Zayaruznaya - Form and Idea in the Ars Nova Motet
Content
FORM AND IDEA IN THE ARS NOVA MOTET
A dissertation presented
by
ANNA ANATOLIEVNA ZAYARUZNAYA
to the Department of Music
in partial fulillment of the requirements
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
in the subject of Music
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts
August 2010
© 2010, Anna Anatolievna Zayaruznaya
All rights reserved.
Professor Sean Gallagher, advisor
Anna Zayaruznaya
Form and Idea in the ARS NOVA Motet
ABSTRACT
Although ars nova motets have traditionally been viewed as “purely mathematical”
due to their highly structured forms, recent studies by Margaret Bent, Jacques Boogaart
and others have challenged this notion, arguing that text and music are sometimes intricately linked. Building upon these analyses of individual works, the present study aims at a
broader evaluation of text-music relations within the repertory.
Part One is dedicated to identifying the units and mechanisms of text-music relations. This involves exploring the reception of motet texts, on the one hand, and the variety
of their musical forms, on the other. I ind that motet reception, as revealed by citation
practices, manuscript transmission, and literary engagement favors the upper voices, which
in turn inluence the structures of motets in ways often audible to audiences. Such emphasis
seems in conlict with the commonly held view that polytextuality masks texts in performance. However, cognitive science and historical evidence can both show that the supposed
limitations of polytextuality need not hinder understanding. The idea that upper-voice
texts may generate musical forms also grates against the notion that motets are structured
from their tenors upwards, but a closer look at upper-voice rhythmic organization reveals
that a signiicant number of motets in the repertory have upper-voice structures that supersede those of the tenor.
Part Two consists of a series of case-studies focusing on a group of motets whose
main ideas are disjunct or hybrid: the goddess Fortune, a chimera, a piecemeal statue. In
iii
these works, the musical settings turn out to be as fragmented as the creatures with which
they are paired, showing segmentation on textural and isorhythmic levels. These hybrid
ideas and their far-reaching effects on musical forms inlect our understanding of latemedieval modes of musical depiction. More than this, when viewed as a group these motets
have the potential to radically alter our understanding of ars nova aesthetics, suggesting that
disjunction, rather than unity, may sometimes have been the highest aim of composition.
iv
FOR MY PARENTS,
without whose courage and foresight
none of this would have been possible.
v
CONTENTS
ix
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
xiii
ABBREVIATIONS, SIGLA AND EXAMPLES
INTRODUCTION
1
PART ONE: FORM AND IDEA
1. MOTETS AS IDEAS
9
The Ontology of Motets
The Indexing of Motets and Manuscript Layout
Motet Citations in Theoretical Treatises
The Transmission of Text
Upper-Voice Texts
Tenor Texts
Intabulations
Motets and/as Literature
Reception of Ars nova Motets Outside of Ars nova Circles
Appendix 1A: Citations of Surviving Ars nova Motets in Treatises
2. HEARING VOICES
17
17
24
32
33
48
50
54
63
68
73
Medieval Listening Practices and Modern Ears
Timbre
The Cocktail Party Phenomenon
3. WHAT IS A TALEA? UPPER-VOICE PERIODICITY IN ARS NOVA MOTETS
The Tenor as Foundation?
The Evidence for Independent Upper-Voice Taleae
Terminology and Diagrams
Supertaleae as Grouped Tenor Taleae
More Intricate Upper-Voice Arrangements
Isorhythm and Memory
Shifts Between Upper- and Lower-Voice Taleae
Upper-voice Structures and Hermeneutics in S’il estoit/S’Amours (M6)
Conclusions: Independent Upper-Voice Structures in the Ars nova Motet
vi
75
84
93
106
108
115
118
119
127
134
144
152
167
PART TWO: MUSICAL DISJUNCTION
4. VOICE-CROSSINGS AND FORTUNA IN MACHAUT’S MOTETS
The Motetus Corde mesto cantando conqueror
Singing from Fortune’s Wheel
Cece Fortuna and Blind Isaac
Amours/Faus Samblant (M15)
Motet 14’s Lying Voices
The Dishonesty of Poets
Fausse Fortune and Amour languour
Other “Fortuna Crossings”
Appendix 4A: Helas/Corde mesto, Texts and Translations
Appendix 4B: Maugre/De ma dolour, Texts and Translations
Appendix 4C: Hélas/Corde Mesto/Libera me, Edition
5. THE MONSTER IN THE MOTET
173
181
183
195
198
203
207
209
216
222
225
228
234
The Texts of In Virtute/Decens
Hockets and Rhetoric
The Isorhythmic Scheme of In virtute/Decens
Hockets and Wordlessness
A Monster-Shaped Motet
Intensiied Monstrosity
Hybridity’s Ambivalence
Vitry and the Zytiron
Ut pictura motetus?
Appendix 5A: In virtute/Decens, Texts and Translations
Appendix 5B: In virtute/Decens, Edition
6. VITRY’S CUM STATUA/HUGO/MAGISTER INVIDIE AND LATE-MEDIEVAL
INTERPRETATIONS OF NEBUCHADNEZZAR’S DREAM
The Statue’s Layers: A Metallurgical Summary
The Motet’s Layers: A Formal Summary
The Composite Tenor of Cum statua/Hugo
The Beginning of the Motet: “Cum statua... Hugo [est]”
“Gradatim deduci ac minus”: The Statue’s Layers in the Motet
The Motet’s Layers: Questions of Isorhythmic Form
Feet of Clay: Hockets and Fragmentation
Phi millies/O Creator/Iacacet granum/Quam sufflabit
vii
235
240
243
249
256
260
262
264
273
278
280
285
289
293
296
303
307
311
314
318
Nebuchadnezzar’s Statue in Machaut’s Complainte
Nebuchadnezzar’s Statues
Gower’s “Divisioun” and the Musical Statue
Epilogue: Ars nova and Disjunction
Appendix 6A: Cum statua/Hugo, Texts and Translations
Appendix 6B: Cum statua/Hugo, Edition
Appendix 6C: Phi millies/O Creator, Texts and Translations
324
335
350
361
367
369
372
CATALOG OF ARS NOVA MOTETS, THEIR SOURCES, AND EDITIONS
375
BIBLIOGRAPHY
386
viii
Acknowledgements
I
F, AS BOETHIUS JUDICIOUSLY WARNS, good Fortune is to be mistrusted and can be counted
on only in its inconstancy, then I’m in for it. While writing this dissertation I have been
astronomically fortunate in the help and support I have received from a list of colleagues,
friends, and family so long that it can only signal my eventual demise. That is, unless we can
consider their inluence Providential rather than merely Fortunate.
Even before I had fully settled on a topic, my colleagues in the thriving ield of medieval and renaissance studies were unfailingly generous with their time, energy, and expertise. Margaret Bent set things in motion in 2004 by suggesting that I look at a few motets
by Machaut. And she has stood by me since then, productively challenging and encouraging
me in turn and providing access to unpublished work and other invaluable resources.
Alejandro Enrique Planchart has also been an ally for many years, and I thank
him for sharing his insight and enthusiasm on a range of topics, and for the very material
loan of the fourteenth century’s most important equine Antichrist. To Jacques Boogaart
I am grateful for his generosity with unpublished work and for saving me from several
embarrassing errors. Jane Alden, Bonnie Blackburn and Dorit Tanai were instrumental in
bringing Chapter 4 to its inal form. Lawrence Earp kindly offered advice on Chapter 1.
Michael Scott Cuthbert, my closest colleague in geographic and temporal terms, has helped
and advised me at various points in my career. On the eve of my dissertation printing I wish
I had heeded his earliest piece of advice: to buy a color laser printer. For discussing dificult
texts that would have been nonsense to me without their expertise I thank Leofranc Holford Strevens and Gabriela Currie. And for his help with a text that is actually nonsense, I
thank Michael Randall.
ix
At the beginning and again at the end of my writing I was bolstered in my resolve
by the warm and knowledgeable group of colleagues that gather in the dolomites to think
about medieval music. By organizing these conferences at Novacella Karl Kügle does our
discipline an enormous service. I thank him for this as well as for his help with motetrelated things.
In Massachusetts, Jane Bernstein, Joseph Dyer, Lewis Lockwood, Virginia Newes,
and Joshua Rifkin have provided support, encouragement, and a steady stream of dificult
questions. In Californa, Anna Maria Busse Berger, Beth Levy, and William Mahrt made me
feel welcome. Jesse Rodin has been a friend, colleague, and co-conspirator on both coasts.
Members of Harvard’s medieval studies community have had a profound inluence
on the extent to which I have felt interested and able to deal with the ideas and images behind the music. I am especially grateful to Jeffrey Hamburger, Michael McCormick, James
Simpson, Hugo van der Velden, and Jan Ziolkowski. My fellow students in medieval studies seminars, Steven Rozenski, Anna Huber, and Beatrice Kitzinger, shared with me their
enthusiasm and some very useful references.
This project would not have been possible without the tremendous aid offered by
librarians: at Harvard’s invaluable Isham library, Sarah Adams and Doug Freundlich tolerated my perpetual residency and offered continuous held and support. At Loeb Music
Library, Virginia Danielson, Kerry Masteller, and Andrew Wilson made me feel welcome
despite my propensity to leave at 9:59 PM (and sometimes, if I’m to be honest, at 10:01).
I am also thankful to William Stoneman and the staff of Houghton Library for granting
me access to several treasures. Digital access to other treasures was facilitated by the Digital
Image Archive of Medieval Music, and I thank Dr. Julia Craig-McFeely for making this
x
invaluable resource available, and especially for allowing me to consult images of the MS
Ferrell–Vogüe, and to reproduce below a few details from this fascinating source. Thanks
also to John Shepard of the Jean Gray Hargrove Music Library at UC Berkeley for making
the beautiful image of En la maison dedalus available to me.
Administrative, emotional, and chocolate support were provided by the powerhouse
staff of the Harvard music department: thank you Kaye Denny, Mary Gerbi, Jean Moncrieff,
Nancy Shafman, Karen Rynne, Charles Stillman, and Fernando Viesca. Several sources of
funding made my research and writing possible: among them a Ferdinand Gordon & Elizabeth Morrill Graduate Fellowship, a Richard F. French Prize Fellowship, a Presidential
Fellowship from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, and an
Alvin H. Johnson AMS 50 Dissertation Fellowship from the American Musicological Society. As a director of graduate studies and later chair of the department, Professor Anne
Shrefler has provided much sound advice and encouragement.
Friends don’t let friends write alone, and I am grateful to Emily Abrams Ansari,
Andrea Bohlman, James Blasina, Carolann Buff, Daphna Davidson, Louis Epstein, Ellen
Exner, Bonnie Loshbaugh, Heather Marlowe, Drew Massey, Carrie Menke, Evan MacCarthy, John McKay, Rowland Moseley, Matthew Mugmon, Andrew Oplinger, Gina Rivera,
David Trippett, Emily Zazulia, and Hillary Zipper for support, encouragement, and calming words and deeds. Michelle Atwood deserves special mention for reminding me from
time to time that, after all, it’s only musicology. And to Ryan Bañagale, Corinna Campbell,
and Katherine Lee—the other members of the small but mighty (ethno)musicology G3s of
2007-8—I owe warm thanks for their patience and friendship, and for making me zoom
out at key points.
xi
Where I come from, “committee” has a harsh ring to it, and usually implies some
body of people whose purpose is to undermine individuality and uphold the status quo. The
committee that advised this dissertation could not have been further from those committees of old. They acted as three distinct voices that together had an undeniable shaping role
to the content and form of the present work, but they also let me pursue my own instincts,
make my own mistakes, and write in my own style (sometimes ill-advised, but never by
them).
Suzannah Clark has shown me what it means to be a reader. Her careful and honest
feedback has led to much fruitful revision, and the subtlety of her thinking has pushed me
to greater care and creativity in my analytical pursuits. To Thomas Forrest Kelly I am grateful for his generosity, his enthusiasm, and his scepticism. His questions, which sometimes
seemed deceptively simple, have acted as important stimuli. No part of this study has not
beneitted from them, and Chapter 1 is their direct result. And to my advisor, Sean Gallagher, I am indebted for asking the right questions at the right times, for thoughtful comments, and for continuing to encourage me when the topic or the circumstances seemed too
daunting. He has lent this work correctness and added style and dignity to many passages.
As a course head and seminar leader he has shown me what it is to inspire and challenge
students. And as I have begun the transition from student to teacher, he has given honest
and helpful advice at every turn.
My family on both coasts (and in the middle) have been loving and supportive
throughout this long process. I thank them for their patience and understanding. And most
of all I thank my husband Yarrow, whose ways of supporting, knowing, reading, questioning,
and loving are as numerous as the leaves of the achillea millefolium.
xii
Abbreviations, Sigla, and Examples
Abbreviations
CMM
Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae. 111 volumes. American Institute of Musicology, 1947– .
Volumes cited:
13. Charles Van den Borren, ed. Missa Tornacensis. 1957.
39. Ursula Günther, ed. The Motets of the Manuscripts Chantilly,
Musée condé, 564 (olim 1047) and Modena, Biblioteca estense, a. M. 5,
24 (olim lat. 568). 1998.
M1–M32
Machaut’s motets, by number. See PMFC2–3.
PMFC
Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century. Leo Schrade, Frank Ll. Harrison, and Kurt von Fischer, general editors. 25 volumes. Monaco: Éditions
de l’Oiseau-Lyre, 1956–1991.
Volumes cited:
1. Leo Schrade, ed. The Roman de Fauvel; The works of Philippe de
Vitry; French cycles of the Ordinarium Missae. 1956.
2–3. ———. Works of Guillaume de Machaut. 1956.
5. Frank Llewellyn Harrison, ed. Motets of French Provenance. 1968.
21. Gordon K. Greene, ed. French Secular Music: Virelais. 1987.
23. ———. French Secular Music: Rondeaux and Miscellaneous
Pieces. 1989.
Manuscript Sigla
Apt16bis
Apt, Cathédrale Sainte-Anne, Bibliothèque du chapitre, Trésor MS 16bis
Apt9
Apt, Cathédrale Sainte-Anne, Bibliothèque du chapitre, Trésor MS 9
Arr983
Arras, Bibliotheque Municipale, MS 983 (olim 766), lyleaf
Barc853
Barcelona, Biblioteca de Catalunya (olim central), MS 853
Barc971
Barcelona, Biblioteca de Catalunya (olim central), MS 971 (olim 946)
Be421
Bern, Burgerbibliothek, A. 471 (lyleaves from A. 421)
BN 1112
Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS fonds latin 1112
Br19606
Brussels, Brussels, Bibliothèque Royal Albert I, MS 19606
Br5170
Brussels, Archives générales du Royaume, Archief Sint-Goedele 5170
(Olim758)
xiii
CaB
Cambrai, Bibliothèque Communale, B 1328 (olim 1176)1
Chantilly
Chantilly, Musée Condé, MS 564 (olim 1047)
Cort
Cortona, Archivio Storico del Comune, 2 fragments without shelfmark
Durham
Durham, Cathedral Library, MS C.I.20, lyleaves
Fauvel
Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS fonds français 146
Ferrell-Vogüé Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, Ferrell-Vogüé MS. Private Collection of James E. and Elizabeth J. Ferrell, on deposit at the Parker Library,
Corpus Christi College, Cambridge
FriZ
Fribourg, Bibliothèque Cantonale et Universitaire, Z 260
Ivrea
Ivrea, Biblioteca Capitolare, MS CXV(115)
Leiden 2515 Leiden, Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit, Bpl 2515.
Leiden 342A Leiden, University Library, MS fragment in group Ltk 342.a, from the
binding of MS Ltk 342A
Lpr 163
London, The National Archives (olim Public Record Ofice), E
163/22/1/24
Machaut A
Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, fonds français 1584
Machaut C
Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, fonds français 1586
Machaut E
Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, fonds français 9221
Machaut J
Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS 5203
Machaut Pm New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, M.396
Machaut Vg
see Ferrell-Vogüé
Mbs 4305
Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 4305
McVeigh
London, British Library, Additional 41667(I)
ModA
Modena: Biblioteca Estense e Universitaria, a.M.5.24 (Latino 568; olim
IV.D.5)
ModB
Biblioteca Estense e Universitaria, a.X.1.11 (Latino 471)
Munich31
Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Handschriften-Inkunabelabteilung,
Latinus monacensis 5362, Kasten D IV ad [31]
1
Foliation as in Lerch, Fragmente aus Cambrai.
xiv
Nür9
Nuremberg, Stadtbibliothek, Fragment lat. 9 (from Centurio V, 61)
Oas 56
Oxford, All Souls College, MS 56, binding strips
Ox 213
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Canonici Miscellaneous 213
Ox 271
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Bodl. 271, binding fragments
PadC
Padua, Biblioteca Universitaria, MS 658
Paris 2444
Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, fonds nouv. acq. latines 2444
Paris 571
Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, fonds français 571
PArs 595
Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS 595
PPic 67
Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Collection de Picardie 67
Robertsbridge London, British Library, Add. 28550
RosL
Rostock, Universitätsbibliothek, phil.100/2
SL2211
Florence, Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana. Archivio Capitolare di San
Lorenzo, ms 2211.2
Strasbourg
Strasbourg, Bibliothèque Municipale (olim Bibliothèque de la Ville), MS
222.C.22 (now destroyed; facsimile of Coussemaker’s transcriptions of
some works in Vander Linden, Le manuscrit musical )
Tarr(1)
Tarragona, Archivo Histórico Archidiocesano, ms s.s. (1)
Tarr(2)
Tarragona, Archivo Histórico Archidiocesano, ms s.s. (2)
Torino 42
Torino, Biblioteca Reale, Vari 42
Trémoïlle
Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, ms fonds nouvelles acquisitions
françaises 23190 (olim Angers, Château de Serrant, Duchesse de la Trémoïlle)
Tou 476
Tournai, Chapitre de la Cathédrale 476
Udine
Udine, Biblioteca Comunale Vincenzo Joppi, ex Archivio Florio 290
Wroclaw
Wroclaw (Breslau), Biblioteka Uniwersytecka Ak 1955/KN 195 (olim MS
fragment 82 from I.Q.411)
Yox
Ipswich, Suffolk Record Ofice HA 30, 50/22/13.15
2
Nádas’s new foliation is used throughout; see “Manuscript San Lorenzo 2211,” 154–68.
xv
Terminology and Titles
Since it no longer seems likely that there was ever a treatise called “Ars nova,” I take
these words as a periodic and stylistic designation that need not be capitalized. I have used
the Latin for “longa” to prevent confusion with the adjective “long,”, but “breve” and “minim” as opposed to brevis and minima, to avoid excessive italicization. Foliation is indicated
with “v” for verso and only the folio number for the recto. “Motetus” rather than “duplum”
is used throughout to designate the middle voice in a three-voice motet, regardless of the
language of its text.
Motets are cited by short incipits in the order Triplum/Motetus. The “Catalog of Ars
nova Motets, their Sources, and Editions” at the end of this study provides longer incipits,
including tenor labels, as well as source and edition information for each motet.
Translations are mine unless otherwise attributed.
Examples and Figures
Unless noted otherwise, musical examples have been newly edited for this study, using the clearest or most complete source available. I have allowed note-values to remain unreduced and preserved original note-shapes, but it should be stressed that these are editions
using simpliied ars nova notation rather than diplomatic transcriptions. Thus ligatures and
multi-bar rests are broken up to make alignment in score possible. Dots of addition are
represented, but not dots of division, since bar-lines are used. In cases where multi-measure
rests affect alteration (such as example 3.9), they are preserved—otherwise not. Modern
clefs are used throughout.
xvi
In some of the examples the music has been shrunk in order to demonstrate larger
points about form. In this case it is not necessary to see the individual notes, but readers of
the higher resolution PDF version should be able to zoom in for details. In some cases color
is used to clarify analytical points. If you are reading this dissertation in a low-resolution
copy scanned by UMI, please contact the author for a PDF.
All images are either reproduced with permission, are under the author’s own copyright, are small details printed under fair use, or are in the public domain. The latter status
for photographic copies of public domain images was reafirmed by the 1999 decision in
the case of Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp.
xvii
INTRODUCTION
“I
REALLY THINK THAT PROSODY AND THE SENSE OF THE WORDS have no importance in the
isorhythmic motet. It proceeds from a purely musical construction; contemporary
music, in this regard, is akin to the ars nova.”1 So opined musicologist Jacques Chailley in
response to the 1955 lecture in which Willi Apel coined the term “pan-isorhythm.”2 He
was not entirely without opposition—Suzanne Clerx had earlier suggested that “alongside the mathematics which is the base of isorhythmic motets there is also the inspiration, the imagination and the necessity of adapting the music…to a text which also has its
requirements.”3 But René Lenaerts countered with a rather categorical reply: “I don’t think
so, due to the fact that relations of text and music only came to life at the end of the fourteenth and in the ifteenth centuries.”4
Chailley and Lenaerts expressed a prevailing view. The relationship between text
and music, which has long been a chief concern in the study of song, is usually referred to
as “word-tone” relations. These units—individual words and small groups of notes—are
1
“Je pense vraiment que la prosodie et le sens des mots n’a aucune importance dans le motet isorythmique.
II s’agit d’une construction purement musicale; la musique contemporaine, a cet égart(sic), est proche aussi
de 1’ars nova et la récente cantate de Leibowitz le montre bien,” published in Apel, “Remarks about the
Isorhythmic Motet,” 145.
2
In drawing parallels between the “purely mathematical” attitude of “Boulez and his partisans” and ars
nova motets, Chailley was not doing either repertory a favor. As a composer, he preferred more conservative
techniques, and used serialism only in the service of satire. For example, in ‘Diafoirus père et ils’ in his Suite
sans prétention pour Monsieur de Moliére (1953). See Spieth-Weissenbacher and Gribenski, “Chailley,
Jacques.”
3
“À côté de la mathématique qui est la base des motets isorythmiques, il y a aussi l’inspiration, la fantaisie
et les nécessites d’adaptation d’une musique, savamment élaborée, a un texte qui a aussi ses exigences,” Ibid.
144.
4
“Je ne le crois pas, car les rapports du texte et de la musique ne deviennent vivants qu’à partir de la in du
XIVe et du XVe siècle,” ibid., 144–5.
the scale on which text and music most obviously interact in later repertories. Word-tone
relations are epitomized in 16th-century text-painting: the well-known melodic ascents on
“skies” and “stars” in madrigals, the upward runs on “et ascendit in caelum” in renaissance
masses, and so forth. When judged by these standards, earlier repertories do indeed seem
to fail in relating words to music. Writing at the same time as Chailley, Alfred Einstein described the addition of voices to a chant as “the smothering new garb” under which the text
“usually disappears.”5 And we can see the same ethos operating thirty years later with Daniel
Leech-Wilkinson’s assertion that “in Machaut’s view, at least, musical form operated, to a
large extent, independently of textual association.”6
In light of the scholarship of the last twenty years such a view is no longer tenable.
A number of careful and sensitive analyses of individual works—mostly from Machaut’s
oeuvre—have shown that the music of ars nova motets can relect their texts through mensural and isorhythmic design, textural manipulation, control of diction, the symbolic use of
number, and a wide array of other techniques.7 Attention to the musical, textual, and contextual content of motet tenors has widened the realm of analysis by increasing the number
5
A. Einstein and E. Sanders, trans., “The Conlict of Word and Tone,” The Musical Quarterly 40, no. 3
(1954): 338.
6
“Machaut’s Rose, Lis,” 13.
7
The earliest analyses that argue for correspondence between form and meaning are Reichert, “Das Verhältnis,” Eggebrecht’s two analyses of Machaut’s Fons/O livoris (M9) (“Machauts Motette Nr. 9,” and “Machauts Motette Nr. 9, Teil II”) and the analyses, especially the one of Sub arturo/Plebs, in Günther, “Das WortTon-Problem.” More recently Margaret Bent has argued that a motet’s texts are manifest in compositional
decisions which have musical, rhythmical, structural, and symbolic-numerical manifestations. In the case
of Machaut’s Amours/Faus Semblant (M15) the texts expressed are ideas of falsehood and deception linked
with False Seeming (“Deception, Exegesis, and Sounding Number”); in Vitry’s Tribum/Quoniam, musical
structure and diction are linked with the Ovidian quotation at the end of the motetus and with the ideas
of sudden downfalls and reversals which it embodies (“The Vitry motet Tribum que); and Machaut’s Fons/O
livoris (M9) shows a number of correlations between musical and textual structure; see “Words and music.”
Jacques Boogaart has explored text-music relations in many of Machaut’s motets; see “O series summe rata,”
and “Love’s Unstable Balance, Part I.” See also Dillon, “The Proile of Philip V.”
2
of texts with which form might interact.8 And consideration of interrelationships between
motets has further expanded the arena in which musico-poetic associations may play out,
allowing for analysis on the level of oeuvre or manuscript.9
The perhaps inevitable side-effect of this is that motets have become “dificult.”
If the ars nova motet of 1955 was a purely musical and sonic object, the ars nova motet of
2010 is almost intimidatingly rich in meaning. In Alice Clark’s summary,
The complexities inherent in the genre—including bitextuality, number
symbolism, allusions to other motets, and other techniques that are inaudible or that cloud the surface comprehension of text and music—can make
us wonder whether anyone listened at all, and if so, what they heard.10
This list of complexities —the result of careful and imaginative studies—is both a boon
and a weakness for our understanding of the genre. For while opening up exciting new
arenas for investigation, the existing readings present us with a challenge. So far, the most
productive approach has been to focus on individual motets, and even analyses of multiple
works may ask a different set of questions, and indeed even call upon a separate set of
methodologies to explore the semantic, cultural, and musical content of each motet. Like
a Mahler symphony, each motet is a world in itself—full of intellectual sophistication, intricate compositional schemes, and deeply coded meaning. But these worlds may well be in
different galaxies.11
8
For studies of how tenors relate to musical and poetic aspects of motets, see Clark, “Concordare cum materia,” Robertson, Guillaume de Macaut, and Maurey, “A Courtly Lover.”
9
Several studies have addressed the ordering of motets within a corpus; on Machaut, see Brown, “Another
Mirror for Lovers?,” and Robertson, Guillaume de Machaut. On a series of motets in Fauvel, see Bent, “Fauvel and Marigny.”
10
Clark, “Listening to Machaut’s Motets,” 487.
11
Boogaart’s analyses are an exception, since he considers Machaut’s motets as an oeuvre and sometimes
applies the same analytical technique—for example, the interpretation of talea rhythms—to several works at
a time. However, his most detailed analyses, such as his analysis of Motet 6 (discussed in detail in Chapter
3 below) focus on the internal poetics of one work. See his “O series summe rata” and “Love’s Unstable Bal-
3
The incommensurability of the existing analyses of ars nova text-music relations is
not necessarily a problem, but it makes it dificult to move beyond the individual work to
consider compositional aesthetics, hermeneutics, and modes of signifying within a repertory. Furthermore, this approach to analysis can leave certain basic questions about genre
unanswered, since an interpretation that stresses the depth and uniqueness of a given work
is more likely to read its properties as individual rather than generic traits. But the opposite approach is perhaps more unpalatable, for in deciding that a given genre is made up of
works that are similar, we will stress the similarities and miss the subtleties of individual
compositions. Indeed, how can we begin to understand the galaxy if we do not know its
worlds?
It is the aim of this study to occupy a middle ground. Though Part II concerns itself
with case-studies that follow in the methodological footsteps of existing work, these casestudies are linked by similar analytical approaches and common units of analysis. It is my
contention that the units of “word” and “tone,” inherited from text underlay discourse and
madrigalisms, are not productive for discussions of musical-semantic relations in the repertory of ars nova motets. Rather, I will suggest that larger phrases or even entire compositions depict the main semantic ideas of texts through bold textural and formal gestures.
Both form and style as possible loci of expression were addressed by Ursula Günther
in an incisive 1984 essay. With the goal of codifying an array of text-music relations in
the middle ages, she built a ive-step ladder whose rungs progress from the most obvious
relations (mimetic) through more complex arrangements, such as pictorial and emphatic
uses of music. On the inal rung of the ladder are located those works which relate text and
ance, Part I.”
4
music “in the formal makeup of a composition, as in motets, canonic works or retrograde
rondeaux.”12 Here Günther includes two works notated on circular staves and three compositions by Machaut: the self-descriptive rondeau Ma fin est mon commencement, the trinitarian three-voiced Lai de le fonteine, and the tritextual canonic ballade Sans cuer/Amis dolens/
Dame par vous, which stages a conversation among its voices.13 Motets are rather underrepresented on all rungs of Günther’s ladder, but it is on this ifth level that the issue comes to
the fore. Though she concedes that “there are even some motets in which form and text are
connected so as to produce meaning,” in the end she cites only one: Sub Arturo/Fons, whose
motetus text summarizes the diminutions which the tenor undergoes.14 “In other motets,”
cautions Günther, “it seems at least less certain, or even questionable whether we can ind
intentional connections between the isorhythmic construction and the numbers mentioned
in the text.”15 In conclusion, she tentatively suggests two possible motets in which a tenor
talea repeated seven times might signify the seven liberal arts.
It is interesting to see how ideas and the forms which depict them change for Günther depending on the genre in question. Theme or subject is interpreted loosely when it
comes to songs: one of the circular rondeaux depicts a labyrinth, Machaut’s ballade evokes
a conversation, the lai enacts the Trinity. And form, too, is a broad enough concept there
to include number of voices, canonic techniques, and page-layout. But in motets the only
12
“im formalen Aufbau einer Kompositon(sic), etwa bei Motetten, kanonischen Werken oder retrograd
aufzulösenden Rondeaux,” Ibid., 236.
13
Ballade 17, edited PMFC 3:88–9. On this work, see Newes, “Dialogue and Dispute,” 71–5.
“Schließlich gibt es sogar einige Motetten, bei denen Text und Form eine Sinnbeziehung aufweisen,”
Günther, “Sinnbezüge zwischen Text und Musik,” 267. Sub Arturo/Fons is edited in Bent, Two 14th-century
Motets.
14
15
“Bei anderen motetten scheint es allerdings weniger sicher oder sogar fraglich, ob man zwischen den
im Text erwähnten Zahlen und der isorhythmischen Konstruktion eine bewußt angestrebte Versinnlichung
sehen sollte.” Günther, “Sinnbezüge zwischen Text und Musik,” 267.
5
valid form is isorhythmic, and thus the only text which can be represented by this form is
one that evokes number. To be sure, numbers were important to the study of late-medieval
motets when Günther wrote, and they remain so today despite challenges to “isorhythm”
as the paradigm for motet construction.16 Günther’s evaluation is instructive here in that
it reminds us that both “form” and “subject” are slippery notions whose deinitions can be
broad or narrow depending on one’s view of the genre.
Part One of the present study is concerned with reining these vague terms as they
might apply to ars nova motets. In Chapter One, I bringing together various strands of reception, from the scribal to the poetic, to explore the ontology of motets for their medieval
listeners. Speciically I focus on the different roles played by upper-voice and tenor texts in
the naming, transmission, and citation of motets. The genre emerges as rather top-heavy:
though tenor melodies undoubtedly have a role in the construction of motets, reception
within ars nova circles repeatedly stresses upper-voice texts, which are more carefully transmitted in both musical and poetic sources. Nor is the situation very different for more
peripheral audiences, though interesting variations in emphasis are evident.
But the idea that motets would be encapsulated for medieval listeners primarily by
their upper-voice texts raises a set of questions about performance. For in combining multiple texts in their upper voices, motets are often charged with rendering those texts inaudible. How, then, can upper-voice texts be a key to reception? The question of intelligibility
is the focus of Chapter Two, where I argue that we may be underestimating the extent to
which texts can be audible in live polytextual performance.
16
See the accounts of the elevation of “isorhythmic” construction and objections to the term “isorhythm”
in Bent, “Isorhythm” and “What is Isorhythm?”
6
But if the ideas of motets come from their upper-voice texts, their forms are usually
thought to come from the tenor. If this is necessarily the case, then the relationship between
form and idea could only be tenuous or retrospective at best. But does all isorhythmic form
come from the tenor? In Chapter Three, I analyze a number of works that use “supertaleae”—upper-voice structures which supersede those of the tenor. The variety of form that
results is in line with Bent’s recent assertion that “isorhythmic” structures are varied rather
than uniied.17 Upper-voice taleae also have interesting implications for the thesis recently
put forward by Anna Maria Busse Berger that isorhythmic composition had a strong mnemonic component.18
Part Two of this dissertation is devoted to the analysis of a number of works whose
forms are closely aligned with the content of their texts. Or perhaps I should say with the
denizens of their texts. For it turns out that form-idea relations play out most dramatically
in works whose hybrid ideas lead to hybrid forms. Thus Chapter Four looks at a group of
works by Machaut that embody the corporeal discontinuities of the goddess Fortune, who
is often depicted as split down the middle. Chapter Five concerns itself with an even more
disjunct creature—the chimera from the beginning of Horace’s Ars poetica. This monster,
who has the head of a woman, a horse’s neck, feathers and a ishtail, turns out to be the main
idea of the Ivrea motet In virtute/Decens. Despite a message that seems to disparage hybridity, this motet highlights the presence of its unusual subject, controlling text declamation
in such a way as to maximally separate the creature into its disjunct parts. Chapter 6 is
concerned with a biblical monster—the statue made of gold, silver, copper, iron, and clay
17
“What is Isorhythm?,” 138–9.
18
Busse Berger, Medieval Music, 212–52.
7
that King Nebuchadnezzar saw in an apocalyptic dream (Daniel 2). This allegorical image of decay through time is present in several works by Vitry and Machaut. But the statue
also has broader cultural signiicance, and can allow us to situate ars nova thought within
contemporary intellectual currents as manifest in the writings of Boccaccio, Deguileville,
Dante, Gower, and others.
When taken together, the analyses in Chapters 4, 5, and 6 show that, in some cases,
semantic contents have been the generating concept for a piece of music. Vitry emerges as a composer particularly interested in disjunct forms and ideas: In virtute/Decens has
been attributed to him by several scholars, and two other motets dealing with hybrids—Phi
millies/O Creator and Cum statua/Hugo are among his most securely attributed works. But a
focus on hybridity and disjunction also allows us to compare the compositional approaches
of Machaut and Vitry, since both dwell on monsters in their works, but they do so using
different devices. Most broadly, the hybrid ideas in ars nova motets—and their far-reaching
effects on musical forms—have the potential to inlect our understanding of late-medieval
musical aesthetics. Viewed as a group, these works suggest that disjunction, rather than
unity, may sometimes have been the highest aim of composition.
8
CHAPTER ONE
MOTETS AS IDEAS
O
N FOLIO
129 of a well-used copy of Guillaume de Nangis’ Chronicon (a history of
the world from the creation until 1300)1, Philippe de Vitry found himself read-
ing about the defeat of the Parthian Army. Their downfall reminded him of another. And
so he picked up his pen and wrote in the margin: “Nota: Post zephiros plus ledit hiems, post
gaudia luctus, etc.”2 With this irst line of a couplet from Joseph of Exeter’s account of the
Trojan war, Vitry linked two parallel scenes of downfall and grief—Nangis’s description of
Orodes I grieving for his son, and Exeter’s account of the death of King Priam, survived by
Hecuba. For both mourners,
Winter harms more after gentle west winds, griefs [harm more] after joys;
whence nothing is better than to have had nothing for the second time.3
For us the annotation is of interest because the same couplet appears at the end of the
triplum voice in Vitry’s motet Tribum/Quoniam.4 Andrew Wathey, who irst discovered the
marginal note, has pointed to a number of thematic parallels between the chronicle and the
motet.5 If, he argues, the motet predates the annotation, then “the later use of the couplet
may well have been intended to recall not only its generalized moral proposition but also
1
Vatican, MS Regin. Lat. 544.
2
Vitry was a frequent annotator who engaged with his books in both personal and erudite ways—the former as when he annotated the year of his birth, 1291, on fol. 361r of this same book. See Wathey, “Philippe
de Vitry’s Books,” 145–8, and “Myth and Mythography,” 95.
3
“Post zephiros plus ledit hyems, post gaudia luctus;/Unde nichil melius, quam nil habuisse secundum,”
trans. Howlett in Bent, “Polyphony of Texts and Music,” 86. See Wathey’s discussion of this quotation in
“Auctoritas and the Motets,” 68–9.
4
For more information on motets cited in the text, see the “Catalog of Ars nova Motets, their Sources, and
Editions” at the end of this study.
5
“Both deal with reprobate tribes, with the excessive ambition and cruelty of their leaders and with their
inal reduction by fortune to misery and death,” Wathey, “Myth and Mythography,” 97.
9
to signal the parallels with the topoi of the motet.”6 But what if the annotation predates the
motet? It is possible that it did.7 If so, I would like to imagine that here Tribum/Quoniam
was born.
And the motet relects its priorities. Writing about an Ovidian couplet (also about
sudden downfalls) that concludes the motetus text, Margaret Bent has argued that the work
is “constructed backward” from these lines, which are as much “starting points and building
materials for both the texts and music” as the motet’s tenor.8 Thus whether Vitrys’ annotation in the Chronicon represents an actual genesis for Tribum/Quoniam or simply a reference to the motet, it does in a sense encapsulate that work, causing us to think of it as a
weaving-together of disparate texts whose juxtaposition is interesting, fundamental, even
germinative: “Nota...”!
That is one way to think about Tribum/Quoniam. Here are two others:
tenor V+12(6ic);
(upper voices 3x24 ic)9
6
Tr: 9L+2(12+ 12L) + 12L+9L
Mo: (3+ 12L) +2( I I + 13L )+ 15L
T: 6L+3[4(6L)]10
Ibid.
7
Wathey is hesitant to put the annotation before the motet, writing that “seems likely [that] Vitry’s motet
predates his annotation of the Chronicon” but notes also that “it remains unclear” when Vitry acquired his
copy of the Chronicon, and that the dateable annotations indicate only that it was “almost certainly in his
hands by 1342” and probably by the late 1320s (“Myth and Mythography,” 97n41 ). Elsewhere, however,
Wathey points out that the name of Louis de Bourbon has been erased from a list of deserters given in the
manuscript under the description of the Battle of Courtrai in 1302, and Louis de Bourbon was Vitry’s
employer “from the early 1320s (or earlier),” so that Vitry may well have been the one to make this early
change. There is no evidence, in other words, that the book could not have been with Vitry before he wrote
Tribum/Quoniam.
8
Bent was writing before Wathey’s indings had been published, and unaware of the quotation in the triplum,
“The Vitry motet Tribum que,” 87, 89.
9
10
Adapted from Besseler, “Studien zur Musik des Mittelalters II,” 223 and 223n12.
Sanders, “The Early Motets,” 27.
10
These are formulae Heinrich Besseler (left) and Ernest Sanders (right) used to describe aspects of Tribum/Quoniam which they found important. Besseler identiies the overall structure of the motet as consisting of a texted introduction followed by 12 periods.11 Sanders
focuses on the length of phrases in each of the work’s three voices, arguing that Tribum/
Quoniam “represents an imaginative ordering of modal tradition to produce a novel, largescale structure” in which “the irst four multiples of the number 3 are all represented.”12
And here is Tribum/Quoniam in yet another guise. In explaining the mechanics of
rhythmic organization to his readers, the author of the Compendium totius artis motetorum
cites an example of each type of meter:
An example of [perfect time with] minor [prolation] is the motet Playn sui
de ameer. An example of imperfect time with major [prolation] is the motet
Adesto sancta trinitas. An example of [imperfect time with] minor [prolation] is the motet [Tribum/]Quoniam secta latronum and many other motets,
rondeaux, and ballades.13
Here the same work that we have already seen characterized as a venue for the juxtaposition
of comments on the idea of sudden downfalls and a mathematical expression of multiples
of three is being invoked as an example of imperfect tempus with minor prolation.
If in that case the upper voices of the composition are being evoked (only they display differences in prolation), other readings of motets evoke their tenors. To take another
piece as an example, Anne Robertson has argued that the key to understanding Machaut’s
11
“V” is for “Vokaleinleitung. The bottom line speciies that the upper voices are arranged in three periods
of twenty-four imperfect longae. The observation is signiicant and I will return to the question of independent upper-voice structures in Chapter Three.
12
Sanders, “The Early Motets,” 26–7.
