The earliest complete polyphonic Mass Ordinaries were votive formularies that were collected
together and copied into special manuscripts for use in memorial chapels where votive Masses were
offered on behalf of donors. Polyphonic votive Masses were the deluxe models, available to major
donors who could afford the extra expense of skilled singers along with the best quality vestments,
incense, altar cloths, and communion fare. The same manuscripts that contain them often contain
monophonic formularies as well, for the less powerful or pecunious. The polyphonic Mass Ordinary, in
short, was one of the finer fruits of a somewhat dubious practice—the practice of buying and selling the
good offices of the church that, grown into an abuse, became one of the precipitating causes of the
sixteenth-century Reformation.
Polyphonic Ordinaries for use at votive services come down to us in manuscripts from several
ecclesiastical centers within the Avignon orbit. There is a “Mass of Toulouse” from the old capital of
Languedoc, a hundred miles or so to the west of Avignon itself. There is a “Sorbonne Mass” from Paris.
There is a “Barcelona Mass” from below the Pyrenees. They vary somewhat in their specific contents, but
all of them contain a Kyrie, a Sanctus, and an Agnus Dei as a nucleus. The Barcelona Mass has a Gloria
and a Credo as well, and the Toulouse Mass ends with a motet laid out over the Deo Gratias.
These were not cyclic compositions, however, but composites. They were not composed by a single
author, or even composed for the specific purpose at hand. Their components were merely selected and
assembled from the general fund of Avignon-style Mass Ordinary settings; individual items from these
Masses turn up elsewhere, in other formularies or in miscellanies like the Apt and Ivrea codices.
The most complete and elaborate of these composite Mass-assemblages, one that Machaut must surely