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MORALES, JOSQUIN AND THE L'HOMME ARMÉ TRADITION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 September 2011

Joseph Sargent
Joseph Sargent*
Affiliation:
University of San Francisco
*
Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

The expansive tradition of Renaissance L'homme armé masses often prompts considerations of how composers competed with, imitated or emulated one another. For fifteenth-century settings, written in close chronological proximity, such comparisons have yielded important channels of influence. But they are less effective in explaining L'homme armé masses from the mid-sixteenth century, written after this tradition's heyday and less immediately concerned with proximate influence. This article addresses the relationships between two pairs of L'homme armé masses by composers of two separate generations: Cristóbal de Morales and Josquin des Prez. Besides uncovering close links between these works relating to source tune treatment, mode, texture and overall style, it offers a new contextualisation for these practices. Morales does not compete with, imitate or emulate Josquin; rather, he reanimates the L'homme armé tradition by adapting features from its most renowned practitioner and translating them into a contemporary musical language.

Type
Research Article
Information
Early Music History , Volume 30 , October 2011 , pp. 177 - 212
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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References

1 Heinrich Glarean writes that Josquin des Prez's two L'homme armé masses were composed particularly as a display of his compositional skill (‘Ad ostentationem autem artis haud dubie duas illas Missas instituit L’homme arme'). See Glarean, , Dodecachordon (Basle, 1547), p. 441Google Scholar .

2 The tune functions in this manuscript as the tenor voice for a set of six masses. It further survives in the Mellon chansonnier as part of the three-voice combinative chanson Il sera par vous/L'homme armé, and in Johannes Tinctoris's Proportionale musices as a melody within a two-voice quodlibet, paired with O rosa bella.

3 Tinctoris, J., Terminorum musicae diffinitorium, trans. and annot. Parrish, C. (London, 1963), pp. 12–13, 40–3Google Scholar .

4 A comprehensive and still-useful introduction to many of these issues is Lockwood, L., ‘Aspects of the “L’homme armé” Tradition', Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 100 (1973–4), pp. 97–122CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

5 Dragan Plamenac, having discovered the Naples manuscript in 1925, presumed the tune to be the tenor of a polyphonic chanson, contrary to Otto Gombosi's concurrent view that the tune was a type of folksong. Several other scholars (most notably Leeman Perkins) have reinforced Plamenac's conclusion, though others argue for its status as a composed monophonic song. Reinhard Strohm calls it an imitation of a chanson rustique, while Alejandro Planchart suggests that the tune was intended as a parody of the Turks. For more on these arguments see Plamenac, , ‘La chanson de L’homme armé et le MS VI. E. 40 de la Bibliothèque Nationale de Naples', in Annales de la Féderation archéologique et historique de Belgique, Congrès jubilaire sous les auspices des Ministères des Sciences et Arts, des Affairs étrangeres et de la ville de Bruges (Bruges, 1926), pp. 229–230Google Scholar ; id., ‘Zur ‘L’homme armé-Frage’, Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft, 11 (1929), pp. 376–383Google Scholar ; Perkins, , ‘The L’homme armé Masses of Busnoys and Ockeghem: A Comparison', Journal of Musicology, 3 (1984), pp. 363–396CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Strohm, Music in Late Medieval Bruges (Oxford, 1985), pp. 119–21; id., The Rise of European Music, 1380–1500 (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 465–6; and Planchart, ‘The Origins and Early History of L’homme armé', Journal of Musicology, 20 (2003), pp. 309–12.

