Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century

tenor (Ex. 12-10) fortuitous or emblematic; and if emblematic, of what?) It is the double reciprocity—
immediate reversal of contour after a leap, the exchange of leaps and steps—that creates the “balanced”
design with which the name Palestrina has become synonymous. The wealth of passing tones (many of
them accented), vouchsafed by the stepwise recovery of skips, is what gives Palestrina’s texture its much
esteemed patina. Otherwise the style of Palestrina’s Kyrie does not differ especially from the ars perfecta
idiom with which we are familiar, because the Kyrie is a sparsely texted, traditionally melismatic item
where textual clarity was not of paramount concern.

EX. 16-7    Giovanni    Pierluigi   da  Palestrina, Missa   Papae   Marcelli,   opening Kyrie

It is in the “talky” movements of the Mass—the Gloria and Credo—that the special post-Tridentine
qualities emerge. The setting of the very first phrase of polyphony in the Credo (Ex. 16-8) can serve as
paradigm. The bass has the Ur-motif, its first note twice reiterated (or, to put it more in sixteenth-century