FIG. 12-4 Opening of Ockeghem’s Missa caput from the so-called Chigi Codex (Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana,
MS Chigi C.VIII. 234, fols. 64 v–65).
Beginning with the generation after that of Ockeghem and Busnoys—the generation Tinctoris called
“younger composers,” who were reaching maturity in the 1470 s and lived into the next century—
residence at the high-paying Italian courts became the rule. Their outstanding representative was Jacobus
Hobrecht (better known as Obrecht, as habitually given in Italian sources), who after a distinguished
career in Dutch and Belgian cities such as Antwerp, Utrecht, Bergen op Zoom, and Bruges was summoned
to the magnificent court of Ercole I, the Duke of Ferrara, where he died of plague in 1505.
THE CYCLIC MASS
The major genre on which all these composers lavished their skills, and the chief vehicle for their fame,
was a genre that did not exist before the fifteenth century. It may be fairly regarded as the emblem of the
century’s musical attainments, for it was a genre of unprecedented altitude.
The quality of “height” or hauteur, as we observed at the end of the previous chapter, was an
important determinant of style within an aristocratic culture. It was the yardstick by which subject matter
and rhetorical manner had been correlated since pre-Christian times. The classic formulation was given
by Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BCE), the Roman statesman and orator, who sought an ideal union of
rhetoric and philosophy to guide human affairs. To make knowledge effective, it had to be cast in the
proper expressive form.
Cicero distinguished three basic styles of oratory, which he called gravis, mediocris, and attenuatus:
weighty, middling, and plain. The Carolingian rhetoricians and their scholastic descendants in the twelfth
century had modified the Ciceronian doctrine to reflect literary rather than oratorical categories,
substituting humilis (“low”) for Cicero’s plain-spoken style and associating it with the vernacular tongues
that had replaced Latin for everyday speech, including the speech of the unlettered. In arguing for artistic
literature in the vernacular, Dante had set himself the task of proving (on the basis of the troubadours’
achievement) that vernacular languages could accommodate all three levels of discourse, identifying them
in terms that had even more obvious social connotations: illustre, mediocre, humile (noble, middling,
lowly).
It was Tinctoris who first applied a variation of this time-honored scheme to music. In his dictionary