authority attach to the L’Homme Armé Mass by Charles’s own court composer. And indeed, Busnoys’s
Missa L’Homme Armé seems to have been regarded as a special “classic”—by contemporary composers
(who emulated it with particular zeal and fidelity), by contemporary theorists (who cited it more often
than any other then-current Mass composition), and by scribes for other potentates (including Pope Sixtus,
one of whose Sistine Chapel choirbooks is its earliest surviving source). This account will follow suit,
for the Mass’s historical significance is matched by its exemplary style and form.
The word “exemplary” is used here in its strictest meaning (a meaning related to the strict meaning of
the world “classic” as well): Busnoys’s Mass exemplifies the style and form of the fifteenth-century
cantus firmus Mass at its most characteristic, most regular, and most fully developed, and may be taken as
a type-work for the “high” style as Tinctoris understood it. One of its most telling features is the technique
—the multiple techniques, actually—by which the Mass is unified in many musical dimensions, for that
musical unification, as we know, served as a metaphor for the unity of the service and the congregation
and was fundamentally bound up with the concept of “highness” as devotional exaltation.
The most obvious way in which the Mass is unified, of course, is in the use of the cantus firmus. Each
of its five constituent sections sends the L’Homme Armé melody through the tenor part, in augmented note
values, in a cursus that joins the various subsections in an overarching continuity. The opening Kyrie (Ex.
12-11) may fairly represent all its fellows, the more so because all five sections begin identically, with a
headmotive consisting of a duo for the superius and altus, three tempora in length, in which the lower part
anticipates the cantus firmus tune, adding yet another level of unity. The first three measures of the Kyrie,
as shown in Ex. 12-11, could (but for the words) as easily have been the first three measures of the
Gloria, the Credo, the Sanctus, or the Agnus Dei.
It may appear odd, from the breakdown in Table 12-1, that Busnoys never divides the cantus firmus up
among the Mass subsections according to its own very clearly articulated three-part (ABA) form, even
though two sections of the Ordinary (the Kyrie and the Agnus Dei) are themselves tripartite in textual
structure. But that is because the composer had his own musical plan in mind, one that overrode the
structure of the original tune and became standard for fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Mass Ordinary
settings. Table 12-1 sums up the apportionment of the cantus firmus in each section and subsection of the
Mass. The treatment varies a bit according to the nature and the length of the various texts, but in all
sections of the Mass, the cantus firmus is dramatically deployed in conjunction with the other voices to
create a sense of climax, much in the tradition of the isorhythmic motet.
EX. 12-11 Antoine Busnoys, Missa L’Homme Armé, first Kyrie, mm. 1–19