very extreme human situation, open up new levels of musical meaningfulness. It goes without saying (but
better, perhaps, with saying) that the only meaningfulness we can speak of meaningfully is the
meaningfulness the music has for us now. But that meaning includes our impressions (impressions
conditioned by specific historical awareness) of what meaningfulness the music may have had for Byrd
and his co-congregants.
The Credo from the Mass in Five Parts also invites hermeneutic reading, and such reading is of course
to be recommended as an exercise in “historical imagination.” Here let it suffice to call attention to one
particular phrase, since it resonates so strongly with the premises on which this chapter is based. At the
beginning of the chapter, when justifying the pursuit of the ars perfecta to its end, it was pointed out that
the “perfect art” would have had no reason for being were it not for the artist’s belief in the perfection of
God’s church as an institution: belief in unam sanctam catholicam et apostolicam ecclesiam.
Compare Palestrina’s setting of these words in the Credo of the Missa Papae Marcelli (Ex. 16-19a)
with Byrd’s (Ex. 16-19b). Palestrina sets them gracefully but somewhat perfunctorily as a double module
—a parallel period in five parts, the basses exchanging at the repeat. The line is both preceded and
(especially) followed by more dramatic music. The “confiteor,” the personal acknowledgment of one’s
baptism, that comes after the lines about the church is set off by longer note values and a higher high note.
The et unam sanctam passage, one feels, was something on the way to something bigger. At any rate,
Palestrina’s very evenly paced recitation is clearly the work of a man for whom this text is a comforting
ritual formula, not a risky personal declaration.
EX. 16-19A Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Missa Papae Marcelli, Credo, mm. 145–53