ABSTRACT

This simple scheme can be traced back to the ancient hierarchy of literary genres and, more directly, to Cicero’s three genera dicendi or levels of rhetoric.2 Just as classical poetry falls into various categories (epic, lyric, pastoral), and classical rhetorical style into various degrees of elaboration (grand, moderate, humble), so musical compositions are either large (magnus), middlesized (mediocris), or small (parvus).3 The polyphonic Mass enjoyed the place of honor among Renaissance musicians, as the epic poem had among the ancient Greeks and Romans, for both aesthetic and ideological reasons. It accompanied the most important ritual act in Christian society, and it was adorned with the most complex and varied techniques available to composers.4 Tinctoris’s definition of the genre includes not only the five well-known Mass movements-Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus-but interdum caeterae partes, “sometimes other parts.” By “other parts” he meant the constantly varying proper of the Mass, the pieces that change from one day to the next: the introit, offertory, and communion, along with some combination of gradual, alleluia, tract, and sequence, according to the season and the importance of the occasion. These proper items are interwoven with the Mass ordinary and are equally vital to the order of the service. William Byrd devoted most of his two volumes of Gradualia to music of this sort.5