Corpus of 15th-Century Anonymous Masses

Corpus of 15th-Century Anonymous Masses makes available to the community of music lovers, musicians and researchers a large repertoire of masses, forgotten for centuries because of their anonymity but valuable for Renaissance contemporaries (who transmitted them in precious manuscripts) and for our deeper understanding of the mass genre. In many cases, the Corpus of 15th-Century Anonymous Masses offers the only existing edition of this repertoire. If Renaissance musicology is familiar with the works of certain famous composers, such as Guillaume Dufay, Johannes Okeghem, Jacob Obrecht, and Josquin Desprez, our ignorance of the qualities of the numerous anonymous masses prevents us from producing an analytical history of the compositional processes, the stylistic transformations and the circulation of the genre in Europe. This repertoire includes masses of excellent quality, as well as some more "artisanal". Studying it allows us to expand our knowledge of the mass from the famous centers of musical production to peripheral areas. This project began in 2007 with the transcription of the anonymous masses preserved in manuscripts (1400s-1530s) from the Vatican, Trent, Milan, Modena, and Verona, as well as other Italian city libraries, and now includes anonymous masses from other European countries, such as Austria, Belgium, France, Germany and Spain.

Musicologists interested in contributing are invited to contact the responsible of the project, Agostino Magro.

Contributors

Hyacinthe Belliot

Vincent Besson

Agostino Magro

Javier Pino

Philippe Vendrix