(Lat.: ‘short mass’).
(1) In the 15th and 16th centuries this term denotes a complete setting of the Ordinary of the Mass in which all movements are short. The term was in use by about 1490 in Italy, as is shown by four masses by Gaffurius so designated in the Milanese manuscript I-Mcap 2268. These settings are typified by brevity, absence or near absence of mensural contrast and, in the Gloria and Credo, considerable omission of text and syllabic setting with many repeated notes. Following Ambrosian practice, all lack settings of the Agnus Dei and most also lack the Kyrie and Benedictus. These masses were clearly part of an older tradition, which may have been concentrated in Milan or have been more widespread: a setting of the Gloria, Credo and Sanctus minus Benedictus embedded in a composite cycle copied in I-TRmp 91 apparently in the mid-1470s shows exactly the same stylistic traits (see A. Peck Leverett: ‘An Early Missa brevis in Trent Codex 91’, Music in the German Renaissance: Sources, Styles and Contexts, ed. J. Kmetz, Cambridge, 1994, 152–73). Similar characteristics also typify such masses as Josquin's ‘D'ung aultre amer’ and Martini's ‘In Feuers Hitz’, although the term seems to have been reserved in contemporary parlance for cycles free of borrowed scaffolding. The term was used more widely after 1560, for example by Palestrina, at a time when a demand for shorter mass settings prompted greater recognition of the missa brevis as a distinct type of mass. A number of works that actually fit the category were not designated in this way, however, since the term was reserved for short masses that had no antecedent from which they could be named: thus Josquin’s Missa ‘D’ung aultre amer’, based on a chanson by Ockeghem, is in its proportions a missa brevis.
(2) In the 17th and 18th centuries the term came to mean principally a setting of the Kyrie and Gloria only, usually intended for use in the Lutheran service (missa alone sometimes signified the same). Less commonly missa brevis refers to a four- or five-movement setting of the Ordinary that was highly abbreviated. Abbreviation was sometimes achieved by the exclusion of portions of the text or by the simultaneous presentation of successive clauses. In the 20th century the term was used for masses of modest proportions, very often with accompaniment for organ only (Kodály, Britten).
See also Mass, §§ II and III.
LEWIS LOCKWOOD/ANDREW KIRKMAN