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.
Le profil humain et artistique de Orfeo Vecchi est encadre dans la realite liturgique et musicale de son temps et on mit a disposition des chercheurs et des musiciens l'edition critique du troisieme ...livre des motets a six voix precedees d'une analyse des temoins, des motets et de la presentation des caracteristiques musicales de chaque composition.
This article explores trends and motivations in the selection of plainchant and vernacular song quotations as the foundations of thirteenth-century motets. I argue that particular tenor melodies that ...received only cursory treatment in the liturgical polyphony of the Magnus liber organi were adopted in motets on account of their brevity and simplicity, characteristics that enabled their combination with upper-voice song forms and refrain quotations. Demonstrating a preference for short and simple tenors within the earliest layers of the motet repertoire, I trace the polyphonic heritage of the tenor OMNES, whose simple melody enabled its combination with another more obscure plainchant quotation, APTATUR, in a unique double tenor motet. I propose that motet creators—while sensitive to the semantic connotations of tenor texts—exploited the musical ability of tenor quotations to be combined with or stand in for other musical quotations. Newly identifying a plainchant tenor source in a motet by Adam de la Halle, I show that Adam’s polyphonic motet quotations of his own three-voice polyphonic rondeaux were achieved by the careful selection of motet tenors to replicate the freely conceived lowest voices of these preexisting rondeaux. The article further reveals profound modal and melodic similarities between the quotations chosen as thirteenthcentury motet tenors and the newly composed lowest voices of polyphonic rondeaux and English pes motets. It offers new perspectives on the relationship between the “elite” genre of the motet and types of polyphony that are less well attested in written sources, often considered to inhabit a more “popular” realm of musical practice.
The article is devoted to the research of choral music by Samuel Barber who was a 20th-century American composer. The research is carried out in terms of its genre and style diversity. It represents ...the historical stages of turning to choral art. The compositions are differentiated by voice composition into a cappella choirs and choirs with instrumental accompaniment. The orchestral scores are analyzed through the interaction of the poetic text and musical intonation taken into consideration. The figurative and semantic shades of religious and secular origin poems are discovered, the relationship between the music and ancient genres is revealed: Gregorian monodies, antiphons, plain chants, motets, madrigals, Easter hymns. The substantive music aspects are researched as projected on the historical genesis and synthesis of stylistic phenomena of different nature. It is researched how much the elements of medieval, renaissance, baroque, romantic and modern musical vocabulary influence the integral system of choral composition artistic means.
Salve Jhesu summe bone Jas, Eric
Early music,
11/2018, Letnik:
46, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The 1597 inventory of manuscripts of Philip II of Spain lists, among its many entries, a music book opening with a six-voice motet Salve Jesu by Pierre de la Rue. Unfortunately this manuscript no ...longer exists, and as the motet could not be located in any of the Alamire manuscripts or in other sources containing La Rue’s works, it figures as a lost composition in lists of La Rue’s works. This article argues that the motet may not be lost, but is rather preserved as an anonymous work in one of the manuscripts of Johannes Heugel. The six-voice Salve Jhesu in manuscript 91 of the former State Library at Kassel, which sets part of a well-known text that was long attributed to Bernard of Clairvaux, is clearly a work from the early 16th century and shows interesting parallels with La Rue’s six-voice motet Pater de caelis.
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