6 Lockwood's study of the L'homme armé tradition provides a useful summary of early views on this subject. Identification with Charles the Bold comes from David Fallows, Richard Taruskin and other scholars, who observe that the song was one of the emperor's favourites and may even have been composed for him. Among those equating the armed man with Christ, Craig Wright interprets retrograde presentations of the source tune in Agnus Dei sections of masses by Guillaume Du Fay and Josquin as a symbol of Christ's return. He further claims a dual symbolism with St Michael, particularly as evidenced by the Sanctus of Johannes Regis's L'homme armé mass. Planchart, meanwhile, suggests that different composers had different perspectives on who, if anyone, the armed man was meant to symbolise. He particularly identifies the combinative chanson Il sera par vous with Symon le Breton and an attitude of mock-aggressiveness. See Lockwood, ‘Aspects of the L’homme armé Tradition', pp. 97–122; Taruskin, , ‘Antoine Busnoys and the L’homme armé Tradition', Journal of the American Musicological Society, 39 (1986), p. 283CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Wright, , The Maze and the Warrior: Symbols in Architecture, Theology, and Music (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), pp. 175–192Google Scholar ; Planchart, ‘The Origins and Early History of L’homme armé', pp. 313–14; Taruskin, , The Oxford History of Western Music, i: The Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century (New York and Oxford, 2005), p. 485Google Scholar ; Gallagher, S., Johannes Regis (Turnhout, 2010), pp. 59–114Google Scholar ; and Kirkman, A., The Cultural Life of the Early Polyphonic Mass: Medieval Context to Modern Revival (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 98–134Google Scholar .

7 William Prizer outlines potential contexts for musical performance at meetings of the Order of the Golden Fleece and offers potential relationships between these events and several musical manuscripts in ‘Music and Ceremonial in the Low Countries: Philip the Fair and the Order of the Golden Fleece’, Early Music History, 5 (1985), pp. 113–153CrossRefGoogle Scholar . A subsequent study, on later meetings of this order, is id., ‘Charles V, Philip II, and the Order of the Golden Fleece’, in Haggh, B. (ed.), Essays on Music and Culture in Honor of Herbert Kellman (Paris, 2001), pp. 161–188Google Scholar . In the realm of liturgy, Flynn Warmington has identified several locales where priests wore armour and/or wielded swords during the Gospel reading, affording suitable possibilities for the performance of L'homme armé masses. Andrew Kirkman also stresses matters of liturgical appropriateness, viewing the L'homme armé mass as participating in a wide-ranging system of allegories embedded in the mass more generally, embodied particularly by the 13th-c. Rationale divinorum officiorum of Guillelmus Durandus, in which everything from vestments to liturgical actions helps to articulate the Passion of Christ. See Warmington, , ‘The Ceremony of the Armed Man: The Sword, the Altar, and the L’homme armé Mass', in Higgins, P. (ed.), Antoine Busnoys: Method, Meaning and Context in Late Medieval Music (Oxford and New York, 1999), pp. 88–130Google Scholar , and Kirkman, , The Cultural Life of the Early Polyphonic Mass, pp. 98–134Google Scholar . For more on notation and melodic length see Taruskin, ‘Antoine Busnoys and the L’homme armé Tradition', pp. 271–3, and Wegman's, Rob C. questioning of the 31 figure in a letter in response to Taruskin, ‘Antoine Busnoys and the L’homme armé Tradition', Journal of the American Musicological Society, 42 (1989), pp. 437–443Google Scholar .

8 Planchart suggests that the Du Fay mass was written before that of Ockeghem (around 1461), and that Philip the Good may have asked Ockeghem to compose his L'homme armé mass between 1461 and 1463, followed by works of Firminus Caron and Regis (1462–7), Busnoys and the Naples masses (1468 and later). Wright affirms that Du Fay composed the first L'homme armé mass in the late 1450s or early 1460s. Taruskin's theory that Busnoys both launched theL'homme armé mass tradition with his Missa L'homme armé (echoing an earlier suggestion by Oliver Strunk and a much earlier statement in Pietro Aaron's Toscanello of 1523) and also composed the six Naples masses has not found wide acceptance. See Strunk, , ‘Origins of the ‘L’homme armé’ Mass', Bulletin of the American Musicological Society, 2 (1937), pp. 25–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Strohm, , The Rise of European Music, pp. 466–471Google Scholar ; Taruskin, ‘Antoine Busnoys and L’homme armé', pp. 255–93; Wright, , The Maze and the Warrior, p. 175Google Scholar ; and Planchart, ‘The Origins and Early History of L’homme armé', pp. 327–56.

