Early Music Advance Access originally published online on August 24, 2006
Early Music 2006 34(4):587-612; doi:10.1093/em/cal038
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Tropes for the Ordinary in a 16th-century chantbook from Toledo, Spain
Lorenzo Candelaria is an assistant professor of musicology at The University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on Catholic sacred music in Spain and Mexico. lorenzo.candelaria{at}mail.utexas.edu
This article focuses on rare instances of troped chants in a large and beautifully decorated Kyriale compiled c.1500 for the Dominican convent of San Pedro Mártir in Toledo (Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Ms. 710). It provides a conspectus of the manuscript's 22 tropes for the mass Ordinary and concentrates on nine that are largely unaccounted for in the basic scholarly literature on tropes and survive only in Spanish sources. One is the extremely rare Agnus trope O Jesu sal-vator which was previously known only from a setting for three voices in the Las Huelgas Codex. The article closes by considering two polyphonic settings of the Et incarnatus est from the Credo that are also found in the Kyriale. One is by Josquin des Prez and the other a previously unknown mass fragment on L'homme armé. Much like the rich collection of tropes surrounding them, they too served an ornamental function in the performance of plainchant at San Pedro Mártir in Toledo. Keywords: tropes; chant; Kyriale; Spain; Josquin; L'homme armé; Las Huelgas