Dictionary of Music - Birding America

232 Massfamous masque, John Milton’s Comus, in 1634.During the second half of the seventeenth century,the masque came to include more and more recitative,and soon it became almost indistinguishablefrom opera. Indeed, Blow’s Venus and Adonis (c.1685) is virtually a miniature opera. Among the lastmasque composers was Thomas Arne (1710–1778).He wrote new music for Comus in 1738, and themasque Alfred (1740), which includes “Rule Britannia,”still a British national song.Mass The central religious service of the RomanCatholic Church and one of the most importantforms of sacred music. The Mass consists of twosections, the Ordinary and the Proper. The Ordinaryis always the same, but the texts (and music) ofthe Proper vary from day to day, according to thechurch calendar. The Roman Catholic Church setsforth both the texts and the music for the Mass. Themusical parts are in plainsong, or GREGORIANCHANT. The portions assigned to the priest and othercelebrants (those who help him celebrate the Mass)are recited in a special kind of monotone; the partsassigned to the choir are sung to special melodies.The texts are traditionally in Latin, although in the1960s the Church began to allow the use of translationsin the language of the country where the Masswas being performed. The music is notated inneumes (see NEUME) on a four-line staff, a systemthat, like most of the music and words of the Mass,dates from the Middle Ages.The most important musical sections of the Massare those of the Ordinary. They are (in order of theservice): (1) the Kyrie (Kyrie eleison, “Lord havemercy”; this is the only text in Greek rather thanLatin); (2) the Gloria (Gloria in excelsis Deo,“Glory to God on high”); (3) the Credo (“Ibelieve”); (4) the Sanctus (Sanctus, “Holy,” withBenedictus qui venit, “Blessed is he who comes”);(5) the Agnus Dei (“Lamb of God”). The nameMass, in Latin missa, comes from a brief final sectionof the Ordinary, the Ite, missa est, which dismissesthe congregation at the end of the service.(On some occasions it is replaced by an alternatedismissal, Benedicamus Domino, “Let us bless theLord.”) The musical sections of the Proper includethe Introit, Gradual, Alleluia, Tract, Offertory, andCommunion. The music and words of these sectionsare older than those of the Ordinary, but it is mainlythe Ordinary that has attracted composers sinceabout the thirteenth century. The only notable exceptionis the Requiem Mass.Although there are many different melodies foreach of the sections of the Proper and the Ordinary,in practice only about twenty are used for each.These are organized into sets or cycles, so that a singlemode is used throughout a Mass (see CHURCHMODES for an explanation). As early as the eleventhcentury, composers began to use one or another ofthe prescribed melodies, which are all monophonic(have only one voice-part), as the basis for a polyphonic(many-voiced) composition. At first theywrote music for only one or another section. Notuntil about 1325 did a complete polyphonic Massappear, the Mass of Tournai, which was made up ofsections that were probably written by various composersover a span of almost fifty years. About 1360the entire Ordinary was set to music by a singlecomposer for the first time, when Guillaume deMachaut wrote his famous Notre Dame Mass, infour voice-parts. The Renaissance (1450–1600) wasthe great age of Mass composition, and as the settingsbecame more elaborate, composers departedfurther and further from the original plainsong. Duringthe fifteenth and sixteenth centuries they generallyused a cantus firmus (fixed melody on which theother voice-parts are based) to unify the composition.Sometimes the cantus firmus came from theoriginal Gregorian chant or a fragment of it, butmore and more often the cantus firmus was a secular(nonreligious) tune, usually a popular song. Amongthe most famous melodies employed in this way wasthe one entitled L’Homme armé (“The ArmedMan”), which was used by Dufay, Ockeghem,Obrecht, and many others. Subsequently motets andpolyphonic songs were rewritten into Masses (seePARODY MASS).Another development was the organ Mass, inwhich the choir, singing in plainsong, alternatedwith the organ, which repeated the chant in an elaboratepolyphonic version. Sometimes instrumentswere introduced to reinforce parts of the music. Inthe mid-sixteenth century, however, the Churchreacted. The complex interweaving of voices, the