What is similarity in music? The allusiveness of musical discourse is so fundamental to the Western tradition that it is hard to imagine a work that does not in some way make reference to some other composition, type or topic. Indeed, over the last 1000 years music has continued to reference earlier pieces, from the layered polyphony of medieval motets to the rampant borrowing of George Frideric Handel, from the topical allusions of film music to looped sampling heard in hip-hop. Citations: The Renaissance Imitation Mass (CRIM) focuses on an important but neglected part of this allusive tradition: the so-called “Imitation” or “Parody” Mass of the sixteenth century, in which short sacred or secular pieces were transformed into long five-movement cyclic settings of the Ordinary of the Catholic Mass: Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei. The resulting works are far more than collections of quotations. The sheer scope of the transformation required the composer to re-think the model, adapting pre-existent melodies to fit new words, while shifting, extending, or compressing ideas in new musical contexts and to meet new expressive purposes. If counterpoint is a craft of combinations, then the Imitation Mass involves the art of recombination on a massive scale. These works offer an unparalleled way to learn how composers heard (and understood) each other’s music.
Why did Mass composers of the sixteenth century borrow in this way? And what effects did such transformations have upon listeners? Clerics like Bishop Cirillo Franco (a cleric associated with the Council of Trent during the 1560s) and St. Peter Canisius (a Jesuit preacher whose teachings were widely read in Renaissance Munich) famously complained of the non-liturgical and even profane influences that might obscure or corrupt the words of the Mass. And yet composers (even figures like Orlando di Lasso in Munich and Giovanni Pierliugi da Palestrina in Rome) persisted in using all sorts of sacred and secular polyphonic models in their Masses. Perhaps composers as well as listeners actually found the interplay between meanings of the Mass and the lyrics of the borrowed material spiritually engaging or even enlightening, as modern scholars (and CRIM participants) David Crook and Jessie Ann Owens have argued. On a purely musical level the composers of Imitation Masses (there are many hundreds of them in the repertory of sixteenth century music) reveal extraordinary inventiveness as they put contrapuntal patterns heard in their models through a series of displacements, recombinations, transformations, and rehearings in the five movements of the Ordinary as they were sung over the course of the larger drama enacted by the Mass itself. No wonder that composers sometimes seem to have competed with each other to see who might make the grandest transformation of a famous model.
Our capacity to measure the Imitation Mass, however, has been dampened by two basic factors: the sheer number of possibilities for contrapuntal elaboration, and the idiosyncratic ways in which individual scholars have sought to explain and exemplify them. The CRIM project, with its digital capacities for managing citations, claims, and counter-claims in a collaborative environment, answers both of these key challenges in ways that will set the stage for the investigation of related corpora as well. It will open the digital investigation of the inner workings of musical counterpoint to new generations of students and emerging scholars, drawing musicologists into conversation with each other, and into collaborative projects with specialists in Renaissance studies, data science and the digital humanities more broadly.
Building upon recent developments in digital music scholarship, this project implements a new kind of quotable text for music, along with the analysis and commentary that illuminates its workings. The CRIM project is the product of a long partnership between Haverford College and the Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance (Tours, France), and among an international team of scholars, students, and information technologists. It grapples with allusive relationships among musical works of the sixteenth century, and with the challenges of modeling scholarly annotations of these connections in the digital domain. Our work charts much new territory, exploring a neglected genre of Renaissance music via technologies that only a few years ago were beyond our grasp. CRIM extends and enhances an topological approach to analysis and digital editions undertaken in The Lost Voices Project.
CRIM is the work of many hands, and the support of key institutional partners, including Haverford College, the Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance, Tours, as well as generous grants. Together, and since 2016 we have created:
In addition to the various About and Help pages on this site, please visit the CRIM Workspace and Editorial Hub to learn more about CRIM methods and tools.