Medieval Motet Research Articles

Mapping Medieval Identities in Occitanian Crusade Song, by Rachel May Golden

Review| December 01 2021 Mapping Medieval Identities in Occitanian Crusade Song, by Rachel May Golden Mapping Medieval Identities in Occitanian Crusade Song, by Rachel MayGolden. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. xviii, 284 pp. Jennifer Saltzstein Jennifer Saltzstein JENNIFER SALTZSTEIN is Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of Oklahoma. She is the author of The Refrain and the Rise of the Vernacular in Medieval French Music and Poetry (D. S. Brewer, 2013). Her article “Rape and Repentance in Two Medieval Motets” (this Journal, 2017) received the H. Colin Slim Award of the American Musicological Society. Her current book project explores relationships between song, landscape, and identity in medieval northern France. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the American Musicological Society (2021) 74 (3): 673–677. https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2021.74.3.673 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Jennifer Saltzstein; Mapping Medieval Identities in Occitanian Crusade Song, by Rachel May Golden. Journal of the American Musicological Society 1 December 2021; 74 (3): 673–677. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2021.74.3.673 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentJournal of the American Musicological Society Search In Mapping Medieval Identities, Rachel May Golden explores the topic of crusade in the songs of twelfth-century Occitania, illustrating how song became a vehicle for the formation of crusader identity. This identity, she underscores, was forged collaboratively by knights and monks: crusade rhetoric appears first in the Latin monastic versus genre and subsequently in vernacular songs written by troubadour-crusaders. Golden illustrates the ways in which many crusade songs worked to articulate a geography of the crusade journey in which songs, through their lyrics and melodies, mapped a spatialized exploration of the experience of crusade and its dynamics of place and movement. Golden’s contention that crusade songs “acted as means for negotiating imagined and real geographies” (p. 233) relies fundamentally on relationships between lyrics and melody. Her close readings of such relationships explore how some songwriters combined music and words to articulate the geography and temporality of crusade. Golden argues... You do not currently have access to this content.

A Critical Companion to Medieval Motets, edited by Jared C. Hartt

Book Review| December 01 2020 A Critical Companion to Medieval Motets, edited by Jared C. Hartt A Critical Companion to Medieval Motets, edited by Jared C. Hartt. Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Music. Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2018. xx, 397 pp. Tamsyn Mahoney-Steel Tamsyn Mahoney-Steel TAMSYN MAHONEY-STEEL is Lecturer in Digital Humanities at the University of Central Lancashire. Her research interests include medieval French music and literature and the use of text mining and text encoding. She has published on the application of the Text Encoding Initiative for editing the works of Guillaume de Machaut, medieval motets, and soundscapes in medieval narratives. She is an editor of the new complete works edition of Machaut. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the American Musicological Society (2020) 73 (3): 800–806. https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2020.73.3.800 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Tamsyn Mahoney-Steel; A Critical Companion to Medieval Motets, edited by Jared C. Hartt. Journal of the American Musicological Society 1 December 2020; 73 (3): 800–806. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2020.73.3.800 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of the American Musicological Society Search Motet scholars see the world in terms of motets: that which is complex, beautiful, and multivalent can be deemed motet-like. Jared Hartt claims this esteemed identifier for his own volume on medieval motets, and he has earned the right to do so. Like those of medieval motets, the contributing voices are competing yet harmonious, working together to provide a rich understanding of the genre, but never attempting to reduce these pieces to a common core. Hartt's A Critical Companion to Medieval Motets is what the field of motet studies needs: a volume that captures the complexity of the evolution of motets in a manner that is satisfying for scholars yet accessible for students. The introduction contains the best summary of medieval motets I have read, alerting the reader to all the traditional definitions, while acknowledging outliers and edge cases—such as the monophonic motet—that may in fact allow us to reorient... You do not currently have access to this content.

