The fundamental, text-generated contour of polyphonic Magnificat settings in the late sixteenth century, familiar to most students of that era's music, has recently been outlined in the first chapter of David Crook's exemplary new study of Lasso's Magnificats. However, since virtually all vocal music ultimately takes its form from its text, and since form is the topic of this essay, it may be useful to review that contour before going into the specifics of form itself.

The Magnificat is the closing element at Vespers, belonging to the species of ritual lyrics of scriptural origin known in the Roman rite as “canticles.” These lyrical texts, which resemble psalms in their devotional, often ecstatic, tone, also resemble psalms in having individual verses of bipartite structure–that is, each verse has two parts, generally of parallel or appositive content. Though these two parts are often of unequal length, it is customary for the sake of brevity to refer to them as “halves.” The text of the Magnificat comes from Luke 1: 46–55. To these ten verses of Scripture are added, in liturgical use, the two verses of the standardized Lesser Doxology (“Gloria Patri et Filio…et in saecula saeculorum. Amen”), so that the text of the sixteenth-century Magnificat has, in all, twelve verses.

At Vespers on any given day an antiphon proper to the day is sung before the chanting of the Magnificat, and again after it.