The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Josquin des Prez · a setting of the Ordinary of the Mass for four voices, Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus and Agnus Dei, scored as one work · built throughout on the plainchant hymn Pange lingua gloriosi, whose melody is paraphrased in every voice and whose words are never sung · as it survives, complete in music and text · about 28 to 35 minutes in performance
Mode
Paraphrase mass; the Ordinary set in pervading imitation for four equal voices, every point of imitation drawn from the phrases of one plainchant hymn
Mythos
The hymn of the Body hidden in the fabric of the Mass and revealed at the Lamb of God; the central Christian story carried by the liturgy
Phase
Five movements in liturgical order, Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus with Pleni, Osanna and Benedictus, and Agnus Dei; the hymn dispersed through all of them and sung plainly only at the end
Presentation
Concert music; four voices throughout the main sections, reduced scoring in inner sections; the Latin Ordinary, with the chant intonations of Gloria and Credo left to the celebrant
Register
Luminous calm; long melismatic imitation in the Kyrie, near-syllabic declamation in the Credo, one passage of chords at the Incarnation, the Phrygian mode’s colour throughout
Scale
295 words of the Ordinary in about thirty minutes; the creation, the Incarnation, the Passion, the judgement and the Lamb, held through one hymn of six phrases
Governing Proposition
A Mass for four voices takes the hymn of the feast of the Body, breaks its melody into its six phrases, and lets every voice begin from them, so that the hymn is the law of the whole fabric and is almost never heard as itself. Only in the last Agnus Dei does it surface plainly in the top voice. The wager of the work is that one melody can be everywhere in a texture and nowhere on its surface, and that its revelation at the end can be the meaning of the form.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The hymn is the Corpus Christi hymn, “Pange lingua gloriosi”
“Sing, my tongue, of the glorious”, attributed to Thomas Aquinas and sung at the feast of the Body of Christ. Its text runs to six stanzas of six trochaic lines, alternating eight and seven syllables, forty-five syllables a stanza; its melody therefore has six phrases. The melody Josquin uses is the Phrygian one, with its final on E. Those six phrases are the whole material of the mass.
Josquin des Prez was born around 1450 and died at Condé-sur-l’Escaut on 27 August 1521. The Missa Pange lingua sets the Ordinary of the Mass, the five texts sung at every Mass of the year, for four voices: Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus with its Pleni, Osanna and Benedictus, and Agnus Dei. The words sung are the Ordinary’s, in Latin. The hymn’s words are never sung. Only its melody is present, and it is present everywhere.
That is the decision on which the work rests. The hymn is not laid out in long notes in one voice, to be heard apart from the others, as the masses of the generation before had laid out their chants. It is broken into its phrases, and each phrase becomes the opening of a point of imitation in which all four voices take it up and let it dissolve into free counterpoint. The listener who knows the hymn hears it begin again and again and never hears it whole. The work withholds its source in plain sight.
Movement II
The Mass opens with the hymn’s first phrase, taken by one voice after another. The four voices are equal: none is a scaffold and none an accompaniment, and each enters with the chant before going its own way. This is pervading imitation, the texture the motet had been developing for two decades, and it is the texture of the whole mass. The Kyrie’s imitations interlock, and the music rises in them without force.
The Kyrie has three words, and they are repeated. Counted by script on the standard Ordinary, it carries six words and about fifteen syllables, under three per cent of the text the mass sets. The Credo carries 159 words and more than half the syllables. A composer who gives each movement comparable musical weight must spread the Kyrie’s few syllables across long melismas and drive the Credo near syllabically. This mass does both, and the difference is a test of its law.
The inheritance is the cantus firmus mass of Dufay, Ockeghem and Obrecht, in which a chant or a song lies in long notes in the tenor and the other voices are built around it; Josquin had written masses on that plan himself. Here the scaffold is gone. What replaces it is not freedom but a stricter law: every voice now carries the chant, and no voice carries it whole. The turn is real, and it lies along the road Josquin and his generation had already taken.
Movement III
The Gloria begins at Et in terra, the Credo at Patrem: their opening words belong to the celebrant’s chant, which polyphonic settings of the period leave to the chant. Between them the two movements carry more than four-fifths of the mass’s text. Josquin carries it at speed. The Credo moves near syllabically, its counterpoint intact, the Latin audible; voices are paired, two answered by the other two, so that the words stay clear and the texture breathes.
