The Cultural Life of the Early Polyphonic Mass: Medieval Context to Modern Revival (review)

Like few other pre-baroque music genres, the polyphonic mass in the late Middle Ages has attracted a massive amount of scholarly attention ever since the early days of active musicological research in the late eighteenth century. Yet few other genres have been so used and misused in order to prop up various ideological agendas. In his new book Andrew Kirkman, who, beyond his conducting activity (The Binchois Consort) has published extensively on several late medieval mass repertories, and who may thus be regarded as one of the major experts in the field, retraces the historical reception of the so-called "cyclic" mass since Charles Burney but, above all, recontextualizes its rise and cultivation since the mid-fifteenth century, providing a rich cultural tapestry that helps clarify and better grasp its enormous spread and appeal until well into the sixteenth century and beyond.

The volume is divided into three main sections, each devoted to illustrating a specific interpretative angle of the polyphonic mass. Part 1 ("The Status of the Early Polyphonic Mass") reassesses the historiography of late-eighteenth to twentieth-century epistemological reception of the mass, which saw and evaluated it as a major landmark along a teleologically oriented progress chart predestined to lead into the highly individualized works of genius of the classical and romantic eras. Within this intensely ideologically charged perspective those aspects of the mass were emphasized that best served the purpose of highlighting its thematic and structural unity, itself seen as an unquestionable mark of the work of the individualized genius. Given this perspective it is only natural that most of the attention was focused on the cantus firmus mass, regarded as a privileged terrain, where the composer, by "freely" choosing a pre-existing theme, afforded the mass an aesthetically independent unification device that allegedly snatched it away and "liberated" it from the (perceived) shackles of purely liturgical considerations. That such an epistemological viewpoint was to prove durable and almost unassailable is proven by the fact that it most potently surfaces as late as in Manfred Bukofzer's seminal Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Music (New York: W. W. Norton, 1950), and has been ever since hardly questioned.

It is without a doubt that the mass was perceived already as an independent genre since at least the authoritative testimony of Johannes Tinctoris who, in his Terminorum musicae diffinitorium, conceived around 1472-74 although published twenty years later, classifies it as cantus magnus in contradistinction to the cantus mediocris of the motet and the cantus parvus of the chanson, as Kirkman shows in chapter 2 ("Contemporary Witnesses"). It is also clear, however that, rather than being value judgments and thus aesthetic judgments as such, the adjectives magnus, mediocris and parvus refer for Tinctoris on the one hand merely to the format and the duration in time of the attendant genres, and on the other to their function within their own social and ideological contexts. The two other contemporary witnesses considered by Kirkman (Paolo Cortese and Johannes Ott) do not essentially seem to depart from Tinctoris, with their judgments being at the same time less self-conscious and competent than the latter's.

In Part 2 ("The Ritual World of the Early Polyphonic Mass") the author considers mass composition within a contemporary theological and philosophical context. The two core chapters (devoted, respectively, to the Caput mass and to masses based on the L'homme armé melody) are framed on the one hand by a contribution on the possible motives behind musical borrowing of (mainly) secular models, with, at the end, a few music examples, and on the other hand by a chapter on the proposed conceptual interactions of secular texts within the sacred context of liturgy. The chapter on the L'homme armé masses is accompanied by a rich array of contemporary documents (many of which are cited in their full length in appendix 1...