria ... Virgo serena, and the popular chansons Adieu mes amours and Que vous ma dame. He served Pope Innocent VIII and Pope Alexander VI in Rome, Louis XII in France, and Ercole I d'Este in Ferrara. Many of his works were printed and published by Ottaviano Petrucci, including the Missa Hercules Dux Ferrariae. In his final years in Condé, Josquin produced some of his most admired works, including the motets Benedicta es, Inviolata, Pater noster–Ave Maria and Praeter rerum seriem, and the chansons Nimphes, nappés and Plus nulz regretz.