9 Lockwood introduced the notion of imitatio as it relates to Renaissance music. Howard Mayer Brown, in a classic discussion, noted that imitation implies a direct modelling of an older piece, often as a learning exercise. Emulation involves either the pedagogical process of a youthful composer working with models before achieving mastery or else a more deliberate effort by an established composer modelling a piece on the work of another master, in which case the effort can be seen as a gesture of either competition or homage. See Lockwood, , ‘On “Parody” as Term and Concept in 16th-Century Music’, in La Rue, J. (ed.), Aspects of Medieval and Renaissance Music: A Birthday Offering to Gustave Reese (New York, 1966), pp. 560–575Google Scholar , and Brown, , ‘Emulation, Competition, and Homage: Imitation and Theories of Imitation in the Renaissance’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 35 (1982), pp. 8–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar . Other studies of Renaissance imitation and borrowing abound, particularly as they relate to the rhetorical concept of imitatio; but for a more circumspect assessment of imitatio as a concept see Wegman, , ‘Another “Imitation” of Busnoys's “Missa L’homme armé” – And Some Observations on “Imitatio”', Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 114 (1989), pp. 189–202CrossRefGoogle Scholar , and Meconi, H., ‘Does Imitatio Exist?’, Journal of Musicology, 12 (1994), pp. 152–178CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

Especially pertinent to imitatio in Spanish Renaissance L'homme armé composition is the case of Francisco Guerrero, who in two versions of his Missa L'homme armé shifted from emulation of Cristóbal de Morales's five-voice mass as a student might emulate a teacher, to a sense of homage in the updated mass, which removes some but not all of his original borrowings. For a detailed study of Guerrero's processes see Rees, O., ‘Guerrero's L’homme armé Masses and their Models', Early Music History, 12 (1993), pp. 19–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

10 Even Robert Stevenson, whose seminal Spanish Cathedral Music in the Golden Age includes a chapter subheading on Morales's use of borrowed material, scarcely considers the L'homme armé tradition. The most detailed analysis so far is McFarland, A. S., ‘Cristóbal de Morales and the Imitation of the Past: Music for the Mass in Sixteenth-Century Rome’ (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Santa Barbara, 1999), pp. 96–109 and 141–57Google Scholar . Though occasionally referencing other composers and cultural contexts of the L'homme armé tradition, her analysis concentrates in the main on aspects of internal structure. Prizer, drawing on McFarland's research, claims that Morales's masses were probably composed for Charles V and connected with the annual St Andrew's Day celebrations that are associated with the Order of the Golden Fleece. Samuel Rubio's analysis of Morales's masses is largely taxonomic, charting such features as frequency of particular interval distances, patterns in the order of voice entrances, types of dissonance figures and types of cadences. For more on Spanish L'homme armé masses see, e.g., Rubio, , Cristóbal de Morales: Estudio crítico de su polifonía (El Escorial, 1969), pp. 35–191Google Scholar ; Rubio, , Juan de Anchieta: Opera Omnia, Estudio técnico estilístico y transcripción (Guipúzcoa, 1980)Google Scholar ; Llorens Cisteró, J. M., ‘El Ms. 40 de la Biblioteca Municipal de Oporto fuente única de la Misa L’home armé de F. Guerrero, Misa pequeña de C. Morales y de otras novedades', Anuario Musical, 49 (1994), pp. 75–102Google Scholar ; Cisteró, Llorens, Francisco Guerrero: Missarum liber quartus. Introducción, estudio y transcripción (Barcelona, 1996), pp. 16–20Google Scholar ; González Barrionuevo, H., Francisco Guerrero (1528–1599): Vida y obra. La música en la Catedral de Sevilla a finales del siglo XVI (Seville, 2000), pp. 410–416Google Scholar ; Prizer, ‘Charles V, Philip II, and the Order of the Golden Fleece’, pp. 171–3; and Knighton, T., ‘A Meeting of Chapels: Toledo, 1502’, in Knighton, (ed.), The Royal Chapel in the Time of the Habsburgs: Music and Ceremony in the Early Modern European Court (Woodbridge, UK and Rochester, NY, 2005), pp. 85–102Google Scholar .