13
“Exemplum de minori in uno moteto Playn sui de ameer. Exemplum de tempore imperfecto majori in
moteto Adesto sancta trinitas, exemplum de minori in moteto Quoniam secta latronum et in multis aliis
motetis, rondellis et baladis,” Wold, ed., “Ein anonymer Musiktraktat,” 37. On the relationship between
the Compendium totius Artis Motetorum and the treatises which present the ars nova teachings, see Fuller, “A
Phantom Treatise,” 45–50, and Balensuela, “The Borrower is Servant to the Lender,” 12–4.
11
Amours/Faus Samblant (M15) is through its sacred tenor, “Vidi dominum” (I have seen the
Lord), which “illustrates the inherent importance of sight of God at this point in the [allegorical journey].”14 Although the motet’s courtly “upper voices…at irst seem to resist the
sacred implications of the tenor,” their content “does not undermine a sacred reading of
[Amours/Faus Samblant],” since even the Christian pilgrim must sometimes keep bad company.15 Here a motet is rendered a complex object whose main idea—sacred and allegorical—lows from its tenor, which is primary, into its upper voices, which are subordinate in
meaning.
And, inally, here is the same motet in different clothes: In a dream, the narrator
of Jean Froissart’s Joli buisson de jonece (1373) witnesses a competition in which a group
of young allegorical people write and perform wish poems.16 After they have recited their
wishes, the question of who will judge the competition arises, and Desire suggests that the
company go to the God of Love, who happens to be nearby. The narrator’s heart leaps at the
opportunity, and his joy causes him to sing:
And when I heard them say this,
My spirit rejoiced
That I would be going on this trip,
For I greatly desired
To see and also to know
The god of Love, who is so esteemed,
What kind of man he was and of what age.
As I traveled along on this excursion,
In peace, joy, and gaiety,
Singing a new motet
That had been sent to me from Reims,
I was neither in the front nor in the back,
14
Guillaume de Machaut, 164.
15
Ibid.
16
Figg & Palmer, Jean Froissart: An Anthology, 444–61.
12
But very comfortably in the middle,
Dressed in new lace-up shoes,
The way lovers go for a late night out.17
Sylvia Huot has argued that the unnamed motet—clearly by Machaut since it came to the
singer from Reims—may well have been Amours/Faus Semblant.18 Here placed into the lips
of a happy lover who sings while walking, the motet (or one of it voices) acts as a soundtrack to an idyllic courtly scene in which the “Vidi Dominum” of the tenor refers to the
God of Love, upon whom the singer expects imminently to gaze.19 But it is not to be. This
musical euphoria is all the more striking for the denouement which follows it. “Someone
shoves me and then I wake up,” the next line reads, and then the dream that takes up most
of the dit is over, and the lover is, in Sylvia Huot’s evocative summary, “plunged back into
the realities of winter, encroaching age, the waning of desire and penitential concerns.”20
Thus the motet, whichever motet it is, here represents an extreme of emotion encapsulated
by joyful sound that is all the more loud for being suddenly interrupted.
In bringing together these various contexts and readings of Vitry’s Tribum/Quoniam
and Machaut’s Amour/Faus Semblant, I have purposely mingled medieval and modern views
of motets. All of these interpretations it comfortably under the broad category of reception. Between them, motets emerge as intersections of texts and quotations, as mathematical structures and explorations of number, as exemplary representatives of a new notational
17
My emphasis; trans. Figg & Palmer, Jean Froissart: An Anthology, 461–3.
18
Huot, “Reading Across Genres,” 2, 8–9.
19
Huot has suggested that given the poem’s broader narrative, the tenor contrasts “the deceptive appearances of the courtly lady with the unmediated and always salviic vision of God,” ibid., 9. This interpretation
gives the motet broader signiicance within the narrative, but it is also useful to read this as a moment of
diagetic, plot-driven music making in which the narrator sings out of joy, especially given the denouement
that follows, which in fact interrupts the song.
20
Ibid., 1.
13
system, as elaborations of their tenor texts, and even as spontaneous, joyful sound in a
dream. Nor is such a list exhaustive. That all of these different interpretations are possible
is a function of the complexity of motets. For they combine multiple voices, multiple texts,
and sometimes involved structural schemes with textual and melodic quotations in the upper voices and the tenor that lead necessarily outside of the work and into the historical
and intellectual context of its composition. Needless to say, all of these are valid critical
approaches (for even Froissart’s decision to cite a motet at this particular moment is critical
and reveals a particular view of the genre), and motets have at some time been all of these
things, and continue to be all of them in the pluralistic climate of early twenty-irst-century
academia.
But in practice these various views of motets have some trouble coexisting. For example, numerical approaches tend to minimize the role of text, owing to an attitude—often
implicit—that mathematical construction results in “absolute” music which is unable or
unwilling to signify.21 Similarly, approaches that begin with the tenor’s text and liturgical
context tend to interact less with upper-voice texts and quotations, except when these support the sacred message of the tenor.22 Studies focused on texts and the roles of quotations
often do engage with structure, and especially with numerical symbolism, which is able to
render structure semantic by imbuing number with meaning.23 But this approach depends
on an imaginary listener who can appreciate these numerical subtleties because he is in-
21
See the comments of Chailley and others quoted at the beginning of the introduction and published in
Apel, “Remarks about the Isorhythmic Motet,” 145. Other studies that focus on structure include Besseler,
“Studien II,” Sanders, “The Medieval Motet,” and Leech-Wilkinson, “Related Motets.”
22
E.g. Clark, “Concordare cum materia,” Robertson, Guillaume de Machaut.
23
For example, Bent, “Deception, Exegesis, and Sounding Number,” 15-27, and Roesner, “Labouring in
the Midst of Wolves,” 212–45.
14
timately familiar with the work, and presupposing this kind of familiarity in an analysis
in turn gives a less active role to sonority and audible events. None of this is necessarily a
problem: any analysis must decide which factors are to be signiicant and central, and which
peripheral. The alternative—a reading in which text, number, liturgy, sonority, quotations,
culture, and contrapuntal progressions are all expected to signify—threatens to render a
work ininitely complicated.
Thus decisions must be made about what aspects of motets will be more signiicant,
and these decisions will have ramiications at every step of the scholarly and performing
process. How we edit motets, whether we translate their texts, how we group them in editions, what other genres we pair them with in concerts—all of these aspects of our interactions are predicated on attitudes about the nature of the genre and the relative importance
of its competing elements. Even names can be instructive. For example, the same motet
has variously been referred to as “O canenda/Rex/Rex regum,” “Rex quem metrorum,” “O
canenda/Rex/T:Rex regum/CT,” “O canenda vulgo per compita-Rex quem metrorum depingit prima igura-Rex regum,” and “V14.” This is not just a matter of academic fashions
or of the disconnect between modern and medieval notions of what a title is—as we shall
see, the fourteenth century’s naming conventions for motets were very consistent. But “O
canenda/Rex/Rex regum” encourages us to think of a composite entity the different elements of which are kept neatly apart by slashes. “O canenda/Rex/T:Rex regum/CT” with
its complete top-to-bottom listing of voices seems most concerned with indicating that
this is a four-voice motet, and with putting each listed voice on equal terms with the others. “O canenda vulgo per compita-Rex quem metrorum depingit prima igura-Rex regum”
seems rather to be three musical works than one, and “V14” evokes an easy-to-encapsulate
15
element of an oeuvre (here, Vitry’s) ready to be compared to others like it (presumably
V1–V13) and having little to do with any text that may or may not be present.
This variety of naming betrays a difference of opinion about what these works actually are. Are they networks of related compositions or individual creations? Is their meaning contained in the long upper-voice texts or the tenor’s pithy content? To what extent do
the separate voices represent independent musico-poetic statements, and to what degree are
they linked? How deining a characteristic, after all, is text to this genre, and if text, then
which text? Where should untexted voices (such as contratenors) or silently texted voices
(most tenors) stand in our analytical priorities? What is a motet? It may be that not so much
is in a name, but these are the questions that arise from the difference between “O canenda/
Rex/Rex regum” and “V14.”
If our ways of editing, naming, and citing motets can reveal something about competing modern notions of the “essence” of these works, certainly analogous medieval practices can do the same. Though no texts have survived that deal speciically with the questions posed above, a broad range of sources comment upon the cultural and intellectual
presence of motets, hinting at the ways in which they were received. We can begin by considering naming conventions as they are revealed in manuscript indexes and treatises. These
give some compelling hints about where medieval composers or theorists may have located
“the work” within the complex of relationships that constitutes ars nova motets. I will then
look to the manuscript transmission of motet texts—those of the upper voices and of the
tenor—for what they can tell us about the relative importance of different texts. Next I will
turn to the poetic presence of motets. Citations, allusions, and even irreverent re-workings
of motet passages in dits and short poems attest to a role for upper-voice motet texts in a
16
broader literary culture.
Throughout these different arenas, we will see that the reception of motets in ars
nova circles emerges as relatively uniied—especially so in contrast with more peripheral
practices. For the priorities or scribes, theorists, and even poets are surprisingly dependent
on geography. Already in the fourteenth century, it seems, the ars nova motet was different
things to different people.
* * *
THE ONTOLOGY OF MOTETS
It may well be argued that the idea of “naming” a piece of music is a later invention,
and that we should not expect motets to be called anything. But insofar as the medieval
evidence can answer these questions, there were clearly conventions involved in referring to
motets. In almost all contexts, ars nova motets are referred to by the irst few words of their
motetus text. This is the case in both indexes and treatises for the irst three quarters of the
fourteenth century at which point, as we shall see, focus shifted to the triplum. I will discuss
the evidence provided by indexes and theoretical treatises in turn.
The Indexing and Manuscript Layout of Motets
The index to the interpolated Roman de Fauvel (c. 1317) gives its motets pride of
place among the musical examples and divides them into two categories. The three-voice
motets are labeled “motez a treblez et a tenur[es]”; the two-voice works, “motez a tenures
sanz trebles.” This designation may not seem intuitive. We can take it for granted that a motet has a tenor, and in keeping with the construction a modern editor would perhaps re-write
these headings to read “tenors with motetus and triplum” and “tenors with motetus, without
17
triplum.” But this would miss the fact that “motet” means both the genre of “motet” and the
voice “motetus.” The Fauvel headings seem to preserve this distinction. What makes a work
a motet, in other words, is not having a tenor with repeating rhythmic patterns or different
texts in different voices (though these are certainly properties of the Fauvel motets a treblez
et a tenur), but having a motetus. That all motets should be called by their middle voice is
perhaps most surprising in a piece like Tribum/Quoniam, where the triplum comes in irst
and declares its opening text clearly, but the motetus enters only later, echoing the triplum’s
opening notes and singing under it (see Example 1.1). Here the experience of hearing the
piece and of calling it “Quoniam secta latronum” seem rather different, and we may wonder
whether someone seeking to ind this motet would not be looking under “Tribum que non
abhorriut”. Nevertheless, even this work is indexed by its motetus.
Example 1.1: Tribum/Quoniam, mm. 1–624
The only exception in Fauvel serves rather to prove the rule than otherwise. The
motet Zelus familie/Ihesu tu dator is listed in the index as “Zelus familie”—that is, by the
incipit of its triplum voice. But upon examination of the music we ind that the voices are
almost identical in their rhythmic activity, rate of textual declamation, and range.25 In24
Reproduced from PMFC 1:6.
25
Both voices declaim on the level of longa and breve, in a Mode 1 rhythm. Individual semibreves do not
carry text.
18
deed the motetus begins on top, delivering its “Ihesu” above the triplum in mm. 2–3 (see
Example 1.2). Granted, the triplum here is still the one with the smallest possible notevalues, which is a requirement according to theorist Johannes Boen: “nor should a triplum
of some motet be called by that name (triplum) unless it has in it some notes having a triple
proportion to the notes of some, be it motetus or tenor.”26 And indeed the triplum’s notated
semibreves (as in m. 5) are on a rhythmic order higher than both tenor and the motetus for
most of the motet.
Example 1.2: Zelus/Ihesu mm. 1–627
However, towards the end of the piece the motetus suddenly begins to speak more
quickly, while the triplum’s rate of text-declamation crawls at times to a halt for three
to four longae.28 By the inal measures the motetus “Ihesu tu dator” seems really to have
changed roles: it sings semibreves and carries the highest note in the work’s inal sonority
(see Example 1.3).29 The scribe’s confusion in this case is thus justiied. The listing of the
motet in the index suggests that he knew the opening texts of both voices and may have
26
“Nec debet triplum cuiuscumque moteti vocari hoc nomine nisi sit in ipso aliqua notula triplam habens
proporcionem ad notam aliquam puta moteti vel tenoris,” Frobenius, Johannes Boens Musica, 42.
27
Reproduced from PMFC 1:65.
28
See the passages beginning at mm. 56, 87, and 92 in PMFC 1:66–7.
29
This fact alone would not be suficient justiication for indexing the motet with a triplum incipit: Quant
je le voi/Bon vin doit the triplum ends lower than the motetus, but the motet is still listed in the index as “Bon
vin doit.”
19
brought his understanding of their musical functions to bear on his decision in making the
index.
Example 1.3: Zelus/Ihesu mm. 84–end30
Dated 1376 and thus standing near the end of our period of interest, the index of
the Trémoïlle manuscript also separates motets from other genres and, collecting them under the rubric “Motez ordenez et escriz ci aprés,” lists the works by their motetus incipits.31
Within the Machaut corpus, the same approach is taken in the famous index that heads
30
Reproduced from PMFC 1:67.
31
See Bent, “A Note on the Dating,” 222–3. Bent has determined that the date of 1376 only acts as a
terminus ante quem for the irst part of the index and for the contents of folios 1–32. Even though most of
the manuscript has been lost, it can be ascertained from the many concordances which exist that all works
are indeed listed by their motetus. Droz and Thibaut assumed that the motet indexed as “O Philippe” was O
philippe/O bone dux, but is probably the Fauvel motet with the motetus “O Philippe”; see Droz & Thibaut, “Un
chansonnier,” 5. See also comments in Earp, “Scribal Practices,” 66. The Strasbourg codex treats “Portio
nature” as the triplum of the motet elsewhere presented as Ida/Portio, and Trémoïlle’s citation of this work
as “Yda capillorum” may rest on this conception; see Günther, The Motets of the Manuscripts Chantilly, p.
lix. Here the distinction between voices is dificult to make, as it was in the case of Zelus/Jesu: the “Ida capillorum” voice sings a long “Ida” at the opening of the motet, while the “Portio naturae” voice declares more
quickly. That there was some question about what this motet should be called can be gleaned also from the
Ars cantus mensurabilis, whose author normally refers to motets by their triplum voice but in one case calls
this work “Portio nature vel Ida capillorum”; Balensuela, ed., Ars cantus mensurabilis, 256. See also Appendix
1A.
20
Manuscript A. Here a list headed “Les motets” uses a motetus incipit for all the works but
two.32 The irst exception is Quant/Amour (M1), which is entered into the index as “Quant
en moy vint premierement,” with a big decorated Q. Earp has suggested that the triplum is
cited “by virtue of its reference to ‘coming irst’,” but the decision to list it thus could also
be a inding aid, since this motet has a miniature above the triplum voice’s decorated Q, and
the eye would naturally be drawn to the left column on fol. 414v, and with it the triplum
“Quant en moy.” The motetus here has only a one-line initial. In all other cases, however,
the motetus has a two-line initial, while the triplum, tenor, and contratenor (where there
is one) have a one-line decorated letter (as in the beginning of He mors/Fine amour, reproduced in Figure 1.1.33 Thus the manuscript’s decoration is keyed to the index.34
It is a strange aspect of motet reception that sometime during the last quarter of the
fourteenth century the naming convention seems to have changed suddenly and decidedly.
In the Machaut corpus, we may compare the priorities underlying the decoration of He
mors/Fine amour (M3) in Manuscript A (Figure 1.1 above) with the same motet’s layout in
the slightly later Manuscript Ferrell-Vogüé (Figure 1.2). Here and elsewhere in the motet
section of this manuscript, it is the triplum voice that begins with a 2-line capital, while
motetus, tenor, and contratenor parts have one-line capitals.35
32
In contrast, Machaut’s three polytextual ballades are indexed by all of their texts: Sans cuer/Amis/Dame
(B17) and De triste cuer/Quant/Certes (B29) are each listed by three incipits, with brackets added on the left
to show the three texts go together. Quant Theseus/Ne quier (B34) was originally indexed as “Quant Theseus,”
but the hand providing pagination later added “Ne quier veoir” to the right of the irst incipit.
33
Observed in Earp, “Scribal Practice,” 65n146.
34
The other exception is M18, in which all voices begin with “Bone pastor” but the incipit given in the
index, “Bone pastor Guillerme,” refers to the triplum. Earp has suggested that the triplum is cited because
it names the work’s dedicatee; ibid., 67. It is also possible that the scribe had a momentary lapse given the
similarity of the incipits.
35
The only exception is Christe/Veni (M21), where 2-line-high initials in both upper voices allow a clever
trick in texting whereby both the introitus section and the beginning of the motet proper use the same deco-
21
Figure 1.1: The Start of He mors/Fine amour (M3) in Machaut A (fol. 416v)
Figure 1.2: He mors/Fine amour in Machaut Vg-Ferrel (fols. 262v–263)
rated inital (fols. 280v–281).
22
The change of priority demonstrated by these decorations is also relected in manuscript indexes after Trémoïlle. Within the Machaut corpus, Manuscript E (copied in the
early 1390s) lists motets by their tripla. Chantilly’s index lists triplum incipits under the
category “Motes” (fol. 10), and the destroyed Strasbourg manuscript (early 15th c.) enters motets by their triplum under alphabetical headings.36 The same holds true for midifteenth-century sources. In Ox 213 (c. 1426–36) the index is organized by alphabetic
headings and could in theory have accommodated multiple entries for the same work, listing
its different voices under different letters if it were likely that a user should have look for a
work by several of its texts. However this is not done, and each of the motets and polytextual
rondeaux in the chansonnier is listed in the index only once, by its top voice.37 Similarly,
the section headed “Hic Incipiunt Motteti” in the index to ModB (c. 1440–50) gives a
textual and musical incipit for the highest voice of each motet in the manuscript—usually
the triplum, though sometimes a quadruplum.38 These later collections largely transmit a
separate repertory, but there are enough ars nova motets present for us to be sure that the
naming conventions have indeed changed, and not only with respect to newer works but
also retrospectively.39
36
Copied in Vander Linden, ed., Le manuscrit musical, 16–25. Both texts of Ida/Portio are listed in the
index—perhaps the indexer thought it was two compositions.
37
Polytextual motets whose top voices are found in the remaining part of the index are catalog nos. 51,
68, 267, 275, 277, 279, 308, and 321. Polytextual rondeaux listed by their top voice are nos. 202, 208,
219, 254, and 284. No. 77 may be a polytextual ballade or not—it is also listed by its top voice/irst verse;
see Fallows, ed., Oxford, Bodleian Library MS. Canon. Misc. 213, 36.
38
On the ModB index and its category of motet see Cumming, The Motet, 48, 51–4. Q15 also groups
motets together but the indexer does not include them in his list. See Bent, Bologna Q15, 1:89–90.
39
Degentis/Cum vix, Ida/Portio, L’ardure/Tres dous, Tant/Bien, and Apta/Flos are concordances between Trémoïlle or Ivrea and Chantilly, and there are several more concordances between the earlier repertoire and
Strasbourg.
23
Motet Citations in Theoretical Treatises
There is a large number of references to speciic ars nova motets in music treatises
from the fourteenth and ifteenth centuries. Though these have been mined for what they
can tell us about motet authorship and music theory, there is good reason to explore the
rhetorical habits employed by theorists in citing pieces: in referring to particular works of
music, theorists stand to provide valuable hints about the ontology and anatomy of motets
as they were represented in the minds of their early audiences.
References to ars nova motets drawn from 16 treatises are collected in Appendix
1A. The irst 55 or so of these belong to the period before c. 1375. As is the case with
manuscript indexes from this time, theorists identify motets by their motetus text almost
without exception.40 Thus the author of De musica antiqua et nova, when he wishes to refer
to Cum statua/Hugo, writes “in moteto qui vocatur Hugo,” and the Compendium totius artis
motetorum talks of “uno moteto Praesidentes in tronis seculi,” by which we are to understand
Super cathedram/Presidentes.41 This consistent use of the motetus incipit is all the more telling in the presence of formulations such as “in moteto qui vocatur...,” which give the sense
that these incipits functioned as titles. The motetus incipit/title could be employed when a
writer wished to refer to the entire piece (such as in the common cases where a motet serves
as an example of a certain mensuration). But it was also used to reference a speciic voice or
40
This tendency has been noted by Besseler, “Studien zur Musik des Mittelalters II,” 235–6, Earp, “Scribal
Practice,” 65–6, and Bent, “A Note on the Dating,” 223–4. The three exceptions are the Ars (musicae)
citation of Rex/Leticie as “Rex Karole,” the citation of Orbis/Vos as “Orbis orbatus” in the treatise which
begins “Sex minimae possunt poni,” and the reference to Qui es/Ha Fortune (M8) as “Qui des promesses de
fortune se ie” in the treatise “Cum de signis temporibus...” (see Appendix 1A). The latter two treatises are
in fact later (possibly early ifteenth-century) copies of ars nova-era texts, and the scribes may well have been
supplementing their exemplars with new citations, using the naming conventions that were current when
they were copying. The irst exception, “Rex Karole,” appears only in a reworked version of Boen’s treatise;
see Boen, Ars, 14.
41
Coussemaker, Scriptorum, 3:347; Wolf, “Ein anonymer Musiktraktat,” 37.
24
passage in either of the upper voices. Thus in his Musica Johannes Boen uses the formulation “in motheto Florens vigor super verbo ‘Mardocheo’” to identify a particular dissonance
that occurs on the word “Mardocheo” in the motetus text.42 But the motetus incipit could
also be used to reference the triplum. For as Boen is explaining the rules of alteration and
imperfection in his Ars, he offers Impudenter/Virtutibus as an example of the “similis ante
similem...” rule and of the inability of breves to alter minims:
No note before a like note takes on imperfection. And this we can observe
clearly in the irst four little notes of that most excellent motet Virtutibus.
From this we can infer that a minim is never altered before a breve, nor a
semibreve before a long.43
Although the motet is cited by its motetus like Boen’s other examples, the “primis
quatuor notulis” must belong to the triplum, which is the only voice singing at the beginning of the motet. Its rhythm there (SSMB) illustrates both of Boen’s points, since the irst of
the two semibreves is perfect and the minim is not altered by the breve.44
Toward the end of the fourteenth century (and earlier in England and Italy) the
fashion for naming switched to the triplum. Since the word “motetus” still referred to the
genre, this led to some seemingly contradictory statements, such as the reference in the
Tractatus Figurarum “in motetis ipsorum magistrorum videlicet Tribum que non abhorruit
et in aliis” (“to the motet(use)s of those old masters, such as Tribum que non abhorruit, and
others”). The old masters would of course have referred to this work as “Quoniam secta la42
Frobenius, ed., Johannes Boens Musica, 68.
43
“Similis ante similem nullam capit imperfectionem. Et hoc in primis quatuor notulis illius excellentissimi moteti Virtutibus clare possumus contemplare. Ex hoc subinferri potest, quod numquam minima
alteratur ante brevem, item nec semibrevis ante longam,” Boen, Ars (musicae), 26.
44
When the motetus enters it is with the rhythm S.MS B, which does not illustrate either point. Neither
does the tenor whose irst four notes—L B B L in imperfect modus—present no problems of alteration or
imperfection.
25
tronum.” Now the term “motetus” paired with the triplum incipit could refer to the triplum
or motetus voice, as well as to the motet as a whole. For example, in the ifteenth-century
literary miscellany F-Pn lat. 3343 the triplum text of Petre/Lugentium is transmitted with
the annotation “Hunc motetus fecit Philippus de Vitriaco pro papa Clemente.”45 Elsewhere
in the same miscellany, the texts of all four voices of the motet Phi millies/O creator are labeled as “Triplum,” “Motetus,” “Tenor,” and “Contratenor.”46
Across this change from motetus to the triplum as the voice of reference, one aspect of naming stays constant: when referring speciically to the tenor voice, theorists use
an upper-voice incipit but specify the tenor. Thus the author of the Compendium totius artis
motetorum writes “in tenore de In arboris” to cite the tenor of the motet Tuba/In arboris.When
the tenor of the same motet is cited in the early ifteenth century by the anonymous Breslau author, the citation reads “in tenore Tube sacre fidei.”47 After what we have said about
indexes and theorists in general, this should not be surprising. But it is worth noting that
neither author wrote “in tenore ‘Virgo sum’”—he did not give the text of this tenor, though
it is unique in the repertory of motet tenors and would thus have been able to work as a suficient identiier of this particular voice.
Despite the uniqueness of many motet tenors, the tenor text was never used by ars
nova theorists to refer to any part of a motet. This simple fact is potentially meaningful,
though it is not clear exactly what it means. Possibly the theorists themselves did not know
the texts of the tenors. Or more likely they did not count on their readers to know them,
45
Earp has noted this as a contradiction, but it need only be one if we read “motetus” as the name of the
voice part rather than the genre; “Scribal Practice,” 66. See also ibid. for another example of a motet cited
by its triplum in the Illustre Lieve Vrouwe Broederschap (c. 1423).
46
Wathey, “The Motets of Philippe de Vitry,” 126n16.
47
See Appendix 1A. Insofar as I know this is the only case in which a motet title is declined.
26
which would make citing them in a treatise inexpedient. Or even if tenor sources were commonly known, it is possible that theorists did not consider them texts in the same sense
as upper-voice texts, since they never sounded in performance. Indeed, a passage from
the seventh book of the Speculum musicae conirms that tenors were not thought to carry
text. Explaining that some kinds polyphony have one text and some, several, Jacobus cites
cantilenae as an example of the former. And as for a polytextual work, his example is not
simply a motet, but a motet with a triplum:
Some of the discanting [voices] are with the same words, and some with different: the same [words] in cantilenae and other diverse ecclesiastical songs;
different, in motets with a triplum.48
There is even some evidence that the tenor voice, since it belonged to plainchant,
was less fully a part of the motet than the upper voices. For example, Johannes de Muris, in
discussing the terms color and talea, makes a distinction between the tenors of motets and
“motets themselves”:
The placing of one series of similar rhythms repeated several times in the
same voice is called color. But note that some singers make a distinction between color and talea, for they call it color when the same notes are repeated,
48
“Discantuum aliqui sunt cum littera eadem vel diversa: eadem, ut in cantilenis et aliquo cantu ecclesiastico; diversa, ut in motetis triplum habentibus,” Bragard, ed., Jacobi Leodiensis Speculum musicae, 25. This
distinction is preserved and expanded by the author of De musica antiqua et nova, who however seems to
qualify the comment with the addition of the phrase “in quibus tenor equipollet littere,” which may mean
that the tenor is of equal value to a text. Nevertheless, his example of a polytextual work is still a motet with
triplum: “Modus operandi in discantu talis est: aut enim discantus cum littera aut sine; si cum littera, hoc
est dualiter: aut cum eadem littera discantus it ut in cantilenis, rondellis et in quodam cantu ecclesiastico;
aut cum diversis litteris it discantus, ut in motetis qui habent triplum cum tenore in quibus tenor equipollet
littere.” [The manner of executing polyphony is as follows: discant is either with words, or without; if with
words, these are of two kinds: either the discantus is made with the same words [in all parts], as occurs in
cantilenae, rondeaux, and in some liturgical songs; or the discantus is made with diverse texts, such as in
motets which have a triplum with a tenor, in quibus tenor equipollet littere.] Coussemaker, Scriptorum, 3:361.
See also Aluas, Quatuor principalia, 521 and 747, where the inal line is translated “in which the tenor is the
equipollent of the texts.”
27
but talea when the same rhythms are repeated and thus make diverse notes.
This difference, although it may be observed in a great many tenors of motets, is not
observed in the motets themselves.49
What Muris seems to be saying is that the distinction between color and talea disappears in the upper voices, probably because here only rhythms but not pitches are repeated.
Thus the two different kinds of repetition can only be observed in tenors and not in motets
as a whole. For this reason the author prefers to call both kinds color. Muris’s distinction is
preserved in the third treatise of the Berkeley manuscript.50
Keeping in mind that there may be an ontological distinction between motetis ipsis
and motetorum tenores can help nuance our reading of the oft-quoted Tractatus cantus mensurabilis of Egidius de Murino. This text has been interpreted as “detailed instructions for the
composition of motets” and “a precept on motet composition.”51 In fact, the treatise is titled
De modo componendi tenores motettorum (“On the manner of composing motet tenors”).52
Thus when the instructions begin “irst take the tenor from some antiphon or responsory...,”
we can by no means assume that the process of composing a motet begins with selecting a
49
Emphasis mine. “Color in musica vocatur similium igurarum unius processus pluries repetita positio
in eodem cantu. Pro quo nota, quod nonnulli cantores ponunt differentiam inter colorem et tallam: nam
vocant colorem, quando repetuntur eedem voces, tallam vero, quando repetuntur similes igure et sic iunt
diversarum vocum. Que differentia, licet servetur in quampluribus tenoribus motetorum, non tamen servatur in ipsis motetis,” Berktold, ed., Ars practica mensurabilis cantus, 78.
50
“Que differncia licet in quampluribus motetorum tenoribum observetur, non tamen observatur in ipsis
motetis, ut in eis liquidem est videre,” ed. and trans. Ellsworth, The Berkeley Manuscript, 180–3; Ellsworth
translates the line in question “This differentiation may be observed in a great many tenors of motets, but
not in the motetti themselves.” This would imply that the author has shifted from motet as genre to motet
as voice over the course of one sentence, which is unlikely.
51
Leech-Wilkinson, Compositional Techniques, 18; Robertson, Guillaume de Machaut, 146.
52
It is unclear why it is sometimes referred to as “De motettis componendis,” for example in Reany, “Egidius
[Aegidius] de Murino [Morino],” and consequently in a number of general reference works such as Randel,
ed., The Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music, 241, and Kibler, ed., Medieval France: An Encyclopedia,
316. Coussemaker’s title is “Tractatus Cantus Mensurabilis” and his subtitle is “De modo componendi tenores motettorum”; Scriptorum, 3:124. The latter seems to be the correct title of treatise when on its own.
In several sources it is appended to the Tractatus figurarum; see Lefferts, ed., Regule, 72n175, and Schreur,
ed., Tractatus figurarum, 6–7.
28
section from plainchant—though certainly the process of composing a motet tenor must
often have begun there. Murino explicitly states that the tenor is chosen in accordance with
some unspeciied but pre-existing materia, with which its words should concord (“et debent
verba concordare cum materia de qua vis facere motetum”), but this feels like an aside.53
In Clark’s estimation, the theorist seems uninterested in the issue of materia: “it is easy
to overlook this statement “concordare cum materia,” and perhaps even Egidius is more
interested in talea and color formation.”54 Indeed he is, since this is both the stated goal of
his treatise and a personal interest: we know from Apollinis/Zodicaum that Murino had a low
voice, and thus probably sang tenor or contratenor in motets.55
But reading between the lines, we can lean that some materia is already decided
upon when the tenor is chosen, and that indeed the texts of the upper voices may already
be written. (Like reading a recipe from the middle, after the ingredients have been already
measured out, we don’t know where these texts are to be gotten, or what has been done to
them before this—the cook is simply instructed to “take the words which are to be in the
motet and divide them into four parts”.)56 Since the texts of motets are often arranged according to their isorhythmic structures, the possibility that they exist before the tenor has
many implications for the role of the upper voices in determining form—a point which will
be addressed in Chapter Three. For now, it will be enough to note that Muris’a distinction
53
Edited in Leech-Wilkinson, Compositional Techniques, 18.
54
Clark, “Concordare cum materia,” 12.
55
“Egidius de Morino baritonans cum Garino,” triplum ll. 22–3. Gallo reads this as “Egidius de Murino
singing tenorista with Garino, ” Music of the Middle Ages II, 127. Henricus Helene is identiied as one who
“noscit…tonorum tenorem bene,” but this is translated as he “knows well the tenor of the tones” (Bent, Two
14th-century Motets, 10) and “knows well the characteristics of the ecclesiastical modes” (Gallo, Music of the
Middle Ages II, 127). Other singers are indicated as having higher voices, such as Arnold of Martin who is
compared to a nighingale.
56
Ibid., 22.
29
between motetis ipsis and motetorum tenores is preserved both in the organization of Murino’s
treatise and more broadly in the habits that theorists exhibit when citing motets: while
either of the upper voices can be referenced by the incipit of one of them, tenors seem to
stand rhetorically apart.
This is not to say that the tenor was considered unimportant. Johannes de Grocheio’s turn-of-the-century comparison between the tenor of a motet and, on the one hand,
the foundation of a house, and on the other, the skeleton of the body, was echoed by numerous later writers.57 For example, the Quatuor Principalia indicates that singers should sing
the tenor articulately so as to avoid dissonant mis-alignment with the upper voices, then
appends the familiar architectural comparison:
It should be known according to…all musical singers that the tenor which
holds the discant should be sung well and strongly to the beat, lest those
discanting above should meet with a dissonance, and thus [musical] sense
should be expelled. For a stable building cannot be constructed upon an
unstable foundation, nor can a discant be performed over an unstable tenor
without dissonance.58
Jacobus de Montibus invokes the same idea in the seventh book of the Speculum miscae.
In the course of providing a possible etymology for “discantus,” he suggests that the word
comes from “de” (from) and “cantus” (song), since polyphony indeed arises from a song—
namely, the tenor:59
57
“Tenor autem est illa pars, supra quam omnes aliae fundantur, quemadmodum partes domus vel aediicii
super suum fundamentum. Et eas regulat et eis dat quantitatem, quemadmodum ossa partibus aliis,” ed.
Rholoff, Die Quellenhandschriften, 146–7. The implications of this foundational metaphor for our perception of upper-voice structures is discussed in Chapter Two.
58
“Sciendum…omnes musicales cantores quod Tenor qui discantum tenet integre et solide pronunciari
debet in mensura ne supra discantantes dissonantiam incurrant, et hoc ratio exigit. Nam super instabile fundamentum stabile aediicium construi non potest, sic nec instabilem tenorem vix sine dissonantia discantus
pronunciari potest,” “De musica antiqua et nova” in Coussemaker, Scriptorum, 3:362.
59
“Vel potest dici discantus a “dy” quod est “de” et cantu, quasi de cantu sumptus, idest de tenore,” Bragard,
ed., Jacobi Leodiensis Speculum musicae, 7:9.
30
The discant is established upon the tenor, somewhat like a building upon its
foundation; and hence that voice is called “tenor,” since it holds (tenet) and
upholds the discant. For what man sings polyphony without a tenor; what
man builds without a foundation?…The discant is derived from the tenor,
by which it should be should be ruled, and with which it should be in harmony rather than in discord.60
But directly following this clear statement about the tenor’s harmonic dominance and foundational nature, Jacobus turns things on their heads, explaining that the upper voices are as
much a song as the tenor, and hence the “cantus” in “discantus” may well refer to them:
Not only is the tenor set under the discant, but also the opposite; for the
discanting voices can either be compared to the tenor with which they are
obliged to concord (and hence this voice is called discantus), or they can be
considered by themselves: not with respect to the notes of the tenor and sung
at the same time as them, but separately and in turn, one after the other, as
when someone by themselves sings some motetus or triplum or quadruplum
without a tenor, and then the whole work (et tunc absolute). Such notes have
the grammatical sense of an independent song; and in the same way it is said
of the notes of the tenor, that they can be compared to [those of] discantus
and sung together with it, or sung separately on their own.61
There is much to wonder at in this passage. Directly following his traditional statement
about the tenor as a foundation and source of origin for the upper voices, Jacobus now explicitly states that the upper voices are indeed independent entities, as much a song as the
tenor, and hence not really dependent on the tenor at all. He ends by comparing the tenor to
the upper voices, and using their independence as paradigmatic of the tenor’s independence.
Things seem to have gone full circle.
60
“Idest de tenore supra quem discantus fundatur, sicut aediicium aliquod supra suum fundamentum; unde
ille cantus tenor dicitur, quia discantum tenet et fundat. Quis enim sine tenore discantat, quis sine fundamento aediicat?…Discantus igitur a tenore dependet, ab eo regulari debet, cum ipso concordare habet, non
discordare,” Ibid.
61
“Non tenor de discantu sumitur, sed e converso. Possunt autem voces discantus ad voces comparari tenoris cum quibus debent concordare, et tunc talis cantus discantus dicitur. Vel possunt per se considerari,
non per respectum ad voces tenoris et ut simul dicuntur cum illis, sed divisim successive una post aliam cum
aliquis per se cantat motetum aliquem, triplum vel quadruplum, sine tenore et tunc absolute. Tales voces
rationem cantus habent. Et eodem modo dicendum est de vocibus tenoris ut ad voces comparantur discantus
et simul cum illis dicuntur, vel ut per se et divisim decantantur,” Ibid.
31
And then there is Jacobus’s example of this independence—a practice that seems to
have been known to his readers, thus requiring no more than a passing reference: “as when
someone by themselves sings some motetus or triplum or quadruplum without a tenor, et
tunc absolute.” This glimpse of a sort-of dissection of motets constituted in the performance
of the upper voices on their own rings true with the other aspects of motet reception so far
discussed and gives some hint about one way of overcoming the dificulties of a polytextual
texture (though more about this in Chapter Two). Signiicantly, Jacobus does not indicate
that a motet tenor would be sung on its own—his assurance that the notes of a tenor can be
“sung separately on their own” is back in the range of polyphony more broadly deined, or
indeed of discant speciically. Certainly the tenors of discant had their own lives as plainchant. But I believe that it is no coincidence that when he wants to give the upper voices
their full due Jacobus switches from talking about discant in general to motets in particular.
The upper voices of motets, with their separate texts, did indeed represent a new level of
independence for discanting voices.
THE TRANSMISSION OF TEXT
Just because a theorist cites a motet—by whatever voice—does not mean that he
knows its text. Indeed, a few of the incipits listed in Appendix 1A are already corrupt.
Christopher Page has drawn attention to this, arguing that “the decay rate for even the most
obvious verbal subtleties in these pieces was very rapid once the piece moved away from
the composer and his immediate circle.”62 As an example, he notes that the words “In nova
fert animus” at the beginning of Vitry’s Garrit/In nova are “distorted in one manuscript of a
treatise containing Vitry’s teachings, becoming In nova sit animus.” Although such a slip may
62
Page, “A Reply,” 130.
32
reveal only “a commonplace ignorance quite beneath the ‘small circle’ of connoisseurs for
motets,” we could also “regard it as signiicant evidence for an indifference among medieval
listeners to some of the kinds of subtlety that modern critics advocate, and therefore as a
cautionary sign that those advocacies may be in some degree misplaced.”63
The treatise in question was copied around 1400 by an Italian scribe who also misspelled Vitry’s name as “Vetri.”64 Nor can it be said to contain Vitry’s teachings, although
it shares a source with a fragment of a treatise that does.65 But Page’s larger point is well
taken. Certainly the relative importance of various aspects of composition may be gleaned
from transmission insofar as scribes themselves were members of the circles in which motets were written or performed.66 Furthermore, differences between central and more peripheral sources relative to a work’s original context may help to reveal, if not indifference,
then shifts in priorities.
Upper-Voice Texts
To see what can be gleaned from this sort of evidence let us consider the variants of
textual transmission and underlay for Apta/Flos. This motet is an especially good candidate
for such an analysis because survives in four legible sources that range widely in provenance
and date. Its Durham source is from the mid-fourteenth century and thus the earliest, but
its English provenance renders it the most peripheral. The other three sources are French
63
Ibid., 130–1.
64
Fuller, “A Phantom Treatise,” 33.
65
Fuller has characterized it as “a potpourri of conventional topics” copied form a defective exemplum,
Ibid., 24.
66
Though it should be stressed that the care or negligence displayed by scribes in the copying of motets does
not indicate anything about authorial intentions, or indeed about performance: scribal errors, especially
minor ones, do not guarantee errors in performance. See the discussion of scribal intention and the status
of variants as evidence in Bent, “Text Setting,” 292–3.
33
or Italian, but later: Ivrea copied c. 1390; Chantilly from the following decade; Modena
A from c. 1410.67 These four sources will thus allow us to ask questions about textual corruption as a function of time and of place. Furthermore, Apta/Flos has a notoriously dificult text: A. G. Rigg has written that “the exact translation of the [triplum] is doubtful at
all parts, and the syntax is obscure.”68 This motet thus represents an extreme test-case for
the transmission of verbal subtleties. Finally, Apta/Flos is conducive to exploring different
kinds of textures, since it includes syllabic texting as well as hockets and melismatic writing.
