Music as a weapon for peace – Jean Mouton called into action

At a time when conflict dominates our news feeds, we do well to reflect on the role music has played since 1945 in keeping a lid on hostility between nation states and how it might again be useful for restoring peace. “Through music… [people] find an immediate bond in that common capacity to be moved by harmonies”, declared UNESCO Director General Jaime Torres Bodet at the establishment of the International Music Council as a “weapon for peace” in Paris in 1949.   ¹ While historians of international relations have regarded the role of music as something fanciful, preferring to focus on economic, social and political factors, musicologists have been more interested in analysing scores than the context in which they were created or how they were received. But lately there has been a shift towards examining the value of soft power versus hard, how issues might be resolved through mutual support rather than by force. 

The soft power of music has been appreciated and utilised for centuries: Italian princes in the 17th century understood the persuasive value of an evening at the opera for that troublesome foreign delegation. And before the birth of opera, court composers were relied on to set the mood with the right kind of music, making use of carefully chosen texts, to suit a range of state occasions. French court composer Jean Mouton, in his later life, became the go-to composer for French and Italian state occasions alike. ²

That Mouton’s contemporaries held him in the highest regard can be seen from his placing in the list of leading figures from French musical life of the 15th and early 16th centuries playfully identified in Pierre Moulu’s “musician motet” Mater floreat (1517). Part one ends with “Josquin incomparabilis/ Bravium accipat” (May incomparable Josquin/ receive the prize), while part two ends “Mouton cum vellere aura” (Mouton with the golden fleece), joining in with all those named to “give honour to the king and queen with strings and organ”. ³ The Greek legend of the golden fleece is well-known but in many folk traditions the fleece has magical properties associated with kinship, prosperity and authority. Those are the qualities celebrated in the senior figure of Mouton, rather than a cheeky pun on his ovine surname.

Mouton’s motet Nesciens mater virgo virum is rightly celebrated as a tour-de-force of contrapuntal wizardry, being a quadruple canon at the fifth with a delay of two bars, but the context of its creation and how it may have been intended to be received are equally fascinating. Mouton had been associated with the French Court since 1502 and by 1509, now in his fifties, was its principal composer. They were turbulent times and amidst the spiritual and cultural turmoil (Reformation, more plague, protracted wars), a motet like Nesciens mater stands out as a rare moment of clarity. It first appears in the summer of 1518 in a compilation of fifty-three motets by twenty-one composers, all but one French or Flemish, that became known as the Medici Codex. Why, as an Italian product, was there only one Italian composer included: Costanzo Festa? Everything French was the fashion at the time in the Italian states and there was a good political reason why its curation glorified the French masters. ⁴

Sources differ about the origin of the Medici Codex but I think it is plausible to think that it was conceived by Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici for Pope Leo X, his cousin, as a portrait of the Pope in music. Both cousins were patrons of the arts and Leo himself was a composer and singer of note. Many of the texts used in the motets can be related in some way to Pope Leo who readily identified himself as a John the Baptist or Nativity figure. Such a compilation would then be most suitable as a diplomatic gift to be bestowed on his nephew, Lorenzo II de’ Medici, Duke of Urbino and his noble French bride, Madeleine de la Tour d’Auvergne. The gift of the Medici Codex, along with other lavish items, was delivered not at the wedding itself, but during a week of celebrations three months later in Florence, as Tim Shephard explains: ⁵

As soon as news arrived on 18 August that Lorenzo and Madeleine had reached Lombardy on their journey home, the [groom’s] mother Alfonsina Orsini de’ Medici began making plans with the city government for festivities to mark their entry into Florence…. A letter written by Alfonsina to Lorenzo’s chancellor Giovanni da Poppi, offers a rather striking detail [about September 8th, day two of the festivities]: ‘‘And at sunset, they went inside [the Palazzo Medici] to rest a bit and at one half-hour past sunset began the performance of a comedy. . . . The comedy having been finished and they having rested a bit inside, all the young women from this morning went to dinner and the duchess with them and after dinner we didn’t wish to dance. I have to tell you that [her husband] the duke had the portrait of his Holiness and the Most Reverend Monsignori de’ Medici and Rossi placed above the middle of the table where the duchess and other gentlemen and ladies were eating, and it truly brightened everything up.” …. knowing that he would not be present in person, Leo X may have wished instead to populate the event with his symbolic presence. Certainly the arrangement would have served to prompt — and perhaps even oppress — the revellers with the knowledge that Leo X was the architect of their happiness and success.

The Raphael portrait was another marriage gift and Tim Shephard argues that In view of the considerable social gap between the Medici and the French monarchy, it may well be that these collateral wedding gifts were intended to fulfil an obligation placed upon the Pope by Francis I’s gift of Madeleine herself.

