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[1] Among the copious writings on musical borrowing in the Renaissance, there are few thorough analyses of whole movements or pieces.(2) This is in part due to the state of early music analysis, which is still in its infancy, and in part because musicologists have focused on cataloguing the many techniques used by composers to modify the material taken from the model. Examples from repertoire have been adduced as illustrations of the techniques of borrowing rather than as whole works to be explicated. (There may indeed be an implicit doubt as to the very status of the imitation piece qua work.) Studies of imitation masses have tended to be more descriptive than interpretive: they do not tell us why a composer would use a given motive in a given place, or why different composers would choose to copy or repeat "blocks" of counterpoint. Rather, the aim has been to understand stylistic norms and compositional techniques as a backdrop against which to place an individual work. As Cathy Ann Elias has written: "The understanding of any genre involves defining it by means of common elements shared by all examples . . . . [these] are nothing more than the most common elements at a composer's fingertips, but once contextualized and repeated within a particular composer's works, they will provide the clues to the unique aspects of that individual's style and compositional process" (2004, 152). However, the attempt to generalize about common borrowing techniques seems doomed, for, as Murray Steib observes, "No two Renaissance composers deal with borrowing in precisely the same way" (2004, 60).[2] We propose another path through this thicket of intertwined pieces of music. We start with the assumption that imitation music is fundamentally like composition from scratch, but when there is a model, we know which musical ideas came first.(3) The composer of the sixteenth-century imitation piece appropriates material from a model-ranging from a single line to a complete block of polyphony-as if it were his own first sketch. Then he modifies, develops, refines and improves the musical ideas, often admixing his own freshly composed material. The simplest type of modification comes from adapting the old music to the declamatory demands of the new text; the most complex comes from changing contrapuntal relationships.[3] These relationships are best viewed through the lens of modular analysis, which focuses on small-scale contrapuntal combinations that repeat.(4) Modular analysis provides a high degree of descriptive precision, since a module must contain two well-defined melodies in a specific relationship to each other. It opens a window into compositional process by showing which contrapuntal ideas the composer thought worthy of repetition and how those repetitions are disposed.[4] The pieces we have chosen as case studies are well known: the Kyries of Lassus and Palestrina based on the famous Lupi chanson, "Je suys desheritee."(5) The chanson was written at least 40 years earlier than the imitation pieces, and some stylistic differences between them will be noted. However, the differences between Lassus's and Palestrina's Kyries are more structural than stylistic.(6) We develop a plausible narrative of each composer's intentions in the movements we examine, and reveal that Lassus and Palestrina worked consistently towards very different goals. Ultimately we hope this will be a step towards the analysis of imitation pieces as valid musical wholes. This in turn may lead to a broader understanding of the language of Renaissance polyphony, for as Quentin W. Quereau wrote, "If approached in the proper manner, parody may be a source of real insight into the syntax of sixteenth-century sacred music and the compositional concerns of its composers" (1982, 198).[5] The idea that composers approach their models with some specific goal in mind has been developed by David Crook in his penetrating study of Lassus's imitation Magnificats. …

What Modular Analysis Can Tell Us About Musical Modeling in the Renaissance