EX. 15-3B Jacobus Clemens, Qui consolabatur me recessit a me, mm. 78–endOn the face of it, Clemens’s procedures seem just as rigorous as Gombert’s, even more so. There is
the same redundancy of overlapping interwoven entries in the opening point of imitation. Clemens, in fact,
brings each voice in exactly twice, producing a precisely calculated, symmetrical “double point,” the
second part in rhetorically effective stretto. But the rhythm does not settle when expected into Gombert’s
regular minim pulse. Indeed, that second statement in stretto is a moment of unexpectedly arrested
rhythmic motion: a rhetorical pause, so to speak, that serves (as pauses do) to focus attention. On what?
On some unusual pitch relationships, to begin with. The reader may already have noticed that the
piece carries an unusually flat-full key signature. That in itself is no indication of chromaticism: quite the
contrary, in fact. What key signatures do is transpose diatonic modes intact. That is what they do
nowadays with modern major and minor scales, and that is what they did in the sixteenth century, too,
when major and minor scales, under the rubrics Ionian and Aeolian, were incipient. Looking at Clemens’s
first point of imitation in terms of its cadence, it is evident that the two flats in the superius, contratenor,
and bassus have simply transposed the Ionian mode down a whole step—most likely to “darken” it in
keeping with the prevailing affect. That first point, just like Gombert’s in Ex. 15-2, establishes the
regularity of the mode by alternating entries on the tuba and the final. (Where Gombert had paired his
entries at the octave, Clemens pairs the first two at the descending fifth, making a direct, rhythmically
regular and highly affirmative progression from full-tempus tuba to full-tempus final.)
But in the second point, the one in stretto, the entries are highly irregular. The tenor, exactly repeating
its first phrase with another entry on the final, is the only voice to reiterate one of the structural pitches, as
we have been calling them. The contratenor does not imitate it but actually enriches it harmonically by
doubling it at the third, beginning on D, so that its intervallic structure departs from precedent. The next
voice to enter is the “quinta vox” or “fifth voice,” imitating not the tenor but the contratenor at the fifth
below. It is forced by the curious extra flat in its signature to imitate the nonstandard intervallic
configuration as well.
And that, of course, is why that extra flat is there: the normal rules of musica ficta would not have
demanded it. It has to be explicitly signed because it is a departure from modal regularity. Thus it is a true
“chromaticism,” if a mild one. Finally, the outer voices both enter on E-flat, in their respective octaves.
Here the normal rules of musica ficta do demand the A-flat that had to be specifically supplied by
signature in the quinta (and, as we now notice, in the tenor as well). The A-flat is no part of the Ionian
scale. It is a “Mixolydian” infusion. The mode of the motet has been “commixed” and rendered unstable.