ANOTHER MASS BY BUSNOYS?

Abstract

IN the past ten years or so there has been a remarkable upsurge of publications dealing with the life and music of Antoine Busnoys.' Increasingly, musicologists regard the composer as one of the great innovators of the Okeghem generation, a man who in his sacred works introduced and developed many of the traits that were to characterize the style of the next generation.2 Busnoys has earned his present reputation on the basis of a small sacred oeuvre exceeded in size by those of several lesser fifteenth-century composers: two Masses and a handful of smaller sacred works.3 Since these few compositions alone show him to have been a bold experimenter, one would expect each work that can be added to his sacred output to reveal new and unsuspected aspects of his musical personality. The present article describes and attributes to Busnoys an anonymous Mass which-if it is by him-fully lives up to this expectation. The work in question, the Missa 'L'Ardant desir', survives only in Vatican Library, MS Cappella Sistina 51, a source dating almost certainly from the 1470s, perhaps as early as 1474.4 Joseph Llorens has already tentatively attributed the L'Ardant desir Mass to Busnoys in his catalogue of the musical manuscripts of the Sistine Chapel.5 Like most of the tentative attributions in the catalogue, this ascription stems from Laurence Feininger.6 So far, Busnoys specialists have not seriously