Mass (music)

• 1. Introduction

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  The Mass, in music, is one of the oldest continuous forms in Western composition, and its history stretches from anonymous monks in the 7th century to jazz pianists performing in California cathedrals. The word itself arrives in four languages at once: missa in Latin, messa in Italian, messe in French, Messe in German. Each name points to the same thing: a musical setting of the unchanging portions of the Christian Eucharistic liturgy, the texts known collectively as the Ordinary. How did a set of fixed liturgical texts become the principal large-scale form of the entire Renaissance? How did it travel from plainchant to full orchestra, from the papal court at Avignon to the concert halls of the 19th century, and eventually to a flamenco guitarist and a jazz trio? Those are the questions this documentary will follow.

• 2. The Ordinary Takes Shape

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  The Kyrie, the Greek plea for mercy at the opening of the Mass, was probably the first of the Ordinary texts to enter the liturgy, perhaps as early as the 7th century. The Credo, by contrast, did not become part of the Roman Mass until 1014. These two endpoints mark how long it took for the Ordinary to solidify into the fixed form that composers would eventually set to music. The earliest musical settings were Gregorian chant, a monophonic tradition that held the field until polyphony began to crack it open in the early 14th century. The reason composers started writing multi-voice versions of the Ordinary around that time is not settled; one explanation offered by scholars is that a shortage of new music pushed composers to develop sacred work, since the leading minds of the day were increasingly drawn to secular forms. Whatever the cause, two manuscripts survive from that moment of transition: the Ivrea Codex and the Apt Codex. These are the primary documentary evidence for early polyphonic settings of the Ordinary. Most of that music came from, or was assembled at, the papal court at Avignon. The settings share a three-voice texture dominated by the highest part, and they look stylistically closer to motets and secular songs than to anything we would now recognize as a distinct sacred genre. Several complete masses from this period survive anonymously, among them the Tournai Mass. But the first complete mass whose composer can be named is Guillaume de Machaut's Messe de Nostre Dame, the Mass of Our Lady, written in the 14th century. Machaut's Mass stands as the earliest individuated monument in a tradition that would run without interruption for the next seven hundred years.

• 3. The Renaissance at Full Power

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  By the middle of the 15th century, writing a complete Mass as a single composer was simply expected. The form had become the main proving ground in sacred music, a multi-movement canvas large enough to show what a composer could do architecturally. Most 15th-century Masses rested on a cantus firmus, a pre-existing melody placed in the tenor voice. Early on, that melody almost always came from Gregorian chant. Later in the century, Guillaume Dufay, Johannes Ockeghem, and Jacob Obrecht began borrowing secular tunes instead, a practice that generated little controversy until the Council of Trent prohibited it in 1562. The secular tune L'homme armé became the most borrowed melody in the entire tradition; more than 40 separate Mass settings built on that single song. As the 16th century opened, two newer techniques began to supplant the cantus firmus approach. The paraphrase technique elaborated and ornamented the borrowed melody rather than stating it plainly. The parody technique went further, drawing in multiple voices from a polyphonic source rather than just one melodic line. Palestrina alone wrote 51 parody Masses. Canon offered a third organizing principle. Johannes Ockeghem's Missa prolationum built every movement as a prolation canon on a freely composed tune. Guillaume Faugues wrote the Missa L'homme armé as an entirely canonic work that also ran the famous tune throughout. Pierre de La Rue wrote four canonic Masses based on plainchant. Josquin des Prez, widely regarded as the single most influential composer of the middle Renaissance, wrote many famous and influential Masses, among them the Missa Ad fugam, which is both entirely canonic and free of any borrowed material. Josquin also wrote Masses under the category of the Missa sine nomine, literally Mass without a name, meaning the music was built from freely composed material rather than borrowed melody. Palestrina's own Missa Papae Marcelli, the Mass of Pope Marcellus, is sometimes credited with persuading the Council of Trent to spare polyphony from outright censure rather than suppressing it entirely.

