recurrences of familiar music can seem merely redundant. When cyclic Masses are performed as choral
symphonies, the music—“as music,” as “esthetically” experienced—often palls. The ideal structure that
makes such a strong appeal to our minds (our “organs of contemplation,” as idealist philosophers have
sometimes dubbed them) can actually tire the ear when presented without admixture in actual sound.
Experiencing the music “as music,” though we may think of it (or been instructed to think of it) as the
“highest” way of appreciating music, is not inevitably or invariably the best way to experience it. And it
can have little to do with what originally made it “high.”
OLD AND YOUNG ALIKE PAY TRIBUTE
To return, in conclusion, to strictly historical and “dynastic” matters, it is absorbing to ponder the
intricate relationships of homage that obtained among composers of cyclic Masses. Among the L’Homme
Armé Masses that reproduce the moment from Busnoys’s Sanctus depicted in Ex. 12-15 a is one by Du
Fay, the oldest and most distinguished composer to have joined the game. The corresponding passage in
his Mass occurs near the end of the Credo (Ex. 12-16), and it is especially close to Busnoys’s allowing
for the speedy diminished note-values that one usually finds near the climaxes of large cyclic Mass
sections.
EX. 12-16 Guillaume Du Fay, Missa L’Homme Armé, Credo, “Et exspecto”The question, of course, is who was emulating whom? The discussion up to now would seem to favor
Busnoys, and yet it might also seem commonsensical to assume that the younger composer imitated the
older rather than the other way around—especially if the older composer were a composer of such
unparalleled standing as the venerable Du Fay, by the 1460 s definitely an aged man by contemporary
standards. Common sense can seem especially persuasive in cases such as this, when there is little or no
hard evidence against which to weigh it. (The earliest surviving source for both Masses is the same
Sistine Chapel choirbook, which postdates the older composer’s death.)
And yet in this particular case some other factors might also carry weight. One is the nature of the
emulatory chain. As Ex. 12-16 already suggests with its very energetic syncopations (even including some
interpolations into the cantus firmus), Du Fay’s Mass is an especially—even an ostentatiously—elaborate
composition. It is a true masterpiece, a demonstration of a great master’s skills—and a great master’s
license, too; for Du Fay subjects the cantus-firmus tune to a great deal of embellishment almost amounting
to paraphrase. The Mass also contains the single most complicated passage in all of fifteenth-century
choral polyphony: a montage of four different mensurations, one for each voice, at the point in the Credo
where the text, referring to God the Father, says “by [Him] all things are made” (per quem omnia facta
sunt). The last three Latin words can also mean “all things are done,” and that is what Du Fay has his
chorus do, all at the same time. Once again we see that what may seem to us like nothing more than a pun
(“the lowest form of wit”) can be a serious symbol indeed, and the pretext for exalted creative play.
In any case, it contradicts the whole idea of emulation to imagine such a work as Du Fay’s Missa
L’Homme Armé at the beginning of the line; with such a starting point, where could it possibly go?