Breakthrough. The New Yorker, Oct. 18, 2021.
Wagnerism
Neutra-Schoenberg
The Josef von Sternberg House, now destroyed.
The Austrian-born architect Richard Neutra, whom I write about in this week's issue of The New Yorker, arrived in Los Angeles well before the great wave of émigrés who fled Hitler's takeover in Germany and the subsequent Nazi invasions of Europe. He established himself in the city in 1925 and became an American citizen in 1929. Although he was Jewish, he seems not to have identified strongly with the sufferings of Jews back in Austria and Germany. The author Lawrence Weschler — who, as the grandson of the composer Ernst Toch, grew up in the émigré milieu — asked Dione Neutra about this in an interview for the UCLA Oral History Program: "Some people who were nominally Jewish became much more Jewish as a result of the Nazis coming to power . . . Was there anything like that going on with your husband?" Dione answered: "No, he was so overwhelmed through his, you know, trying to make a living, trying to keep his head above water, that I don't think that he was very aware of it." In this respect, Neutra was very different from Arnold Schoenberg, another Viennese native, who arrived in Los Angeles in 1934. Schoenberg re-converted in Judaism, removing the umlaut from his name in the process, and embraced Zionist politics. He had been fiercely prescient about the rise of anti-Semitism in Austria and concluded at a quite early date that Hitler was planning a Jewish genocide.
Given that disparity, and various other cultural differences, it's perhaps not surprising that no strong connection existed between Neutra and Schoenberg. Nonetheless, there were several interesting links between the two. Neutra may have encountered Schoenberg in childhood; according to the historian Thomas S. Hines, his brothers made music with the composer and his pupils. Then, in March 1913, Neutra attended the famous "scandal concert" at the Musikverein, perhaps the most violent event in the early history of musical modernism. Hines quotes a fascinating description of the event from Neutra's diary — a source I've seldom seen cited in the Schoenberg literature. It reads:
Right at the beginning, a few people began to bawl and scream, there was talking and yelling and knocking about. The rabble just had the feeling that there was someone to butcher in a cheap manner, someone there for the taking. It was . . . shocking to witness . . . At times I thought I would jump out of my skin. After the Schönberg symphony [the Chamber Symphony No. 1], which despite everything made an impression of power and of an artwork on me, a hellish racket broke out. In the second gallery, a few people were thrown out after hard scuffles. Berg's 'Lieder' were interrupted by roaring [and] neighing. Earlier [Adolf] Loos had almost engaged in acts of violence. Schönberg screamed threats into the auditorium. The 'Lieder' were completed. Then all limits broke. People challenged each other, were torn apart, screamed, laughed, howled. Arthur Schnitzler sat across from me in the second box. Someone yelled to the audience to behave in a civilized manner or leave. Someone yelled back 'rascal.' The former jumped down into the crowd, slapped the supposed man who had insulted him in the face. The whole assembly followed these acts anxiously. Then some more shouting. A uniformed commissioner screaming something . . . my whole body trembled out of rage. The musicians left the hall. The mob had succeeded in breaking up the concert.
Neutra appears to have witnessed the altercation between the writer Erhard Buschbeck and a doctor-composer named Viktor Albert, which led to a court case. Indeed, various witnesses reported that Adler had hurled the epithet "Lausbuben" at Bruschbeck, making the latter feel compelled to strike back.
When Schoenberg came to LA, he contemplated commissioning a house from Neutra. A 1936 letter in the Schoenberg archive, to the Viennese architect Heinrich Kulka, reports:
I will probably have the opportunity to build myself a house here, and you will understand how it pains me that Loos is no longer alive, or that I cannot ask one of his pupils, such as you, to do the job. I would nonetheless like to obtain a modern house and to that end I am in contact with two modern architects. One is an American, but the other is Richard Neutra, who comes from Vienna and whom you probably know. He is evidently also from the Loos circle and makes very lovely houses, even if he is consciously a little more doctrinaire than Loos, and not uninfluenced by Bauhaus principles. Still, he has, as ever, Viennese taste and knows what a creator needs.
Nothing came of that scheme. Schoenberg ended up settling in a roomy Spanish Colonial house on North Rockingham Avenue, where he remained until his death. Interestingly, he seems to have become closer to Dione Neutra's family — her parents, Alfred and Lily Niedermann, and her sister Regula Thorston— than to Neutra himself. The historian Thomas Hines told me that when the Niedermanns were living at the Kelton apartments, which Neutra designed, Schoenberg came to visit and apparently played their piano. And Raymond Neutra, the architect's son, passes along the fascinating information that Thorston, a trained nurse, went to the Schoenberg home to perform the emergency delivery of Lawrence Schoenberg, in January 1941. (Larry confirms as much, though he does not have a clear memory of the events in question.)
