The Polyphonic Mass in France, 1600–1780: The Evidence of the Printed Choirbooks by Jean-Paul C. Montagnier (review)

The history of liturgical music in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is rich and varied; nevertheless, research lacunae on multiple levels often hamper its scholarship. A significant gap in research concerns the development and practice of church music in France: beyond the repertory of the composers linked to its royal court, whose cultivation of concerted motets is well known, and the output of Marc-Antoine Charpentier, music produced for public celebrations of the Mass has received scant attention. Another subject deserving of more sustained investigation is the widespread continuity of ecclesiastical vocal polyphony during this period. While standard histories of music recognize that this type of composition remained a vital and malleable church-music idiom beyond the early 1600s, particularly in Italy and Austria, the scope of its cultivation is often neglected. Thus individual examples of compositions in a cappella style stemming from these years are too easily viewed as historicist projects detached from the mainstream of musical progress. Yet many centers of church-music composition, especially those within the Catholic realms, sustained a meaningful development of this Renaissance musical tradition. It is manifest in the variety of works already known to musicologists and performers, but perhaps even more so in the number of unstudied works, in both print and manuscript forms, cataloged in the archives of such centers. The farreaching endurance of a cappella settings of the full Ordinary of the Mass, in particular, testifies to the import that the "old-style" choral music retained from the early 1600s through the late eighteenth century.

As the first significant monograph on the cultivation and dissemination of this type of Mass in France during these years, Montagnier's book stands as a welcome and authoritative contribution to the literature. It reveals a field of polyphonic craft and performance that flourished in many of the kingdom's provincial cathedrals and collegiate churches but has been overshadowed in history by the activities of the more prestigious royal sacred musical milieu of Versailles and Paris. It does not present a comprehensive survey of polyphonic Masses in these seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French contexts but rather a focused examination that serves well the author's goal of opening a "path for further investigations" (p. 12). The study's purview encompasses mainly the substantial and fascinating repertory of Masses that successive generations of the Ballard printing dynasty continued to publish in the format of the Renaissance choirbook, in which all individual voice parts are arranged in discrete regions of each page opening, from circa 1600 to 1780.

The book's eight chapters are preceded by a brief but insightful introduction that gives an overview of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French sacred music-historical context. It is judiciously accentuated by a consideration of the better-known contemporary Italian and Austrian polyphonic contexts. The first chapter discusses the choirbook sources in relation to the market forces and performance continuities that sustained their demand across the long time frame under consideration, as well as various material aspects of these editions. Such aspects include the layout of parts and typographical characteristics as well as the modernization of the notation in successive printings and its implications for printing and performance. The second chapter explores numerous matters of choirbook performance practice more closely, including the historical understanding of a cappella choral style, which rarely precluded the integration of instruments, and links between certain examples and the grand choeur-petit choeur format of the grand motet.

Chapters 3 and 4 situate the polyphonic Masses in their institutional and ritual contexts. The former surveys the network of publishers, composers, and patrons in which the repertory circulated. The latter discusses the liturgical environment from which it stemmed, how it functioned within it, and how certain compositional strategies can be related to it. While conforming to the standard...