Abstract
Ockeghem’s Missa Mi-mi has intrigued and puzzled scholars for many centuries after its creation. A great amount of research has been dedicated to the ambiguous title ascribed to the mass and what it may have represented during the latter part of the fifteenth century. One area that has not been covered in such detail is that the mass itself is exemplary through the use of the Hypophrygian mode, a mode that had been hardly used in polyphony throughout the fifteenth century. This study, then, critically examines the secular output of contemporary foremost composers Guillaume Dufay, Gilles Binchois, Antoine Busnois, Johannes Ockeghem, and Johannes Tinctoris in order to establish a stylistic paradigm of the Phrygian modes. After establishing this paradigm, we come to the realization that the chanson O invida Fortuna by Johannes Tinctoris represents a burgeoning trend within Phrygian modality—an attempt to increase the overall Phrygian nature of the work as a whole through the addition of a Phrygian cadence on the fourth scale degree of the modal octave. In light of this evidence, and given Ockeghem’s penchant for musical games, the Missa Mi-mi represents a culmination of this trend and establishes a paradigm-shift within Phrygian modality, one that favors Phrygian cadences to the fourth-scale degree instead of the fifth within mode 3 contexts. We then examine and analyze the nature of A within Ockeghem’s mass as a whole, before turning to the after effects of these modal procedures and the ramifications that the Tinctoris chanson, and Ockeghem’s mass, had on Phrygian modality moving into the sixteenth century.