Neutra would undoubtedly have been delighted to take on a Schoenberg commission. Even more gratifying would have been the plum assignment of designing a house for Thomas Mann, the emperor of the emigration. In 1938, in advance of Mann's move to Los Angeles, Neutra took the great author on a driving tour of modernist houses, possibly including the Sternberg House and the Lovell Health House. Mann reacted negatively in his diary: "Kubischer Glaskasten-Stil, unpleasant." Later, Neutra is said to have pursued Mann so avidly that the latter became exasperated. Dione Neutra reports an incident at the house of the bestselling author Vicki Baum: "My husband cornered Thomas Mann and talked to him for at least a half an hour, and finally Vicki Baum sent somebody and said, 'For heaven's sake, get that Neutra off Thomas Mann's back. There are other people who want to talk to him, too.' And we were never invited again." The émigré architect J. R. Davidson built Mann's house instead — a sleek but in no way cubistic structure that now belongs to the German government. Nonetheless, some friendly contact remained; in 1949, Mann went to a gathering at the Neutra VDL House in Silver Lake, and in 1954, after he had returned to Switzerland, we find him reading an unidentified manuscript by Neutra — mostly likely Survival through Design, published that year.
I have the sense, reading anecdotes like the Vicki Baum story, that the élite émigrés found Neutra uncouth, vulgar, perhaps prematurely "Americanized." One can't discount the possibility that a strain of anti-Semitism affected his reputation: portraits of him as pushy, grasping, overambitious, etc., smack a bit too much of Jewish stereotypes. Consider the standard contrast that is made between Neutra and Rudolph Schindler: the one commercially oriented, fame-obsessed, the other a "pure" artist interested only in the pursuit of his art. Of course, Neutra undeniably possessed character traits that rubbed people the wrong way and did create a fair degree of resentment among colleagues. But accounts of him tend too much toward caricature. He was, like so many artists of his calibre, an acutely complex, contradictory individual.
As for Schindler and Schoenberg, I haven't seen any traces of a link so far, but I wouldn't be surprised if at some point or another Schoenberg had shown up at the famous bohemian house on Kings Road, even if its doings were not to his liking. He did go to a musical evening at the Silver Lake home of the critic Peter Yates, the founder of what became Monday Evening Concerts. That event took place in a roomy upstairs studio that Schindler had added to the extant structure. The house remains in artistic hands: it is occupied by the filmmaker and critic Thom Andersen, who created the astonishing documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself. If anyone could put the whole complicated story of Neutra and Schindler on film, it would surely be he....
Neutra + notes
Vanishing Act. The New Yorker, Sept. 27, 2021.
As the pandemic wore on, I was casting about for a project to pursue in Los Angeles. My sage editor, Daniel Zalewski, steered me toward the architect Richard Neutra, whose story I had been exploring as I delved into the German-speaking émigré world in L.A. The project ended up becoming a spring- and summer-devouring obsession, as I looked at around three hundred buildings from the outside and toured around fifty of them— not only the work of Neutra but also that of Rudolph Schindler, Frank Lloyd Wright, Irving Gill, J. R. Davidson, Gregory Ain, Raphael Soriano, Harwell Hamilton Harris, and others. Although I could make use of only a fraction of what I saw, the entire adventure proved richly rewarding — a deeper education in this vast, mysterious metropolis. Following my accustomed practice, I here offer an interminable and unreadable addendum to the published piece, together with heartfelt acknowledgments to the many people who helped me with the research. Piles of reading aside, the heart of the piece turned out to be my encounters with the original Neutra owners, of whom there are, I believe, no fewer than eight — although I never heard back from two of them.
Because so much of Neutra's work took the form of private residences, it's not so easy to see the best of it. The first stop for any LA-modernist tourist should be the Neutra VDL House, overlooking Silver Lake Reservoir. It recently reopened for tours. It's not a typical Neutra house by any means; the initial design was done in the early thirties, when Neutra was in his hardcore modernist phase, and it was then extensively redesigned after the original building burned in the 1963, with Neutra's son Dion having a considerable hand in the proceedings. If you walk just a little ways south on Silver Lake Boulevard, you can see the great cluster of houses that make up the Neutra Colony. These are the four houses south of Earl St., one house on the north side, and four houses on Neutra Place, just up the hill. You can easily combine such a visit with a walk around the hills just east of the reservoir, where there's a splendid display of R.M. Schindler houses and some choice examples of work by Ain, Harris, and John Lautner (whose Silvertop house crowns the ridge). Here's a Schindler walking tour for their Silver Lake area.
