Against a post-Enlightenment yardsick of order and balance a composer of Agricola’s sensibilities can only ever come up short; but the listener willing to be persuaded might (as some commentators already have) fruitfully set him against his contemporary Hieronymus Bosch, an artist similarly fired by unrestrained flights of invention and fantasy. In such a context of linear and discontinuous invention we might even start to experience Agricola like his contemporary Jean Lemaire de Belges, for whom he was ‘one hundred times brighter than quicksilver’. Check it out for yourselves:

For a composer with such a quirkily individual voice it is perhaps surprising how many of Agricola’s secular works constitute recastings (or textural augmentations) of songs by other composers. In many cases the floridity and wide ranges of the added voices strongly suggest instrumental performance and, if the division between ‘vocal’ and ‘instrumental’ in such music seems more blurred nowadays than hitherto, it is surely the case that many of these voices were habitually played rather than sung.

We open each half of this programme with precisely such reworkings of Okeghem’s famous song D’ung aultre amer. In our opening setting à 3, an alto voice singing Okeghem’s superius is wrapped in instrumental parts playing Agricola’s newly composed superius and bassus. By contrast, another setting after the interval combines the original tenor voice by Okeghem (but again sung by an alto) with parts by Agricola played by the instrumental consort.

The group of works which follows our opening number interact musically in ways which, we hope, will become evident when you hear them. Following the first item, Agricola’s famous Flemish song In minen zin (here presented on instruments) we set Agricola’s song S’il vous plaist with vocal parts on superius and bassus pitted against a second soprano on mute cornett; Allez regretz showcases the tenor of Hayne van Ghizeghem’s song—one of the pops of its age—alongside two parts by Agricola performed on instruments. While, as we shall see, Agricola’s famed prolixity finds its outlet of choice in larger-scale sacred works, he was not above introducing a song-like idiom in his shorter Mass sections. As you will hear, the Agnus II of the Mass based on In minen zin partakes of a similar idiom, with a more ‘vocal’ upper part, here sung by an alto voice, in tandem with two busier lower voices delivered on instruments. If you’re listening carefully you will notice that the pieces are linked by more than just texture, however, riffing as they do on similar motifs at their respective openings.

With no fewer than 30 manuscript sources, the clearly instrumental Si dedero counts as the most widely distributed piece of the fifteenth century. Its popularity spawned a series of apparent musical responses, of which we present two further examples in the course of our programme: Si sumpsero, variously ascribed to Jacob Obrecht and to Agricola himself but more likely the work of the former, and Si dormiero, by either Heinrich Isaac or Pierre de la Rue.

Surely no text outside the Mass has occasioned such a masterful range of musical responses as the Salve regina, and Agricola’s two settings would have to rank high on any list. Typically for their composer, though, their full glories can only be teased out by careful contemplation. The distinctive opening figure (lower neighbour note plus falling fifth) of the Salve regina chant in the superius of Salve regina II announces from the outset the venerable ‘Salve’ tradition, and chant paraphrase continues to pepper the texture throughout. But all is not quite what it seems: some 13 bars in, the tenor ushers in what must count as the era’s most emblematic musical dedication to the Virgin in the form of the tenor of Frye’s ‘song-motet’ Ave regina celorum. This eminently memorable song appears not only in multiple manuscript copies but even in three paintings (including one on the ceiling of a French chateau). Perhaps most tellingly, though, it functions as the opener of a number of chansonniers of the period, announcing the dedication not only of its text but also, ultimately, of the courtly songs that follow to the unattainable lady in heaven.

With this piece we enter the thick of the wayward and irregular setting typical of Agricola that Fabrice Ftch has memorably dubbed ‘rhizomatic’: the busy, breathless idiom already encountered in the songs makes its presence felt from the outset, but it alternates, with whimsical freedom, with a more placid approach that reaches a point of stasis in the chordal setting of the key words ‘Et Jesum’. There is a linear, ‘performative’ aspect to this music, but one that also admits of truly heartfelt response to the text: listen out, for example, for the yearning arabesques on ‘Ad te suspiramus, gementes et flentes’ (‘To thee we sigh, mourning and weeping’).

