The Model of Nicholas V

Julius II's decisions to rebuild St. Peter's and to found the Cappella Giulia are indebted equally to the examples of Sixtus IV and Nicholas V. Indeed, in view of the musical developments at St. Peter's detailed in this study, music must now be recognized as yet another arena in which Nicholas established precedents followed most closely by Sixtus and Julius. As in their choices of residence, their ambitious building programs, and their commitments to the papal library, so also in their support of music. Yet while northern musicians figured prominently at the basilica under each of them, the cultural standing of northern musicians changed considerably. As Nicholas initiated one era at St. Peter's, setting the pace for his successors, Julius did another.

These three popes demonstrated their attachments to St. Peter's both through symbolic and financial actions. Their commitments are evident first of all in their choices of living quarters. Sixtus, like Nicholas, lived adjacent to the basilica in the Vatican Palace, but that was otherwise far from the normal practice. Although Martin V had evidently first moved into the Vatican on his return, he soon had set up residence at Santa Maria Maggiore and by 1424 had moved to the center of the city, to his familial palace adjacent SS. Apostoli in the so-called "insula dei Colonna"; and Eugenius IV lived briefly in the old papal palace near Santa Maria Maggiore that he had restored, but mostly outside of Rome altogether; while after Nicholas, Plus II traveled away

from Rome for fully half of his term, and Paul II preferred his new palace attached to St. Mark's.^[1]

With regard to construction at St. Peter's, all popes in the fifteenth century contributed to the old basilica. But Nicholas's plans to remodel St. Peter's, commencing with the construction of a new choir in 1452, have long been regarded as the important antecedent to Julius's more grandiose scheme. Sixtus IV, for his part, selected a rebuilding project that posed less of a burden for the papal treasury: Instead of expanding on Nicholas's vision of the basilica, Sixtus rebuilt the papal chapel, the cappella magna . While Nicholas may have been the first fifteenth-century pope with enough money to build on a large scale, thanks to the Jubilee of 1450, the extraordinary will to build that he shared with Sixtus and Julius rested as well on a common vision of what Rome and the papacy should be. According to his biographer Manetti, Nicholas looked to King Solomon for his model as a building pontiff and to Solomon's Temple as the inspiration for a new St. Peter's. The della Rovere popes likewise cited Solomon, Sixtus when he built the Sistine Chapel, Julius as his justification for founding the Cappella Giulia.^[2]

Aside from their uncommon zeal for building projects throughout Rome, these three popes also stand out from the others for the attention they devoted to the papal library. In this instance Nicholas laid the groundwork for Sixtus, who is generally credited with founding the Vatican Library in its modern sense as a collection open for public consultation.^[3] Nicholas pursued his interests as a humanist and bibliophile throughout his ecclesiastical career, helping to shape the library of Cosimo de' Medici while also assembling his own. Upon becoming pope he appointed the classical scholar Giovanni Tortelli as his librarian, and together they more than tripled the papal collection from some 340 volumes in the 1443 inventory to over 1,150 at his death in 1455. This expansion occurred partly through his paying scribes and illumi-

[1] Sylvia D. Squarzina, "Roma nel Quattrocento: Il brusio dell'architettura," 33-37; and Torgil Magnuson, Studies in Roman Quattrocento Architecture , 222-26.

[2] Charles Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome , 222.

[3] Josè Ruyschaert, "Sixte IV, fondateur de la Bibliothéque Vaticane (15 juin 1475)," 513-24; Carroll W. Westfall, In This Most Perfect Paradise: Alberti, Nicholas V, and the Invention of Conscious Urban Planning in Rome, 1447-55 , 139-40.

nators to copy manuscripts and partly through gifts.^[4] A revealing notice in the St. Peter's account books shows that the new pope wasted no time in exploring the library of the basilica. In July 1447 Niccolo the porter and his helpers carried "two cases of books to the palace of our pope," doubtless books from the large collection of Cardinal Giordano Orsini that the basilica had inherited in 1438.^[5]

It remained to Sixtus to convert the papal collection into a genuine library. This he accomplished in 1475 with a bull dedicating the library both to theological studies and to the liberal arts, with frescoed rooms set aside specifically to house the collection and for public and private study, and with the establishment of a library administration. During his papacy Sixtus also added nearly 1,000 volumes. Elsewhere in Rome nephews of Sixtus founded libraries at their titular churches, SS. Apostoli and San Pietro in Vincoli (the latter by Giuliano della Rovere).^[6] The mania for collecting books and documents reached even to the papal bureaucracy when Sixtus declared that all papal bulls should be preserved in the Castel San Angelo. He further directed Platina to assemble the bulls and documents governing papal rights into the three-volume collection Liber privilegiorum .^[7] Such activities provide the background for the employment of Ausquier during these very years to copy the basilica's manuscripts of polyphony.