11 Morales was hardly alone in this respect. Other known 16th-c. L'homme armé masses in Spain include those by Juan de Anchieta, Francisco de Peñalosa, two versions of Guerrero's mass plus a lost mass by Diego Ortíz. Outside Spain, later L'homme armé masses include works by Robert Carver, Mathurin Forestier (a work also attributed to Jean Mouton), Pierre de la Rue, Matthaeus Pipelare, Ludwig Senfl, Vitalis Venedier and two by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina.

12 Rees traces in great detail two sources of Guerrero's masses and his particular debts to Morales's five-voice L'homme armé mass. He illustrates that Guerrero's mass has strong relations with Morales's settings, becoming progressively enriched over the course of the composition, using the same variant of the source melody and other closely related material as well. James Haar, meanwhile, suggests that Palestrina knew the Morales masses despite the disparities in these composers' styles, since they both wrote four- and five-voice versions and many similarities in physical characteristics appear among the respective print editions. For more on these connections see Rees, ‘Guerrero's L’homme armé Masses and their Models', pp. 19–54, and Haar, , ‘Palestrina as Historicist: The Two L’homme armé Masses', Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 121 (1996), pp. 193–194CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

13 Though one of the two masses attributed to La Rue is anonymous in its source, most scholars accept an attribution based on stylistic features.

14 Though, as McFarland observes, Morales often introduces the opening notes of Credo I into his masses.

15 This process also belies the increasingly untenable claim that Morales was essentially a ‘conservative’ mass composer, strictly adhering to traditional compositional techniques. McFarland upholds this view in observing that Morales's masses ‘show a marked preference for older, in some senses archaic, types of construction’, noting his relatively sparse usage of parody technique and heavy concentration on four-voice masses, which lead to their occasional labelling as ‘conservative oddities’. More recently, Cristle Collins Judd has argued that Morales's engagement with the Missa Si bona suscepimus, based on a motet by Philippe Verdelot, presents more novel manipulations of borrowed material than previously recognised. See McFarland, ‘Cristóbal de Morales and the Imitation of the Past’, pp. 5–6, and Judd, , ‘Compositional Approaches to Si bona suscepimus’, in Rees, O. and Nelson, B. (eds.), Cristóbal de Morales: Sources, Influences, Reception (Woodbridge, UK and Rochester, NY, 2007), pp. 123–140Google Scholar .

16 The five-voice mass had previously been published in Quinque missae Moralis Hyspani, ac Jacheti musici excellentissimi: Liber primus, cum quinque vocibus (Venice: Girolamo Scotto, 1540).

17 I am grateful to Bonnie Blackburn for her insight on the identification of these images. For more on this iconography see Stevenson, Spanish Cathedral Music, p. 57; McFarland, ‘Cristóbal de Morales and the Imitation of the Past’, pp. 50–1; Rees, ‘Guerrero's L’homme armé Masses and their Models', pp. 49–50; and Prizer, ‘Charles V, Philip II, and the Order of the Golden Fleece’, p. 172. McFarland further suggests that the Liber missarum primus might originally have been intended for Charles V, in the light of two masses contained therein with evident connections to the emperor (the Missa L'homme armé and the Missa Mille regretz; the former due to its associations with the Order of the Golden Fleece, the latter based on Mille regretz, a chanson described in Luis de Narváez's Los seis libros del Delphin de musica de cifra para tañer vihuela (Valladolid, 1538) as ‘la cancion del emperador’) but none of any apparent relevance to the volume's actual dedicatee, Cosimo de' Medici. See McFarland, ‘Cristóbal de Morales and the Imitation of the Past’, pp. 80–1. For more on associations between Mille regretz and Charles V see Rees, , ‘Mille regretz as Model: Possible Allusions to “The Emperor's Song” in the Chanson Repertory’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 120 (1995), pp. 44–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

18 McFarland, ‘Cristóbal de Morales and the Imitation of the Past’, p. 156.

19 Ibid., pp. 156–7.

20 Ibid.

21 See Stevenson, Spanish Cathedral Music, p. 57, and Haar, ‘Palestrina as Historicist’, pp. 4–5. One possible occasion was a visit by Charles V to Rome in Apr. 1536, at which he heard the Sistine Chapel choir. See Casimiri, Raffaele, ‘I diarii sistini’, Note d'archivio per la storia musicale, 1 (1924), p. 157Google Scholar .

