opposed to music) was not for the ear but for the mind. A shape that expressed unity on the level of
Musica as well as on that of music was unified at a level transcending the human, hence serving the
mediating purposes of sacred music ideally, in every sense of the word.
AN ESTHETIC PARADOX (OR, THE PARADOX OF
“ESTHETICS”)
And this raises a final cluster of fascinating, somewhat troubling questions. What is the relationship
between the esthetics of modern music-listening and the esthetics of fifteenth- or sixteenth-century service
music that is so often transplanted now from its natural habitat to the secular concert stage or to the even
more casual venues where recordings are savored? What survives the translation process? What is lost in
it? What, for that matter, may be gained?
These questions apply with particular urgency to cyclic Mass Ordinaries—large and impressively
complex compositions in multiple parts. Their status as the paramount genre of their day prompts
comparison with genres that enjoyed comparable standing in other historical periods. As Manfred
Bukofzer, the most eminent historian of the genre, once put it, the cyclic Mass Ordinary in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries “held as dominating and prominent a place in the hierarchy of musical values as the
symphony did in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.”^7
The comparison between the cyclic Mass Ordinary and the symphony seems especially compelling
because both genres are composites of smaller constituent units that are conceived and presented in a
certain fixed, conventional order. But a moment’s reflection will confirm that the constituent sections of
the cyclic Mass Ordinary actually have very little in common with symphonic movements, and that the
nature of the two genres as wholes, however unified, is really just as dissimilar and incommensurable as
is the nature of their component parts.
The manuscript choirbooks containing cyclic Mass Ordinaries can mislead us. Unlike the scores that
preserve and transmit classical symphonies or more recent compositions, they are service books that store
music as economically as possible for active use. Each voice part, as we know, is separately inscribed
for the individual singers’ benefit, rather than space-wastingly aligned for a reader’s perusal. The
“movements,” moreover, are entered in direct sequence, like those of a symphony, even though they were
never performed in direct sequence. But that, of course, is how they are generally performed in concert
and recordings today, as if Masses were in fact choral symphonies.
Modern transcriptions of cyclic Masses, like those on which we have been relying for most of our
examples, “score” the works in accordance with modern practice and make them look more like
symphonies than ever. So it is easy to forget (or ignore, or minimize) the fact that the “movements” of a
cyclic Mass Ordinary, the first pair excepted, were spread out in performance over the whole length of
the service, spaced as much as fifteen or twenty minutes apart, with a great deal of liturgical activity,
including other music, intervening.
And that, over and above any urge to unify the works “esthetically,” is why the “movements” of cyclic
Masses were deliberately made to resemble each other as much as possible. As we have seen, they all
begin exactly alike, with a “headmotive”; they all feature the same foundation melody, often presented in
identical or near-identical form in the tenor; and—how completely unlike the movements of a symphony!
—follow similar or identical standardized formal schemes.
All of this furthered the liturgical or spiritual purpose of the music in its original setting, adorning and
integrating a festal rite. But take away all the intervening liturgical activity, and the uplifting symbolic