At “Et incarnatus est” the counterpoint stops and the voices move together in chords. It is the one sustained passage of chordal declamation in the Credo, and it falls on the words of the Incarnation, the doctrinal centre of a mass on the hymn of the Body. The traditional point of awe in the Mass is set here with great plainness, and the plainness is the point: for a few bars the four voices say one thing at once.
The Credo also holds the widest orders the work contains: the creator of things “visibilium omnium et invisibilium”
“visible and invisible”, a dated suffering “sub Pontio Pilato”
“under Pontius Pilate”, the judgement and the life to come. They are the liturgy’s, sung at speed. In the middle stretches of the Gloria and the Credo one point of imitation follows another by the logic of the text rather than of the whole, and there the making, by Josquin’s standard, is fluent routine.
Movement IV
The Sanctus is the mass’s widest span of short texts, the Sanctus itself, the Pleni, the Osanna and the Benedictus. Here the texture varies most. Inner sections are set for fewer voices than four, the fabric thinned where the text is short, and the Osanna’s broader motion lifts the movement. The scoring changes; the source does not. Every reduced passage still begins from a phrase of the hymn.
The mode is Phrygian throughout, and the Phrygian mode is awkward at its cadences. Josquin handles it so that its colour becomes a resource, not a problem. How far the cadences should be inflected by musica ficta, the unwritten accidentals singers of the time supplied, is a question on which editions and performances differ, and it stays open; the sound of those cadences as heard is beyond what the score alone decides.
Take the two most distant elements in the mass: the Kyrie’s long melismas on three words and the Credo’s near-syllabic run through 159. One law governs both, and the Sanctus and its thinned sections obey it too. What the law governs is a narrow range of feeling, a sacred serenity with little terror or grandeur of force. The work’s height is that of clarity, and it comes often; it seldom becomes transport.
Movement V
In the last Agnus Dei the hymn comes into the open. The superius, the top voice, carries the melody more nearly whole than anywhere before, plainly enough to be heard as itself, while the three voices below continue in imitation around it. It is the work’s largest moment, and it is quiet. It falls at the Lamb of God and at “dona nobis pacem”
“grant us peace”, the last words of the Mass. A hymn of the Body, hidden through the whole Ordinary, is revealed at the Lamb: presence in the fabric, made manifest at the end.
The mass was first printed in 1539, eighteen years after Josquin’s death, and it survives also in manuscript. Its date is open, and so is the claim that it is his last mass. It was sung, copied and printed through the sixteenth century, and the method it shows, a whole Ordinary generated from one chant through pervading imitation, became the norm of the mass in Gombert’s generation and in Palestrina’s paraphrase masses. Then it fell silent with its style. For about three centuries it lived in libraries and in theory.
It returned in the nineteenth-century revival and, in performance, in the twentieth. The Josquin Festival-Conference of 1971, Richard Sherr’s Josquin Companion of 2000 and David Fallows’s Josquin of 2009 keep it near the centre of the composer’s literature. Recordings differ on voices, pitch, tempo and ficta, and it is now among the most performed masses before Palestrina, in the world of early-music choirs. What it knows has not changed since it was written: the hymn is in every voice, and is sung only at the end.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test meets resistance because nothing in the mass is free material: every point of imitation is a phrase of the hymn, so to cut a passage is to cut a line of the chant from the argument. The Credo is the plainest evidence. Carrying more than half the text, it moves near syllabically and does not linger, and the one place it changes manner, Et incarnatus est, is the doctrinal centre of a mass on the hymn of the Body. The last Agnus releases the hymn in the top voice, a release the whole work has withheld. The give lies in the middle stretches of the Gloria and the Credo, where one point follows another by the logic of the text rather than of the whole. The liturgy fixes the order; only what Josquin made of it is credited.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Disclosure through sound is credited as fully as in words, and here it can be stated: the hymn of the Body is present in every voice and almost never heard as itself. Broken into its phrases and taken into the imitation of all four parts under the words of the Ordinary, it emerges plainly only in the last Agnus, at “dona nobis pacem”