After Sixtus, the next expansion of the library took place under Julius II, who added to the available space and created another library for his own use. Pietro Bembo lauded Julius's support of the Vatican Library in 1513, as Battista Casali had in 1508. Not only Sixtus and Julius were aware of their papal predecessors; so too were their contemporaries. In praising Julius for creating a new Athens in modern Rome, Casali probably followed the example of Aurelio Brandolini, who had praised Sixtus for duplicating the Greek and Roman library that the

[4] Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome , 283-84.

[5] Doc. 1447e. On the cardinal and his library, see E. König, Kardinal Giordano Orsini (1438): Ein Lebensbild aus der Zeit der Grossen Konzilien und des Humanismus . Three of the Orsini manuscripts are discussed in Victor Saxer, "Trois manuscrits liturgiques de l'Archivio di San Pietro, dont deux datès, aux armes du Cardinal Jordan Orsini," 501-5.

[6] Elisabeth Schröter, "Der Vatikan als Hügel Apollons und der Musen: Kunst und Panegyrik von Nikolaus V. bis Julius II," 214.

[7] Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome , 286 and 309.

emperor Augustus had built on the Palatine. Both must have known Manetti's Life of Nicholas V , with its comparison of Nicholas's collection to the Alexandrian library of Ptolemy Philadelphius; indeed, Bembo made the same comparison for Julius.^[8]

With each of these projects, the roles of Nicholas, Sixtus, and Julius have been recounted often and the debt of one pope to another acknowledged. This has not been the case with music. For the basilica's music Julius and Sixtus have each received credit for their patronage to the virtual exclusion of Nicholas. And yet in this regard no pope in the Renaissance effected more dramatic changes than Nicholas. By founding chapels at St. Peter's, Sixtus and Julius certainly made important administrative and financial contributions, but these were contributions toward the sustenance and modification of the musical establishment they each had inherited. In comparison, the musical innovations that Nicholas brought to St. Peter's were revolutionary. Within weeks of his becoming pope there were numerous signs of a new attitude toward music: the "loan" of the papal singer Richard Herbare; the hiring of several northern singers, perhaps as many as twelve after the Jubilee; a stronger financial footing for music as singers received salaries rather than per-job wages; a new organ; intensive work on manuscript reparation (and, as suggested below, perhaps also composition); and the first indication of boys attached to the basilica (through the singer Rubino). When in 1480 Sixtus granted the singers of St. Peter's all "privileges, favors, and graces" traditionally accorded papal singers, he followed by thirty years the example of Nicholas.^[9]

These improvements in the music at St. Peter's must be understood as an integral part of the attention to liturgical ceremonies that contemporaries praised in Nicholas. His biographer Giannozzo Manetti noted the lavish expenditures on vestments and church plate decorated with jewels. The purpose of these and other efforts was to inspire the admiration and greater devotion among the faithful and to restore the

[8] John O'Malley, "The Vatican Library and the School of Athens: A Text of Battista Casali, 1508," suggests that Raphael's fresco the School of Athens may have been done in response to Casali's sermon. See also Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome , 282 and 286-87; Westfall, In This Most Perfect Paradise , 140, n. 40; and Deoclecio Redig de Campos, I Palazzi Vaticani , 102.