22 These connections are detailed in McFarland, , ‘Within the Circle of Charles V: New Light on the Biography of Cristóbal de Morales’, Early Music, 30 (2002), pp. 330–332Google Scholar .

23 Cosimo's wife, Eleanora de Toledo, was the daughter of Pedro Álvarez de Toledo, and the duke himself owed fealty to the emperor. See McFarland, ‘Within the Circle of Charles V’, pp. 331. Samples of Morales's correspondence with Cosimo are published in Pietschmann, K., ‘A Renaissance Composer Writes to his Patrons: Newly Discovered Letters from Cristóbal de Morales to Cosimo I de’ Medici and Cardinal Alessandro Farnese', Early Music, 28 (2000), pp. 383–402CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

24 Notable omissions from the Sistine Chapel repertory include the mass by Obrecht, as well as those of the Naples manuscript. See Haar, ‘Palestrina as Historicist’, pp. 203–5. Further background on the Sistine Chapel's special devotion to L'homme armé masses and Vatican manuscript collections around 1500 appears in J. Rodin, Josquin's Rome: Hearing and Composing in the Sistine Chapel (New York and Oxford, forthcoming). I am grateful to Rodin for sharing an advance copy of portions of this work prior to publication. For more on editing and recopying efforts see Haar, , ‘Josquin in Rome: Some Evidence from the Masses’, in Sherr, R. (ed.), Papal Music and Musicians in Late Medieval and Renaissance Rome (Oxford and New York, 1998), pp. 213–223Google Scholar , and Rodin, , ‘Finishing Josquin's “Unfinished” Mass: A Case of Stylistic Imitation in the Cappella Sistina’, Journal of Musicology, 22 (2005), pp. 412–453CrossRefGoogle Scholar . For more on the Sistine Chapel's manuscript collection see the index to Llorens, , Capellae Sixtinae codices musicis notis instructi sive manu scripti sive praelo excussi (Vatican City, 1960)Google Scholar .

The Josquin copying project entailed adding a previously omitted “Et in Spiritum” section of the Credo and a si placet voice to the final Agnus Dei. For more on this project see Haar, ‘Josquin in Rome: Some Evidence from the Masses’, p. 217.

25 See Haar, ‘Palestrina as Historicist’.

26 A recent discussion of the Sistine Chapel's special cultivation of L'homme armé masses is in Rodin, Josquin's Rome. For more on ‘conservative’ elements in the 16th-c. Sistine Chapel's musical tastes see, e.g., Sherr, R., ‘Illibata Dei Virgo Nutrix and Josquin's Roman Style’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 41 (1988), pp. 434–464CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Dean, J., ‘The Evolution of a Canon at the Papal Chapel: The Importance of Old Music in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries’, in Sherr, (ed.), Papal Music and Musicians, pp. 143–150Google Scholar ; M. Brauner,‘Traditions in the Repertory of the Papal Choir in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries’, ibid., pp. 167–74; and Schmidt-Beste, T., ‘A Dying Art: Canonic Inscriptions and Canonic Techniques in the Sixteenth-Century Papal Chapel Repertory’, in Schiltz, K. and Blackburn, B. J. (eds.), Canons and Canonic Techniques, 14th–16th Centuries: Theory, Practice, and Reception History. Proceedings of the International Conference, Leuven, 4–6 October 2005 (Leuven and Dudley, Mass., 2007), pp. 339–355Google Scholar .

27 The most recently published tally of Morales's music credits the composer with twenty-three masses, compared with ten for Willaert, nine for Gombert, five for Carpentras and just two for Festa. For a complete accounting of Morales's masses and surviving sources, see Ham's, Martin worklist in Rees and Nelson (eds.), Cristóbal de Morales, pp. 362–370Google Scholar .

