In the first monograph specifically on the polyphonic Mass Ordinary since Peter Wagner's Geschichte der Messe of 1913, Andrew Kirkman argues for a radical paradigm shift in the interpretation of the genre. He argues that the understanding of the Mass cycle from the late fifteenth century onwards as a manifestation of ‘essentially aesthetic concepts’ (Manfred Bukofzer) still maintains a tenacious grip on musical historiography – and although it has become unfashionable to talk about the ‘great works’ and ‘great masters’ of the Renaissance, he is certainly correct in claiming this for handbooks and other reference works which perhaps shape our view of history more than we are comfortable to admit.

His first two chapters (substantially based on his article on ‘The Invention of the Cyclic Mass’ published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society in 2001) demonstrate with great cogency how deeply embedded the aesthetic assumptions underlying this view are in nineteenth-century German idealism, how the Hegelian historiographer August Wilhelm Ambros ‘invented’ the cyclic mass as a work of ‘Renaissance’ genius worthy to stand alongside a Beethoven symphony, and how the very cyclicity of its construction – with a single pre-existent cantus firmus (or later a polyphonic model) permeating all five mass ordinary movements, expertly crafted, deployed and transformed – fed into concepts of unity and coherence which still form the backbone of the way we construct meaning in music. These assumptions about coherence as an aesthetic paradigm continue to privilege the cyclic mass over all other forms of polyphonic mass settings: plenary settings, masses based on diverse ordinary chants (such as the popular Marian masses), mass propers, or indeed – the ultimate put-down – ‘free’ compositions which are not based on pre-existent material at all. Not only does Kirkman deconstruct very convincingly the idealist underpinnings of this paradigm; he also shows with equal perceptiveness how contemporary authors who have traditionally been cited in support of the ‘cyclic mass’ paradigm – Tinctoris, Cortese – are overrated or indeed misinterpreted as witnesses. Indeed, he demonstrates how little evidence there is that, in the fifteenth century, mass movements or combinations thereof were seen as anything special, anything more than ‘motet’ settings of sacred texts. Following recent trends in historiography and cultural criticism, he offers an alternative reading – the polyphonic mass as a practice deeply embedded in the cultural, religious and intellectual values and concepts of its time.

Consequently, the following four chapters explore ‘The Ritual World of the Polyphonic Mass’. Building on the substantial amount of scholarship that has sprung up on this topic over the past decades, the author embeds the composition of polyphonic masses in the context of late medieval piety and devotion, looking for answers to the age-old question regarding the function and meaning of a borrowed cantus firmus, and specifically the motivation and justification for using secular melodies (and texts), often of a decidedly non-pious nature. The first of the four chapters tackles this question on a general level. Kirkman argues that the rite became more specific and more personalised through endowed masses which proliferated in the latter part of the fifteenth century, with the aim of effecting or supporting the salvation of an individual through the use of relevant texts and chants – as ‘a spiritually potent legacy for [the] posthumous soul’. This concretisation of the mass would have received further worldly grounding through the use of secular material; the author cites authorities from St Thomas Aquinas onwards in support of the notion that ‘the revelation of divine and spiritual truth’ to mere humans is facilitated through use of religious allegory, even of a very down-to-earth kind. The ‘unattainable lady’ of the late-medieval chanson as an allegory for the Virgin is the best-known instance of this, but passages from other songs (such as D'ung aultre amer or J'ay pris amours) give rise to Christological imagery as well. It was not rare, Kirkman demonstrates, for composers to construct a dialogue between the cantus firmus and the Mass Ordinary, specific words of the model coinciding meaningfully with specific points in the ritual (in parallel to the ‘counterpoint of words’ uncovered by Margaret Bent and others in the polytextual motet).

The following two chapters are given over to two substantial case studies on the most famous models for cyclical Mass composition of the period: the ‘Caput’ melisma and the L'homme armé song. Kirkman demonstrates both to be fundamentally Christological in nature – ‘Caput’ for Christ as the Head of the Church (originally, he argues, conceived for the feast of Corpus Christi), L'homme armé as ‘Christ the warrior’, the head of the Church Militant, the defender of the faith. In a second stage, he explores the wider contexts in which these associations could be put to specific secular uses: ‘Caput’ as an ‘earthly head’ (monarch) by the grace of God, the ‘armed man’ as a secular ruler or crusader. The evidence he produces in support of these claims is overwhelming in both quantity and quality, and every subsequent intepretation of a ‘Caput’ or L'homme armé mass will have to take this as its point of departure – albeit with a small dilemma of which the author himself is surely aware: Christ, by definition, stands at the centre of the rite of the Mass, and therefore every Mass, in a sense, is about both ‘Caput’ and the ‘armed man’. Thus, the two models become so all-encompassing as to be potentially meaningless – which belies the impetus towards personalisation that Kirkman identifies as the driving force behind the growth of cyclical Mass Ordinary composition.