[9] See p. 50.

dignity, honor, and authority of the papacy in Christendom at large. Nicholas himself, in the "last testament" recorded by Manetti, considered one of his principal achievements to have been the increased magnificence of liturgical celebrations. Cardinal Jean Jouffroy was one of many to articulate the theological justification for the attention to ceremonial splendor, claiming, in his eulogy for Nicholas, that the beauty of liturgical services was an earthly embodiment of heavenly beauty.^[10]

Through the remainder of the fifteenth century, music at St. Peter's retained a character more or less set by Nicholas V; that is, of a salaried polyphonic choir independent of the papal chapel, a choir that the papal chapel could nevertheless depend on as a source for new singers when positions opened. A sense of continuity must have existed if only because the Italian church officials who sang in the choir from the 1460s to 1490s first appeared at St. Peter's when Nicholas was pope or shortly after: The beneficiaries and sopranos Bonomo (sang from 1462 to 1476; if he is Bononinus, then he sang as early as 1458) and Christoforo Sancti (sang from at least 1481 to 1489) both began their affiliations with the basilica in April 1447, Nicholas's first full month; Dns. Nicholas de Setia, cleric and sacristan (sang in the 1470s and then again for Easter 1485) was already a cleric at St. Peter's in 1448; and Dns. Jacobus Antonius (sang tenor and bass, 1481-99), a cleric, rented several houses from the basilica from 1458 at the latest.

The arrival of northern composers may also date to Nicholas's first year. Because Faugues may have been employed at St. Peter's and Caron in Rome, the possibility is greater that not only the motets by Josquin and Puyllois and the last additions of hymns and antiphons to SPB80 but also other works in the earlier repertoire may have been composed and copied in Rome, that among all the northerners identified in pay records by first name only there were some of the composers repre-

[10] Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome , 46-48 and 156-57; John O'Malley, Praise and Blame in Renaissance Rome: Rhetoric, Doctrine, and Reform in the Sacred Orators of the Papal Court, c. 1450-1521 , 9-11. In discussing the connection between earthly and heavenly hierarchies, O'Malley calls the analogy "an insistent theme in preaching at the court" (p. 11). Regarding similar ideas in the early sixteenth century, see idem, Giles of Viterbo on Church and Reform: A Study in Renaissance Thought, 95-96 ; and John Shear-man, Raphael's Cartoons in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen and the Tapestries for the Sistine Chapel , 21-22.

sented in SPB80. While this employment cannot be proven on the basis of archival data presented in part 1, the following hypotheses that Le Rouge, Barbingant, and Compare each spent time at St. Peter's are based on a comparison of that data with musical evidence presented in part 2.

The identification of Mass associations between Faugues (Missa La basse danse ), Puyllois (Missa ), Le Rouge (Missa So ys emprentid ), and Barbingant (Missa ) in chapter 6 has biographical implications for the four composers. Faugues is unequivocally, but briefly, employed in Bourges and less securely, but for a much a longer period, established in Rome. The longtime employment of Puyllois in Rome is the best documented residency of the four, followed by the tenure that Guillaume Le Rouge enjoyed in the chapel of Charles of Orleans from 1451 to 1465. Called "W. de Rouge" in Tr90, he is commonly taken to be the Lerouge included by Eloy d'Amerval in his Livre de la dèablerie (Paris, 1508), where he is placed alongside Ockeghem, Agricola, and others. In Orleans he would have encountered Tinctoris in the early 1460s, while Tinctoris acted as procurator of the German nation at the university and instructed the boys at the cathedral.^[11]

Musical relationships suggested by this Mass complex raise the possibility that Le Rouge should be identified with the Rubino who arrived at St. Peter's in 1447—also the year Puyllois came to Rome—in other words, the very period in which Le Rouge and Puyllois are presumed to have composed their Masses. This presumes that the Rubino there in 1447-48 and the Robinetto who died in 1451 were not the same individual. And Tinctoris links Le Rouge and Puyllois in a complaint about the improper notation of proportional relationships in Masses that they had composed (now lost).^[12]

The group of Mass associations also has potential significance for the yet-to-be-located Barbingant. Because of the extent to which his

[11] Paula^[*] Higgins provides the dates for his years in Orleans in "Antoine Busnois and Musical Culture in Late Fifteenth-Century France and Burgundy," 251, n. 521. See also E. Dahnk, "Musikausübung an den Höfen von Burgund und Orleans während des 15. Jahrhunderts," 184-85. On Tinctoris, see Ronald Woodley, "Johannes Tinctoris: A Review of the Documentary Biographical Evidence." The list of students mentioning Tinctoris is in Nicole Gotteri, "Quelques ètudiants de l'universitè d'Orlèans en 1462," 557.

[12] Tinctoris, Opera theoretica , 2a: 47.

