The “Christe” appears to begin with a new point woven out of the “gratia plena” motive, but it is
actually the altus counterpoint, derived from “cujus assumptio” near the end of Josquin’s motet, from
which most of the fabric is actually woven. The final “Kyrie” is especially ingenious. The motivic
material for its first point of imitation is provided by the tenor’s version of the third phrase (“Dominus
tecum”) in Josquin’s motet. What had been an accompanying melisma—part of the background, as it were
—in the original motet is moved on reweaving into the foreground. Févin’s final point is woven more
straightforwardly out of Josquin’s “Virgo serena” phrase. In its general effect, the Mass Kyrie is a
reworking of the opening quatrain from the motet, but with subtle variants and digressions at the
reworker’s discretion.
FACTS AND MYTHS
Févin was “Josquin’s happy follower” chiefly in matters of texture—the texture exemplified in Ave
Maria, with its rhetorically supple alternation of pervading imitation and emphatic chordal declamation.
The full integration of musical space—rather than the hierarchical stratification of parts found in older
music, with each part carrying out its own particular functional assignment—implied not only a new
technique but a whole new philosophy of composition.
The technique as such was given an early general description in 1523, two years after Josquin’s death,
when the Florentine theorist Pietro Aaron published his compendium Thoscanello de la musica. Aaron, a
Jew, was the first major writer on music to use the Italian vernacular rather than Latin, for which reason
he is often looked upon as the first “Renaissance” music theorist. His book went through several editions,
the last of which was published in 1539, when the new style Aaron was the first to recognize theoretically
was fully established in practice.
The description in the Thoscanello was actually foreshadowed by Aaron himself in an earlier treatise
published in 1516, a year after Févin’s Mass was published; it is a less detailed and distinctive
formulation than the one now classic, but it mentions Josquin explicitly as one of the composers whose
methods it describes. No wonder, then, that Aaron is looked upon as the literary harbinger of “high
Renaissance” music, and Josquin as its master architect.
Both aspects or poles of the “Ave Maria style” are represented in Aaron’s discussion. The
functionally integrated, imitative style of the opening quatrain is reported as a recent innovation, replacing
the older discant practice in which the voices were laid out one at a time. “The moderns,” Aaron
somewhat gloatingly observed, “have considered better in this matter,” his complacent tone recalling
Tinctoris, whose works Aaron had studied well. “Modern composers,” he continued, “consider all the
parts together rather than by the method described above.” And when all the parts are considered together,
each is free to play whatever role composer may wish to assign it.
As to the homorhythmic, declamatory style, Aaron is the first theorist to consider what we would call