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.
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.
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.
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.
The Exegetical Motet Crook, David
Journal of the American Musicological Society,
08/2015, Letnik:
68, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
What made a motet appropriate for performance on a particular occasion in the sixteenth century? Previous studies have demonstrated that motets performed on a given day generally drew their texts ...from the liturgy of that day. Yet many of the eighty-five motets assigned to the Sundays and major feasts of the year in Johannes Rühling's Tabulaturbuch (1583) do not. What mattered to this Lutheran organist was not a motet text's previous liturgical association but its ability to gloss—sometimes in surprising ways—the Gospel or Epistle lesson of the day. His approach has strong parallels in a tradition of Lutheran preaching grounded in exegesis of the assigned lessons. The same exegetical approach figures, moreover, in Catholic use of the motet, exemplified both in musical sources, such as Andreas Pevernage's Cantiones sacrae (1578 and 1602), and in performances recorded in the diaries of the Sistine Chapel.
Two thirteenth-century vernacular motets copied side by side in the Montpellier Codex tell a story of sin and repentance. In one a shepherd rapes a maiden, while in the other a penitent begs the ...Virgin Mary to forgive a great sin. The music of these two motets is nearly identical: one is a contrafactum of the other, and represents a conscious narrative continuation of the first. This article offers a close reading of this unusual pair of motets, interpreting their texts and polyphonic musical settings in the context of other motets, the pastourelle song genre, their liturgical tenor, the technique of contrafacture, the chanson pieuse, and the intertextual refrain repertory. The two motets constitute a medieval exploration of the boundary between seduction and rape, and the spiritual consequences of its transgression. Having placed the story told by the motets in the context of medieval attitudes toward rape in both legal and pedagogical spheres, I close by reflecting on the ethics of listening to artistic representations of violence for both medieval and modern audiences.
Ludwig Senfl – Schlüsselfigur der Komponistengeneration zwischen Heinrich Isaac und Orlando di Lasso – begann 1498 seine Karriere am Hof Kaiser Maximilians I., bevor er ab 1523 am Hof von Herzog ...Wilhelm IV. in München wirkte. Von seinen Zeitgenossen hoch geschätzt, wurde seine zentrale Position in der frühen Musikhistoriographie durch J. N. Forkel und A. W. Ambros verankert. Trotz der herausragenden Qualität von Senfls Werk war ein Großteil seines OEuvres bislang noch nicht in einer modernen Edition zugänglich. Die New Senfl Edition (NSE) schließt diese Lücke und bietet einen umfassenden Überblick über das Schaffen des Komponisten auf Basis der neuesten Forschung. Die ersten beiden Bände der NSE präsentieren erstmals das gesamte erhaltene Korpus der vierstimmigen Motetten, deren große textliche wie kompositorische Bandbreite demonstriert, wie der Komponist die internationalen musikalischen Trends verinnerlichte und auf innovative Weise weiterentwickelte. Ludwig Senfl — a key figure in the generation of composers between Heinrich Isaac and Orlando di Lasso — began his career in 1498 at the court of Emperor Maximilian I, before working at the court of Duke Wilhelm IV in Munich from 1523 onwards. Highly esteemed by his contemporaries, his central role in early music historiography was later cemented through the writings of J. N. Forkel and A. W. Ambros. Despite the outstanding quality of Senfl’s work, the majority of his oeuvre has never been made available in a modern edition. The New Senfl Edition (NSE) aims to close this gap by offering a comprehensive overview of this composer’s oeuvre based on the latest findings in research. The first two volumes of the NSE present for the first time his complete extant body of four-voice motets, which demonstrate how Senfl internalised international trends in music composition and developed them in innovative ways.
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