'Missa Scaramella': The Second Life of an Incomplete Obrecht Mass

Jacob Obrecht’s Missa Scaramella survives as a unicum in two partbooks (altus and bassus) in Kraków’s Biblioteka Jagiellońska. A reconstruction of the mass has recently been published by Fabrice Fitch (in collaboration with Philipp Weller and Paul Kolb). To ‘verify’ the results of that reconstruction, this review will look into claims made about the original notation of the cantus firmus (Scaramella va alla guerra) and compare it with another, independently conceived, reconstruction of the Missa Scaramella by Marc Busnel.