Thirteenth-Century Motets in France

Abstract

The first extant written motets appear in manuscripts of the mid-13th century, written in the north of France. By this time, they seem to be an already well-established genre, possibly dating back to the late 12th century. These early motets comprise a genre of vocal polyphony in which the lowest voice, the tenor, is based on preexisting musical material. Most frequently, it borrows a small section of liturgical plainchant. As tenors generally borrow melismatic musical material, they do not usually have a syllabic text, although some later motets use secular French song for their tenor, sometimes quoting its syllabic text. Above the tenor, there are between one and three upper voices, named motetus, triplum, and quadruplum respectively, each singing a syllabic text. When motets have more than one upper voice, all upper voices might sing the same text at the same time; such motets are often named ‘monotextual’ or conductus motets, after the medieval polyphonic genre with similar text-setting (see the separate article in Oxford Bibliographies in Medieval Studies article “Medieval Songs” by Vincent Corrigan). In other cases, motets are polytextual, with each upper voice singing its own text. Each of these texts might be in Latin or French, a choice which sometimes runs along generic lines: almost all extant monotextual motets have Latin texts, while polytextual motets that use both languages almost always use Latin texts for the motetus and French texts for the triplum and, if present, the quadruplum. According to the traditional scholarly narrative, motets emerged out of the practice of adding texts to clausulae, short sections of vocal polyphony whose tenor contained a short segment of liturgical chant and whose upper voices did not have a syllabic text. Some motets originated in this way, adorning the upper voices of clausulae with Latin texts that expanded on the sacred topic of the chant from which the tenor was taken. However, recent scholarship has complicated this origin narrative, suggesting that the relationship between clausulae and motets was not so monodirectional. Additionally, some scholars have suggested that French-texted traditions had a separate origin, which was dependent on refrains—small snippets of music and French text that were quoted in many 13th-century genres. This would explain the French etymology of motet, meaning “little word.” The different practices of motet composition in the 13th century make up what is known as the “ars antiqua,” or old practice, which was eventually transformed by the 14th-century practices of the “ars nova,” or new practice, the end point of this entry’s coverage.