Back in June, I wrote an online piece about the pioneering gay-rights activist Harry Hay, the composer John Cage, and the old radical bohemian community of Silver Lake. That piece was a direct offshoot of my Neutra meanderings — I had noticed that the Mattachine Steps, leading up to Hay's historic house, are right next to the Neutra Colony. As it happens, Hay commissioned Gregory Ain to build a house for his mother, Margaret Hay, which is in the area of the Cahuenga Pass. Ain was a fascinating figure who began as a Neutra disciple but became bitterly disenchanted with the man. Closely aligned with radical circles, Ain designed houses with the explicit intention of foiling surveillance from the street. The clerestory windows at the Urcel Daniel House are high horizontal slits, so that the structure takes on the look of a machine-gun bunker — albeit one that opens up dramatically on the inside. Daniel, the secretary of the Los Angeles Newspaper Guild and a Communist Party member, later felt compelled to name names to the House Un-American Activities Committee. One of those she named was William E. Oliver, who lived in a Schindler house just down Micheltorena Street. Oliver, a drama and movie critic who co-founded the guild, stood fast against H.U.A.C. questioning in 1953. His daughter Noel Osheroff still owns the house; she and Frank Gehry were the only people I met who had memories of Schindler. Osheroff told me that Schindler struck her as being rather shy — contrary to his rakish reputation.
The other essential tourist destination is the 1922 Schindler house on Kings Road, which has been preserved thanks to the efforts of the Friends of Schindler House. Programming at the house is run by the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, LA, an outpost of the Museum for Applied Arts in Vienna, which also oversees two other Schindler buildings, the Mackey Apartments and the Fitzpatrick-Leland House. Beyond that, you can spend days driving around looking at modernist houses in the area of Los Angeles. Some of them aren't visible from the street, and of course no one should spend much time gawking at private residences. But a quick pass on foot or in a car does no harm. Bring with you David Gebhard and Robert Winter's An Architectural Guidebook to Los Angeles, the sixth edition of which is available from Angel City Press.
My chief guide, in print and in person, was the architectural historian Thomas S. Hines, long based at UCLA. His Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture remains the fullest account of Neutra's life and work. Barbara Lamprecht's colossal volume Richard Neutra: Complete Works can be seen on sturdy coffee tables in many Neutra homes; it occupies the place of honor in Ann Brown's house in Washington, DC. Lamprecht also has an excellent short overview, Richard Neutra (Taschen). I read most of Neutra's published writings: Survival Through Design, Life and Shape, Life and Human Habitat, World and Dwelling, Mystery and Realities of the Site, Nature Near, and his first book, Wie baut Amerika?, which devotes many pages to Schindler's Pueblo Ribera complex in La Jolla. I also consulted Arthur Drexler and Hines's The Architecture of Richard Neutra: From International Style to California Modern, Volker M. Welter's Tremaine Houses: One Family’s Patronage of Domestic Architecture in Midcentury America, Dietrich Neuman's Richard Neutra’s Windshield House, and Stephen Leet's Richard Neutra’s Miller House. Barbara Bestor's Bohemian Modern, a contemporary architect's ode to Silver Lake, helped me find several hospitable owners; David Schreyer and Andreas Nierhaus's Los Angeles Modernism Revisited interviews several of the same Neutra residents. Raymond Neutra, the architect's sole surviving son, sent me an unpublished article titled "The Subtle Secrets of a Neutra Design," in which he discusses the making of the Ohara House with his father's collaborator John Blanton.
