will be clear why the music of this motet could not be given here in its entirety. Even the concluding
“Salve” is an interpolation, tacked on to give expressive meaning even to the final cadence, which now
matches verbally the first grandly impressive “tutti” in the piece.
And that is yet another way in which the style of the Eton antiphons has been amplified: in terms of
sheer sonority. The phenomenal upward extension of range in this music testifies to the Eton choirboys’
astounding proficiency. Their ample numbers are suggested not only by the augmented complement of
voices—five parts being the Eton norm, with several pieces going to six or even more—but also by the
frequency with which the parts are split into “gymels” or twinsongs (in the original meaning of the terms),
for final cadential chords like the one in m. 10, for even greater richness of sound.
All that magnificence comes at a price. The Eton music is thoroughly “official,” collective,
impersonal. It is institutional devotion par excellence. It makes no concession whatever to the “middling”
tone that had long since begun to distinguish the continental votive motet and give it its compelling mien of
personal urgency. That heightened expressivity came in part from a simplification of means. That
simplification had originally come, as Tinctoris found it so ironical to recall, from England; but it was
abandoned there as the English church became, under the Tudors, increasingly the partner and agent of
royal authority.
And that especially necessitated the high style—a style that, as David Josephson, a historian of
English music of the early Tudor period, describes it, “does not elicit the understanding, much less the
participation, of the congregant. It is music of the High Church. It awes, overwhelms, and perhaps oddly,
comforts, as did the ritual to which it was attached, and the buildings in which it was sung.”^3 The comfort
was the comfort that comes from knowing and believing in something bigger, more powerful, more
lasting, more important than ourselves—something with which our presence at worship puts us in touch,
and something to which we pray, as embodied and personified in Mary. But note that the prayers
addressed to her in the trope to the Salve Regina are collective, not personal: they use the first person
plural, never singular; and they are generalized, never particular, rendered on behalf of the community for
the salvation of all and for the common good.
The very peak of the High Church style came early in the next century, when English and continental
music contrasted even more starkly than they are doing in this chapter, owing to continued continental
drift, in the name of personalization, toward simplicity of texture and clarity of declamation. By the time
of the English Reformation (or rather, just before it), when we will sample them again, the English and
continental styles, particularly in the Mass, will appear downright antithetical despite their common
ancestry. That musical divergence reflects a larger divergence in ecclesiastical mores. The one cannot be
understood historically without taking due account of the other.
THE MILANESE GO LOWER STILL
A further step in the continental transformation—and stylistic “lowering”—of motet style was taken in
Milan in the 1470 s, when a custom was instituted within the Ambrosian rite of actually substituting
votive motets addressed to Mary, more rarely to Christ or to local saints, for all of the Ordinary texts of
the Mass (and in larger cycles, some of the Propers as well). Cycles of these motetti missales, or
substitute motets for the Mass, were turned out in quantity. They are affectionately known by scholars as
“loco Masses,” from the word meaning “in place of,” found in the rubrics that identify such pieces.
The most accomplished and widely disseminated cycles were those composed by the Flemish
musicians employed at the court of the Sforzas (the brazenly self-styled “Usurpers” or “Governors-by-
force”), a family of mercenary soldiers who in the middle of the century had suddenly risen from the