“grant us peace”. Presence hidden in the fabric and revealed at the end is a sacramental claim, made by the form. What holds the axis lowest of the eleven: the words of the Ordinary are not Josquin’s, and the work carries them rather than discloses them; the step from a technique, paraphrase, to a theology is an interpretation the technique does not compel; and it opens a sacred order more than an articulated human condition.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Elevation is constant and mostly of one kind, a luminous calm. The Kyrie rises in interlocking imitations. At Et incarnatus est the counterpoint gives way to chords: the classic point of awe in the Mass, set here with great plainness. The Osanna moves more broadly. The last Agnus, the hymn surfacing in the top voice over the other three, is the work’s largest moment and a quiet one. Height is real and frequent. Held below the upper band by range: the register seldom leaves serenity, and there is little terror or grandeur of force. The height is that of clarity more than of transport, and the final Agnus, the strongest claim on the axis, is one moment.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The Ordinary carries the central Christian story, creation, incarnation, passion, resurrection, judgement and the sacrificed Lamb, but it is the liturgy’s, set by every composer of masses, and the work does not build it. What Josquin builds is narrower and particular: the hymn of the feast of Corpus Christi, “Pange lingua gloriosi”, dispersed through the body of the Mass and gathered at the Agnus Dei, the Lamb of God, where it comes into the open. The body given, broken and received becomes the structure of the mass, not an allusion. Held below the gate because the particular stays thin: no person, place or act is made specific by the music, and the theology is assembled by the listener who knows the hymn.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The inheritance is the cantus firmus mass of Dufay, Ockeghem and Obrecht: a chant or song laid out in long notes in the tenor as a scaffold, a plan Josquin had used himself. The departure is the dissolving of the scaffold. The hymn becomes the motivic source of all four voices in pervading imitation, the texture of equal voices that the motet had been developing, carried across a whole Ordinary and pared to great brevity. Held below the gate on the stake and the path. Paraphrase was not new, and pervading imitation had been Josquin’s road, and his generation’s, for two decades. A master of settled fame risked nothing; the swerve is a summation that turns the road, not a wager against it.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Change the form and the work stops knowing what it knows: that one melody can be everywhere in a texture and nowhere on its surface, and then be revealed. Set as a tenor cantus firmus, the hymn would be a scaffold heard apart from the other voices from the first bar, and the end would reveal nothing. Composed freely, there would be no hidden presence at all. Paraphrase in imitation is the instrument: each point begins with a phrase of the chant and lets it dissolve into counterpoint, so the hymn is the law of the fabric and not an object in it. The chordal Et incarnatus is form too, the one place the counterpoint yields. Held below the top because the liturgy gives the order, and in the long texted movements the form serves the succession of the words more than it thinks.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Evidence, of the scholarly and the performing kind. The mass has stood near the centre of the Josquin literature since the nineteenth-century revival, through the Josquin Festival-Conference of 1971 and its proceedings, Richard Sherr’s Josquin Companion (2000) and David Fallows’s Josquin (2009). The open questions are real: its date, and whether it is his last mass; the relation between the print and the manuscripts; musica ficta and cadential inflection in the Phrygian mode; voices, pitch and tempo, contested across recordings. It keeps yielding formally, since each hearing can follow the chant’s phrases into another voice. Held below the top because the yield is concentrated in specialist analysis and in the twentieth century, and because what the work means is little disputed, only how it is made.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The field is the polyphonic Mass of Josquin’s generation, around 1500 to 1520. The force is the larger component: the work shows that a whole Ordinary can be generated from one chant through pervading imitation, with equal voices and clear declamation, the method that became the norm of the sixteenth-century mass in Gombert’s generation and in Palestrina’s paraphrase masses. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is real but shared. The redirection belongs to Josquin’s generation and to his motets as much as to this mass; it was printed only in 1539, when the change was already under way; and its later reach lies in the revival and the recording era, not in composition. Delayed influence is credited and discounted, and Josquin’s standing is not counted as this work’s reach.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Survival is weighed in form, presence and fabric. The form is whole: music and text survive complete, and the variants between the print and the manuscripts do not touch the work’s form. Presence is the cost. Sung, copied and printed through the sixteenth century, the mass fell silent with its style, and for about three centuries it lived in libraries and in theory. It returned in the nineteenth-century revival and, in performance, in the twentieth, and it is now among the most performed and recorded masses before Palestrina, though in the narrower world of early-music choirs. This is a long silence with a strong return. The fabric costs nothing: the Latin rite that fixed its surface has outlived the conditions that produced it.