I spent quite a bit of time studying the work of Schindler, without whom Neutra's story cannot be told. (David Coffey, who owns a 1930s-era Neutra house in Bakersfield, told me, "You're either a Schindler person or a Neutra person — you have to choose.") I read Robert Sweeney and Judith Sheine's Schindler, Kings Road, and Southern California Modernism, Judith Sheine's R. M. Schindler, Lionel March and Judith Sheine's RM Schindler: Composition and Construction, Elizabeth Smith and Michael Darling's The Architecture of R. M. Schindler, David Gebhard's Schindler, and Mitch Glazer's hugely entertaining 1999 Vanity Fair article, "Genius and Jealousy." Two other big books by Hines were indispensable: Architecture of the Sun: Los Angeles Modernism 1900-1970 and Irving Gill and the Architecture of Reform. For other architects who played prominent roles in Neutra's story, I read Robert Sweeney's Wright in Hollywood, Kathryn Smith's Frank Lloyd Wright, Hollyhock House, and Olive Hill: Buildings and Projects for Aline Barnsdall, Anthony Denzer's Gregory Ain: The Modern Home as Social Commentary, and Wolfgang Wagener's Raphael Soriano. Julius Shulman's Architecture and Its Planning is full of striking insights. I consulted three books by the critic Esther McCoy, who knew both Neutra and Schindler: Five California Architects, Piecing Together Los Angeles: An Esther McCoy Reader, and Vienna to Los Angeles: Two Journeys — the last a collection of Neutra-Schindler correspondence that is framed by a decided anti-Neutra bias. I also relished the pyrotechnic architectural writings of the British critic Reyner Banham: Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, A Concrete Atlantis, the collection A Critic Writes, and, a personal favorite, Scenes in America Deserta.
There's a small boom in scholarly studies of Neutra and architects of his generation. I garnered many insights from Beatriz Colomina's X-Ray Architecture, Sylvia Lavin's Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture, and two books by Alice T. Friedman: Women and the Making of the Modern Home and American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture. An important study by Todd Cronan is forthcoming. I also read Matthias Brunner's "Richard Neutra’s Ambiguous Relationship to Luxury," Arts 75 (2018); Simon Niedenthal's "'Glamourized Houses': Neutra, Photography, and the Kaufmann House," Journal of Architectural Education 47:2 (1993), pp. 101-112; Brett Tippey's "Richard Neutra's Search for the Southland: California, Latin America and Spain," Architectural History 59 (2016), pp. 311-52; and Barbara Lamprecht's “The Landscape Architect Cannot Come Later!” Richard Neutra’s Faith in Landscape," Eden 23:4 (2020), pp. 4-31. Gary Marmorstein's "Steel and Slurry: Dr. Philip M. Lovell, Architectural Patron," Southern California Quarterly 84 (3-4), pp. 241–70, is the chief source on the mesmerizing Dr. Lovell, who almost deserves a biography to himself. Incidentally, when I went to visit the restorer and architectural expert Josh Gorrell at the Lovell Health House on Dundee Drive — he'd been living there in a caretaker role, before the house's recent sale to Manuela and Iwan Wirth — he mentioned that he'd listened to an interview in which Lovell talked about the "Nazi" who lived across the street. This came from Esther McCoy's interview with Lovell, now in the Smithsonian archives. Some combing of newspaper archives yielded the information that for a couple of years Lovell's neighbor at 4601 Dundee Drive had been Georg Gyssling, the not fully Nazi-aligned German consul in L.A. Even more strangely, in the same period the gay film director James Whale had been living just down the street at the Villa Sophia.
For cultural and political background, I read Tom Sitton's Los Angeles Transformed: Fletcher Bowron's Urban Reform Revival, 1938-1953, Lyra Kilston's Sun-Seekers: The Cure of California, a trilogy of books by the suburban sage D. J. Waldie (Holy Land, Where We Are Now, Becoming Los Angeles), Emily Abel's Tuberculosis and the Politics of Exclusion and Suffering in the Land of Sunshine, George Sanchez's Boyle Heights: How a Los Angeles Neighborhood Became the Future of American Democracy, William Deverell's Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past, William Alexander McClung's Landscapes of Desire: Anglo Mythologies of Los Angeles, Richard Cándida Smith's Utopia and Dissent, Eric Avila's Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight, Michael Webb's Modernism Reborn, Norman and Dorothy Karasick's The Oilman’s Daughter: A Biography of Aline Barnsdall, Paul Karlstrom's On the Edge of America: California Modernist Art, 1900-1950, Michael Locke's Silver Lake Chronicles, Ellen Hoobler, Mark Nelson, and William H. Sherman's Hollywood Arensberg, Greg Hise's Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis, Daniel Hurewitz's Bohemian Los Angeles and the Making of Modern Politics, Ken Bernstein's Preserving Los Angeles, and Wim De Wit and Christopher James Alexander's Overdrive: LA Constructs the Future 1940-1990. Carey McWilliams's Southern California: An Island of the Land, from 1946, remains the best and most bracing book ever written about the region.
The former Hughes Auto Showroom.
