reciprocal fashion, by a rising fourth to the final, describing the modal tetrachord. The second phrase
(beginning “loquente”) seems to vary the scheme a bit: entries are on G or its fifth, D; but the finishing or
cadential notes are again in every case either G (the tuba) or C (the final).
This modal regularity is reinforced by range-deployment (tessitura): the old structural pair, cantus
and tenor (plus the “quintus” or fifth voice, which coincides with the tenor’s range) are the first to enter,
moving from tuba up to final. That suggests a plagal ambitus (to recall the old chant-theorists’ term), and
the suggestion is confirmed by the overall range of those parts, with the initial G functioning as a lower
limit and the final located in midrange. The remaining parts—the old nonessential pair of high and low
contratenors, plus the “sextus,” or sixth voice that doubles the range of the bass—are pretty strictly
confined to the “authentic” octave. For them the final is the lower limit.
The other factor suggesting an endless stream is uniformity of texture and, above all, of rhythm. Once
all six voices have entered, they remain constantly in play until the end. The nearly three-tempus rest in
the bass between its last “in illo tempore” and its first “loquente” is about the longest rest in the entire
motet; there are no radical contrasts in texture, whether for structural delineation or for rhetorical effect.
Even more tellingly, once the six voices are in play, there is steady motion on every minim (quarter notes
in transcription) until the very end.
That is to say, some voice moves on every minim pulse, so that the “resultant,” were the moving parts
to be summarized on a separate staff for analytical purposes, would be a steady stream of quarter notes,
occasionally decorated by eighths. As the motet proceeds, moreover, the regularity of the minim pulse is
progressively emphasized by the increasingly syllabic text-setting. Harmonic smoothness is assured by the
pervading use of consonance on every minim, cadential suspensions alone excepted. Otherwise, once the
six voices are all in play, the only dissonances are on the “weak” eighths, and are all of them fully
classifiable according to our modern harmonic terminology: mainly passing notes and incomplete
neighbors (échappées).
One can readily see the sort of stylistic perfection at which Gombert was aiming. We have little
information about the way in which such music struck listeners, but we do know that it enjoyed great
prestige among composers, who found Gombert’s technical control impressive enough to go on vying with
it for several generations. Indeed, as late as 1610, more than fifty years after Gombert’s motet first saw
the light of day, Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643), who will get lots of attention later in this book but
who was not yet born at the time of Gombert’s death, published a parody Mass that rewove and recast In
illo tempore on a truly heroic scale. Gombert was first and last a composer’s composer.
CLEMENS
Willaert’s other important contemporary was the fantastically prolific Jacobus Clemens (or Jacob
Clement, ca. 1510–56), jestingly dubbed “Clemens non papa” by his Antwerp publisher, Tylman Susato,
as if anyone would confuse a Dutch composer with the Roman pope. The silly nickname, however, has
stuck. His sacred music falls into two very different groups. The larger portion consists of the traditional
Latin Masses, of which he wrote 15, and motets, of which he wrote a staggering 233—a proportion that
gives an extreme but not inaccurate idea of the relative weight of the two genres in the output of most
“post-Josquin” church composers: the opposite of what it had been pre-Josquin. It is a fair measure of
their “rhetorical,” which is to say humanist, orientation. In these works Clemens uses the same integrative
techniques that we have observed in Gombert, if with a somewhat less determined rigor and a bit more
caprice.
One of Clemens’s best known motets is Qui consolabatur me recessit a me (“He who once consoled