Missa shows a familiarity with that by Puyllois, the possibility that he too spent time in Rome must be considered. Arguments about where Barbingant worked have been based entirely on musical grounds. Some connection with Paris is presumed from the two chansons with conflicting attributions to Barbingant.^[13]L'homme banni is attributed to Barbingant in Mellon and in Tinctoris's Proportionale musices and to Fede in the less reliable source, Flor176. Similarly, Dijon ascribes Au travail suis to Barbingant and Nivelle de la Chausèe to Ockeghem. Thus in both instances the rival candidate is a composer strongly associated with Paris: Ockeghem served three French kings between 1453 and his death in 1497, and Fede often worked in or near Paris between 1449 and 1474. Also Fallows has argued the importance of Barbingant's influence on Ockeghem and in favor of Barbingant as the composer of Au travail suis .^[14] More recent biographical hypotheses propose that Barbingant worked at some point between circa 146o and 1475 at the Imperial Court (based in part on similarities of his Mass and those of Touront) and that he may have been a teacher of Loyset Compére.^[15]

Similarities between Barbingant and Puyllois and Faugues are not the only grounds for proposing a Roman period. for Barbingant. The position that his Masses occupied in SPB80, as Ausquier originally began it, suggests some sort of relationship with St. Peter's: From all appearances, his Missa was intended to be the first composition in the manuscript; SPB80 is the only manuscript with both of his known Masses; and in SPB80 the two Masses both appear in the presumptive second layer from 1463.^[16] Moreover, the Missa Terriblement , which in SPB80 has the motto Omnia vincit amor , is particularly well suited to

[13] Christopher Reynolds, "The Origins of San Pietro B 80 and the Development of a Roman Sacred Repertory," 289, n. 52; and David Fallows, "Johannes Ockeghem: The Changing Image, the Songs and a New Source," 218-30.

[14] Fallows, "Johannes Ockeghem: The Changing Image," 218-30. His arguments are seconded by Gerald Montagna, "Caron, Hayne, Compare: A Transmission Reassessment," 115-16.

[15] Adelyn Peck Leverett, A Paleographic and Repertorial Study of the Manuscript Trento, Castello del Buonconsiglio, 91 (1378) , 100-101 and 185-90; and Montagna, "Caron, Hayne, Compére," 115-17.

[16] The other source of the Missa Terriblement , Ver759, is later by twenty years; that of his Missa , Tr89, was evidently copied ca. 1466; Suparmi Saunders, "The Dating of the Trent Codices from Their Watermarks, with a Study of the Local Liturgy of Trent in the Fifteenth Century," 91.

glorifying papal Rome, based as it is on the chanson Terriblement suis fortunèe , which takes as its soprano melody the introit for the dedication of a church, Terribilis est locus iste . As noted in chapter 1, this feast day had a special importance at St. Peter's.

If Barbingant were indeed present at St. Peter's during this period, a possible candidate among the several singers identified only by a first name is Gregorio, the choir's only tenor for four years during the papacies of Plus II and Paul II (from January 1462 until June 1464 and from March 1465 until at least February 1466). To judge from his salary and from his position of leadership in the choir as it was reformulated in Pius's last years (including two possible recruiting trips), Gregorio was a distinguished musician. His monthly wage of 4 ducats was unsurpassed for his time, equaled only by that of his French colleague, Fede, and by a few singers at the turn of the century. The possibility that Fede and Barbingant worked together at St. Peter's suggests that simultaneous employment in Rome as well as in Paris may have contributed to the confusion about whether Barbingant or Fede wrote the chanson L'homme banni . As previously noted, the period during which Gregorio arrived at St. Peter's is also the most logical time for singers from France to appear in Rome, because Louis XI had just revoked the Pragmatic Sanction, and because St. Peter's was then hiring many northerners, in contrast to the papal chapel and chapels in some other Italian cities. In the context of Louis XI's newly pledged allegiance to Plus, the liturgical source of Barbingant's Missa Terriblement would have been singularly appropriate, even if composed years before.