The two brief motets Sancte Philippe apostole (our next item) and O crux ave, in part 2, represent what must be the least known corner of Agricola’s output. With the motet to St Philip we encounter the typical imploration to a saint for intercession in the face of the damnation risked by fearful earthly sinners (listen out, amidst all the floridity, to the sudden musical gathering together on ‘et consociis tuis’ (‘and your companions’)). Set unusually for two pairs of voices an octave apart, O crux ave presents an almost Josquin-like clarity, with parts entering in regular imitative succession.

To that extent O crux provides a fitting scene-setter for the last number of our first half, Transit Anna timor, Agricola’s only big commemorative motet. With its ordered alternation of homophonic and polyphonic passages, the latter showing a marked propensity to imitation, Transit strikes such an obviously ‘Josquinian’ tone that, in the absence of its ascription, surely no-one would have guessed its authorship by Agricola. Perhaps its idiom (which hints at many similarly scored pieces by composers in French court orbit) can be put down to the likely cause of its composition. As accounted through its text by a counsellor of the French royal court, the motet celebrates the recovery, probably between 1503 and 1505, of the French King Louis XII from one of his recurring phases of illness. His consort, Anne of Brittany, is praised for her steadfastness while the King teetered between life and death, while Christ and the Trinity are acknowledged for vouchsafing the King’s elder daughter Claude, and thereby the stability of the realm. The political force of the inclusion of the King’s daughter is clear: with no male heir, Louis was at such pains to ensure the French succession that in 1501 he dissolved her betrothal to no less a magnate than the Emperor Charles V, promising her instead to the heir to the French throne, the future Francis I. A particular advantage of this putative dating would be to situate this work in the last years of the composer’s life, a dating arguably concordant with its (for Agricola) highly regularised presentation.

The basis of the Credo Je ne vis oncques on the tenor of the well-known (ultimately) Marian song of the same name (which we present as its prelude) seems just about the only ‘regular’ aspect of this almost shockingly individual piece. Here we enter the quintessence of Fitch’s ‘rhizomatic’ style, with its shifts between the wayward and regular occurring so unexpectedly and discontinuously that, in Fitch’s words ‘the ordinary is presented as extraordinary’ (listen out especially for the chordally enunciated ‘Et unam sanctam et apostolicam ecclesiam’ (‘and one holy and apostolic church’) near the end). This has to be one of the most exhilarating musical rides of the fifteenth century, one that frequently leaves singers as much as listeners feeling bewildered and stimulated in equal measure.

Although in some ways an obvious companion to the similarly expansive and discursive setting performed in the programme’s first half, Salve regina I has its own tricks up its sleeve. Its opening gambit with superius and tenor trading off a fast-paced and mesmerising descending sequence feels in retrospect like a smoke screen for the ensuing series of paraphrases of the model chant. Would-be performers of this piece are advised to find singers with powerful lungs to cope with the extraordinarily long phrases which the composer sends to test them. The main ‘party piece’ here, however, comes in the section (beginning on ‘benedictum fructum ventris tui’) in which the two lower voices are presented as a canon in inversion at the second or, as the rubric announces it, ‘facie ad faciem’ (‘face to face’).

We close the proceedings with two comparative ‘pops’. The popular Dutch song T’andernaken was clearly one of the hit tunes of its day. Cast as it was in polyphony by a host of composers (including, allegedly, even King Henry VIII) over a period of about a century, it was clearly de rigueur for Agricola to try his hand, which he did in the form of the exhilarating setting presented here by the three wind players. With the six-voice Fortuna desperata Agricola took the original three-voice song (by Busnoys or, more likely, the shadowy ‘Felice’) and added an extra contratenor and two bass parts to make a brilliant and festive capstone to our tour through the mind of one of musical history’s great originals.