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight throughout. The counterpoint is the century’s model: points of imitation in which each voice enters with the chant’s phrase and becomes an independent line without a crowded bar; voice-pairing, two voices answered by the other two, for clarity and for scale; declamation that lets the Latin be heard, the Credo’s text carried at speed without losing the counterpoint. The Phrygian mode, whose cadences are awkward, is handled so that its colour is a resource, not a problem. Reduced scorings vary the texture without loss of law. The last Agnus is a feat of disposition, the hymn in the top voice and the other three still in imitation around it. Held off the ceiling on load: the making is flawless more than strained, and the middle stretches of the Gloria and Credo are, by Josquin’s standard, fluent routine.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the Kyrie’s long melismatic imitation on three words, and the Credo’s near-syllabic run through 159. One law governs both: every point is a phrase of the one hymn in the one mode, paraphrased into imitation. The chordal Et incarnatus, the reduced inner sections and the hymn revealed in the Agnus obey it too; they vary scoring and texture, not the source. The range is real within the liturgy, from three words to the creed, from a thinned texture to the full four voices, from melisma to declamation. Held below the top because narrowness is not coherence: the expressive range is a sacred serenity, and the law has less distance to govern than a work that runs from a lament to a street song.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The orders held are those of the Ordinary, and they are held, not listed: the sacred first and throughout; the cosmos, in the creator of all things “visibilium omnium et invisibilium”
“visible and invisible”; history, in a dated suffering “sub Pontio Pilato”
“under Pontius Pilate”, and the state that inflicted it; mortality, judgement and the life to come; the community, in a liturgy sung by a body of voices for a body of people, and the Body itself as the feast’s subject. The breadth is the text’s; its integration through one hymn is the work’s. What holds the axis lowest: consciousness, the family, labour and the natural order do not appear, and history and the state are clauses sung at speed. The setting holds the frame of a world more than its particulars.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.4, The Inner Law at 9.1 and The Living Form at 9.0. Points of imitation in which every voice enters with a phrase of the chant and becomes an independent line, a Credo carried at speed without loss of counterpoint, and a final Agnus that places the hymn whole in the top voice over the other three; one law, the hymn paraphrased in one mode, governing the Kyrie’s melismas and the Credo’s declamation alike; and a form in which the hidden melody and its revelation are what the work knows.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.6: the sacred, the cosmos, history and the state, mortality and the community are held through one hymn, but the breadth is the Ordinary’s, consciousness, the family, labour and the natural order are absent, and history and the state are clauses sung at speed. Next above it, The Unconcealment at 8.2 and The Swerve at 8.3: the words are the liturgy’s and the disclosure is one the form makes and interpretation must state, and the turn from scaffold to paraphrase summed a road Josquin and his generation had already taken, at no stake.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.4, The Inner Law at 9.1, The Living Form at 9.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.9 clears the bar of 8.5 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.6 clears it by a tenth, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.4, The Swerve at 8.3 and The Unconcealment at 8.2 fall short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.2, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.6. Four of the five summit conditions are met, and with the Epochal Gate unmet and an aggregate of 8.6 the work stands in Tier IV.
Basis · the Missa Pange lingua of Josquin des Prez as it survives: a Mass for four voices, Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus with Pleni, Osanna and Benedictus, and Agnus Dei, music and Latin text together, scored as one work; read from knowledge under the desk’s convention for concert music, with its performance tradition as evidence for The Made, The Bottomless Well and The Imperishable. No score, edition, text or recording was in hand. Nothing of the work is lost and nothing has been reconstructed; the variants between the print of 1539 and the manuscripts are weighed as variants of the one work. The words are the liturgy’s and are weighed as inheritance; their setting, and the hymn carried through it, are credited to the work. The hymn’s words are not sung and are not part of the unit; its melody is. Latin is quoted only in short phrases of which the desk is certain, and every English gloss is the desk’s own. The text of the Ordinary was counted by script, excluding the celebrant’s intonations of Gloria and Credo; the syllable counts are approximate and the shares are the useful figure. Details that could not be verified, among them the printer and title of the first edition, the manuscript sources, the place of the work among Josquin’s printed books, its date, the distribution of the chant among the voices in each section, the scoring of every inner section, the length of the values in the chordal passage, the editions of the revival, and the dates of particular recordings, are not given; the running time is a range across the recorded tradition, not a measurement. Pitch, voice types and musica ficta, and the sound of the work as heard, are beyond this reading and are neither credited nor charged.