It is not known if any of the music in the Medici Codex was performed at these festivities although after-dinner performances of music were commonplace. Given the amount of money Leo X spent on maintaining groups of singers and musicians, it seems inconceivable that some, if not all, of the motets would have been performed. ⁶

Also, by the time the newly-weds arrived in Florence it was already known that Madeleine was pregnant. The child-birth theme of Nesciens Mater fits a timeline of early summer 1518 for its composition although its complexity suggests it may have been something he’d made earlier. The extraordinary part-writing in Mouton’s setting of the Christmas antiphon Nesciens mater is more than another masterful exercise in the art of canon, for which he was renowned. Mouton may also have intended the motet’s intricate design as a charm to ward off ill-fortune, a flourishing of his golden fleece! Mouton would have been acutely aware of the numerous failed pregnancies and infant mortalities suffered by his former patron Anne of Brittany and elaborate designs, such as the SATOR square, a double acrostic, were associated in the medieval and Renaissance mind with magical properties that could, for instance, defend a person against rabies, insanity, or provide relief during childbirth – peperit sine dolore. We’re accustomed to the roles of priest and sorcerer being very distinct, but they were evidently more closely aligned at the time of Mouton. The Medici Codex itself is preceded by a table of contents that make up an acrostic: VIVAT SEMPER INVICTVS LAVRENTIVS MEDICES DVX VRBINI (May Lorenzo de’ Medici, undefeated Duke of Urbino, live forever). The acrostic is based on the first letter of title of a work by a composer either working in Rome or at the French Court at that time. ⁷ 

Sadly, the medicinal charms, if that was the intention, failed. Madeleine gave birth to a daughter, Caterina, on April 13th 1519 in Florence. Within a month both her parents were dead: Madeleine died on April 28th from puerperal fever and Lorenzo on May 4th.  ⁸ Caterina was first cared for by her paternal grandmother Alfonsina Orsini but she died the following year. After that the story of Caterina, later Catherine de’ Medici, mother of three French kings, becomes more involved than anyone at those wedding festivities, including Jean Mouton, could ever have imagined. ⁹

As for Jean Mouton, by the time the Medici Codex was compiled in 1518, he was already well-known to Pope Leo X. For his election to Pope in 1513 (slightly delayed on account of the discovery that although a cardinal since the age of thirteen, Giovanni de’ Medici had never been ordained!) Mouton composed Christus vincit . After the Battle of Marignano (September 13-14 1515), a French victory over Swiss and Papal forces, he wrote Exulta Regina Galliae (which appears as no. 18 in the Medici Codex). ¹⁰ In December of that year Mouton accompanied King Francis I to Bologna to a meeting that laid the ground work for the Concordat of Bologna (1516). For this meeting Mouton composed Christo canamus gloriam (no. 19 in Medici Codex) and Leo X awarded Mouton the position of Apostolic Protonotary. ¹¹

Another of Mouton’s motets Tota pulchra es (notable for its astonishing central cadence in the minor key) was preserved in a notebook belonging to Anne Boleyn alongside works by Brumel, Févin and Compère. This inclusion may have resulted from another landmark gathering at which Mouton is likely to have attended, the so-called Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520 where Henry VIII and Francis I bid to outdo each other in displays of opulence. Music played an important role: England was represented by William Cornysh and France by Sermisy. Some sources say Mouton was in charge of the French music, so if Mouton was present, did he meet Cornysh and is that how his motet ended up in Anne Boleyn’s notebook?

Mouton died in 1522 and was buried in what is now the Basilica of St Quentin; the tombstone no longer exists, but the inscription that was on it is known, here in translation: 

Here lies Master Jean de Hollingue, called Mouton, in his lifetime singer for the King, Canon of Therouanne and of this church, who died on the penultimate day of October 1522. Pray to God for his soul. A contemporary described Mouton as ‘Besides being gifted, he is the most humble man you could find and a good servant of God’. 

Mouton was one of the first composers to have an entire volume of his music published during his lifetime, another compilation being made in 1555. His legacy also lived on in the work of his star pupil Adrian Willaert who was influential in spreading the Franco-Netherlands style to Italy. Mouton’s importance to the musical diplomacy of his time, his “weaponry for peace” is clear to see: his relative neglect until recent times is hard to comprehend. Edward Lowinsky’s performing editions appeared in the 1960s following earlier research in America on the Masses. The Motets of Jean Mouton an AHRC funded research project at Southampton University led by Stephen Rice in 2011-2012 led to performances by his Brabant Ensemble, their CD on the Hyperion label and radio broadcasts, including an Early Music Show dedicated to Mouton. Peter Phillips and the Tallis Scholars released Renaissance Radio in 2013, featuring Mouton in the contemporary context of Josquin, Palestrina, Guerrero, Victoria, et al. The Gesualdo Six provided similar context with their CD Josquin’s Legacy in 2021. Owain Park made an arrangement of Tota pulchra es to mark the 500th anniversary of Mouton’s death and featured the original in Gesualdo Six’s 2024 album Queen of Hearts. Shorn of temporal diplomatic (and ‘medicinal’) soft power, today’s singers and audiences can marvel at the variety of harmony, counterpoint, texture, and speed of harmonic motion that Mouton achieved within the confined structure of Nesciens Mater, a motet  that, in Stephen Rice’s words, “fully deserves its reputation as one of the finest masterpieces of the sixteenth century”. Portsmouth Baroque Choir is therefore delighted to share in this company and to be augmenting latter day exposure of this important transitional figure in Renaissance music with a spatial performance of Nesciens Mater in the first half of this year’s Christmas Concert at the United Reformed Church in Havant on December 6th.

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