Figure 1.4 compares readings for the irst 37 breves of the triplum voice, and Figure
1.5 for the entire motetus.69 Not surprisingly, differences in spelling between the sources
are common, especially as regards doubled letters (barum vs. barrum), “c” for “t,” (segnities/
segnicies), and so forth. There is also one instance of metathesis: “cabarsis” for “carbasis” in
Ivrea’s triplum. Textual corruptions that could threaten sense are few. The most serious one
is in Ivrea’s version of the motetus, where “multa byssus” seems to have become “non multa
abissu” or perhaps “abissus”—it is dificult to tell. This is the only case in which a word has
been added in any of the sources. No words are missing. Ivrea has “indiga” (needy) where the
three other sources have “indigna” (undeserving), though Rigg suggests that the Ivrea reading makes more sense.70 Regarding the inal word in the segment of the triplum reproduced
67
Two more sources—CaB and SL2211—are illegible, or nearly so. The motet is also listed in the index
to Trémoïlle.
68
PMFC 5 supplement, 5.
69
In order to represent the alignment of text and music as faithfully as possible, the relative spacing and
size of text and notes have been adjusted. Thus when a word is written with spaces (“c o n s u m i t o,” etc.) it
is not because the letters are spaced out in the source, but because a large number of notes are squeezed in
over this word in one source, but not in others. Scribal abbreviations and ligatures are indicated with italics,
and boxed areas represent passages which will be analyzed in more detail below, and for which facsimiles are
provided.
70
PMFC 5 supplement, 5.
34
Iv
Mod
Ch
Dur
AP
A
[ ]P
AP
B.SMMMSMSMSSSBSBSMSSS33MS S M33M S M MMM33MMMMS S M SMB1 S MS M S S S M SMB.33M33
ta caro plumis ingenii desidie barum et studii
apta caro plumis ingenii desidie barrum & studii
ta caro plumis ingenii desidie barum se studii
ta ca ro plu mis ingenii desidie bar rum & studii
Laboris que
L a borisque
La borisque
Laboris
foco moli ci es |
foco mollici|es
foco molici es
que foco mollicies
MS M M M M33M33M S M M M M33M S M M M M MMM SMMMMSMSS S M M M S M SML1 S S S M
Iv
nablum tangevocis plus so lito duc pulmonis |
et c o n i u g a centro s egnities quo piscressit plumbm consumi to
Mod
coniuga
centro sengnities quo pigrescit plumbum consumito
nablum tange vocis plus solito |duc pulmonis
Ch
et coniu|ga centro segnicies quo pigrescit plumbum consumito
nablum tange vocis plus solitus duo pulmonis
Dur & coniunga centro segnicies quo pigrescit plumbum c o n s u m i t o nablum tange |vocisplus solito duc pulmonis
35
facsimiles in Figure 1.10
Iv
Mod
Ch
Dur
M M M S M S 33M M MM33M S M M M M 33M33MMMM33M33M33M S M M M M334M4444M M M33MM M M S MS33M S
cabarsis cardinem lingue lini gutris arundinem tua d ? i ? a l i t u r a m littere quam conetur in preces fundere iusto
carbasis cardinem lingue lini guctris arundinem
tua clio
licturam lictere quam| conetur in preces fundere iusto
carbasis|cardinem lingue linigutris arumdinem tuam dio
licturam lictere quam conetur in pre ces fundere visco
carbasis cardinem lingue lini guttris arundinem tua c l i o l itt u<> ram| lñe? quam c on e tur in perces fundere visco
Figure 1.4: Apta/Flos, mm. 1–37; a comparison of triplum text underlay in four sources
Iv
Mod
Ivrea, fol. 5v–6
ModA, fol. 18v–19
Ch
Dur
Chantilly, fol. 60v–61
Durham, 338v–339
“|”
“?”
line-break
unclear text
“<>”
missing notes
Iv
Mod
Ch
Dur
44444BBSSSSSMSSSSMSMBSSMMMSMSSB1B1B1SB S S S S S M S M B1B S BS2S B S B SM SMMMMSMSMMMSMSMSMSM
Flos
F
fLOS
FLos
virginum decus et species
virginum decus et speties
Virginum decus & species
v i r g i n u m d e c u s & species
Los
adultere lucis
con<>nubio
Adultere| lucis connubio non
In
a dultere lucis co nu bis non
in
adultere lucis connu bi o
non in
|non in
di
di ga
facsimiles in Figure 1.9
Iv
Mod
Ch
Dur
36
Iv
Mod
Ch
Dur
SMSMSMS SM SMB4S M S MMMS S M S MB1S2 S B S 1B.2B2B2BS S SB S S S S MB1 S S S B S2SB S SMSSB S
dig na us auri radio si ge marum vesperescat dies te
ga
vel auri radio Si gemmarum vespera|scit dies te
diga
|vel auri radio Si ge ma rum verperescit dies te
vel au ri
|radio si gemmarum vesperescit dies te
surgente de
cor ipse quo nichil gra|tius & agrada gratie l i n e a que
surgente
decor ipse quo nichil gratius Et agrada
gratie linea que|
surgente de
cor ipse quo nichil gracius Et agrada gra|ci e li nea qua
s u r g e n t e d e c o r ip se q u o nichil gratius &a g r a d a gratie l i n e a q u a |
SS4SSMSS4S44S M S MSMSMSM S S S B4 4S44S4M 4SMB1 S2 S B S 1 B. 2B2B2B@S4S44S44B44S4S4M4 S4M 44B4
st?ix atrum sol scalor t r a b e a limus ostrum quo tinxit tiri us
stix a t r u m sol scolor trabea
limbus ostrum quo tinxit tyrius
stix a t r u m sol scalor tra be a
Lumbus ostrum quo tinxit tirius
stix a t r u msolscalor tra be a l i m b u s ostrum quod tinxit tirius
it candente non| m u l t a
it ca den te
sit candentem.Mul |
sit candente m u l t a a
a bis
|multa
ta
bis
su ? virtutam calcu lo
byssus virtutum calcu lo
bissus virtutum calcu lo
s u s virtutum cal|culo nu-
facsimiles in Figure 1.8
Iv
Mod
Ch
Dur
1 S S S444B4S424S44B S SSSBSM S S S S M S S SMSS4SMMMSMS S M S M B S S MMMSMB1S2S B S 2SS1
nunu menummo
mer orum non certa i li a
nati mater patris p l u e pia
rorum n on certa i li a Nati mater patris plue
|pia
merorum non certa i li a
nati mater patris p l u e pia
rum
non certa i li a n a t i mater p r i ? s p l u e pia l a c
la crimarum|nimbos pro po p u l o
Lacrimarum nimbos pro popu
lo
Lacrimarum|nimbos pro popu
lo
r i m a r u m nimbos pro p o p u l o
te p o s c e n t e.
te poscente.
te p o s c e n t e :
te p o s c e n t e.
Figure 1.5: Apta/Flos, comparison of motetus text underlay in four sources (abbreviations and symbols as in Figure 1.4)
in Figure 1.6, the sources are evenly divided between “iusto” and “visco,” as they are about
whether the motetus should read “it” or “sit” before “ca(n)dente(m)” (Figure 1.5, middle
of third line). Finally, two scribes seem to have had problems with the name of the muse
Clio in the triplum (Figure 1.4, middle of line 3). Perhaps not expecting the reference, the
Chantilly scribe has read “clio” as “dio,” while Ivrea has something illegible at this point.71
These are all of the signiicant variants that I have noticed, and some ambiguities
in Ivrea may be the fault of the microilm rather than the scribe. Certainly these kinds of
differences should give us some pause—we might well object, for example, to an argument
that the whole motet is focused around the presence of Clio, which had special signiicance
for listeners in 1380s Ivrea.72 But overall the readings are remarkably similar, especially
given the dificulty of the text. Broadly speaking, I do not see here too many examples of
the kind of corruption that would preclude consideration of texts as analytically signiicant.
This in itself is interesting when we remember the temporal and geographic scope covered
by the sources, which indeed take us far beyond “the composer and his immediate circle.”
A more interesting set of differences is to be found in comparing these four scribes’
approaches to text underlay—or really, I should say with regard to note overlay, since in
all four cases words were clearly copied before notes.73 This order of operations makes the
most sense where text-setting is syllabic or mostly syllabic. But an ars nova motet such as
Apta/Flos also includes passages of melismatic writing and of hocket, and it is here that
alignment becomes a more complicated matter. For if in syllabic textures words take up
71
On the problem of illegible proper nouns (and proper nouns born of illegibility) in Chantilly, see Dulong
& Sultan, “Nouvelles lectures,” 105–7.
72
On the circumstances surrounding the copying of Ivrea, see Kügle, “The Manuscript Ivrea,” 46–79.
73
This seems to have been true of ars nova motets more generally. On the order of copying in the Machaut
manuscripts, see Earp, “Scribal Practice,” 178–94.
37
more space than notes, the reverse is often true in hockets and melismas, so that space must
be left between some words and syllables, but not others. A look at the beginning of the motetus in Chantilly is instructive (see Figure 1.6). The scribe has left a space for the opening
melisma on “los”—though almost too small a space, as the crowded notation shows—and
also later on “non” and “in-” at the end of the line. The inal syllable of the line is also followed by a melisma, and this too is crowded in. Clearly some calculation and experience was
required to achieve the correct text underlay in this repertory, and even this expertise would
not guarantee even note spacing.74
Figure 1.6: The opening of the motetus of Apta/Flos (Chantilly, fol. 61)
A different approach to the problem is taken by the Durham scribe, whose rendition of the same passage is reproduced in Figure 1.7. In writing the text he left no spaces
between words, with the exception of the introitus on “Flos”—and even here, not enough.
Thus “Virginum” begins six breves earlier in the Durham source, where it is underlaid to
breves separated by rests.
Figure 1.7: The opening of the motetus of Apta/Flos (Durham, fol. 339)
74
Elizabeth Randell Upton has critiqued editorial reliance on scribal text underlay as based on “the assumption that a medieval manuscript is a score in the modern sense,” arguing that the Chantilly scribe in
particular was often more interested in the symmetry of page-layout resulting from text-placement than he
was in music overlay, “Aligning Words and Music,” 115, 121–3. However this evaluation of scribal practice
does not take the motets into account, for example when Upton cites Armes, amours as exhibiting “some of
the clearest and most unambiguous word/tone alignment in the entire manuscript” (118).
38
A look back at Figures 1.4 and 1.5 shows that this example is characteristic of the
Durham scribe’s less precise approach to underlay. While Ivrea, Modena, and Chantilly
agree in essentially all details of text underlay for the syllabic parts of the motet, the notes
in Durham phase in and out of synchrony with their texts. As a result, words or parts of
words are sometimes underlaid to rests, and the alignment of many passages is unclear.
And yet the Durham scribe does not bungle things completely. Especially in the more syllabic triplum, his underlay is actually quite close to the other three sources. Furthermore,
it is clear that he copied from an exemplar that had good underlay, since the line-breaks in
Durham leave nothing to be desired and align perfectly with the text set in other sources
for those passages. Such would not have been the case if Durham were copied from a source
like Durham. In any case, we do arguably see a different set of priorities at play here, and
it would be telling if other insular sources of ars nova motets were equally cavalier (we’ll
discuss one more below).
Differences in text-setting among the other three sources are limited to melismatic
passages and hocket. In melismas, syllable placement varries slightly from source to source.
See, for example, the word “ilia,” in the passage from the motetus represented in Figure
1.8. Here Modena gives a semibreve to “i-,” two ligated semibreves to “-li-,” and the rest
(BSM) to “-a,” while Chantilly gives two semibreves in ligature to “i,” one to “li,” and, again,
three notes to “-a.” In both cases the text-setting is unambiguous. Ivrea seems to have the
same text-setting as Chantilly, also with a ligature on “i-,” though it is less clear because
the spacing is more cramped. Only Durham does not allow three notes to “-a,” and this
seems less a deliberate choice than a function of the more inexact approach already mentioned. (Strangely, PMFC follows the Durham texting.) The other two melismatic words
39
(a) Ivrea:
(b) Modena:
(c) Chantilly:
(d) Durham:
Figure 1.8: Apta/Flos, motetus mm. 74–82; text placement in four sources
(a) Ivrea:
(b) Modena:
(c) Chantilly:
(d) Durham:
Figure 1.9: Apta/Flos, motetus mm. 32–45; text placement in four sources
40
in the passage, “plue” and “pia,” are also clearly texted in Modena and Chantilly. Ivrea does
not indicate the switch from one syllable to another, but does clearly group the appropriate
notes over each word. Overall, then, the differences in underlay in the passage in question
are tiny, and this in itself is signiicant. Slightly more divergence can be found in the melismatic section between “connubio” and “indiga” in the motetus, but here too the divergences
are fairly small, since short note-values are involved (Figure 1.5, end of irst line).
The four sources of Apta/Flos also differ in their approaches to texting hockets. The
motetus passage represented by igure 1.9 is indicative. Only Durham makes no allowance
for the hocketed notes, writing them over the second half of “surgente” and “decor.” The
other three sources accommodate the hocketed notes, but demonstrate two approaches:
Ivrea and Chantilly (Figure 1.9a and c) both leave space by splitting up the word “decor,”
thus setting the hocketed notes to “de-.” Modena, on the other hand, leaves space between
“surgente” and “decor,” so that no word is split by the rests in the hocket (Figure 1.9b).
Similar discrepancies can be seen when we compare readings for a triplum passage that
mixes syllabic declamation and hocket (Figure 1.10). Here Modena makes it clear that a
four-syllable phrase (“tua[m] clio”) is surrounded by untexted hockets on either side, which
separate these words from others in the text (Figure 1.10b). Durham has a similar reading, though less precisely aligned (Fig 1.10d). The Chantilly scribe has also left space after
“tuam” and “clio,” but seems to set the former to the two hocketed minims (Figure 1.10c).
Ihe Ivrea reading is similar to Chantilly (Figure 1.10a).
41
(a) Ivrea:
(c) Chantilly:
(b) Modena:
(d) Durham:
Figure 1.10: Apta/Flos, triplum mm. 32–4; text placement in four sources
Some of these text-underlay solutions are prescriptive, and others pragmatic. The
Modena scribe has made an effort in both examples of hocket discussed so far (Figures 1.9
and 1.10) to set text unbroken to groups of notes which can accommodate it. On the other
hand, the solutions offered by the Ivrea and Modena scribes seem to be a means to an end:
words are split or spaced out as necessary when text is written to ensure that there will be
enough space for the hocket. Then, notes are added in an arrangement as close as possible
to the desired texting, but this still often means placing rests over syllables. The latter approach to texting would degrade quickly as copies became exemplars. We may perhaps agree
with Page that this kind of subtlety is less robust, and may become lost more easily when
works left the circles of performers and audiences who knew them well.
And yet, the texting of hockets was an important enough issue to form the subject of
the motet Musicalis/Sciencie. Here the motetus text is a letter from Rhetoric to Music asking
that she inluence her disciples not to split words with hockets, and the triplum is a letter
from Music to these very disciples (a long list of whom is given) asking them to comply with
42
Rhetoric’s request.75 This of course tells us that some people were splitting text and others
were not—which may seem unhelpful. But a closer look at scribal practice and compositional design shows that far fewer words are so split than the available editions would have
us believe.76
In fact, the intended texting is often clariied by the notes which follow the hocket
section. In the example of Apta/Flos discussed above, the solution offered by Modena is
most convincing not only because words stay intact, but because the melodic line seems to
be built to accommodate the text following the hocket. In Figure 1.10, “litturam” clearly
belongs with the minim-semibreve-minim phrase after the hocket, and In Figure 1.9, the
irst syllable of “Decor” also belongs after the hocket, and in that case the entire phrase
“Decor ipse quo nichil gratius” is texted syllabically, like the corresponding phrase in the
irst talea—“virginum decus et species.”77
It is important to note that in both of these cases Ivrea does not support the reading
which is indicated by compositional design. Since it is our only source for many ars nova
motets, we have trusted it perhaps too readily to provide texting solutions for these passages.
But there are a number of cases in the manuscript where a word that seems split by a hocket
is in fact perfectly accommodated by notes after the hocket which have been transcribed as
untexted. The most striking example is Vitry’s Petre/Lugentium, where all hockets seem to
split words according to Schrade’s edition (which mostly follows Ivrea). In fact it is not clear
to me that any words are split. The Ivrea readings and PMFC text underlay for the motet’s
75
Musicalis/Sciencie is discussed in more detail in Chapter Five.
76
As Bent has observed regarding a slightly later repertory, “all too often, modern editors observe the actual
physical alignment without adequate consideration of the practical constraints which produced it,” “Text
Setting,” 294.
77
Mm. 14–6.
43
irst hocket are given in Figure 1.11 and Example 1.4, and these represent the hockets as
sparsely texted. But there is space for this text in mm. 27–32. Moving it there leaves us
with an alternation of texted and untexted musical space that is much more convincing (see
Example 1.5, which also uses an improved reading of the text).78 The same kind of change
applies in six more passages in the motet: in each case the text which has been loosely underlaid to hockets by the scribe or editor can be snugly added after them, where there is
often exactly enough space for them—to the note. Making this series of changes renders
Petre/Lugentium an essay on alternating textures, since the motet in fact cycles regularly between sections of hocket with no text in either voice, sections in which the upper voices alternate in delivering passages of text two breves in length (as in mm. 31–6 in Example 1.5),
and truly polytextual sections. More broadly, it is my impression that there are few loosely
texted hockets in this repertory. Very often, and especially in the work of Vitry, hockets
either have words, or they don’t, and this has consequences for the editor and performer as
well as—in some cases—serious implications for the analyst.79
Scribal corrections and erasures serve as further evidence both of the dificulties
involved, and of the importance of text-music alignment in the copying of motets.80 These
usually involve either the erasure and re-notation of notes to bring them into better alignment with syllables, or the drawing of lines between syllables and notes that belong together
but are not aligned. Lawrence Earp has shown that in the Machaut manuscripts “a large
78
The edition in Example 1.5 uses textual readings drawn from a literary source for the motet from 1340,
which has “tenuit” instead of “temnunt” and “suscepisti” in place of “superes”—both make more sense given
the meter. See David Howlett’s edition and discussion of the source in Wathey, “The Motets of Philippe de
Vitry,” 133–6. Note however that owing to an error the motetus and triplum text switch places partway
through Howlett’s edition, without notice.
79
See the analyses of In virtute/Decens and Cum statua/Hugo in Chapters Five and Six.
80
See comments in Bent, “Text Setting,” 294.
44
Triplum:
Motetus:
Figure 1.11: Petre/Lugentium mm. 19–30 (Ivrea, fols. 37v–38)
Example 1.4: Petre/Lugentium mm. 19–30 (reproduced from PMFC1, 97)
Example 1.5: Petre/Lugentium mm. 19–38, alternate text-setting
45
portion of the erasures and corrections in the texts and music…were made speciically to
clarify the correlation between words and notes.”81 And while all genres were subject to such
emendations, motets seem to be the most frequently affected.82 Not surprisingly, corrections often clarify texting during melismas and hocket—the places where, as we have seen,
normal procedures of copying may not be precise enough. Figure 1.12 shows two examples
of guide-lines used by the scribe of Machaut Manuscript A: the irst of these connects the
last syllable of “Desir” with the longa that ends the phrase, and the second clariies the
placement of “-na” in the melisma over “superna.” Guide-lines are also used to help align
text and hockets: the lines barely visible in Figure 1.13a and simulated in Figure 1.13b
(but clearly present in the original) correct text underlay that would have split the word
“dolereus.” The reulting reading for this passage, which is not followed in any of the available editions of Motet 10, is given as Figure 1.13c.83
Figure 1.12: Clariication of text underlay during melismas in Machaut Manuscript A
(a) motetus of De bon/Puis (M4, fol. 417v)
(b) motetus of Fons/O livoris (M9, fol. 422v)
81
“Scribal Practice,” 195–6. See also Bent, “Text Setting,” 294.
82
See ibid., 266–8 for a list of corrections by genre within each manuscript.
83
Machaut, Musikalische Werke, 3:39; PMFC 2:143; Boogaart, “O series summe rata,” 607. Manuscript
C has an extra word at this point (fol. 214v), so that the line reads “et pour plus croistre mes dolereus meschies”—this can work within the meter if “croistre” functions as a monosyllable, but the music scribe assigned it two notes, and dolereus is again split. Ferrell-Vogüé follows MS C, including “plus” in its text but
giving two notes to “croistre.” Perhaps the discrepancies in later MSS arise from this initial error in MS C,
or the uncertainty that produced it. In any case, the correction in MS A is clear in its intention.
46
Figure 1.13: Hareu/Helas (M10), triplum mm. 75–82 in Manuscript A (fol. 424)
(a) Faint lines clarify text underlay before a hocket
(b) transcription in PMFC (2:143), with lines from source replicated
(c) text underlay adjusted to match corrections in source
It is not surprising that such care should be taken with Machaut’s motets in sources
that were in all likelihood copied under his watchful eye.84 But similar types of emendations
were also made in other manuscripts transmitting ars nova motets. As Kügle has noted,
Ivrea’s “numerous corrections and erasures in text and music suggest [that] most entries
were routinely proofread,” and some of these are clearly motivated by text-underlay.85 In
Chantilly, we ind a correction of a different sort near the beginning of the motetus of Rex/
Leticie. Here the music scribe noticed the words “ac salutis” missing from the text “ac salutis
humano generi,” and supplied them with a small hand, carefully placing the syllables under
the appropriate notes. He then repositioned the irst syllable of “humano” to accord with the
new text underlay (Figure 1.14).
Figure 1.14: Missing text added to the motetus of Rex/Leticie in Chantilly (fol. 66)
84
See Earp, “Machaut’s Role.”
85
For example, several minims have been erased and re-notated to clarify underlay in the triplum of A vous/
Ad te on fol. 19v.
47
Tenor Texts
So far the discussion of textual transmission and underlay has been limited to the
upper voices of motets. Tenor text underlay is not an issue in most cases, but we can look at
the transmission of tenor texts and compare the variations here with those observed in the
upper voices. Tenors are as subject to small variants as the upper voices— “ante thronum
trinitatis” of Ida/Portio is labeled “Ante thorum trinitatis” in Chantilly, with disastrous results for the translation.86 But more common are variants in how much, if any, of the tenor’s text is given. In the case of Apta/Flos, all the sources give a tenor incipit. Ivrea, Modena,
and Durham have “Alma redemptoris mater,” while Chantilly has “Alma redemptoris.” On
the other hand, the tenor of O canenda/Rex is variously labeled as “Tenor o canenda” (Ivrea
fol. 55), “Rex regum tenor” (Durham, fol. 337v and FriZ, fol. 86v), and “Tenor primus”
(Paris 2444, fol. 48v). None of these four souces transmits the full text of the chant fragment used, which is “Rex regum regi ilio.”87 Clark has listed 17 other motets whose tenors
“use more melodic material than their manuscript text indicates,” and this number is in
fact much larger when we take different sources into account—for example, “Merito hec
patimur,” the tenor of Tribum/Quoniam in Fauvel, is labeled “Merito” in Brussels.88 Clark
86
“In the presence of the throne of the trinity” becomes “in the presence of the trinity’s protuberance” (or
“the trinity’s mussel”); Chantilly, fol. 61v. The variant is transcribed without emendation in PMFC5, 24.
87
Clark, “Concordare cum materia,” 217.
88
See Ibid., pp. 46–7. The list does not include O canenda/Rex. Clark also gives a list of four “Motets that
use less melodic material than their manuscript tag indicates” (p. 48, Table II), but it is not clear that the
four should be grouped together. In once case (Apollinis/Zodiacum) only a inal melisma is omitted, so the
label is correct, as Clark notes (48n47). Firmissime/Adesto uses an Alleluia chant as tenor and the Fauvel
label, “Alleluya Benedictus et cetera,” simply indicates which Alleluia is being used (Alleluia Benedictus es
from Trinity Sunday), and as such is acting as a label rather than an incipit or a text (also noted by Clark,
p. 48). The same tenor in Brussels is labeled “[A]lleluya alleluya alleluya,” which is closer to an incipit,
depending on the number of times “Alleluia” is repeated—the tenor is repeated twice. Kügle argues that the
change was deliberate; “Two Abbots and a Rotulus,” 162n35. On the source of the chant, see Robertson,
“Which Vitry,” 57–69. The inal motet in Clark’s Table II does not in fact have a labeled tenor in either of
its surviving copies, and the tenor melody was identiied in Gunther, The Motets of the Manuscripts, xlviii.
48
has suggested that because their tenor labels diverge from the amount of chant used, these
works make up “a group of motets where the composer apparently asserts a bit more control
over the preexistent melody.” But it is not clear whether there is a stable enough pattern of
transmission to speak of authorial control, or whether in fact the decision of how much of
a tenor text to write was made by scribes. Only Machaut’s tenors are consistently labeled,
and that only within the Machaut corpus. Beyond it, they too are subject to emendation and
omission.89 The levels of divergence between tenor labels differ markedly from the kinds of
differences we have seen in the upper voices. In the upper-voice texts it is rare indeed to see
a word missing, and when missing, this text is sometimes supplied, as in the example from
Chantilly. In tenors, on the other hand, there is clearly not the same idea of a “text” that
need to be complete—tenors have labels, not texts, and these vary greatly in accuracy and
completeness from source to source.
And, of course, many tenors are not labeled at all in some or all of their sources.
With few exceptions, these missing labels seem not to have been subject to correction. In
Ivrea’s redaction of Les l’ormel/Meyn the tenor’s text—originally omitted—was indeed supplied later in a different ink color (see Figure 1.15). However, the tenor of this late thirteenth-century motet is itself a rondeau, whose text can and probably was intended to be
sung. Thus the omitted text is in this case treated as missing lyrics rather than as a missing
label.90
89
Amours/Faus semblant has the tenor “Vidi Dominum” in Trémoïlle (fol. 8)—this matches the Machaut
sources. In Ivrea (fol. 21), this tenor is written as “Vidi dmñ &c.,” which is not strictly incorrect since the
chant used includes the words “vidi dominum facie ad faciem.” Qui es promesses/Ha Fortune (M8) has the
tenor “Et non est qui adiuvet” in Trémoïlle (fol. 8), “Non est qui adiuvet” in Ivrea (fol. 24v), and no label
other than “Tenor” in CaB (fol. 16v). Martyrum/Diligenter, which has the tenor “A christo honoratus” in the
Machaut manuscripts, is labeled “Tenor xp˜ o honorate & c.” in Ivrea (fol. 11); in this case, the “& c.” is actually incorrect, since the chant used ends with “honoratus.”
90
Though in Ivrea the text is not underlaid exactly to the tenor notes (it could not it under the tenor as
49
Figure 1.15: Tenor text added to Les l’ormel/Meyn (Ivrea, fol. 22)
The text added to the rondeau tenor of Les l’ormel/Meyn and the missing syllables
supplied in Chantilly for the motetus of Rex/Leticie serve as reminders that when text is
missing it can be supplied, if someone deems it necessary. The large number of works in the
repertory whose tenors remain unlabeled in one or all of their sources strongly implies that
a motet was considered complete in its redaction whether or not its tenor had a text.
Intabulations
The last type of material to consider from the point of view of scribal reception for
motet texts is intabulations. On the face of it, the very existence of instrumental intabulations of motets would argue against the importance of words, since the fully instrumental
(probably keyboard) performance that tablatures make possible precludes the delivery of
text and seems to silence the poetic aspects of composition.91 But the transmission of several ars nova motets in the so-called Robertsbridge Codex tells a surprising story.92
written), and is allowed to low into the margin. The text given is “Je n’y saindrai plus graile saintureite, mon
ami est marie. Il a mis mon cuer en si grant distresse,” which provides enough text for all but the internal “ab”
of the rondeau. CaB does not give a tenor here. Torino 42 has only “Je ne chaindrai mais”; Udine includes
the tenor text as part of the original copying effort, though as in Ivrea it is not underlaid, but simply written.
The source is fragmentary, thus “Je ne chaindray plus haingre chainturete mes amis est” is all that survives
of the tenor text (fol. 1).
91
Though Jane Flynn has suggested that in the case of Machaut’s De toutes flous in the codex Faenza “the
intabulator emphasizes certain aspects of the poetic content and musico-poetic structure”: “The Intabulation of De toutes flours,” 178.
92
This source, BL Add. 28550, is probably from the 1350s; see Roesner’s introduction in Vitry, Complete
50
At the end of this manuscript, which contains a chronicle of the abbey of Robertsbridge between the years 1308 and 1333, are found two folios which are the earliest
surviving examples of instrumental notation. In addition to three estampies, three motets
are intabulated: Firmissime/Adesto and Tribum/Quoniam from Fauvel and an unicum with
a triplum which begins Flos vernalis stirps regalis. The reason that we can know the text of
the latter, and easily identify the two former works, is that, unlike the estampies, the motet
intabulations are in fact texted.
The irst three lines of Firmissime/Adesto, reproduced in Figure 1.16 along with a
diplomatic transcription of the text underlay, are instructive. Here the motetus text “Ades”
is underlaid to the beginning of the motet, this being as much of the word “Adesto” as
sounds before the triplum text begins, overlapping with “-to.” After this the triplum text
only is given. It may come as a surprise that in all three motets the triplum text is given in
full. Though the writer has used a large number of abbreviations, not a single word is missing from either Firmissime fidem or Tribum que non abhorruit.93
If an initial explanation for the presence of this text is that it served as an aidemémoire for the intabulator, a closer look dispels this theory: the text was entered after the
notes and letters of the intabulation, which it studiously avoids. At two points reproduced
in Figure 1.16 the scribe has run out of space and added a word above the text, and in
once case, the addition of “morti” near the end of line 2, he has drawn a faint line showing
where this interlinear word its into the text. A more detailed comparison of the motet with
its intabulation shows that the underlay of the triplum is surprisingly faithful. Despite the
Works, v–vi.
93
Flos vernalis is an unicum, and preserved incompletely, but the portion of the text that survives seems to
be metrically complete.
51
|| Fir
2. tis
patrem dili g[a]mus qui
trinita
missime idem teneamus
morti
nos tanto amore dilexit datis ad vitam e[re]
3. xit
Figure 1.16:
Intabulation of Firmissime/Adesto, mm. 1–34 (Robertsbridge, fols. 43v–
44) with text underlay transcribed
Example 1.6: Firmissime/Adesto, mm. 7–18 (reproduced from PMFC 1:60)
52
transformative arranging that makes the intabulation much more lorid than the original,
the basic points of congruence between the triplum text and its melodic contour remain.
Thus the intabulation preserves the A on “-mis[sime]” in m. 8, the F on “qui” in m. 16,
and the B-lat–F–B-lat sonority on “-xit” in m. 23 (see the congruent points marked “b,”
“d,” and “g” in Figure 1.16 and Example 1.6). Certainly not all the underlay is the same:
the parallel fourth movement between the upper voices in m. 22 is set to “ad vitam” in the
intabulation and “[e]rexit” in the motet (“f” in Figure 1.16 and Example 1.6). However, the
F-C leap in m. 21 appears in both versions with the words “[mor]ti da[tos]”—a congruence
achieved in Robertsbridge by the addition of “morti” above text already entered (see label
“e”). The other interlinear placement of text—that of “trinita-” at the end of the irst line
in Figure 1.16, is also necessitated by text underlay: as written, this text accompanies the
notes B-lat–A–G, as it does in the original (see label “c”). All around, then, it seems that
the scribe of the codex was surprisingly faithful to the original motet in his text-underlay,
and that in entering the text, after the intabulaiton had already been written, both completeness and accuracy seem to have been priorities.
What does all of this mean? For our understanding of the Robertsbridge Codex,
this messy-looking but actually quite careful texting opens up the possibility of vocal performance—perhaps by a self-accompanying musician. But even if we do not co-opt this—
the earliest source of “purely” instrumental music— for sung performance, the care taken
about text in all three motets implies that the presence of this text was an important part
of the composition on some level, whether musical or intellectual. Of course, the bitextual
framework is not preserved—the motetus is represented only by two syllables in Firmissime/
Adesto, and not at all in the other two works. And no sign of the tenor text is present. But
53
the complete presence of one voice—here the triplum—emphasizes the importance of upper-voice text to motets while also showing how these texts can sometimes take on lives of
their own.94 This independence is further conirmed by the literary transmission of motet
texts and by their citations in a wide range of poetic contexts.
MOTETS AND /AS LITERATURE
In a frequently cited passage of the Règles de la seconde rhétorique (c. 1411–32), the
anonymous author places Vitry chronologically between Jean de Meun and Machaut, commenting on his achievements and innovations:
Aprèz vint Philippe de Vitry, qui trouva la manière des motès, et des balades,
et des lais, et des simples rondeaux, et en la musique trouva les .iiij. prolacions, et les notes rouges, et la noveleté des proporcions.95
[After [Jean] came Philippe de Vitry, who discovered the manner of motets,
and of ballades, and of simple rondeaux, and in music he discovered the four
prolations, and red notes, and the novelty of proportions.]
In light of our scant knowledge of Vitry’s biography and reputation, these few lines
have been mined for anything they can tell us about the author’s lost output and legacy. The
evidence of his having found a “manner of motets” is often read as synonymous with the
ars nova.96 As for the ballades and rondeaux, commentators have lamented that no musical
settings of the formes fixes by Vitry survive.97
These readings, though by no means impossible, seem to ignore the larger structure
94
Cf. Roesner, who notes the presence of the triplum voice in the arrangements, but cites their embellishment and thinning of texture as “indicative of the complete transformation in idiom occurring when a motet
was stripped of its most distinguishing feature, its texts, and performed as an idiomatic instrumental work,”
Vitry, Complete Works, v.
95
Langlois, Recueil d’arts de seconde rhétorique, 12.
96
For example in Leech-Wilkinson, “The Emergence of Ars nova,” 285.
97
As in Brothers, Chromatic Beauty, 91.
54
of the quotation, which is clearly divided into two halves. The irst part, in keeping with the
focus of the treatise (namely, the art of versiication) lists Vitry’s poetic achievements. Then
the author shifts focus to his musical “inds.” Signaling the change of subject unambiguously with “et en la musique,” he identiies Vitry’s musical innovations as the four prolations, red notes, and the novelty of proportions. The prose format of the treatise places
few constraints upon the writer, and thus we should take him at his word when he includes
two separate lists. Thus motets would seem to be listed among other poetic forms—though
forms that are often (ballades, rondeaux) or sometimes (lais) set to music.98
That ars nova motet texts could in themselves have been considered poetry should
not be a surprise, given that the two most famous fourteenth-century motet composers
were also two of France’s most illustrious poets. Machaut’s inluence on later writers such
as Geoffrey Chaucer and Chrisine de Pisan is well known, as is Petrarch’s praise of Vitry as
“the only true poet among the French” (‘poeta nunc unicus Gallicarum . . .’).99 And yet the
idea that Vitry’s newly-discovered “manière des motès” is a poetic achievement will perhaps
sit uncomfortably with received views of the motet’s evolution. While inquiries into Machaut’s literary and musical output have recently joined forces to some extent, Vitry’s poetic
output has been traditionally down-played, or assessed separately from him musico-poetic
works.100 And as for truly anonymous ars nova motet texts (as opposed to the texts of works
98
Indeed, Vitry’s only surviving ballade, De terre en Grec Gaule appellee, survives without music and was
probably never set. It was part of an exchange to which poets Jean de le Mote and Jean Campion also contributed ballades, all of which survive without music. Their theme is the poetic craft, and it is possible that none
of them was set—we have no evidence that le Mote, the target of the exchange, was a musician. This series of
ballades is discussed in Chapter Six. For an edition and commentary, see Diekstra, “The Poetic Exchange.”
99
This praise is transmitted in the longer (a) version of Petrarch’s letter to Vitry; see Paris, Les manuscrits
françois, 3:181. On Vitry’s literary reputation, see Wathey, “The Motets of Philippe de Vitry,” 119–21.
100
Ibid. 121–2.
55
surviving anonymously but probably by Vitry), these have received no attention whatsoever
as poetic texts.
And yet motet texts clearly functioned in literary ways. Andrew Wathey has recently drawn attention to the survival of seventeen motet texts—most by Vitry—in fourteen
sources from the 14th and 15th centuries. These manuscripts, which range from a collection of sermons from 1340s Avignon to humanist miscellanies copied by German scholars
working in Italy in the mid- and even late- ifteenth century, transmit motet texts in versions that are in some cases more accurate than the versions preserved in sources such as
Ivrea.101 Thus motet texts were interesting enough to be transmitted on their own as poetry,
long after the music with which they were associated would have gone out of style. But at the
same time, this poetry seems to have gained something from being motet texts. Wathey has
stressed “the initial dependence of the tradition on copies including music, demonstrated
most clearly by the inclusion of voice-labels in the earliest of the text-only sources.”102 That
texts would be copied into manuscripts grouped by the motet to which they belong, and
with the indications of which motet voice sings which text, clearly shows that the scribes
and readers of these manuscripts took pleasure from the idea that separate texts combine
to make one work. In fact, the motet Phi millies/O creator survives only in a text manuscript,
but owing to the care of the scribe, we know not only which words belong to the motetus and
which to the triplum, but also that the tenor and contratenor sang a parodic rhyming couplet between them.103 Clearly the co-existence of texts in motets was an important aspect
101
Wathey, “The Motets of Philippe de Vitry,” 122–4.
102
Furthermore, the literary transmission of Vitry’s motet texts is an anomaly for the 14th century. As
Wathey shows, the transmission of motet texts outside of music manuscripts was not unusual in the 13th
and 15th centuries, but for the 14th century it is conined to Vitry. Idem, “Words and Music,” 1550.
103
Phi millies/O creator is discussed in detail in Chapter Six.
56
of their overall aesthetic value.
The poetic transmission of texts not by Vitry is rarer—so much so that Wathey has
suggested that “the fact of literary circulation may even emerge as a pointer towards attribution,” pushing, for example, the anonymously transmitted text Quid scire proderit closer
to the Vitry corpus.104 This may well prove to be the case, or it may be subject to revision if
more motet texts from anonymous works are discovered in literary collections. From the
Machaut corpus, the two texts of Qui/Ha Fortune (M8) survive in a collection of French
poetry from the 1480s.105
Aside from the transmission of entire texts, a number of literary allusions, citations, and elaborations attest to broader late-medieval interest in motet texts. These involve works by Vitry and Machaut as well as pieces transmitted anonymously. Sometimes
the motet text is quoted explicitly, and carries the force of a proverb. Such is the case in
Gace de la Buigne’s hunting treatise in verse, the Roman de Deduis (1359–77). Here, in the
course of discussing the behavior of falcons the speaker quotes most of the irst three lines
of the motetus in Vitry’s Douce/Garison. Vitry’s original is as follows, with the text quoted
by la Buigne italicized:106
Garison selon nature
Desiree de sa dolour
Toute humaine creature
Mais je qui ai d’un ardour
[Every human creature desires a natural cure for its sorrow.
But I, who am seized by an ardor...]
104
Wathey, “The Motets of Philippe de Vitry,” 128.
105
Earp, “Machaut’s Role,” 494–5.
106
On the place of this quotation within the larger narrative of la Buigne’s poem, see Leach, Sung Birds,
229–32.
57
In the Roman de Deduis the word order has been shifted slightly, creating a rhyming couplet
where Vitry’s rhyme-scheme was ABAB. More importantly, the word “humaine” has been
left out of Vitry’s original because la Buigne is applying the maxim to a bird rather than a
person. In a sense he has rendered Vitry’s message more universal, and also perhaps more
humorous:107
Et, se l’oysel se va baignier,
Queer il a de l’eaue mestier,
L’en ne le doit mie blasmer
De ce de quoy fait a loer
Quant garison selon nature
Desire toute creature
De sa douleur, si comme dit
Un aucteur, qui le nous escript
En un motet, qu’il ist nouveaux,
Et puis fu evesque de Meaux;
Phelippe de Vitry ot nom,
Qui mieux ist motés que nulz hom.108
[And if the bird goes to bathe itself, it seeks from the water that which is
necessary. One cannot blame it at all for this but rather must praise it, because “every creature desires a natural cure from its sorrow,” as an author
said who wrote it for us in a motet, which he newly made. Afterwards he was
Bishop of Meaux. Philippe de Vitry was his name, and he knew how to make
motets better than any other man.]109
A similar (proverbial but transformative) use of the irst several lines of a motetus
text occurs in a fatras impossible. In this form of nonsense poetry a two-line refrain AB often taken from pre-existing material is allowed to dictate the rhythmic and metrical scheme
for a poem of eleven lines with structure “AabaabbabaB.”110 These poems were not usually
107
Or perhaps not: Elizabeth Eva Leach has read in this passage an evocation of burning love, especially
Dido’s love for Aeneas, to which “the garison…is sexual consummation,” Sung Birds, 230.