A Critical Companion to Medieval Motets ed. by Jared C. Hartt

A Critical Companion to Medieval Motets ed. by Jared C. Hartt

Polyphonic Minds: Music of the Hemispheres by Peter Pesic

Book Review| April 01 2019 Polyphonic Minds: Music of the Hemispheres by Peter Pesic Pesic, PeterPolyphonic Minds: Music of the HemispheresMIT Press, 2017: 344 pp. ($38.00 cloth) Anna Zayaruznaya Anna Zayaruznaya Anna Zayaruznaya is associate professor in the Department of Music at Yale University. She is author of The Monstrous New Art: Divided Forms in the Late Medieval Motet (2015) and Upper-Voice Structures and Compositional Process in the Ars nova Motet (2018). Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Music Theory (2019) 63 (1): 153–163. https://doi.org/10.1215/00222909-7320663 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Anna Zayaruznaya; Polyphonic Minds: Music of the Hemispheres by Peter Pesic. Journal of Music Theory 1 April 2019; 63 (1): 153–163. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00222909-7320663 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsJournal of Music Theory Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2019 by Yale University2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Francisco Guerrero héritier de la tradition franco-flamande: onze pièces basées sur un ostinato

Dans son œuvre religieuse, Francisco Guerrero exploite à plusieurs reprises un type de composition contrapuntique relativement peu répandu à son époque: l'écriture sur cantus firmus ostinato. Pour les musicologues germaniques, ceci représente une des formes ultimes du motet isorythmique médiéval. Le travail architectural, particulièrement soigné, y est ordonné par une véritable arithmétique musicale, issue de l'ars música mathematica. Guerrero honore ainsi la tradition de ses prédécesseurs, illustrée par le Miserere à 5 voix de Josquin des Prés. Il suit également son maître Cristobal de Morales en lui empruntant, semble-t-il, quelques modèles. Mais son écriture sait se mettre au goût du jour, et confère à l'ostinato un sens et une efficacité oratoires dignes d'un grand rhétoricien. Cet aspect de sa personnalité musicale s'unit harmonieusement à son côté novateur -celui des villancicos et des motets polychorauxpour témoigner de son génie universel.

The Montpellier Codex: The Final Fascicle. Contents, Contexts, Chronologies ed. by Catherine A. Bradley and Karen Desmond

Reviewed by: The Montpellier Codex: The Final Fascicle. Contents, Contexts, Chronologies ed. by Catherine A. Bradley and Karen Desmond Flannery Cunningham KEY WORDS Manuscript studies, late medieval, music, notation, polyphony, art history Catherine A. Bradley and Karen Desmond, eds. The Montpellier Codex: The Final Fascicle. Contents, Contexts, Chronologies. Rochester, New York: The Boydell Press, 2018. 351 pp. $99. ISBN: 9781783272723. The Montpellier Codex: The Final Fascicle, edited by Catherine A. Bradley and Karen Desmond, is a wide-ranging collection of essays [End Page 421] exploring the last fascicle of a thirteenth- and/or early fourteenth-century music manuscript: the Montpellier Codex (Bibliothèque interuniversitaire, Section Médecine, H.196, hereafter Mo). Mo is an important witness to polyphony of the Middle Ages, containing, among other items, the largest extant collection of medieval motets in Latin and French. While this repertoire and Mo as an object have a rich history in scholarship, this is the first book-length work on a single fascicle of the manuscript. As such, it represents a kind of deep dive into a relatively small collection of medieval musical works and the impetus behind their compilation. Bradley and Desmond provide a capable and accessible primer to Mo in their introduction, outlining the broad scholarly consensus on the production and dating of the rest of the manuscript (the "old corpus" of fascicles 2–6 plus the later additions of fascicles 1 and 7 as well as supplements to fascicles 3 and 5). From there, they turn to the intriguing questions that the final section (fascicle 8) presents. These include the fascicle's contested dating, whether it was originally intended to serve as part of Mo or as a standalone manuscript, its low number of concordances with other manuscripts and the eclecticism of the repertoire it presents, and what Bradley and Desmond call the "crucial historiographical juncture" to which this fascicle bears witness through its inclusion of works that stand squarely in the tradition of thirteenth-century motets alongside those that feature notational and musical innovations. The rest of the volume's contributors engage with these questions through a range of techniques, including paleography (Curran); iconographical analysis (Stones); consideration of page layout (Huck); engagement with thirteenth-century compositional practice as described by roughly contemporary music theorists (Pesce and others); examination of strategies for compilation and ordering (Grau); and melodic (Guhl-Miller), harmonic (Pesce), and rhythmic (Desmond, Dobby, Maw, and Wolinski) analysis of the eighth fascicle's motets. Such techniques will be familiar to any musicologist working on music of the Middle Ages, and though Bradley and Desmond's introduction acknowledges the importance of codicological and art-historical evidence in answering questions of dating and provenance, the fundamental locus of the volume's inquiry is musicological. Apart from Anne Ibos-Augé's study of refrains and practices of citation in Montpellier's motets, textual analysis [End Page 422] is largely absent from the volume. Where The Montpellier Codex: The Final Fascicle shines instead is its thoughtful and varied exploration of rhythmic techniques, especially as they relate to the fascicle's dating and its relation to both ars antiqua compositional practice and the innovations that led toward the ars nova. Indeed, the volume's second section ("Innovation and Tradition") focuses squarely on such questions, with three of its five chapters highlighting aspects of the fascicle's rhythmic language. Rhythm thus becomes an important marker of "newness" or "oldness" for many of the volume's contributors. This provides a useful focus to the volume, and many readers will no doubt appreciate these scholars' explorations of transitional notational practices, such as those employed in the fascicle's "Franconian" and "Petronian" motets (especially considering the short shrift given such practices in many introductory courses, where the modal notation of Notre Dame polyphony and the mensural innovations of ars nova composers usually form the bulk of students' study of rhythm in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries). Within this rhythmic study, Desmond's terminological framework for stratification of rhythmic activity in motet voices felt particularly useful to me, and I intend to present her concept in my own teaching. Besides rhythmic language, another convergence of inquiry by the volume's...