28 Palma de Mallorca, Biblioteca de la Fundación Bartolomé 6832, and Catedral de Toledo, BC 31. The work is known to have existed also in Treviso, Biblioteca capitolare della Cattedrale 1 at pp. 96–104, but this source was destroyed during the Second World War. A vihuela intabulation of the Et resurrexit, Benedictus and Agnus Dei appears in Miguel de Fuenllana's Orphénica lyra (Seville: Martin de Montesdoca, 1554).

29 Morales's only predecessors in composing a Phrygian-mode L'homme armé mass were Jacob Obrecht (a work conspicuously absent from Sistine Chapel sources) and Loyset Compère.

30 McFarland, ‘Cristóbal de Morales and the Imitation of the Past’, pp. 96–8, 100.

31 Pervasive ‘conspicuous repetition’ offers perhaps one of the clearest instances of stylistic differentiation between Josquin and his peers, none of whom uses this technique with nearly the same zeal. As Rodin observes, ‘composers other than Josquin simply do not write melodic lines as obsessive as his; and the few exceptions one can find often give the impression of having come about by accident’. For more see Rodin, , ‘Josquin and the Polyphonic Mass in the Sistine Chapel’ (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2007), pp. 232–234Google Scholar . For a listing of all instances of conspicuous repetition in Josquin's Missa L'homme armé super voces musicales and Missa Fortuna desperata see pp. 324–8.

32 These repetitions also feature in parts of the Missa Tu es vas electionis; this and the four-voice L'homme armé mass rank as the two masses most deeply inspired by earlier musical styles. The Missa Tu es vas electionis, which opens Morales's 1544 Missarum liber secundus (dedicated to Pope Paul III) and was clearly written for the pope, connects with L'homme armé in that they are the only ones to rely heavily on perfect tempus; it also consciously cultivates older techniques such as lengthy cantus firmi, open-fifth cadences and the use of polyphonic ‘extensions’ at ends of sections even after the cantus firmus is fully declaimed. For further analysis see McFarland, ‘Cristóbal de Morales and the Imitation of the Past’, pp. 130–40.

33 In addition to Rodin's exploration of Josquin's motivic manipulations, previous studies include Haar,‘Parody Technique in the Masses of Josquin des Prés’ (MA thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1954), pp. 57, 79Google Scholar ; Judd, C. C., ‘Josquin des Prez: Salve Regina (à 5)’, in Everist, M. (ed.), Music before 1600 (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass., 1992), pp. 114–153Google Scholar ; and Milsom, J., ‘Analysing Josquin’, in Sherr, R. (ed.), The Josquin Companion (Oxford and New York, 2000), pp. 431–484Google Scholar .

34 It should also be noted that both masses use the superius to declaim parts of this melody elsewhere in the mass, though not as a cantus firmus, and here yet another parallel emerges between the composers: Josquin and Morales both open their Kyrie and Sanctus movements by placing portions of the melody in the superius, in anticipation of the tune's cantus firmus entrance in the tenor. Marbrianus de Orto also placed the L'homme armé melody in the superius in his final Agnus, which may have influenced Josquin's practice in particular. For more on the connection between these composers see Rodin, ‘Josquin and the Polyphonic Mass’, pp. 353–6.

35 These dual sequential repetitions also appear at the close of other Morales mass movements. One prominent instance comes at the end of the Gloria of the Missa de Beata Virgine a 5, a work which, like Morales's four-voice Blessed Virgin mass, also shows a heavy Josquinian influence. For a detailed comparison between Morales's four-voice mass and Josquin's Missa de Beata Virgine see McFarland,‘Cristóbal de Morales and the Imitation of the Past’, pp. 158–86.

36 For a detailed comparison of mode and cantus firmus pitch levels from various Vatican sources see Rodin, ‘Josquin and the Polyphonic Mass’, p. 351.

37 As for other precedents in modal mismatches between a source melody and its surrounding polyphony, David Fallows observes practices in Du Fay's Missa Se la face ay pale and the six Naples masses where the final of the source tune in the tenor fails to match the modal final of the other voices. Rodin observes additional points of contact with the practices of Ockeghem and de Orto. Josquin's tune presentations on the six notes of the hexachord may compare with Ockeghem's Missa Cuiusvis toni and de Orto's L'homme armé mass, which quotes the cantus firmus on the pitches of g, a, b, c and d. Josquin's avoidance of conventional modal configurations thus represents both a technical tour-de-force in its own right and a highly creative response to de Orto's ‘incorrect’ modal designations. See Fallows, Josquin (Turnhout, 2009), pp. 148–9 and Rodin, ‘Josquin and the Polyphonic Mass’, pp. 338–9, 350–2.