108
ll. 6345–56
109
Trans. Leach, Sung Birds, 312.
110
The couplet is sometimes considered part of the poem, which is then summarized as “AB AabaabbabaB,”
but as Uhl has noted, the manuscript layout and placement of large capitals does not support this, and the
58
set to music, although there are two fatras in the interpolated Roman de Fauvel whose irst
and last lines are notated.111 And conversely a bit of the Roman de Fauvel made its way into
a fatras. Speciically, Watriquet de Couvin (l. 1319–29) used the opening two motetus
lines of Super cathedram/Presidentes to structure a fatras. The borrowed material is a complaint about corrupt rulers that sits comfortably with the broader world of Fauvel:
Presidentes in tronis seculi
Sunt hodie dolus et rapina.
presiding on the thrones of [our] age
today are treachery and plunder
In the twisted world of the fatras, the two lines get split, as we would expect, and their sense
becomes twisted. The irst line of the motetus still refers to this world, but the second is
linked hypothetically with the next: when upon the death of a sinner the “Our Father” is
said in order to absolve his wrongdoings, treachery and plunder are now in the sky with
the angels. An early transition into Latin in the middle of line 10 helps to cement this rereading:
5
“Presidentes in thronis seculi,”
Ce dist uns eus armez de cuir boilli,
“En cop de [vit] si grant medecine a
C’une charrete jusqu’a Mes en sailli,
Qui engendra le seigneur de Seulli,
La Maselaine, dont uns cos se disna;
Mais uns harens touz s’en desgratina,
Quant il fu mors, pour ce c’on li toli
La pater nostre qui li adevina
irst two lines were written only as aides-mémoire for scribes, “Fatras → fatrasie,” 218. This would have an
impact on the editions of the two fatras set to music in the interpolated Roman de Fauvel: Rosenberg and
Tischler have inserted the eleventh line after the irst to form the irst “AB,” though the manuscript presents
eleven lines without a refrain, underlaying the irst and last to music: The Monophonic Songs, 125–7.
111
Ed. Rosenberg and Tischler, The Monophonic Songs, 125–7. Two other potential musical settings of
couplets on which fatras are built survive—one is the lowest voice in the polytextual English motet Deus
creator/Rex genitor/Doucement; the other, a monotextual setting in WrocĆaw—see Brewer, “French Ars Nova,”
194–5 and “A Fourteenth-Century Polyphonic Manuscript,” 9–10, and Lefferts, The Motet in England,
84–5. However, it is not clear whether these are examples of fatras notés (as has been assumed), or whether
the poems and musical works share the same refrain. If the fatras was indeed conceived of in its eleven-line
form as Uhl suggests (see previous note), then the polyphonic works, which place lines 1 and 11 together, are
probably referring to a common source rather than to a fatras.
59
10
Qu’avec les angles, in gloria celi,
Sunt hodie dolus et rapina”112
[“Presiding on thrones of time”
Said one with arms of boiled leather,
“There is such strong medicine in a good fuck
That it blew a cart right into Metz,
Which gave birth to the lord of Seuilly,
On the Feast of Madeleine, when he dined on the hull of a wheat germ;
But a herring scratched them all,
When he was dead because one took away from him
The “our father” which came upon him
With the angels in the glory of heaven,
There are days of deceit and plunder.”]113
The exact meaning of some of the lines is elusive, but the way in which the original
couplet is transformed is evident: the ideal reader of for such poetry is one who is familiar
with these lines in their original context, and is therefore all the more able to appreciate
their transformation. Such a man was Watriquet de Couvin, and such another was his patron Guy de Châtillon, for whom this and other fatras were copied into a manuscript which
also includes a miniature of all estates grooming Fauvel, placed somewhat inexplicably
before Watriquet’s Dit de Loyauté.114
In addition to being the source of these obvious quotations (labeled as such in the
Roman de Deduis and marked as external in the fatras by their position within the form and
their use of the Latin language), it seems that motet texts also exerted a more oblique inluence on late-medieval writers. A famous example comes from Chaucer’s oeuvre. As Kittredge irst observed in 1915, the Book of the Duchess incorporates many translations and
112
Ed. Uhl, “Fatras → fatrasie,” 219–20.
113
I am grateful to Professor Michael Randall for his translation of these lines, which have not previously
been rendered in English.
114
BN fr. 14968; on connections between Watriquet and the Fauvel crowd, see Taylor, “Le Roman de
Fauvain,” 580–9.s
60
paraphrases from a number of Machaut’s works, including several motets.115 The following
lines, from a tirade against fortune, Borrow in at least four instances from Qui/Ha Fortune
(M8):116
Chaucer, Book of the Duchess
For fals Fortune hath pleyd a game
Atte ches with me, allas! the whyle!
The trayteresse fals and ful of gyle,
That al behoteth and no-thing halt,
She goth upryght and yet she halt,
That baggeth foule and loketh faire,
The dispitouse debonaire,
That scorneth many a creature!
An ydole of fals portraiture
Is she, for she wil sone wryen;
She is the monstres heed y-wryen,
As filth over y-strawed with floures;
Hir moste worship and hir lour is
To lyen, for that is hir nature;
Withoute feyth, lawe, or mesure.
She is fals; and ever laughinge
With oon eye, and that other wepinge.
That is broght up, she set al doun.117
Machaut, Qui es promesses
Fausse, traïtre, perverse (l. 17)
Une ydole est de fausse pourtraiture (l. 9)
C’est iens couvers de riche couverture (l. 7)
Sans foy, sans loy, sans droit et sans
mesure (l. 6)
Chaucer’s poem refers at several points unambiguously to Machaut’s triplum, borrowing ideas (ilth covered in lowers), copying diction (faith, law, measure), and even translating word for word when he calls Fortune “An ydole of fals portraiture.” None of this is
115
Chaucer certainly knew Qui /Ha Fortune(M8), and possibly Hé! Mors/Fine amour (M3) and Fons/O livoris
(M9). His use of Qui /Ha Fortune in the tirade against Fortune is discussed below, and this triplum is also
relevant to Duchess ll. 812–13. It has been suggested that the description of Fortune as a scorpion who
stings from behind in ll. 636–40 is borrowed from the motetus of Fons/O livoris (Wimsatt, Chaucer and the
French, 73, 159), but Fortune is not mentioned in that text, and the scorpion represents Lucifer. Perhaps
the idea of a scorpion is common enough that Chaucer need not have gotten it from Machaut. Kittredge
cites lines 1–8 of the triplum of M3 as an inspiration for the Black knight’s lay of complaint (ll. 475–486)
but Wimsatt cites Jugement dou Roy de Behaigne as a main source here, though he notes the similarity with
Motet 3; Kittredge, “Guillaume De Machaut,” 7–8; Wimsatt, Chaucer and the French Love Poets, 158.
116
This passage also has borrowings from Machaut’s Remede de Fortune and the Roman de la Rose; see Kitteredge, “Guillaume De Machaut,” 10–11, and Wimsatt, Chaucer and the French Love Poets, 158–9.
117
Ll. 618–35; Chaucer, The Complete Works, 1:298.
61
surprising within the broader scope of the Book of the Duchess, which is full of references to
the Roman de la Rose, dits by Machaut and Froissart, and a host of other classical and medieval sources.118 What may be surprising is that the triplum of Qui/Ha Fortune (M8), along
with several other motet texts, should be included in this company of inluences alongside
the Ovide moralisé, Jean de le Mote’s Regret Guillaume, Vergil’a Aeneid, and Alan of Lille’s De
Planctu Naturae, to name a few.
Obviously Chaucer knew his source well. Not only does he quote directly in one case,
he also seems to have the whole of the original triplum irmly in mind. For these references
appear in reverse order in Chaucer’s poem, relative to their original context. This could of
course be a coincidence, but it could also be deliberate. As the last line of the quoted text
reminds us, Fortune brings down what is brought up: in other words, she causes reversals.
The backwards incorporation of a series of lines from a source about Fortune would thus
be well in line with her usual iconography; we will see her doing far stranger things to music
and poetry in Chapters Four and Six. Regardless of whether the particular order in which
lines from the motet are used here is signiicant, it is interesting to see Mahchaut’s triplum
becoming part of the fabric of Chaucer’s poem. As Jacques Boogaart has shown, Machaut’s
motets are themselves suffused with quotations from sources ranging from the bible and
Boethius’s Consolatio to the poetry of the trouveres.119 Here we see them in turn become the
objects of citation and allusion.
Nor is this phenomenon limited to Machaut. Andrew Wathey has recently brought
to light a number of later engagements with motet poetry—mostly the work of Vitry—by
118
See list in Wimsatt, Chaucer and the French Love Poets, 155.
119
Boogaart, “Encompassing Past and Present.”
62
ifteenth-century humanists. Not only did they include motet text in their collections, as
noted above, but they also allowed these texts to serve as models and inspiration for new
poetry and moralistic literature. For example, a 1444 pamphlet by Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (later Pius II) engages with the themes of the triplum of Colla/Bona and echoes its
language.120 Another mid-ifteenth century source—a humanist miscellany—includes a
113-line poem that begins “Quondam colla iugo Veneris submisserat Hugo” (“Once Hugo
had lowered his neck under the yoke of Venus”). It tells the story of a cleric named Hugo
who is tried for having taken a concubine. When she denounces him because he is not rich,
Hugo is driven into a mysoginistic tirade (“Woman, dregs of satan, stinking rose, charming
poison,” etc.), and the reader is given the moral: “character, strength, spirit, possessions,
body, and honor—so many goods things does the cleric loose in [turning to] women.”121
The poem is pertinent here because its opening line references the triplum of Colla/Bona,
which begins “Colla jugo.” Furthermore, in naming the lleric Hugo the poem’s author seems
to be referencing the motet Cum statua/Hugo, which is a tirade against a friar named Hugo
for having committed some unspeciied hypocritical act against Vitry.122 In combining
these two references in the poem’s opening lines, the writer is thus implicitly noting that
they belong together because they are borrowed from the same genre.
RECEPTION OF ARS NOVA MOTETS OUTSIDE OF ARS NOVA CIRCLES
Although our primary focus has been on motets in their initial contexts, and on
their meanings for the scribes and theorists who were among their irst interpreters, we have
120
Wathey. “The Motet Texts of Vitry,” 200.
121
“Femina, fex sathane, rosa fetens, dulce venenum,” l. 93; “Ingenium, vires, animam, res, corpus, honores
/ Tot perdit bona vere clericus in muliere,” ll. 110–11: Huemer, “Lateinische Rhythmen,” 296.
122
Cum statua/Hugo is discussed in detail in Chapter Six.
63
also had occasion to see ars nova motets functioning farther out from their points of origin,
both geographically (England, Italy) and temporally (the ifteenth century). When we compare reception of motets by ars nova theorists and scribes with that of more peripheral audiences, a number of interesting differences come to light. The most consistent of these concern naming and emphasis. The fact that the Robertsbridge intabulations give the triplum
rather than the motetus text for each motet gains signiicance in light of the propensity of
English music theorists to cite ars nova and even ars antiqua motets by their triplum texts.123
And as we have seen, Chaucer’s borrowings from Machaut’s Qui/Ha Fortune (M8) also involve the triplum rather than the motetus. Poets, scribes, theorists, and intabulator: each in
his own way seems to give primacy to the triplum. This implied hierarchy in turn contrasts
with continental practice, which consistently refers to the motetus as the name-giving voice
across the irst three quarters of the century. Here again, indexers and theorists agree, as
indeed do poets: both fourteenth-century citations of motet in poetry discussed above (in
the Roman de Deduis and in Watriquet’s fatras) use the beginning of a motetus text.
To be sure, these are not earth-shattering differences. But behind names lies ontology. Noting that Italian treatises use triplum citations earlier in the 14th century than do
French treatises, Margaret Bent has suggested that such citations may disclose “a different
view of the genre.”124 And in our case the conluences in naming and placing of emphasis
among theorists, scribes, and poets in France, on the one hand, and England on the other
indeed suggest that there are differing views of the genre at play. What these views might
be is harder to say. In most motets the triplum text is probably the more easily intelligible,
123
See Appendix 1A for examples from the Regule of Robertus de Handlo and the Summa of Johannes
Hanboys; the latter even cites an ars antiqua motet (Aucun ont trouvé/Lonc tans) by its triplum.
124
Bent, “A Note on the Dating,” 223.
64
since its range is higher and its speed of delivery closer to that of speech. And yet the motetus has historical primacy and an etymological link with the motet as genre. The tendency
of French theorists to refer to motets by their inner, less audible voice may relect a heightened awareness of this history and etymology, perhaps combined with a kind of inside-out
listening. Once outside of the circles for which is was written, the motet was likely heard
differently, and the more audible triplum seems to have taken the lead.
One other difference between insular and continental reception concerns the writing of “contrafacta”—new texts to it existing melodies. This was common ars antiqua practice: Gordon Anderson has written that of the surviving corpus of thirteenth-century Latin
double motets, more than a third are contrafacta of French or bilingual motets.125 In contrast, ars nova motets were never furnished with new texts within the circles for which they
were initially written. This lack of textual re-composition is probably a result of the close
structural, rhetorical, and semantic alliances between ars nova texts and music—alliances
which have been demonstrated for a number of works in the repertory, and which will be
explored in depth in later chapters of this study. It would seem that the original intended
listeners and practitioners were aware enough of these congruences that they did not wish
to re-write texts to change their language or subject-matter. But this was not the case outside of France. As Peter Lefferts has noted, the “avoidance of the vernacular was a feature
of the motet outside a narrow but proliic Parisian orbit,” and the small number of ars nova
contrafacts that survive replace French text with Latin for English audiences.126 Thus the
125
In some cases a motet received new texts in two stages—irst for one of its upper voices, then for another: Anderson, “Notre-Dame Latin Double Motets,” 41.
126
These begin to appear in English sources in the second half of the century, created perhaps in the wake
of Jean le Bon’s captivity in the battle of Poitiers and ensuing English stay, Lefferts, The Motet in England,
190. But the English preference for Latin over French goes back to the thirteenth century: see Anderson,
“Notre-Dame Latin Double Motets,” 37.
65
notes, but not the words of the Ivrea motet Se paour/Diex tan desir/Concupisco are preserved
in the rear lyleaves of an English source from the second half of the century as Domine
quis/De veri cordis/Concupisco.127 As Lefferts has noted, these “Latin texts addressed to God
and Jesus,” are less suited to the tenor “concupisco” (“I lust”) than the courtly French texts
which came before them.128 But the use of Latin texts in this motet (and likely in several
other works from the same source) resulted in upper-voice content more suited to the overwhelmingly sacred contexts for motet performance in England.129 That the replacement
of French texts with Latin was fairly common practice is attested by the triplum of the
ive-voice motet Are post libamina/Nunc surgunt by Matheus de Sancto Johanne. This text
ends by actually identifying itself as a Latin contrafact of a French original: “the active, distinguished Frenchman composed this song on French melodies but after he had revised it
with the Latin language it more often became sweet to the English, replacing Deo gratias’.130
*
*
*
In this chapter I have used various kinds of reception as evidence about how those
interacting with ars nova motets in the fourteenth century might have conceived of them.
Speciically I have been interested in how the internal hierarchy of voices might have been
constituted. What emerges from this reception—scribal, theoretical, and poetic—is a topdown, or perhaps inside-out, rather than a bottom-up idea of the motet. Upper-voice texts
seem to be integral to motets, with the motetus voice giving its name to the genre and the
127
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Mus. e. 7, fols. 268v–9.
128
The Motet in England, 280.
129
Lefferts suggets that Parce piscatoribus/Relictis retibus and Omnis terra/Habenti dabitur are also contrafacts,
ibid. 204.
130
On Matheus de Sancto Johanne’s authorship of this work and its broader cultural context, see Wathey,
“The Peace of 1360–1369,” 149–50.
66
motetus incipit giving composition their names. This is not to downplay the fact that motets would surely have had different kinds of signiicance for different kinds of musicians
and listeners—recall Murino’s focus on tenor construction. But he also makes it clear that
these voices are a subset of the genre—tenores motettorum. More broadly, a rhetorical and
ontological emphasis on the upper voices is borne out by the layout and illumination of
manuscripts, by the focus of scribal corrections, and by the independent poetic lives motet
texts seem sometimes to have led.
This top-heavy view of motets seems to conlict with several aspects of modern
motet reception. On the one hand, we have been suspicious of motet texts because of the
polytextual texture in which we encounter them: it is often assumed that when upper-voice
texts are combined, they are rendered inaudible. On the other hand, it seems that the musical form of motets arises from the tenor’s rhythmic repetitions, and as such the upper voices
would seem to be subordinate to the tenors in theme or form. Both views can be nuanced
considerably, and this will be the goal of the following two chapters. These in turn will prepare the way for a series of analyses that read motets in ways consistent with their reception
as described above: that is, as works in which upper-voice ideas can fundamentally affect
musical texture, form, and sometimes even the tenor’s textual and melodic content.
67
APPENDIX 1A
Citations of Surviving ARS NOVA Motets in Treatises
The following list of motet citations from c. 1300–1415 is arranged in approximate
chronological order. Unless otherwise indicated, numbers in parenthesis refer to pagenumbers in the editions identiied in the notes. Information on the sources and editions
of cited motets is available in the Catalog of Ars nova Motets at the end of this study.
“COMPENDIUM TOTIUS ARTIS MOTETORUM”
(before 1340)1
Douce/Garison
“in tenore de Garyson” (35)
Tuba/In arboris
“in tenore de In arboris” (35)
Super/Presidentes
“in uno moteto Praesidentes in tronis seculi” (37)
Firmissime/Adesto
“in Adesto sancta trinitas” (37)
“in moteto Adesto sancta trinitas” (37)
Mon chant/Qui doloreus
“in uno moteto Qui doloretus” (37)
Tribum/Quoniam
“in moteto Quoniam secta latronum” (37)
JOHANNES BOEN, MUSICA
Floret/Florens
(c. 1355)2
“Sic et secunda admittitur in motheto Florens vigor super verbo
Mardocheo” (68)
O canenda/Rex
“et secunda et quarta in tenore motheti Rex quem metrorum” (68)
Se grasse/Cum venerint
“Ex quo concludo motetum Cum venerunt” (67)
“SEX SUNT SPECIES PRINCIPALES...”
Firmissime/Adesto
(mid-14th century)3
“in moteti tenore qui vocatur Adesto” (67)
1
Ed. Wolf, “Ein anonymer Musiktraktat,” 34–8. On the relationship between this treatise and the ars
nova writings broadly construed, see Fuller, “A Phantom Treatise,” 44–5, and Balensuela, “The Borrower is
Servant,” 12–14.
2
Frobenius, ed., Johannes Boens Musica.
3
“Sex sunt species principales...explicit ars quevis mensurandi motetos compilata a magistro Philippo de
68
Colla/Bona
“in Bona condit” (67)
Douce/Garison
“in Garison” (69)
“ut in tenore de Garison” (69)
Tuba/In arboris
“ut in tenore In arboris” (69)
Garrit/In nova
“ut in tenore de In nova fert animus” (69)
“DE MUSICA MENSURABILI”
(mid-14th century)4
Super/Presidentes
“ut in tenore de Presidentes” (184)
Douce/Garison
“ut in motecto de Garison” (186)
“ut in eodem de Garison exemplum de tenore dicti moteti” (186)
Garrit/In nova
“ut in tenore de In nova” (186)
Tuba/In arboris
“ut in tenore In arboris” (186)
“QUATUOR PRINCIPALIA”
Cum statua/Hugo
(1351)5
“in moteto qui vocatur Hugo quod edidit Philippus de Vitriaco”
(420)
Vos/Gratissima
“ut patet in tenore de Gratissima, quem idem Philippus edidit”
(420)
Tant a soutille/Bien
“ut patet in moteto qui vocatur Tant a sotile pointure” (459)
ARS (MUSICAE)
Impudenter/Virtutibus
(Johannes Boen, c. 1350–75)6
“quod in moteto Virtutibus” (28)
“in tenore Virtutibus” (29)
Vitry Magistro in musica.” This is the treatise also referred to as “Ars mensurandi motetos”—a title derived
from the explicit. Ed. Reany et al., Philippi de Vitriaco Ars nova, 55-69. See comments in Fuller, “A Phantom
Treatise,” 26–7.
4
Ed. Coussemaker, Scriptorum 3:177-93.
5
Ed. Aluas. See commentary on motets cited, p. 145–8. The last part of this treatise in its “A” version is
edited as “De musica antiqua et nova” in Coussemaker, Scriptorum 3:334-64.
6
Boen, Ars (musicae), 15-46.
69
“et hoc in in primis quatuor notulis illius excellenter moteti Virtutibus clare possimus contemplare” (17v)*
Apta/Flos
“sic et in tenore Flos virginum” (29)
“ut in tenore de Flos virginum” (28)
Tuba/In arboris
“ut in tenore moteti In arboris” (26)
O canenda/Rex
“ut in contratenore de Rex quem metrorum” (27)
Rex/Leticie
“ut in tenore Rex Karole moteti eodem” (78v)**
* In the redaction in London, British Library, Additional 23220, ff. 14v-21v.
**In the redaction in Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, lat. app. cl. VIII/24 (coll.
3434), ff. 73v-89v on fol. 78v.
“CUM DE SIGNIS TEMPORIS…”
Firmissime/Adesto
(later 14th-c. copy from mid-century exemplar)7
“ut in moteto Adesto sancta trinitas” (4v)
“in moteto Adesto” (4v)
Colla/Bona
“in Bona condit” (4v)
Tuba/In arboris
“in moteto In arboris epyro” (4v)
Garrit/In nova
“ut in tenore In noua fert animus” (4v)
Mon chant/Qui doloreus
“ut in moteto Qui dolereux” (4v)
Vos/Gratissima
“ut in moteto Gratissima uirginis species” (4v)
Qui/Ha Fortune
“ut in moteto Qui des promesses de fortune se fie” (5)
Douce/Garison
“ut in moteto Garison selonc nature” (5)
Zolomina/Nazarea
“ut in moteto Nazarea” (5)
7
Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, lat. 14741, ff. 2r-6v. Edited in the Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum, <
http://www.chmtl.indiana.edu/tml/14th/ANOQUAE_MPBN1474.html>. Also edited but conlated with
other treatises in Reany et al., Philippi de Vitriaco Ars nova, 25–9, 32.
70
“SEX MINIMAE POSSUNT PONI…”
(c. 1400; Italian copy of an earlier exemplar)8
Orbis orbatus/Vos pastores “ut in Orbis orbatur” (19v)9
Firmissime/Adesto
“ut in Adesto uetus” (19v)
“in Adesto” (20r)
Colla/Bona
“in Bona condit” (20r)
Douce/Garison
“in moteto Garison” (20r)
“ut in tenore de Garison” (20r)
Tuba/In arboris
“ut in motecto In arboris in tenore illius moctecti” (20r)
“ut In arboris” (20r)
Garrit/In nova
“ut in tenore In noua sit animus” (20r)
“OMNI DESIDERANTI NOTITIAM...”
Tuba/In arboris
(late 14th century)10
“in moteti tenore qui dicitur In arboris” (33)
“in tenore de In arboris” (34)
Garrit/In nova
“vel in tenore de In nova fert animus” (33)
“ARS CANTUS MENSURABILIS”
Ida/Portio
(after 1376)11
“in motecto Ida capillorum” (212)
“ut habetur in tenore Portio nature vel Ida capillorum ut hic, per
exemplum” (256)
Rex/Leticie
“sic in illo magno motecto Rex Karole” (241)
8
Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Barberini lat. 307, ff. 17r-20v. Edited in the Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum, < http://www.chmtl.indiana.edu/tml/14th/VITANV_MBAVB307.html>. Edited but
conlated with other ars nova related sources treatises in Reany et al., Philippi de Vitriaco Ars nova, 23–31.
See comments in Fuller, “A Phantom Treatise,” 25–6.
9
“Orbis orbatus” is the more verbose voice but “Vos pastores” is usually higher.
10
Two versions exist, one edited as the Ars perfecta of Vitry in Coussemaker, Scriptorum III:28–35, and
the other in Anglès, “Dos Tractats Medievals,” 6–10. The above excerpts are from the former. The latter
reads ““Et de omnibus veritas patet in tenore de In arboris. Innova fer anims,” and two examples follow; Ibid.,
10.
11
Ed. Balensuela, Ars cantus mensurabilis.
71
“TRACTATUS FIGURARUM”
(last quarter 14th century)12
Apta/Flos
“ut patet in Apta caro”
Tribum/Quoniam
“in motetis ipsorum magistrorum videlicet Tribum que non abhorruit et in aliis et cetera.”
Rex/Leticie
“et in Rex carole, ac etiam in aliis motetis” (34)
“QUONIAM CIRCA ARTEM MUSICALIS SCIENCIE...”
(after 1400)13
Mon chant/Qui doloreus
“ut monachant de morte wilhelmi” (336)
Apollinis/Zodiacum
“ut Apollinis” (336)
Degentis/Cum vix
“Degentis vita” (336)
Tuba/In arboris
“in tenore Tube sacre fidei” (336)
“NOTITIA DEL VALORE DELLE NOTE”
Sub Arturo/Fons
(early 15th century)14
“come el tinore di certi motetti, cioe Luce clarus o Sub Arturo o
Omni habenti…Sub Arturo a tre taglie di valore” (57)
“DIFFERENTIA EST INTER MOTETOS…”
Ida/Portio
“[I]da capillorum”
Impudenter/Virtutibus
“Impudenter”
(early 15th c., Italian)15
“TRACTATULUS DE CANTU MENSURALI…”
Degentis/Cum vix
(1462)16
“ut Degentis vita” (16)
“in cantione Degentis vita” (29)
Apollinis/Zodiacum
“ut…Apollinis” (16)
12
Ed. Schreur, Tractatus figurarum.
13
Ed. Wolf, “Ein Breslauer Mensuraltraktat,” 331–45.
14
Ed. Carpentyan, Notitia del valore delle note.
15
Ed. Staehelin, “Beschreibungen und Beispiele, 237–42.
16
Ed. Gallo, Tractatulus de cantu mensurali.
72
CHAPTER TWO
Hearing Voices
“One of our most important faculties is our ability to listen
to, and follow, one speaker in the presence of others. This is
such a common experience that we may take it for granted;
we may call it “the cocktail party problem.” No machine has
been constructed to do just this, to ilter out one conversation from a number jumbled together.”
—Colin Cherry, 19571
“I saw how in a large gathering of discerning people, when
motets were sung according to the new manner, it was asked
what language the singers were using, Hebrew, Greek, or Latin, for it was not understood what they were saying.”
—Jacobus de Montibus (olim Leodiensis), c. 13302
W
ITH THE GROWTH OF COMMERCIAL AVIATION
in the 1950s, air trafic controllers
encountered an unexpected problem: presented with the voices of multiple pilots
coming out of the same loudspeaker, they had trouble keeping these different streams of
information separate, and were thus at risk of misunderstanding important messages. Their
dificulties led to the irst research on what has since been termed “the cocktail party effect”
or “cocktail party problem”—the ability of people to isolate one sound-source in the presence of many. The brains of most humans are able to navigate complex social soundscapes
without much conscious effort. But how exactly we do this, and why it should have been
dificult for the air trafic controllers—and later for computers—constituted the problem.3
1
Cherry, On Human Communication, 278.
2
Bragard, ed., Jacobi Leodiensis Speculum musicae 7:95; this passage is discussed in detail below. On the
dating of the treatise and the evidence for “Jacobus de Montibus” as opposed to “Jacques de Liège” as the
treatise’s author, see Desmond, “New Light on Jacobus,” 24–36.
3
This effect has been an object of study in physiology, neurobiology, psychophysiology, cognitive psychology, biophysics, computer science, and engineering. For a review, see Haykin & Chen, “The Cocktail Party
73
For musicologists, a parallel effect—or perhaps problem—is inherent in the polytextual soundscapes of medieval motets, whose superimposition of multiple strands of text
has led us to inquire whether audiences were meant to understand any of the words during
performance. Scholars have answered this question in various ways, some insisting that the
texts of motets were not meant to be understood in performance, others suggesting that
only select words or phrases were meant to be perceived by the listener. These stances about
intelligibility have in turn led to varying views of the genre, the compositional priorities of
its composers, and the role of text in its aesthetics. In the chapters that follow, I discuss a
number of examples from the ars nova motet repertory in which compositional choices stem
from the content of the texts. These show that motet texts were meaningful to their composers. But I will also suggest that many of those compositional choices resulted in musical
events that would have been audible to listeners familiar with the generic norms of motets.
These listeners could only connect these compositional choices with the semantic stimuli
that inspired them if they were able to hear and understand some considerable amount of
the motets’ texts. For this reason it will be necessary for me to engage here with the question of intelligibility. I will irst address the small amount of medieval evidence that bears
on the topic, including the famous observation by Jacobus quoted at the head of this chapter. I will then engage with musicological literature pertaining to this problem, especially
with the arguments put forward by Christopher Page in Discarding Images. This in turn will
lead to a consideration of the performance aesthetics that underlie assumptions about the
intelligibility of motet texts. Finally, I will return to the cocktail party effect to see what
cognitive science can tell us about the listening conditions under which motet texts might
be understood.
Problem.”
74
MEDIEVAL LISTENING PRACTICES AND MODERN EARS
Before moving further with the question of intelligibility in polytextual performance, it should be noted that some motet poetry may have also been heard in monotextual
contexts. In the case of Vitry’s motets, literary circulation of the texts must have given
some the opportunity to study the poetry on the page, and perhaps to commit it to memory.
There is also the possibility that motet voices were sung separately irst and then together.4
Indeed, Jacobus refers to such a practice in the Speculum musicae.5 I have already discussed
this passage and its broader context in Chapter 1, but it will be worth repeating the relevant
part here:
The discanting voices can either be compared to the tenor…or they can be
considered by themselves, not with respect to the notes of the tenor and sung
at the same time as them, but separately and in turn, one after the other, as
when someone sings some motetus or triplum or quadruplum by himself without a
tenor.6
Clearly the practice of singing voices on their own was nothing too out of the ordinary, since Jacques is citing it here not for its own sake, but to support a broader claim
that the voices of polyphonic compositions can each be considered as independent songs
on their own terms. Further evidence of this independence comes from the interpolated
Fauvel. There, the triplum voice of the motet Floret/Florens, which survives in the Brussels
4
This approach is taken to good effect on several Gothic Voices recordings and posited by Page in a footnote: “It must be acknowledged that a ‘layered’ performance of motets (each voice being sung individually,
perhaps over the tenor) followed by a ‘complete’ performance may have taken place in the 13th c., a method
which solves the problem of comprehensibility at a stroke,” Discarding Images, 85n73. Page has also suggested that before performing a motet, the singers might have summarized the contents of their voice for
the audience, but this conjecture is supported by no evidence pertaining to the motet; “Listening to the
Trouvères,” 648; “Around the Performance,” 351.
5
Page makes reference to this passage in “Around the Performance,” 351, 356n14.
6
“Possunt autem voces discantus ad voces comparari tenoris…vel possunt per se considerari, non per respectum ad voces tenoris et ut simul dicuntur cum illis, sed divisim successive una post aliam cum aliquis per
se cantat motetum aliquem, triplum vel quadruplum, sine tenore,” Bragard, ed., Jacobi Leodiensis Speculum
musicae 7:9.
75
rotulus and Cambrai fragments, is reworked into a monophonic prose beginning Carnalitas
luxuria.7 Though some of the rhythms have been changed, the long rests that originated in
the motet remain in the prose, as do several leaps of a fourth. Alice Clark has noted that
“no concession is made in the prose melody to the fact that this voice, originally the top
part in a three-part texture, is now a monophonic piece that must stand alone.”8 Indeed, the
re-working seems to prove Jacques’ claim. In theory, and here in practice, an upper voice is
as much a song as the tenor.
And there is evidence from the literary realm that motet voices were sometimes
sung on their own: as the narrator of Froissart’s Joli Buisson de Jonece (1373) walks along in
a courtly procession on his way to see the god of Love, he gives voice to his joyful mood by
singing “a new motet” that he had been sent from Reims (“En chantant un motet nouviel/
Quon mavoit envoiiet de Rains”).9 Troubled probably by this solo performance and the late
date for a “motet nouviel” from Reims, Earp has suggested that the term in this context
may refer to “a new polyphonic ballade or rondeau, the sort of work that to a non-musician
would surely have sounded as complicated and learned as a motet.”10 But it seems likely
that Froissart, who himself composed in the formes fixes, would have been able to tell the
difference. Rather, the passage seems to attest to the spontaneous solo performance of a
single motet voice.
7
The prose is edited in Harrison, “The Monophonic Music,” 188–90. Floret/Florens in Sanders, “The Early
Motets,” 37–45, and Lerch, Fragmente aus Cambrai, 2:205–14. For a hypothesis on why the prose and not
the motet appears in Fauvel, see Bent, “Fauvel and Marigny,” 46–7.
8
She therefore posits that the original plan was to notate a two-voice composition, but the editors ran out
of space. Clark, “The Flowering of Charnalité,” 183.
9
On this source and the motets to which it may allude, see Huot, “Reading across Genres.” See also discussion in Chapter One of the present study, and below.
10
Guillaume de Machaut, 54.
76
And yet these references to voices sounding on their own do not obviate the need
for questions about intelligibility. It is unlikely that all listeners would have had access to
all motet texts ahead of hearing the works performed—indeed, motets not by Vitry seem to
have been transmitted as poetry very rarely. Nor can we assume that all performances began
with turn-by turn sing-throughs. And even if they did, it is still worth asking what audiences
heard (were expected to hear, or were able to hear, or chose to hear) in a tutti performance.
The most frequently cited medieval evidence that there might have been problems
with comprehension when motets were sung is the anecdote from the Speculum musicae
cited at the head of this chapter. Jacobus seems to refer to problems arising from polytextuality when he reveals that a listener at a “gathering of discerning people…asked what
language the singers were using: Hebrew, Greek, or Latin.” If the listener could not even
understand what language he was hearing, its seems impossible that he could have understood the words. Thus the passage has been used to support the claim that “the very nature
of double motets with their simultaneous presentation of two texts jeopardized the ‘message’
of either [text].”11
But an examination of this comment in context serves to give an entirely different
impression of its meaning. In this 46th chapter of Book Seven of the Speculum musicae,
Jacobus undertakes a comparison of two sets of things—the old art of composing and the
new, and also the “old manner of singing” and the new (“comparatio veteris artis musicae
mensurabilis ad modernam…et antiqui modi cantandi ad modernum”).12 There is no implication that it would be possible to perform the old kind of music in the new mode of
11
Pesce, “The Signiicance of Text,” 91–2.
12
Ed. Bragard, Jacobi Leodiensis Speculum musicae 7:93.
77
singing, and for the most part Jacobus keeps these two dimensions—the compositional and
the performative—coupled. But towards the end of the chapter he turns his attention to
performing speciically, and it is at that point that the discussion of text and its intelligibility takes place. The passage is worth quoting in full:
In a certain gathering in which skilled singers and discerning laypersons
were gathered together and where modern motets were sung according to the
modern manner, and some old [motets] as well, I observed that the old motets and also the old manner of singing were more adequately pleasing, even
to the laypersons, than the new. And even though the new manner [initially]
pleased in its newness, this is no longer the case, for it begins to displease
many.
Therefore let the old songs and the old manner of singing and notating be
called back to the native land of singers. Let these things come back to use,
and let the rational art lourish once more. It has been exiled, along with
its [corresponding] manner of singing, as though violently thrown down by
the fellowship of singers. But the violence need not be perpetual. To whom
does such wantonness of singing give pleasure—this curiosity in which, as
may be seen by anyone, the words are lost, the harmony of the consonances
diminished, the length of notes changed, perfection disparaged, imperfection elevated, and measure confounded?
I saw how in a great gathering of discerning people, when motets were sung
according to the new manner, it was asked what language the singers were using,
Hebrew, Greek, or Latin, for it was not understood what they were saying. Thus
the moderns, although they write many beautiful and good texts in their songs, lose
them in their manner of singing, since they are not understood.13
The inal sentence of the quoted text, which serves as a summary of what we should get
13
“Vidi ergo, in quadam societate, in qua congregati erant, valentes cantores et laici sapientes. Fuerunt ibi
cantati moteti moderni et secundum modum modernum, et veteres aliqui. Plus satis placuerunt, etiam laicis,
antiqui quam novi, et modus antiquus quam novus. Etsi enim modus novus in sua placuerit novitate, non
sic modo, sed incipit multis displicere. Ergo iam placeat cantus antiquos et cantandi notandique modum
antiquum ad patriam revocare cantorum. Revertantur haec ad usum reloreatque rationabilis ars. Exul fuit et
eius cantandi modus. Quasi violenter deiecta sunt haec a cantorum consortio. Violentum autem non debet
esse perpetuum. Ad quid tantum placet cantandi lascivia, curiositas in qua, ut aliquibus videtur, littera perditur, harmonia consonantiarum minuitur, valor notarum mutatur, perfectio deprimitur, imperfectio sublimatur mensuraque confunditur? Vidi in magna sapientium societate, cum cantarentur moteti, secundum
modernum modum, quesitum fuit, quali lingua tales uterentur cantores, Ebrea, Greca, vel Latina, vel qua
alia, quia non intelligebatur quid dicerent. Sic moderni, licet multa pulchra et bona in suis cantibus faciant
dictamina, in modo tamen suo cantandi cum non intelligantur, perdunt ea.” Bragard, ed., Jacobi Leodiensis
Speculum musicae 7:95; emphasis mine.
78
from the anecdote, is crystal clear in its meaning: it’s too bad that the well written texts of
the moderns are masked by the new manner of performance. The implication, then, is that
if the same good texts were delivered in the old manner of singing, they would not be lost. In
complaining that new texts are obscured Jacobus tacitly acknowledges that the clear projection of text is a merit of the older repertory that he champions. Far from proving that
medieval audiences could not understand the texts of motets in performance, then, this
passage in fact suggests that there was an expectation on the listener’s part that text would
be intelligible.
Nor does Jacobus necessarily men for us to take him fully at face value. As Suzannah Clark has pointed out, “Jacques’s complaint that they could be singing in Hebrew or
Greek is, of course, spurious, for the upper voices of motets were either in Latin or French
or both.”14 Hence the observer is making fun of a delivery of Latin text which was, to his
mind, muddled as a result of the new manner of singing. The listener’s mocking comment
would hardly makes any sense unless understanding text was an aspect of appreciating the
modus antiquus cantandi.
What does this passage tell us about the ars nova and new manner of singing? Not
much. Jacobus is writing to persuade, and the relation of a fellow conservative’s negative
evaluation of the performance is intended to malign the modern manner rather than to
give us insight into its aesthetics or the expectations of its adherents. It is certainly possible
that for Jacobus and similar listeners familiarity with, and a preference for older textures
and norms might have resulted in a greater facility of comprehension of texts set in the
older style. Speciically, the increased use of duple meters may have made melodies and text
14
“‘S’en dirai chançonete’,” 32n6. Frank Hentschel also points out the humor in the remark, seeing it to
relect back on the apparently discerning persons who listened. “Der Streit um die ‘ars nova,” 120.
79
delivery seem stilted enough to obscure meaning for those accustomed to perfection. But to
an unbiased listener it is hard to believe that the words of ars nova motets would be harder
to understand than those of older works, since they feature more transparent textures.
Even if Jacobus is not a trustworthy source for reporting on ars nova performances
in any but a negative way, he clearly tells us something about contemporary expectations.
Undoubtedly he and the learned person whom he paraphrases would agree that in an ideal
situation the texts of motets should be intelligible. Furthermore, he gives us the key to understanding why they are sometimes not. For towards the end of the passage he uncouples
composition and performance, focusing on the moderns’ manner of singing as the cause
of incomprehension. In doing so, he reminds us of an obvious but important fact: performances can make words audible, or they can obscure texts, causing them to become lost.
