oa Early Parody Masses, Their Composers, and the French Connection in Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Musica Ms. F

Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Musica Ms. F [MunBS F] is significant for being one of the earliest surviving collections of parody masses, and for being the only manuscript in the Alamire complex to contain parody masses almost exclusively. An examination of these masses shows the wide variety of parody techniques used in these early works. The French royal chapel has long been hypothesized to be the birthplace of the sixteenth-century parody mass. Although MunBS F was produced in the Low Countries, the three identifiable composers of the masses that it transmits (Pierre Moulu, Mathieu Gascongne, and Jean Richafort), as well as the four identifiable composers of the models that are being parodied (Josquin Desprez, Loyset Compère, Antoine Févin, and Pierre de la Rue), can all be associated in some way with the royal court of France during various years between 1481 and 1518. This provides clear support for this thesis and shows how the Alamire scriptorium preserved and propagated a good portion of the sacred French court repertory of the early sixteenth century.