The Invention of the Cyclic Mass

Abstract

Abstract This article explores the origins of the notion of the polyphonic mass as an epoch-making early embodiment of the principle of musical unity and as the quintessence of the Renaissance “masterwork.” Finding no evidence for this status in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, it uses surviving written materials to inquire how the mass might have been perceived by its original users. Taking this inquiry as its point of departure, the study details how the modern status of the mass evolved gradually in the course of the “rediscovery” of early music from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth. That status arose in response to prevailing ideologies in Western European thought from the Enlightenment through Hegel, reaching its apogee (influenced by Hegel and Jacob Burckhardt) in the Geschichte der Musik of August Wilhelm Ambros. Ambros was the first music historian to place aesthetic value on music of the generation of Du Fay, and the first to broach the notion of a musical Renaissance. Although he did not actually propose a Renaissance beginning in the fifteenth century, he was construed to have done so by later writers. The subsequent location of the beginnings of a musical “Renaissance” in the early fifteenth century, and the association of the early “cyclic” mass with it, provided the linchpin in the creation of the level of prestige and historical importance enjoyed by the mass in modern music-historical writing.

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