This sort of tonal planning, necessitated by the absence of a cantus firmus and the need to keep the
music “in motion” without the propulsion that pervasive imitation can afford, amounted to something quite
new. The harnessing of tonal tension by delaying cadences (or, more subtly, delaying points of necessary
arrival) undoubtedly depended on aural memories—on the composer’s part and that of his audience as
well—of the sort of improvisatory music over ground basses that we observed briefly at the end of the
previous chapter.
Returning to the Credo, we can summarize its structure as a strategically planned series of cadential
“cells,” or “modules,” each expressed through a fragment of text declaimed homorhythmically by a
portion of the choir in an iridescently shifting succession and rounded off by a beautifully crafted cadence.
In the middle section (“Crucifixus”) Palestrina apes the tenor-tacet sections of old by scaling down the
performing forces to a four-voice “semichoir,” but the nature of the writing does not differ; it still consists
of a kaleidoscopic interplay of homorhythmically declaimed, cadenced phrases.
The third and last part (“Et in spiritum”) returns to the full six-part complement, which is deployed
more frequently than before at full strength, reaching a massive tutti at the final “Amen” (Ex. 16-10) that
develops the arching “recovery” idea—upward leaps followed by downward scales—into a thrilling
peroration. (The first tenor attempts for a while to swim against the tide with downward leaps and
upward scales, but is finally caught up in the cadential undertow; the plagal cadence at the very end is an
embellishment of the long-sustained final C in the second tenor—an archly deliberate whiff of the old,
decisively superseded cantus-firmus texture.)
The expressivity of this music arises out of the cadence patterns, not to say the “tonal” progressions. It
is with Palestrina that we first begin to notice—and, more, to feel the effects of—strategic harmonic
delays. It is an expressivity that is based almost entirely on “introversive” (inward-pointing) signification
and the emotion that delayed fulfillment of expectations produces in the listener. There is little or no
extroversive symbolism in this—or any other—Mass setting by this time. As one can readily imagine,
relying on extroversive symbolism when setting the same text repeatedly would drastically restrict rather
than enhance one’s creative choices.
EX. 16-10 Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Missa Papae Marcelli, Credo, mm. 186–97