The Montpellier Codex: The Final Fascicle; Contents, Contexts, Chronologies ed. by Catherine A. Bradley and Karen Desmond

Reviewed by: The Montpellier Codex: The Final Fascicle; Contents, Contexts, Chronologies ed. by Catherine A. Bradley and Karen Desmond Karen M. Cook The Montpellier Codex: The Final Fascicle; Contents, Contexts, Chronologies. Edited by Catherine A. Bradley and Karen Desmond. (Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Music.) Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2018. [xviii, 333 p. ISBN 9781783272723 (hardback), $99; ISBN 9781787441828 (ebook), $24.99.] Music examples, inventories, illustrations, bibliographies, index. In 2014, a two-day conference was held at St. Hugh's College, University of Oxford. Organized by Catherine A. Bradley, Karen Desmond, and Elizabeth Eva Leach, the event was dedicated to the eighth and last fascicle of the manuscript known commonly as the Montpellier Codex (Montpellier, Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire, Section Médecine, H. 196; hereafter Mo). This beautifully decorated manuscript is also the largest surviving collection of medieval motets and is of significant interest to musicologists, performers, and other medieval historians. The bulk of Mo is believed to have been copied in Paris, likely around the 1270s. Yet its eighth fascicle (hereafter Mo8) is not so clear-cut. With all the benefits and casualties of hindsight, scholars often regard the fascicle as a transitional document, on one hand recalling the ars antiqua repertories in the rest of Mo, on the other hand looking toward ars nova styles found in later, fourteenth-century sources. The conference, therefore, revisited lingering questions about Mo8's dating, provenance, paleography, notation, and illumination; its diversity of repertory; and its possible connections to other musical sources. So too do these questions arise in this new volume, the subtitle of which makes clear its central concerns. From its first pages, coeditors Bradley and Desmond construct this collection as a continuation of the conversations held at, and since, the conference. The sixteen essays, plus the editorial introduction, form a rich, developed, and interrelated microhistory of Mo8, investigating it through "paleographical, art historical, codicological, and notational" lenses as well as "musical and hermeneutic close-readings" (p. 8). Three main categories delineate the essays. The first seven chapters ("The Material Object") investigate the fascicle's physical aspects; the next five ("Innovation and Tradition") address genre, notation, quotation, and thematic connections; the last four ("Analytical Case Studies") focus on select works in Mo. Almost every individual contribution, however, speaks to all of these categories and, unlike typical conference proceedings, engages highly with the other authors in the volume. This interaction not only strengthens the points on which they agree but highlights areas of dispute as fruitful for future study, which is a boon to any of its readers looking for potential research projects. Mark Everist reprises his role as the conference keynote speaker in the first [End Page 250] essay. Following the thorough introduction by coeditors Bradley and Desmond, Everist provides a detailed overview of the historiography of work on Mo, neatly summarizing a century of scholarship from the entwined perspectives of dating, genre, and notation. He then lays out various questions that persist about Mo8, noting again the fascicle's transitional and somewhat inscrutable nature. Focusing on different elements within Mo8—certain song tenors, for example, or "Petronian" (p. 5) notational developments—he finds that each has its own narrative, answering some old questions while simultaneously frustrating others and raising new ones in the process. The rest of the authors proceed to tackle many of these elements. Sean Curran's chapter is one of several that center on questions of Mo8's dating. Noting that arguments about the fascicle's dates have been based on its illuminations, he focuses instead on the hand of the scribe writing the text. In comparing the letter forms and decorations in Mo8 to other datable French-Parisian sources, he proposes a copying period of 1290–1310. Based on the fascicle's artwork, Rebecca A. Baltzer and Alison Stones also propose datings for Mo8, although different from Curran's and each other's. Stones looks at the illuminated initial D on the opening folio 350r, examining its color, contents, and possible connections to similar illuminations elsewhere and also to the one that occurs on the first folio of Mo itself. She suggests the likeliest window of 1315–25 but warns that "a certain stylistic ambiguity" persists with...

