FIG. 9-2 An echo of the “Babylonian captivity,” this altarpiece, executed ca. 1520 by the Venetian painter Antonio Ronzen for
the church of Sainte Madeleine in Saint Maximin, France, shows Christ in chains before Herod against a background fancifully
depicting the old papal palace at Avignon, the seat of the antipopes.
The first center where Mass Ordinary settings began to proliferate was the papal court at Avignon.
One of the larger cities in the southeastern corner of France, Avignon had become the papal see in 1309,
when Pope Clement V, a Frenchman (born Bernard de Got), abandoned Rome at the behest of the French
king, Philip the Fair. The next six popes after Clement were also French and also subservient to their
kings. This virtual “capture” of the papacy by the French crown was dubbed the Babylonian Captivity by
disapproving Italians like the poet Petrarch, who coined the phrase (but who nevertheless found
profitable employment at Avignon in his youth). In 1378 Pope Gregory XI was prevailed upon to move
the papacy back to Rome, touching off the Great Schism. It was more a national than a religious dispute.
The French popes who, under royal protection, were elected to continue the line of Clement at Avignon,
were later decanonized—ruled “antipopes”—at the Council of Constance that ended the Schism in 1417
and brought the papacy back within the Italian orbit where it remained almost without interruption until
the election of Pope John Paul II, a Pole, in 1978.
Two surviving manuscripts, both of them full of Ordinary settings, comprise what music remains from
the papal liturgical repertory at Avignon. These manuscripts are called the Apt and Ivrea codices after the
towns where they may have originated, but where they are in any case kept today. Apt is close by Avignon
to the east; Ivrea, a bit farther east, is now across the Italian border near Turin. Just why it should have
been at Avignon that settings of the Ordinary began to flourish has never been fully explained. But it may
have had something to do with the general Frenchification of the papacy during the Babylonian Captivity.
The Apt and Ivrea settings employ textures associated with other genres popular in France and may have
been deliberately modeled on them.
The most elaborate are in motet (or, when particularly melismatic, in hocket) style, built up from a
cantus firmus that is often cast in isorhythmic taleae. The other characteristic “Ordinary” textures were far
simpler and increasingly prevalent as the Avignon repertory developed. One was the homorhythmic (or
“simultaneous”) style previously associated with the conductus. It was often used for the wordier texts,
such as the Gloria and Credo, where syllabic texting helped expedite their recitation. But most
characteristic of all was the specifically French and originally secular three-voice “cantilena” (a.k.a.
“ballade”) style, composed in the top-down fashion we have associated with Machaut. Thus, even as the
Latin-texted motet was becoming more brilliant and impressive than ever over the course of the fourteenth
century (and more and more firmly associated with occasions of civic and ecclesiastical pomp), within
the confines of the actual service liturgy there seems to have been a countervailing tendency toward
modesty and simplification. This, too, may have been among the factors conducive to Ordinary settings,