have known and possibly taken as a model, was the so-called “Mass of Tournai” from a Belgian (then
Burgundian) cathedral town not at all far from Machaut’s home city of Reims. A full set of six items, it
was gathered together in 1349 for use at Lady Masses that were available to donors at a special altar that
had been set aside for the purpose in the right transept or side-wing of the Tournai cathedral building.
The Mass is a stylistic hodgepodge of local favorites. The Kyrie is uncomplicated and somewhat
archaic: its note-against-note homorhythm is practically virgin-pure and its durational patterns are
virtually modal (iambic, or “second mode”). Given a syllabic text it might have passed for a century-old
conductus. Like the simplest chant Kyries it contains four brief musical sections to fill out a ninefold
repetition scheme: a Kyrie for singing threefold; a Christe for singing threefold; a second Kyrie to be
repeated once; and a final, somewhat more elaborate Kyrie to conclude. Its final is G.
The Gloria is cast in a texture that straddles the line between homorhythm and cantilena. What tips the
balance in favor of the latter is the spread of vocal ranges, with the somewhat more active top voice
occupying the octave above middle C, and the other two voices overlapping a somewhat lower tessitura,
as a tenor/contratenor pair would do. There is a lengthy, melismatic Amen with motetlike features
including a rhythmically stratified texture and some little bursts of hocket. The final of the Gloria is F.
The Credo is unambiguously homorhythmic, the three voices spitting out the lengthy text in lockstep,
often in strings of uniform semibreves. The punctuation of the text is faithfully followed, each sentence
being marked off from the surrounding ones by little textless bridge passages in the two lower voices. The
final is D.
The Sanctus and Agnus Dei were pretty clearly composed as a pair. They collectively revert to the
archaic style of the Kyrie, but their final is F, not G. And then, all of a sudden, the response to the Ite
missa est is cast, as in the Toulouse Mass, as a full-fledged isorhythmic motet over a liturgical cantus
firmus. It would have made Pope John XXII see red, for it sports an “upper part made of secular songs” in
the form of a French-texted triplum about self-abasing service to the ladylove (here, of course, to be taken
metaphorically as addressed not to the poet’s lady but to Our Lady). The Latin motetus contains a more
straightforward votive prayer on behalf of the donor, uttered, significantly, not to the Virgin but to her
minions, the “lords” of the church, from whom indulgences and benefices flowed.
CI COMMENCE LA MESSE DE NOSTRE DAME
“Here beginneth the Mass of Our Lady,” reads the heading following the motet section in one of
Machaut’s most sumptuous personally supervised manuscripts. It, too, was a votive Mass, one that the
composer himself endowed with a bequest, to serve as a memorial to “Guillaume and Jean de Machaux
[sic], both brothers and canons of the church of Our Lady (l’eglise de Notre Dame) of Reims.” So reads
the preface to an eighteenth-century copy of the composer’s cathedral epitaph, which went on to quote a
provision of his will stating that he had left three hundred florins to ensure “that the prayer for the dead,
on every Saturday, for their souls and for those of their friends, may be said by a priest about to celebrate
faithfully, at the side altar, a Mass which is to be sung ” (italics added). In fact, the will was honored
(though not with the music originally provided) until the middle of the eighteenth century.
So Machaut’s Mass was intended to serve the same purpose as were the other Ordinary formularies of
the period. (The familiar conjecture that it was composed for the Coronation of Charles V of France,
which happened to take place at Reims in 1364, is still occasionally repeated but has long been
discredited). And the detailed description of the Mass of Tournai given above is also, to an astonishing
degree, a description of Machaut’s Mass.
Although it is the work of a single author, it is no less a composite than the other Ordinaries of its