—the process that continually asked, “Can you top this?”
Yet even as he attempted to top all his predecessors in his manipulation of the age-old cantus firmus,
he paid them signal tribute in his headmotive (Ex. 12-17). If you do not immediately recognize this theme
—the opening music, so to speak, in Petrucci’s volume of the greatest Masses by the greatest composer of
the day—go back to the beginning of this chapter and look again at its first musical example. Josquin’s
headmotive is modeled on the phrase with which Busnoys had set the name of Ockeghem in In hydraulis
(Ex. 12-1b), and Ockeghem had returned the compliment in Ut heremita solus (Ex. 12-1c).
EX. 12-17 Josquin des Prez, Missa L’Homme Armé super voces musicales, KyrieJosquin, who wrote a lament on Ockeghem’s death in which he referred to the older composer as his
“bon père,” his good (musical) father, was very possibly Ockeghem’s pupil. Surely he knew Busnoys’s
Missa L’Homme Armé (for no musical literatus of his generation did not), and its special place in the
L’Homme Armé tradition. How better to assert his place in the dynasty of “high style” composers than by
making this most conspicuous reference to their most directly relevant work? And how better inaugurate
and legitimate the “future” of music as a literate tradition—the phase of printed music, which has lasted
until our own time and is only lately showing any sign of waning—than by making showy obeisance to the
glories of the immediate past? Josquin’s headmotive was thus a triple emblem: the emblematic unifier of
his Mass, an emblem of heirship, and an emblem of the continuing vitality of the dynastic tradition.