The Armed Man in Mass: On Religious Subjectivity and the L’homme Armé Mass Tradition
The tradition of mass writing in the Renaissance Era is based on expanding a typically sacred monophonic chant into a polyphonic work. Usually found in the tenor, the chant may remain the same, manipulated, inverted, or treated in some way that shows the composer’s skill and professionalism. However, composers not only used sacred chants to write a mass. Many investigated secular chants for inspiration for their masses. In fact, no other folk tune so captured the imagination of Renaissance composers than the L’homme Armé (the Armed Man). Celebrated Renaissance composers such as Dufay, Josquin, Ockeghem, and Palestrina were part of this L’homme Armé mass tradition which comprises of over two dozen masses.
According to the musicologist Richard Freedman, “this secular monophonic tune first entered the repertory of polyphonic music in the mid-fifteenth century.”[i] Since then, over two dozen masses were based on this tune, often in response to each other, “suggesting a culture of competition, emulation, and historical self-consciousness.”[ii] While this secular tune calls for everyone to take arms and to fear the armed man, many contend how it entered the sacral repertory, notably the mass, and what this integration could have meant for composers and religious devotees. Per Allan W. Atlas, the early L’homme Armé masses may have two compelling connections with, first, Phillip the Good’s Order of the Golden Fleece, “which Phillip hoped wound mount a crusade against the Turks;”[iii] and second, with a special Christmas Mass where “the Holy Roman Emperor unsheathed a sword to symbolize the defense of Christianity against the Turks.”[iv] Freedman also suggests that the canonic wanderings of this tune in these masses “represent archetypes of moral…rather than real combat.” Spiritual pilgrimages often occurring in mazes, labyrinths, and writings of the time offer the image of the armed man as a sort of an emblem for a “spiritual armor one might need on the way.”[v] While these reasons clearly relate to a crusade against the Turks or a moral one, how could the devout justify using a secular melody as basis for the sacred mass?
I argue that this borrowing of L’homme Armé and other secular texts is justified because of religious subjectivity: the mutual formation of one’s identity and their religious faith. In exploring this argument, I divide this paper into two parts. First, I elaborate on this concept of religious subjectivity through the ideas of semiotician Massimo Leone in Signs of the Soul: Toward a Semiotics of Religious Subjectivity and of Søren Kierkegaard in “Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments.” Second, I show how religious subjectivity can be a product of a dialectical synthesis between the individual and society. Throughout, I utilize the L’homme Armé mass tradition to support my claims.
The concept of religious subjectivity acts like a double-edged sword: it concerns the reciprocal relationship between the individual and their religion. The first part in understanding religious subjectivity involves religion’s influence on conceiving the self. Leone suggests that “religious cultures…instill in individuals the idea of their spiritual uniqueness, an idea that interacts, then, with self-awareness at all levels.” He argues that this religious subjectivity “have played a primary role in nurturing the concept of human individuality” notably through the cultural figure of “the soul.” This soul is rooted in “a complex reelaboration of a labyrinthe amount of previous cultural materials, of signs, discourses, and texts that, shaped by previous civilizations, were reshaped in the extraordinary cultural fabric of the new religion.”[vi] Ancient civilizations, notably the Greek, portrayed and elaborated on the idea of the psyché—a figure that is less emblematic of a spirit but a narrative of death, of an existence beyond death.[vii] Similar to the psyché, the Catholic soul revolves around a narrative: a set of linear sacraments from baptism to the anointing of the sick. In addition to this, several dogmatic narratives (on creation, the good life, and judgment) heavily influence how devotees lead their lives and save their souls from punishment. The Christian narrative becomes the scaffolding for an individual to become conscious of their soul. To impose such a narrative, the Church preached a penal system that the panoptic God oversees and judges those who stray from the path. By feeding on people’s fears of hell and conscience, devotees become hyper-aware of the construction of their soul. These rules pervade music inasmuch it pervades daily life such as avoiding the devil’s tritone and ascribing to certain symbols like octave leaps for the divine. Moreover, the spiritual self-awareness impels individuals to notice the religious undertones of secular objects such as the L’homme Armé. Yet, different people recognize different religious connections to this secular melody.
