To judge by their distribution among the surviving sources, Josquin’s masses seem to have circulated widely but unevenly: some are preserved in many manuscripts and printed collections, others in only a single one. Cn this evidence the Missa L’homme armé super voces musicales was one of the most popular; for it survives in about as many sources as the Missa Pange lingua, a frequency that is exceeded only by the Missa de beata virgine. But both of the latter are among Josquin’s latest works, while the L’homme armé mass, on internal evidence, is not. This is not the place to discuss the criteria for dating Josquin’s masses, which are complicated and sometimes conflicting, but the following features point to a comparatively early date (perhaps in the later 1470s):

a) relatively little attention to correct or effective declamation;
b) relatively little concern for the expressive meaning of the text;
c) adherence throughout to the structural primacy of the Tenor voice;
d) an emphasis on contrapuntal ingenuity.

Given the sixteenth century’s admiration for technical virtuosity, it may well be this last hzitnre of the work’s style that made it more poprilar than its more freely composed (and prohitbly rather later) companion-piece, the Missa L'homme armé sexti toni.
The technical ingenuities operate on at least two different levels. First there is the procedure that gives the work its title “super voces musicales”, which might be translated as “on the notes of music” or, in more modern terms, “at all the different pitches of the hexachord”. Since the time of Dufay there had been friendly emulation among composers of the Franco-Flemish tradition in composing masses based on the tune "L'homme armé". The majority of composers, following Dufay, chose to notate the tune itself (normally used as a cantus firmus in the Tenor voice) starting on G and with one flat (i. e. transposed Dorian); others, including Dufay’s Cambrai pupil Regis, chose untransposed Dorian, starting on D and with no flat. In both these versions the tune has a “minor” flavour, but Ockeghem, in his L'homme armé mass, preferred a “major”, or in modal terms Mixolydian, version starting on G with no flat; this is, incidentally, closer to our earliest surviving version of the tune, the chanson setting by Robert Morton. Josquin too, in his other L’homme armé mass, the one known as sexti toni (in the sixth mode), preferred a “major” version of the tune, though he achieved it in a subtly different way by starting on F with a flat in the signature. In his mass super voces musicales, however, he chooses to exploit all the ambiguities inherent in the melody by stating it at a new pitch in each successive movement, even though the surrounding polyphonic context remains essentially Dorian throughout. Thus in the Kyrie the Tenor starts on C, in the Gloria on D, in the Credo on E, in the Sanctus and Osanna on F, in the first Agnus Dei on G, and in the third and final one on A. As a result, although Josquin preserves precisely the same, slightly ornamented, rhythmic form of the melody throughout the mass, the disposition of tones and semitones within it changes with each transposition.
In the longer movements, moreover, he needs a longer tenor scaffolding than a single statement of the tune can provide; this he achieves by repeating it either backwards (Gloria) or in shorter note-values (Osanna) or both in succession (Credo). These manipulations are indicated in the earliest sources by more or less cryptic verbal instructions (“canons” in the strict sense); so too is the omission of all rests in the statement of the tune as it eventually comes to the top of the texture in the final Agnus Dei: “Clama ne cesses” say the manuscripts, evoking Ezekiel’s cherubim. The fact that the architectural framework of the mass is thus rigidly laid out is a further reason for accepting the unusual but not unprecedented omission in the text of the Credo (from “Et in Spiritum Sanctum” to “et apostolicam ecclesiam”) as Josquin’s original intention; certainly it seems to have been accepted as such by his contemporaries, since only a single source, a late sixteenth-century Sistine Chapel choirbook, attempts to make good the deficiency.