38 Rodin, ‘Josquin and the Polyphonic Mass’, pp. 279 and 350–3. Josquin does this through a highly novel combination of ostentation and avoidance right from the opening Kyrie, introducing the first of his mensuration canons while simultaneously having the two voices (superius and tenor) sound together for just two bars.

39 In Morales's Missa Mille regretz, based on the superius melody of the source chanson, this tune is integrated rhythmically with the other voices rather than set off from them in slow-moving rhythms, and is customarily placed in the cantus voice. As McFarland observes, ‘It is rare to find Morales using his borrowed material so faithfully and so invariably, even in a cantus-firmus Mass; and here, placed in the first cantus, it is not just audible but inescapable’. The Missa Tu es vas electionis keeps the cantus firmus source melody largely in the tenor; rhythmically, it is distinguished by use of triple metre in all movements (though with internal duple sections for each) and a diminution/transposition of the source tune in the final Agnus after its initial presentation. For further analytical detail on these masses see McFarland, ‘Cristóbal de Morales and the Imitation of the Past’, pp. 110–40.

Of course ostinato technique is used to great effect in certain Morales motets (Andreas Christi famulus, Veni Domine et noli tardare and others), but in each case the ostinato is carefully planned, the melody retaining its precise shape and appearing at clearly specified intervals.

40 The Missa Tu es vas electionis comes closest to the four-voice L'homme armé mass in this respect, and not coincidentally these are the only two of Morales's masses to employ triple metre. But its simpler, shorter source melody offers fewer possibilities for rhythmic manipulation, as does the cantus firmus's absence over several lengthy mass sections.

41 As Blackburn has observed, ‘The [Missa L’homme armé super voces musicales's] fame in the sixteenth century lay not so much in the novelty of presenting the melody in various modes as in the complexity of the rhythmic notation, involving mensuration canons, augmentation, and diminution'. See Blackburn, , ‘Masses on Popular Songs and on Syllables’, in Sherr, (ed.), The Josquin Companion, p. 53Google Scholar .

42 Rodin, ‘Josquin and the Polyphonic Mass’, p. 279.

43 A thoughtful recent analysis of this section is Rodin, ‘Josquin and the Polyphonic Mass’, pp. 277–82.

44 Similar manipulations permeate other movements as well. In the Gloria, Morales presents the tune's A section using the same duple hemiolas against a prevailing circle mensuration. When the B section is presented in nearly identical rhythms to the source tune, the effect comes as somewhat of a shock. In fact, this is about as close as Morales comes to a faithful presentation of the tune. Two other outstanding examples include the Benedictus, where Morales indulges in a characteristic fondness for using a tune segment as an ostinato, and the Agnus II, where he places the tune in the cantus voice (which, as observed earlier, appears to be a direct imitation of Josquin).

45 Though the dating of Josquin's masses remains open to conjecture, the bulk of scholarly opinion suggests that super voces musicales came before sexti toni. The super voces musicales mass survives in VatS 197, dating from c. 1492–5, while the first extant source for sexti toni is JenaU 31, copied around or shortly before 1500. Rodin speculates that sexti toni may have been composed at the end of Josquin's tenure at the Sistine Chapel, around 1497–8, though he remains cautious about making chronology decisions on stylistic grounds. For further analytical and dating considerations of the sexti toni mass see, e.g., Reese, , Music in the Renaissance, p. 238Google Scholar ; Osthoff, H., Josquin Desprez, 2 vols. (Tutzing, 1962–5), i, pp. 164–166Google Scholar ; Haar, ‘Josquin in Rome: Some Evidence from the Masses’, p. 214; Blackburn, ‘Masses on Popular Songs’, pp. 62–9; and Rodin, ‘Josquin and the Polyphonic Mass’, pp. 222–4 and 335–7.

