Review: The Monstrous New Art: Divided Forms in the Late Medieval Motet, by Anna Zayaruznaya

Abstract

The Monstrous New Art: Divided Forms in the Late Medieval Motet , by Anna Zayaruznaya. Music in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. xvii, 301 pp. The early fourteenth-century motets of the self-proclaimed New Art ( ars nova ) have long been prized for their complex and intricately proportioned musical structures. Ars nova motets typically feature two independent upper-voice texts and are built on a melodic quotation from liturgical plainchant, which is arranged and repeated in elaborate rhythmic patterns. The Monstrous New Art: Divided Forms in the Late Medieval Motet offers a unique, fresh, and ceaselessly creative perspective on these large-scale works, whose sophisticated compositional techniques have long attracted analytical attention.1 Under the idea of the “monstrous”—which can encompass formal division, disjunction, distortion, deformity, fragmentation, experimentation, and hybridity—Anna Zayaruznaya forges a new way of understanding musical forms. Rather than focusing on the underlying numerical designs favored in previous analyses, she prioritizes the audible aspects of a motet's upper-voice surface and the matiere (the main theme or object) of its texts. This method underlines the importance of text-music relationships in ars nova motets, advocating not only music's ability to draw attention to individual words, but also its allegorical potential to express and embody an overarching poetic idea. Zayaruznaya's statement that “monsters themselves encourage out-of-the-box thinking” (p. 16) could be taken as a maxim for the book as a whole. But this is not to imply that monstrosity, as a useful and imaginative lens through which to scrutinize musical form, is merely a fanciful or fashionable choice. Zayaruznaya documents with depth and thoroughness the appearance of monsters and hybrid creatures in multiple musical contexts in the early fourteenth century, particularly in the music of the interpolated …