Journal of the Alamire Foundation

In order to provide a new theoretical basis for reassessing the late fifteenth-century motetti missales and their interaction with liturgy in Sforza Milan, this paper starts not with the missales specifically, but rather with the broader issue of ‘hearing the mass’. This precept was central to the life of early modern Christians, but in how many ways could the faithful fulfil it? How many forms of attention and participation were deemed acceptable? What role did sonic elements play in it? And conversely, how did these conceptions influence musical choices? Through the study of treatises, methods, and other documents, the first sections of the paper explore the theory and practice of attending mass and examine problems such as the synchronization between ritual actions, individual devotion, and collective experiences. Focusing back on the motetti missales in light of the background thus delineated, I argue that the motetti missales were performed during votive low masses. In the conclusions, I put this practice in the perspective of the early modern era and suggest that the low mass may have been an important venue for the performance of motets throughout the period.

Elevation motets have been considered a peculiar feature of the Milanese motetti missales. Yet an exploration of elevation prayers and their circulation makes it possible to contextualize the Milanese transmission of elevation motets in a wider liturgical and musical practice. After discussing the liturgical significance and function of the elevation, with its rich gestural symbolism, this study focuses on the peculiarities of the Milanese elevation motets in comparison with other elevation pieces. The ‘loco Sanctus’ motets of the Milanese Libroni were intended to surround the elevation ritual with music, and also include a part to be sung before the elevation took place. In this regard the Milanese elevation motets show a more direct connection with the mass ritual than other motets ‘de corpore Christi’. Mapping the elevation motet texts reveals significant connections in particular between O salutaris hostia and the liturgical uses of the regions in northern France and Flanders from which Galeazzo Maria Sforza recruited his singers. Although our knowledge of the use of motets and of related practices in those regions is incomplete, this nonetheless suggests narrower ties than have typically been supposed between the Milanese elevation sections and Franco-Flemish singing traditions related to the elevation at mass.

The homophonic passages usually found in fifteenth-century motets to be sung at the culmination of the mass, the elevation, play a paradoxical role in modern scholarship. On the one hand, these passages serve to identify the liturgical function of the motets and the cycles surrounding them; on the other hand, they are hardly ever analyzed in detail, not only because their homophonic austerity seems to be of little interest, but also because they defy normal analytical procedures. To explain what happens when ‘nothing’ happens, this paper gathers a repertoire of contrapuntal-harmonic stock formulas distinguishable as clausulae, gymel, and tabula naturalis progressions. These progressions can be seen working in very different ways in elevation motets. To imagine composers with these polyphonic complexes at their disposal is to imagine theoretical and practical ways beyond a simple dichotomy between ‘counterpoint’ and ‘harmony’. In the discussion of elevation motets, questions of compositional design, of theoretical context, of performance, and of cultural context coalesce.

In December 2015 a music manuscript that had been purchased at auction by a private Belgian art-dealer was brought to the Alamire Foundation in Leuven for examination. The manuscript, it turns out, is a previously unknown later fifteenth-century chansonnier, complete and in its original cloth binding. The book is clearly a prestigious personal object for wealthy nobility. It contains forty-nine French songs from the Ockeghem- Busnois generation and one Latin-texted work. Along with concordances for works known from elsewhere, it also contains twelve entirely unknown pieces. The discovery counts as sensational: only a very small number of similar sources survive. The book was considered of such importance that it was acquired by the Koning Boudewijn Stichting and deposited with the Alamire Foundation. This article presents the first scholarly discussion of the source and its contents.