... a pre-existing plainchant melody is heard in the slow-moving tenor part) became an alternative within a broader range of compositional techniques. Instead, the most distinctive style of Renaissance music is imitative polyphony, where all the voices move at the same speed and share in motivic development by combining points of imitation in a way later known as fugue. The Missa Pange Lingua by Josquin Desprez, perhaps the greatest composer of the High Renaissance, takes a plainsong not as a long-note cantus firmus but instead as a source of melodic ideas treated imitatively through all the voices. This new way of conceiving and controlling musical space was taken up with enthusiasm by the post-Josquin generation, reaching a classical peak in the sacred music of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina-his plainchant-based Missa de Beata Virgine (published in 1570) uses the same technique-and it lasted, if with an increasing sense of archaicism, through the ...

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