Potential corroboration for the assumption that Du Fay came relatively late in the emulation chain is found
in the inventory of the composer’s property, drawn up after his death in 1474.^8 It lists six manuscripts of
music, which the composer had willed to Charles the Bold, for transfer after his death. If the Missa
L’Homme Armé were among the items contained therein (and Charles, after all, may have been the Armed
Man himself), that would make it a late work indeed, as the style of the music already suggests.
In all likelihood, then, the Missa L’Homme Armé was the second-latest of Du Fay’s cantus-firmus
Masses. The cyclic Mass was a genre developed in the period of Du Fay’s maturity, and one to which he,
consequently, contributed little. Only four such Masses of his survive. Two of the others are based on
plainsongs; one of them incorporates the music of a motet that Du Fay wrote for his own funeral, so it is
probably the last of the four. The remaining Mass, the earliest, is the most famous. It embodies an intricate
structure, very similar in its layout to a gigantic isorhythmic motet, based on a cantus firmus derived from
the tenor of one of Du Fay’s own chansons: Se la face ay pale (“If my face is pale, love’s to blame... “).
It has been suggested that this elegant love-song Mass was written for an aristocratic wedding,
possibly during Du Fay’s period in service at the court of Savoy in the 1450s.^9 That would put the Mass
on Se la face ay pale in the same general category as the L’Homme Armé Masses: sacred music in honor
of secular authority. Alternatively, and more in keeping with motet practice, Du Fay’s love-song Mass
may have been intended, like Leonel’s Mass on Alma redemptoris mater, for a Marian votive service, the
cantus firmus now symbolizing the worshiper’s love for the worshiped.
Either conjecture, if corroborated, would provide an explanation for the novel practice, of which Du
Fay was a pioneer, of basing sacred music on secular tenors. Far from a blasphemy, it seems to have
worked the other way, as a means of consecrating the secular. And thus, even if, as seems likely, Du Fay
may have been a relatively late contributor to the L’Homme Armé tradition, he was among the founders of
the larger tradition that made the L’Homme Armé cycles possible. Thus his dynastic authority lay behind
that of Busnoys even as the authority of Busnoys’s “classic” L’Homme Armé Mass may have called forth
Du Fay’s spectacular riposte in its turn. That is how artistic dynasties, as distinct from political ones, tend
to work: they are elaborate cultural exchanges, not straightforward biological successions.
For one last, particularly revealing dynastic commentary, let us have a quick look at a later stage of
the L’Homme Armé tradition. The composer who headed the next generation after Obrecht, and who was
as commanding a presence among the musicians of his time as Obrecht had been—or Busnoys and
Ockeghem before Obrecht, or Du Fay before Busnoys and Ockeghem, or Dunstable before Du Fay—was
Josquin des Prez, to whom a whole chapter will shortly be devoted. It was Josquin’s special good fortune
to have been the protagonist of one of the great historical turning points for European music, when the
printing revolution finally hit, and utterly transformed, its literate wing.
The very first printed volume of music devoted to the works of a single composer was a book of
Masses by Josquin, issued by the Venetian printer Ottaviano Petrucci in 1502. Of the five Masses it
contained, two of them—the first and the last, the alpha and omega—were based on L’Homme Armé.
There could be no greater testimony to Josquin’s stature than his laying claim in this way to the venerable
tradition, and no greater testimony to the potency of that tradition than the way it was spotlighted by
Petrucci in opening and closing this auspicious volume.
The opening work in the volume was called Josquin’s Missa L’Homme Armé super voces musicales.
The voces musicales, as we may remember from chapter 3, were the six solmization syllables of the
Guidonian hexachord: Ut–re–mi–fa–sol–la. The special unifying tour de force of Josquin’s Mass was to
begin it with the cantus firmus pitched on C (the “natural” ut) for the Kyrie, and have it ascend step-by-
step throughout the Mass so that in the final Agnus Dei (scored for a climactically enlarged five-part
chorus) it was pitched on A (the natural la), the highest note of the hexachord, and transferred by way of
zenith to the superius voice. No question, then, that Josquin was still engaging in the process of emulation