Blog post 5- Musical Masses and our Relationship to God’s Time
Music gives you a material way of dealing, living, and abiding with time. Through the musical masses, we can experience “a distinctly theological account of created temporality, redeemed by God in Jesus Christ, and what it means to live in and with time as redeemed creatures” (Begbie 6). We live in time, yet we do not need to escape it. We need to live more deeply within this time that is redeemed, by developing a different theological understanding of worship.
The Missa Caput by Obrecht presents a different theological understanding of worship through the materiality of music by bringing to life the destruction of evil through Christ’s presence in the eucharist. Music moves people in an emotional way, and as the caput melisma ungulates throughout the different voices of the music, it immerses the listeners in the battle between good and evil, ultimately ending in the destruction of the serpent.
The Missa Caput by Obrecht uses transposition of a cantus firmus (an existing melody in a polyphonic composition) from one voice to another, a common compositional technique in fifteenth-century masses. The tenor starts out by carrying the Caput melisma in the Kyrie, then the top voice has it in Gloria, and the tenor reclaims it in the Sanctus, then the bassus takes it over in the Agnus Dei. This movement of the cantus firmus through all five voices is very unusual, however this undulation through the voices “might easily have been imagined serpentine” (Robertson 592). The way Obrecht assigns the very end of mass to the lowest possible register allows the diabolus in musica to “bellow freely at this climatic moment of the work” (Robertson 594). This fall of the melody to its lowest point at the end of the piece, and the resulting tritones in the Agnus “allow us to imagine the dying demon moving through melody, harmony, and time” (Robertson 594). This musical performance materializes the destruction of Satan through the presence of Christ in the eucharist, emphasizing the victory of Christ conquering evil.
The Missa Ecce Ancilla Domini by Guillaume Du Fay presents a different theological understanding of worship through the materiality of music by layering two texts over each other. One text is sung in the Sanctus, as the tenor then enters singing a different text, connecting the Annunciation with the moment of the consecration so the enfleshment of Christ in the womb of Mary is linked to the Eucharistic moment itself.
Missa Ecce Ancilla Domini by Guillaume Du Fay presents the melody and texts of two antiphons from the Annunciation liturgy as they unfold in the tenor, “creating a dialogic structure designed to foreground the Virgin’s reply to the angel Gabriel that precipitated the miracle of the Incarnation” (Bloxam 520). Du Fay’s technique of placing the ritual drama front and center affirms the power of the preexisting melody, to declare and dramatize a specific ritual association. Although the two antiphons are most strongly associated with the feast of the Annunciation, the way Du Fay uses them both produces a dialogue between Mary and the angel, beginning the conversation with Mary’s response because Du Fay “wanted to make center the symbolic content of the mass upon Mary herself” (Planchart 35). It is a mass liturgically, rhetorically, and theologically about the Virgin, linking the incarnation itself to the eucharistic moment. Layering these two texts helps have a different theological understanding of worship because it is combining two momentous events which people may not normally associate together. Without the incarnation of Christ through the womb of Mary, we would not have had Christ’s great sacrifice, thus we would not have a eucharist to celebrate. Combing these two texts in this mass is a reminder of how Christ came to be on this earth and the wonderful task Mary did for the sake of humanity.
These musical Masses help the human person understand oneself in relationship to God’s time by offering “interpenetrating temporality because of a complex hierarchy of waves of tension resolution” (Begbie 148). These musical masses put us on God’s time by showing us what comes later while never leaving behind the past, as the past and future are ordered through Christ who gives us back time. These Masses do not call us to escape our worldly time, but instead, to enter deeper within it, entering this union between creation and the Creator.