Tinctoris’s L’homme armé Mass Restored

Abstract

In an earlier article in this Journal (2013), I argued that the Tenor parts of the ‘Et in terra’ and ‘Patrem’ subsections of Johannes Tinctoris’s L’homme armé mass, which had been omitted by the main scribe of the unique manuscript (V-CVbav Cappella Sistina 35) and added by a slightly later scribe, were not by the composer, but I could not show what I thought he had written. In this article I demonstrate that Tinctoris constructed both Tenor parts from canonic transformations of a single melodic module, the A-section of the L’homme armé tune. I discuss the implications of this discovery and evaluate the conjectures I put forward in 2013; about half of them were accurate. I extend my earlier discussion of varietas as expressed by Tinctoris’s reference in his L’homme armé mass to those of earlier composers, arguing that one of these must have been that of Philippon (Philippe Basiron), known to have been newly available in central Italy in early 1484, meaning that Tinctoris’s mass must have been composed in 1484-89. I argue that no occasional significance can be attributed to this mass, but that all its special features simply intensify the inherent Christological and Trinitarian aspects of the mass Ordinary.