And it is here that we can turn from the new manner to a newer manner still, and consider
the effect of twentieth- and twenty-irst century performances of ars nova motets on the
intelligibility of their texts.
*
*
*
One of the most inluential and controversial arguments about the audiences for
medieval motets was put forward by Christopher Page in his 1993 Discarding Images. Offering a new reading of the often-quoted lines from Grocheio’s De Musica (c. 1300), which
seem to locate motets within elite intellectual spheres, Page argued that motet audiences
included a much broader cut of society: “Johannes de Grocheio’s ‘clergy, and those who care
for the reinements of any skill’ may have formed a very diverse group indeed.”15
15
Discarding Images, 111. The main tenets of this important study been widely discussed and critiqued in
print, and it is not the purpose of this chapter to rehearse those arguments—arguments about the writing
of history, periodization, and the role of scholars and performers in interpreting medieval music, broadly
80
But while diversifying the intended audience for ars antiqua motets, Page has narrowed the listening experiences available to this group, downplaying the intellectual aspects
of listening and shifting the focus to sensory pleasure. Objecting to the reading of mere
“contrast” as “opposition,” he argues that in fact while motets may present us with differences in diction or topic between their texted voices, these do not result in “the destabilizing
quality that much modern criticism tends to discern and explore.”16 In the process, motets
emerge as integrated structures, their separate voices merged into a uniied whole by congruences in theme, vowel-sound, and diction.
Such an aesthetic certainly has implications for the importance of individual
texts—indeed, of any text—as a salient aspect of composition or reception. Indeed, Page
suggests that part of the pleasure gained from motets by their diverse medieval audiences
may have been derived from not understanding the texts:
Some listeners in the thirteenth century may have enjoyed the sound-patterns of Latin motet poetry without deriving any signiicant understanding
of the sense, much as some modern listeners do today when hearing these
motets (or operatic arias, for that matter)…it can scarcely be doubted that
many motets were designed to induce an exhilarating impression of words
leaving sense behind and beginning to skirl.
And later:
The existence of triple motets with three simultaneous poems that sometimes deal with subjects in two languages, French and Latin, proves that the
aesthetic of the poet is one which allows verbal communication to decline
as metrical, musical, and structural ambitions mount. This was surely not
taken to involve a sacriice of meaning but rather a gain of pleasure that was
‘intellectual’ in this sense”: it produced the exhilaration of knowing that a
piece contains more than one can ever hope to hear.”17
construed. See, in order of publication, Bent, “Relections on Christopher Page’s Reflections,” Page, “A Reply
to Margaret Bent,” Strohm, “How to Make Medieval Music Our Own,” Wegman, “Reviewing Images,” and
Weller, “Frames and Images.”
16
Discarding Images, 92, 96.
17
Ibid., 85–6, 101.
81
Page’s claims and supporting arguments pertain mostly to ars antiqua motets, which
were the subject of Grocheio’s observations. And it is in this repertory that he locates a
number of traits that argue against the independence or intelligibility of texts, such as the
coordination of rhyme-sounds and vowels between voices. As additional evidence against
an intellectual reception he cites what he perceives as a lack of engagement with the time’s
intellectual trends (“the scholastic method, for example, has left virtually no impression
upon the Latin or French motets”).18
But is it is also clear that Page sees the same problems as extending beyond the ars
antiqua, to “the” motet:
Of all the musical genres known to the Middle Ages, it is the motet which
most candidly acknowledges the importance of verbal sound over verbal
sense by placing two or even three texts together, minimizing their intelligibility but maximizing their phonic contrast.19
In fact ars nova motets are much less likely to have the moments of sonic unity that Page
sees in those of the thirteenth century. And a wide cross-section of current intellectual
trends is indeed represented by their texts, which engage in contemporary theological debates, incorporate quotations from learned sources and even treat such esoteric subjects as
metaphysics and poetic theory.20 But in one aspect ars nova motets are open to the kinds of
18
Ibid., 84.
19
Discarding Images, 85–6. See also the evaluation of Machaut on p. 14: “Machaut’s music leaves no doubt
that his sensations when composing were as indifferent to moral or intellectual persuasions as those of any
composer at any period in history when genuinely engrossed.” It should be said that in general Page’s arguments are more persuasive for the ars antiqua motet, which is after all his subject. In some passages, especially
in the longer section surrounding the passage quoted above, he seems to shift from thirteenth-century listeners to “the medieval motet” almost seamlessly.
20
For an argument in favor of the Assumption as doctrine, see the triplum Almifonis melos cum vocibus, edited and summarized in PMFC 5, supplement, p. 8. On classical quotations in Vitry’s motets, see Bent, “Polyphony of Texts and Music,” and Wathey, “Myth and Mythography.” Metaphysics is criticized in ll. 19–31
of the triplum Tuba sacre fidei (PMFC vol. 1, 32–4). On In virtute/Decens and its engagement with Horace’s
Ars poetica, see Chapter Five.
82
criticisms leveled by Page—they absolutely combine diverse texts in one work.
Some arguments that motet texts may have a semantic as well as a sonic role in
performance have been put forward. Dolores Pesce has argued that in double Latin motets,
music serves texts by giving “musical prominence to…igures of repetition and rhetorical
expressions,” and that in some cases this kind of emphasis may represent “at least an attempt
to give musical expression to the words.”21 And in a recent study of the Montpellier motet
Joliement en douce/Quant voi/Je sui joliete/Aptatur, Suzannah Clark has drawn attention to a
variety of “ways in which the music clariies rather than obscures the meaning of the text
in performance.”22 Beginning from the premise that “hearing the odd word here and there
is less a matter of chance than one of effort on the part of poet-composers to convey the
text,” she has argued that some level of understanding is made possible—even assured—by
compositional choices such as the placement or refrains, the use of musical echoes, and the
careful coordination of rests between voices.23 And yet even here the matter of understanding—albeit a rather deep understanding—depends upon “grasping” on the listener’s part.24
Other scholars have agreed with Page’s claims about the impossibility of hearing individual texts while nevertheless preserving a place for an intellectual dimension. Margaret
Bent, the main advocate for the importance of text to the analysis of motets, concedes to
an “impossibility of understanding [motet texts] at a irst or unprepared hearing,” but argues
that there is space for the “prepared listener”—an “experienced listener who, like Boethius’s
musicus, ‘exhibits the faculty of forming judgments according to speculation or reason’” and
21
Pesce, “The Signiicance of Texts,” 94, 97.
22
Clark, “‘S’en dirai chançonete’,” 31.
23
Ibid., 34.
24
Ibid., 58–9.
83
is already familiar with the composition: “instant understanding is impossible, prepared
understanding possible; this applies to many kinds of music.”25
There is no doubt that a listening experience such as the one suggested by Clark—
full of intertextual and intermelodic references—would be meaningful. No doubt also that
the understanding of a piece by a listener prepared in Bent’s sense of the term—intimately
familiar with a motet’s texts, proportions, and numerical structures, as well as the liturgical context of its tenor—would be deep. But must instant understanding of the text always
be impossible for the audiences of a polytextual work? Reminded by Jacobus how much
depends on the manner of singing, I would like to evaluate one aesthetic underpinning of
Page’s incredulity about intelligibility: the question of timbre.
TIMBRE
Page’s debt to recordings—especially to his own work with Gothic Voices—is selfavowed:
The primary inspiration for [Discarding Images] has been provided by performance…recordings are sometimes superseded by advances in knowledge,
and are often vanquished by changes in taste, yet innovative or challenging
performances can none the less disturb a wide range of preconceptions that
we may unwittingly hold about the interest and scope of a repertory.26
And of course he is not alone in this. I am among those for whom Page’s beautiful recordings with Gothic Voices have felt deeply “authentic.” And there can be no doubt
that they are closer to medieval performances than many previous modern re-creations in
one sense: inspired by his research into the question of instrumental versus vocal perfor25
Bent, “Relections,” 632, and “Words and Music,” 387. Reading the latter article makes us a listener
prepared, in Bent’s sense, to hear Machaut’s Fons/O livoris (M9).
26
Discarding Images, p. xx.
84
mance of medieval song, Page’s recordings allowed us to reconceive of a wide repertory of
music as primarily vocal.27 Lawrence Earp evokes the feelings of many when he writes that
the recordings of Gothic Voices “are consistently of the highest quality, and put into practice the most advanced and solidly grounded views of performance practice at the time of
recording.”28 But if in the respect of instrumentation Page’s re-imagination of the medieval
sound was fresh and radical, another aspect of his aesthetic—that which pertains to timbre—seems to have been inherited perhaps too readily from the English choral tradition.
This is not to say that Page was not thoughtful about questions of timbre. If, as John
Potter has argued, “the position of authority [held by the British early music sound] has
been achieved with the minimum change to the techniques that the singers learned to gain
their choral scholarships,” this is perhaps less a matter of laziness (certainly in Page’s case)
than of agenda. For Page was reacting to the bright, mixed sound of instrumental performance current in the irst stage of the early music revival—a sound, in his words, of “boldly
individualized lines collaborating in a polyphony which is extrovert and almost heraldic in
colour, which is candid, even naive, in its directness of address to the listener.”29 The ascetic
English choral sound evocatively described by Daniel Leech-Wilkinson as “freshly cleaned
Anglicanism” must have seemed like the perfect antidote.30
This pure sound with its equal timbres, matched vowels, and lack of vibrato could
not but inluence Page’s conception of the motet. As his performance aesthetic blends
sounds together into a uniied whole where sonority reigns supreme, so his arguments about
27
See Page, “Machaut’s ‘Pupil’ Deschamps,” and “The Performance of Songs.”
28
Earp, Review of The Medieval Romantics, 289.
29
Page, “The Performance of Songs,” 441.
30
Leech-Wilkinson, The Modern Invention of Medieval Music, 206.
85
ars antiqua—and ars nova—aesthetics stress unity over contrast. For me, “synchronization
of vowels” and “verbal identity” that lead to sonorities “of exceptional clarity and forthrightness—characteristics which Page argues are inherent to the compositional fabric of ars
antiqua motets—bring to mind an Oxford college choir, or the Tallis Scholars.31 Theirs is
a sound in which we may “[enjoy] the sound-patterns of Latin motet poetry without deriving any signiicant understanding of the sense.”32 And in the phrase “there is variation and
contrast, but there is neither conlict nor tension,” which Page uses to describe the relationship between the motetus and triplum in a motet, I cannot help but read also a description
of the sound-world cultivated by Gothic Voices.33 Margaret Bent has pointed out the “danger
of drawing circular conclusions from particular styles of performance that emphasize some
rather than other features of the music.”34 And indeed, Page’s arguments about the priorities of the genre could double as an aesthetic manifesto: “The complexity is purely phonic
and not semantic. As I read them, the texts of this motet are designed to be so similar to
one another that there is little or no contrast between them.”35 The texts, or the voices that
execute them?
Page has himself cautioned that his reconstructions of medieval sounds are not
“wholly objective” in part because they are “based upon…experience with professional British singers, most of whom received their training in the choir of some cathedral or collegiate
31
Discarding Images, 103, 105.
32
Ibid., 86.
33
Ibid., 97.
34
Bent, “Relections on Christopher Page’s Reflections,” 630. On the question of authenticity and its role
in Page’s argument see also Wegman, “Reviewing Images,” 269–70.
35
Page, Discarding Images, 110.
86
establishment in England.”36 But we are to understand that the reconstructed sound-world
is at least mostly objective, and Page has cited various kinds of evidence to support the idea
that the late-medieval sound might be similar to the modern British one. For example, the
similar range of motet voices is cited as evidence that motets were “performed by identical
(or by nearly identical) voices”:
Many of the motets in the Bamberg manuscript (probably dating from c.
1285) exploit a range of around eleven notes from top to bottom, while
some individual voice parts also employ this compass. It would therefore
seem that 13th-century motets were conceived to exploit the resources of
two, three or four equal voices; one singer, in other words, could normally
perform any part in a motet—tenor, duplum, triplum or quadruplum—
without undue dificulty. The result would have been a well-blended sound
with each part distinguished by its text rather than by its colour.
the evidence of voice ranges suggests that blend, and not contrast, is the
guiding colour principle of the Ars Antiqua motet. This is quintessentially
music for singers, designed to exploit the sounds of Latin and Old French
as put into song by voices of very similar type singing in very much the same
kind of way.37
Such a reading of the evidence blatantly conlates range with tessitura. The compass of a
part is hardly indicative of where that part lies for most of a composition, but it is the latter
information that would indicate which singer is to be placed on which voice. Furthermore,
even if singers had similar usable ranges, it seems likely that some would be more used to
singing tenors, and some, upper parts. This distinction would be cemented in the following
century with the emergence of function designations such as “tenorista.”38
But most importantly, nothing guarantees that two medieval singers, even if they
36
“The Performance of Ars Antiqua Motets,” 149.
37
Ibid., 153–4.
38
On “tenorista” as function rather than range, see Wegman, “From Maker to Composer,” 445–8. In contrast, “contratenorista” seems to have been a range designation for bass voices. I am grateful to Alejandro
Enrique Planchart for discussing this issue with me.
87
had the same range, would necessarily have “voices of very similar type.” The unity of sound
achieved by English singers is the result of a huge system of choir schools and choral scholarships, with many professional performers emerging from either Oxford or Cambridge.39
Arguably, only such an infrastructure can produce singers so similarly trained as to perform music in this way. This is not to say that those singing motets in the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries were not experienced—the degree of specialized knowledge needed
to sing mensural notation was great, and all singers able to execute motets would probably
have begun as choirboys or, in the case of the nobility, would have been taught by clerics.40
But while the performers would all have been schooled, they would by no means have been
products of the same school. We can imagine a scenario where a Latin motet was sung by
three university men, each from a different part of Europe and with a different way of
pronouncing Latin. Would their vowels be matched, or their training be similar? We know
that even different regions within France had their own local ways of singing: the canons at
Lyons cathedral, for example, were known to shout.41 On the international level, these differences were apparently worthy of—and subject to—rivalry and ridicule. Thus an Italian
rhetorician wrote in 1226 that
the Greeks say the Latins bark like dogs and the Latins say the Greeks growl
like foxes. The French claim that the Italians groan… the Italians, on the
other hand, say that French and Germans emit tremulous sounds like someone suffering from fever, and that they sing so loudly they must think God
is deaf.42
39
Potter, Vocal Authority, 116–17.
40
Certainly there was some non-clerical performance of mensural polyphony, as indicated by the depictions of lay singers in the Machaut manuscripts (e.g. the singers gathered around a barrel, discussed below).
In the Voir dit the narrator sends notated music to the noble Toute Belle, expecting her to perform it. For
further evidence that women performed mensural polyphony, see Page, “A Treatise on Musicians.”
41
Page, “Around the Performance,” 348. See also the contemporary comments about French and Italian
singers collected in McGee, The Sound of Medieval Song, 17–8.
42
Vecchi, “Musica e scuola,” 266–73; trans. Page, “Around the Performance,” 348.
88
But motets were performed in precisely those places where singers from different corners
of Europe would have mingled—in universities, at courts, and during occasions of state.
Would not some performances have had in them, then, a trace of those exaggerated differences? If not exactly emitting howls, groans, and feverish wails, it would nevertheless be
surprising if such diverse performers could be found “singing in very much the same kind
of way.”
Other scraps of evidence support the idea that the sound-world of motets may have
been a varied one. One unlikely source of insight comes from a description of dog-song in
Gace de la Buigne’s Roman de Deduis (c. 1359–77). In arguing that hunting with dogs is
more noble than hunting with falcons, the allegory Love of Dogs alludes to the pleasure of
hearing dogs sing—in fact, he describes them singing a motet:
Les uns vont chantans le motet,
Les autres font double hoquet.
Les plus grans chantent la teneur.
Les autres la contreteneur.
Ceulx qui ont la plus clere guile
Chantent les tresble sans demeure,
Et les plus petis le quadouble
En faisant la quinte sur double.43
[Some of [the dogs] go singing the motet; the others make a double hocket:
the largest [dogs] sing the tenor and the others the contratenor. Those that
have the clearest voice sing the triplum without delay and the smallest [sing]
the quadruplum, making a ifth on the duplum.]44
To be sure, this is hardly informative from a performance practice perspective. But the variety of look and sound cultivated in this passage is still compelling. The parody evokes a disparate group producing sounds that vary both in timbre and ambitus: the dogs singing the
43
La Buigne, Le Roman de Deduis, ll. 8081-8; Page has cited this passage in support of all-vocal performance of chansons: “Machaut’s ‘Pupil’ Deschamps,” 487.
44
Trans. Leach, Sung Birds, 181–2.
89
triplum have penetrating voices, the big dogs sing tenor, and the quadruplum is left to the
puppies. This variety is the more signiicant when we remember that—as Page has noted—
many motets are relatively narrow in range, often covering no more than a twelfth—and
this in turn can be the range of a single voice in a more virtuosic work such as a chasse.45
Thus Love of Dogs presents us with a more varied picture than we might expect (if we have
any expectations of canine motet performance).
This variety is not dissimilar from that cultivated in the image of performance
which opens the motet section of Machaut’s manuscript A (see Figure 2.1). Here a mix of
clerics and laypersons is gathered around a wine cask, drinking wine and singing a motet
from a scroll.46 Their diverse ages, different backgrounds, and presumed state of inebriation (have they drained the barrel?) all but guarantee that their voices will not sound similar.
This group is a far cry from the singing angels of van Eyck’s Ghent altarpiece, whose young
identical faces seem to imply the kind of sound we associate with the English aesthetic. This
diverse group of drinkers hints instead at a smorgasbord of timbres and volumes.
45
See Kügle, The Manuscript Ivrea, 153n134.
46
That the composition being performed is a motet is clear not only from the miniature’s position at the
head of the motet section, but also from the words “tenor” and “dame” that are visible on the scroll. This
image is usually interpreted as a group of singers (and drinkers)—see descriptions in Huot, From Song to
Book, 300–1, Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 187, Wimsatt, Chaucer and His French Contemporaries, plate 13,
and Leo, “Authorial Presence,” 44. Kügle has argued that the four men on the right are singing, while those
on the left (a layman, a cleric, and a servant) are drinking and listening; “Die Musik des 14. Jahrhunderts,”
361 (note that the image descriptions and images are reversed, so that the description labeled “bild links”
pertains to the motet image, which is on the right). Kügle’s analysis is convincing as pertains to the direction
of the scroll, but the nobleman at left does seem to be keeping tactus on the arm of the cleric to his left, and
the latter’s holding the scroll seems to imply his performative participation.
90
Figure 2.1: A group of men around a wine keg singing a motet47
Granted, this too is not the kind of evidence we would like. It is certainly possible
that rather than recording anything akin to a performance, the image is serving as an allegorical depiction of motets, with their mixture of the sacred and secular.48 And Love of
Dogs is at least as biased an observer as Jacobus de Montibus. But choices were made in both
cases—the choice to use a motet as the example to be sung; the choice to depict a diverse
group as singing it. Also noteworthy is the joyful, easy mood that characterizes both depictions. Nothing could be more natural, Love of Dogs wants us to believe, than this singing,
and “there isn’t a responsory or an alleluia, even if it were sung in the Kings’ chapel…that
would cause the same tremendous pleasure that one experiences in hearing such a hunt.”49
In this context we may also return to the above-mentioned passage from Froissart’s Joli
47
Machaut MS A, fol. 414v.
48
The same iconographic motif—singers around a wine keg—is also used to illustrate the singing of a
rondeau in Machaut MS E (fol. 16). Here the singers seem all to be laypersons, but they still vary in age and
class. See Kügle’s discussion of the differences between these two images in “Die Musik des 14. Jahrhunderts,” 361. Dominic Leo also discussed this image in “Singing Around a Wine Keg.”
49
Trans. Leach, Sung Birds, 181. Though the sound is natural, it is not rational, and Leach has argued that
this passage is part of a broader discourse about vox confusa and vox discreta—the dogs are cantores but not
musici; ibid., 212–9.
91
Buisson de Jonece, in which a lover joyously sings a motet while walking to meet the god of
love. As he sings, the lover is ideally situated in mood and position:
En cheminant sus ce voyage
En pais en joie et en reveil
En chantant un motet nouviel
Quon mavoit envoiiet de rains
Premiers nestoie ne darrains
Mais en mi lieu par grant solas
Pares duns noes solers a las
Ensi quamant vont a la velle
On me boute et lors je mesvelle.
[As I traveled along on this excursion, in peace, joy, and gaiety, singing a new
motet that had been sent to me from Reims, I was neither in the front nor in
the back, but very comfortably in the middle, dressed in new lace-up shoes,
the way lovers go for a late night out.]50
We can almost hear this performance. As the lover looses his song, it is with joyful ease, allowing the sound of his voice to relect his general euphoria.51
I think it is fair to say that some of the joy and spontaneity that seems to have been
an aspect of motet performance is lost when a uniied sound is the goal. Indeed, Page has
written that singing motets should be dificult, even uncomfortable for the singer:
Something is often to be gained by pitching these motets in a way that lifts
the singers on the upper parts away from the comfortable range where they
can coast or croon. When the music is lifted above this range the relatively
higher pitch brings many things under closer control because the vocal cords
are vibrating more quickly and because the singers, recognizing that danger
is only about a tone away, begin to work hard in a fashion that is always beneicial to this music.52
Elsewhere, the same author has written that in the Middle Ages “to succeed [at composition] was to create something that singers could control and dominate,” but here the music
50
Ed. and trans. Figg and Palmer, Jean Froissart: An Anthology, 462–3.
51
The lover’s ease and happiness here are all the more important because in the next line he is woken up
from his happy dream—see the discussion in Chapter One.
52
Page, “The Performance of Ars Antiqua Motets,” 158.
92
is instead allowed to control the singers, coaxing a uniied sound from them with the threat
of nearby danger.53
The reason that all of this is pertinent to an argument about intelligibility is that
timbre is one of several variables that allows the human ear to focus on one sound-source
in the presence of others. A number of other aspects of performances—including acoustics,
an audience member’s ability to see the performer, and the role of recording technology—
also bear on this issue. In what follows I will not suggest that performance conditions which
maximize intelligibility are either authentic or desirable. I will only review the evidence
provided by psychology on the acoustic and cognitive phenomena that allow a person to
navigate a busy soundscape —whether it be a cocktail party or a “gathering of discerning
people.”
THE COCKTAIL PARTY PHENOMENON
Given the high likelihood that a motet’s intended audience would hear multiple
performances of the same work, the question of whether it is possible to hear both texts of
a polytextual motet at the same time wanes in importance next to a more basic inquiry: Is
it possible to hear any text in a polytextual setting, or does the act of combining more than
one text in one sonic space necessarily render any and all of those texts unintelligible?54
53
Cf. Jerome of Moravia’s advice that “a song never be begun very high, especially by those possessing head
voices…but they should always begin moderately, that is ‘sing’; that is so that the song may not rule the voice,
but the voice rule the song; beautiful notes cannot be produced otherwise,” trans. Rosenfeld in McGee, The
Sound of Medieval Song, 28.
54
Given the relatively small size of the repertory it seems likely that works would have been performed
multiple times. Occasional works would perhaps have been an exception to this, but they too seem to have
been reused, as in the case of Servant regem/O Philippe and Servant regem/Ludovice. Robertson has also argued
that Machaut’s Bone pastor/Bone pastor, though seemingly an occasional piece, was in fact intended to be “an
‘archbishop motet’ in the widest possible sense,” in which “Guillerme” could be replaced with another name;
Guillaume de Machaut and Reims, 60.
93
Rephrasing the question clariies the link between the psychological “cocktail party phenomenon” and the ars nova motet. Whether in a busy room where the person behind you may
be speaking louder than your collocutor, or in a motet where the triplum is singing higher
and faster than the motetus which you are perhaps desirous of hearing, the cognitive task
is the same: to isolate a sound-source of interest in the presence of other, sometimes more
prominent ones. But the assumptions have been very different in the two ields: in psychology, it is readily agreed that the cocktail party phenomenon is “one of our most important
faculties”—“such a common experience that we may take it for granted.”55 And indeed,
walking into a busy restaurant and shifting attention from one conversation to another
will quickly remind us of our considerable powers of segregating sounds.56 In musicology,
the burden of proof has been on the other side—motet texts are inaudible until proven audible, simply because they are joined by other motet texts. Given this discrepancy, it will be
worth summarizing the results of some studies that have investigated how humans are able
to solve this cocktail party “problem” that continues to bafle machines and musicologists.
A listener’s ability to understand speech in a complex environment depends on the
segregation of simultaneously occurring sounds into streams originating from different
sources—a process known as Auditory Scene Analysis.57 The ability to do this successfully rests on a number of connected factors, some of which are the result of the sound
sources while others pertain to the environment in which listening is taking place. Among
the former, differences in the fundamental frequencies and spectral proiles of sounds—or
55
Cherry, On Human Communicaton, 278.
56
Though the experiment has the side-effect of making one feel rather nosy.
57
Bregman, Auditory Scene Analysis, 3–6.
94
we might say differences in timbre—are vital to the segregation of concurrent sounds:58
“Sounds of similar timbres will group together, so that the successive sounds of the oboe
will segregate from the harp, even when they are playing in the same register.”59 And when
sounds are separated by range as well as timbre, lower and higher sounds will naturally
segregate themselves into groups, or perceptual streams. Claude Alain has shown that “an
observer’s ability to identify two different vowels presented simultaneously improved by
increasing the fundamental frequency separation between the vowels”—speciically that simultaneous sounds at least 4 semitones apart in pitch can be more easily parsed than those
closer that 4 semitones.60
These timbral and registral aspects of sound-sources are so-called monaural cues—
that is, they can be perceived and separated with one ear. But even more crucial to solving
the cocktail party problem is our faculty of localizing sound, which depends on binaural
hearing. The distance between the ears allows humans to accurately identify the location of
a sound-source along a horizontal axis, since the sound waves enter the two ears at different
times. Using a more subtle set of cues in a process known as “head-related transfer function,” we are also able to localize sounds on the other axes.61 It has long been recognized
that “spatial hearing plays a major role in the auditory system’s ability to separate sound
sources in a multiple-source acoustic environment” and thus in our ability to solve the
58
Ibid., 92–103. Though “timbre” is an inexact term (Bregman calls it “an ill-deined wastebasket category,” that “can include fundamental frequency, spectral component frequency, the balance of the spectrum,
and possibly individual peaks in the spectrum,” ibid., 92), it is also an intuitive one.
59
Ibid., 19-20, 85–6.
60
Alain et al., “Hearing Two Things at Once.”
61
See summary in Haykin & Chen, “The Cocktail Party Problem,” 1878–9.
95
cocktail party problem.62 In parallel to the observations that increased pitch differences
can aid in sound segregation, a number of studies have found that an increase in distance
between the sources of simultaneous sounds aids in their auditory differentiation.63
Some circumstantial factors also seem to play a role. Room acoustics can have an
adverse effect on the cocktail party phenomenon if excessive reverberation interferes with
auditory scene analysis, though the auditory system is powerful enough to suppress even
moderate amounts of echo and focus instead on the source sound.64 On the other hand,
visual cues such as facial expression and especially the movement of the lips in speech can
aid with comprehension. Even under ideal listening conditions, lip-reading can help us by
resolving certain ambiguities of speech—for instance by giving visual cues to aid in the
rather small phonetic difference between “b” and a “v.” In noisy situations such cues become
much more important, and an ability to see the speaker is thus a signiicant asset in understanding what s/he is saying.65
Together these monaural and binaural processes enable us to carry out auditory
scene analysis, and this subconscious process is the irst step to solving the Cocktail Party
Problem. Once sound sources are localized, attention comes into play. Attention is, in
William James’s classic deinition, “the taking possession of the mind, in clear and vivid
form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought.
Focalization, concentration of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from
62
Ibid.
63
Most recently in Drennan et al., “Perceptual segregation of competing speech sounds.”
64
Haykin & Chen, “The Cocktail Party Problem,” 1885.
65
Summerield, “Lipreading and Audio-Visual Speech Perception.” See also Wei et al., “Lip-Reading Aids
Word Recognition.”
96
some things in order to deal effectively with others.”66
In the context of the cocktail party problem, several kinds of attention have been
studied. One is selective attention, in which the listener chooses to focus on some source
and ignore others. In this case the comprehension level of the primary stream is high, but
the secondary stream is hardly attended to. In an early study in which a different text was
played into each ear (dichotic listening) and listeners were asked to speak the right-ear text
back while they listened (a process referred to as shadowing), Colin Cherry found that the
“rejected” text got very little attention—indeed, listeners did not notice when that left-ear
text switched to German.67 But more recent studies have shown that while shadowing or
listening actively to one text a listener may still hear aspects of the other, and may be able
to recall some words from the “rejected” stream.68 The listener may also be subconsciously
affected by text which they consciously choose not to listen to.69
Another paradigm is divided attention, in which the listener focuses on more than
one sound source, or switches between channels (switched attention). These different types
of focus can be produced by telling the listener what to pay attention to, though certain
sonic events in a rejected stream, such as hearing one’s own name, can produce shifts of
attention even during selective attention. Furthermore, factors that interfere with auditory
scene analysis can make some kinds of attention more dificult to sustain. For example, as
Wood and Cowan have noted, “selective attention depends heavily on physical (e.g. voice)
66
James, The Principles of Psychology (1890), 403–4.
67
Cherry, “Some Experiments on the Recognition of Speech,” 978.
68
Wood & Cowan, “The Cocktail Party Phenomenon Revisited.”
69
This is demonstrated in a number of studies using priming, for example DuPoux et al., “Lexical Access
Without Attention?”
97
differences between channels” and thus dichotic studies which use similar monotone voices
in both ears may not allow listeners to fully concentrate on one channel or to fully ignore
the other.70
If there are any similarities we can count on between ourselves and medieval listeners, they are in the makeup of our auditory systems and the cognitive mechanisms which
support the listening process.71 For the cocktail party problem precedes cocktails—it is in
fact a basic necessity for human society. But these similar biological systems and processes
receive radically different musical stimuli today than they did 600 years ago. Listening to
medieval music in the twentieth and twenty-irst centuries often means listening to a recording. The list of factors allowing the human listener to solve the cocktail problem gains
in relevance to my broader argument when we consider how much relevant information is
lost when we listen to a recording.
Most importantly, the three-dimensional localization of sound sources usually carried out by head-related transfer function is rendered ineffective by the lattening of the
auditory scene to only two channels, and even the information potentially contained in
these is often erased due to editing and mixing. Auditory scene analysis is further impeded
by often excessive reverb—either inherent in the recording space (often a large church) or
added to evoke a “medieval sound.” Such surroundings and post-production choices muddy
the waters, making it even more dificult to pick out the texts of individual voices. The recent Hilliard Emsemble recording of Machaut’s motets is a good example.72 A large amount
70
Wood & Cowan, “The Cocktail Party Phenomenon Revisited,” 255.
71
The claim of a common biological makeup is, I think, less subject to accusations of universalism than invocation of a “trans-historical humanness” or trans-historical aesthetics; see Page, Discarding Images, 190,
and Wegman’s response in “Reviewing Images,” 270.
72
Hilliard Emsemble, Motets: Guillaume de Machaut.
98
of reverb cloaks each motet with a blanket of overtones and echoes. As one reviewer wrote,
“the engineers beautifully capture the glow of the church acoustic.”73 Indeed they do, but
these are secular works—mostly love songs—which as far as we know would not have been
sung in a church, but in a chamber or small hall.74
The problem of reverb can be compounded with those of timbre discussed above to
create recordings in which is it impossible to tell voices apart by any cues other than range.
And range can be a ickle indicator. Consider the Hilliard’s recording of Machaut’s Dame/
Fins cuers doulz (M11). Listening to their rendition of mm. 11–28 (Track 9, 0:20–:54) the
impression is of a tenor and two texted voices almost identical in timbre and separated by
anywhere from a 3rd to a 6th. The upper voice seems to sing a number of neighbor-note
gestures in semibreves (A-G-A, E-D-E, G-F-G, etc). But a look at the score reveals that a
series of voice-crossings occur in this passage, so that the voices are in fact trading off this
motif (See Example 2.1). Eventually it is possible to teach oneself the difference between
these two very similar voices, and to begin to hear the crossings of their lines. But this is
a task requiring focused work and a score. How can we begin to make decisions about our
attention or to listen for a text’s meaning when the irst step—auditory scene analysis—is
made so dificult? And of course, the visual aspects of performance, which would be a great
aid in a situation where competing sound-sources are vying for attention, are taken away
in any recording. In this case trying to understand the text of a given voice is like trying to
hear your neighbor at a party held in a vaulted hall where the guests wear opaque masks over
their faces, while their voices are re-mixed and projected through two speakers at the front
73
Dan Davis, editorial review for Amazon.com, accessed 5 May 2010.
74
The recording includes eighteen motets of which four can be classiied as ceremonial, and two more as,
perhaps, paraliturgical. These latter works might have been sung in a larger space, but this is a matter of
conjecture.
99
of the room with extra reverb added by the capricious hosts.
Of course, not all recordings are the same. The 2002 album of Machaut’s motets
by the French group Ensemble Musica Nova uses two discernibly different voices to render
the same work.75 The triplum is sung by a bright tenor with forward resonance, while the
motetus is breather and has a slight buzzing quality; these distinct timbres make the voicecrossings in mm. 11–28 much more discernible (disc 2, track 2, 0:17–:39). A relatively
dry acoustic adds to the intelligibility of these voices, which are pleasantly resonant on their
own. The same can be said of several Machaut motets recorded by the American ensemble
Liber unUsualis.76 More reverberant than Ensemble Musica Nova, the performance here
is nevertheless closely miked, so that it is easier to separate the two upper voices. Quant/
Amour (M1) is sung by a triplum with a slight, fast vibrato and focused tone, and a motetus
with a slightly breathier, more luminous sound and a slower, less prominent vibrato. These
well-matched but distinct timbres allows us to keep track of each individual voice—and its
text—even through a hocket section in which the vocal ranges are suddenly equal (Track
5, :27–36).
75
Ensemble Musica Nova, Guillaume de Machaut, Intégrale des motets.
76
Liber unUsualis, Unrequited.
100
Example 2.1: Machaut’s, Dame/Fins cuers doulz (M11), mm. 7–3077
But even—or rather, especially—in these latter cases, how much more is gained by
listening to a live performance, when the ability to distinguish sound-sources from each
77
Reproduced from PMFC 2:144–5.
101
other is rendered all but automatic by their location in three-dimensional space, and when
the faculty of sight can aid our comprehension of texture and text, showing us who is singing what, when. Of course we do not always have access to a live performance (though many
scholars have the means to make a live performance happen when they need one). But it is
vital to recognize the differences between recorded and live performances, especially as they
pertain to questions of intelligibility and text-music relations more generally. Too often,
“performance” is taken as synonymous with “recordings”—indeed, Page demonstrates the
easy slippage between the two in speaking of the inluences for Discarding Images:
The primary inspiration for these chapters has been provided by performance.
The chance to hear medieval music in recorded performances is one of the
most obvious ways in which the musicological opportunities available to the
modern scholar exceed those of previous generations. Recordings are sometimes superseded by advances in knowledge...78
Similarly, when Daniel Leech-Wilkinson makes an argument for “analysis of performance”
and “studying music as sound” in his second analysis of Rose, lis, he in fact focuses on three
recordings, two of them by Gothic Voices.79 Signiicantly, the kinds of observations he makes
focus on—and, I would suggest, stem from— the dificulty of isolating voices:
When we listen to the irst phrase of Rose, lis we generally concentrate our
listening on the tune and the harmony that goes with it. In a three-part
performance that is very easy to do; with all four parts it is a little trickier,
because the tune is not always on top. The four-voice version is useful…
for this reason, that it divides our attention, taking a bit of it away from
the tune…and tempting us to hear tune and top voice, at least, as separate
but more nearly equal. The extent to which that happens depends…on our
willingness to try it rather than just to listen to the highest pitch all the
time, and on the performance. In the four-part performance issued on disc by
Gothic Voices in 1983…it is not easy to pick out the cantus...80
Indeed it is not, and it is no surprise that the ensuing analysis focuses on the interac78
Page, Discarding Images, p. xx; emphasis mine.
79
Leech-Wilkinson, “Rose, lis revisited,” 253.
80
Ibid., 254; emphasis mine.
102
tion of musical sonorities and vowels—vowels are audible in this recording. Now, LeechWilkinson is careful not to make any claims about the historicity of his approach—quite
the opposite, in fact—and the problem here is not one of authenticity. But by conlating
a recording with “performance,” with “the sound” of a piece, we risk distorting priorities,
whether they be our own or Machaut’s. For instance, it is dificult to take at face value the
assertion that “one is much more aware of the sound of the text when one sings it oneself
than when one listens to it being sung” while listening to the rendition of Dame/Fins cuers
doulz by Ensemble Musica Nova.81
None of this is to argue that “modern performance is a sensuous and provocative
inducement to study medieval music and one that must be left behind as that study becomes
progressively more engaged and serious.”82 But this music in its recorded form is perhaps
that sensuous and provocative inducement which, though there is no reason to leave it behind, must at least be viewed critically. I submit that in a live performance where each singer
is allowed to sing with his or her own voice, and where each understands the text enough to
be able to project some of that understanding in their facial expressions and declamation,
an audience member familiar with the language in question should have no problem picking one voice out and focusing on it. If that same audience member had the opportunity to
hear this piece again, then s/he would perhaps focus on a different voice. Certainly there are
times when one voice or another begs for attention by a bold gesture of some kind—here
a listener has the option of heeding the call of that gesture, or of staying their attention in
one place. In such a performance, a motet can be explored like a painting; and the listener
81
Ibid., 258. Conversely, in some recordings it is not clear that the performers themselves are any more
aware of the text than their listeners.
82
Page, “A Reply to Margaret Bent,” 132.
103
has control over their gaze. To suggest that it would be impossible to pick out various elements of that painting seems rash—especially if we perceive it most frequently through
lower-resolution, low-contrast reproductions.
How can we explore such experiences practically? A number of avenues seem open.
I have experimented with translating motets into English for English-speaking audiences,
in order to remove the linguistic barriers set up by middle French and Latin. The result
was a greater intelligibility of the text, though needless to say the translation was inelegant
compared to Machaut’s original. And the mode or performance—a recording in which
the same singer sang both voices to a MIDI tenor—is open to every objection I have outlined above.83 One can imagine multi-channel recordings that take advantage of surroundsound technology to place the listener at the center of a performance in which auditory
scene analysis is not futile, and shifts of attention can be voluntary. One can even imagine
a visual element added to this. Perhaps a trio of laptops, each with the video of one singer
(and subtitles?) could execute these complex pieces. Or we can go analog: we can perform
these works more, in small venues, with a variety of vocal types, perhaps even repeating the
same work several times in a row, so as to give the audience a chance to explore. We can reinstitute those gatherings of discerning people.
*
*
*
The goal of this chapter has not been to argue that motet texts, whether heard individually or in tandem, would have been necessarily or immediately intelligible to medieval
listeners. Nor do I hope to have convinced anyone that hearing or understanding these
texts in a live performance would be automatic, even if one knew the language. But focused,
83
I played this recording to accompany my “Lies, Damned Lies, and Hockets.”
104
mindful attention on the part of the listener will always pay off in the case of ars nova motets, and in the case of most other types of music. The limited medieval evidence seems
indeed to place a premium on clarity—that much we can glean from Jacobus’s comments.
Other contemporary echoes of performance seem to suggests that motets might well have
been performed by different-sounding voices. And whatever kind of evidence this is, there
is none to the contrary—that there was any ideal of poetic, cultural, or sonic homogeneity
associated with the ars nova motet. That is not to say that medieval performances would
have been ideal in terms of intelligibility. We cannot know that. But we can recognize that
the idea that texts in a polytextual setting are unintelligible de facto is a modern prejudice,
born in part of 1980s performance aesthetics and supported in large part by the digital
mediation to which much of our listening is subject.
