Josquin des Prez
Youth

There is no documentary evidence covering Josquin's education or upbringing. Fallows associates him with Goseequin de Condent, an altar boy at the collegiate church of Saint-Géry, Cambrai until mid-1466. Other scholars such as Gustave Reese relay a 17th-century account from Cardinal Richelieu 's friend Claude Hémeré, suggesting that Josquin became a choirboy with his friend Jean Mouton at the Collegiate Church of Saint-Quentin; this account has been questioned. The collegiate chapel there was an important center of royal patronage and music for the area. All records from Saint-Quentin were destroyed in 1669, and Josquin may have acquired his later connections with the French royal chapel through an early association with Saint-Quentin. He may have studied under Johannes Ockeghem, a leading composer whom he greatly admired throughout his life. This is claimed by later writers such as Gioseffo Zarlino and Lodovico Zacconi; Josquin wrote a lamentation on the death of Ockeghem, Nymphes des bois. There is no concrete evidence for this tutorship, and later commentators may only have meant that Josquin "learnt from the older composer's example". Josquin musically quoted Ockeghem several times, most directly in his double motet Alma Redemptoris mater/Ave regina caelorum, which shares an opening line with Ockeghem's motet Alma Redemptoris mater.

Josquin could have been associated with Cambrai Cathedral, as there is a "des Prez" among the cathedral's musicians listed in Omnium bonorum plena, a motet by Compère. The motet was composed before 1474 and names many important musicians of the time, including Antoine Busnois, Johannes Tinctoris, Johannes Regis, Ockeghem and Guillaume Du Fay. The motet may refer to the singer Pasquier Desprez, but Josquin is a likelier candidate. Josquin was certainly influenced by Du Fay's music; the musicologist Alejandro Planchart suggests that the impact was not particularly large.
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