The important contribution of Heinrich Isaac (ca. 1455–1517) to the genre of the proper of the mass has long been recognised. His work in this genre, collected in the monumental posthumously published Choralis Constantinus, was considered a landmark even in the sixteenth century. Yet Isaac’s magnum opus was by no means isolated. The mass proper played a much greater and more significant musical and symbolic role in the landscape of later-medieval and Renaissance music-making than is currently acknowledged. The present collection of fifteen essays offers new insights into both Isaac's mass propers themselves, which are still shrouded by many enigmas, and their context within broader later-fifteenth and sixteenth-century mass proper traditions. The circumstances under which Isaac's mass propers were composed, performed, and transmitted are discussed afresh, as is the striking late-sixteenth-century reception that the Choralis experienced. Studies of previously unknown or little-examined mass proper collections from countries as widely seperated as Portugal and Poland, as well as of the transformation of the genre in Lutheran territories and in the hands of William Byrd, show that Isaac's enterprise, though the largest of its kind, was built on and embedded in a strong and ongoing tradition of proper settings and cycles.

Mass proper chants comprise many different forms and performance types; their textual origins are varied; compositional activity fluctuated throughout the Middle Ages. They are nevertheless conceivable as one genre, represented by a specific liturgical book, the Gradual. Their unity resides in their character of a “distributive set” that is spread across the calendar year. Polyphonic proper settings are among the earliest specimens of Western polyphony; later centuries provide polyphonic settings in cycles of large liturgical coverage (as in the Notre-Dame repertory). Fourteenth-century written polyphony for the proper is extremely rare, suggesting practices of extemporization. The fifteenth-century proper setting is typically a cantus firmus composition (with the chant either as “discant paraphrase” or as tenor); the chant text is heard in all voices, in contrast to the motet or mass ordinary. Again, large cycles were frequently attempted—first in France—although polyphonic extemporization may still have been frequent. From ca. 1430 onwards, central-European sources document the acceptance of Western proper settings, sometimes in the form of mass "plenary cycles” and sometimes as proper cycles. The large proper collections in the Trent manuscripts 93 and 88 have been connected with Cambrai cathedral and other centres in France, pinpointing the contribution of Guillaume Du Fay. But the first traces of central European proper compositions also appear here; the Habsburg chapel of St. George, Wiener Neustadt (residence of Emperor Frederick III) is a possible provenance of early indigenous settings. The great contribution of Henricus Isaac stands on the shoulders of a strong central European tradition of proper settings and cycles, bearing out the tendency towards large-scale production and monumentality that is already implied in the chant genre itself.

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   |texte=   The Medieval Mass Proper, and the Arrival of Polyphonic Proper Settings in Central Europe
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