This chapter explores the musical life of the Armed Man, beginning with Josquin, Pierre de La Rue, and others active at the turn of the sixteenth century. It proposes a new way of parsing the musical connections that bind several fifteenth-century settings together. The chapter considers several additional examples of musical borrowing, with respect to both masses and secular L'homme arme settings. It discusses the terminological propriety and methodological value of musical borrowing. The earliest surviving reference to a L'homme arme mass dates from 1462-63, when Regis's setting was copied in Cambrai. Musical quotation is central to late medieval ways of composing. Borrowing might seem the sexier interpretive tool, but the lingua franca is often more powerful. The L'homme arme tradition is a resonant, indeed cacophonous echo chamber that challenges one to distinguish originary sounds from their reverberations.

Joseph Kerman's Contemplating Music and the new-musicological positions it catalyzed and nourished in the 1980s and 1990s posed a particular challenge to scholars of fifteenth-century music. Hearing was a metaphor for close reading in the absence of sound. Josquin's mass represents an expression and articulation of many musical practices that must have fundamentally informed musical hearing and listening around 1500, and even before. The metaphorical language brought to bear on this musical entity since the middle of the last century offers a meaningful snapshot of stasis and change in early music historiography. Busnoys's tenor connects the piece to the cantus firmi of other late medieval musicians' motets, and to the kinds of musical communities in which they circulated. The sounds of musical teaching and learning embody the unending cyclic repetitions comprising music history. Busnoys, Josquin, and the drums of Techiman realize the wholeness of community and the wholeness of history as moments of sounding as did the organ of Reims.