Rape and Repentance in Two Medieval Motets

Two thirteenth-century vernacular motets copied side by side in the Montpellier Codex tell a story of sin and repentance. In one a shepherd rapes a maiden, while in the other a penitent begs the Virgin Mary to forgive a great sin. The music of these two motets is nearly identical: one is a contrafactum of the other, and represents a conscious narrative continuation of the first. This article offers a close reading of this unusual pair of motets, interpreting their texts and polyphonic musical settings in the context of other motets, the pastourelle song genre, their liturgical tenor, the technique of contrafacture, the chanson pieuse, and the intertextual refrain repertory. The two motets constitute a medieval exploration of the boundary between seduction and rape, and the spiritual consequences of its transgression. Having placed the story told by the motets in the context of medieval attitudes toward rape in both legal and pedagogical spheres, I close by reflecting on the ethics of listening to artistic representations of violence for both medieval and modern audiences.

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

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 …

Games and Gaming in Medieval Literature ed. by Serina Patterson

SERINA PATTERSON, ed., Games and Gaming in Medieval Literature. The New Middle Ages. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Pp. xviii, 241. ISBN: 978-1-137-31103-0. $90.Focusing on the 'tension between games and the real world,' this volume presents nine inquiries into games played in medieval life, literary representations of games, and, most intriguingly, texts that are themselves games. It contextualizes these investigations with an introduction by Serina Patterson and an afterword by Betsy McCormick that do the heavy lifting of identifying common themes and outlining how game studies might evolve as a field.In her introduction, Patterson usefully lays out three threads that run throughout the essays in the volume: games and the problem of definition; games and earnest; and games and reality. The first of these points out the continuing difficulty of defining what exactly a game is but emphasizes that games are formal moments in contrast to the more fluid category of play. The second thread asks whether games are frivolous or meaningful activities (falling on the side of the latter), while the third identifies the porous boundaries between games and the 'real' world. The stated aim is to 'showcase non-digital games as a serious area of study and, as the first collection dedicated to premodern games in literature ... to lay the groundwork for future research' (p. 11). The collection meets these goals admirably.The volume is divided into two parts. The first, 'Spaces of Play,' considers concrete games, both physical and text-based, among clergy, students, poets, and the gentry. Robert Bubczyk begins the collection with an essay on the vexed attitudes toward chess among the clergy, identifying a broad trend toward stricter policies in later centuries and substantiating his analyses with a variety of illuminating examples. Nicholas Orme, with characteristic clarity, then lays out the games schoolboys played, arguing that in contrast to later periods, medieval schools were largely ambivalent about the usefulness of games; he extends his analysis to consider games among the higher classes, girls, and university students. Shifting gears, Daniel O'Sullivan focuses on how scribes in Arras shaped the reception ofThibaut de Champagne's jeux-partis. He argues that these compilers played a game in their works with Thibault's poetry by downplaying it as one contribution among many other Artesian examples in order to claim cultural prestige for their region. In the final essay in the first part, Patterson traces out the evolution of the Ragman le Bon game, concluding that it was a game played by the gentry that provided a 'safe space' to engage with social mores and that its popularity demonstrates the gentry's desire to be immersed in fictional game-worlds. Should anyone have doubted the importance of games in medieval culture, this section proves that they were ubiquitous-and contentious.The second part, 'Game and Genre,' moves into theoretical and imaginative territories, investigating how games represented in literature are lenses for examining social, ethical, and political issues. Tamsyn Rose-Steel begins the section with a reading of four medieval French motets that invoke gaming in the tavern and chess, paying close attention to how the interaction of music and text within those motets creates meaning and embodies the function of the motet form itself. Next, Jenny Adams provides a tight close reading of the thirteenth-century Flemish romance Walewein, focusing on the symbolism of the magical chessboard that appears at Arthur's court. Adams challenges the idea of games as bounded in space, illustrating how they 'reimagine a social order, forge a relationship between two players, and/ or teach lessons to those who watch' (p. 128). In a similar vein, Nora Corrigan then argues that Chaucer's The Knight's Tale, particularly during the tournament between Palamon and Arcite, illustrates that games are not just safe spaces and that gaming is a serious matter that may mask hidden perils and agendas. …

