Mass (Musical Setting)

A Mass, in musical terms, is a setting of the fixed texts of the Catholic liturgy — the Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei — for singers, with or without instrumental accompaniment. Because the words are essentially the same from setting to setting, the genre offers an unusually direct way to compare how composers across very different eras approached identical material.

Mass settings run from simple Medieval chant, sung in unison with no harmony at all, through elaborate Renaissance polyphony written for church choirs, to large-scale Baroque and Classical-era settings (like Bach's Mass in B Minor) scaled up with full orchestra and vocal soloists into effectively concert works rather than pieces intended for liturgical use.

Where to start listening: Bach's Mass in B Minor is the form's most towering achievement; for something more austere, Palestrina's Renaissance Mass settings show the style at its purest.