Whether or not Févin and Josquin enjoyed a personal relationship, Glareanus accurately described
their musical relationship. And yet Févin, while basing his technique and his stylistic preferences
squarely on Josquin’s, was nevertheless an innovator. His Mass on Ave Maria ... Virgo serena, published
by Petrucci in 1515, bears a novel relationship to its musical model, in a manner dictated by the very
nature of the model (which is to say dictated, albeit indirectly, by Josquin).
In the new style exemplified by Josquin’s motet the texture is so mobile and protean—now imitative,
now homorhythmic, now proceeding by one sort of pairing, now by another—that no single voice-part has
enough self-sufficiency to bear appropriation either as a tenor for cantus-firmus treatment, or as a melody
for paraphrase. Instead, the polyphonic reworking of such a piece has to adopt the whole polyphonic
texture as its model. The adaptation consists of a thorough reweaving of the texture, producing a new
polyphonic fabric from the same fund of melodic motives.
Févin and his contemporaries called this new technique imitatio, and called a Mass in such a style a
Missa ad imitationem (“Mass in imitation of “) or simply a Missa super (“Mass on”) followed by the
name of the model. A fairly obscure late-sixteenth century German composer in the humanist tradition,
Jakob Paix, published a mass in this style in 1587 under an affected pseudo-Greeky equivalent, Missa
parodia, which means exactly the same thing as Missa ad imitationem. Since “imitation” already meant
something else in modern musical parlance, modern scholars have adopted Paix’s term for the polyphonic
reweaving technique. We now call such Masses “parody Masses,” and try to forget that the term now
ordinarily suggests some sort of caricature or lampoon.
The Kyrie from Févin’s Missa super Ave Maria (Ex. 14-8), one of the earliest true parody Masses,
gives a good idea of the new genre and its possibilities. (“True” parody Masses are distinguished here not
from false ones, but from earlier works—like Du Fay’s Missa Ave Regina Coelorum, quoted in chapter
13 —which are basically tenor cantus-firmus Masses but which might occasionally draw informally on
additional voices from a polyphonic prototype; such Masses were also composed by Ockeghem, Martini,
Faugues, Obrecht, and Josquin himself.^19 ) It is set in three parts, following the structure of the text. The
“Christe section,” like the outer “Kyries,” uses the whole four-voice complement. (There is no need for a
“tenor tacet” reduction where there is no tenor cantus firmus to withhold for effect.) The first section (Ex.
14-8) opens with a superius/altus duo on the opening motto-phrase of Josquin’s motet, with a melismatic
extension that takes it one scale degree higher for its climax. The tenor enters with what sounds like a
repetition of the same point, but in fact the tenor sings an elision of the first two phrases from the motet,