Journal of the Alamire Foundation

Antoine Busnoys’s Missa L’homme armé has been the subject of particular musicological study since Richard Taruskin argued that Busnoys composed the mass according to a numerological ground-plan. Since then, the question of the correct mensuration sign of the tenor-tacet ‘Christe’ and ‘Benedictus’ sections has come under particular scrutiny. In these sections, there is disagreement among the sources between C and O2. This seemingly minor notational detail has had significant ramifications in the literature on L’homme armé; an original sign of C is required for the numerological reading Taruskin proposed, and even as Taruskin’s claims have been critiqued on other grounds, the question of Busnoys’s original signs remains. This article reassesses the situation of the signs in Busnoys’s Missa L’homme armé. After considering Busnoys’s use of modus, examining the sources of the mass and some of their unconsidered details, and contextualizing Busnoys’s mass alongside various works related to it, I argue that the mensuration sign C in perfect minor modus is original-but not for the numerological reasons Taruskin proposed.

The origins of the L’homme armé mass tradition have fascinated musicologists since the early twentieth century. After identifying an epistemologically rigorous ‘early L’homme armé’, this paper interrogates two aspects of the tradition’s origins as they have been sketched in recent literature. First, I argue that attempts to connect L’homme armé with the ceremonial of the Burgundian Order of the Golden Fleece cannot be sustained in light of recent findings on related manuscripts and documents, especially Sean Gallagher’s exposition on the Missa L’homme armé of Johannes Regis. Second, I revisit the compositional question of ‘strict’ and ‘free’ cantus firmi, demonstrating how a heretofore unexplored aspect of Regis’s cantus firmus challenges this familiar distinction-within the L’homme armé tradition and beyond.

Pierre de la Rue’s Missa L’homme armé survives in four sources: BrusBR 9126, VienNB 1783, Petrucci 1503, and JenaU 22. The movement consists of three sections: a section in O; a 4-ex-1 mensuration canon; and a section in sesquialtera. The Brussels and Vienna sources, choirbooks prepared by the early sixteenth-century copyist known as ‘Scribe B’, place the canon second, and the sesquialtera section last. Petrucci reverses the canon and sesquialtera sections, while Jena omits the canon entirely. Stemmatic and notational considerations suggest that Petrucci preserves La Rue’s original conception. This is surprising considering Scribe B’s presumed proximity to the composer, on the one hand, and Petrucci’s presumed distance, on the other.

Three Requiem masses, one for five voices and two for four voices, have been attributed to Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina with different degrees of certainty. A thorough analysis of sources, as well as stylistic and liturgical features, reveals that an alternative attribution can be inferred for two of them. The five-voice Requiem is the only one that can be attributed to Palestrina with certainty. However, the oddity of its structure leaves room for some speculation about the role of pro defunctis masses at the Cappella Giulia in the late Renaissance.

This article presents findings and conclusions from a recently completed Ph.D. project which researched the use of recorders in performing sacred music in Spanish cathedrals and churches during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This study also examined interactions of the historical findings with artistic questions arising in twenty-first-century performance of sacred music repertoire. Paradoxically, while numerous sets of recorders were purchased by ecclesiastic institutions during the sixteenth century, most contemporary compositions did not specifically call for their use. As well, surviving sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century documentation is highly fragmentary regarding the participatory role of recorders in sacred repertoire of this period. Scholarly research and writing had not addressed this issue, and many questions persisted regarding any role of recorders in this repertoire. Sacred music of this era offers the modern musician an extensive and rich potential repertoire of supreme quality and beauty. Therefore, in seeking an historically informed basis for performance, this project asked if recorders were used in such works in Spanish ecclesiastic institutions during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and, if so, how.