Mass (music)

A musical setting of texts from the Roman Catholic Mass, composed for worship or concert performance. Its movements commonly follow the Ordinary, whose texts remain largely unchanged across the liturgical year.

Ordinary of the Mass: The set of Mass texts whose wording remains largely constant across the liturgical year. Its five principal texts supply the standard movements of a musical Mass.
Polyphony: Music in which multiple independent melodic lines sound simultaneously. Renaissance composers used interweaving voices to set Mass texts.
Gregorian chant: The repertory of Latin liturgical chant associated with the medieval Western Church. Its melodies provided musical material and models for early Mass compositions.
Missa Papae Marcelli: A six-voice Mass by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, probably composed in the sixteenth century. It became emblematic of Renaissance polyphony and later stories about textual clarity.
Mass proper: The changing texts appointed for particular days and seasons in the Roman Catholic Mass. Its variable texts contrast with the Ordinary’s stable words and standard musical movements.
Kyrie: A short Greek liturgical text that asks God for mercy and opens the Ordinary. Its repeated pleas for mercy often form the Mass setting’s opening movement.
Plainchant: Unaccompanied liturgical singing using a single melodic line and flexible rhythm. Chant melodies could serve as foundations for polyphonic Mass settings.
Notre-Dame school: A group of composers associated with polyphonic music at Paris’s Notre-Dame Cathedral around 1200. Its polyphonic innovations helped prepare the ground for composed Mass cycles.
Missa L'homme armé: A family of Renaissance Mass settings based on the French song “L’homme armé.” Its many settings show how composers reused a popular secular tune in sacred music.
Motet: A vocal composition, often polyphonic, setting a sacred text outside the fixed structure of the Mass Ordinary. Motets set sacred texts without necessarily forming movements of a Mass cycle.

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