105
CHAPTER THREE
What is a TALEA? Upper-voice Periodicity in ARS NOVA Motets
M
ANY ASPECTS OF THE PRACTICE KNOWN AS “ISORHYTHM”
have recently come under
review. Margaret Bent has questioned the appropriateness of the term, especially
of “iso-” (“the same”) in describing processes that are more often transformational than
simply repetitive.1 The technique’s role as generic determinant has also been subject to revision, as focus has shifted from what Ernest Sanders once characterized as “the isorhythmic
Ars nova motet,” (“a reduction of the bewildering variety of motets lourishing at the turn of
the [fourteenth] century to one deinitive type”) to, in Bent’s words, “the variety rather than
the sameness of strategies of motet composition in the 14th and 15th centuries [which
can] even less be accommodated within a single model than can sonata forms.”2 And Anna
Maria Busse Berger has questioned the purpose of isorhythmic practice, arguing that structural regularity often seen as an end in itself is in fact the result of mnemonic practices
which helped composers to write motets and performers to memorize them.3
Within this revitalized discourse, one basic aspect of the narrative remains unquestioned, even though exceptions to the apparent rule are known: the tenor continues to be
viewed as the primary shaping force in the construction of “isorhythmic” works. The idea
that the tenor’s layout dictates those of the other voices and that a motet’s primary structuring device is that of the tenor affects the ways in which 14th-century motets are edited and
1
Bent, “What is Isorhythm?” and “Isorhythm.” See also Sanders, “Isorhythm,” 351, and Kügle, “Isorhythmie,” 1219–20.
2
Sanders, “The Medieval Motet,” 556, emphasis mine; Bent, “What is Isorhythm?,” 135. See also comments in Everist, “The Horse, the Clerk,” 138–9, and Bent’s account of the emergence of “the isorhythmic
motet” as generic label in “What is Isorhythm?,” 121–8.
3
Busse Berger, Medieval Music, 212–52.
106
interpreted. In fact, a number of motets have upper-voice structures different from those
of the tenor. These upper-voice units, which have sometimes been referred to as “Großtalea” or “super-talea,” have been observed in the analyses of individual pieces, and in at least
one case—Margaret Bent’s pioneering analysis of Vitry’s Tribum/Quoniam—the presence
of such upper-voice structures has been used to question the tenor’s supremacy.4 The effects of supertaleae are also incorporated by Bent and others into a number of analyses of
individual pieces, especially, as we shall see, of Machaut’s motets Helas/Corde mesto (M12)
and Amours/Faus Semblant (M15). More general remarks about different or multiple taleae reside in Heinrich Besseler’s footnotes, Friedrich Ludwig’s editorial notes, and Ursula
Günther’s “asides,” which anticipate many of the observations below.5 And Karl Kügle has
discussed some of the formal irregularities to which I will draw attention from a complementary analytical stance.6
4
Bent argues that noticing the tenor’s structure alone in Tribum/Quoniam “will give only subsidiary attention to the amazing interlocked tripartite structure, with its own internal identities, that is counterpointed
against the two identical tenor color statements,” “Polyphony of Texts and Music,” 92. Bent’s argument has
been very inluential in the writing of this chapter. At the same time, I wish to question the notion that
the upper-voice structures in Tribum/Quoniam and other motets discussed below are “counter-isorhythmic”
(ibid.); as I will argue below, they are isorhythmic, but with units or repetition which are dictated by the upper
voices rather than the tenor. I hope that the other motets discussed here will serve to place the upper-voice
periods of Tribum/Quoniam in context.
5
In the case of In virtute/Decens, Besseler points out that the upper voices in the motet’s irst section are
organized into taleae twice as long as those of the tenor (“Studien zur Musik des Mittelalters II,” 222n9)
and other upper-voice conigurations that do not match those of the tenor are included in the footnotes
to the table on his pp. 222–4; these will be referenced individually below. Interestingly, Besseler notes the
presence of hockets in his main table as though they were a property of tenor rather than of upper-voice
construction. Günther also mentions in passing many of the motets discussed in this chapter: “As to some
extent with Vitry, in some [of Machaut’s] motets (nos. 1, 8, 10, 12 and 15) it takes two or three Tenor periods to make up one period of the upper voices. In the other 15 works the tenor divisions occur at the same
place as the upper voice ones…it is normal in [Ivrea] too for the upper voice periods to coincide with those
of the lower voices. The appearance of two short Tenor taleae against one upper voice period occurs only in
motets 9, 13, 22 and 71. The irst part of no. 15 is exceptional insofar as here the reverse process occurs,
so that two upper voice periods are the equivalent of one Tenor talea,” “The 14th-Century Motet,” 30, 37.
6
Although he does not invoke the possibility that upper-voice taleae might in fact be of different lengths,
Kügle has drawn attention to the results of supertaleic organization. For example, he notes that in the irst
107
But no discussion exists of supertaleae as a phenomenon. This is not surprising,
since it sits between general and speciic procedures. Where analysis is focused around a
single motet (usually in order to demonstrate its depth and uniqueness) the presence of
similar procedures in other works might be inconvenient or irrelevant. And in broader
surveys, these motets stand as exceptions, and are thus not worth dwelling on in great detail.
But a collection of exceptions can change the rules. I have brought together the
analyses that follow because I believe that they illustrate a single point: in a number of
14th-century motets upper-voice structure is to some extent independent of tenor talea
structure. The idea that some motets may have forms into which the tenor is made to it,
rather than forms built by that tenor, opens the space to richer and more meaningful analysis. But before turning to these “irregular” works it will be useful to consider the consequences of allowing the tenor unquestioned structural (and semantic) primacy.
THE TENOR AS A FOUNDATION?
It is by no means unreasonable to call the tenor a fundamental element in many ars
nova motets, and at irst glance the theoretical evidence seems strongly to support such a
view. Color and talea, the only terms used in the middle ages with reference to the procedure
later called isorhythm, are usually deined as the repetition, in the tenor, of melody and
rhythm respectively. Johannes de Grocheio, writing around 1300, famously compared the
tenor of a motet to a building’s foundation and to the body’s skeletal frame:
half of Colla/Bona, “phrase joints occur at the beginning…of every second talea statement”; The Manuscript
Ivrea, 98.
108
The tenor is that part upon which all the others are founded, in the same way
as the parts of a house or building are, upon its foundation. And the tenor
regulates them and gives them quantity, just as the bones do to the other
parts [of the body].7
This metaphorical description is supported by Egidius de Murino, whose De modo
componendi tenores motettorum is the only detailed account of compositional process for
ars nova motet tenors. He indicates that a composer should irst rhythmicize a tenor, then
a contratenor (if there is to be one) and inally the upper voices.8 Thus there is medieval
precedent for seeing the tenor as central to motet composition; Bent’s suggestion that most
of these works would better be called “tenor” motets than “isorhythmic” motets rings true.9
But the theoretical evidence is also contingent. For example, Murino warns that
his instructions are “written for the teaching of children” and may therefore be too simplistic for the subtilis cantor.10 And Ugolino of Orvieto provides evidence that, by the early
ifteenth century, the terms color and talea could refer to the upper voices as well—an expanded usage that Daniel Leech-Wilkinson reasonably suggests must date back to the fourteenth century.11 Most importantly, Grocheio, an oft-cited witness to the tenor’s primacy,
was writing before the developments of the Ars nova. A comparison of his statement with
Murino’s is instructive. Writing in the middle of the fourteenth century, Murino advises
his reader to “take the Tenor from some antiphon or responsory or another chant from the
7
“Tenor autem est illa pars, supra quam omnes aliae fundantur, quemadmodum partes domus vel aediicii
super suum fundamentum. Et eas regulat et eis dat quantitatem, quemadmodum ossa partibus aliis,” ed.
Rholoff, Die Quellenhandschriften, 146–7.
8
Ed. Coussemaker, Scriptores 3:124–8, partial edition and translation in Leech-Wilkinson, “Compositional Techniques,”18–23.
9
“What is Isorhythm?,” 138. Clark has also referred to the tenor as “the primary voice of the motet”—quite
naturally, given the focus of her study; “Concordare cum materia,” 2.
10
Ed. and trans. Leech-Wilkinson, Compositional Techniques, 19, 22.
11
Ibid., 15.
109
antiphonal, and the words should concord with the materia of which you wish to make the
motet.”12 Scholars sometimes read this as a statement equivalent to Grocheio’s foundational metaphor, interpreting it as evidence that “composers worked from the bottom up; that is,
they took a segment of chant and used it as a scaffold for the added upper voices.”13 But in
fact, it is clear from Murino’s description that something—materia—precedes the choice of
tenor. What is this materia? The word is unhelpfully elusive: it can mean substance, topic,
subject matter, even building material. Leech-Wilkinson reasonably interpreted it as “the
message of the upper-voice texts,” but several other commentators have linked materia with
the very tenor whose choice depends on it. Alice Clark’s discussion of Murino’s statement
exempliies the problems of interpretation presented by the text:
The tenor is thus the melodic, harmonic and rhythmic point of origin for
the motet, though it is in fact preceded by the motet’s materia, on whose basis it is chosen. In his sketchy account, it is easy to overlook this statement
“concordare cum materia,” and perhaps even Egidius is more interested in
talea and color formation than in tenor selection, but he makes it clear that
such selection is not a random act. Egidius does not, however, specify just
how the tenor is to relate to the matter of its motet. That relationship is
generally thought to center around the textual incipit given to the tenor in
the manuscript: that is, the tag is appropriate for a tenor on that subject.14
On the one hand, materia clearly precedes the tenor; on the other, materia is so vague and
unhelpful a term that it is much easier to think of the tenor, or perhaps its text in the manuscript, as the motet’s point of origin.
12
“Primo accipe tenorem alicuius antiphone vel responsorii vel alterius cantus de antiphonario et debent
verba concordare cum materia de qua vis facere motetum,” Ibid., 18, 21.
13
Robertson, “Remembering the Annunciation,” 287.
14
Clark, “Concordare cum materia,” 6. Compare also Anne Walters Robertson’s interpretations of this passage, which read it variously as indicating bottom-up composition and a more lexible approach: “Composers worked from the bottom up; that is, they took a segment of chant and used it as a scaffold for the added
upper voices. This practice was summed up by music theorist Egidius de Murino,” “Remembering the Annunciation,” 287; “for Egidius a motet grows from top down and from bottom up simultaneously,” Guillaume
de Machaut and Reims, 146.
110
If some modern accounts of isorhythmic composition unquestioningly adopt Grocheio’s foundation metaphor rather than dwelling on the nature of Murino’s “materia,” it
is also perhaps because of an implicit symmetry between the progress of music history and
a bottom-up order of composition. Plainchant is the oldest material, and thus composers
must have begun with it. The repetition of rhythm independently of melody occurred irst
in the tenors of thirteenth century motets and only later in their upper voices; thus it follows that isorhythm must have irst been applied to the tenor voice of a motet, and only
later to the upper voices. In music history and in a single composition (which here acts as
a microcosm) “isorhythm”—so the logic perhaps goes—begins in the tenor and moves upwards, “crystallizing” in the upper voices with geological propriety, “spreading” to them (like
a disease), and once there causing “acts of violence.”15 The most bruised specimens (and
therefore, the logic sometimes goes, the latest) are called “Panisorhythmic” motets—works
in which every rhythmic value in every voice is subject to periodic articulation.16
From this progression—apparently compositional as well as historical—stems the
reason most often given for the presence of upper-voice isorhythm: to make the tenor’s repetitions more audible. In the textbook explanation, “upper voices may also be organized isorhythmically, in whole or part, to emphasize the recurring rhythmic patterns in the tenor.”17
15
“It was felt necessary to introduce…strophically recurring isorhythmic passages into the upper voices.
Such isorhythmic parallelisms at irst crystallized mainly around phrase endings,” Sanders, “Isorhythm,”
352. “Isorhythms started in the tenor line but spread complexly to other parts,” Delahoyde, “Medieval Music: Ars nova” <http://www.wsu.edu/~delahoyd/medieval/ars.nova.html>. “The new principle [on the contrary] even extends the application of isorhythm to the upper voices (since the tenor is constructed in this
manner, and the complexity of its rhythm, which repeats several times, requires in compensation a rhythmically uniied layout of the upper voices as well). This necessarily leads to acts of violence”; Ludwig, “Studien
über die Geschichte,” 224, cited and trans. Bent, “What is Isorhythm?,” 122.
16
The term “pan-isorhythm” was coined by Apel; see “Remarks About the Isorhythmic Motet,” 139.
Günther used the extent of upper-voice isorhythm to date motets—a practice that has been criticized by
Bent; see Günther, “The 14th-Century Motet,” and Bent, “What is Isorhythm?,” 127–8.
17
Grout, Burkholder & Palisca, A History of Western Music, 121. The sentiment behind this textbook
111
The highlighting of structure, we are to understand, is an end in itself.18
The result is something of a contradiction. On the one hand, upper-voice rhythmic repetition has interested scholars, who have used it for dating and for articulating,
exalting, and ultimately condemning a compositional ethos “whose smallest details were
foreordained, and to which any sort of lyric sentiment was as foreign as to the numbers
that determined the form and dimension of the work.”19 On the other hand, the purpose
of all this tightly controlled compositional material is simply to highlight the repetition of
rhythmic patterns in the tenor—repetition which in and of itself was by no means new in
the fourteenth century. Despite this contradiction the unspoken assumption that ars nova
motets have no structure independent of that of their tenor persists, and it has important
implications.
For not only upper-voice rhythmic repetition, but also the structure of upper-voice
texts are said to amplify the tenor’s rhythmic cycles. In his edition of the Ivrea and Chantilly motets, Frank Harrison included a table entitled “Relation Between Sections of Poems
and Taleae” in which he assigned a letter grade, from a+ to d, to each voice of each motet
based on “the degree of coordination between poetic and musical design.”20 Although he
deinition is well represented in scholarship of the past century. To take just two examples, Ludwig wrote of
upper voices whose purpose is “die Isorhythmie der einzelnen Tenorabschnitte ebenfalls ganz scharf ausprägen,” “Geschichte der Mensuralnotation,” 622. Later Sanders claimed that “rhythmic correspondences
between successive [upper-voice] phrases or phrase groups [were put in] evidently to lend emphasis to the
work’s structure,” “Isorhythm,” 351.
18
There is however 14th-century evidence that tenor taleae are not meant to be heard, as when Johannes
Boen warns composers not take too much time in the rhythmic organization of tenors because “[talea] is
presented more to the sight than to the hearing.” Cited and trans. Busse Berger, Medieval Music, 223.
19
de Van, ed., Guglielmi Dufay opera omnia, 2:i. Sanders comments on this discrepancy: “Isorhythm is often
deined with reference only to the tenor taleae (recurring rhythmic units) of 14th-century motets [although]
it is the growth of isorhythm in the upper voices of 14th-century motets that is characteristic and signiicant,” “Isorhythm,” 352.
20
Harrison, ed., Motets of French Provenance, xii.
112
notes that these “value-symbols…admittedly cannot be completely objective,” his very belief in the exercise speaks to the analytical primacy given to tenors.
The burden of semantic congruence also lies with the upper voices. Even though
Murino indicates that the tenor’s words are chosen to concord with some pre-existing thing,
the tenor is often given interpretive priority. In Anne Robertson’s words:
What is evident [from Murino’s treatise] is that a certain amount of knowledge was embedded a priori into a composition on a cantus irmus simply
by virtue of the choice of tenor. The tenor thus assumes a crucial role in the
interpretation of a motet: it holds the key to certain aspects of meaning in
the work; it may indicate the way in which the piece was used in the liturgy;
and it may help explain the relationship of the voices to one another.21
Jacques Boogaart reads the passage similarly, conlating the choice of materia with the choice
of tenor: “According to Egidius de Murino…the composer must irst deine the materia with
which the work deals by choosing a suitable fragment from plainchant; in other words the
idea at the base of the whole construction must be ixed irst of all.”22
Tenor-centric readings of Murino tend to produce religious interpretations of ars
nova motets, since they take the tenor’s liturgical origin as a starting point. Almost inevitably, the upper-voice texts are relegated to the status of accessory and called upon only to
support interpretations which have their basis in the tenor.23 Rarely is the reverse standard
applied: just as an inverse of Harrison’s table does not exist, so it is not asked whether a par21
“Remembering the Annunciation,” 287.
22
“Love’s Unstable Balance, Part I,” 5.
23
This is the approach taken by Robertson in her study of Machaut’s motets, where “the tenors do fundamentally shape and ultimately guide the interpretation of Motets 1–17”—pieces which are only “seemingly
secular,” Guillaume de Machaut, 82. As Everist has pointed out, “while Robertson’s account of the ordering
of Machaut’s tenors, where ‘the gist of the story of Motets 1–17 is irst revealed’ (p. 84), has a strong evidential base in the mystic theological texts that she adduces, this base is much less clear and more subject to
ad hoc interpretative strategies in her accounts of the ‘story’ as told in the upper voices of the 17 motets,”
“The Horse, the Clerk,” 139.
113
ticular tenor’s text is well-suited to the message of the upper voices. This is partly because
tenor texts are only a few words long, and thus easily bent in many directions, but more
because the tenor’s perceived structural supremacy seems to preclude the question—since
the tenor is a foundation, a starting-point, and a “melodic, harmonic and rhythmic point of
origin for the motet,” its propriety to the piece is beyond reproach.24
And yet, an entire building must be planned before the foundation can be laid.
Nor is it always possible to tell from looking at a foundation how many loors the eventual
structure may have, or what materials it might be constructed from, or for what purpose.25
The elusive materia that precedes the tenor may include any number of signiicant musical and semantic decisions which may directly impact the choice of tenor and aspects of
text-music relations. Nowhere is the tenor’s foundational role more open to question than
in the works I wish to discuss here: motets in which the upper-voice taleae are of different
lengths than those of the tenor. Some of these motets exhibit structural peculiarities that
are noted in existing analyses and editions. Others will be new to the discussion. But taken
as a group they have the potential to complicate and enrich our understanding of ars nova
compositional processes by casting that basic compositional building block—the talea—in
a new light.
24
Clark, “Concordare cum materia,” 6.
25
As Abigail Klima has kindly explained to me in a private correspondence, foundations are more conditioned by the climate, soil, and earthquake potential of a region than by the materials of the structure to be
placed upon them. Understanding the soil condition, an architect would be able to make a ballpark guess
about the height of a building based on the foundation.
114
THE EVIDENCE FOR INDEPENDENT UPPER-VOICE TALEAE
The irst half of the Ivrea motet In virtute/Decens exempliies the phenomenon of
independent upper-voice structures. Its tenor and contratenor are organized in 10-breve
taleae, within which both lower voices are fully isorhythmic. But the upper voices have no
rhythmic congruence across these sections, except for a longa in the motetus in breves 5–6
of each talea (see Example 3.1, where isorhythm is shaded). Accordingly, Harrison categorized the upper voices in this part of the motet as not isorhythmic.26
In fact there is more rhythmic repetition in the upper voices than irst meets the
eye. While the odd-numbered taleae are still largely not isorhythmic, the upper voices above
tenor taleae A2, A4, and A6 have a notable amount of congruence. Or, to put it another
way, the periods being articulated in the upper voices are twice as long as the tenor taleae
(see Example 3.2). The resulting 20-breve units (marked a1–3 in Example 3.2) look
more like normal upper-voice taleae, in which isorhythm is more often found in the second
half than in the center of the talea.27 These upper-voice units of periodic repetition are not
marked in this motet’s only edition, which labels only the tenor’s repetitions. But they are
important to our understanding of the work in which we can now, at the very least, observe
a greater degree of isorhythm.
26
See the evaluations of Motet #18 in Tables II and IV in Harrison, ed. Motets of French Provenance, 202,
204.
27
This is obvious in cases where there are hockets, but it applies more broadly, as Boogaart has observed:
“Normally the degree of isorhythm increases towards the end of the tenor talea,” “Love’s Unstable Balance,
Part 1,” 13–18.
115
Example 3.1: In virtute/Decens mm. 1–60, arranged according to tenor taleae;
isorhythm shaded
116
117
Example 3.2: In Virtute/Decens mm. 1–60, arranged according to upper-voice periods; rhythmic congruence shaded
Terminology and Diagrams
In analyses of individual motets it has been unnecessary to name the phenomenon
with which we concern ourselves here—it has been suficient to comment, as Günther does
in discussing Ida/Portio, that “1 color equals 4 taleae, 2 of which correspond to one musical
section of the upper voices.”28 Similarly Bent, in describing Tribum/Quoniam, which has
twelve repetitions of the tenor talea, speciies that there are “thrice two blocks of music.”29
Discussing the phenomenon in several works, Georg Reichert used the term “Großtalea” to
describe these upper-voice constructions; Jacques Boogaart has called them “Supertaleae.”30
Although Reichert’s term is more commonly used, supertalea avoids the problems of pluralization presented by the former (Großtaleen? Großtaleae?). Unless we read “super-” as
“above,” both terms restrict themselves etymologically to upper-voice taleae that are longer
than those of the tenor. They are thus less useful in describing a work like Flos/Celsa, in
which, as I shall argue, the upper voices have shorter periods—Kleintaleen?—than those
of the tenor. In still other cases, I will suggest that even where the musical periods articulated by repeated rhythms are the same length in the tenor and the upper voices, the units
of repetition are not aligned. Perhaps there is no need for an umbrella term to describe
this variety of approaches to upper-voice form, but terminology, even if slightly imprecise,
can help us to think symbolically about related processes. I will use the terms “supertalea,”
“upper-voice talea,” and “upper-voice period” interchangeably.
Most editions of Ars nova motets label the tenor talea and color using Roman num28
The Motets of the Manuscripts, p. lx.
29
Hence, six—because every upper-voice talea includes two tenor taleae. “Polyphony of Texts and Music,”
91–2.
30
Reichert, “Das Verhaltnis,” 202; Boogaart, “O series summe rata,” 107.
118
bers for the former and letters for the latter.31 Where color breaks also fall at talea breaks,
this results in alpha-numberic labelling, so that AII would be the second talea of the irst
color, BIII the third talea of the second color, and so forth. Sometimes editors switch from
Roman to Arabic numerals to describe taleae in diminution, but this practice is not consistent. Since adding upper-voice periodic construction as a third layer has the potential
to confuse matters, it begs for some modiication of this scheme. In the diagrams below,
I through-label tenor taleae without regard of which color they belong to, though the traditional distinction between Roman and Arabic numbering is preserved, so that II is the
second talea in the motet’s irst section, and 2 is the second diminution talea. Integer valor is
indicated by straight lines (
), diminution by wavy lines(
), and breaks between taleae
by vertical strokes( | ). Greek letters refer to successive upper-voice taleae, which are labeled
according to their isorhythmic region rather than the color to which they belong (a only in
a unipartite work, a and b in a motet with two sections, etc.) Measure numbers are included
to the right of each diagram to allow comparison with available editions. In the enclosed
editions I have also used Greek letters to label the beginnings of upper-voice taleae where
these differ from the tenor’s taleae by length or position.
Supertaleae as Grouped Tenor Taleae
Reichert’s 1956 study of structural relationships between text and music in Machaut’s motets is the irst to explore supertaleic construction. There he observed that uppervoice periods in Hélas/Corde mesto (M12) and Amours/Faus Semblant (M15) encompass
31
This is the practice followed by Schrade in PMFC1, Harrison in PMFC5, and Günther in The Motets
of the Manuscripts. Ludwig’s Musikalische Werke uses Roman numerals for both color and talea, the former
larger in size.
119
several taleae.32 In discussing Motet 12 he coined a term to describe the phenomenon:
“Every such ‘Großtalea’ covers three tenor periods and coincides exactly with the course of
the tenor [color] which sounds a total of three times.”33 Thus while the tenor talea repeats
nine times, the upper voices repeat their longer period three times (see Figure 3.1). Reichert
locates the raison d’être of this super-structure in the motetus text, which is split into three
strophes, “and each of these strophes is now made the basis of a Großperiod in constant
overall disposition.”34
upper voices: |supertalea a1
tenor: |talea I
|talea II
|supertalea a2
|talea IV
|supertalea a3
|talea VII
|talea III
|talea V
|talea VI
|talea VIII
|talea IX
|
|
mm. 1–54
|
|
mm. 55–108
|
mm. 109–162
|
Figure 3.1: Upper- and Lower-voice taleae in Hélas/Corde mesto (M12)
In Amours/Faus Semblant (M15) he also saw a connection between upper-voice
text structure and isorhythmic super-structure. This time, the triplum’s text is in control.
Though it is divided into four strophes which relect the tenor’s four taleae, there is complete metrical afinity only between alternate strophes. And the musical setting exhibits
complete rhythmic replication in the upper voices only between the material corresponding
with tenor taleae I and III, and II and IV (see Figure 3.2):
32
Reichert also observed “ein ähnlicher Ansatz zur Großtalea” in the motetus of Motet 21, but I have been
unable to replicate his analysis, “Das Verhaltnis,” 203.
33
“Jede solche ‘Großtalea’ umfaßt drei Tenorperioden und deckt sich genau mit einem Ablauf der Tenormelodie, die insgesamt dreimal erklingt (= 3 ‘Colores’),” ibid., 202.
34
“Und jede dieser Strophen ist nun in gleichbleibender Gesamtdisposition zur Grundlage der Großperiode gemacht,” ibid.
120
upper voices: |supertalea a1
tenor: |talea I
|supertalea a2
|talea III
|talea II
|talea IV
|
|
mm. 1–60
| mm. 61–120
|
Figure 3.2: Upper- and Lower-Voice Taleae in Amours/Faus Semblant (M15)
Here the supertaleae are particularly stark: tenor taleae II and IV—but not I and
III—contain hockets, and since hockets are always isorhythmic, the arrangement into two
halves is inevitable (though unmarked in Ludwig’s and Schrade’s editions). Ernest Sanders, Ramon Pelinski, Agostino Ziino and Karl Kügle have all mentioned the bi-partite arrangement of the upper voices in Amours/Faus Semblant, and Margaret Bent and Jacques
Boogaart have carried out more extensive analyses linking the work’s structure with ideas
expressed in its texts.35
As Bent has noted, the upper-voice taleae of Motet 15 are also highly repetitive
within the space deined by tenor taleae. In Figure 3.3 the solid gray shading indicates
rhythms shared by all four taleae, while the patterned shading is for rhythms shared only by
alternate taleae—the rhythms which deine the supertaleae.36 Hélas/Corde mesto (M12) thus
serves as a better example of the supertaleae I would like to examine, in that the upper-voice
35
Sanders, “The Medieval Motet,” 558n257: “The analytical layout of Nos. 12 and 15 in Ludwig’s edition does not take their phrase structure into account. This was observed by G. Reichert…who recognized
the form of these motets on the basis of the poetic structure, but failed to identify the subdivisions of the
musical form, with which the poetry is congruous”; Pelinski, “Zusammenklang und Aufbau,” 69: “Auch der
Tenor-Cantus irmus der Motette Nr. 15 wird in vier Taleae gegliedert, die paarweise (Taleae 1–2 und 3–4)
den Oberstimmenperioden entsprechen”; Ziino, “Isoritmia musicale,” 450: “il Triplum ed il Motetus invece,
a mio avviso, sono costituiti da due sole talee e non da quattro, come risulta sempre dall’edizione di Ludwig
(e da quella di Leo Schrade)”; see also Kügle, “Die Musik des 14. Jahrhunderts,” 370. Besseler makes no
mention of the upper-voice structure in the footnotes to his chart, but his characterization of the triplum
and motetus as “streng isorhythmisch” implies that he must have observed the supertaleae, “Studien zur
Musik des Mittelalters II,” 222n1, 223. More extensive analyses of the motet’s form are available in Bent,
“Deception, Exegesis, and Sounding Number,” 20–22 and Boogaart, “O series summe rata,” 144–6.
36
Figure 3.3 follow’s Bent’s analysis of isorhythm in this work, as summarized by shading in her Example
1, “Deception, Exegisis,” 16–9.
121
taleae are considerably more relective of their own scheme than they are of the tenor’s.
Figure 3.3: Isorhythm in Amours/Faus semblant (M15); Correspondences on the level
of tenor Talea shaded in solid gray; those on the level of Supertalea in checks and stripes.
In both Machaut motets discussed so far, and in In vitrute/Decens, the upper-voice
taleae encompass several tenor taleae (three in Hélas/Corde mesto; two in the others). This is
the most common relationship between upper- and lower-voice taleae in cases where they
do not coincide, and it is present in several more motets. Machaut’s Qui/Ha! Fortune (M8)
consists of four supertaleae, each of which encompasses three repetitions of the tenor’s talea
(see Figure 3.4).37 In Vitry’s Tribum/Quoniam, the twelve tenor taleae are superstructured by
three supertaleae in the upper voices (see Figure 3.5).38
37
Noted in Besseler, “Studien zur Musik des Mittelalters II,” 224n19. Hoppin also observed that “By
treating three of the rhythmic patterns as one talea, [the upper voices] make the form of the tenor become 3[colores]=4[taleae],” Medieval Music, 412–13. See also Boogaart, “O series summe rata,” 1:134, and
HaĆaburda, Fortuna in weltlichen mehrstimmigen Kompositionen, 110, 218. Schrade’s edition indicates supertaleae for this motet, labeling them as though they were taleae (The Works of Guillaume de Machaut, 134–6);
in this he follows Ludwig, who however indicates in his editorial notes that although the upper voices are
made up of four periods of 9 longae each, “im Tenor T. 1–3, 4–6 und 7–9 rhythmisch gleich sind,” Guillaume de Machaut: Musikalische Werke, 3:32. Sanders reads the passage in a similar way, pointing out that
this work and also motets 1 and 10 are “based on tenor taleae with internally repetitive rhythmic patterns,”
“The Medieval Motet,” 558.
38
Figure 3.5 excludes the six-breve introitus that precedes the tenor’s entrance. Compound upper-voice
122
upper voices:
tenor:
|supertalea a1 |
|supertalea a2 |
|supertalea a3 |
|supertalea a4 |
talea I
talea II
|talea III
talea IV
talea V
|talea VI
talea VII
talea VIII
|talea IX
talea X
talea XI
|talea XII
|
|
|
|
mm. 1–27
mm. 28–54
mm. 55–81
mm. 82–108
Figure 3.4: Upper- and lower-voice taleae in Machaut’s Qui/Ha! Fortune (M8)
|
|supertalea a2 |
|supertalea a3 |
upper voices: supertalea a1
tenor: talea I
|talea II
|talea III
|talea IV
talea V
talea VI
|talea VII
|talea VIII
talea IX
talea X
|talea XI
|talea XII
| mm. 7–30
| mm. 31–54
| mm. 55–78
Figure 3.5: Upper- and lower-voice taleae in Tribum/Quoniam
|
|supertalea a2
|supertalea a3
|supertalea b1|
|supertalea b2|
|supertalea b3|
upper voices: supertalea a1
tenor: talea I
|talea II
talea III
|talea IV
talea V
|talea VI
talea 1
talea 2
talea 3
talea 4
talea 5
talea 6
|
|
|
|
|
|
mm. 1–24
mm. 25–48
mm. 49–72
mm. 73–84
mm. 85–96
mm. 97–108
Figure 3.6: Upper- and lower-voice taleae in Hareu/Helas (M10)
123
Upper-voice supertaleae composed of multiple tenor taleae are also used in several
motets with diminution sections, where two different talea lengths are already in play. In
some cases, there are supertaleae in both parts of the motet, so that the proportions between
the integer valor and diminution sections are preserved. An example is Machaut’s Hareu/
Helas (M10). Here, the tenor talea is twelve breves long (BLLLB1)becoming twelve semibreves
in diminution (SBBBS2). In the upper-voices, the talea length is doubled in both sections of
the motet, resulting in three supertaleae of 24 breves followed by three more of twelve (see
Figure 3.6).39
Ida/Portio by Edigius de Pusiex follows the same plan in a more complex fashion.
This motet, preserved in the Ivrea codex but also in later sources such as Chantilly, is
quadripartite, with successive diminution in the proportions 6:4:3:2. Each section consists of four tenor taleae, which are interpreted in the upper voices as two supertaleae (See
Figure 3.7).40 Here again, the talea length is doubled, but the proportions of diminution
are preserved. The upper-voice isorhythm (present in the triplum within each of the four
taleae noted in Besseler, “Studien zur Musik des Mittelalters II,” 223n12. Bent’s analysis does not privilege
this arrangement; her example 4.1 lines up the isorhythmic section of the motet in four rows of three taleae,
and Figure 4.1 is arranged according to color, thus 2 rows of 6 taleae each. But the structure diagramed here
plays a large role in the analysis: “thrice two block of music arranged over twice three identical places in the
tenor [create] a great hemiola of threefold form arranged over a twice-stated color,” “Polyphony of texts and
Music,” 92. The kind of supertaleic structure at work in Tribum/Quoniam is not unique to that work—If
Machaut’s Motet 8 were arranged as 3 blocks of four taleae (that is, according to its color), instead of the 4
blocks of three (the shape dictated by its upper-voice isorhythmic structure), we might there too see interesting patterns of non-coordination created by rhythmically identical blocks of music.
39
Observed by Besseler in “Studien zur Musik des Mittelalters II,” 224n18. Schrade’s edition (The Works
of Guillaume de Machaut, 108–11) ignores the tenor taleae and arranges the voices according to the uppervoice supertaleae, in which he follows Ludwig, who mentions the tenor in his notes (“im tenor T. 1–4 und
5–8 rhythmisch gleich sind”) but marks only supertaleae in his edition, Guillaume de Machaut: Musikalische
Werke, 3:37–40. Only Boogaart indicates both levels of organization in his edition, calling the tenor taleae
Ia, Ib; IIa, IIb, etc.; “O series summe rata,” 1:253–4, 2:604–8.
40
Noted by Besseler, who further points out that the motetus ceases to be isorhythmic before the triplum
does, “Studien zur Musik des Mittelalters II,” 222n8.
124
|
|supertalea a2
|supertalea b1 |
|supertalea b1 |
|supertalea g1|
|supertalea g2|
|supertalea| d1 |
|supertalea| d2 |
upper voices: supertalea a1
tenor: talea I
|talea IV
talea III
talea 1
talea 2
talea 3
talea 4
talea i
talea ii
talea iii
talea iv
talea1
talea 2
talea 3
talea 4
|
|
|talea II
|
|
|
|
mm. 1–36
mm. 37–72
mm. 73–96
mm. 97–120
mm. 121–38
mm. 139–56
mm. 157–68
mm. 169–80
Figure 3.7: Upper- and lower-voice taleae in Ida/Portio
upper voices: |supertalea a1
tenor: |talea I
|supertalea a2
|talea III
|supertalea a3
|talea V
| talea II
| talea IV
|
|
|
|supertalea b1
| talea 2
|supertalea b2
| talea 4
|talea 3
|supertalea b3
| talea 6
|talea 5
mm. 1–30
|
|
mm. 31–60
|
mm. 61–90
mm. 91–108
mm. 109–126
mm. 127–144
|
|partial supertalea b4
| talea 8
|talea 7
|
|
| talea VI
|talea 1
|
mm. 145–159
Figure 3.8: Upper- and lower-voice taleae in Vos/Gratissima
125
sections and in the motetus in sections a and b) is so prevalent that Harrison organizes
this work according to supertaleae in his edition, making no mention of the tenor taleae.41
In both parts of Vitry’s Vos/Gratissima too, tenor taleae are doubled to make uppervoice supertaleae. As Besseler has noted, while the tenor has six taleae in the irst section and
7 1/2 taleae in the second, the upper voices are grouped in three larger sections followed
by four shorter ones, the last of which is truncated (see Figure 3.8).42 At what point in
the compositional process might composers have decided to use supertaleae? For several of
Machaut’s motets, the answer is provided by the poetic structures of the upper-voice texts,
which mirror the supertaleae more closely than they do the tenor taleae. This suggests that
the tenor rhythms were here concieved as half-periods, rather than as building blocks in
themselves.43 The same is true for Vos/Gratissima, where the irst half of the triplum text
is arranged in six-line strophes with the structure a7a7b8a7a7b8. In section a, each of these
strophes is set to one upper-voice supertalea, while tenor taleae correspond with the smaller
3-line half-units (see Table 3.1). Thus the triplum’s rhyme scheme beautifully mirrors the
doubled-up taleae; certainly the three-line unit has structural validity, just as the tenor’s talea is a building block in the work’s form. But only the six-line stanza is poetically complete.
41
Motets of French Provenance, 24–9, 193.
42
“Studien zur Musik des Mittelalters II,” 223n13. Kügle has also described the results of the larger units
in the upper voices during the second half of the piece in terms of differences between adjacent taleae: “isorhythmic passages (without hocket) and isorhythmic hocket passages between triplum and motetus alternate
at the beginning of each talea in the second segment, similar to the layout of the diminution section in Flos/
Celsa,” The Manuscript Ivrea, 102. Vos/Gratissima is a slightly unusual case, in that the tenor is re-rhythmicized in the second section of the motet, rather than being diminished. This approach has sometimes been
called “pseudo-diminution,” though there is no diminution here to speak of. While other works with freely
re-rhythmicized tenors often use smaller note-values in the talea rhythm of the second section into order to
“mimic” the effect of diminution, Vos/Gratissima uses perfect and imperfect longs, breves, and breve rests in
its tenor in both sections. But the length of the taleae decreases from 15 breves in section a (L11BLLL1) to 9
in section b (1BLBL). The resulting 5:3 proportion (one that would be impossible to achieve with diminution)
is preserved in the doubled supertalea lengths of 30 and 18 breves.
43
Reichert, “Das Verhaltnis,” 202–3.
126
Table 3.1: Allocation of the Triplum text in Vos/Gratissima, section a
triplum text
rhyme
supertalea tenor talea
Vos, quid admiramini.
a1
A1
a7
virgines, si virgini
a7
pre ceteris eligende
b8
A2
c7
dignati fuerimus
c7
nubere? dum nupsimus
b8
tamquam valde diligende:
Ista pulcra spetie.
humilis manerie
ac opere virtuosa;
turpis vestrum altera.
ausu numis aspera.
necnon virtutes exosa.
d7
d7
e8
f7
f7
e8
a2
Ista lux, vos nubila
ista velox aquila.
vos, colubres gradientes!
Ista super ethera
regnat, vos in misera
valle languetis egentes.
g7
g7
h8
j7
j7
h8
a3
A3
A4
A5
A6
More Intricate Upper-Voice Arrangements
In Hareu/Helas, Ida/Portio, and Vos/Gratissima, all sections of the motet take the
same approach to building supertaleae, so that the upper-voice periods ultimately preserve
the proportions and effect of the tenor’s diminution. But at least two other works, Vitry’s
Colla/Bona and Flos/Celsa (also ascribed to Vitry), use supertaleic structure to render all of
the upper-voice periods the same length, in spite of the tenor’s diminution. The tenor of
Colla/Bona is arranged in the rather complicated scheme of seven-and-a-half twelve-breve
taleae in integer valor, followed by seven six-breve taleae in the diminution section (Figure
3.9a). But the short tenor taleae clearly form larger units, doubling up in periods which are
127
12 breves long—the same length as the integer valor taleae (see Figure 3.9b).44 Thus the inal six taleae in diminution combine to form three supertaleae. Supertalea 8 becomes a compound period, combining a fragmentary integer valor talea with irst of the short diminished
taleae. Although the text-setting is far from regular, Vitry treats the compound talea 8/9
as a unit: in the motetus, he sets one line— “nunquam saporifera”—across the diminution
break. In the triplum, two lines are set to this compound talea (“aulici sunt opere/semper
adulari”), just as two lines are set to the ive integer valor taleae before it (see Example 3.3).
The result is much simpler than it sounds: with its combination of integer valor taleae, diminution supertaleae, and the hybrid talea 8/9, the upper voices of Colla/Bona emerge
as eleven (super)taleae of twelve breves each, plus a inal longa which stands outside of the
isorhythmic scheme.
Where Colla/Bona uses double-length supertaleae in its diminution section to create periodic equality between the motet’s two sections, Flos/Celsa, another motet probably
by Vitry, takes the opposite approach to achieve the same effect: it uses half-taleae in its
integer valor section. The tenor talea is 24 breves long in the irst section—by far Vitry's
longest. This is repeated three-and-a-half times, and then sung again in diminution (12
breves long) three-and-a-half more times (see Figure 3.10a). But throughout the motet the
upper-voice rhythms recur at a rate of 12 breves.45 In other words, the tenor talea is divided
in half in the irst section of the motet (see Figure 3.10b).
