Abstract
A cognitive view of narrative emphasizes transmission. Narratives that survive repeated horizontal and/or vertical transmissions are those that have a selection advantage – they are superior attractors of attention. One particularly durable narrative concerns certain events of the late-sixteenth-century Council of Trent. According to legend, the Council was on the verge of banning polyphonic music from the Catholic Mass, but desisted upon hearing Palestrina's Missa Papae Marcelli. This paper demonstrates that this legend is essentially unsupported by the historical record, describes the cumulative evolution of a Palestrina Myth from c. 1607, and posits that the resilience of the myth lies in its tacit acknowledgement that polyphony represents a violation of expectations for doctrinal rituals as described by Whitehouse's Modes of Religiosity theory.
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