While at St. Peter's, Gregorio apparently had a student or younger protegèe, because from May 1465 until the pay records break off after February 1466, there was a contra named Ludovicus Gregori; that is, assuming both were French, Loyset of Grègoire.^[17] Since a teacher-pupil relationship has been suggested for Barbingant and Loyset Compére, these arguments are relevant. Compare, like Barbingant, shows in his early chansons a penchant for sequential writing that was un-

[17] The Latin form of Loyset is Ludovicus, as Compare is named in his epitaph, for instance, and in a 1486 benefice letter written in Rome, where he is called Ludovicus Compatris; see Ludwig Finscher, Loyset Compére (c. 1450-1518) , 19-20; and Leeman Perkins, "Musical Patronage at the Royal Court of France under Charles VII and Louis XI (1422-83)," 552.

common in chansons from the 1460s. Moreover, Compare seemingly honors the older master in his quodlibet Au travail suis . In this chanson, which begins by quoting Barbingant, Compare also included Hayne's De tous biens plaine , Ockeghem's D'ung aultre amer and Presque transi , Du Fay's Malheureux cueur and Par le regard , and perhaps also Puyllois's Si ung bien peu d'esperance . The inclusion of Puyllois in this company may thus stem from personal contact in Rome during the 1460s. It is too much to claim that Compare had "prolonged compositional training under Barbingant" on the strength of shared stylistic tendencies and one quodlibet that quotes Barbingant's Au travail suis .^[18] But these are supplemented as well by Compére's chanson Le renvoy , which begins with a quotation of the first tenor phrase of the chanson Terriblement suis fortunèe (related also to the Et resurrexit of Ockeghem's Missa Caput ).^[19]

This would be the earliest sighting for Compére, one that occurs at a time when nothing is known about him, except that, on the basis of knowing Jean Molinet in the 1460s, he is presumed to have been in Paris. While Compare is first securely documented in Milan in 1474, he may be the Aloysio already there in October 1471, when Galeazzo Maria Sforza sent him and the singer Raynero north as far as England ("in loca transalpina et in Angliam") to recruit singers.^[20] A year after the payments to Ludovico Gregori, St. Peter's employed a soprano named Loysetto in December 1467 and February 1468, after which there is a break in the records. It is possible that Loysetto and Ludovicus Gregori were one individual, since by the time the accounts name Loysetto, Gregorio had left.^[21] In Milan Compare sang with Johannes

[18] Montagna, "Caron, Hayne, Compare," 115-17.

[19] See chapter 10, p. 262-63.

[20] Emilio Motta, "Musici alla corte degli Sforza: Ricerche e documenti milanesi," 301, 307-9 and 321-22; Guglielmo Barblan, "Vita musicale alla corte sforzesca," 830; and Prizer, "Music at the Court of the Sforza: The Birth and Death of a Musical Center," 156 and 159.

[21] Court records from Milan refer to Compére as Loyseto and Aluysetto (Edward E. Lowinsky, "Ascanio's Sforza's Life: A Key to Josquin's Biography and an Aid to the Chronology of His Works," 38 and 40). There are precedents for musicians singing two different voice parts: At St. Peter's Jacobus Antonius normally sang tenor, but for July, Nov., and Dec. 1490 he was a contrabasso ; and the 1469 letter from Jachetto di Marvilla (in Rome) to Lorenzo de' Medici promises a French contra "who is a good bass as well" (Frank D'Accone, "The Singers of San Giovanni in Florence during the Fifteenth Century," 324).

Cornuel, the singer who had arrived at St. Peter's in mid-March 1465 with Ludovicus Gregori and Carulo Britonio (also Karulo Sancti Briotii, or St. Brieuc), as a result of Gregorio's second possible recruiting trip. Both Cornuel and Compare knew Jean Molinet: A chanson linking Compare to Molinet, Vous qui parlè de gentil Buciphal , survives in the chansonnier Pav362, from the 1460s; and Molinet wrote a humorous poem to Cornuel.^[22] Last, had Compare been a recent alumnus of the St. Peter's choir, Ausquier's inclusion of the motet Omnium bonorum plena in SPB80 would be easier to understand; for of all the pieces he copied, this motet is the least fitting. As a motet evidently written in honor of a specific occasion, probably at Cambrai, Omnium bonorum plena has a text that does not serve any liturgical need of the St. Peter's choir.^[23]

