The motet was unquestionably one of the most important vocal genres from its inception in late twelfth-century Paris through the Counter-Reformation and beyond. Heard in both sacred and secular contexts, the motet of the Middle Ages and Renaissance incorporated a striking wealth of meaning, its verbal textures dense with literary, social, philosophic, and religious reference. In Hearing the Motet, top scholars in the field provide the fullest picture yet of the motet's "music-poetic" nature, investigating the virtuosic interplay of music and text that distinguished some of the genre's finest work and reading individual motets and motet repertories in ways that illuminate their historical and cultural backgrounds. How were motets heard in their own time? Did the same motet mean different things to different audiences? To explore these questions, the contributors go beyond traditional musicological methods, at times invoking approaches used in recent literary criticism. Providing as well a cutting-edge look at performance questions and works by composers such as Josquin, Willaert, Obrecht, Byrd, and Palestrina, the book draws a valuable new portrait of the motet composer. Here, intriguingly, the motet composer emerges as a "reader" of the surrounding culture--a musician who knew liturgical practice as well as biblical literature and its exegetical traditions, who moved in social contexts such as humanist gatherings, who understood numerical symbolism and classical allusion, who wrote subtle memorie for patrons, and who found musical models to emulate and distort. Fresh, broad-ranging, and unique, Hearing the Motet makes vital reading for scholars, performers, and students of medieval and Renaissance music, and anyone else with an interest in the musical culture of these periods. Contributors include Rebecca A. Baltzer, Margaret Bent, M. Jennifer Bloxam, David Crook, James Haar, Paula Higgins, Joseph Kerman, Patrick Macey, Craig Monson, Robert Nosow, Jessie Ann Owens, Dolores Pesce, Joshua Rifkin, Anne Walters Robertson, Richard Sherr, and Rob C. Wegman.

A re-evaluation of the Latin-texted motet during the age of Du Fay.

In the motets of Philippe de Vitry, Guillaume de Machaut, and their contemporaries, tenors have often been characterized as the primary shaping forces, prior in conception as well as in construction to the upper voices. Tenors are shaped by the interaction of talea and color, medieval terms now used to refer to the independent repetition of rhythms and pitches, respectively. The presence in the upper voices of the periodically repeating rhythmic patterns, often referred to as "isorhythm," has been characterized as an amplification of tenor structure. But a fresh look at the medieval treatises suggests a revised analytical vocabulary: for many fourteenth- and fifteenth-century writers, both color and talea involved rhythmic repetition, the latter in the upper voices specifically. And attention to upper-voice taleae independently of tenor structures brings renewed emphasis to the significant portion of the repertory in which upper voices evince formal schemes that differ from those in the tenors. These structures in turn suggest a revision of the presumed compositional process for motets, implying that in some cases upper-voice text and forms may have preceded the selection and organization of tenors. Such revisions have implications for hermeneutic endeavors, since not only the forms of motet voices but the meanings of their texts change, depending on whether analysis proceeds from the tenor up, or from the top down. Where the presumed compositional and structural primacy afforded to tenors has encouraged a strand of interpretation that reads the upper-voice poetry as conforming to, and amplifying, the tenor text snippets and their liturgical contexts, a "bottom-down" view casts tenors in a supporting role and reveals the poetic impulse of the upper voices as the organizing principle of motets.

A unique capacity of measured polyphony is to give precisely fixed places not only to musical notes, but also to individual words in relation to them and each other. The Motet in the Late Middle Ages offers innovative approaches to the equal partnership of music and texts in motets of the fourteenth century and beyond, showcasing the imaginative opportunities afforded by this literal kind of intertextuality, and yielding a very different narrative from the common complaint that different simultaneous texts make motets incomprehensible. As leading musicologist Margaret Bent asserts, they simply require a different approach to preparation and listening. In this book, Bent examines the words and music of motets from many different angles: foundational verbal quotations and pre-existent chant excerpts and their contexts, citations both of words and music from other compositions, function, dating, structure, theory, and number symbolism. Individual studies of these original creations tease out a range of strategies, ingenuity, playfulness, striking juxtapositions, and even subversion. Half of the thirty-two chapters consist of new material; the other half are substantially revised and updated versions of previously published articles and chapters, organized into seven Parts. With new analyses of text and music together, new datings, new attributions, and new hypotheses about origins and interrelationships, Bent uncovers little-explored dimensions, provides a window into the craft and thought processes of medieval composers, and opens up many directions for future work.

