FIG. 13-2 Milan Cathedral (Il duomo).FIG. 13-3 The second Agnus Dei (starting in the middle of the third system) from Josquin des Prez’s Missa L’homme armé
super voces musicales as printed in Missae Josquin (Venice: Ottaviano Petrucci, 1502). The three parts are to be realized from
the single notated line as a triple mensuration canon.
In such pieces, the absence of a foundational tenor had been compensated by the use of pervading
points of imitation, in which the voices were treated as functionally equivalent, each providing the
“authority” for the next. The beginning of Gaspar’s airy-textured Mater, Patris Filia (“O Mother, daughter
of the Father”), a motet loco Agnus Dei from one of his Mass substitution-cycles (Ex. 13-7), seems a
clear application of this “tenorless” technique to a full four-part complement. The text, composed of three
rhyming verses of votive supplication to the Virgin, reflects the threefold prayer of the Agnus Dei text.
The inconsistent rhymes, scansion patterns, and syllable-counts in the verses meanwhile betray the origin
of the text in an “extraliturgical” pastiche of stock Marian epithets.