| Contents |
The polyphonic progeny of an Et gaudebit: assessing family relations in the thirteenth-century motet / Rebecca A. Baltzer -- Beyond glossing: the old made new in Mout me fu grief/Robin m'aime/Portare / Dolores Pesce -- Which Vitry? the witness of the Trinity motet from the Roman de Fauvel / Anne Walters Robertson -- Polyphony of texts and music in the fourteenth-century motet: Tribum que non abhorruit/Quoniam secta latronum/Merito hec patimur and its "quotations" / Margaret Bent -- Du Fay and the cultures of Renaissance Florence / Robert Nosow -- For whom the bell tolls: reading and hearing Busnoys's Anthoni usque limina / Rob C. Wegman -- Love and death in the fifteenth-century motet: a reading of Busnoys's Anima mea liquefacta est/Stirps Jesse / Paula Higgins -- Obrecht as exegete: reading Factor orbis as a Christmas sermon / M. Jennifer Bloxam -- Conflicting levels of meaning and understanding in Josquin's O admirabile commercium motet cycle / Richard Sherr -- Josquin, Good King René, and O bone et dulcissime Jesu / Patrick Macey -- Miracles, motivicity, and mannerism: Adrian Willaert's Videns Dominus flentes sorores Lazari and some aspects of motet composition in the 1520s / Joshua Rifkin -- Lasso as historicist: the cantus-firmus motets / James Haar -- Tonal compass in the motets of Orlando di Lasso / David Crook -- Palestrina as reader: motets from the Song of songs / Jessie Ann Owens -- On William Byrd's Emendemus in melius / Joseph Kerman -- Byrd, the Catholics, and the motet: the hearing reopened / Craig Monson. |
| Abstract |
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 this book, 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 a cutting-edge look at performance questions and works by composers such as Josquin, Willaert, Obrecht, Byrd, and Palestrina, the book also 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, this book makes indispensable reading for scholars, performers, and students of medieval and Renaissance music, and anyone else with an interest in the musical culture of these periods. |
