Missa Gaudeamus

The Missa Gaudeamus is a musical setting of the Ordinary of the Mass by Franco-Flemish composer Josquin des Prez, probably composed in the early or middle 1480s, and published in 1502. It is based on the gregorian introit Gaudeamus Omnes and its setting is for four voices.

The number of sources for this work is relatively high: two printed editions, four reprints and seven manuscripts. The [Missa] super Gaudeamus mass was first published in Misse Josquin ("Liber Primus Missarum Josquin ") (Venice, 1502) by Ottaviano Petrucci together with the masses L'homme arme. Super voces musicales, La.sol.fa.re.mi, Fortuna desperata, L'homme arme. Sexti toni, and reprinted in Rome in 1526. Among the first manuscript copies we mention the Kyrie copied by Johannes Orceau, for the Sistine Chapel, in Rome, dated between 1503 and 1512. Some sources misattribute the mass to Ockeghem: The Fugger manuscript A-Wn Cod. 11778, probably copied in the 1520s by Pierre Alamire ascribes the mass to Ockeghem, as well as an 1836 manuscript in Liepzig by Moritz Hauptmann.Fétis, in his Biographie universelle des musiciens, under the voice relative to Ockeghem, cites a manuscript of the Kyrie and Christe of a messe [..] intitulée Gaudeamus published by Kiesewetter in 1834; however, such authorship had been later amended by Kiesewetter in his 1848 edition of the History of the modern music of western Europe.

There are no manuscript sources that can be dated before 1502, and Planchart suggests that the mass can be dated around the 1480s. Because of its style the work is probably the earliest among the other masses based on a gregorian plainsong that Josquin started composing by the middle of his compositional career (the others being Ave maris stella, De Beata Virgine, Da pacem and Pange lingua).

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