MACHAUT’S MASS AND ITS BACKGROUND
By a curious twist of fate, Guillaume de Machaut—best known in his day as a poet and, secondarily, as a
composer of courtly songs—is best known today for what seems an entirely uncharacteristic work: a
complete polyphonic setting of the Ordinary of the Mass. Machaut’s Messe de Nostre Dame (“Mass of
Our Lady”) is in fact the earliest such setting to survive from the hand of a single known author. What
might otherwise seem a liturgical anomaly in an otherwise basically secular career has instead loomed
disproportionately large both within Machaut’s output and in music historiography itself, because the
“cyclic Mass Ordinary” (that is, a setting of the mostly nonconsecutive items of the Ordinary liturgy as a
musical unit) became the dominant musical genre of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and Machaut
seems willy-nilly its prophetic harbinger.
The actual history of the polyphonic Mass Ordinary, while it might seem to diminish Machaut’s
legendary stature, is a much more interesting story than the myth of its single-handed invention by Machaut
might suggest. The rise of polyphonic Ordinaries was a by-product of one of the most turbulent periods in
the history of the Roman church—the phase during which, briefly, the church was not Roman.
AVIGNON
Until the fourteenth century polyphonic settings of the Mass Ordinary, or any part of it, were uncommon.
In eleventh- and twelfth-century Aquitaine, as we know, one could find occasional polyphonic settings of
the Kyrie. But these were fully “prosulated” Kyries, with syllabic verses that were “proper” to specific
occasions or the places where they were sung, not “ordinary” (in the sense of all-purpose). At Notre
Dame de Paris, as we know, only the responsorial chants of the Mass Proper and the Office were set, and
of these only the soloist’s portion. The Ordinary was sung by the musically unlettered choir, and for that
reason alone might well have been thought off-limits to polyphonic treatment. Therefore, before the
fourteenth century one simply does not find settings of melismatic (“untroped”) Kyries, to say nothing of
the remaining motley assortment of Ordinary chants—the Gloria (an acclamation), the Credo (a contract),
the Sanctus (an invocation of the heavenly choir), the Agnus Dei (a litany), or the “Deo Gratias” response
to the Ite (dismissal formula).
EX. 9-10 Guillaume de Machaut, De toutes flours as arranged in the Faenza Codex