Description:
The transmission of Josquin's chanson Quant je vous voye (New Josquin Edition 27.32) appears to be problematic in various aspects: the transmitted text includes a confusing reading caused by a wrong verb, its poetic structure may suggest that the text is incomplete, and variances in text underlay between the sources make it difficult to understand the composer's intention in combining text and music. In 'Unravelling Josquin's Quant je vous voy' (Early Music, xli/4 (2013), pp.633-44) Marianne Hund and Willem Elders examined the chanson as published in the NJE, criticizing and confronting it with quite a drastic reworking by way of some added text lines and the removal of an 'unstylish' shift in modality. The present article, by one of the editors of the chanson in the NJE, re-evaluates the transmitted text, confronting it with the setting's layout, and proposes a quite different understanding of the setting's original conception.