The first master of the High Renaissance style was Josquin Desprez. Like Dufay, he was born in the north of France, and like Dufay and many other of his countrymen, in early life he traveled to Italy. The list of Josquin’s patrons reads like a Renaissance who’s who: Pope Alexander VI, the notorious Sforza family of Milan, the Estes of Ferrara, Louis XII, king of France.

An amazingly imaginative composer, Josquin brought the fifteenth-century Mass to a brilliant climax and pioneered whole new expressive genres, such as the sixteenth-century chanson and motet. He was famous both for his technical prowess and for his expressive innovations — for the prayerful serenity of his motet “Ave Maria” as well as the grief-stricken accents of “Planxit autem David,” a setting of King David’s lament for his dead son Absalom.

Josquin wrote eighteen different settings of the Mass — all large pieces in the standard five-section form. The Pange lingua Mass, one of his masterpieces, derives its melodic material largely from a hymn called “Pange lingua” (Proclaim the Mystery). This is a Gregorian hymn of the same kind as “Ave maris stella,” which we have heard in Dufay’s harmonized setting. “Pange lingua” (and hence Josquin’s Mass) is designed for Corpus Christi, a feast celebrating the Holy Eucharist, or Communion.

This is a four-part Mass (that is, a Mass for a choir with four separate melodic lines). In Josquin’s day, boys sang the high parts and men the lower ones; Josquin probably started his musical career as a choirboy. Today women usually substitute for boys in music of this period.

We shall examine the first two sections of Josquin’s Pange lingua Mass.

Kyrie The men in the choir sing line 1 of the hymn “Pange lingua,” in simple monophony, before the first section of the Pange lingua Mass. This first section, the Kyrie, is an elemental prayer consisting of three subsections:

For Kyrie I, Josquin wrote a point of imitation — a brief passage of imitative polyphony usually using a single melodic motive. Here the motive is a paraphrase (see page 60) of line 1 of the hymn:

This motive enters many times in the various voice parts, sometimes with delays in between: tenor, bass, wait, soprano, alto, wait, bass, tenor, soprano. Josquin did not invent this motive — it was derived from the plainchant hymn, as shown above — but his paraphrase is very beautiful, especially at the end.

The Christe section has two points of imitation, also derived from the hymn, for the words Christe and eleison; the motives of these points are rhythmically similar. Kyrie II has a new point of imitation for the words Kyrie eleison, followed by free material not paraphrased from the hymn — a descending sequence and, prior to the drawn-out final cadence, a powerful oscillating passage.

Gloria The four remaining sections of the Mass — the Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei — introduce countless new points of imitation, which are interspersed with occasional passages of homophony.

In the second subsection of the Gloria, beginning with the words Qui tollis, polyphony and homophony are contrasted in a highly expressive way. At the beginning, we can almost envisage one or two persons timidly invoking Him “who takes away the sins of the world” (polyphony), and then the whole congregation — or, symbolically, the whole of Christendom — urgently responding together with a plea for mercy and relief: “have mercy” (homophony). This music gives a dramatic sense of communal worship.

The “Qui tollis” subsection as a whole includes eight points of imitation and four homophonic or nearly homophonic phrases. (The imitation on “Tu solus Dominus” is illustrated on page 64.) Even in the imitative phrases, the vocal lines fit together smoothly into chords, and while the sequence of these chords seems hard to predict, at least for modern ears, it does not seem arbitrary. The remarkable mood of Josquin’s music — at once sober, quietly energetic, and reverential — owes much to its Phrygian (E) mode. Like the hymn “Pange lingua,” the Pange lingua Mass is in this mode.