Within the polyphonic mass ordinary in the period between 1400 and 1550, the Agnus Dei presents various distinctive issues. Composers frequently fail to set the complete liturgical text, and this issue is unique to the Agnus. Performers of this repertoire must decide to what extent they wish to augment these textual lacunae with either the repetition of polyphony or the addition of plainchant. At the same time, composers engaged in various special musical techniques in the Agnus, especially in the final section of music, that are used to suggest large-scale formal closure of the mass as a whole. While individual composers’ techniques of finality have been discussed, a holistic approach to widely-used gestures, and an understanding of the aesthetic desired behind them is lacking. As a primary investigation, this dissertation pursues a complete survey of every surviving polyphonic Agnus in every surviving source, which numbers slightly over 1700. This allows a ground-up inventory of techniques of finality, beginning in those masses that transmit the full liturgical text, and therefore where it is obvious what constitutes the end of the piece. These techniques are then found in the final sections of bipartite and monopartite Agnus settings, and in concert with textual rubrics and variant readings in concordant sources, these settings are shown to be complete as they are, notwithstanding their liturgical lacunae. This approach also uncovers local preferences across time and place for musical settings of the Agnus, as well as individual composers’ standard practices.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/48262 |
| Date | 26 February 2024 |
| Creators | Bradley, Samuel |
| Contributors | Rifkin, Joshua |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ |
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