Composing the earliest motets

Abstract

In Polyphony in medieval Paris: the art of composing with plainchant, Catherine A. Bradley offers a revisionist account of the origins of the 13th-century motet genre. Through probing analyses, Bradley reveals the hands of anonymous medieval composers and scribes at work as they interwove plainchant with newly composed and borrowed lyrics and melodies. Bradley’s approach to this repertory centres on case studies chosen for their capacity to undermine existing narratives of the motet’s origins, especially the ‘clausula-to-motet’ model of generic development, as well as assumptions that the motet genre moved from Latin to French texts and from sacred to secular materials. The analyses in Polyphony in medieval Paris are technical and would challenge non-specialist readers. The book will likely prove essential reading in medieval graduate seminars, providing models of rigorous analytical approaches to the motet, clausula and contrafacta, as well as the refrain. In chapter 1, ‘Plainchant in polyphony: the gradual Propter veritatem in organa, clausulae and motets’, Bradley demonstrates the diversity of ways in which chant melodies were adapted and altered when quoted in polyphonic contexts. Bradley focuses on the gradual Propter veritatem, chosen because its polyphonic elaborations ‘are among the most liberal in their handling of plainchant’ (p.45). The organal version of this chant tenor, Bradley argues, was adapted for reasons that seem aesthetic, namely, enhancing formal or motivic repetition. She shows that the surviving polyphonic settings of the word ‘filia’ (from Propter veritatem) divide evenly between faithful quotations of the original plainchant version of the tenor and adoption of the altered, organal version of the chant, demonstrating that ‘creators of polyphony evidently relished the opportunity to draw out and to embellish subtly different forms of their chant foundation’ (p.29). Bradley then explores 12 motet compositions based on the tenor Veritatem. Her analyses show that there are variations in the tenor melismas that are shared between the surviving motets but are absent from the monophonic chant and its organal version, implying an ‘exclusively motet-based practice of compositional reworking of this tenor’ (p.34). The polyphonic settings of Propter veritatem suggest that medieval composers approached chant tenors in a rich variety of ways, some operating with great sensitivity to the original plainsong context while others may not have been ‘fully alert’ to details of the chant (p.37). In chapter 2, ‘Mini clausulae and the Magnus liber organi’, Bradley explores a curious corpus of brief clausulae that occupy fewer than seven folios of the so-called Florence manuscript (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut. 29.1, or F). Bradley argues that the mini clausulae ‘may represent a significant trace of the kinds of functional polyphony that were presumably widely performed and in principally oral circulation in the thirteenth century, but for which little other written musical evidence is extant’ (p.79).