The Polyphonic Mass in France, 1600-1780. The Evidence of the Printed Choirbooks

Jean-Paul C. Montagnier Professeur de musicologie à l'Université de Lorraine This is the first ever book-length study of the a cappella masses which appeared in France in choirbook layout during the baroque era. Though the musical settings of the Ordinarium missæ and of the Missa pro defunctis have been the subject of countless studies, the stylistic evolution of the polyphonic masses composed in France during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has been neglected owing to the l..