There is a moment near the end of Josquin’s Missa L’homme armé super voces musicales — the Agnus Dei, voices dissolving into something that feels less like resolution than evaporation — when Cut Circle under Jesse Rodin achieves exactly the kind of stillness that most early-music ensembles merely describe in their liner notes. You don’t anticipate it. It arrives.
This two-disc set reconstructs the sonic world of the Sistine Chapel around 1490, and the ambition alone deserves acknowledgment. The papal choir of that period was arguably the most concentrated gathering of compositional talent in European history — Josquin not yet the towering legend he would become under Leo X, but already the dominant intelligence in the room, already bending polyphony toward something more psychologically searching than his contemporaries were quite ready to follow. Rodin and his singers understand this. They don’t flatten the repertoire into a unified stylistic surface; they let the differences breathe.
And there are real differences. Gaspar van Weerbeke — born in Oudenaarde, trained in the Flemish tradition, recruited to Milan by the Sforza before landing in Rome — is not Josquin. His “Dulcis amica Dei/Da pacem,” with its five-voice texture and those hemiolas folded into the fabric almost conversationally, has a warmth that’s almost Burgundian, even as the two-part passages open little windows of austerity. Cut Circle plays the contrast straight, without editorial nudging. The “Ave regina coelorum” is more sequential, more immediately satisfying — Weerbeke knew how to please a room — and the Agnus Dei from his Missa Princesse d’amourettes introduces dissonances that feel, even now, slightly unsettling, the cantus firmus drawn from a chanson so thoroughly lost to history that only the mass survives to mourn it.
Bertrandus Vaqueras is even more obscure. His “Domine non secundum peccata nostra” — placed on the first disc in deliberate juxtaposition with Josquin’s setting of the same text — is a useful lesson in what separates the good from the transformative. Vaqueras was a professional, a contrabass singer who joined the papal choir in 1483 and served it apparently until his death. His motet is competent, shapely even. Then Josquin’s version arrives, and the difference is not subtle. It’s the difference between a sentence and a revelation.
Marbrianus de Orto occupies a middle ground. The Gloria from his Missa ad fugam — the title announces the compositional procedure, strict canonic writing, no apologies — is more intellectually transparent than emotionally immediate, and Cut Circle renders it with appropriate clarity. Not everything here needs to be profound. The Sistine Chapel in 1490 was also a workplace, and these men sang a lot of masses.
The second disc belongs, finally, to the two great L’homme armé settings. The anonymous tune — that jagged, indestructible melody that composers used as a kind of shared compositional dare throughout the fifteenth century — appears first in a tiny fragment, then in a Dufay attribution (contested, possibly Pieter Bordon’s work) that frames what follows. De Orto’s complete Missa L’homme armé is given a clean, somewhat restrained reading; Rodin’s tempos are measured without being slack, and the ensemble’s blend is remarkably consistent across the long spans of the Kyrie and Credo.
But the Josquin — the Missa L’homme armé super voces musicales, in which the cantus firmus migrates through each of the six hexachord pitches across successive mass sections, an architectural conceit of almost frightening rigor — this is where the recording earns its keep. The intellectual scaffolding never feels like scaffolding. Josquin hides his machinery behind melody, and Rodin hides his scholarship behind sound. The Gloria has the energy of argument; the Credo the gravity of belief actually felt, not merely professed. And that Agnus Dei — yes, back to that Agnus Dei — achieves the kind of transparent, nearly sourceless consonance that makes you wonder where the sound is coming from, whether it’s coming from the singers at all or from somewhere between them.
There are competitors. The Hilliard Ensemble’s Josquin recordings from the 1980s still have their champions, and rightly — Paul Hillier’s group brought an austerity to this music that remains influential. Pomerium under Alexander Blachly has recorded the L’homme armé super voces musicales with particular scholarly care. Cut Circle brings something different: a sense of physical presence, of voices in a room together, that feels almost documentary. Less manicured. More alive.
The plainchant “Factum est silentium” — just over a minute and a half, dropped into the disc like a breath taken before the Josquin mass — is a small masterstroke of programming. It reminds you what these composers inherited, the long, unharmonized line that polyphony complicated and never quite escaped.
This is a serious, beautifully realized disc of music that too few listeners know. Rodin has built something here that stands on its own terms — not as scholarship with voices attached, but as music-making that happens to be scholarly. The distinction matters enormously. Essential.
