Tenor mass.

A setting of the five sections making up the Ordinary of the Roman Catholic Mass in which the same borrowed material appears as a cantus firmus in the tenor of each section. Although the several hundred tenor masses composed between about 1420 and about 1520 constitute a coherent tradition, unified by a complex of recurring compositional conventions, the genre designation is a modern invention that has no counterpart in writings on music from the period. This is not to say that no significance was attached at the time to the choice and treatment of mass cantus firmi. Rather, it underlines that any compositional choice, including free composition, tended to be evaluated principally in terms of appropriateness (or usefulness) to context. Tenor masses seem to have inherited the association with significant political, ecclesiastical and liturgical events that characterized the early 15th-century tenor motet (from which the genre evidently originated).

Post-Enlightenment models of historical explanation, on the other hand, have placed greater emphasis on the intrinsic compositional interest of ‘cyclic unification’, which was seen to reflect the new artistic spirit of the Renaissance. Although little is known about the historical occasions for which individual settings must have been composed, there has been no shortage of proposals in recent decades. This seems to reflect an intellectual trend away from the assessment of medieval and Renaissance compositions purely as autonomous art works and towards contextualized interpretation, drawing on the study of political and cultural history, archival documents, scholastic and theological doctrine and much more. Identification of original performance contexts has generally proved more feasible in the case of liturgical cantus firmi, whose connections to specific feasts or particular devotional practices may provide important clues. Du Fay's Missa ‘Ave regina celorum’ has now been convincingly associated with an endowment of the feast of Our Lady of Snows at Cambrai Cathedral, made by the composer himself in 1472. Similarly, Obrecht's masses for St Martin and St Donatian's can be connected to two endowments at the church of St Donatian, Bruges, in 1486 and 1487, respectively. It is not inconceivable that Josquin's Missa Hercules dux Ferrarie was written for a votive service for the spiritual benefit of Duke Ercole d'Este (and probably endowed by him), since there were few other liturgical contexts in which it was useful to mention a living individual so prominently by name. The anonymous English ‘Caput’ Mass, based on the final melisma of the Maundy Thursday antiphon Venit ad Petrum, seems to have carried baptismal or apostolic significance, though we know little about its occasion other than it was probably in the 1440s. Significantly, all these works circulated well beyond their original performance contexts, indicating a certain tolerance for liturgical or musical incongruity.

Even greater tolerance is suggested by the widespread practice of modelling tenor masses on secular songs. It is possible that the song texts or incipits (which were hardly ever borrowed as well) could provide significant clues, given apparent parallels in later tenor motets. (A good example is Compère's prayer to the Virgin Omnium bonorum plena, based on Hayne van Ghizeghem's song De tous biens plaine, or Josquin's Stabat mater, which quotes the tenor of Binchois's Comme femme desconfortée). This possibility has been explored with particular intensity in the case of the L'homme armé masses, which are believed to have been associated, at least during the mid-15th century, with Europe's political mobilization against the Turkish threat. A connection with warrior saints is however suggested by Regis's setting, which quotes a chant for St Michael along with the L'homme armé tune. (The same explanation cannot be advanced for the anonymous mass for St John the Baptist, probably by Obrecht, which was modelled on Busnoys's L'homme armé mass, though without actually quoting its cantus firmus.) It also the possibility that, for instance, tenor masses such as O rosa bella, Ma maistresse, or De tous biens plaine were written for Marian feasts. Many cases of apparent incongruity remain, however, especially when masses are based on popular songs with allusions to carnality or infidelity (e.g. Se tu te marie or L'ami Baudichon). Contemporary sensitivity to such considerations is not apparent until the early 16th century, when ecclesiastics and reformers openly objected to the inclusion of ‘lascivious songs’ in religious ceremonies. At the same time an emerging interest in the personal circumstances underlying cantus-firmus choices can be discerned, as is illustrated by Glarean's anecdote about Josquin's Missa ‘La sol fa re mi’.

Tenor masses offer much more of historical and musical interest than contemporary authors may have cared to articulate in their writings, however. The genre was unprecedented in compositional dimensions and scope, and composers proved themselves astonishingly imaginative in addressing the artistic problems they faced. The definitive study of cantus-firmus treatment remains Edgar Sparks's Cantus Firmus in Mass and Motet, 1420–1520 (Berkeley, 1963). Sparks identified two broad tendencies in the 15th-century tenor mass: one that favoured literal quotation and schematic treatment (‘rational’), and one in which pre-existing melodies were freely rhythmicized and melodically ornamented, sometimes almost beyond recognition (‘irrational’). Although there are several composers whose oeuvre exemplifies both tendencies (Du Fay, Caron, Josquin), many others developed a consistent preference for one tendency. This preference gives them a distinctive profile (Sparks spoke of ‘rationalists’ and ‘irrationalists’), and in some cases one may even identify lineages or local traditions. Strictness of cantus-firmus treatment and the prominent use of Kanonkünste seem to have been peculiarly Flemish tendencies (Domarto, Busnoys, Obrecht), whereas free elaboration tends to be associated with composers active in central France (Ockeghem, Faugues, Basiron, the exception being the Flemish composer Johannes Martini). Domarto's Missa ‘Spiritus almus’ (c1450) prominently applies mensural transformation, one of several compositional habits that Busnoys seems to have adopted from him and Obrecht in turn adopted from Busnoys. A work that carries the ‘rationalist’ trend to extremes is the anonymous Missa ‘L'ardant desir’ (perhaps by Busnoys or a composer close to him), which applies not only mensural transformation but also transposition, augmentation and schematic sampling techniques, as well as a unique form of inversion that literally involves reading the notation upside down and thus affects the rhythmic interpretation of ligatures. At the other extreme are settings whose treatment of pre-existing material in the tenor is so casual or ornate that it is hardly worthwhile to distinguish them from freely composed masses. Examples include Bedyngham's Mass Dueil angoisseux, whose tenor makes only fleeting allusions to Binchois's song tenor, and the anonymous Missa ‘D’ung aultre amer' (early 1470s, presumably from central France), in which the degree of melodic ornamention varies according to the composer's compositional design, generally retaining only a token presence towards the end of the longer movements.

Generally speaking, the ‘rationalist’ trend remains closer to the traditions of the Ars Nova motet and to the practice of contrapuntal improvisation. Some composers make explicit allusions to this practice, such as Obrecht in his Missa De Sancto Martino, whose ‘Pleni’ may be the nearest we have to a written-out example of cantare super librum. The ties between the tenor motet and the tenor mass remained close also in another respect: until about the 1470s tenor motets tended to be structured similarly to tenor mass movements. This may explain why mass movements were sometimes lifted from their contexts and retexted for performance as a motet. A peculiar tradition in the mid-15th century is the mass-motet cycle, in which a motet is added as a sixth mass movement, being identical in formal layout and cantus-firmus treatment to the other movements (often the motets in question circulated independently).