Basiron builds other generic resonances into his setting as well. The opening line of the chant
paraphrase is accompanied by the altus only, creating the kind of duo one often finds in Mass Ordinary
settings—or, more to the point, in the older isorhythmic motet—during the introitus that preceded and
heralded the entrance of the all-important tenor. The repetition of the opening superius phrase takes place
over that entrance—and sure enough, the tenor behaves on entering just like a cantus firmus voice, in note-
values outstanding for their slowness vis-à-vis the note-values of the introitus. The tenor seems to identify
itself as—indeed, to impersonate—the bearer of the holy relic, the preexisting chant, when all the while
the chant-bearing voice is the superius. The long-note tenor “melody” has never been identified, and in all
likelihood will never be. It is a decoy.
What we have, in short, is a deliberate play on styles and genres by a supremely self-conscious
composer-literatus: a paraphrase motet disguised as a cantus-firmus motet. The disguise is light and not
seriously intended to deceive, of course: by the time the superius has descended its fifth between sal-and
-ve in the first measure everyone in Basiron’s envisaged audience would have surely recognized the most
famous melody in all the liturgy. It is just a playful disguise, meant to amuse in an edifying sort of way.
The deliberate playfulness—what we might call the “thematization” of genre—has a serious point.
Incorporating elements of “low” (the superius in “pseudovernacular” style) and “high” (the tenor in
“pseudoplainchant” style), the motet pitches itself, or balances itself, right in the middle, showing the
composer’s awareness of the rhetorical categories available to him, and his ability to exploit them
meaningfully.
The secunda pars (“part two”) of Basiron’s Salve Regina shows a budding concern for choral
“scoring.” The cantus firmus migrates into the second and even the third voice from the top, and there is a
great deal of interplay among various duos and trios drawn from the full four-part texture, with full four-
part “tuttis,” as we might call them, assuming in such a context a rhetorical, emphatic role. Particularly
calculated for oratorical effect is the concluding triple acclamation to the Virgin—O clemens, O pia, O
dulcis (“O thou gentle, O thou holy, O thou sweet”)—in a progression from two to four voices, with the
three-voice passage in the middle cast as a slightly modified fauxbourdon (note the altus and tenor in
parallel motion at the fourth), the musical emblem of gentle sweetness (Ex. 13-1b).
For a remarkable contrast within a similar general approach, and certainly with no loss of
expressivity, compare Ockeghem’s grander setting of the same triple acclamation at the end of his Salve
Regina (Ex. 13-2). The cantus firmus is now in the bassus (transposed down a fourth), paraphrased
decoratively like Basiron’s superius but nevertheless “held out” in tenor fashion. The rhetorical
progression of intensity is achieved here not by augmenting the vocal complement, the way Basiron had
done, but by an expanding melismatic luxuriance. The idea of “sweetness” is conveyed in harmonic terms,
by means of melting cadences (or, to be grammatically precise, “half-cadences”) to full triads with the
third in the highest voice. Also noteworthy, for its bearing on the “prehistory” of tonally functional
harmony, is the placement of the successive cadence chords—E minor, A-minor, D-minor—on a circle of
fifths to the final. But notice that the sweet imperfect consonance over the final at the very end is treated