Masses
The anonymous Missa Sine nomine in MS Cappella Sistina 14
Edited with an introduction by Peter Woetmann Christoffersen (October 2018)
Sound files illustrating Missa Sine nomine: Kyrie – Sanctus
See also the discussion in my article
‘An experiment in musical unity, or: The sheer joy of sound. The anonymous Sine nomine mass in MS Cappella Sistina 14’, Danish Yearbook of Musicology 42 (2018), pp. 54–78.
In the middle of the fifteenth century a principal concern of the new sacred genre, the cyclic cantus firmus mass, was the question of musical and liturgical unity. How to balance the quest for unity and the wish for diversty in musical expression or varietas, which Tinctoris advised in his teachings of counterpoint. I take a closer look at an anonymous mass dating from the decade just after 1450, the Missa Sine nomine in MS Cappella Sistina 14, in which the composer was intensely involved with the problem of unity, so involved that he – according to our ideas about music – has focused on ‘unity’ to such a degree that it became rather to the detriment of ‘diversity’. The mass was highly regarded in its time, and this fact puts our aesthetic understanding of the period’s music to test. In addition to the classical analysis of how such a cantus firmus mass is structured as a musical architecture transmitted in writing, we have to ponder how it served as a sounding reality, and how it may have related to the little we know about the musical practices of the period.
Guillaume Du Fay, Missa Sancti Anthonii de Padua (Mass ordinary)
Edited with an introduction by Peter Woetmann Christoffersen (June 2019)
Guillaume Du Fay, Missa Sancti Anthonii de Padua (Mass proper)
Edited with an introduction by Peter Woetmann Christoffersen (October 2019)
Guillaume Du Fay, Missa Se la face ay pale
Edited with an introduction by Peter Woetmann Christoffersen (June 2018)
Johannes Ockeghem, Missa Quinti toni
Edited with an introduction by Peter Woetmann Christoffersen (June 2021)
The interpretation offered in the present edition is based on an understanding of the hexachordal disposition of Ockeghem’s mass. Since some aspects concerning Missa Quinti toni have not been touched on in the existing literature, the introduction has become quite extensive. After a survey of the sources and their special features, I discuss the relationship between Du Fay’s and Ockeghem’s masses, the questions of Ockeghem’s use of a model, his composing with hexachordal procedures, the use of imitation, and finally his handling of the rhythmic layout of the mass.
Motets
Gregorius presul meritis. The anonymous three-part motet in the manuscript Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana, Ms. 2794. An abandoned dedicatory song from the 1470s?
Introduced and edited by Peter Woetmann Christoffersen (December 2018)
Simple polyphony
Songs for funerals and intercession. A collection of polyphony for the confraternity of St Barbara
at the Corbie Abbey.
Amiens, Bibliothèque Centrale Louis Aragon, MS 162 D.
Edited by Peter Woetmann Christoffersen
– with an introduction ‘Prayers for the dead, funeral music and simple polyphony in a French music manuscript of the early sixteenth century’ (September 2015)