peasantry to become by violent insurgency and advantageous marriage-making the ruling family of Milan.
Among this clan of ruthless parvenus were some astute and enthusiastic patrons of the arts, notably the
despotic Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza, the temporal ruler of the city from 1466 until his assassination ten
years later, and his brother, Cardinal Ascanio Maria Sforza (d. 1505), the city’s ecclesiastical dictator.
Galeazzo’s chief court-and-chapel composer was a very eminent and influential musician indeed, yet
one whose current historical reputation does not adequately reflect his eminence and influence. Gaspar
van Weerbeke, a Dutchman, was recruited, possibly from Busnoys’s choir at the court of Charles the
Bold, to lead the Milanese ducal chapel in 1471. From 1474 to around 1480 he was the Maestro di
Cappella at the Milan Cathedral, and then went on to Rome, where he rose eventually to the leadership of
the papal choir. His motetti missales seem so decisively to reject the lofty tone and the architectural
genres of the Franco-Burgundian tradition that his style is often described as having been influenced by
Italian popular (hence oral, undocumented) styles and genres. That may be one reason for his comparative
neglect by historians and revivers of early music in performance, who have understandably tended to find
most of interest in the loftiest and the lowest, and to take the stylistic middle for granted.
There is no real evidence to warrant the assumption that the music of the motetti missales is truly
“popular” in style, but plenty of evidence that its style is, in the Tinctoris sense, “low.” There is also
evidence that the liturgical practice of substituting votive motets for Mass sections—and indirectly, then,
the musical style of the result—was dictated by Duke Galeazzo himself, the grandson of an illiterate
farmer, and may have reflected his plebeian personal tastes. The leading Italian member of the choir, later
to make a great name for himself as a theorist, was Franchino Gafori (known from his treatises as
Gaffurius), who inherited Weerbeke’s position around 1490 and had three enormous choirbooks inscribed
with the court chapel repertory for use at the cathedral (the so-called Milan libroni, the “big books”), thus
insuring the survival of the motetti missales into our day. In a treatise written in the early 1480s, that is,
shortly after the fact, Gafori refers to Weerbeke’s motet cycles as the motteti ducales, the “ducal motets.”^4
What kind of motets are ducal motets? For one thing, their texts are mostly not canonical liturgical
texts. Rather, they tend to be informal composites or pastiches of individual verses drawn from the Bible,
from various liturgical items, or from rhymed Latin versus, sometimes specially composed. For another,
the music generally avoids all suggestion of the “tenor cantus firmus” style. Instead, it tends to resemble
the style and some of the constructive methods of the tenor tacet sections that relieved and contrasted
with the cantus-firmus bearing sections in cyclic Masses, especially those of Busnoys.