Elements of narrative in the masses of Loyset Compà ̈re

has been approved by the Examining Committee for the thesis requirement for the Master of Arts degree in Music at the December 2010 graduation. ii To Angela iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my committee members for all of their patience and insight without which I could never have attempted such a project. I would also like to thank Wallace Tomasini of the University of Iowa for introducing me to the Renaissance art and artists of northern Italy. Of course any misunderstandings or mistakes concerning the visual arts contained in this thesis are mine alone. I would also like to give fervent thanks to my wife, daughter, and parents for their love and support throughout the course of this project. State of the Scholarship Ludwig Finscher, author of the most comprehensive study of the works of Loyset Compère to date, introduced his 1964 monograph about the composer with the following observations about the paucity of scholarship on Compère at the time: Like most composers of the Josquin period, Compère has been almost completely neglected, yet he is one of the most significant and celebrated musicians of his time…the few pages devoted to him in general histories of the period reveal for the most part a haphazard choice of works and hence a subjective approach on the part of the authors…Now with the present work, together with the edition of Compère's collected works, 1 which must go hand in hand with this study, it is hoped that the neglect suffered by Compère will have been remedied, and that justice will have been done to the composer's name and place in music history. 2 With the goal of filling in the gap of scholarship, Finscher proceeded to analyze Compère's entire opus and provide a chronology for the works based on source and stylistic evidence. He also included some critical assessment in his text with the premise that " present-day musicology has no right to ignore the problem of aesthetic judgments in historical investigations altogether, " his main criterion for good art being " inner consistency. " 3 The resulting work of Finscher has become an indispensable resource for studying Compère's highly varied and strikingly individual compositional output. In fact, no scholarship concerning Compère has been written since its publication that does not cite Finscher's work. 2 Unfortunately, the state of scholarship has not changed significantly since the publication of Finscher's monograph. …