The heaviest overload of all came in the guise of length, a heavenly expanse in which the listener is
lost by design. An early Tudor setting like Taverner’s of the Mass Ordinary—a text that can be recited in
a couple of minutes—will typically last about three-quarters of an hour, and that is minus the Kyrie, which
in Tudor England was always full of tropes, left in plainchant, and considered a part of the Proper. A
Tudor polyphonic Mass setting begins with the Gloria. And even so, it is half again as long as a full five-
section continental Ordinary from the sixteenth century, which will usually clock in at under thirty minutes
if sung straight through at a comparable tempo.
It is often said (and even echoed, somewhat ironically, here) that the English music of the early
sixteenth century represented a survival of medieval attitudes that had, owing to the so-called
Renaissance, become outmoded on the continent. Dueling Zeitgeists again: they simplify the story but do
not clarify it. For the “Renaissance” Zeitgeist is represented in this dichotomy in a very selective and
tendentious guise. As students of humanism have long agreed, humanism as a mode of thought is by no
means to be equated, in its totality, with rationalism or “modern” empirical attitudes. It retained a great
deal of magical thinking about nature and about human nature, and about the influence of the cosmos on the
human constitution, all of it fully sanctioned by a different strain of classical thought from the one on
which the ars perfecta theorists relied. The god of the perfectionists was orderly Aristotle, the great
observer and classifier and logician. The god of magical thinkers was Plato, who believed in a realer
reality than that which either our senses or our empirical logic can grasp.
The transrational and transsensible powers of music that the ancients described—its ethos, to use
their word for it—lay altogether outside the Aristotelian ken of those highly professionalized musicians of
the ars perfecta like Zarlino or Willaert. But they attracted the keen attention of neo-Platonist humanists
(mainly literary men), many of whom practiced astrology and tried to harness the occult power of music
to aid them in calling upon cosmic forces. Chief among them was the Florentine physician, classical
scholar, and musical amateur Marsilio Ficino, the founder of the Platonic Academy of Florence, a bastion
of humanism and an emblem of “The Renaissance” if ever there was one. He thought that music was the
best avenue available to humans for “capturing celestial benefits,” and even tried to codify the practice of
“channelling astral influxes” in a treatise called De vita libri tres (“Three books on life”). Needless to
say, Ficino’s treatise has little in common with Zarlino’s. It prescribes no actual method of composition,
but instead gives three rules by which to judge the products of composition, drawing on the magical
powers of correspondence or analogy—that is, of shared attributes. A three-sided relationship is set up