For the grim story of the Mexican American villages of La Loma, Palo Verde, and Bishop — partly obliterated to make room for Neutra and Robert Alexander's Elysian Park Heights project, finally destroyed to make room for Dodger Stadium — I relied chiefly on Eric Nusbaum's wrenching history Stealing Home: Los Angeles, the Dodgers, and the Lives Caught in Between. I also read writings by the late Don Parson — his 2006 book Making a Better World: Public Housing, the Red Scare, and the Direction of Modern Los Angeles; his article "Los Angeles' 'Headline-Happy Public Housing War,'" Southern California Quarterly 65:3 (1983), pp. 251-85; and the posthumous collection Public Los Angeles: A Private City's Activist Futures — together with John H. M. Laslett's Shameful Victory: The Los Angeles Dodgers, the Red Scare, and the Hidden History of Chavez Ravine and Thomas Hines's essay "Housing, Baseball, and Creeping Socialism: The Battle of the Chavez Ravine, Los Angeles, 1949–1959," Journal of Urban History (1982), pp. 123–43. Robert Alexander's UCLA oral history, delivered to Lawrence Weschler, yielded striking comments. The LA City Archives supplied me with a copy of the minutes from the City Planning Commission meeting of April 26, 1951, a haunting document. The website Chavez Ravine: The Real Story gives a sense of what was lost; close study of the maps shows how you can walk through an area north of the stadium parking lots where remains of the old villages can be seen. Just last week, protesters took the field during a Dodgers game, carrying signs that said "La Loma," "Palo Verde," and "Bishop."
I'm very grateful to the following for their hospitality: Thom Andersen, Clara Balzary, Noah Baylin, John Bertram, John Brice, Ann Brown, David Coffey, Alberto Chehebar, Ruth Eliel and Bill Cooney, Susie Akai Fukuhara, Jocelyn Gibbs, Tom Hines, Elsa Hosk and Tom Daly, Catherine Jurca, the Leddy clan (Patricia Leddy, Claire Leddy, Michael Hackett, Richard Leddy), Dominic Mondavi, Laura Kuhns Moody and Scott Moody, David Netto, my sublime colleague Susan Orlean, Noel Osheroff, Andrew Romano (read his account of his gorgeous Schindler home), Sharon Salinger, Larry Schaffer and Magdalena Sikorska, Susan Sorrells, Elizabeth Timme and Hank Harris, Spencer Velazquez, and, above all, the magnificent Thelma Lager Huebsch and her children Hilary Cohen and Mark Huebsch. Much thanks also to Dana Balkin, Barbara Bestor, Gerard Bisignano (for showing me the Kaufmann House), Abbey Brach and Kevin Jew (for giving me a tour of the superbly renovated Hollyhock House and the under-renovation Residence A), Elissa Brown (for letting me see her documentary about the Windshield House), Paddy Calistro at Angel City Press, Michele Ciaccio and Emily Park at the Getty Institute (who supplied me with recordings of Tom Hines's Neutra-related interviews), Darrel Cowan, Todd Cronan, Bill Deverell, Crosby Doe, the staff of UCLA Special Collections (Simon Elliott, Courtney Jacobs, Molly Haigh, Neil Hodge), Sasha Frere-Jones (for supplying a Flea connection), Valentina Ganeva (whose Schindler documentary will be worth seeing), Frank Gehry, Paul Goldberger, Josh Gorrell, Jia Yi Gu at the MAK Center, Chris Hawthorne (who honored me by inviting me to be part of his Civic Memory Working Group), Michael Holland at the LA City Archives, Mary Jo Holmes, Gabriel Kahane (composer of the best Neutra song), Barbara Lamprecht, PJ Letofsky (for letting me see his Neutra documentary), Raymond Neutra (visit the website of the Institute for Survival through Design for Neutra's ideas about environmental implications of his father's work), Becky Nicolaides, Eric Nusbaum, Oscar A. Ramirez, Noam Saragosti at the Neutra VDL House, Andrea Schwan on behalf of Hauser & Wirth, and Ryan Soniat. Deepest thanks, finally, to Daniel Zalewski, copy-editor Andrew Boynton, and fact-checkers Anna Boots and Alex Brady.
Nightafternight playlist
New and recent releases of interest.
