Josquin was a towering figure in the development of musical composition. He was born in an area of France not far from Flanders, and was brought up very much in the Flemish musical tradition. Like many other composers from the region, he spent a good few years employed in Italy, and his music marries Flemish counterpoint with a more chordal, harmonically driven style that he encountered south of the Alps. The use of melodic motifs that would be imitated from voice to voice, creating artistic unity, was an increasingly vital structural element at the time.

At the same time, Josquin’s music, like that of many of his contemporaries, displays a greater concern than was previously apparent to tailor music to the particular texts being set. This means on the one hand fitting the music to the form of the words and the structure of the text, but on the other hand also being more aware of the sense – and therefore the emotional impact – of the words. An increasing amount of church music, and a significant part of Josquin’s output, took the form of motets, meaning settings of freely chosen texts rather than of the texts prescribed for the church’s liturgy (although of course those continued to be set as well). This frequently suggests a more personal connection to the words and a desire to express them.

Josquin’s music is such a happy marriage of the horizontal element – melodic lines – and the vertical, or harmonic, that it is important for singers to be aware of both, as well as of the expression that the composer appears to be aiming at. Thus the individual lines need to be shaped dynamically, in the light both of their overall structure and of the function of each note, and at times with the aid of textually guided emphasis, while also being aware of the concords (and sometimes dissonances) between the voices. These are important elements in the approach that the Art of Music tries to adopt.

A rather less important consideration, but one that the ensemble has always sought to bear in mind, is the way in which the Latin texts might originally have been pronounced. During the Renaissance, the pronunciation of Latin is known to have varied widely, being strongly influenced by local vernaculars. Some of the recordings here were made using a French style of pronunciation, appropriate to Josquin’s home region of Picardy, while others were simply performed using an Italianate pronunciation, such as is widely used by singers everywhere today but need not be a default choice.

However, it is rarely straightforward to decide which version of Latin is appropriate, as little is known about where and when Josquin composed particular works or who would have sung them. Even in the Pope’s choir in Rome – one of the choirs in which Josquin himself sang and for which he no doubt composed as well – there were for example many Flemish singers during the times in which he lived, and nothing is known about the approach that choirs adopted to this issue. Thus any decision on it is to some extent arbitrary.