time. Like the others, it is modally disparate: the final of the first three sections is D (minorish), while that
of the last three is F (majorish). Like the Tournai Mass, it has a Gloria and Credo that contrast
stylistically with the other components, and contrast in precisely the same way. The Gloria is a cantilena
bordering on homorhythm, but with a grand motetlike Amen replete with hockets; the Credo is in a more
rigorously homorhythmic style. Both movements have the same textless bridging passages as in the
Tournai Credo. Again as in the Tournai Mass, the Sanctus and the Agnus Dei form an actual pair and are
stylistically related to the Kyrie—but in a different mode. Yet again as in the Tournai Mass, the Kyrie is
composed in four sections whose repetitions fill a ninefold scheme.
FIG. 9-3 Reims Cathedral, where Machaut lived and worked during the last thirty years of his life.
Yet however similar it may be to its predecessors and counterparts, Machaut’s Mass is incomparably
more ambitious. Although it lacks an actual motet (say, for the dismissal, where the singing of motets had
apparently become customary), it has, throughout, a “specific gravity,” so to speak, that bears comparison
with contemporary motet composition, and in this it stood alone among the Ordinary settings of the
fourteenth century. Partly that gravity is the result of the heightened emphasis given motetlike
architectonics: the Kyrie, Sanctus, Agnus Dei, and Ite missa est are all based on isorhythmic tenors
derived from canonical plainchant; within these large divisions, moreover, several subsections are pan-
isorhythmic, with repeating taleas in all parts.
But architectural design and duration are not the only dimensions in which Machaut’s Mass is
remarkably big. The work is more sonorous than any of its counterparts as well, being cast throughout in
the four-part texture identified in the previous chapter as the “luxuriant” style. It is a texture that crosscut
traditional genres, adding both a high supplementary voice (endemic to the motet) and a low one (endemic
to the cantilena) to round out the essential counterpoint of cantus (here called the triplum) and tenor.
With four elaborate movements in motet style, one quasi cantilena, and one quasi conductus,
Machaut’s Mass stands as a summa of contemporary compositional technique. Historically speaking, it is
much more tellingly viewed as a culmination of a half-century of Avignon-oriented liturgical composition
than as a dry run at the fifteenth century’s cyclic Masses. Yet it is nevertheless something more than a
summary of existing possibilities. The unprecedented four-part chordal textures of the Gloria and Credo
explore novel sonorities and establish new possibilities. An attempt to account for a work of such