A Critical Companion to Medieval Motets, edited by Jared C. Hartt

Abstract

Book Review| December 01 2020 A Critical Companion to Medieval Motets, edited by Jared C. Hartt A Critical Companion to Medieval Motets, edited by Jared C. Hartt. Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Music. Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2018. xx, 397 pp. Tamsyn Mahoney-Steel Tamsyn Mahoney-Steel TAMSYN MAHONEY-STEEL is Lecturer in Digital Humanities at the University of Central Lancashire. Her research interests include medieval French music and literature and the use of text mining and text encoding. She has published on the application of the Text Encoding Initiative for editing the works of Guillaume de Machaut, medieval motets, and soundscapes in medieval narratives. She is an editor of the new complete works edition of Machaut. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the American Musicological Society (2020) 73 (3): 800–806. https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2020.73.3.800 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Tamsyn Mahoney-Steel; A Critical Companion to Medieval Motets, edited by Jared C. Hartt. Journal of the American Musicological Society 1 December 2020; 73 (3): 800–806. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2020.73.3.800 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of the American Musicological Society Search Motet scholars see the world in terms of motets: that which is complex, beautiful, and multivalent can be deemed motet-like. Jared Hartt claims this esteemed identifier for his own volume on medieval motets, and he has earned the right to do so. Like those of medieval motets, the contributing voices are competing yet harmonious, working together to provide a rich understanding of the genre, but never attempting to reduce these pieces to a common core. Hartt's A Critical Companion to Medieval Motets is what the field of motet studies needs: a volume that captures the complexity of the evolution of motets in a manner that is satisfying for scholars yet accessible for students. The introduction contains the best summary of medieval motets I have read, alerting the reader to all the traditional definitions, while acknowledging outliers and edge cases—such as the monophonic motet—that may in fact allow us to reorient... You do not currently have access to this content.