(In characteristic art-conceals-art fashion, the canon is hidden behind a general point of imitation for the
five voices in the texture, in which the two canonic parts are the third and fifth entries, the latter further
obscured by being placed in an inner voice.) In the middle section (Christe eleison), the canon is at the
seventh at a time lag of seven semibreves, and in the closing section, the canon is at the sixth, at a time lag
of six semibreves.
Palestrina is not vying here merely with Jacquet. He is after much bigger game: none other than
Ockeghem, whose Missa Prolationum, another progressive canonic cycle (but with expanding pitch
intervals) had set the Netherlandish benchmark for artifice, and whose preeminence had lately been
decreed anew in Italy, in a specifically humanistic context. The famous Florentine polymath or
“Renaissance man” Cosimo Bartoli, in a commentary to Dante called Raggionamenti accademici, wrote
that “in his day Ockeghem was, as it were, the first to rediscover music, then as good as dead, just as
Donatello discovered sculpture.”^2 Bartoli’s observations, published in 1567 (three years before
Palestrina’s Mass), echo all too clearly the famous theses of Giorgio Vasari, whose “Lives of the
Painters” (1550) virtually created the popular notion of the Renaissance in the visual arts. Now there was
such a notion for music, too, and Palestrina was getting in on its ground floor.
PARODY PAIRS
More than thirty of Palestrina’s Masses are of the paraphrase type—pioneered by Josquin in his late
Missa Pange lingua and standard practice (as we have seen) for ars perfecta motets—in which a
Gregorian chant is absorbed into a pervadingly imitative texture. But the lion’s share, accounting for
almost exactly half of Palestrina’s output in the genre (fifty-three to be exact), are parody Masses, in
which the motives of a polyphonic model are exhaustively rewoven into new textures. The sources of
these Masses were most often motets by composers whose works were popular in local liturgical use
during Palestrina’s youth. More than twenty times, though, Palestrina based a Mass on one of his own
motets (or even madrigals, including Vestiva i colli).
When this is the case, it suggests that both the motet and the derivative Mass may have been meant for
performance in tandem on the same major feast. Palestrina provided three such motet-plus-Mass sets for
Christmas. The one on O magnum mysterium (“O great mystery!”—motet published 1569, Mass in 1582)
has become particularly famous, and with good reason. The motet begins with a marvelously effective
rhetorical stroke: a series of colorful (i.e., chromatic) chords and a reiteration of “O!” that conspire
vividly to portray a state of wonder. The chords are connected for the most part along an ordinary circle