The Use of Secular Cantus Firmi in Sacred

Music of the 15th and 16 Century

In the 15th century composers began to start using secular

music to for the Cantus Firmus on which they would base the rest

of their Mass. One of the most popular choices was the song

Lhomme Arme(1). The original song was written by Johannes

Regis and takes place in the Dorian mode. It is only made up of

eight phrases and is divided into and ABA form. This itself isnt

too odd, but the fact that the whole piece is made up of 30

semibreves as well as one final semibreve leads some to

conclude that the song was intended as a Chanson Rustique for

the Order of the Golden Fleece with each semibreve representing

the 30 chevaliers of the order and the one master. This was first

used for a mass by the Brugundian composer Guillame DuFay in

his mass titled Missa Lhomme Arme, although the song had been

set to other polyphonic works, the first of which is believed to be

Robert Mortons chanson titled Il sera par vous combatu-

Lhomme arme. However, it should be noted that there is much

contention over who wrote this Chanson and some even have

good reason to believe that DuFay himself was also the composer

of this piece. Examining this piece on the following page, we can

see how the two bottom voices recite the Lhomme Arme in

canonic fashion while the top voice sing contrapuntally against

it(4).
Around the same time frame that DuFay was composing his Missa

Lhomme Amre, Ockeghem was doing the same. In fact, it is more

than likely that the two of them both knew that the other was

composing a mass using the same Cantus Firmus as they each

make allusions to the others piece as well as including an

homage to the other composer. The original Lhomme Arme

composer, Johannes Regis, also created a mass based his

song(4). A number of notable composers received their chance to

toy with the piece through the following century such as Josquin,

de Silva, and Palestrina. A composer named Busnoys took it upon

himself to write 6 different Lhomme Arme Masses. Eventually,

like all things of pleasure, the catholic church began to feel

threatened by it. In 1562 the Counsil of Trent finally put a ban on

masses with secular cantus firmus, which is referred to as a

parody mass, because they thought music was becoming too

complicated and it obscured the divine message which it was

supposed to embody. While the Italians followed this demand, the

French had already been starting to head in this direction on their

own anyways and the Germans more or less completely ignored

this decree(3). However, before this tyrannical decree of the

church a great many masses had been composed using secular

melodies besides just Lhomme Arme. For instance, Guillaume

DuFay did a mass based on a secular ballade composed by

himself(2), Obrecht composed one called Missa Sub tuum

presidium(5), and a number of composers also composed a mass

on the anonymous folk tune Westron Wynde. Most of these were

English composers during the early reign of the Tudors. Among

the mostly commonly remembered are those of John Taverner,

Christopher Tye, and John Shepherd. Like Lhomme Amre,

Westron Wynde is thoroughly emerged in the folk style yet still

features various composition techniques which suggest that it did

not arise out of the folk tradition, but rather was created for the

folk tradition by an educated composer. A second similarity is

that the two are both in the Dorian mode, which was fairly

standard at the time. Taverners is considered to be the most

influential because at the time that he composed his opus the

idea of a secular melody serving as the cantus firmus for a mass

still hadnt been received to the capacity that it had been in the

rest of Europe at that time, although he cant be claimed to be

the first example of this because Fayrfax briefly touched on this

concept of a parody mass in his work O bone Jesu. Yet after his

work was completed, this practice began to flourish in Europe(6).

In total each movement contains 9 reiterations of the Westron

Wynde melody which creates a total of 36 choral variations. One

thing that should be noted however, is that there appear to be

discrepancies between the Taverners Mass setting and the

original melody for the song.

We know from a few select sources from the time that the song

Westron Wynde undoubtedly served as the source for this cantus

firmus, and we can clearly see similarities between the two, yet

there are still aspects of the connection between these two

pieces that scholars are unsure about. However, due to some of

the length-relationships between the notes, some scholars

conclude that Taverner was a Boethian thinker who considered

music to be an auditory for of numbers representing divine

symmetry. At the very least we can say that Taverner did give a

great deal of thought towards developing a formal method to

organize his work(7).

Bibliography:

1) Western Music Before 1700, Ginsberg

2) "Welcome to Naxos Records." Guillaume Dufay- Bio, Albums,

Pictures Naxos Classical Music. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Nov. 2016.

3) Gustav

4) Planchart, Alejandro Enrique Planchart. The Origins and Early

History of L'Homme Arm . The Journal of Musicology, vol. 20,
no. 3, 2003, pp. 305-
357.www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jm.2003.20.3.305

5) http://www.cengage.com/music/book_content/049557273X_wrigh
tSimms/assets/bigPicture/Big%20Picture_2.pdf

6) Davison, Nigel. The Western Wind Masses. The Musical

Quarterly, vol. 57, no. 3, 1971, pp. 427443.
www.jstor.org/stable/740944.

7) Benham, Hugh. The Formal Design and Construction of

Taverner's Works. Musica Disciplina, vol. 26, 1972, pp. 189209.
www.jstor.org/stable/20532149.