This album, the third of a series of twelve that will encompass all of Morales’s Masses and Magnificats, features his two Masses (a4 and a5) based on the L’homme armé tune which was the most popular bit of music to base a polyphonic Mass on from the late 15th century to the end of the 16th. This Mass tradition has a strong early connection to the chivalric Order of the Golden Fleece, whose meetings featured polyphonic Masses. Morales’s contributions to the repertory likely originated at the Sistine Chapel, where he would doubtless have seen and sung a good many L’homme armé Masses by others and would have known the tradition well. His Mass in five voices first appeared in an anthology of 1540, and the one in four in his Missarum liber secundus of 1544. The connection of the four-voice mass to the order and its Grand Master, Emperor Charles V, is made clear in the print by the ornamental ‘K’ at the beginning of the cantus (i.e. alto) part which features a portrait of Charles as a warrior wearing the imperial crown, plus his motto, ‘Plus ultra’, in a banner wound around the pillars of Hercules.

In his own time, and for a long time thereafter, Morales was best known throughout the Catholic world for the Magnificats – a set of eight, one for each of the church modes, each setting all twelve verses of the canticle, as it was sung in the papal chapel. From 1542 on they were printed and re-printed for many years and sung all over Europe and in the New World. Here we have the second of the set, the Magnificat secondi toni, as it was included in the initial 1542 print.

De Profundis, founded by Mark Dourish in 2011, is a vocal ensemble that performs Renaissance polyphony using adult male forces like the church and chapel choirs of the period: the top line sung by male altos, and the lower parts taken by tenors, baritones, and basses.