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.
What Fortune Can Do to a Minim Zayaruznaya, Anna
Journal of the American Musicological Society,
08/2012, Letnik:
65, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Among the numerous references to music in the writings of poet, composer, and Burgundian chronicler Jean Molinet, none is more puzzling than a passage from hisRoman de la rose moralisé(ca. 1500) that ...describes the misadventures of a note—a minim—fallen victim to Fortune. As it rides her wheel, it becomes a maxima and then a minim again, while its pitch is raised, then lowered. Another passage linking Fortune with transposition and mensural change occurs in Molinet'sPetit traictié soubz obscure poetrie. Both stories are exempla divorced from their immediate contexts, raising the possibility that Molinet may have been influenced by specific musical compositions related to Fortune. Aspects of notational usage andcantus-firmusmanipulation in theFortuna desperatamasses of Jacob Obrecht and Josquin des Prez make these works—especially the latter—likely influences for Molinet's strange digressions. And Molinet's exempla, insofar as they can help clarify previously misinterpreted aspects of both works, are an important early example of musical hermeneutics. The difficult relationship between Molinet's musical stories and the ostensibly sacred texts from which they digress also offers insight into the devotional functions of secular mass models.
In chapter 27 of the last book of his Speculum musice, Jacobus faults an unnamed theorist for misattributing some ars nova doctrine to the ars antiqua; he then excuses the offense by explaining that ...the oldest ars nova theory might already seem old to current practitioners. This passage and several others suggest that Jacobus was writing at a time when the ars nova was hardly new. And yet the earliest ars nova theory dates from 1319, while the completion of the Speculum musice is often placed in the mid-1320s or ca. 1330. Since the Speculum cites a range of ars nova treatises that in turn cite a repertoire of motets, Jacobus’s comments serve as a terminus ante quem for the ars nova writ large. This study reconsiders the date of completion for the last, seventh book of the Speculum musice. It is clear that Jacobus was older than the moderni and finished his treatise as an old man, but he also reveals that he wrote over a long span of time and revised his work repeatedly. His notational proclivities are those of a musician who came of age in a post-Franconian idiom prevalent until ca. 1320, but the latest notational developments he mentions include semiminims, dragmas, and even note shapes otherwise associated with the so-called ars subtilior. In light of this, I suggest that the Speculum musice could have been finished as late as the 1350s by an author in his mid-to late seventies. This redating, in turn, invites broad reconsideration of the transition between ars antiqua and ars nova.
New voices for Vitry Zayaruznaya, Anna
Early music,
11/2018, Letnik:
46, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The Ars Nova fragments Aachen, Öffentliche Bibliothek der Stadt, Beis e14 contain previously unknown voices for two motets securely attributed to Philippe de Vitry. Their rendition of Petre / ...Lugentium includes two lower voices—a tenor and a contratenor. These had not been suspected missing, since the lowest voice for the motet provided in the Ivrea codex—the motet’s only other source—is labelled ‘tenor’. It now appears to be a solus tenor, and the tenor–contra pair of which it is a conflation is revelatory in several respects. The Aachen leaves also preserve part of a triplum for Phi millies / O creator, a work of Vitry’s for which only the texts were known to have survived. 148 breves of its triplum can now be reconstructed. This voice gives clues as to the original form of Phi millies / O creator and says much about its musical and notational style. Based on the evidence of its texts Phi millies / O creator appears to be a product of the 1350s. The new insights into Vitry’s two latest dateable works provided by the Aachen leaves invite a broader reconsideration of Vitry’s notational usage across his career.
Intelligibility Redux Zayaruznaya, Anna
Music theory online,
06/2017, Letnik:
23, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The medieval composers of polytextual motets have been charged with rendering multiple texts inaudible by superimposing them. While the limited contemporary evidence provided by Jacobus’s comments in ...the Speculum musicae seems at first sight to suggest that medieval listeners would have had trouble understanding texts declaimed simultaneously, closer scrutiny reveals the opposite: that intelligibility was desirable, and linked to modes of performance. This article explores the ways in which 20th-century performance aesthetics and recording technologies have shaped current ideas about the polytextual motet. Recent studies in cognitive psychology suggest that human ability to perform auditory scene analysis—to focus on a given sound in a complicated auditory environment—is enhanced by directional listening and relatively dry acoustics. But the modern listener often encounters motets on recordings with heavy mixing and reverb. Furthermore, combinations of contrasting vocal timbres, which can help differentiate simultaneously sung texts, are precluded by a blended, uniform sound born jointly of English choir-school culture and modernist preferences propagated under the banner of authenticity. Scholarly accounts of motets that focus on sound over sense are often influenced, directly or indirectly, by such mediated listening.
Plumley's book about citation and allusion in American songs is reviewed. The book's stated goal is to draw attention to "quotation, citation, allusion, and other forms of modeling (loose or more ...pervasive) undertaken consciously by authors." The similarities with which Plumley is concerned are demonstrated through the painstaking comparison of lyrics, with highlighting and italics showing exact and approximate matches of words, and with music examples lined up to reveal melodic similarities.
The whimsical upper-voice texts of the anonymous fourteenth-century motet Musicalis/Sciencie stage an epistolary exchange between Rhetoric, Music, and a long list of French composers and singers. The ...letters complain that these musicians, whose ranks include Guillaume de Machaut and Philippe de Vitry, split words with rests when they write hockets. The critical tone of Musicalis/Sciencie implies that some ars nova composers must have regularly split words with hockets, while others—the motet’s composer, for one—held this to be bad practice. But since modern editions and medieval scribes alike are imprecise in the placement of text around hockets, the existence of such opposing camps seems difficult to substantiate. An analysis of text-note alignment in four sources for Apta/Flos reveals that some scribes were prescriptive in their texting of hockets, while others, like the scribe of the important Ivrea codex, were pragmatic. An awareness of these differences can lead to alternate modes of interpreting ambiguous text underlay. In the case of Philippe de Vitry’s Petre/Lugentium, shifting syllables adjacent to hockets can transform the work, highlighting carefully differentiated textural zones that are key to its structure. Such editorial intervention can in turn yield fresh insight into competing compositional approaches.
The whimsical upper-voice texts of the anonymous fourteenth-century motetMusicalis/Scienciestage an epistolary exchange between Rhetoric, Music, and a long list of French composers and singers. The ...letters complain that these musicians, whose ranks include Guillaume de Machaut and Philippe de Vitry, split words with rests when they write hockets. The critical tone ofMusicalis/Sciencieimplies that somears novacomposers must have regularly split words with hockets, while others—the motet’s composer, for one—held this to be bad practice. But since modern editions and medieval scribes alike are imprecise in the placement of text around hockets, the existence of such opposing camps seems difficult to substantiate. An analysis of text-note alignment in four sources forApta/Flosreveals that some scribes were prescriptive in their texting of hockets, while others, like the scribe of the important Ivrea codex, were pragmatic. An awareness of these differences can lead to alternate modes of interpreting ambiguous text underlay. In the case of Philippe de Vitry’sPetre/Lugentium, shifting syllables adjacent to hockets can transform the work, highlighting carefully differentiated textural zones that are key to its structure. Such editorial intervention can in turn yield fresh insight into competing compositional approaches.
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