cynically, an error is something with which one can deceive.
This particular genetic fallacy—to reduce the “tonal system” to the chance product (or worse, the
tenacious misinterpretation) of a contrapuntal accident—was a common academic strategy for
undermining belief in the reality of the tonal system at a time around the middle of the twentieth century
when the rights of “atonal” music—a music then practiced exclusively in the academy—were being
defended against those who called it “unnatural.” Instead of arguing that a basis in nature is only one of
the criteria by which musical styles acquire perceptual viability (especially in academic or otherwise
“high” or elite environments), an attempt was made to deny all natural basis to habits of musical
“hearing.” In this controversy, we can see especially clearly how fundamentally the writing of history can
be influenced by current esthetic or political concerns.
So we will avoid taking sides in a misconceived argument and limit ourselves to the perceptual facts
insofar as they are available, and with recognition that such facts are never entirely available. “Oral”
practices that we know only imperfectly if at all—for example, the use of chord-strumming instruments in
unwritten musical repertories and their effect in reconditioning musical “hearing” during the two centuries
in question—unquestionably had an important bearing, but one that can never be fully documented, on the
“transition” from modal discant counterpoint (“their” way of composing) to functional harmony (“our”
way of hearing).
PATTERNS OF EMULATION
Leading composers of two “Tinctoris generations” of continental musicians—both that of the theorist’s
own contemporaries and the younger, up-and-coming generation—wrote Caput Masses in imitation (or
rather, in emulation) of the one we have been examining, thereby casting themselves into a sort of three-
generation dynasty. That these Masses were in fact responses to the older Mass and not two independently
conceived Masses on the same cantus firmus tune is proved by the nature of the cantus firmus itself. It is a
very little-used chant (neither from the Mass nor from the regular Office, but from a special service
attended only by the clergy) that occurs only in English chant books. Ockeghem and Obrecht, the
composers of the subsequent Caput Masses, would have been unlikely to encounter the tune anywhere
else but in the tenor of the first Caput Mass, which circulated widely in continental manuscripts (in one of
them under a spurious attribution to Du Fay that was long believed by scholars). Even more conclusively,
the melody shows up in Ockeghem’s and Obrecht’s tenors in the precisely the same modified and
rhythmicized form we have already observed in the first Caput Mass.
Ockeghem’s Mass, because of its heavy dependence on a model, is presumed to be a relatively early
work (possibly from the 1450 s), but Ockeghem’s works are not easy to date, since many of them are
found only in manuscripts—like the magnificent Chigi Codex illustrated in Fig. 12-4—that postdate his
death. That illustration, it so happens, shows the Kyrie from Ockeghem’s Caput Mass, transcribed in Ex.
12-6, with which it may be compared. Of all the sections of Ockeghem’s Mass the Kyrie is the freest in its
relationship to the model, and therefore the most interesting and instructive one to describe.
EX. 12-6 Johannes Ockeghem, Missa Caput, first Kyrie, mm. 1–8