This leads us to the second aspect of religious subjectivity, which involves individuals creating their own understanding of their faith. Kierkegaard argues that subjectivity is truth and defines it as “an objective uncertainty, held fast through appropriation with the most passionate inwardness.”[viii] A person who holds their faith as the truth regards that as their highest form of truth. To Kierkegaard, when an individual conceives their idea of good and evil, they next try to advance their pursuit of good into the pursuit of God, the absolute truth.[ix] Since the gap between individuals and God is inconceivable, the only way to reach absolute truth is through faith. While this seems contradictory to Leone, the foundation of this faith in the Renaissance involves the influence of the Church. While the church is doctrinal, individuals can frame their relationship to God through personal faith. Again, per Leone, the cultural figure of the soul helps in nurturing the idea of human individuality through the belief that each soul is unique to oneself, and that the soul allows individuals to make choices as to what they believe is right.[x] In an anthropocentric move, humans believe that only they have a will and choice, because only they have a soul. The possibility of choosing is at the heart of the development of the soul: the potential to stray from the righteous path but also the potential for redemption. This can be a reason despite the multitude of contrapuntal rules, composers find a way to express their own subjectivity in their compositions. Although sacred, their works may exude their understanding of their faith. Hence, given the multiple iterations of the L’homme Armé masses, each composer may have imbued their religious outlook and interpretation of this secular melody within the bounds of religious rules that they so believe in.
These two aspects of religious subjectivity can be a dialectic between the self and society, which in this case constitutes the individual and the Church. While an individual tries to create an intelligible and marked difference between oneself and others, they must comply with rules and with the universalizing narrative of a good Catholic life. To synthesize these two poles, the figure of the soul is necessary to reconcile having an individual choice and a path that leads to purify the soul from sins that it commits. Religious subjectivity then uses the soul as an intervention between the individuated self and the religious society. In terms of sacred music, the soul becomes a justification for following set contrapuntal rules, yet it also becomes a fountain of inspiration from which individual musical choices—creative choices within the bounds of religious dogma—are decided. These choices are necessary for Renaissance composers to stand out and to showcase their professionalism against each other and among religious circles.
The L’homme Armé mass tradition is not short of composers participating in the one-upmanship—an excellent example of how religious subjectivity operates. Dufay, in the closing “Agnus Dei” from Missa L’homme armé, decided to play the folk tune backwards while following the convention of dividing “Agnus Dei” into three sections that mirror the threefold repetition of the phrase Agnus Dei. In Ockeghem’s Missa L’homme armé, the bass sings the folk tune (with the original text) instead of the tenor in “Agnus Dei.” While it is not uncommon to do this in the periods after the Renaissance, Ockeghem’s move is radical yet still moving within the bounds of sacred rules in voice leading and form as he uses the same conventional form as Dufay. The six anonymous L’homme Armé masses found in Naples built each movement from different sections in the chant. Josquin in his Missa L’homme armé super voces musicales decided to use solmization syllables from the hexachordal system to create a progression for each movement of the mass. The “Kyrie” would start in C, “Gloria” in D, and so on, while maintaining the same mode.
While one understands subjectivity as the expression of the self, religious subjectivity is how one understands and expresses their faith (again echoing Kierkegaard). As we see in the L’homme Armé mass tradition, the composers utilized this secular tune, because they may have seen religious undertones, albeit their interpretations may differ. These interpretations are translated through how they engineer their Missa L’homme Armé as a showcase of their individual faith and creativity. Although they try to be skillful and innovative, composers do so within the bounds of religious rules as a constant dynamic interaction between the self and society. Indeed, Renaissance composers are commissioned by churches to write these masses the same way nineteenth-century composers have patrons; however, unlike the Romantics, these religious composers do not aim to put their self, identity, and subjectivity (experiences of yearning and desire) in the spotlight, rather, they aim to put forward their subjective truth—their religious faith—in the music that they write.
Religious subjectivity tells us that a form of subjectivity in music existed in the Renaissance Era. Composers, while they follow sets of musical rules, always seek ways to express their own faith and find religious inspiration from virtually any source—even secular ones. This possibly tells us why secular tunes such as the L’homme Armé became integrated in the plethora of sacred musical works. More importantly, religious subjectivity offers a way to understand why different versions of the Missa L’homme Armé exist—as a unique expression of an individual soul’s faith walking down the path towards the good Christian life.
Endnotes
[i] Richard Freedman, Music in the Renaissance: Western Music in Context (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013), 82.
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Allan W. Altas, Renaissance Music: Music in Western Europe, 1400-1600, 1st Edition (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998), 150.
[iv] Ibid.
[v] Freedman, Music in the Renaissance, 87.
[vi] Massimo Leone, “Signs of the Soul: Toward a Semiotics of Religious Subjectivity,” Signs and Society 1, no. 1 (March 1, 2013): 115–59, 117.
[vii] Leone, “Signs of the Soul,” 125.
[viii] S. Kierkegaard, “Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments,” in The Essential Kierkegaard, ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton University Press, 1980), 187–246, 207.
[ix] Ibid.
[x] Leone, “Signs of the Soul,” 117.