The Monstrous New Art: Divided Forms in the Late Medieval Motet. By Anna Zayaruznaya

The Monstrous New Art: Divided Forms in the Late Medieval Motet. By Anna Zayaruznaya

Review of Anna Zayaruznaya,The Monstrous New Art: Divided Forms in the Late Medieval Motet(Cambridge University Press, 2015)

[1] Anna Zayaruznaya's book, The Monstrous New Art: Divided Forms in the Late Medieval Motet, presents an intriguing new perspective on a relatively small, complex, and much-scrutinized repertoire. The book is an expansion of the concept behind her important 2009 article, which portrays voice crossing in Machaut's motets as Fortune turning the tables on the usual position of voices, just as in the composer's poetry she is wont to level kings and raise the ignoble. In The Monstrous New Art, Zayaruznaya expands her purview to ars nova motets generally, and beyond voice crossing to any atypical patterning that effects (audible) divisions in a motet. For the author, "features which seem strange or unusual are places to look deeper rather than anomalies to gloss over" (20) and "the lens through which [she has] chosen to examine this repertory magnifies rifts and fissures, allegorical as well as psychological" (220). Zayaruznaya thus carves out a new subgenre of the ars nova motet that flourished in the half century between Fauvel (1310) and the 1360s, a significant bestiary comprising some twenty out of ninety extant ars nova motets (173). "Monstrous" here are those works whose text(s) treat themes of division and disunity, broadly construed to reference the character of historical people, mythological creatures (chimera, centaur, siren), allegorical figures (Fortune, Love, courtly lady, triune God), objects of piecemeal construction, and more subtly the stratified organization of "bodies" like medieval civil and clerical classes. Her vital connection is made when "motets whose upper voices dwell on a series of fragmented creatures. . . turn out to have musical forms that are equally fragmented" (62).[2] Zayaruznaya stresses that the relation between hybridity in textual subject matter and musical organization is an abstract one. Ars nova motet composers pursued what she calls the broader congruence of "form-idea relations," driven by analogy and allegory (18). Zayaruznaya situates this relationship as an "important early chapter in the history of musical hermeneutics" (234) before the more direct mimesis of Renaissance text painting.[3] The first chapter is devoted to a question upon which the acceptance of the monstrous subgenre is predicated: how can a motet have a body? Zayaruznaya finds ample evidence of this creaturely ontology. Not only do medieval bestiaries align meaning with morphology (21), "medieval music treatises are replete with body parts" (25). We are reminded of familiar analogies like Guido's hand, Grocheio's likening of the tenor to a skeleton that gives structure to the whole, the varying note heads of mensural notation, and tails [caudae] tacked on to the end of antiphons.(1) Having established a concern for taxonomy and the proper arrangement of parts, Zayaruznaya brings an eye for division to bear on musical structure, showing in the case studies that follow how composers explored and exploited the new compositional possibilities afforded by an increasingly well-ordered motet genre.(2)[4] As ars nova composers developed tenor isorhythm, an early form of intrinsically musical structure not based upon a poetic scheme (as in the formes fixes), they experimented with boundaries as a natural process in the very effort of defining them (see 222-25). Because the ars nova motet was an organic whole made up of interdependent parts, it could be conceived of as bodily. And if bodily, anything but the perfect alignment and coordination of all parts can be interpreted as deformity. Matching their potential for hybridity in form, many ars nova motets are also polytextual and speak from (or embody) three unique voices simultaneously. While the upper-voice poetry of many motets serves to amplify and interpret the classical subject of the tenor voice, it may also contradict the tenor, dividing the whole.(3) Exploiting unity as a norm in the greater quantity of non-monstrous motets, motets based upon divided materia could play with that expectation as a means of expressivity; they could distort, subvert, and otherwise comment upon wholeness. …

