Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century

FIG.    13-4    Lorenzo de’Medici,  “the    Magnificent”    (1449–1492),    depicted    among   the artists whom    he  patronized  by  the

Florentine  painter Ottavio Vannini ca. a   century after   Lorenzo’s   death.

EX. 13-12   Josquin des Prez,   Missa   L’Homme Armé    super   voces   musicales,  Agnus   II, realized    in  three   parts

The threefold invocation “Christe fili Dei” is set each time to the same music. It consists of what by
now we might fairly expect, namely an imitative duo for superius and tenor, the “structural pair.” That is
what arrests the immediate attention and occupies the mind’s foreground. Yet the very end of the text gives
away the votive game: if Christ is to hear our prayers, they must be mediated by his sanctissima mater,
his “most holy Mother, Mary,” ever our intercessor.

And now we notice the subliminal message that the altus has been insinuating all along; for it carries,
throughout, a borrowed melody, and a very famous one—the superius of the rondeau J’ay pris amours
(“I’ve taken love as my motto”), probably the most popular French chanson of the late fifteenth century
(Ex. 13-14). The altus, then, crooning this love song in the midst of prayer, is in effect sending a secret
love letter to the Virgin while the text ostensibly addresses her Son. In a much less formal way, Josquin is
doing what Du Fay had done in his Missa Se la face ay pale. Where Du Fay’s Mass had displayed the
borrowed secular tune as an emblem, Josquin allows it to infiltrate his texture as an inconspicuous
“nonessential” voice.

The borrowed    melody’s    big moment  comes   at  the end,    where   Mary    is  finally alluded to  in  the text,   and