John Cage, Number Pieces; Apartment House (Another Timbre)
N’espérez plus mes yeux…: airs by Le Jeune, Guédron, Moulinié, and others; William Christie, Les Arts Florissants (Harmonia Mundi)
Clara Iannotta, MOULT, paw-marks in wet cement (ii), Troglodyte Angels Clank By, dead wasps in the jam-jar (ii); Michael Wendenberg conducting the WDR Symphony, Aurélien Azan-Zielinsky conducting L'Instant Donné, Enno Poppe conducting Klangforum Wien, Clemens Schuldt conducting the Munich Chamber Orchestra (Kairos)
Francisco Coll, Violin Concerto, Hidd’n Blue, Mural, Four Iberian Miniatures, Aqua Cinerea; Patricia Kopatchinskaja, Gustavo Gimeno conducting the Luxembourg Philharmonic (Pentatone)
Annea Lockwood, Becoming Air and Into the Vanishing Point; Nate Wooley, Yarn/Wire (Black Truffle)
When the Violin: works by Esmail, Salonen, Bach; Vijay Gupta (Vidya Projects)
Haydn, Piano Sonatas Nos. 20, 34, 51, 52; Paul Lewis (Harmonia Mundi)
Tyshawn Sorey, For George Lewis, Autoschediasms; Alarm Will Sound (Cantaloupe)
BariTenor: arias by Mozart, Rossini, Donizetti, Verdi, Offenbach, Wagner, Ravel, Orff, Korngold, and others; Michael Spyres, Marko Letonja conducting the Orchestre Philharmonique de Strasbourg (Warner, out Sept. 24)
Linda Catlin Smith, Through the Low Hills and Ballad; Apartment House (Another Timbre)
Ben Phelps, Mahler Symphony No. 5; The B Band (Cereal Music)
Herbert Blomstedt at Tanglewood
A Delicate Balance. The New Yorker, Aug. 30, 2021.
Eastman's Femenine
Florid Minimalism. The New Yorker, July 12, 2021.
Bookshelf
New and recent publications of interest.
Joseph L. Clarke, Echo's Chambers: Architecture and the Idea of Acoustic Space (University of Pittsburgh Press)
Micaela Baranello, The Operetta Empire: Music Theater in Early Twentieth-Century Vienna (University of California Press)
Eric Weisbard, Songbooks: The Literature of American Popular Music (Duke UP)
Susan Tomes, The Piano: A History in 100 Pieces (Yale UP)
Humphrey Burton, In My Own Time: An Autobiography (Boydell)
Chris Walton, Richard Wagner’s Essays on Conducting: A New Translation with Critical Commentary (University of Rochester Press)
Douglas W. Shadle, Antonín Dvořák's New World Symphony (Oxford UP)
Liz Brown, Twilight Man: Love and Ruin in the Shadows of Hollywood and the Clark Empire (Penguin)
Josquin
Opus One. The New Yorker, June 21, 2021.
Also: A Listening Guide to Josquin Desprez.
Some acknowledgments: I'm grateful first and foremost to Jesse Rodin and Joshua Rifkin, for inviting me into their genially duelling West Coast / East Coast Josquin seminars and for answering innumerable elementary questions. I also learned from the Josquin experts, veteran and rising, who were in attendance at the seminars: Fabrice Fitch, Peter Urquhart, Donald Greig, Emily Zazulia, John Milsom, Wolfgang Fuhrmann, Clare Bokulich, Brett Kostrzewski, Christina Kim, and Sam Bradley, among others. At The New Yorker, deep thanks to Nina Mesfin for checking the piece; Andrew Boynton for copyediting it; and, as ever, Daniel Zalewski for humoring my obsessions and guiding them toward readability.
Here is a rough summary of the scholarship that informed the piece. The principal modern resource for the composer's threadbare biography is David Fallows's Josquin (Brepols, 2009), a result of extraordinarily thorough research and keen musical insight. Not everyone agrees with Fallows's conclusions and suggestions — the notion that Josquin spent time in Hungary has yet to be widely embraced — but the book is indispensable. So is Richard Sherr's anthology The Josquin Companion (Oxford UP, 2000), which gives a comprehensive overview of the work; in my article, I paraphrase John Milsom's commentary on the Miserere in his essay on the five- and six-voice motets ("Like an experienced preacher, Josquin varies his voice according to the significance of the moment"). Willem Elders's Josquin des Prez and His Musical Legacy: An Introductory Guide (Leuven UP, 2015) is a concise introduction, though somewhat preoccupied with numerological speculation. Jesse Rodin's Josquin's Rome (Oxford, 2012) contains some of the sharpest, most vivid writing on the music to date. Edward Lowinsky's massive anthology Josquin des Prez: Proceedings of the International Josquin Festival-Conference Held at the Juilliard School at Lincoln Center in New York City, 21-25 June 1971 (Oxford UP, 1976) is a gorgeous object, but much of it has been rendered obsolete, particularly in light of the revision of Josquin's birthdate from c. 1440 to c. 1450, and its grandiose tone has aged poorly (“Though we are commemorating Josquin’s death, we are also rejoicing in his resurrection," said Claude Palisca in his opening remarks). If my principal research base, the UCLA library, had been open, I might have delved into Helmuth Osthoff's two-volume Josquin Desprez (Schneider, 1962-65), but, perhaps for the best, the doors were closed. Lacking access to the New Josquin Edition, I relied heavily on the repository of scores at the Josquin Research Project.
On fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century more broadly, I read or re-read the relevant chapters of Richard Taruskin's Oxford History of Western Music; Gustave Reese's classic tome Music in the Renaissance (ponderous in appearance, but absurdly rich in musical detail); more recent surveys by Leeman Perkins and Allan W. Atlas; Anna Maria Busse Berger and Jesse Rodin's Cambridge History of Fifteenth-Century Music, which encompasses much social and cultural history as well as musical analysis; and, hot off the presses, Fabrice Fitch's incisive Renaissance Polyphony (in the Cambridge Introductions series). Andrew Kirkman's The Cultural Life of the Early Polyphonic Mass: Medieval Context to Modern Revival (Cambridge, 2010) is also unusually broad in scope. I also explored some monographic studies of other composers of the period; particularly enlightening were Rob Wegman's Born for the Muses: The Life and Masses of Jacob Obrecht (Oxford, 1994) and Alejandro Enrique Planchart's Guillaume Du Fay: The Life and Works (Cambridge, 2019). I'd spent quite a bit of time with Ockeghem over the years, but Johannes Regis was mostly new to me: Fallows's "The Life of Johannes Regis, ca. 1425 to 1496," Revue belge de musicologie / Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Muziekwetenschap 43 (1989), pp. 143-72, sorts out the biography, and Sean Gallagher's notes to the superb Clerks' Group recording of Regis's complete extant works (Musique en Wallonie, 2010) fleshes out the picture. I also became bewitched by the often deliciously bizarre work of Alexander Agricola; Fitch's "Agricola and the Rhizome: An Aesthetic of the Late Cantus Firmus Mass," Revue belge de musicologie / Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Muziekwetenschap 59 (2005), pp. 65-92, is a bracing overview. As I mention in the piece, Emily Zazulia's Where Sight Meets Sound: The Poetics of Late-Medieval Music Writing is about to appear from Oxford; it's a fascinating examination of the notation of polyphonic works, showing how seemingly recondite formulas serve musical purposes.
Hundreds of scholarly articles address Josquin and related matters. The "cult of Josquin," the construction of his posthumous legend, has itself been addressed in various studies: Jessie Ann Owens's "How Josquin Became Josquin: Reflections on Historiography and Reception," in Music in Renaissance Cities and Courts: Studies in Honor of Lewis Lockwood, ed. Jessie Ann Owens and Anthony Cummings (Harmonie Park Press, 1997), pp. 271-80; Andrew Kirkman's "From Humanism to Englightenment: Reinventing Josquin," Journal of Musicology 17:4 (1999), pp. 441–58; Paula Higgins's "The Apotheosis of Josquin des Prez and Other Mythologies of Musical Genius," Journal of the American Musicological Society 57:3 (2004), pp. 443- 510; and four important articles by Rob Wegman: "From Maker to Composer: Improvisation and Musical Authorship in the Low Countries, 1450-1500," Journal of the American Musicological Society 49:3 (1996), pp. 409-79; "And Josquin Laughed...": Josquin and the Composer's Anecdote in the Sixteenth Century," Journal of Musicology 17:3 (1999), pp. 319-57; "Who Was Josquin?" in The Josquin Companion (pp. 21-50); and "The Other Josquin," Tijdschrift van de Koninklijke Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis 58:1 (2008), pp. 33-68. For a measured response to the critique of Josquin-focused studies, see Rodin's "Josquin and Epistemology" in the Cambridge History of Fifteenth-Century Music (pp. 119-36).
Joshua Rifkin adheres to a more traditional conception of Josquin's stature, though he avoids the overblown rhetoric of past generations. He has yet to issue a volume on Josquin, though a hefty one could easily be assembled from his many articles and papers. Two of the most significant are "Munich, Milan, and a Marian Motet: Dating Josquin's Ave Maria ... virgo serena," Journal of the American Musicological Society 56:2 (2003), pp. 239-350; and "Milan, Motet Cycles, Josquin: Further Thoughts on a Familiar Topic," in Motet Cycles between Devotion and Liturgy, ed. Daniele V. Filippi and Agnese Pavanello (Schwabe, 2019), pp. 221-338. Other articles of note are "Compere, 'Des Pres,' and the Choirmasters of Cambrai: Omnium bonorum plena Reconsidered," Acta Musicologica 81:1 (2009), pp. 55-73; "Musste Josquin Josquin werden? Zum Problem des Frühwerks," Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 74:3. (2017), pp. 162-84; and "A Black Hole? Problems in the Motet around 1500," in The Motet around 1500: On the Relationship between Imitation and Text Treatment, ed. Thomas Schmidt-Beste (Brepols, 2012), pp. 21-82.