The tenor’s rhythm seems to have been designed with such a division in mind. The
full pattern—X LLL11 LLLL11 11—splits easily into two rhythmically similar halves of 12
44
Noted in Besseler, “Studien zur Musik des Mittelalters II,” 222n3.
45
Again, noted by Besseler, ibid., 222n7.
128
(a) Tenor:
|talea 1
|talea 2
|talea 3
|talea 4
|talea 5
|talea 6
|talea 7
|half-talea 8 |
|talea 9 |
|talea 10 |
|talea 11 |
|talea 12 |
|talea 13 |
|talea 14 |
|talea 15 |
(b) Upper Voices:
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|talea 1
|talea 2
|talea 3
|talea 4
|talea 5
|talea 6
|talea 7
|half-talea 8 |talea 9
|talea 10 |talea 11
|talea 12 |talea 13
|talea 14 |talea 15
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| = supertalea 8
| = supertalea 9
| = supertalea 10
| = supertalea 11
Figure 3.9: Tenor (a) and Upper-voice (b) periods in Colla/Bona
Example 3.3: Colla/Bona, mm. 85–96 (reproduced from PMFC1, 86)
129
|talea I
|talea II
|talea III
|half-talea IV
|talea 1
|talea 2
|talea 3
|half-talea 4|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
mm. 1–24
mm. 25–48
mm. 49–72
mm.73-84
mm. 85–96
mm. 97–108
mm. 109–20
mm. 121-6
Figure 3.10a: Tenor taleae in Flos/Celsa
|a1
}
|}
|}
|
a2
|a3
a4
|a5
a6
|a7
|b1
|b2
|b3
|b4
|
|
|
|
|
= tenor talea I
= tenor talea II
= tenor talea III
mm. 1–12
mm. 13–24
mm. 25–36
mm. 37–48
mm. 49–60
mm. 61–72
= tenor half-talea IV
mm. 73–84
= tenor talea 1
mm. 85–96
= tenor talea 2
mm. 97–108
= tenor talea 3
mm. 109–120
= tenor half-talea 4
mm. 120–6
Figure 3.10b: Upper-voice taleae in Flos/Celsa
130
breves each. The maxima of the irst half is replaced in the second by two longae, and the
irst half’s inal longa becomes rests: X L L L 11 | L L LL11 11.46 And over these similar tenor
halves the upper voices sing similar phrases which in no way hint at the tenor’s larger structure.47
So far we have considered two ways in which multipartite motets use supertaleae. In
some, such as Ida/Portio, all sections combine upper- and lower-voice periods in the same
way, for instance by doubling the tenor with respect to upper-voice supertaleae. In others,
supertaleae appear in only one section, making the length of upper-voice periods throughout
the work equal even though the length of the tenor color changes (e.g. Colla/Bona). Machaut’s
Quant/Amour (M1) apparently combines these two approaches. Like the former group of
motets it uses supertaleae in both its integer valor and its diminution sections, with the result
that the tenor’s twelve taleae (six in each section) become six (see igure 3.11).48
46
Kügle has commented on the similarity of these “two hemistichs of twelve breves each, differentiated
from each other only by the substitution for a long of a longa rest on breves 9–10 in the second phrase
(X = L L),” The Manuscript Ivrea, 100. The sonic effect is perhaps more similar still, since in performance
a maxima does not sound any different, from a textural point of view, to two longae, though the former
guarantees more tonal stability.
47
The analytical “shape” of Flos/Celsa is not as neat as that of Colla/Bona, since it does not “square up”
completely: a inal half-talea in diminution seems external to the scheme of repetition, and its presence is
unexplained by upper-voice rhythmic concordances. I will return to this point below.
48
This was irst noted in Besseler, “Studien zur Musik des Mittelalters II,” 224n18. Gombosi also noted
that “the tenor of each talea is a double period,” seeing in this an “off-center” kind of symmetry, “Machaut’s
‘Messe Notre-Dame,’” 220.
131
upper voices:
tenor:
|a1
|talea II
talea I
|a2
|a3
|b1
|b2
|b3
talea III
|talea IV
talea V
|talea VI
talea 1
|talea 2
talea 3
|talea 4
talea 5
|talea 6
|
|
|
|
|
|
mm. 1–36
mm. 37–72
mm. 73–108
mm. 109–20
mm. 121–32
mm. 133–44
Figure 3.11: Supertaleae in Machaut’s Quant/Amour (M1)
Numerically the three inal supertaleae (b1–3) add up to one upper-voice supertalea of the
integer valor section, since the latter are 36 breves long, and the former, 12. This is not a
coincidence, but rather a result of the 3:1 ratio produced by diminution. Yet the setting of
the triplum text suggests that Machaut was thinking of the entire diminution section as
a unit equivalent to an upper-voice supertalea. The triplum is divided into four nine-line
stanzas, of which the irst three are set to sections a1, a2, and a3, and the inal one to the
diminution section:
a1
Quant en moy vint premierement
Amours, si tres doucettement
Me vost mon cuer enamourer
Que d’un regart me ist present,
Et tres amoureus sentement
Me donna aveuc dous penser,
Espoir d’avoir mercy sans refuser.
Mais onques en tout mon vivant
Hardement ne me vost donner;
132
a2
Et si me fait en desirant
Penser si amoureusement
Que, par force de desirer,
Ma joie convient en tourment
Muer, se je n’ay hardement.
Las! et je n’en puis recouvrer,
Qu’amours secours ne me veut nul prester
qui en ses las si durement
me tient que n’en puis eschaper;
a3
ne je ne weil, qu’en atendant
sa grace je weil humblement
toutes ces doleurs endurer.
Et s’Amours loyal se consent
que ma douce dame au corps gent
me weille son ami clamer.
je scay, de vray que aray, sans iner.
joie qu’Amours a in amant
doit pour ses maus guerredonner.
b1
Mais elle atent trop longuement
et j’aimme si follettement
que je n’oze merci rouver.
car j’aim mieus vivre en esperant
d’avoir merci procheinnement
que Refus me veingne tuer.
Et pour ce di en souspirant:
Grant folie est de tant amer
que de son doulz face on amer.
b2
b3
The triplum text’s arrangement invites us to view the diminution section as, in a
sense, section a4. Quant/Amour is thus poetically reminiscent of Colla/Bona, which “squares
up” its diminution section to equate it with the integer valor. Meanwhile, the motetus text
acknowledges the motet’s structure as it stands, with two lines of text assigned to each of
the supertaleae, whether in integer color or in diminution. The result is a much more densely
texted motetus in section b of the motet, since the same number of lines is squeezed into a
section a third the length.
This is as good a place as any to add that though I have opposed “upper-voice”
133
structures to tenor ones, it is by no means impossible for a motetus and a triplum to suggest
slightly different isorhythmic structures. In Colla/Bona, for instance, the actual patterns of
upper-voice rhythmic recurrence are a little more complicated than Figure 3.9b suggests,
since the motetus, but not the triplum, hints at upper-voice supertaleae during the irst four
tenor taleae. Meanwhile the text-setting for the motetus supports the scheme graphed in
Figure 3.9b, while the triplum sets approximately the same amount of text to each tenor talea, without regard for supertaleae. The kinds of structural differences I have observed above
between the tenor and the upper voices may well apply between voices, on a smaller scale.
* * *
It is one thing to argue that upper-voice supertaleae structure the relationship between text and music in a motet, and another to wonder why they should do so. What is the
point, for Machaut, of these poetic and isorhythmic congruences in Quant/Amour? And
why does Vitry use half-taleae in Flos/Celsa? Is he playing a numerical game? Maybe so.
But I think that there is a more interesting explanation for the presence of supertaleae in
the motets I have discussed so far—an explanation which has its roots in mnemonic procedures.
ISORHYTHM AND MEMORY
It is generally agreed that isorhythm was a compositional tool—a way for composers to organize their works and keep track of rhythm, which as the most recently updated
dimension of notation was probably still something of a conceptual challenge in the midfourteenth century.49 In the received view, composition took place on some kind of writ49
See, for instance, Günther’s observation that generally “complete isorhythm appears in the Machaut motets in all bars distinguished by more interesting rhythms,” “The Fourteenth-Century Motet,” 31.
134
ing surface. For example, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson suggested that a composer might have
sketched a “model talea” to help him make his way through a motet.50 More recently, Anna
Maria Busse Berger has brought the emerging ield of medieval memory studies to bear
on motet composition. As the culmination of her study of the ars memorativa in the teaching, transmission, and composition of chant, music theory, and medieval polyphony, Busse
Berger focuses on the isorhythmic motet, arguing that “isorhythmic structures assist the
memory” both for the composer and the performer.51 She argues that motets were sung by
heart and that composers used mnemonic schemes—especially of the architectural variety—to compose. Composers and singers are not separable for Busse Berger, who suggests
that isorhythmic structures were useful both in learning and composing: “The memorization of old texts and the creation of new ones are closely intertwined: they both use the same
tools. The importance of this point cannot be overstated.”52
Arguing that singers memorized text and music separately, Busse Berger goes on to
show how texts and music are separately memorable.53 Learning texts is made easy by their
regular meters and simple rhyme-schemes.54 And musical lines can be memorized due to
the presence of taleae in the tenors and of regular phrase lengths, recurring rhythmic igures,
and isomelism in the upper voices. Bringing it all together is the manuscript page, on which
50
Compositional Techniques, 60–1, 113, 140–41, 154.
51
Medieval Music, 228.
52
Ibid., 214.
53
Citing Fallows’s indings about disorderly text-underlay in ifteenth-century chansons, Busse Berger
suggests that “the evidence leaves little doubt that singers did not learn music and text at the same time,”
Medieval Music, 213. However, ifteenth-century song-texting practices differ signiicantly from those for
14th-century motets, where text-setting is often syllabic and remarkably consistent between sources (see
Chapter 1). It would seem likely that in this repertory the music is more memorable for the presence of text,
and vice-versa.
54
Ibid., 225–9.
135
both composer and performer can see the entire motet:
I suggest that composers of isorhythmic motets chose to organize their pieces in tightly organized structures because it allowed them to work out the
pieces in their mind and make them memorable to performers. Ars nova
notation allowed them to see the entire musical structure on an opening, an
important condition for mnemonic structures.55
Busse Berger’s main argument—that composers visualized compositions in their minds
during the compositional process—is compelling. But manuscript openings do not highlight musical structure. They do not, as a rule, separate tenor taleae with bars or lag uppervoice isorhythm, either by means of markings or layout. Nor is it easy when looking at an
opening of, for example, the Ivrea Codex, to see isorhythm (except perhaps in the tenor).
There can be no doubt that the ability to zoom out and view the entire memorized object at
once is a crucial aspect of mnemotechnics. But just because performer and composer see the
piece in one glance, the former on parchment and the other in his mind’s eye, can we assume
that they were seeing the same thing?
I contend that pieces with supertaleae offer some compelling hints about what the
composer might have seen when he zoomed out. In all cases described above, supertaleae
transform more complicated structures into less complicated ones. Perhaps the best example of this is Colla/Bona. Based on the tenor only, the motet’s structure is an unwieldy
seven taleae followed by a fragmentary eighth, and then seven more taleae which are half the
size of the irst seven. However, the diminution section is organized in supertaleae which are
the same length as the taleae in the integer valor section. The half-length eighth fragmentary talea “folds in” with the irst diminution talea, and the others pair off. The piece can
now be conceived as eleven phrases of equal length. It goes almost without saying that this
55
Ibid., 254.
136
arrangement of the upper voices is more memorable than that of the tenor. Where in the
tenor’s scheme there are two lengths of talea, the upper-voice units are all the same length
(12 breves), and the motet can be summarized in the simple formula 11x12—one we would
use to summarize the dimensions of a rectangle.
Flos/Celsa is also easier to picture when the long taleae of the integer valor section
are re-organized by the upper voices into half-taleae. Instead of keeping three different
lengths of talea in mind (24, then 12, then 6 breves), the motet is re-inscribed as ten 12breve taleae, with a fragmentary eleventh of 6 breves (10x12+ 1x6). And even in Machaut’s
Quant/Amour(M1), the triplum text encourages us to think of the inal three supertaleae as
combined together, making a rectangle with the three integer valor supertaleae.
To call the motet a rectangle reeks of a-historicism. It suggests that the composer
would imagine the parts as aligned, perhaps in score, and that he would further engage in
some kind of mental stacking of sections, associating like with like, perhaps even beginning
in the top and ending in the bottom of some mental space. I am not implying that composers thought in modern score layout—but I would argue that they did not think in choirbook
format either. Several factors point to the possibility that a composer might indeed visualize his work in a geometric manner.
Although the use of score notation would not be common until the sixteenth century, examples of score (or, rather, of what has been called “quasi-score”) were known in the
14th century.56 In England, it was commonly present in the ubiquitous and often virtuosic
56
Owens deines “quasi-score” as an arrangement in which “individual voices each occupy a single staff and
are superimposed one above the other, not necessarily in the order high to low, and without barlines or vertical alignment,” Composers at Work, 35. See also the discussion in Lowinsky, ‘Early Scores in Manuscript.’
137
discant repertory.57 In France, although songs and motets were notated in parts, sources
of Parisian organum continued to be available, as indicated by inventories.58 Additionally, theoretical treatises copied in the fourteenth century sometimes included examples
in pseudo-score, on grids, or on large staves.59 For instance, the anonymous De varietate et
modo discantandi (late 14th c.) contains two-part contrapuntal examples notated on staves
from six to ten lines high and separated by vertical bars (see Figure 3.12).
Figure 3.12: Example on a ten-line staff from De varietate et modo discantandi60
Even without recourse to the concept of a “score,” it does not seem drastic to posit
that composers thought of voices as progressing together through time. Regardless of how
these works were composed, the three or four voices that made up any polyphonic ars nova
composition were written to belong together. The rhythms of the upper voices especially beg
to be viewed in tandem in hocket, where they are carefully constructed to be complementary
57
Facsimiles of sources notated in score and quasi-score are collected in Summers, English FourteenthCentury Polyphony.
58
For inventory mentions of Notre-Dame organum sources, see Haggh & Huglo, “Magnus liber—Maius
minus,” Appendix I kindly made available by Professor Haggh on her website, < http://www.music.umd.edu/
Faculty/haggh-huglo/>.
59
Some of the earliest notations of polyphony use vertical alignment of simultaneous pitches in different
voices—see the famous examples cited in Apel, The Notation of Polyhonic Music, 205–13.
60
Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit, incunabulum nË 70, with facsimiles reproduced in Schreurs, Anthologie
van muziekfragmenten, 26–9.
138
(see Example 3.4). Nor need we think in score to bring these parts together; a superimposition of all three voices on one staff is easily achieved, and more readily brings to light their
closeness in range and rhythmic complementarity (see Example 3.5).
Example 3.4: Hocket in Quant/Amour (M1), mm. 94–6
Example 3.5: Hocketed notes in Quant/Amour (M1), mm. 94–6, with voices superimposed; triplum in pink, motetus in green, tenor in blue.
As for the idea that composers would mentally “stack” similar sections of compositions, this is a matter of conjecture, but perhaps an unproblematic one. Medieval diagrams
and calendars regularly stack data in columns, and illuminations often present the same
subject on several vertical levels, divided by lines.61 In the writing down of verse, lines of the
same length are placed over each other. The practice in musical manuscripts of underlaying
successive verses of a strophic piece one under the other also hints at such vertical align-
61
Other arrangements, notably circular ones, were also common. See Carruthers, The Book of Memory,
248–50. For an example of repeated depiction of the same subject see the lions in the Peterborough bestiary, reproduced in Otto Pächt, Book Illumination in the Middle Ages (New York: Harvey Miller), 26.
139
ment of like with like.
Further evidence that composers might have conceived of their works in geometric
terms comes from mnemonic treatises. As Mary Carruthers has argued, things which are to
be remembered “were thought in some way to occupy physical space” which can be surveyed
by the mind’s eye.62 The physical space so occupied was often described as square or rectangular. Thus Thomas Bradwardine writes in his “De memoria artiiciali” (c. 1333) that
the location into which texts to be memorized can be placed “should be like a four-sided
oblong” (that is, a rectangle or square) made of stacked rows.63 Similarly, Jacobus Publicius,
writing in the late 15th century, explains that the memorial matrix “will follow the pattern
of a square.”64 Even the dimensions of these squares are indicated. Bardwardine rcommends “four times ive” backgrounds, “or perhaps ten of them”; Jacobus gives an example
with ive by ive spaces.65
Busse Berger has noted that, like Bradwardine and other writers on memory, music
theorists from the fourteenth century use verbs of seeing to talk about rules of counterpoint and composition. Johannes Boen’s discussion of color serves as especially compelling
evidence that that composers might have thought this way about tenors. Busse Berger explains:
His division of the thirty tenor pitches into 6x5 or 3x20 notes is reminiscent of what we read…in memory treatises. If one were to make a diagram
of the isorhythmic structure described by Boen, it would be very similar
62
The Book of Memory, 27.
63
Trans. ibid., 281.
64
Cited and trans. in Carruthers and Ziolkowski, The Medieval Craft of Memory, 238.
65
Trans. Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 282.
140
to the structures depicted by Bradwardine…Boen’s discussion leaves little
doubt that the composer planned and visualized the composition before he
wrote it down.66
Boen discusses two motets, of which one, Impudenter/Virtutibus, is unipartite and the
other, Apta caro/Flos virginum, has a second color in diminution—“another thirty that would
make one half the length of the others.”67 Neither of motets uses supertaleae in its upper
voices, thus to describe the tenor is to describe the layout of all three voices. But is it possible that in a motet like Colla/Bona one of the mental images used by the composer to plan
his composition was the plan of the upper voices?
Certainly the emphasis on four-sided oblongs as desirable spaces for mnemonic
storage could help to explain the shape of that motet when its upper-voice isorhythm is
taken into account. Though their tenors present awkward collections of taleae and partial
taleae of various lengths, the overall schemes of both Colla/Bona and Flos/Celsa are rendered rectangular by the supertaleae. (Or nearly so: Flos/Celsa contains an extra half-talea
to which I shall return below.)
What of the simpler examples, such as Tribum/Quoniam and Qui/Ha! Fortune, where
all taleae are the same length to begin with, and supertaleae serve only to change the dimensions of the rectangle? There too the upper-voice structures may point to the presence of
a mnemonic component in composition. As noted above, Bradwardine mentions that the
memorial matrix might be some four by ive blocks, or perhaps ten by ive, “or somewhat
fewer, unless a man should want to make unheard-of marvels.”68 This accords with recent
66
Busse Berger, Medieval Music, 224.
67
Quoted and trans. ibid., 223.
68
Trans. Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 282.
141
indings that there is a capacity limit to working memory, that is, to the number of individual things we can keep in our head at the same time. George Miller famously deined this
limit in 1956 as “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two.”69
In this light it is notable that many of the motets discussed above are far “taller”
than nine taleae when we look at their tenor structure only. Qui/Ha! Fortune and Tribum/
Quoniam would each require the composer to keep twelve separate units in mind. Just try to
picture twelve distinct units without grouping them—reader, you’ll get lost. But the number
of distinct units decreases dramatically when these works are rearranged according to their
upper-voice periods. The point is not that Vitry and Machaut were reading Bradwardine,
but rather that where the memorial faculty is involved in the construction of a structure,
some limits are necessarily imposed.
Of the works catalogued by Besseler in his 1927 article (a list that includes almost
all ars nova motets) only two that have more than ten taleae do not use supertaleae.70 And
of these, one—the Fauvel motet Firmissime/Adesto—has no upper-voice isorhythm at all,
so we have no way of knowing whether its composer was indeed combining its very short
taleae in his head. The prevalence of supertaleae in motets whose structures would otherwise
exceed the limits of working memory adds weight to Busse Beger’s argument that the composition of isorhythmic works had a signiicant mnemonic component.
69
Miller, “The Magical Number Seven.” Though Carruthers and Ziolkowski caution that the limits of medieval memory are spatial rather than temporal, they observe that “the psychological phenomenon of ‘seven
plus or minus two’ can certainly be observed to apply to ancient and medieval mnemotechnic,” The Medieval
Craft of Memory, 12.
70
Besseler, “Studien zur Musik des Mittelalters II,” 222–4. Both are Fauvel motets—Firmissime/Adesto
and O canenda/Rex. The former consists of eight integer valor taleae three longae in length, and eight more
one-longa taleae in which the tenor is freely re-rhythmicized (in “pseudo-diminution”); the latter is eight
taleae in integer valor plus four more in diminution.
142
For our purposes, memory and writing are of course inseparable. While texts could
be composed entirely in the mind and then written down, they could also be memorized
from books (Hugh of St Victor recommended always using the same copy of a text); and
some treatises recommended writing on wax tablets to train the memory.71 As Busse Berger
has noted, “isorhythmic motets... could not have come about without writing.”72
But while it is misleading to rigidly oppose literacy and orality, invocation of literacy alone tends to skew our priorities. Carruthers has argued that “as a concept, literacy
privileges a physical artifact, the writing-support, over the social and rhetorical process that
a text both records and generates, namely, the composition by an author and its reception
by an audience.”73 That is where a consideration of mnemonic techniques can help identify
both the object of analysis and the most appropriate means of analytical representation.
While the manuscript opening does indeed present the motet at a glance, to privilege it is
to over-emphasize the physical artifact at the expense of the processes—literate, rhetorical, mnemonic, cultural—at work in its composition. Although the examples above, and
even more so the examples to follow, are arranged in score and stacked in accordance with
modern “paradigmatic” approaches to analysis, I suggest that they can still serve as evidence
of a kind. For it seems in keeping both with late-medieval rhetorical and compositional
practices and with the internal salient properties of these works themselves that composers might have visualized their motets as collections of similar things ordered spatially and
sequentially—as matrices, grids, or shapes.
* * *
71
Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 9, 86.
72
Medieval Music, 254.
73
The Book of Memory, 11.
143
Once we allow ourselves a sort-of birds’-eye-view of motets by assigning shapes to
them for analytical purposes at least, the question follows: were these shapes always regular?
In the examples presented above, supertaleae serve only to change the dimensions of repeating blocks, in all cases but one making larger units out of smaller ones and rendering the
object more memorable. But the next series of examples suggests that the shapes evoked by
some motets may be more complicated.
SHIFTS BETWEEN UPPER- AND LOWER-VOICE TALEAE
Doubling, tripling, quadrupling, and halving—the ways in which we have so far seen
upper-voice periods interact with the tenor’s taleae—all have in common the fact that talea
breaks in the tenor and in the upper voices regularly coincide. Here the terms supertalea (or
subtalea) are, I think, unambiguous. But there are other cases in which upper-voice periods
align less regularly with tenor taleae. One extreme example of this is a case like Machaut’s
Trop plus/Biaute (M20), in which the tenor is in the form of a rondeau, its two statements
repeated in the order ABAAABAB, while the upper voices move freely above it. The uppervoice hockets, however, are isorhythmic with each other, though they occur irregularly over
the course of the motet.74 Indeed, each of the three hockets is placed over a different tenor
rhythm, so that the only isorhythm is between upper voices (see Figure 3.13 and Example
3.6).
This approach exempliies a kind of upper-voice independence that is easy to miss.
74
The irst and third hockets sound over sections of the A and B parts of the tenor which are almost
rhythmically identical (BS BSSSSB), differing only in the inal note (a perfect breve the irst time around,
and an imperfect breve the second time). But the second hocket falls on a part of the tenor that bridges the
repetition of the A section, underlaying an entirely different tenor rhythm (S S S B1 BS BS) to the isorhythmic
hocket in the upper voices. Bent has argued that this motet “has three irregularly placed blocks of complete
isorhythm in all three parts, at mm. 8–11, 25–28, and 42–45” (“What is Isorhythm?,” 131), but the only
exact matches between all three voices are between measures 8–10 and 42–4.
144
|Hocket 1
-et 2
|
|Hocket 3
|
|Hock|
Figure 3.13: Hocket placement relative to the tenor in Machaut’s Trop plus/Biaute
(M20), Ferrell-Vogüé fol. 280.
Hocket 1:
Hocket 2:
Hocket 3:
Example 3.6: Hockets in Trop plus/Biaute (mm. 8–11, 25–8, 42–5, reproduced from
PMFC 3:11–12), isorhythm shaded.
145
As Bent has noted,
In…motets by Machaut and others, signiicant rhythmic and melodic repetitions have often been overlooked because they are not aligned with the
tenor talea. It is often the case that only regular repetition is signaled, to the
end of charting a qualitative crescendo towards tidy and mechanical rhythmic identity. The result is that subtler kinds of variation are neglected.75
But in exploring such “subtler kinds of variation,” it is worth asking whether “regular repetition” is always “aligned with the tenor talea.” A counter-example appears in Sub Arturo/
Plebs, the inal section of which features three upper-voice taleae that are out of sync with
the tenor: the upper voice periods consist of 10.5 breves of c (63 minims) but the tenor
takes up 16 breves in C (64 minims). Thus the tenor begins one minim into talea g2 and 2
minims into talea g3 (See Figure 3.14).76
|
upper voices g1
|
mm. 121–31
|upper voices g2
|
mm. 132–42
tenor talea C1
|tenor talea C2
|upper voices g3
|tenor talea C3
|
mm. 143–53
Figure 3.14: Alignment of upper-voice and tenor taleae in Sub arturo/Plebs (inal section)
Sub arturo/Plebs may seem like an extreme case, but it is also part of a later generation of motets—not transmitted in either Trémoille or Ivrea, it survives in Chantilly and
even Bologna Q15. As such I think its structure is the culmination of the independent
upper-voice schemes already implicit in much earlier works. But where in Sub Arturo/Plebs
75
Ibid., 129.
76
This is not relected in Günther’s edition (The Motets of the Manuscripts Chantilly, 52) but it is in Harrison’s (Motets of French Provenance, 176–7) and Bent’s (Two 14th-Century Motets, 1–7). See also the discussion in Bent, “What is Isorhythm?,” 129n41. Both Harrison and Bent indicate tenor talea repetitions but
not upper-voice isorhythmic regions.
146
periods of different length get progressively further misaligned, in the earlier motets the
periods of repetition in the tenor and upper voices are of the same length, but their boundaries are misaligned.
Now, this necessarily gets us into a realm of some conjecture, since if something is
looped over and over, who is to say where its cycles begin and end? In fact, motet taleae are
not identical—only rhythmically similar in parts. And these similarities may begin to appear at different points in different voices. For example, the opening and closing measures
of the work are less likely to be isorhythmic in the upper voices than corresponding measures in internal taleae. This by no means surprising: the aesthetic decisions involved in beginning and ending a piece are different from those made in structuring measures internal
to a work. But does it follow that the irst or last talea is simply less isorhythmic than others,
or is it possible that openings or closings may sometimes stand outside of the upper-voice
isorhythmic structure?77
A case in point is Flos/Celsa. As noted above, its irst three-and-a-half tenor taleae
are split in half to support seven upper-voice subtaleae equivalent in length to the periods
in diminution that follow (diagramed in Figure 3.10b, above). But this arrangement does
not adequately describe the integer valor section (see Example 3.7). To begin with (and unsurprisingly), the opening two measures are not isorhythmic. Furthermore, the upper-voice
isorhythm is clustered mostly at the beginning of each subtalea—a somewhat unusual cir77
This is more obviously the case in works that begin with an “introitus” (so called in the Machaut sources)—
a section that may include the lower voices of a motet but does not igure in the isorhythmic structure that
follows. However, Michael Allsen has convincingly shown that these sections are often related to the isorhythmic form in terms of length, and thus are affected by that form even though they do not participate in
it (or perhaps they question the notion of what it means for some section of a composition to participate in
its form). Allsen, “Style and Intertextuality,” 246–51. I am grateful to Professor Allsen for sharing unpublished work with me on this subject. I plan to address “introitus” as term and practice in a forthcoming study.
147
Example 3.7: Flos/Celsa, mm. 1–84, arranged according to upper-voice subtaleae
148
cumstance since upper-voice rhythmic congruences are more likely to occur toward the
end of periods.78 Finally, the line-ends of the upper-voice texts are consistently misaligned
with the talea breaks. Though the text-setting seems consistent (four triplum lines and two
motetus lines per upper-voice talea), the inal syllable of each group of lines falls each time
at the beginning of the next talea—a circumstance which earned Flos/Celsa’s triplum and
motetus a C+ and a C on Harrison’s report-card.79
However, if we take the non-congruence of the opening two measures as a clue that
they stand outside of the work’s isorhythmic structure, we can shift the upper-voice units of
repetition by two breves with respect to the tenor. Now the triplum and motetus line-ends in
the integer valor section correspond with upper-voice talea ends and the end of each period
is marked by several breves of upper-voice isorhythm (See Example 3.8, section a). As a
result the internal divisions and repetitions highlighted in the analysis are more closely
aligned with line-ends, and thus with the experience of both composing and performing
the work.
Since the two-breve shift does not seem to continue into the diminution section,
I have proposed in Example 3.8 that measures 85-6 function in both parts of the motet—that its two “rectangles” overlap slightly.80 This is in part borne out by the rhythmic
evidence. Although these measures correspond exactly with the rhythms which open the
78
Boogaart, “Love’s Unstable Balance, Part I,” 13–8.
79
PMFC5, Table IV, item 7, p. 204.
80
Kügle has described the same phenomenon in terms of phrase differential between the upper voices:
“This phrase differential is reversed at the beginning of the diminution section; the motetus, formerly ending after the triplum, now leads the triplum, ending its phrases one breve before it (phrase lengths: triplum
eight, twelve, twelve and ten breves; motetus seven, twelve, twelve, and eleven breves). Simultaneously with
the change in phrase alignment, isorhythmic hockets of four breves in length appear at the outset of every
tenor talea,” The Manuscript Ivrea, 100.
149
Example 3.8: Periodic Alignment in Flos/Celsa
Section a: 7 x 6L
Section b: 3 x 6L; 2-breve overlap between sections
8 breves external to periodic structure (2 at the beginning,
6 at the end)
Line-breaks in the text are marked with horizontal lines
(“|”).
150
subsequent diminution taleae (a correspondence indicated by yellow shading), the tenor’s
longa at this point (the diminished version of the maxima which begins the tenor’s integer
valor talea) corresponds with tenor longae found at the ends of alternate subtaleae in the integer valor section (e.g. mm. 13–4, 37–8, and 61–2). Thus the tenor and one measure of
the triplum in this section (shaded in green, as the intersection between blue and yellow)
correspond with both the a and the b material. Such a rhythmic link might well have been
planned in the tenor: a longa is the only rhythmic value that is shared between the original
and diminished versions of the tenor’s talea. The others (maximae and breves) are unique to
tenor parts a and b respectively.
Finally, the two measures which stand outside of the structure at the beginning of
the motet invite us to see the motet’s last six breves not as a partial talea (as igure 3.10b
would have it), but as closing material standing outside of the repetitive structure. After all,
neither an analysis nor a pre-compositional plan needs to take account of every note.
In a sense, my rearrangement of Flos/Celsa is a matter of pushing breves around
for purely analytical aims: I have not affected the edition in any way, nor have I changed
any aspect of text-music relations. But there is nothing pure about analysis. Not only do
our analytical perceptions of a piece affect judgements about its quality (as with Harrison’s
grades—the upper voices would surely deserve As now?), they also igure prominently in
the kind of hermeneutic endeavor with which the following chapters concern themselves. If
I am to argue (as I shall) that motet texts can inluence large-scale structural decisions, it is
important to be aware of the range of possible structures. The idea that upper-voice structures are both more varied and perhaps more complicated than those of the tenor opens up
new avenues of interpretation. But it may also preclude certain kinds of argument, since it
151
can alleviate what might otherwise be perceived as formal tensions between the tenor and
the upper voices. That is, if it is not unusual for the upper voices to have their own structure, then we might view their departures from the tenor’s form with less expectation of a
hermeneutic explanation. A comparison of several analyses of Machauts S’il estoit/S’amour
(M6) will illustrate this point.
UPPER-VOICE STRUCTURES AND HERMENEUTICS IN S’IL ESTOIT/S’AMOURS (M6)
S’il estoit/S’Amours is unique among Machaut’s works in being bipartite without either diminution or renotation of the tenor.81 Only its irst color is given in the manuscript
sources, with a repeat sign. But the tenor as written is one breve short of a perfection, so
that the second color begins on the third breve of a modus grouping. This results in mensural transformation upon the repetition of the notated material, since different breves are
altered the second time through:82
Notated tenor:
Altered irst time:
Altered second time:
1
1 1
1 1
1 1
BB BLBBBBB BB BLBBBBB BB BLBBBBB BB :||:
â
â
â
â
â
â
â
Figure 3.15: Altered Breves in the tenor of S’il estoit/S’amour (M6)
A further unusual aspect of the tenor is that it appears to end with a fragmentary
talea. The color is 29 notes long, but each talea only uses nine notes, hence 27 notes for
81
Günther has argued that “the work may be considered unipartite rather than bipartite” (“The 14thcentury Motet,” 30); Bent suggests the helpful term “homographic” as a descriptor of the tenor’s unity. See
also objections to Günther’s claim in Apel, “Remarks about the Isorhythmic Motet,” 143; Sanders, “The
Mediaeval Motet,” 262–3n279; and Bent, “What is Isorhythm?,” 131.
82
Cf. Bent, “What is Isorhythm?,” 129, who suggests that this example of “mensural transformation without diminution” leads to a modus change, so that “the second [tenor statement] neither renotated, nor
rewritten, nor speciied, is in imperfect modus with unaltered breves.”
152
three taleae. The two extra notes appear at the end as two breves followed by two breves of
rest, seeming to make up a partial fourth talea (and a partial eighth talea, when repeated; see
Figure 3.16).
|talea 1
|talea 2
|talea 3
|talea 4? :||:
Figure 3.16: S’il estoit/S’Amours, tenor (Ferrell-Vogüé, fol. 266)
To be sure, fragmentary taleae exist in other motets—notably Colla/Bona, Flos/Celsa
and Vos/Gratissima, all discussed above. But as we have seen, these may be reinterpreted by
upper-voice isorhythm (as in Colla/Bona) or stand outside of the isorhythmic structure (as
in Flos/Celsa). And in all three cases, the partial taleae are substantial, taking up at least half
the length of a full talea. By contrast, the extra “bits” in S’il estoit/S’amours are short in comparison with the ifteen-breve taleae, lasting only three breves in the irst section, and six in
the second. For all of these reasons the short taleae have occasioned comment. In Newman
Powell’s evaluation,
When one considers the neat, highly organized mathematical structures
found in the tenor parts of other motets by Machaut, this periodic structure—or, rather, this analysis—strikes one as being strangely lopsided, unconvincingly chopped off, irregular, and somehow inadequate.83
Nor does everything seem quite right with the upper voices. Speciically, attention
has been drawn several times to the so-called “Phasendifferenz” between the upper voices
and tenor. Speciically, the triplum’s phrases (musical as well as poetic) consistently end
83
“Fibonacci and the Gold Mean,” 242.
153
three breves later than the tenor taleae (see Example 3.9). This combination of unusual
factors—a color that changes without being renotated or diminished, a talaeic structure that
seems formally excessive, and texts that lag behind—have produced a number of fruitful
analyses.
Those analysts progressing, as it were, from the top down, have explained the tenor’s
fragmentary taleae from a text-layout point of view. Thus Reichert argued that the three
“excess measures” at the end of the irst color are there to make up for the lagging of the
triplum text, so that it is not compressed into a small space. For this reason the fourth talea
“is broken off after three measures, to wit exactly with the completion of the strophe, at
which point the irst talea of the new color begins.”84 Lawrence Earp has also noted that the
“staggered phrasing [of the triplum text] is compensated by a talea fragment of three breve
measures at the end of the integer valor section and at the end of the diminution section.”85
Such upper-voice-oriented explanations differ from the analytical indings based
on “bottom-up” approaches, which seek to explain the tenor’s fragmentary extra “bits” and
the apparent asymmetry of its two halves without recourse to non-structural elements. This
was the approach of Gombosi, who argued that despite appearances to the contrary the entire tenor is in fact symmetrical, its rhythms “strictly concentric, with the pivot of the irst
talea of the second part serving as center of the whole composition.”86 Gombosi’s analysis
is, to borrow Günther’s evaluation, “somewhat forced,” in that the symmetry he proposes
involves the interpretation of some rhythmic cells, but not of others, as retrograde, in a
84
Reichert, “Das Verhältnis,” 208.
85
Guillaume de Machaut, 371.
86
“Machaut’s Messe Notre-Dame,” 221.
154
155
Example 3.9: S’il estoit/S’Amours (M6), arranged by tenor talea (continued on following page)
The edition is based on the version of the motet preserved in Ferrell-Vogüé.
156
Example 3.9, continued.
not altogether methodical manner.87 But Gombosi’s approach prompted a more detailed
treatment of symmetry in the tenor by Powell.88 The two analyses have in common a focus
on mm. 49–51 as the central pivot within the motet’s symmetrical scheme, but differ in
their interpretations. For Gombosi, “the beginning of this talea [the irst in the diminution
section] serves as a transition,” and therefore does not participate in the form, which “is
completed by a corresponding half-talea at the end” (his diagram is reproduced as Figure
3.17).89
Figure 3.17: Gombosi’s analysis of the tenor of S’il estoit/S’Amours (M6)90
Powell places his center at the same place, but makes these measures count as part of both
halves (his analysis is reproduced as Figure 3.18):
The [11B] that is in the absolute center will be seen to complete a grouping of
ive longae in the established periodization of the irst half and at the same
time to begin the periodization of ive longae for the second half, just as this
same perfect longa both completes the irst color and begins the second.91
87
Günther, “The 14th-century Motet,” 30n16. See also Dömling’s critique of Gombosi’s approach in
“Isorhythmie und Variation,” 26n9.
88
“Fibonacci and the Gold Mean,” 242–52. Earp has summarized this approach as “Gombosi’s suggestions carried to an extreme,” Guillaume de Machaut, 371.
89
Gombosi, “Machaut’s Messe Notre-Dame,” 221.
a and b respectively represent the rhythms which read hqqqq and q ŒŒ qh in Gombosi’s 8:1 reduction; the
analysis refers to values as transcribed rather than as written, in that no distinction is made between longs
and altered breves, “Machaut’s Messe Notre-Dame,” 221 ex. 19.
90
91
Ibid., 246.
157
Figure 3.18: Powell’s analysis of the tenor of S’il estoit/S’Amours (M6)
In opposition to these demonstrations of symmetry, Jacques Boogaart argues that
asymmetry and imbalance lie at the heart of its form:
The symmetry shown by [Gombosi and Powell’s analyses] is doubtlessly
there, and yet on the surface the motet shows an intriguing pattern which is
almost, but not quite, in balance and seems to forbid any idea of symmetry.
One might even wonder whether the symmetry was meant to be there at
all, whether it was a conscious process or a natural feeling for harmonious
proportions that resulted in an unconscious symmetry in spite of apparent
disbalance.92
This disbalance begins in the tenor, which in Boogaart’s reading is made up of “two colores,
of which the second exceeds the irst by one perfect long.”93 That the tenor taleae do not line
up with the upper voices is a further relection of unbalance and inequality; together these
features have led Boogaart to propose an ingenious structure for the motet. Arguing that
the three “extra” bars at the end of the irst color really belong to the third talea, he suggests
that the irst two taleae of each half are “telescoped” (Boogaart’s diagram is reproduced as
Figure 3.19):
92
“Love’s Unstable Balance, Part I,” 4.
93
This imbalance is contingent upon counting the rests from the irst repetition as part of the second
statement—a reading “made clear by the polyphonic context” (Ibid., 10). Technically rests cannot be part of
a color, since a color is a collection of pitches that are timeless until given duration by taleae. If we compare the
length in breves of the notated tenor (including the inal rests) in its irst and second iteration, the difference
is one breve (50 breves vs. 49). If we count only the time in which the notes of each color sound, including
rests internal to the color but not the rests at the end or between colores, the difference is reversed: 48 breves
for color 1, 47 for color 2. If instead the inal breve is functionally a longa, the difference is reversed again,
etc.
158
The structure is composed of three taleae, of which only the last one reaches
its full length; the other two are foreshortened—“telescoped”, whereby the
ends of taleae I and II are simultaneously the beginnings of taleae II and III,
respectively.94
Figure 3.19: Telescopic tenor in Boogart’s anlysis of S’il estoit/S’amours95
Boogaart argues that this structure is intended to be audible, creating confusion in a listener who expects an eighteen-breve talea but is disappointed until the end of each half.96
The key to understanding this imbalance and deception is, Boogaart argues, in the
upper voices, whose texts discuss the concepts of excess and imbalance in courtly terms. The
lover complains that Love makes him suffer too much, but that if Love smiles upon his suit
he might get more joy even than he might wish (“plus qu’il ne voudroit”). This commentary
94
“Love’s Unstable Balance, Part I,” 13.