46 Connections between these masses extend to other areas as well. Rees observes in his discussion of the Morales–Guerrero relationship how Morales in the Sanctus of his five-voice mass adds a new subject to the points of imitation present with Josquin's mass. He further suggests that Guerrero evokes Josquin's sexti toni mass in his Sanctus, using canons on the source tune in lower voices and a looser canon in the upper voices; and in his Agnus Dei, which includes a retrograde cantus firmus in the lower voices and certain melodic motifs from Josquin's mass. See Rees, ‘Guerrero's L’homme armé Masses', pp. 38–9.

It may also be no coincidence that the first printed appearance of Morales's five-voice mass (Scotto, 1540) occurs in a volume with several affinities with Josquin. This print includes five masses, each scored for five voices: Morales's L'homme armé and Missa de beata Virgine, plus Jachet of Mantua's Missa Hercules dux Ferrariae and Missa Ferdinandus dux Calabriae, and Jachet Berchem's Missa Mort et merci. Besides sharing three titles in common with Josquin masses, including a mass honouring Ercole d'Este I, both Jachet's works employ the soggetto cavato technique pioneered by Josquin, matching vowels in the honorand's name to notes of the hexachord. In features such as his deployment of soggetto, motivic borrowing and use of mensuration and canon Jachet owes clear debts to Josquin, a characteristic also found in several of his other masses and motets.

Several of the masses also have links to Charles V. Philip T. Jackson has suggested the text for the Missa Hercules dux Ferrariae published in this volume may not be original, as the cantus firmus notes fit uncomfortably with the name ‘Hercules vivet’, and posits Charles as a possible original name. The Missa Ferdinandus dux Calabriae is associated with Don Ferdinand of Aragón, Duke of Calabria, whom Charles freed from prison, later named viceroy of Valencia, and in 1526 joined for a double wedding in Seville in which Ferdinand married Germaine de Foix and Charles married Isabella of Portugal. For a detailed study of these two pieces see Jackson, , ‘Two Descendants of Josquin's “Hercules” Mass’, Music & Letters, 59 (1978), pp. 188–205CrossRefGoogle Scholar . For more on Ferdinand of Aragón and music see, e.g., Nelson, B., ‘The Court of Don Fernando de Aragón, Duke of Calabria in Valencia, c.1526–c.1550: Music, Letters and the Meeting of Cultures’, Early Music, 32 (2004), pp. 194–224CrossRefGoogle Scholar . For detailed considerations of Jachet's devotion to Josquin see Jackson, ‘Two Descendants of Josquin's “Hercules” Mass’, pp. 195–205.

47 McFarland, ‘Cristóbal de Morales and the Imitation of the Past’, p. 141.

48 As a cantus firmus the tune remains most often in the tenor, though with frequent migrations to the bassus and superius.

49 This blending of F, G and C statements permeates other movements as well, contributing further to the piece's modal destabilisation. When introduced in the Gloria at ‘Qui tollis’, the B section is presented in imitation across the five voices on all these pitches. In the Credo, the B section appears at ‘Qui propter nos homines’ in a full, cantus firmus-style statement – not on f′ but on g′, in altus I, while other voices declaim segments in imitation on F, G and C.

50 For a thorough discussion of these borrowings see Fallows, Letter to the Editor, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 40 (1987), pp. 146–8, at 147 n. 4, and Rodin, ‘Josquin and the Polyphonic Mass’, pp. 344–9.

51 Most prominent among the repetitions in other movements is the Kyrie II, where cantus, altus I, tenor and bassus engage in sequential repetition of motifs around the altus II's cantus firmus declamation of the L'homme armé melody.

52 Haar has commented on this impulse in relation to Palestrina's L'homme armé masses, composed even later than those of Morales and engaging with what he describes as characteristically Renaissance concerns with emulation and sensitivity to history. See Haar, ‘Palestrina as Historicist’, pp. 191–2.

53 For a recent commentary on this issue in relation to Josquin's super voces musicales mass see Rodin, ‘Finishing Josquin's “Unfinished” Mass’.