Ed Zubrow wrote:

>As a historical aside I'd like to inject into the discussion the reminder
>that the Church was very fearful of allowing popular influences into the
>music.

That's not exactly so.  Since XIV to XVII century, the Church was fearful
of allowing interferences into the intelligibility of liturgical texts, and
that was the main problem concerning music.  Some "bullae" were dictated
by the Popes during this time, condemining the complexity of religious
polyphonic music as "luxury".  The climax of this came by the times of
Counter Reform, due to obvious reasons.  However, those attempts were not
taken too seriously even by the Papal Chapel.  Gregorian chant (which was
considered the true and purest music of the church) was always intended to
be "popular":  or at least, people from all social kinds knew it and sang
it.

>But composers continued to blend genres and the congregation seemed to
>appreciate it.  Thus there were "parody" Masses which were not parodies
>but, rather, Masses that used a popular song as their melodic basis.  There
>were also examples of the same music being used for both liturgical and
>popular purposes, though I can't come up with any examples right now.

The most known example of this is "L' homme arme", a popular tune of those
times which was used as "tenor" in Masses by Dufay, Ockeghem, Josquin and
others (there's also a milanese manuscript from XV century which contains
several anonymous Masses written on this tune).  However, the main secular
material of parody masses were courtly songs, not popular.  The case of
"L'homme arme" is a sort of exception.

Pablo Massa
[log in to unmask]