This is the first full-length study of the vernacular motet in thirteenth-century France. The motet was the most prestigious type of music of that period, filling a gap between the music of the so-called Notre-Dame School and the Ars Nova of the early fourteenth century. This book takes the music and the poetry of the motet as its starting-point and attempts to come to grips with the ways in which musicians and poets treated pre-existing material, creating new artefacts. The book reviews the processes of texting and retexting, and the procedures for imparting structure to the works; it considers the way we conceive genre in the thirteenth-century motet, and supplements these with principles derived from twentieth-century genre theory. The motet is viewed as the interaction of literary and musical modes whose relationships give meaning to individual musical compositions.
In an article published in 1979, Ludwig Finscher defined imitation and text treatment as the main parameters of the stylistic shift he detected in motet composition around 1500, and Josquin Desprez as the composer whose works embodied them most clearly. This volume of twenty-five essays by leading Renaissance musicologists - based on a conference which took place in Bangor (Wales) in 2007 - takes stock of developments in motet research in the intervening three decades. It does focus considerable attention on text treatment and compositional technique (texture and cantus firmus manipulation as much as imitation in the strict sense), but also on questions such as regional repertoires (such as Bohemia and Spain), manuscripts (such as the 'Medici Codex'), and semantic aspects (devotion, symbolism etc.). Josquin's oeuvre, while still the focus of several essays, is contextualized through studies on composers as diverse as Regis, Busnoys, Obrecht, Fevin, Moulu, Gascongne, Gaffurio, Martini, and Senfl. Although there are still many questions to be answered about the motet around 1500 - a period which, according to Joshua Rifkin, is like a 'black hole' for the genre given the lack of extant works, ascriptions, and stylistic consistency - the volume is an important step forward in exploring and understanding this crucial repertoire.
This book focuses on the literary artistry of the texts of Old French and bilingual motets, notably the special feature of motets that distinguished them from other medieval lyric forms: the phenomenon of polytextuality.
Questions of authorship are central to the late thirteenth-century motet repertoire represented by the seventh section or fascicle of the Montpellier Codex (Montpellier, Bibliothèque interuniversitaire, Section de médecine, H. 196, hereafter Mo). Mo does not explicitly attribute any of its compositions, but theoretical sources name Petrus de Cruce as the composer of the two motets that open fascicle 7, and three later motets in this fascicle are elsewhere ascribed to Adam de la Halle. This monograph reveals a musical and textual quotation of Adam’s Aucun se sont loe incipit at the outset of Petrus’s Aucun ont trouve triplum, and it explores various invocations of Adam and Petrus – their works and techniques – within further anonymous compositions. Authorship is additionally considered from the perspective of two new types of motets especially prevalent in fascicle 7: motets that name musicians, as well as those based on vernacular song or instrumental melodies, some of which are identified by the names of their creators. This book offers new insights into the musical, poetic, and curatorial reception of thirteenth-century composers’ works in their own time. It uncovers, beneath the surface of an anonymous motet book, unsuspected interactions between authors and traces of compositional identities.
A Performer's Guide to Medieval Music is an essential compilation of essays on all aspects of medieval music performance, with 40 essays by experts on everything from repertoire, voices, and instruments to basic theory. This concise, readable guide has proven indispensable to performers and scholars of medieval music.
The motet was unquestionably one of the most important vocal genres from its inception in late twelfth-century Paris through the Counter-Reformation and beyond. Heard in both sacred and secular contexts, the motet of the Middle Ages and Renaissance incorporated a striking wealth of meaning, its verbal textures dense with literary, social, philosophic, and religious reference. In Hearing the Motet, top scholars in the field provide the fullest picture yet of the motet's "music-poetic" nature, investigating the virtuosic interplay of music and text that distinguished some of the genre's finest work and reading individual motets and motet repertories in ways that illuminate their historical and cultural backgrounds. How were motets heard in their own time? Did the same motet mean different things to different audiences? To explore these questions, the contributors go beyond traditional musicological methods, at times invoking approaches used in recent literary criticism. Providing as well a cutting-edge look at performance questions and works by composers such as Josquin, Willaert, Obrecht, Byrd, and Palestrina, the book draws a valuable new portrait of the motet composer. Here, intriguingly, the motet composer emerges as a "reader" of the surrounding culture--a musician who knew liturgical practice as well as biblical literature and its exegetical traditions, who moved in social contexts such as humanist gatherings, who understood numerical symbolism and classical allusion, who wrote subtle memorie for patrons, and who found musical models to emulate and distort. Fresh, broad-ranging, and unique, Hearing the Motet makes vital reading for scholars, performers, and students of medieval and Renaissance music, and anyone else with an interest in the musical culture of these periods. Contributors include Rebecca A. Baltzer, Margaret Bent, M. Jennifer Bloxam, David Crook, James Haar, Paula Higgins, Joseph Kerman, Patrick Macey, Craig Monson, Robert Nosow, Jessie Ann Owens, Dolores Pesce, Joshua Rifkin, Anne Walters Robertson, Richard Sherr, and Rob C. Wegman.
In this, the first of a three-volume study of Byrd's complete output, under the general title The Music of William Byrd, the author essays a first full-scale historical and critical assessment of Byrd's sacred music to Latin words - one of the great glories of the Elizabethan Age. Each of the approximately 175 compositions is considered, at least briefly, with fuller appreciation accorded to such masterpieces as Emendemus in Melius, Tristitia et anxietas, Iusorum animae, Ave verum corpus, the lamentations and the three famous masses. There are more than sixty musical examples, some of considerable length. In critical prose that slights neither technicalities nor the intense emotional qualities of his subject matter, the author sheds fresh and often unexpected illumination on Byrd's musical rhetoric and on his powerful, endlessly inventive musical structures. Re-examining the known facts of Byrd's life in relation to the patronage and politics of the time, the author boldly argues that while the impetus behind Byrd's early motets was primarily traditionalist and technical, that behind his Cantiones sacrae motets of the 1580s was essentially political: they were covert laments and protests on behalf of the embattled recusant community.
