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>Another assumption was that Josquin’s career began in 1459, and hence that several of his most significant works might have been written as early as the 1460s. However, it has now been established beyond question that no document before the mid-1470s mentions Josquin as a professional musician (or indeed at all). Moreover, less than a fourth of Josquin’s works actually survive in sources copied before about 1500. The evidence of the sources thus confirms what is already apparent from other evidence, especially the virtual absence before 1500 of contemporary comments mentioning Josquin as a composer of any eminence. Simply put, his breakthrough as a composer is likely to have come only in the very last years of the century, about 10 years after Obrecht’s breakthrough in the late 1480s. And the corollary is inevitable: that the ‘later music’ in which Obrecht’s influence could have been apparent must include about half of Josquin’s oeuvre even if the influence was only posthumous.
>he thought early music research is a static field