• 4. Baroque Disparity and New Forms

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  Antoine Brumel had already pushed the vocal forces of the Mass to twelve voices before the Baroque era began, and Stefano Bernardi created masses for double choir specifically designed for the balconies of the Salzburg Cathedral, including his 1630 Missa primi toni octo vocum when he served as music director of the new building. The early Baroque brought a split that defined the tradition for two centuries. On one side stood the stile antico, the old polyphonic style, now updated with basso continuo and a gradually broader harmonic vocabulary. On the other stood the modern mass, built around solo voices and instrumental obbligatos. Michael Praetorius, a Lutheran, published a Mass for double choir in the old style in 1611 as part of his collection Missodia Sionia. The Italian style cultivated orchestral masses with soloists, chorus, and obbligato instruments, and that model spread northward into the German-speaking Catholic countries. It gave rise to what became characteristic of 18th-century Viennese composition: dialogues between solo voices and chorus, color drawn from instruments, operatic elements folded into a sacred frame. A second structural split ran parallel to the stylistic one: the festive missa solemnis, large and ceremonial, versus the missa brevis, compact and practical. Johann Joseph Fux cultivated the stile antico Mass in the 18th century, finding it well suited to weekday use when a full orchestra was impractical. Many of Mozart's Masses are in missa brevis form, as are some of Haydn's early ones. Haydn's later Masses shifted toward symphonic structure, with long sections organized like a symphony and soloists used as an ensemble rather than as individual vocal stars. The line between liturgical use and concert performance also began to matter more as the 19th century advanced, a distinction that would sharpen considerably. Among the most celebrated works of the Romantic period in this tradition is Brahms's A German Requiem, which sets not the standard liturgy but the composer's own selection of biblical texts.

• 5. The Council of Trent and Reform

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  Pope Pius X issued the motu proprio Tra le sollecitudini in 1903, and scholars have pointed to it as a possible fuel source for the 20th-century revival of Renaissance polyphony and plainchant in Mass composition. Pius X believed that post-Renaissance Masses had grown too long and too theatrical for a church setting. He championed Gregorian plainchant and polyphony above all else, drawing on the work of the Abbey of Solesmes. His rules were specific and strict: all percussive instruments were forbidden, the piano was explicitly banned, the centuries-old practice of alternatim between choir and organ was to end immediately, and women were barred from the choir. He also required that any new Mass be composed as an integrated whole, not assembled from separate pieces written for individual sections. These regulations have little force today. The Second Vatican Council eventually revised the liturgy substantially, promoted vernacular languages in Catholic worship, and spurred the composition of many Masses in English for United States congregations. In England and Wales, when a new translation of the Roman Missal appeared in 2011, the bishops allowed congregations time to learn new settings and permitted older ones to remain in use until Pentecost Sunday, 2014. Pope Benedict XVI later encouraged a return to chant as the primary music of the liturgy, citing Sacrosanctum Concilium, paragraph 116, from the Second Vatican Council's own documents.

• 6. Beyond Church Walls

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  The Glagolitic Mass by Leos Janacek, written in 1926, is one of the clearest 20th-century signals that the Mass had fully outgrown the church as its only venue. Benjamin Britten's War Requiem of 1962 set the Latin Requiem texts alongside the English war poems of Wilfred Owen. Ariel Ramirez wrote the Misa Criolla in a Latin American vernacular idiom. Paco Pena composed the Misa flamenca in 1991. Dave Brubeck wrote a Mass To Hope. The jazz organist Vince Guaraldi performed a jazz Mass at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. By the 21st century, Ennio Morricone had composed the Missa Papae Francisci in 2015, and a jazz Mass by Justin Binek called the Missa Lucis had joined the tradition. The Mass for mixed chorus by Paul Hindemith dates from 1963; Leonard Bernstein, Igor Stravinsky, and Arvo Part each wrote works in the form. Part contributed both the Berliner Messe and the Missa Syllabica to that roster. The Mass by The Electric Prunes, a rock band, stands in the same list as works by Brahms and Haydn. The tradition of the Anglican Communion runs alongside the Catholic one. In the Anglican liturgy, these settings are more often called Communion Services, the Gloria generally appears last rather than early, and the Creed, the most substantial movement, is nowadays rarely performed in Anglican cathedrals. Charles Villiers Stanford published a Benedictus and Agnus Dei in F major separately to complete his setting in C, a small practical compromise that itself tells a story about the form's adaptability.