I have a feeling that only attendees of the Josquin seminars are still reading (at best), but I'd like to mention other articles I consulted: Jaap van Benthem's "A Waif, a Wedding and a Worshipped Child: Josquin's 'Ut phebi radiis' and the Order of the Golden Fleece," Tijdschrift van de Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis 37 (1987), pp. 64-81 (source of the scandalous source of the probably-by-Josquin L'Ami Baudichon Mass); Bonnie J. Blackburn's "Josquin's Chansons: Ignored and Lost Sources," Journal of the American Musicological Society 29:1 (1976), pp. 30-76; Clare Bokulich's "Contextualizing Josquin’s Ave Maria ... virgo serena," Journal of Musicology 34:2 (2017), pp. 182-240; Theodor Dumitrescu's "Reconstructing and Repositioning Regis's 'Ave Maria... virgo serena,'" Early Music 37:1 (2009), pp. 73-88; Carlo Fiore's "Josquin Before 1919: Sources for a Reception History," in Josquin and the Sublime: Proceedings of the International Josquin Symposium at Roosevelt Academy Middelburg, 12-15 July 2009, ed. Albert Clement and Eric Jas (Brepols, 2011), pp. 215-40; Wolfgang Fuhrmann's "Josquins Hommage à Brumel? Zu Symbolik und Funktion der Missa Mater patris," in Polyphone Messen im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert: Funktion, Kontext, Symbol, ed. Andrea Ammendola, Daniel Glowotz, and Jürgen Heidrich (V&R, 2011), pp. 101-144 (the source of the Fuhrmann quotation in my piece); Eric Jas's "What Other Josquin?," Early Music History 33 (2014), pp. 109-142; Herbert Kellman's immortally titled "Dad and Granddad Were Cops: Josquin's Ancestry," in Uno gentile et subtile ingenio: Studies in Renaissance Music in Honour of Bonnie J. Blackburn, ed. M. Jennifer Bloxam and Gioia Filocamo (Brepols, 2009), pp. 183-200; Patrick Macey's Josquin's Miserere mei Deus: Context, Structure, and Influence (PhD. diss., University of California, 1985); Lora Matthews and Paul Merkley's chronology-exploding "Iudochus de Picardia and Jossequin Lebloitte dit Desprez: The Names of the Singer(s)," Journal of Musicology 16:2 (1998), pp. 200-226; John Milsom's "Sense and Sound in Richafort's Requiem," Early Music 30:3 (2002), pp. 447-63; Jesse Rodin's "Taking the Measure of Josquin" and "The Josquin Canon at 500" (both forthcoming); Pamela Starr's “Josquin, Rome, and a Case of Mistaken Identity,” Journal of Musicology 15 (1997), 43-65; Alanna Rophock Tierno's "The Lutheran Identity of Josquin's Missa Pange lingua: Renaissance of a Renaissance Mass," Early Music History 36 (2017), pp. 193-249; and Peter Urquhart's "Ad Fugam, de Orto, and a Defense of the 'Early Josquin,'" Tijdschrift van de Koninklijke Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis 62:1/2 (2012), pp. 3-27. On the matter of "O virgo virginum" and the R 142 source, see "The Many Names of Josquin in Bologna."
At the end of the piece, I ponder the question of anonymity in Renaissance polyphony. What do we do with pieces that are no longer securely attributed to Josquin? Laurie Stras's remarkable work on sixteenth-century convent music and the possible hidden authorship of female composers gives a sense of the worlds we don't know: see her "Voci pari Motets and Convent Polyphony in the 1540s: The Materna Lingua Complex," Journal of the American Musicological Society 70:3 (2017), pp. 617-96; her Women and Music in Sixteenth-Century Ferrara (Cambridge, 2018); and her notes to the Musica Secreta recording Lucrezia Borgia's Daughter (Obsidian, 2017), which Stras co-directed with Deborah Roberts. You can hear Stras in conversation with Will Robin on the podcast Sound Expertise. Will has also featured Jesse Rodin on his invaluable show.
