Cantus firmus mass

In Renaissance music, the cyclic mass was a setting of the Ordinary of the Roman Catholic Mass, in which each of the movements – Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei – shared a common musical theme, commonly a cantus firmus, thus making it a unified whole. The cyclic mass was the first multi-movement form in western music to be subject to a single organizing principle.

The period of composition of cyclic masses was from about 1430 until around 1600, although some composers, especially in conservative musical centers, wrote them after that date. Types of cyclic masses include the "motto" mass (or "head-motif" mass), cantus-firmus mass, paraphrase mass, parody mass, as well as masses based on combinations of these techniques.

Prior to complete settings of the Mass Ordinary by a single composer, which had become the norm by around the middle of the 15th century, composers often set pairs of movements. Gloria-Credo pairs, as well as Sanctus-Agnus Dei pairs, are found in many manuscripts of the early 15th century, by composers such as Johannes Ciconia, Arnold de Lantins and Zacara da Teramo. While it is possible that some of these composers wrote an entire setting of the mass, no complete cyclic setting by a single composer has survived. (The Messe de Nostre Dame by Guillaume de Machaut (c. 1300-1377), which dates to before 1365 is generally not considered to be a true cyclic mass, but is the earliest surviving complete mass setting by a single composer, although the existence of at least four earlier such pieces is known.) Some mass cycles from the period 1420-1435, especially from northern Italy, show that composers were working in the direction of a unified mass, but were solving the problem in a different way: often a separate tenor would be used for each movement of a mass that was otherwise unified stylistically.

The true cyclic mass most likely originated in England, and the first composers known to have organized a mass by using the same cantus firmus in each movement were John Dunstable and Leonel Power. However it was the Missa Caput, an anonymous English composition once attributed to Guillaume Dufay, "one of the most revered compositions of the 15th century", which was to be the most influential on continental practice; this work appears in seven separate continental sources of the 15th century, more than any other mass prior to the 1480s. Among other features, it was the first widely influential work to use a freely-written bass line underneath the tenor cantus firmus. As a result of the spread of the Missa Caput, composers commonly added this lower voice to their polyphonic textures after about mid-century; this allowed a harmonic and cadential flexibility which was previously lacking.

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