The problem is that, as one wag put it a few years after the composer’s demise, “Now that Josquin is dead, he is putting out more works than when he was still alive” — the height of his fame, in the decades after 1500, coincided with the birth of music printing and the utter lack of copyright law, and many publishers found they could juice sales by slapping the great man’s name on other people’s music. Alex Ross spent much of this spring sitting in on Zoom seminars with two of the world’s top Josquin scholars, Joshua Rifkin and Jesse Rodin, watching students wrestle with determining whether a given work was genuine Josquin or not. – The New Yorker