In the final chapter of this section, Kirkman returns from the specific to the general and revisits the justification of using secular texts and melodies in the Mass. He presents a wealth of new material shedding further light on an issue which created much controversy among contemporary writers (the famous prohibition of the Council of Trent being only the tip of the iceberg). What is more, he posits a common context – that of the divine service – for the newly fashionable mass movements, the polytextual motets and indeed for secular songs, since a number of manuscripts from the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries in fact combine all these genres. The medieval motet, he argues, had created a symbolic and allegorical union between a chant foundation and newly written texts (devotional, ceremonial or secular); the Mass worked the other way around, integrating secular material which served as both the compositional and the allegorical point of reference – secular material whose use on its own in the church would have become increasingly unacceptable in light of the growing pre-Tridentine polemics against such ‘abuses’. Kirkman thus encourages us to consider the permeability of the sacred and the secular within late medieval culture to an even greater extent than previous authors. One might even turn the question around and ask: if love songs were heard in the church, could not motets and mass movements have been sung (from the same manuscripts) in private gatherings for devotion, edification, or indeed entertainment?

In the third part of the book – ‘The cradle of the early polyphonic mass’ – Kirkman approaches his question from yet another angle: what ritual or sensual function was polyphony deemed to fulfil in the mass, and why was the Ordinary the privileged place for it? The author answers these questions by identifying two countercurrent tendencies: the standardisation and simplification of the mass liturgy in the thirteenth century on the one hand, which resulted in a regularisation of the Ordinary and a more exposed position within the liturgy; and on the other, the above-mentioned particularisation through specific devotions and the proliferation of endowments with a resultant wealth of ‘private masses’ where less stringent rules applied. Both taken together provided a fertile breeding-ground for the ‘subject-specific’ polyphonic cyclic cantus firmus mass ordinary. Within the mass itself, Kirkman identifies the elevation of the host (the liturgical climax) as the notional nucleus of the musical setting: in a mass celebrated at the high altar, the text and part of the action were in fact ‘hidden away’ from those standing outside the rood screen, but would have revealed themselves through visual and, more particularly, aural clues. The Sanctus was made to coincide with this moment of the elevation, sometimes additionally highlighted by an elevation motet or, in the Milanese motetti missales tradition, by the exceptional block-chord sound of the respective motet. In the same way as the Passion of Christ permeated the celebration of mass ‘working outwards’ from the Sanctus, the polyphonic mass setting would have expanded to encompass all parts of the Ordinary, simultaneously serving to integrate the rite through ‘a consistency and unity of utterance across the five component movements’ (p. 204) and to create particularised manifestations of this rite through the specificity of the chosen model. This is all cogently expressed and eloquently argued, but one pressing question remains: how does this concept of the mass as a mystery, embodied by the rood screen and the sacrament unfolding behind it (implying distance), square with the polyphonic mass cycle if the latter is primarily a manifestation of private endowments and took place in side chapels, implying closeness (if restricted to a few)? The author acknowledges this tension, but does not do enough to resolve it.

The book is rounded off by three copious appendices containing primary material that scholars will find immensely useful (although, puzzlingly, translations into English are sometimes provided, sometimes not): the first with a wealth of primary testimonies on the ‘armed man’, the second and third presenting contemporary evidence documenting (mostly condemning) the use of secular song in church. Almost 100 pages of endnotes follow which will frustrate even the most ardent supporter of this type of layout as they contain not only references, but much crucial additional material (comments and elaborations on the main text, transcriptions of original text passages, discussion of secondary literature, etc.) which necessitates constant flipping back and forth, not assisted by the fact that the numbering of the notes is per chapter and the chapter numbers are indicated at the top of the page in the endnote section, but not in the main text.

Kirkman has written a book which is thought-provoking in many ways and which will encourage, indeed force us to rethink many assumptions about the mass as a medium for polyphonic composition. In that sense, the book succeeds admirably and will be required reading for all scholars of the period. But by approaching his topic from a number of angles, he fails to weave a truly coherent argument from the diverse threads. Most crucially, the criterion of ‘unity’, so eloquently challenged at the beginning, has returned with vengeance at the end (if with a different motivation), once again sidelining those traditions where the cyclic Mass Ordinary does not necessarily take pride of place. There is no doubt that The Cultural Life of the Early Polyphonic Mass is a long-overdue step in the right direction, but one hopes that many more will follow.