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

Reviewed by: The Monstrous New Art: Divided Forms in the Late Medieval Motet by Anna Zayaruznaya Bradford Lee Eden The Monstrous New Art: Divided Forms in the Late Medieval Motet. By Anna Zayaruznaya. (Music in Context.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. [xvii, 301 p. ISBN 9781107039667 (hardcover), $99.99; ISBN 9781316190982 (e-book), $80.] Music examples, illustrations, companion Web site, appendices, glossary, bibliography, indexes. This book focuses on the motets of the French Ars nova period, roughly ca. 1315– 70, encompassing the careers and compositions of Philippe de Vitry (1291–1361) and Guillaume de Machaut (ca. 1300–1377). The author begins her study of this period by relating an interesting interaction on the topic of isorhythm that is recorded in conference proceedings from 19–23 September 1955 near Liège, Belgium. The account of this discussion shows that it anticipated many of the chief debates in Ars nova research during the next sixty years, and the author frames her introduction around the diverse views of these early experts. The themes of monstrosity and hybridity appear in Ars nova motet texts, and Zaryaruznaya attempts to illustrate a similar approach to form and musical texture by Ars nova composers as the focus of this particular study. Zayaruznaya opens with a detailed description of the state of research on Ars nova motets. She begins with their structures, which exhibit an almost obsessive [End Page 285] approach to planning in terms of rhythm. Interlocking patterns of rhythms (talea) and pitches (color) form the well-known foundation of isorhythm, and current research has moved from a focus on deep structural understanding to that of sonic surface, supported by musicologists who are also medieval ensemble instrumentalists and conductors. This “supermusical” structure takes into account the excessive rhyme, assonance, and alliteration in the music that is meant to subsume and even drown out the words. On the other hand, some musicologists insist that the words have priority over the music, showing that the text often preceded and influenced the complex mathematical musical structures. In this book, the author indicates that she is taking a somewhat middle ground in her examination of the topic, paying attention to those aspects of form that are apparent to the listener, such as repetitive rhythms, the more audible and active upper voices (especially hockets), changes in declamation (when voices slow down or speed up), and changes in range. In the end, the goal is to add a new level of detail to the debate about the relative importance of words and music in the Ars nova motet. As indicated previously, hybrid and monstrous creatures are the subjects of a number of Ars nova motets (see table 5.1, p. 174); in a sense, the monsters are as colorful and vibrant as the musical and textual complexity that surrounds them, a reflection of the motets themselves and vice versa. Chapter 1 examines how musical form, monstrosity, and bodies are woven together in the texture of the Ars nova motet. This anthropomorphization of the music results in both song and bodies “coming alive” in this repertory, and the author explores this topic as found in musical treatises and literary theory. A number of songs are explored to illustrate this practice, from notational ligatures to Machaut’s Fons/O livoris (where the music represents dragons, serpents, and the stinging tail of the scorpion) to Johannes de Grocheo’s description, ca. 1300, of the motet De animalibus. There are also examples of self-referential songs, such as Machaut’s Ma fin est mon commencement and Baude Cordier’s Tout par compas, two rondeaux that essentially describe themselves and their structures in the first person during their performance. Finally, the profusion of creatures represented in the Roman de Fauvel adds substance to the argument for the interconnection between music and bodies, as the reader witnesses songs being born into the world and then endowed with bodies. In sum, Chapter 1 sets up a framework for how song, bodies, and structure have been woven together in medieval music and literature to the ultimate height of complexity and union in the work of the Ars nova composers and their motets. Specific music examples of this and their dissection (so...

The Selection of Clausula Sources for Thirteenth-Century Motets: Some Practical Considerations and Aesthetic Implications

