This is not to imply that Machaut had any intention or premonition of such a thing. On the contrary, his
unambiguous use of repetition signs shows clearly that his intention was to repeat his polyphonic settings
rather than interpolate organ verses according to a practice he may or may not have known about. And yet
the choice of the same cantus firmus for the Kyrie in Faenza, which contains other compositions by
Machaut and his contemporaries, nevertheless suggests the possibility that the Faenza Kyrie may have
been intended for insertion—or at least that it could have been inserted—into Machaut’s very
distinguished Mass. Despite its fame, in the early fifteenth century nobody regarded the work as an
inviolable or canonical “classic” in our current sense of the word; such a concept did not yet exist.
Machaut’s Mass—any Mass—was functional music and as such was adaptable to circumstances and to
local requirements.
In the first section of Machaut’s setting (shown in Ex. 9-15) the Cunctipotens genitor melody, carried
of course by the tenor, is cut up into bite-sized taleae of archaic cast: they actually correspond to “third
mode” (LBBL)ordines as described a century earlier by Garlandia, with whose treatise a well-educated
musician like Machaut had to be familiar. The contratenor, too, is composed of short recurring rhythmic
“cells,” although they are not strictly enough organized to be considered isorhythmic. Isorhythmic or no,
there is a great deal of rhythmic repetition: the rhythmically active triplum at mm. 7–12, for example, a
passage encompassing two measures of syncopation and one of hocket, is exactly mimicked by the
rhythms in mm. 20–24; moreover, two measures in the same repeated passage—compare mm. 10–11 and
mm. 22–23—are pan-isorhythmic (rhythmically identical in all parts).
The Christe section introduces a new level of rhythmic energy—syncopated, hockety minims—into the
two uppermost parts. In the triplum it is the extremes of rhythmic activity—full-measure longs and rapid
hockets—that recur most strictly. The most striking rhythmic effect—and a characteristic one—is that of
wild activity regularly hitting the brick wall of utter stasis. Machaut was far from the only composer of
his time to revel in this sort of radical rhythmic contrast. It displays the potentialities of the Ars Nova at
maximum strength.