Son of a town trumpeter, Jacob Obrecht became one of the most prominent composers in Europe in the late fifteenth century. In Born for the Muses, Rob Wegman enlarges our picture of the social and cultural conditions that framed his world, drawing on a wealth of new archival sources and a newly discovered dated portrait that sheds light on his development as a composer. Obrecht's greatest contribution lay in the field of mass composition. In a penetrating stylistic analysis, Wegman treats each of the thirty-odd surviving masses as a historical record, tracing influences and establishing a rich context for the development of Obrecht's musical language. This new assessment of his creative achievement and historical significance entirely changes the face of Obrecht studies and of late fifteenth-century music in general.

In the final decades of the fifteenth century, the European musical world was shaken to its foundations by the onset of a veritable culture war.At a time when composers like Obrecht, Isaac, and Josquin were bringing the craft of composition to new heights of artistic excellence, critics began to insist that art polyphony was useless, wasteful, immoral, decadent, and effeminizing. They campaigned aggressively to popularize those criticisms, challenging old certainties about music, and threatening its position in contemporary church and society. Their most effective slogans became critical commonplaces, ideas that left their mark in the writings of figures as diverse as Leonardo, Erasmus, Savonarola, Castiglione, and others.Yet defenders of polyphony struck back with a vicious counter-offensive, and for several decades music would remain a topic of bitter controversy. When the crisis had finally passed, in the 1530s, nothing would ever be the same again.The Crisis of Music in Early Modern Europe tells the story of this cultural upheaval, drawing on a wide range of little-known texts and documents, and weaving them together in a narrative that takes the reader on an eventful musical journey through early-modern Europe.