The Monstrous New Art: Divided Forms in the Late Medieval Motet

Abstract

Anna Zayaruznaya. The Monstrous New Art: Divided Forms in the Late Medieval Motet. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015. Pp. 234 + appendices. Broadly speaking, Zayaruznaya's The Monstrous New Art is about text-music relations in the ars nova motet with a focus on the period spanning 1315 to 1370. Zayaruznaya demonstrates with aplomb that late medieval motet composers were far more sensitive to the texts they were setting than has previously been realized, responding to their matiere (or subject matter) in myriad subtle ways. Her focus is, specifically, on texts concerning fragmentation and disjunction--themes especially frequent in representations of the monstrous, but also present in works on the Trinity (three in one), the stratified body politic, and the two-faced courtly lady. The book's introduction situates the analysis it precedes within ars nova scholarship. It also justifies its focus on monsters, which are characterized, in Zayaruznaya's reading, primarily by a lack of unity. Zayaruznaya rightly notes that her findings--even as they focus on the monstrous--point towards broader aesthetic strategies in ars nova composition and, consequently, that her methodology might productively be applied to other repertoires. Chapter 1, Songs Alive, sets out to show that songs were not infrequently imagined as having bodies. Medieval theorists' zoomorphization and anthropomorphization ranged from the passing reference, such as the Summa musice's description of the cauda as a kind of tail, to full-blown metaphorical identification (e.g. Dante). Sometimes, Zayaruznaya shows, songs are treated as creatures that can both talk and travel. Such a conceit is common in the envois and tornadas of the grand chant. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Je voi/Fauvel in the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, MS. fr. 146 version of the Roman de Fauvel. Zayaruznaya convincingly reads this piece as a kind of monstrous birth of an embodied song. The final section of the chapter preemptively responds to the objection that medieval composers would not have conceived of their works as works, let alone works with shapes (instead, the argument goes, they would have conceived of them as sounding events). In response, Zayaruznaya proposes a creature concept of composition (p. 66). While not exclusively about ars nova motets, the chapter's analyses set up what is to follow in that they show the creative interrelations of songs and sundry creatures. The main strength of this chapter lies in its demonstration of the commonality--corporeality--underlying many theorists' discussion of song, envois, and pieces such as Machaut's famous Ma fin est mon commencement and Tout par compas, whose shapes are explicitly thematized. The second chapter, How (not) to Write a Motet: The Exemplary In virtute/Decens, turns to Phillipe de Vitry's motet and its depiction of the monster evoked in Horace's Ars poetica via tale a and hocket. …