To trope or not to trope? Or, how was that English Gloria performed?

The creation of polyphonic music for the mass ordinary texts in fourteenth-century England was unquestionably the major compositional pursuit, if the surviving fragmentary sources are to be taken as an accurate reflection of practice. Given the general musical uniformity of the corpus of liturgical music, there is one subset within the music for the mass, the Gloria, Spiritus et alme , that seems not entirely to follow the standardizing trend towards setting entire liturgical texts with polyphony. A small number of tropes with the text Spiritus et alme carry three-voice polyphonic music for the trope text only. To be sure, tropes of many kinds were well known to those who celebrated the Opus dei in fourteenth-century England. They played a special role in the chant sung in secular and regular venues, both as markers of the solemnity of certain feasts and as commentary upon the importance of a particular saint or occasion.