of terms, he designated three musical styles, calling them magnus, mediocris, and parvus: great (= high-
ranking or lofty), middle, and small (= low-ranking).
He associated each of them with a genre. The small, predictably enough, was associated with the
vernacular chanson. The middle was associated with the motet, especially as transformed by contact with
English models, as we witnessed in the previous chapter.
The great or lofty style was the style of the Mass—a new type of standardized Mass composition in
which five items from the Ordinary (no longer including the brief dismissal-plus-response formula) were
set as a musical unit. A musical unit precisely, not a liturgical one, for there is nothing unified about the
Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei as a set of texts. They had different histories, traced in the
early chapters of this book; their structures were different, and they served different functions. Two are
prayers, two are acclamations, one is a profession of faith. Only the Kyrie and the Gloria are consecutive
in the liturgy.
Settings of the Ordinary in the fourteenth century, as we have seen, were of individual items, or
occasionally of pairs. Such complete formularies as exist were ad hoc compilations of individual,
musically heterogeneous items (even when, as in the case of Machaut, they were all the work of a single
author), opportunistically assembled for “votive”—which from the church’s point of view chiefly meant
fund-raising—purposes.
And now, all of a sudden (or so it seems), the Mass Ordinary emerges as a unified musical genre—the
most fully unified in history, covering a longer span, and shaped by more purely “musical,” composerly
(hence arbitrary) processes, than any we have yet encountered. The fact that its constituent sections were
nonconsecutive in performance meant that its musical unity was “thematized” and made symbolic. The
musically integrated Mass Ordinary setting now unified the whole service, symbolically integrating a
process lasting as much as an hour or more by means of periodic inspiring returns to familiar, hence
significant, sounds.
It was the most potent demonstration yet of the abstract shaping powers of music and their potential
import in mediating between the human and the divine; and it was a kind of shaping for which the literate
tradition and only the literate tradition could provide the necessary means. Consequently, the genre of the
musically unified Mass Ordinary quickly acquired enormous prestige as a symbol of ecclesiastical power
—the power, let us recall, of a church that was itself newly restored to unity, a church that frequently lent
its support to temporal authorities, intervening in their affairs and disputes, and that just as frequently
drew similar support from them.
Cyclic Mass Ordinaries were what chiefly filled those early Sistine chapel manuscripts, and thirteen
of these mammoth cycles, posthumously collected together in one fantastically decorative presentation
manuscript, were what attested to—or rather, what established—Ockeghem’s claim to pre-eminence
among the composers of his day. In short, the Mass Ordinary “cycle” became, in Manfred Bukofzer’s
words, “the focal point on which all the artistic aspirations and technical achievements of the composer
converged,” for it was the focal point of patronage and prestige.^1
CANTUS FIRMUS AS TROPE OF GLORY
But first, its history: one that, like so much in the history of fifteenth-century music, begins with the
English. And it begins at the moment when the device of paired movements based on a common cantus
firmus tenor, already found in the Old Hall manuscript, was expanded to encompass all the major
components of the Ordinary.