| Messe De Nostre Dame |
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Created before 1365 , the Messe de Nostre Dame is one of the great masterpieces of Medieval Music and of all religious music. It is the earliest complete setting of the Ordinary of the Mass attributable to a single composer. STRUCTURE The Messe de Nostre Dame consists of 5 items -- the Kyrie , Gloria , Credo , Sanctus , Agnus -- followed by the Dismissal , the ''Ite Missa Est'' (Go, the Mass is done). To unify these parts, Machaut selected chants for each section -- a Kyrie chant for the Kyrie, etc. Further, each chant he selected was a chant for the feast in honor of the Virgin Mary . Machaut's Messe de Nostre Dame is for four voices rather than the more common three. Machaut added a Contratenor voice that moved in the same low range as the Tenor , sometimes replacing it as the lowest voice. UNIFICATION What was most extraordinary was that, in the celebration of the Mass, most items of the Ordinary are separated from one another by various Prayer s and Chant s. The items of the Ordinary are not performed one after the other. To think of these items as an artistic whole was to impose an abstract artistic idea on something that had never been so considered. PURPOSES Machaut composed his Messe de Nostre Dame for the Cathedral at Reims where he was a Canon , a permanent member of the Clergy . Later, in conformity with the wills of Guillaume and his brother Jean (who also was a canon at the Cathedral), the mass was transformed into a memorial service for them following their deaths. (Jean died in 1372 and Guillaume in 1377). INFLUENCE The Messe de Nostre Dame irrevocably influenced the course of the composition of Sacred Music . Without Machaut's concept of a single composer organizing all of the Ordinary movements of a mass into an artistic whole, Bach 's Mass In B Minor would not exist. RECORDINGS All three of the following recordings are considered excellent:
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