The Messe de Nostre Dame
Introduction: Music for the Mass in fourteenth-century France
Machaut’s Mass is well known as the first polyphonic setting of the Ordinary of the Mass by a single known composer. (We’ll unpack that statement in a moment.) Because it is a “first,” and because we can attach a name to it, the Mass arguably gets more than its fair share of attention within Machaut’s compositional output. Still, it is a useful entry point to thoughts about medieval music, and medieval attitudes toward life and the afterlife.
Let’s start with that opening statement. The Mass can indeed be seen as a “first,” but only with qualifications. The Ordinary of the Mass refers to the sections that maintain the same text from day to day, as opposed to the Proper, which changes according to the day or season. More specifically, a musical setting of the Ordinary consists of the items that are sung to melodies, rather than simply recited to formulas: the Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Agnus Dei, and occasionally (as here) Ite missa est.
The foundational music of Christian worship in medieval Europe was Gregorian chant, which was monophonic, based on a single melodic line without accompaniment. Polyphonic (multi-voiced) settings of sections of the Ordinary can be found in an eleventh-century manuscript known as the Winchester Troper, but these focus on tropes added to the Kyrie and Gloria, rather than on the Ordinary texts themselves. In the early fourteenth century, settings of Ordinary items begin to appear. These pieces borrow from other styles, especially the motet, the nascent polyphonic secular song, and the conductus, a genre otherwise fading from the scene. The papal court at Avignon seems to have been a major center, but Italian and English examples survive as well.
For the most part, these early Mass movements appear to have been written independently, and they survive in the manuscripts in groups organized by text: a section of Kyries, one of Glorias, etc. Singers would draw on these small collections to compile the music needed for a specific service. Sometimes, a scribe would copy together a pair of musically-related movements (usually Gloria-Credo or Sanctus-Agnus), or even a complete cycle. An example of this kind of scribally-created cycle is the Tournai Mass, so called from its appearance in a manuscript now in Tournai. The six sections included here are not related musically, so they were almost certainly brought together by the scribe or someone else associated with the compilation of the manuscript. J. Dumoulin has argued that the Mass was brought together to serve for an endowment made in 1349 by Jean des Prés, bishop of Tournai, of a daily Mass in honor of the Virgin Mary, to be celebrated at a side altar in the cathedral.[1] The practice of such endowments was common, and, as we shall see, a similar motivation underpins Machaut’s Mass.
Machaut’s Mass, then, does not come out of the blue, but it is the first surviving example of a complete setting of all six sections of the Ordinary created by a single composer, not compiled from separate elements by a singer or a scribe. As such, it plants a seed that will bloom in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as composers create cyclical Masses of various types.
[1] J. Dumoulin et al., La Messe de Tournai: étude et nouvelle transcription (Tournai and Louvain-la-Neuve, 1988)
Let’s start with that opening statement. The Mass can indeed be seen as a “first,” but only with qualifications. The Ordinary of the Mass refers to the sections that maintain the same text from day to day, as opposed to the Proper, which changes according to the day or season. More specifically, a musical setting of the Ordinary consists of the items that are sung to melodies, rather than simply recited to formulas: the Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Agnus Dei, and occasionally (as here) Ite missa est.
The foundational music of Christian worship in medieval Europe was Gregorian chant, which was monophonic, based on a single melodic line without accompaniment. Polyphonic (multi-voiced) settings of sections of the Ordinary can be found in an eleventh-century manuscript known as the Winchester Troper, but these focus on tropes added to the Kyrie and Gloria, rather than on the Ordinary texts themselves. In the early fourteenth century, settings of Ordinary items begin to appear. These pieces borrow from other styles, especially the motet, the nascent polyphonic secular song, and the conductus, a genre otherwise fading from the scene. The papal court at Avignon seems to have been a major center, but Italian and English examples survive as well.
For the most part, these early Mass movements appear to have been written independently, and they survive in the manuscripts in groups organized by text: a section of Kyries, one of Glorias, etc. Singers would draw on these small collections to compile the music needed for a specific service. Sometimes, a scribe would copy together a pair of musically-related movements (usually Gloria-Credo or Sanctus-Agnus), or even a complete cycle. An example of this kind of scribally-created cycle is the Tournai Mass, so called from its appearance in a manuscript now in Tournai. The six sections included here are not related musically, so they were almost certainly brought together by the scribe or someone else associated with the compilation of the manuscript. J. Dumoulin has argued that the Mass was brought together to serve for an endowment made in 1349 by Jean des Prés, bishop of Tournai, of a daily Mass in honor of the Virgin Mary, to be celebrated at a side altar in the cathedral.[1] The practice of such endowments was common, and, as we shall see, a similar motivation underpins Machaut’s Mass.
Machaut’s Mass, then, does not come out of the blue, but it is the first surviving example of a complete setting of all six sections of the Ordinary created by a single composer, not compiled from separate elements by a singer or a scribe. As such, it plants a seed that will bloom in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as composers create cyclical Masses of various types.
[1] J. Dumoulin et al., La Messe de Tournai: étude et nouvelle transcription (Tournai and Louvain-la-Neuve, 1988)
Pages in this section: