The Motet in the Late Middle Ages
The Motet in the Late Middle Ages

Author: Margaret Bent

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023

Total Pages: 777

ISBN-13: 0190063777

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"The book ranges widely over French, English and Italian motets, mostly between the 1310s and the 1420s. About half the chapters are previously unpublished, the remainder revised to varying degrees from previous publications and now organised into Parts devoted to compositional techniques, Fauvel and Vitry, Machaut, the Musician motets, English motets, Italian motets, music for popes and courts. Transcriptions of entire motets complement the musical analyses, many downloadable from the companion website. Chapters vary in their technical demands, allowing readers to select as appropriate. The five Musician motets of Part IV (chs. 15-21) praise over sixty musicians and range over many decades, each playing off its predecessors with citation, allusion and modelling. Motets of this period are individual conceptions, virtuosic creations of multi-layered words and music as tightly constructed as Chinese puzzles. Many chapters are devoted to individual motets, drawing on a multitude of new analytic directions and giving close attention to the detailed fit and juxtapositions of words and music. Verbal texts borrow musical techniques of repetition and recapitulation, words which may then be underlined musically by melodic or rhythmic 'leitmotives'. Alliteration and onomatopoeia abound, and there is a wider range of ingenious word painting than has usually been recognised, including puns on number and structural joins. Segments of chant are often chosen for their musical characteristics (number, symmetries, cadencing opportunities, melodic qualities) as well as their textual suitability to the pre-compositional materia"--

The Motet in the Late Middle Ages
The Motet in the Late Middle Ages

Author: Margaret Bent

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023-11-03

Total Pages: 777

ISBN-13: 0190063793

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A unique capacity of measured polyphony is to give precisely fixed places not only to musical notes, but also to individual words in relation to them and each other. The Motet in the Late Middle Ages offers innovative approaches to the equal partnership of music and texts in motets of the fourteenth century and beyond, showcasing the imaginative opportunities afforded by this literal kind of intertextuality, and yielding a very different narrative from the common complaint that different simultaneous texts make motets incomprehensible. As leading musicologist Margaret Bent asserts, they simply require a different approach to preparation and listening. In this book, Bent examines the words and music of motets from many different angles: foundational verbal quotations and pre-existent chant excerpts and their contexts, citations both of words and music from other compositions, function, dating, structure, theory, and number symbolism. Individual studies of these original creations tease out a range of strategies, ingenuity, playfulness, striking juxtapositions, and even subversion. Half of the thirty-two chapters consist of new material; the other half are substantially revised and updated versions of previously published articles and chapters, organized into seven Parts. With new analyses of text and music together, new datings, new attributions, and new hypotheses about origins and interrelationships, Bent uncovers little-explored dimensions, provides a window into the craft and thought processes of medieval composers, and opens up many directions for future work.

Hearing the Motet
Hearing the Motet

Author: Dolores Pesce

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 1998-12-10

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 0195351657

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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.

The Dorset Rotulus
The Dorset Rotulus

Author: Margaret Bent

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 419

ISBN-13: 1783276185

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From its origins in the thirteenth century, the Latin-texted motet in England and France became the most significant and diverse polyphonic genre of the fourteenth, a body of music important both for its texts and its variety of musical structures. However, although the motet in England plays a vital role in the music-historical narrative of the first decades of the 1300s, it has too often been overlooked in modern scholarship, due largely to its preservation in numerous but almost entirely fragmentary sources.0In 2017, substantial new fragments of medieval polyphony came to light. They originated at the Benedictine monastery of Abbotsbury, a major institution located high above Chesil Beach on Dorset's Jurassic Coast. The two leaves once headed an imposing musical scroll, and preserve significant portions of four large-scale Latin-texted motets from early fourteenth-century England.0This book introduces the manuscript and its provenance in Abbotsbury, relates it to other scrolls of late medieval music, contextualizes its motets within the larger corpus of contemporary Latin-texted motets, and analyses and reconstructs each of the motets, providing complete performable transcriptions of three of these compositions as well as three of its large-scale comparands. Spurred by the Dorset discovery, this monograph, the first in thirty-five years devoted to the medieval motet in England, offers a new evaluation of the richness of the English repertory in its own terms.

Ritual Meanings in the Fifteenth-Century Motet
Ritual Meanings in the Fifteenth-Century Motet

Author: Robert Michael Nosow

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-02-02

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 0521193478

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The first large-scale study of how fifteenth-century motets were used across Western Europe, dispelling the mysteries surrounding these outstanding works.

Music and Culture in the Middle Ages and Beyond
Music and Culture in the Middle Ages and Beyond

Author: Benjamin Brand

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2016-10-27

Total Pages: 379

ISBN-13: 131679895X

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It has become widely accepted among musicologists that medieval music is most profitably studied from interdisciplinary perspectives that situate it within broad cultural contexts. The origins of this consensus lie in a decisive reorientation of the field that began approximately four decades ago. For much of the twentieth century, research on medieval music had focused on the discovery and evaluation of musical and theoretical sources. The 1970s and 1980s, by contrast, witnessed calls for broader methodologies and more fully contextual approaches that in turn anticipated the emergence of the so-called 'New Musicology'. The fifteen essays in the present collection explore three interrelated areas of inquiry that proved particularly significant: the liturgy, sources (musical and archival), and musical symbolism. In so doing, these essays not only acknowledge past achievements but also illustrate how this broad, interdisciplinary approach remains a source for scholarly innovation.

Music of the Middle Ages
Music of the Middle Ages

Author: David Fenwick Wilson

Publisher: New York : Schirmer Books ; Toronto : Collier Macmillan Canada

Published: 1990

Total Pages: 440

ISBN-13:

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Music of the Middle Ages provides a comprehensive, chronological survey of musical style and compositional technique from early plainchant to the flourishing of fourteenth-century polyphony.--From publisher description.

The Monstrous New Art
The Monstrous New Art

Author: Anna Zayaruznaya

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-04-02

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1316194655

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Late medieval motet texts are brimming with chimeras, centaurs and other strange creatures. In The Monstrous New Art, Anna Zayaruznaya explores the musical ramifications of this menagerie in the works of composers Guillaume de Machaut, Philippe de Vitry, and their contemporaries. Aligning the larger forms of motets with the broad sacred and secular themes of their texts, Zayaruznaya shows how monstrous or hybrid exempla are musically sculpted by rhythmic and textural means. These divisive musical procedures point to the contradictory aspects not only of explicitly monstrous bodies, but of such apparently unified entities as the body politic, the courtly lady, and the Holy Trinity. Zayaruznaya casts a new light on medieval modes of musical representation, with profound implications for broader disciplinary narratives about the history of text-music relations, the emergence of musical unity, and the ontology of the musical work.

The Cambridge History of Medieval Music
The Cambridge History of Medieval Music

Author: Mark Everist

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-08-09

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 1108577075

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Spanning a millennium of musical history, this monumental volume brings together nearly forty leading authorities to survey the music of Western Europe in the Middle Ages. All of the major aspects of medieval music are considered, making use of the latest research and thinking to discuss everything from the earliest genres of chant, through the music of the liturgy, to the riches of the vernacular song of the trouvères and troubadours. Alongside this account of the core repertory of monophony, The Cambridge History of Medieval Music tells the story of the birth of polyphonic music, and studies the genres of organum, conductus, motet and polyphonic song. Key composers of the period are introduced, such as Leoninus, Perotinus, Adam de la Halle, Philippe de Vitry and Guillaume de Machaut, and other chapters examine topics ranging from musical theory and performance to institutions, culture and collections.