In addressing questions of compositional process, scholars of medieval polyphony have relatively little on which to build. They cannot gain insight from reading explicit written testimonies by medieval composers; nor can they look to evidence such as sketches, drafts, or revisions for guidance. Instead, they can only study theoretical accounts of how to compose good discant and examine the surviving pieces themselves to increase their understanding of medieval compositional process. l Of all the surviving types of medieval music, the early Latin offers perhaps the best opportunity to explore aspects of compositional process, for the vast majority of early Latin motets were created in several observable stages. More than one hundred years have passed since Wilhelm Meyer's pathbreaking report that many early motets originated with the the addition of text to preexisting discant clausulae (Meyer 1898). While Meyer'S discovery prompted an intense effort to identifY related motets and clausulae (Ludwig 1910; Gennrich 1957; van der Werf 1989), other elements of compositional process were largely overlooked. Norman Smith (1989) recognized this lacuna and drew attention to the process of converting clausulae into motets; in this paper, I shall focus on an earlier stage of compositional process-the process of selecting clausula models to convert into motets. In brief, I shall identifY factors that may have attracted medieval to select certain types of clausula models for early Latin motets.2 I shall then consider the extent to which their criteria for selection apply to other segments of the thirteenth-century repertory. As I will show, the initial selection criteria not only reflected practical considerations, but also had long-range aesthetic implications for the stylistic development of the medieval motet. The surviving sources of Notre Dame polyphony indicate that the composers of the earliest motets did not indiscriminately add texts to all of the approximately 950 passages of discant; instead, they focused their efforts on less than twelve percent of the available repertory.3 To investigate potential criteria for selection, I compared a motet group of fifty-five clausulae that were converted into motets with a control group of 103 clausulae that did not become motets.4 The purpose of this comparison was to look for possible stylistic differences between the two groups; if

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

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. …

Liszt's final decade

Toward the end of his life Franz Liszt maintained extensive correspondence with two women who were at the time his closest confidantes, Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein and Olga von Meyendorff. Liszt wrote regularly to these women, expressing his intimate feelings about personal and career events and his conflicted self-image as a celebrated performer but underappreciated composer. Absent a diary, the letters offer the most direct avenue into Liszt's psychein his final years. Liszt's Final Decade explores through these letters the mind and music of one of the nineteenth century's most popular musicians, providing insight into Liszt's melancholia in his last years and hisstruggle to gain recognition for his music yet avoid negative criticism. The exchange indicates that Liszt ultimately resolved his self-image through a personally constructed Christian moral philosophy that embraced positive resignation to suffering, compassionate love, and trust in a just reward to come. The book also examines how Liszt's sacred compositions unfold a paradigm of suffering that yields to joy and hope. Significantly, Liszt viewed these works, commonly overlooked today, as a major part of his compositional legacy. This volume thus challenges the idea of a single late Lisztian style and the notion that despair overwhelmed the composer in his final years. Dolores Pesce, Avis Blewett Professor of Music at Washington University in St. Louis, has published books and articles on medieval and Renaissance music theory, the medieval motet, Franz Liszt, and Edward MacDowell.

French and English Polyphony of the 13th and 14th Centuries. Style and Notation

Tonal aspects of 13th-century English polyphony cantilena and discant in 14th-century English polyphony the question of Perotin's Oeuvre and dates the medieval motet the medieval hocket in practice and theory the early motets of Philippe de Vitry English polyphony in the Morgan Library Manuscript consonance and rhythm in the organum of the 12th and 13th centuries sine littera and cum littera in medieval polyphony style and technique in datable polyphonic Notre-Dame conductus conductus and modal rhythm the earliest phases of measured polyphony rithmus additions and corrections.

New tenor sources for fourteenth-century motets

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.

Anti-semitism in an early fifteenth-century motet: Tu, nephanda

There is much interest at present in the way medieval motets generate meaning, both with their texts and their music. In two articles from a recent issue of Early Music History, for example, a remarkable density of meaning and symbolism, both textual and musical, has been proposed for Machaut's motet 15. Studies of this kind are intended to demonstrate what can be achieved by placing the poems of motets in a literary context and by considering the structure of words and music. Such research also no doubt serves to reinforce the idea that many motets of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries demand a wealth of erudite knowledge to be understood and is thus congenial to the current belief that many motets were intended for an intellectual elite. Whilst there can be no doubt that medieval motets often cultivate a literary style of considerable – indeed intense – obscurity, what I wish to suggest here is that one, very ambitious, motet can be interpreted using some of the most basic tools of the medieval cleric.

Two Medieval Motets, 13th century. For Three-Part Brass Choir [Horn, Cornet or Trombone, Trombone or Horn, and Baritone, Trombone, or Tuba

Two Medieval Motets, 13th century. For Three-Part Brass Choir [Horn, Cornet or Trombone, Trombone or Horn, and Baritone, Trombone, or Tuba