Underlying the contention that St. Peter's may have employed a succession of northern composers—in addition to Fede, arguments can be made for Le Rouge, Faugues, Corbie (either as Corbet in Omnium bonorum plena , or as Courbet in Tinctoris's Proportionale ), Philip-pus de Holland, Barbingant, Compére, and, for a second time, Faugues (as Guillaume des Mares)—is a new awareness of the reasons why employment at the basilica would have been desirable enough to attract such composers in the first place. Among these the multi-faceted system of curial patronage that provided northern clerics with a variety of patrons, both institutional and personal, stable and mobile, was more important than the artistic predilection of any single pope, the revocation of the Pragmatic Sanction, or the appointment of a cardinal from Normandy as archpriest. The old view of Rome as a city in which the papal chapel was seen as the only attraction for northern musicians was part of a wider misunderstanding of Rome's musical status in the mid-fifteenth century, a view that erred by not taking into consideration the ways in which Rome differed politically from all other European cities. The cooperative network of patrons met the needs of the theocratic, rather than royal or aristocratic, organization of the city as a whole. Whether in the papal choir or in the bureau-

[22] Finscher, Loyset Compére , 14 and 138; Joshua Rifkin, "Loyset Compére," Grove , 4:595-96; and Montagna, "Caron, Hayne, Compare," 113-14. On Cornuel and Molinet, see E. Droz, "Notes sur Me Jean Cornuel, dit Verjus."

[23] On the date of Omnium bonorum plena , see David Fallows, Dufay , 77-78; and Montagna, "Caron, Hayne, Compare," 111-12.

cracy at large, the corporate body took precedence over the individual, a much different arrangement from the secular hierarchy of the Italian and French courts ruled by a duke or king. There the lines of authority plainly devolved from one person, and talented courtiers could make a more immediate impact.

Rome did not offer musicians the roles of leadership and dominance enjoyed by Willaert in Venice, Isaac in Florence, Gaffurio in Milan, Johannes Cornago and Tinctoris in Naples, Marchetto Cara at Mantua, and the illustrious sequence of Ferrarese maestri di cappella : Johannes Martini, Josquin, Obrecht, and Antoine Brumel. The relative standings of Josquin at Ferrara and in the Sistine Chapel illustrate the disparity. At the Este court Ercole I installed Josquin immediately as the head of his chapel, while in six years at Rome Josquin worked his way up from eighteenth to fourteenth in seniority. Ahead of him was the by-then-venerable Johannes Monstroeul, who had cultivated his position for four decades, having started out in the St. Peter's choir in the 1450s. In Ferrara the duke gained from the reputation of the artist; in Rome the office of the papacy profited from the orderly administration of its constituent departments, but one of which was the papal chapel.

By identifying too closely the musical status of Rome with the personnel of the papal choir, it was possible to depict Rome as a musical anomaly, as a city without a polyphonic tradition of any significance between the departure of Du Fay and the arrival of Gaspar van Weerbecke. During the 1450s and 1460s the only recognizable composer was Puyllois (and even he was wrongly assumed to have left Rome during the 1460s).^[24] And at St. Peter's, where the singers were long known only through Haberl's incomplete and uncritical list of musicians, the collection of polyphony, SPB80, was thought to be a northern manuscript.

For reasons that remain unclear, the succession of northern scribes and composers at St. Peter's declined after the copying of SPB80.

[24] Puyllois was supposed to have worked in 's-Hertogenbosch during the 1460s as recently as Keith Mixter, "Johannes Pullois," 453-54. For evidence that he remained in Rome, see Christopher Reynolds, "Musical Careers, Ecclesiastical Benefices, and the Example of Johannes Brunet," 62, n. 40; and Pamela Starr, "Music and Music Patronage at the Papal Court, 1447-1464," 167-75.

None of the singers potentially identifiable as composers were paid for scribal activities, not Bertrandus Vaqueras, Roberto Anglico, Serafinus, or Johannes Brunet. Judging from the few additions to SPB80, Masses stopped being copied at St. Peter's altogether after 1475. Either the papal chapel may have assumed some of the former duties of the St. Peter's choir, or the choir may have shared access to the papal Mass collections CS14 and 51. Only under Leo X did a St. Peter's scribe copy a manuscript large enough to have a new group of polyphonic Mass settings. The recently founded Cappella Giulia paid to have a manuscript of twenty quinterns copied between October 1513 and April 1514.^[25] After Ausquier copied the last new Masses in 1475, the choir experienced other major and suggestive changes: the construction of the organ pair in 1475-76, the decline in wages in 1478, and the decrease in the number of northern singers at St. Peter's. It therefore appears as if the golden age of northerners at St. Peter's coincided with the peak of Mass composition and copying at St. Peter's, years that also saw St. Peter's do without an organ, but with higher salaries for its predominantly northern singers.