Since the 1990s scholars have spent a lot of time thinking about what cantus firmi—the borrowed melodies that underpin mass cycles—might symbolize. By drawing together the different sections of the mass, an emblematic tenor renders the Mass Ordinary “proper"—that is, tied to a given occasion. Like hanging the right banner for the right feast day.

And yet, for all our certainty about quoted songs pointing to specific occasions, we’ve barely stopped to ask how this symbolic linkage actually works. And we should, given that the fifteenth-century mass repertory encompasses a hefty portion of masses that are anything but proper—from tunes that mock courtly values to songs that would make a sailor blush. This paper uses these awkward cases to take a hard look at how late-medieval music handles representation in the first place. Asking how scholars talk about the song mass as a meaning-making machine may tell us more about our own need to see music as a representational medium than about late-medieval musical practices. These examples suggest that although we think we've moved past old debates about music's representational capabilities, these questions continue to shape our analytical frameworks—we've just stopped acknowledging them so explicitly.