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35 results

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  • 14 - Materia Matters: Reconstructing Colla/Bona

  • Edited by Jared C. Hartt
  • Book:
    A Critical Companion to Medieval Motets
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    21 October 2020
    Print publication:
    18 May 2018, pp 287-300

  • Summary

    THANKS TO THE SURVIVING TESTIMONIES of Egidius de Murino and Johannes Boen – which are backed up by cycles of rhythmic and melodic repetition so clear they can be noticed by even the novice analyst – we know quite a bit about how ars nova motet tenors were constructed. But at what point in the process of motet composition did tenor construction take place? Did composers begin with tenors and then proceed to the upper voices, or did some aspects of upper-voice construction precede the ordering of borrowed chant notes into rhythmically patterned motet tenors? The chief theoretical witness on this point is again Murino, who indicates in a famous aside near the beginning of his treatise that chants are selected for motet tenors based on some pre-existing constraints:

    Primo accipe tenorem alicuius antiphone vel responsorii vel alterius cantus de antiphonario et debent verba concordare cum materia de qua vis facere motetum.

    First take a tenor from some antiphon or responsory or another chant from the antiphoner, and the words should be in agreement with the stuff (materia) out of which you wish to make the motet.

    While this remark patently indicates that materia precedes the selection of a chant for the tenor, it does not make clear what exactly ‘materia’ is. The word is frustratingly vague: it can mean substance, topic, subject matter, even building material; I have translated it above as ‘stuff’. A range of scholarly viewpoints has been expressed on what exactly this stuff might be, and how it relates to the process of composing motets. Sometimes ‘materia’ has been interpreted as a broad theme, the subject-matter which a motet treats. At other times it has been suggested that the upper-voice texts were fully written before the tenor was selected. In most accounts this stuff is limited to the semantic realm – indeed Murino links materia with text specifically. When it comes to notes and pitches, the tenor is still often characterized as ‘the “bones” and “foundation,” defining the outlines of the whole work’.

  • Quotation, perfection and the eloquence of form: introducing Beatius/Cum humanum

  • ANNA ZAYARUZNAYA
  • Journal:
    Plainsong & Medieval Music / Volume 24 / Issue 2 / October 2015
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    25 September 2015, pp. 129-166
    Print publication:
    October 2015

  • The newly reconstructed motet Beatius/Cum humanum is remarkable in several respects. It ranks among the longest of Ars Nova motets, and divides neatly into three parts of which the middle is an eighty-breve untexted hocket section. It also contains an extended quotation – textual as well as musical – from the Fauvel motet Firmissime/Adesto. The quoted material speaks of ‘Trinity and unity’, turning a spotlight onto the tripartite form of Beatius/Cum humanum. Firmissime/Adesto has occasioned comment because it is built up of duple (‘imperfect’) notes even though it praises the perfect Trinity. Beatius/Cum humanum can be read as participating in the same conversation. By shifting the salience of the number three from local rhythmical organisation to the global level of form, it serves as an example of how music can depict perfection ex imperfectis.

The Monstrous New Art
  • Divided Forms in the Late Medieval Motet
  • Anna Zayaruznaya
  • Published online:
    05 April 2015
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015
  • Late medieval motet texts are brimming with chimeras, centaurs and other strange creatures. In The Monstrous New Art, Anna Zayaruznaya explores the musical ramifications of this menagerie in the works of composers Guillaume de Machaut, Philippe de Vitry, and their contemporaries. Aligning the larger forms of motets with the broad sacred and secular themes of their texts, Zayaruznaya shows how monstrous or hybrid exempla are musically sculpted by rhythmic and textural means. These divisive musical procedures point to the contradictory aspects not only of explicitly monstrous bodies, but of such apparently unified entities as the body politic, the courtly lady, and the Holy Trinity. Zayaruznaya casts a new light on medieval modes of musical representation, with profound implications for broader disciplinary narratives about the history of text-music relations, the emergence of musical unity, and the ontology of the musical work.

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