Article: The Order of Mass and Renaissance Polyphony

Renaissance Polyphony is one of the major singing traditions of the Catholic Church from about the 14th-16th centuries. In order to contextualize our continued journey through the history of sacred music, let’s begin by talking about the Order of Mass. Somewhere in the back of our minds, we can probably recall what the order of Mass is, but let’s take a moment to lay it out. 

Within the order of Mass, we have two main ideas: 

1. Ordinary – The Ordinary is called ordinary, because it doesn’t really change. These are the parts of the Mass that are the same each week – kyrie, gloria, alleluia, creed, the holy holy, agnus dei, etc.
2. Propers – The Propers are called proper because they are assigned to specific days – Sundays and Feast Days have special prayers that go along with them. These are called introit, gradual, offertory, and communion. 

This order of Mass has been pretty similar from the Medieval Mass to the present and is important in this conversation because these prayers are where we can observe the development of sacred music over the course of many centuries. As Gregorian chant melodies continued to develop throughout the 9-11th centuries, we began to also see evidence of polyphonic singing in notation. The first polyphonic singing, called organum, was largely improvised and was based predominantly on the melody of the original chant. 

Different written examples of more developed polyphony began to pop up as we moved through the 12-13th centuries, and in each case, the melodies were more florid than the previous example. The real shift, though, comes in the 14th century, when the order of Mass in some sense took on a life of its own and became the dominant form of sacred music for the next several hundred years. It’s here that we find some of the most incredible examples of sacred music ever created from composers like William Byrd and Orlando di Lasso, and in the Roman tradition at the Sistine Chapel with Josquin de Prez and Giovanni Pierluigi de Palestrina. The music from these composers came full circle with the earliest Gregorian Chant melodies. One of the most oft-used musical techniques of the renaissance, called cantus firmus, bases polyphonic composition around the melody of a Gregorian chant from one of the ordinary or proper texts we talked about earlier. 

One fun aside is that the cantus firmus technique was not relegated solely to sacred melodies – in many cases, composers would take popular secular tunes and base their Mass setting off that, which was not viewed favorably by Church hierarchy. This early example of the secular finding its way into sacred settings will set the stage for our in-person conversation about whether or not secular styles belong in our contemporary liturgies.

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