Brumel worked at the cathedrals of Chartres, Laon, Notre Dame (Paris), as well as in Geneva and Rome. However, he ended up succeeding the composers Josquin and Obrecht at the Court of Ferrara (which lies near the river Po, between Bologna and Padua) – known to readers of Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait.
This setting of the mass is for twelve voices and uses spacial effects, foreshadowing the motet Spem in Alium by Thomas Tallis (which uses eight choirs, each of five voices).
It has carefully constructed melodic detailing against astonishingly long stretches of slowly-moving blocks of harmony.
Why is it called the Earthquake Mass? Not for the reasons you might expect – it’s based on an Easter antiphon “And behold, there was a great earthquake”, although the most exciting writing can be found in the Agnus Dei:
The Listening Project Blog 