New tenor sources for fourteenth-century motets

Abstract

The study of the medieval motet in France has recently been rejuvenated, in part by returning to the motet's point of origin – its tenor. Some scholars have focused on the tenor's pitch content, showing how it shapes the motet's harmonies, and how it is in turn shaped by local chant variants; others, by considering the tenor's text and the origin of that text in the liturgy and frequently in the Bible, have shown the motet to be perhaps the quintessential musical manifestation of medieval intertextuality. By bringing together sacred and secular, Latin and vernacular, the motet, better than any other musical genre, exemplifies both the Boethian ideal of music as something much larger than sound and the interconnectedness of all things in the medieval mind. The discovery of hitherto unknown chant sources for motet tenors is therefore an opportunity to reinterpret the texts of the motets they underpin.