This monograph offers a comprehensive study of the topos of the malmariée or the unhappily married woman within the thirteenth-century motet repertory, a vocal genre characterized by several different texts sounding simultaneously over a foundational Latin chant. Part I examines the malmariée motets from three vantage points: (1) in light of contemporaneous canonist views on marriage; (2) to what degree the French malmariée texts in the upper voices treat the messages inherent in the underlying Latin chant through parody and/or allegory; and (3) interactions among upper-voice texts that invite additional interpretations focused on gender issues. Part II investigates the transmission profile of the motets, as well as of their refrains, revealing not only intertextual refrain usage between the motets and other genres, but also a significant number of shared refrains between malmariée motets and other motets. Part II furthermore offers insights on the chronology of composition within a given intertextual refrain nexus, and examines how a refrain’s meaning can change in a new context. Finally, based on the transmission profile, Part II argues for a lively interest in the topos in the 1270s and 1280s, both through composition of new motets and compilation of earlier ones, with Paris and Arras playing a prominent role.

The first large-scale study of how fifteenth-century motets were used across Western Europe, dispelling the mysteries surrounding these outstanding works.

Mapping the Motet in the Post-Tridentine Era provides new dimensions to the discussion of the immense corpus of polyphonic motets produced and performed in the decades following the end of the Council of Trent in 1563. Beyond the genre’s rich connections with contemporary spiritual life and religious experience, the motet is understood here as having a multifaceted life in transmission, performance and reception. By analysing the repertoire itself, but also by studying its material life in books and accounts, in physical places and concrete sonic environments, and by investigating the ways in which the motet was listened to and talked about by contemporaries, the eleven chapters in this book redefine the cultural role of the genre. The motet, thanks to its own protean nature, not bound to any given textual, functional or compositional constraint, was able to convey cultural meanings powerfully, give voice to individual and collective identities, cross linguistic and confessional divides, and incarnate a model of learned and highly expressive musical composition. Case studies include considerations of composers (Palestrina, Victoria, Lasso), cities (Seville and Granada, Milan), books (calendrically ordered collections, non-liturgical music books) and special portions of the repertoire (motets pro defunctis, instrumental intabulations).

Choral Music: A Research and Information Guide, Third Edition, offers a comprehensive guide to the literature on choral music in the Western tradition. Clearly annotated bibliographic entries guide readers to resources on key topics within choral music, individual choral composers, regional and sacred choral traditions, choral techniques, choral music education, genre studies, and more, providing an essential reference for researchers and practitioners. Covering monographs, bibliographies, selected dissertations, reference works, journals, electronic databases, and websites, this research guide makes it easy to locate relevant sources. Comprehensive indices of authors, titles, and subjects keep the volume user-friendly. The new edition has been brought up to date with entries encompassing the latest scholarship, and updated references and annotations throughout, capturing the continued growth of literature on choral music since the publication of the second edition.

In the early fourteenth century, musicians in France and later Italy established new traditions of secular and sacred polyphony. This ars nova, or "new art," popularized by theorists such as Philippe de Vitry and Johannes de Muris was the among the first of many later movements to establish the music of the present as a clean break from the past. The rich music of this period, by composers such as Guillaume de Machaut and Francesco Landini, is not only beautiful, but also rewards deep study and analysis. Yet contradictions and gaps abound in the ars nova of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries-how do we read this music? how do we perform this music? what was the cultural context of these performances? These problems are well met by the ingenuity of approaches and solutions found by scholars in this volume. The twenty-seven articles brought together reflect the broad methodological and chronological range of scholarly inquiry on the ars nova.

This is an annotated bibliography to books, recordings, videos, and websites on choral music. This book will serve as an excellent tool for librarians, researchers, and scholars in sorting through the massive amount of new material that has appeared since publication of the previous edition.