"The light of Spain in music" was the phrase a contemporary musician used to describe Cristóbal de Morales. The precocious Spaniard has been credited both with influence on the young Palestrina, and with helping to transplant the mature musical style of Renaissance Rome to the Iberian peninsula, where it would bear fruit in the music of Francisco Guerrero and Tomás Luis de Victoria. Whether or not this is overstatement, Morales certainly assimilated the best of the central European styles and techniques during his 10-year employment in the papal chapel in Rome (1535-1545), and helped spread them to his native Spain when he returned. He was also instrumental in bringing the quintessential genre of the "parody," or imitation Mass to Spanish lands. His six-voiced Missa Mille regretz offers perhaps the most classic example from his output.

On a formal level, Morales' Missa Mille regretz follows the conventions of his time. The "model" upon which it is built is the four-voiced chanson attributed (though with some question) to the famous Josquin Desprez. Morales follows the accepted practice of his contemporaries in basing the Mass on this chanson, borrowing more or less musical material from the model for each movement of the Mass. At the same time, he significantly expands the musical affect of his model. Whereas the chanson uses only four voices in fairly simple phases to explore the mournful Phrygian mode, following the chanson's depressed text ("a thousand regrets..."), Morales first broadens the musical texture to six voices. He further imposes a careful and effective large-scale structure on his Mass—movements of the ritual that are separated by long periods of other chanted music and action relate to one another in his crafted trajectory. The opening Kyrie hews closely to the musical motives of the chanson model, but the following Gloria deviates a bit. Morales, however, emphatically returns the listeners' consideration to his Mass in the central moment of the Credo: at the text that describes the Crucifixition, he suddenly returns to his model, almost literally quoting a passage that in the chanson describes the "great pain and suffering" of the courtly lover. The Sanctus movement opens again with close imitation of the model, though it uses an extended and simplified version of the chanson's sequential motion, and the final Agnus Dei returns to more direct quotation of the mournful original music. The Mass as a whole cries out in plangent emotion to celebrate the feast of a painful martyr's commemoration, perhaps even the Holy Week observances of Christ's Passion.

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