Josquin des Prez: Missa L'homme armé

Hear the opening L’homme Armé before continuing into Kyrie I. With the little tune still in memory, notice what you start looking for among several voices. Josquin’s two Masses share a starting point, but this is not the same music played twice. Enjoy the change from a compact song to an expanding choral texture without tracing every borrowed note. Choose the line that reaches you most clearly and stay with it.

The Tallis Scholars and Peter Phillips made this Gimell album, issued in 1989. That date concerns a modern recording, not the composition of Renaissance music. The two Masses have different subtitles: Super voces musicales and Sexti toni. The linked digital edition divides the song and both works into sixty-three audio sections. These are not sixty-three separate compositions. Let neighbouring sections continue when you want to hear a movement’s shape rather than a succession of excerpts.

Two beginnings to compare

Tracks two and thirty-four each begin with Kyrie I, but belong to different Masses. Listen to one and then the other. Does the interval between vocal entrances feel different? Can you keep following a line when another arrives? Choosing these two small gateways makes a long programme easier to approach than trying to absorb both works immediately.

Turn praise into a listening question

Gimell reproduces Peter Urquhart’s later assessment of the ensemble’s tuning and coordination. That is not a survey of what every listener thought in 1989. Try a question of your own: when voices overlap, can one melody remain distinct? Notice whether a shared ending feels like a single sound, while separate movements remain audible before it. The experience can matter more than accepting a definitive verdict.

Stay for an ending

The first Mass ends at track thirty-three, Agnus Dei III; the second reaches its corresponding ending at sixty-three. Keep the work’s subtitle in view so that identical movement names do not confuse the route. Hear one ending alone, then return through its Agnus Dei I and II. What changes when the final section has something before it? A preview cannot supply the complete connection. A whole closing sequence is a useful next step once a short passage catches your ear.