But apart from the unusual consistency of the Tenor scaffolding (the entire part could, at least in theory, be sung from a single written statement of the melody, if it were provided with appropriate “canons”) Josquin also shows his skill at canonic writing in the more modern sense, and that in one of its more demanding varieties, the mensuration canon (this being one in which the same melody is sung simultaneously at different speeds by different voices). Thus the three sections of the Kyrie treat the three sections of the “L’homme armé” tune as mensuration canons between the Tenor (which has it in long notes) and, respectively, Superius, Contratenor and Bassus; the Benedictus consists of three duets, each of which is a freely-composed mensuration canon at the unison, and the second Agnus Dei is a mensuration canon for three voices, at the fifth and octave. Such a parade of technical virtuosity (surpassed only by the Ockeghem of the Missa prolationum) might incline modern listeners to dismiss the work as dry or inexpressive, but in fact the boundless resource of Josquin’s melodic invention, the unflagging energy of his counterpoint, both contained within the firm architectonic framework, generate a purely musical momentum and excitement all their own, and help to explain why this mass was not only admired but performed long after his death. For the present performance a new edition has been prepared on the basis of most of the surviving sources; special weight has been given to the readings of Cappella Sistina Ms. 197, which appears to date from the period of Josquin’s employment in the Papal Chapel and preserves many features of the work’s original notation.
If the mass sums up the confident virtuosity of Josquin’s early middle age, the Passiontide motet Huc me sydereo shows all the hallmarks of his later style - above all a detailed concern both for declamation and for the expressive content of the verbal text. This is a poem in elegiacs by the Italian humanist Maffeo Veggio, in which Christ addresses the faithful as he hangs upon the cross: “From starry Olympus love made me come down, and here transfixed me with a cruel wound ... Love taught the Lord to wear the crown that pierced his head, and to bear heavy scourgings ... If you wish to show me signs of gratitude, understand above all: Love alone suffices me.” It is a measure of Josquin’s control over his melodic and harmonic resources that he contrives to underline the affective details of this moving text without recourse to any of the harmonic devices (suspensions, false relations) that would soon become the stock-in-trade of sixteenth-century composers. Instead he relies on melody, rhythm, tessitura. The long descending lines that depict Christ’s descent from heaven to earth; the subtle melodic emphasis on words like “crudeli”, “durae”; the repetitive rhythm at “verbera tanta pati” (“and to bear heavy scourgings”); the frequent pairing of voices (particularly the top two) in plangent thirds; above all the pervasive melodic figure of a pathetically falling third - all these make of this motet a masterpiece of high Renaissance musical pathos that never topples into sentimentality or sensationalism. And through the middle of the texture there runs, as an emblematic cantus firmus, the Holy Week antiphon “Plangent eum...” - “Let them lament him as a first-born son, for the innocent Lord is slain”. In this performance the extra Altus part, which appears in most but not all sources and is clearly not a part of Josquin’s original conception, has been omitted, as its unfunctional counterpoint tends to muddy the work’s transparent texture.
The two laments for Josquin that are performed on this record both appeared in Susato’s post-humous collection of his chansons (Antwerp, 1545), but it seems likely that they were composed soon after his death in 1521. Virtually nothing is known of Hieronymus Vinders, though the fact that the text he sets, “O mors inevitabilis”, was affixed to a portrait of Josquin that once hung in the church of St. Gudule at Brussels suggests that he may have been active in that area, and perhaps even have had some contact with the master in his last years at Conde. Gombert, who was for many years master of the children in the Imperial Chapel of Charles V, also seems to have laid claim to be a pupil of Josquin’s, though he must have been very young at the time. Both composers, in any case, evidently felt it appropriate to weave some features of Josquin’s style into their elegies upon him. Apart from such details as the characteristic descending scales (at “comprimat” and “ille occidit”), Gombert incorporates into his six-part texture a plainsong cantus firmus that Josquin himself had used more than once: “Circumdederunt me gemitus mortis...”, “The plaints of death are come around me, the pains of hell encompass me”. Vinders, more ambitiously, combines two cantus firmi in his sevenpart motet, including the Introit from the Requiem Mass that Josquin himself had used in his own elegy for Ockeghem some 25 years earlier. Even a minor composer is not debarred from feeling himself art of a reat tradition.