95
Example 4 from “Encompassing Past and Present,” 25.
96
“It seems that the listener is led by the isorhythmic signals to think that the talea ends after breve 18 and
then, observing gradually how the tenor proceeds, to come slowly to the conclusion that the talea ends sooner
than expected. In other words, the composer has made the talea shorter than expected and thus played a trick
on the listener,” “Love’s Unstable Balance, Part I,” 18. If we believe Johannes Boen that “color is presented
more to the sight than hearing” and therefore “not so much trouble or expense of intellect should be made
concerning it,” we might well question the listener’s ability and inclination to follow the tenor’s patterns
while counting breves—the more so given the other demands Boogaart’s analysis makes on her: noting poetic line-ends, keeping track of the meanings of both texts, and noticing where upper-voice isorhythm occurs.
159
on deiciency, excess, and equality is played out in the motet’s form and encapsulated in the
inal lines of both voices:
The closing lines of both texts refer to the procedure but in opposite terms.
Longae 6 and 7 contain the entire thirteenth line of the motetus, whose irst
twelve lines are evenly divided over the motet; the declamation is suddenly
rushed on the words ‘S’Amours le fait trop languir’ (‘if Love lets him languish
too much’). On the other hand, in the triplum the last two syllables read:
-paire, ‘equal’ (belonging to the word repaire, ‘abode’). Thus, by the excess, the
proportions of the motet are restored to an imaginary equality: plus que droit
[more than proper] turns out to be paire.97
In the inal analysis, texts and music together provoke “a permanently instable state of
balance” in which stability is only imaginary, achieved with the hypothetical “telescoped”
taleae.98
Boogaart’s reading of S’il estoit/S’Amours is careful and thought-provoking. While
it shares some aspects with earlier arguments (for instance the idea that a measure might
count twice, which also igures in Powell’s analysis), only he considers the upper voices both
on their own (formally and semantically) and in conjunction with the tenor. Furthermore,
Boogaart notes that upper-voice taleae may have different boundaries from tenor taleae:
“one can speak of the taleae in triplum or motetus, only keeping in mind that there may be
a small phase-difference between the tenor taleae and those of the upper voices, i.e. their
endings or beginnings may slightly overlap.”99 But in practice it is the very tension between
upper-voice and tenor phrase endings that drives his analysis: “the stanzas do not conform
exactly to the tenor taleae, which, ideally, they should.”100
97
Boogaart, “Encompassing Past and Present,” 26.
98
Idem, “Love’s Unstable Balance, Part I,” 23.
99
Ibid., 12.
100
Ibid.
160
It is here that considering upper-voice structures as potentially independent of tenor
organization may come to bear on the analysis. What kind of structure might we perceive in
S’il estoit/S’Amours if we attend irst to the upper-voice isorhythm, and then to the tenor?
There are several signs that the layout in Example 3.9 is not fully representative of
the motet’s form. Unusually, taleae A2 and A3 begin mid-hocket, whereas normally hockets are found towards the end of a talea and do not cross talea joins. Even more strange is
that this hocket is missing from the irst talea. Although we might expect the beginning of
a motet to be exempt from isorhythm, we expect even more strongly that hockets should
be isorhythmic, so that when a hocket occurs, it generally occurs in all taleae within a given
section.101 This circumstance suggests an analytical shape for the piece in which mm. 1–3
stand outside the isorhythmic structure, acting as an introitus before region a begins. This
shifts the resulting taleae in the upper voices with respect to the tenor’s structure (or what
is traditionally perceived to be the tenor’s structure—more about this in a bit). The uppervoice taleae retain their length of ifteen breves, but now begin and end three breves later
than the tenor (see a1–a3 in Example 3.10, below).
Three ifteen-breve taleae, and the brief introitus that precedes them, account for
the irst color, and only two breves of rest remain from the tenor as notated. In order to complete the longa they are joined by the irst note of the second color. The rhythmic transformation of the tenor’s second repetition with regard to the irst has now begun. This brings
us to the measures (mm. 49–51) that Gombosi and Powell singled out as the center of the
work. Certainly their centrality is numerical: they follow 48 breves and are followed by 48
more. And it is structural, since it is here that the tenor transitions between colores, bridging
101
Günther, “The 14th-Century Motet,” 31.
161
b
a
(3x5L)
(3x5L)
Example 3.10: S’il estoit/S’amours (M6) arranged according to upper-voice isorhythm
Tenor talea breaks as they are usually perceived (and as they are marked in Ludwig
and Schrade’s editions) are marked with elongated tenor barlines.
Line-breaks in the text are marked with horizontal lines (“|”).
162
the notated material and its repetition. I suggest that this longa stands as a bridge between
sections a and b, belonging to neither. Like the external opening measures, this reading is
supported by upper-voice rhythms. Comparing mm. 49–51 with mm. 64–6 and 79–81
(aligned on page 2 of Example 3.9) we ind a high degree of isorhythm between the latter
two that does not extend to mm. 49–51.
Allowing that mm. 49–51 are, as Gombosi irst suggested, “a transition,” the second half of the motet, like the irst, features a three-breve shift for its taleae. Region b now
begins with note 2 of the color.102 As in Sub Arturo/Plebs, the placement of the lower-voice
talea has shifted with respect to the upper voices, but the length of the upper voice taleae is
unchanged: b1, b2, and b3 are each 15 breves, with hockets toward the end of each talea,
just where we would expect them (see Example 3.10, section b). Three more breves remain
at the end of b, notated as inal longas in the upper voices and a breve followed by a longa
rest in the tenor.103 This too stands outside of the motet’s isorhythmic structure, as inal
longae sometimes do. As deined by the upper voices, then, the motet’s structure is elegantly
balanced, and may be summarized as 3+(3x15)+3+(3x15)+3.
This balanced form also conforms better to the triplum text as underlaid. As noted
above, the voice seems to “lag behind” the tenor taleae; rearranged as in Example 3.10, the
talea breaks now complement the triplum’s poetic structure. The text’s divisions according
to old and new talea breaks are as follows (old divisions in gray, new in black):
102
Gombosi, “Machaut’s Messe Notre-Dame,” 221.
103
The rests must remain unperformed and a fermata placed on the tenor’s inal note, since an unsupported
fourth in the upper voices would otherwise result. This is in contrast to He Mors/Fine amour (M3), which
ends with tenor rests that, as Thomas Brown suggested, may well be observed, lightening the motet’s texture
at its conclusion; “Flos/Celsa and Machaut’s Motets,” 44.
163
S’il estoit nuls que pleindre se deüst
Pour nul meschief que d’amour receüst,
Je me devroie bien pleindre| sans retraire,|
Car quant premiers me vint enamourer,
Onques en moy hardement demourer
Ne vost laissier de ma| dolour retraire;|
Mais ce qui plus me faisoit resjoïr
Et qui espoir me donnoit de joïr
En regardent, sans plus di|re ne faire,|
Fist departir de moy; puis en prison
Elle me mist, où j’euç ma livrison
D’ardans desirs qui si mestient con|traire|
Que, se un tout seul plus que droit en eüsse,
Je sçay de voir que vivre ne peüsse
Sans le secours ma dame debon|naire|
Qui m’a de ci, sans morir, respité.
Et c’est bien drois, car douçour en pité
Et courtoisie ont en li leur re|pai|re.
a1|
a1|
a2|
a2|
a3|a4 a3|
b1|
b1|
b2|
b2|
b3|b4 b3|
It is not surprising that upper-voice structures should conform to upper-voice texts. But
it is worth noting that they do conform to some structure, especially given the normative
discourse that has traditionally surrounded the relationship between upper-voice and tenor
form. With the redeined taleae, line- and section-ends are aligned, at least in the triplum,
so that every shifted talea coincides with a line-end, and the text-setting is regular throughout.
But are these structures limited to the upper voices? What, in fact, is the tenor’s
form? Looking again at the color as notated, it appears that where repetition occurs—and
where the “extra bits” lie—is entirely in the eye of the beholder. There are certainly three
cycles of a pattern there, and these are joined by two surplus notated breves and two breves’
rest. But whether these extra “bits” fall at the beginning, at the end, or are split (the breves
at the beginning and the rests at the end; one of the breves at the beginning with the rests,
the other at the end, etc.) is in no way indicated (See Figure 3.20).
164
|talea 1
a)
b)
c)
d)
|talea 1
|talea 1
|talea 1
|talea 2
|talea 2
|talea 2
|talea 2
|talea 3
|
|talea 3
|
|talea 3
|talea 3
|
|
:||:
:||:
:||:
:||:
Figure 3.20: Four ways of dividing the tenor of S’il estoit/S’amours (M6)
The decision to call the beginning of the tenor the beginning of talea 1 is arbitrary.
No matter how we divide the tenor, some part of it must be external to a fully repetitive
scheme. I suggest that the upper-voice rhythmic congruences and phrase-ends clarify the
tenor’s structure. A shift indeed takes place between the irst and second part of the motet.
In section a, the taleae begin on the rests following note 2 of the color, and the irst note to
sound within a talea is note 3 (Figure 3.20, option b). In section b, the taleae begin on note
2 of the color (Figure 3.20, option c). Never, it seems, do they begin on note 1.104
* * *
It should by now be evident why upper-voice structures must feature in the discourse
on text-music relations in motets. Several of the analyses discussed above, most notably
Boogaart’s, take the conlict between tenor and upper-voice periods as a starting point.
Perceiving an imbalance that stemmed from the tenor’s mensural transformation, Boogaart
104
Another work in which it might be worth asking where the tenor taleae begin and end is Machaut’s He!
Mors/Fine amour (M3), which is usually understood as having three full and a fourth partial talea in each
half. Thomas Brown’s careful analysis singles out several features which hint at shifted upper-voice periods,
including the overlapping of textual units with tenor taleae. Brown further argues that He! Mors/Fine amour
is based on Flos/Celsa; if so, then his model’s intricate upper-voice structure might well have led Machaut to
construct something similar. See “Flos/Celsa and Machaut’s Motets,” 39–52.
165
has made a compelling case for a kind of imaginary balance that represents the elusiveness
of the beloved in courtly discourse. The possibility and justiication of such a balance, created by extending the lengths of taleae to 18 breves and allowing them to overlap, is suggested to him by the ideas of deiciency and excess, thematized in the upper voices. In my
analysis nine breves stand outside of the motet’s two isorhythmic regions, and these can
certainly be read as a comment on the idea of “too much.” But perhaps we need to look to
the last two syllables of “repaire” for equality. If we begin with the upper voices, we ind not
only that the motet is balanced as it stands, but that, in retrospect, the tenor structures are
not at all in conlict with those of the triplum and motetus, for which 15-breve periods are
in fact suficient.
In a sense, S’il estoit/S’amours serves as something of a negative example within the
broader frame of this study, since a focus on upper-voice structures here has resulted in
perhaps less rather than more space for hermeneutic interpretation. By relaxing a perceived
tension between the tenor and upper voices I have made the story shorter, probably less
interesting, and certainly less inclusive of upper-voice ideas. And yet it is important to
establish the potential independence of upper-voice structures, whether they signify or not.
Any analytical stance must place some kinds of information in the foreground at the expense of others, and thus may close certain hermeneutic windows while opening new paths
for interpretation. The alternative is an analytical framework so broad that every detail is
signiicant—a dangerous foundation for interpretive endeavors, where too many open windows risk a hermeneutic draft.
In Chapter 4 and, to a greater extent, in Chapters 5 and 6 I will show that attention to upper-voice structures can in fact create larger spaces of discourse that bind music
166
and text in striking ways. This will be particularly true for Vitry’s In virtute/Decens and Cum
statua/Hugo, whose upper-voice structures bear a certain resemblance to S’il estoit/S’amours
but exhibit even more formal fragmentation without recourse to tenor diminution or renotation.
CONCLUSIONS: INDEPENDENT UPPER-VOICE STRUCTURES IN THE ARS NOVA MOTET
A list of motets whose upper voices contain periods which are different in length or
position from their tenor taleae is given as Table 3.2. Twelve of these are discussed above
in varying degrees of detail; Machaut’s Hélas/Corde mesto (M10) and Amours/Faus Samblant (M15) will feature in the next chapter. Two more—In virtute/Decens and Cum statua/
Hugo—will be the foci of detailed inquiries in Chapters 5 and 6. What can we say about
this list of pieces as a group?
The list includes fourteen works—a signiicant percentage of the ninety or so ars
nova motets.105 It thus serves to reinforce Bent’s argument that the composers of “isorhythmic” works cultivated variety.106 Chronologically these works fall within what we might
think of as a “middle” or “later” Ars nova, represented by Machaut’s motets (irst redaction
c. 1356), the Trémoille index (dated 1376) and the Ivrea codex, which Kügle has dated to
the 1380s but whose repertory he characterizes as “frozen in 1359.”107
105
For a list of the motets and notes on this qualiied use of the label “ars nova,” see the “Catalog of Ars nova
Motets, their Sources, and Editions” at the end of this study.
106
“What is Isorhythm?,” 127.
107
The Manuscript Ivrea, 76.
167
TABLE 3.2: MOTETS IN WHICH UPPER-VOICE PERIODS DIFFER FROM THE TENOR TALEAE
Motet
Tribum/Quoniam (V3)
Vos/Gratissima (V7)
Cum statua/Hugo (V8)
Colla/Bona (V9)
In virtute/Decens
Flos/Celsa
Quant/Amour (M1)
Hareu/Helas (M10)
Hélas/Corde mesto (M12)
Amours/Faus Semblant (M15)
S’il estoit/S’amour (M6)
Qui/Ha! Fortune (M8)
Ida/Portio
Sub Arturo/Plebs
Composer
Vitry
Sources
Fauvel, Str, Rob, Bru 19606, Munich 31,
RosL
Vitry
Ivrea, Durham, CaB, Br5170, (Trémoïlle)
Vitry
Ivrea, CaB
Vitry
Ivrea, Trémoïlle, CaB, Apt16bis, Arr983,
Tarr(1), Tarr(2), WrocĆaw, (Str)
?Vitry
Ivrea, Paris 2444, Trémoïlle
?Vitry
Ivrea, CaB, Paris 2444, SL2211, Trémoïlle
Machaut
Machaut MSS
Machaut
Machaut MSS, Trémoïlle
Machaut
Machaut MSS
Machaut
Machaut MSS, Ivrea, Trémoïlle
Machaut
Machaut MSS
Machaut
Machaut MSS, Ivrea, Trémoïlle, CaB
Edigius
Ivrea, Chantilly, Str, (Trémoïlle)
John Aleyn Chantilly, Q15, Yox
There are two exceptions: Tribum/Quoniam is already present in Fauvel (c. 1317)
and is likely to be the earliest in the group. Sub Arturo/Plebs is a later work, present in the
Chantilly codex but not in Ivrea. That work’s shifting approach to upper-voice/tenor coordination is arguably the most complicated of the cases examined here. But by illustrating an
extreme it helps us to deine the ield. Ida/Portio, which also survives in later sources, nevertheless its more comfortably with the rest of the listed repertory, and its use of doubled-up
supertaleae in successive diminution sections connects it with bipartite works with doubled
taleae such as Vos/Gratissima and Hareu/Hélas.108 Overall, we can say that the group of mo-
108
The work’s composer, listed in Coussemaker’s copy of F-Sm 222 as Egidius de Pusiex, was identiied by Hoppin and Clercx as the priest and composer Egidius de Puisieus, who died in 1348; “Notes
biographiques,” 86.
168
tets which use upper-voice taleae different from their tenor taleae belongs to the middle or
later ars nova, and is perhaps contemporary with some of the works Kügle has identiied as
belonging to the “ars magis subtiliter ordinata.”109
Also notable is that the list of motets in Table 3.2 is comprised overwhelmingly of
works by Machaut and Vitry.110 Only the two latest motets are by others; the rest are split
evenly between the two most famous French composers of the century. Given the number
of anonymous works in the repertory, the possibility of this being random is small indeed.
Rather, it suggests that the construction of upper-voice taleae that do not coincide with
the building blocks of the tenor represent an advanced aspect of isorhythmic technique.
I have suggested above that supertaleae can help conirm the theory put forward by Busse
Berger that isorhythmic structures have mnemonic properties—because they can yield simpler shapes and help the composer deal with large numbers of taleae. By no means is this
intended to imply, however, that these structures were simple. It was, after all, a composer’s
109
Kügle, The Manuscript Ivrea, 140–6. Of the motets on the list Kügle identiies only Ida/Portio and
Amours/Faus Semblant (M15) as potential participant in this ars, which “was well established by the end
of the 1340s” (146). The latter is included in part because of its long taleae and complicated “network of
structural ambiguities” as revealed by the analyses of Bent and Brownlee (Bent, “Deception, Exegesis, and
Sounding Number” and Brownlee, “Machaut’s Motet 15”). By these measures one might also include Flos/
Celsa and the related Colla/Bona. As for Cum statua/Hugo, that work may well date from the 1340s (see note
on dating in Chapter 6), as may the similarly constructed In virtute/Decens.
110
Problems of attribution abound with respect to Vitry, but not for the works listed here. Tribum/Quoniam
has been irmly linked with Vitry based on a marginal comment in one of his books, as discovered by Wathey,
“Myth and Mythography,” 95–7 (see Chapter One). Vos/Gratissima is attributed to Vitry in the Quatuor principalia. Cum statua/Hugo includes the composer’s name in its triplum text, and Colla/Bona, long attributed to
Vitry on stylistic grounds, inds further support from the circulation of its text in manuscript anthologies
where it is combined in several ways with references to Cum statua/Hugo (Wathey, “The Motets of Philippe
de Vitry,” 141–2). In virtute/Decens has been attributed to Vitry by Leech-Wilkinson on stylistic grounds;
Leech-Wilkinson, Compositional Techniques, 190–96, “Related Motets,” 5–8, 18–19. I believe that the
similarities with Cum statua/Hugo discussed in Chapter 6 of the present study lend further weight to the
attribution. Flos/Celsa has been assigned to Vitry by Leech-Wilkinson and Kügle based on structural and
stylistic evidence; Leech-Wilkinson, “Related Motets,” 11; Kügle, The Manuscript Ivrea, 124–5.
169
decision to use a large number of tenor taleae, incorporate partial taleae, or choose colores
with numbers of notes that do not it easily into the projected talea length. No doubt Vitry
and Machaut made things “more dificult” for themselves, and this is not in conlict with the
idea of a mnemonic component, since there is ample evidence of subtle and complicated
texts being drafted on the wax tablets of the mind.
Perhaps what we see in this more advanced set of compositional choices is a kind of
experimentation—an outlet for creativity on the parts of Vitry and Machaut. Encountering a variety of forms is perhaps less surprising in Machaut, whose motets have received
more individual attention from analysts; Bent’s and Boogaart’s work especially has underlined the extent to which each of Machaut’s motets is an individual creation. The prevailing
view of Vitry has been rather different. Reading the Règles de la Seconde Rhétorique perhaps
a bit too literally when it tells us (in a poetic context, incidentally) that Vitry discovered
“la manière des motès,” we have tended to see uniformity rather than diversity within his
works:111 Thus was Daniel Leech-Wilkinson’s impression after examining tenor color and
talea design in a number of Vitry’s works:
It seems that, at the very least, this complex of relationships [between taleae and colores] shows the composer tending to produce similar solutions to
similar compositional situations; and one would probably be justiied in suggesting a signiicant degree of plain borrowing. Indeed, it is not impossible
that Vitry set out in each new work to re-use as much as possible from his
earlier compositions. As a pioneer in a new style he may even have felt that
this was the safest way to proceed.112
This makes a rather cowardly pioneer out of Vitry. But it is also a picture developed largely
from examination of tenor structures. Attention to upper-voice units rather differentiates
these works, showing how, in at least six securely attributed motets, Vitry has created a form
111
Emphasis mine. Langlois, ed., Recueil d’arts de seconde rhétorique, 12.
112
Leech-Wilkinson, “Related Motets,” 2–3.
170
unlike any other in the repertory, though sharing some similarity of approach with his other
motets and with works by Machaut. In a further two motets, Firmissime/Adesto and Douce/
Garison, Vitry used an unusual approach to tenor construction sometimes called “pseudodiminution.” In these bipartite works a second color uses shorter taleae than the irst, hinting
at diminution. But these shorter taleae are in fact freely re-rhythmicized.113 This practice,
which we have already encountered in Vos/Gratissima, is also limited to Vitry and Machaut,
and further complicates the notion that Vitry’s motets it into some common mold.114 If,
as Gace de la Buigne wrote in his Roman des Deduis, Vitry was indeed the composer “qui
mieulx ist motets que nulz hom,” he earned this praise by the variety, rather than the monotony of his production.115
But quite apart from their contributions to our understanding of Vitry’s output, the
motets listed in Table 3.2 should cause us to question the account of motet composition
we ind in Egidius de Murino. Murino’s instructions are explicitly aimed at beginners, and
leave little space for the kind of planning that would produce the structures discussed above,
unless we relegate all of it to the realm of “materia.” If this kind of detail is less likely to be
emulated in anonymous works, it is perhaps because it required some extra skill or a different idea of how motets are composed. But to assume more generally that a motet composer
would begin composition by selecting and arranging a tenor and only then move upward,
writing his texts in a inal compositional stage after all formal decisions had been made
113
Firmissime/Adesto survives anonymously in Fauvel, but is sometimes thought to be by Vitry—it is edited
by Schrade with the Fauvel motets with a bracketed attribution to Vitry, was de-ascribed by Roesner along
with the other Fauvel motets, and re-ascribed by Leech-Wilkinson; Roesner, Avril and Regalado, Introduction to Le Roman de Fauvel, 38–42; Leech-Wilkinson, “Related Motets,” 298–9. Douce/Garison is identiied as a work of Vitry’s in la Buigne, Le Roman des Deduis, 315 (see Chapter One).
114
Machaut uses pseudo-diminution in the second part of Tous corps/De souspirant (M2).
115
la Buigne, Le Roman des Deduis, 116.
171
limits our understanding of the compositional process to only those simpler works, and
indeed means that we might miss subtleties such as those detailed here.116 The creation of
texts must often have happened at a much earlier stage in the compositional process, since
upper-voce musical structures often amplify the poetic forms of upper-voice texts.
More broadly, motets with supertaleae challenge received notions about the role of
the upper voices and the tenor in the construction of isorhythmic motets, since the forms
of these pieces are represented more meaningfully by upper-voice periods than by tenor taleae. Of course, these two are not unrelated: in cases where a very short tenor talea is doubled
to make a longer upper-voice period the result is certainly neither dramatic nor particularly
hard to explain. But even those simple examples, and certainly the more complex structures
of Colla/Bona, Flos/Celsa, and S’il estoit/S’Amours belie the cliché that isorhythmic organization in the upper voices exists “to emphasize the recurring rhythmic patterns in the
tenor.”117 In some cases, it seems, the tenor is a building block in the isorhythmic scheme
laid out by the upper voices.
116
See, for example, the compositional order proposed in Busse Berger, Medieval Music, 232.
117
Burkholder, Grout, & Palisca, A History of Western Music, 121.
172
CHAPTER FOUR
Voice-Crossings and Fortuna in Machaut’s Motets
T
HE UPPER-VOICE TALEAE
discussed in Chapter 3 represent a mode of dividing motets
into units beyond those dictated by the tenor’s rhythmic cycles that nevertheless de-
pends on the repetition of rhythm. But rhythmic repetition is by no means the only way of
segmenting motets, and it is far from the most audible. In the works analyzed in this chapter, range rather than rhythm is manipulated when the usual contrapuntal order between
triplum and motetus is reversed. Alternations between this novel texture and the more usual registral order (triplum-motetus-tenor) create audible subdivisions within compositions
which are directly linked to the presence of Fortune in the upper-voice-texts of each motet.
* * *
Fortune is a ickle goddess. To be scorned for her unfairness, to be berated for her
deceit—these are her functions within the French lyric tradition, where her name almost
always appears in the context of a lover’s complaint. How strange it seems, then, to hear the
deity praised as an ally by the motetus of Machaut’s Maugré mon cuer/De ma dolour (M14):
“[I am] a friend of Fortune to my satisfaction” the happy lover proclaims.1 And as if to
ensure that we do not miss this extraordinary admission in the motetus, the triplum voice
drops down from its customary position, allowing the normally lower motetus to sound at
the top of the texture as though carried up by its jubilation (see Example 4.1, where the
voice crossing is marked with arrows). A subversion of the poetic norm is thus accompanied
A longer version of this chapter is published as Zayaruznaya, “‘She has a wheel that turns…’: Crossed and
Contradictory Voices in Machaut’s Motets,” Early Music History 28 (2009): 185–240.”
1
l. 6, “Et de Fortune amis et à mon gré.” Full texts and translations for Motet 14 are found in Appendix
4B.
173
by a reversal in contrapuntal procedure. Signiicantly, these unusual circumstances coincide also with a moment of marked intertextual opposition: while the motetus brags on, the
normally higher triplum, here relegated to the middle of the texture, complains of the usual
courtly state of things: tears, sadness, and futile efforts. What does Machaut’s use of a voice
crossing at this contradictory moment signify?
Triplum: “[not a day which did not] pass in sadness and in
tears, illed with rejection to increase my efforts and
counter me.”
Motetus: “and a friend of Fortune to
my satisfaction”
Example 4.1: Maugré/De ma dolour (M14), mm. 49–59
To answer this question it is necessary to examine Machaut’s use of crossed voices in
his motets. Against a backdrop of “normal” usage, I have found several remarkable passages
that cue a network of ideas connected with Fortune, including circularity, reversal, contra-
174
diction, and falseness.2 In this context, Helas/Corde mesto (M12) will emerge as the work
in which Machaut’s use of voice crossings to comment upon Fortuna’s actions is at its most
systematic and accessible. I will then turn to Amours/Faus samblant (M15), which cleverly
re-uses and re-interprets some of the poetic and compositional devices developed in Helas/
Corde mesto. Finally, I will return to the above-quoted passage and to Maugré/De ma dolour,
in which Fortuna’s presence is more subtly signaled, but no less pervasive.
* * *
The question of voice crossings in Machaut’s motets has rarely been addressed by
scholars.3 The “voice-exchange” technique of earlier repertories was generally abandoned
after 1300, giving way to the gradual registral separation of the upper voices that produced
the tenor—motetus—triplum arrangement found in many 14th-century motets and discussed by the theorists of the time.4 It is often true that a motetus is, as Ernest Sanders
2
The theme of Fortune in Machaut’s motets has been most fully engaged by Jacques Boogaart in his 2001
dissertation, where he argues that a ‘Fortune’ rhythmic pattern is used in motets 8, 12, 14, and 15 to
symbolize the “instability and unreliability personiied in the igures of Fortune or Faus Semblant,” see “‘O
series summe rata’,” 130–47, 491–3. Anne Walters Robertson also discusses representations of Fortuna in
Motets 8 and 12; Guillaume De Machaut and Reims, 132–7, 156–9. Sylvia Huot touches upon Motet 12 in
“Patience in Adversity,” 233–4. For a poetic analysis of ive ballades by Machaut in which lovers complain
about Fortune, see Johnson, Poets as Players, 41–56. Elizabeth Eva Leach has analyzed two Machaut ballades dealing with Fortuna and two related anonymous ballades preserved in the Reina codex in “Fortune’s
Demesne,” 47–9. A related body of scholarship is that treating the role of Fortuna in motets from the
interpolated Roman de Fauvel. On this, see especially M. Bent, “Fauvel and Marigny,” 35–52.
3
In his discussion of the complementary relationship between Motets 12 and 15, Boogaart has compared
the registral exchange between the upper voices until the midpoint of Motet 12 with the division into halves
of Motet 15 by means of isorhythmic structure; see “‘O Series Summe Rata’,” 492. Boogaart also discusses
a highly idiosyncratic passage in Motet 17 where the Triplum is the lowest of all three voices; see “Encompassing Past and Present,” 49. Finally, Bent describes a moment in Motet 9 where low notes on signiicant
words in the triplum “sometimes allow the motetus to soar above it”; see “Words and Music,’ 376.
4
For example, Egidius de Murino identiies the order of composition for a motet as tenor, then contratenor
(if there is one), then a third voice “above [the tenor].” He also gives instructions about how to compose a
type of motet in which the tenor lies above the motetus, but where the relationship between the two newly
composed voices is unaltered: “make the triplum concord above the motetus as well as you know how and are
able to”; see Leech-Wilkinson, “Compositional Procedure,” 21, 23.
175
deines it, the “voice immediately above the tenor.”5 And yet, Machaut’s irst 20 Motets
contain some 165 instances in which the motetus sings above the triplum and tenor—a
state to which I will from now on refer as “voice crossing.”6 Together, these passages account
for approximately 17% of the combined length of the motets (Figure 4.1 represents these
voice crossings by dark shading for Motets 1-20). Indeed, such a statistic is not dificult to
believe of voices that are often close and sometimes identical in range (range for each of the
irst 20 motets is indicated in Figure 4.2).
But attributing these crossings to the similar ranges of the voices does not tell the
whole story. A comparison of Figures 4.1 and 4.2 reveals that closeness of range does not
appear to be a primary determining factor of the likelihood of voices crossing. For instance:
the upper voices of M6 and M10 have nearly identical ranges, but cross three times more
often in the former than in the latter. The same situation exists with M3 and M5. In other
words, there is no strong correlation between the closeness of the upper voices in range and
the frequency of their crossing. This would suggest that Machaut’s local control of range
is at least partially independent of a given part’s ambitus in relation to other voices in the
same work.
5
Sanders, “Motetus.”
6
Boogaart’s term “registral exchange” is useful here as well, but I want to emphasize the contrapuntal act of
crossing as opposed to the exchange that results vertically from this contrapuntal act. I exclude the last three
motets because they belong to a different stylistic period and intellectual sphere. It is also worth noting that
none of Machaut’s motets belongs to the small group of ars nova motets with a central tenor, which include
Tribum/Quoniam and Apollinis/Zodiacum.
176
Figure 4.1: Voice Crossings between Triplum and Motetus in Machaut’s Motets 1–20
177
Figure 4.2: Range of Upper Voices in Motets 1–20
Scrutiny of speciic crossings conirms the intentional nature of the device. Consider the passage from Dame/Fins (M11) reproduced as Example 4.2. The crossing in mm.
25–6 is only made possible because of the downward fall of a ifth in the triplum (indicated
in the example by diagonal lines between the notes). This sudden change in ambitus allows
a remarkable imitative passage to occur, with Motetus repeating triplum’s bars 23–5 as its
own 25–7. When this imitation has run its course, the motetus leaps down a ifth in bar 27,
allowing the triplum to continue the imitation with its a’–g’–a’.7 Another crossing follows in
measure 28. Neither of these crossings is necessitated contrapuntally, nor do they result in
smooth vocal lines; rather, they are deliberately punctuated (and caused) by unusually wide
leaps in both voices.
7
This passage attracted the attention of Gustave Reese in his search for early examples of imitation. He
calls it a “somewhat…effective” attempt on Machaut’s part, since the imitation is “obscured…by the preixing, to the melody of the second voice, of a motive that does not belong to the phrase”; Music in the Middle
Ages, 355. In fact, the voice crossing serves to conceal the “extra” motive (motetus, m. 24).
178
Example 4.2: Dame/Fins (M11), breves 23–28
There are only two other melodic leaps of a ifth in this motet, also between d’ and
a’, and they too serve to facilitate transitions between crossed and un-crossed voices. In
Motet 11, then, crossings between triplum and motetus are achieved only by means of large
intervals. If Machaut had simply re-distributed the melodic material to avoid registral exchange and allow for smoother melodic lines, the “sonic image” of the piece would not be
radically different—the same notes would sound, though they would be texted differently.
But this has not been done. The motet is written with crossings, and the conclusion must be
that in this case they are deliberate.8
Bar 28 of Example 4.2 deserves a second glance because it is typical for Machaut’s
voice crossings. Indeed, approximately 72% of the crossings in his motets begin with the
start of a poetic line, whether in triplum or motets, and last no more than a few breves. The
purpose of these crossings is probably to draw the listener’s attention to the less audible
motetus as it is about to begin a new phrase.9 which I believe to be the intelligibility of the
motetus text, are discussed in Chapter 2, above. But what is signiicant here is that, regard8
In other genres, the use of voice crossings may be less regular. In the ballades, Leach has discussed
Machaut’s use of crossings to avoid awkward contrapuntal situations; see, “Interpretation and Counterpoint,” 329–34. See also Bain, “Theorizing the Cadence.”
9
See the discussion of selective and switched attention in Chapter Two.
179
less of their purposes, Machaut’s voice crossing practices are extremely regular. Against the
background of these typical crossings, certain remarkable passages in his works come into
greater relief.
So let us return to Figure 4.1. Even a passing glance reveals that the crossing from
M14 given in Example 4.1 is noteworthy. At eight breves, it is among the longest in the motets. Furthermore, it is conspicuously placed, ending just before the midpoint of the piece
(the vertical dotted line in the igure marks the midpoints). But nothing speaks as clearly
for the purposefulness of Machaut’s use of voice crossing as Helas/Corde mesto (M12). As
Figure 4.1 shows, that work’s two halves employ two entirely different vocal hierarchies (an
edition of Helas/Corde mesto is given in Appendix 4C). In its irst half, there are only six or
seven breves in which the motetus is in its customary position below the triplum; the rest
of the time, the voices are crossed. But after the midpoint, there are no more than ive or
six breves of crossings; elsewhere, the motetus is in its usual place “immediately above the
tenor.”
What could have motivated Machaut to compose such counterpoint? The crossing
of voices in Helas/Corde mesto cannot be merely the by-product of voices that are too close
in range, since this would result in crossings throughout the piece, and not just in the irst
half. Moreover, the crossings that dominate the Motet’s irst 80 breves are entirely inconsistent with Machaut’s usual practice, being much longer than usual and coinciding only
rarely with the beginnings of poetic lines. These circumstances, combined with the careful
placement of the point of un-crossing at the midpoint of the piece, speak of a deliberately
conceived and executed authorial plan—as central to the form of the piece as the tenor’s
color and talea.
180
That midpoints are important in Machaut’s musical and poetic works is often
stressed,10 but a midpoint as starkly articulated as that in Helas/Corde mesto is hard to ind.
Is there anything in the text to warrant such an unusual manipulation of the musical texture?
THE MOTETUS CORDE MESTO CANTANDO CONQUEROR
Helas/Corde mesto is unusual in Machaut’s oeuvre for mixing upper-voice texts in
two languages: its triplum is French; its motetus, Latin (see Appendix 4A for full texts
and translations).11 This disparity in language is matched by another in poetic voice. The
triplum keeps to a stylized courtly register, presenting us with the familiar igure of a lover
whose lady ignores his affection and suffering. The Latin motetus, however, does not it
comfortably into the conventions of any one poetic register. In the irst stanza the speaker
seems to be a usual courtly lover complaining of his lady’s indifference to his suit, the second stanza represents a generic complaint against Fortune’s unfairness, and by the third
stanza the lover has waxed religious, turning to prayer and penitence “that to me, cleansed
of the ilth of guilt by forgiveness, at my death may glory be given.” As a whole, then, the
10
The importance of the midpoint to Machaut’s music has been investigated on several levels of magnitude.
In the ordering of the motets, Thomas Brown has noticed parallels between the midpoint speech of Amours
in the Rose, and the middle lines (12–13) of the motetus of M10. Placing the midpoint of the sequence at
the “silence between M10 and M11,” Brown shows a mirrored structure in the ordering of Motets 1–20; see
“Another Mirror for Lovers,” 128–32. Focusing instead on the irst seventeen motets as an ordered unit,
Robertson has argued for M9 as an important midpoint, with its fera pessima (most evil beast) analogous
to the minotaur at the center of a maze; Guillaume De Machaut and Reims, 168–74. In individual pieces
of music, the midpoint is sometimes marked by textual or isorhythmic means. For the former, see Brown,
“Another Mirror for Lovers,” 126; For the latter, Boogaart, “O series summe rata,” 492. In the Mass, Owen
Rees points to “an aurally striking emphasis upon the midpoint” of the Kyrie I, Christe, Agnus I and Agnus
II; see “Machaut’s Mass and Sounding Number,” 103. Some important caveats are offered by David Maw in
“Machaut and the ‘Critical’ Phase,” 285–6.
11
Machaut’s other bilingual motet is Quant vraie/O series (M17).
181
motetus text represents a sublimation of love into purely religious fervor.12 Now, we should
not be surprised to ind amorous desire transformed into something more noble and lasting
in Machaut’s poetry. Sylvia Huot sees the “elaboration of a love independent of desire” as “a
hallmark of Machaut’s poetry.”13 However, the third stanza of the motetus goes rather too
far. Instead of the usual re-painting of the lady as eternally available to the lover’s imagination, though unyielding to his desire, the text rejects her outright. This kind of sublimation
is much rarer in Machaut’s work, and indeed Douglas Kelly wrote that it was represented
only by a solitary ballade.14
If stanzas 1 and 2 are part of the usual courtly register, then Stanza 3’s sudden shift
seems inexplicable. But does the shift occur there? Or is there something in the middle
stanza to help explain the ultimate rejection of fin’ amors? The topic of the second stanza
has been identiied by Huot as “the implicit allegorization of the courtly lady as Fortune.”15
That is, where in the irst stanza the focus is on the protagonist’s futile servitude, the second
stanza addresses—not the lady, but the goddess:
In derisum
Das arrisum
Et obrisum
Tollis risum
Fortuna te ponis.
Expers rationis,
Malis; sed a bonis
Et abis cum donis.
[You put yourself to scorn, o Fortune:
You give favor, without sense,
And gold, to evil men; but from the good
You take laughter away, and depart with your gifts.]16
12
For another detailed analysis of this motetus, see Boogaart, “O series summe rata,” 102–9, 37–40.
13
“Reading the Lies of Poets,” 36. On mixing the erotic and sacred realms, see also ead., “Guillaume de
Machaut,” 47-69.
14
Kelly was perhaps not including the motet texts when he wrote that “in only one poem, an isolated ballade,
does Machaut [move] from courtly love to a speciically religious sentiment,” Medieval Imagination104n40.
15
“Reading Across Genres,” 5.
16
I am grateful to Rob Getz for his translation of this motetus.
182
Is Fortune identical to the lady implied in stanza one? It is possible to read the text
that way. However, the middle stanza can also be read as separate both from what came before it and what comes after, if we consider its context not courtly, but Boethian.
The inluence of Boethius and his Consolation of Philosophy on Machaut’s work generally, and his motet texts speciically, is well known and extensive, and particularly remarked upon in this motetus.17 And indeed, the Consolation, with its insistence that those
suffering injustices should turn to God, who “orders all things and directs them towards
goodness” despite sometime appearances to the contrary is a comfortable it with the change
of focus that takes place in the text’s second stanza.18
The three stanzas of motetus live in three different realms: courtly—philosophical—religious. And it is philosophy’s Consolation that creates the shift from the irst to the
third. We leave the dame behind in the irst stanza, only to encounter her much-less-nice
allegorical twin in the second. And if there were to be a lady in the inal stanza, perhaps it
would be Our Lady. Fortune, a goddess but a disreputable one, thus mediates between the
earthly and the divine.19
17
Indeed, Machaut’s reliance on Boethius is self-declared—a passage in the Remede de Fortune reminds
the reader that “Boeces si nous raconte/Q’on ne doit mie fair conte/De ses anuis,” l. 982–4, Machaut, Jugement and Remede, 222. Huot treats the courtly transformation of Boethius in Machaut’s dits in “Guillaume
de Machaut.” Boogaart points to Boethius’s panegyric of Love in book II, m. 8 as a rhetorical model for
the triplum of Motet 17; “Encompassing Past and Present,” 42–4. Robertson also links Motet 17 with
Boethius: Guillaume de Machaut and Reims, 174–5. On boethian inluence in this motetus in particular, see
Huot, “Patience in Adversity,” 233–34, and Robertson, Guillaume de Machaut and Reims, 156–57.
18
Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, 109. For ease of reference I use a widely available edition of
the Latin Consolation. However, it is likely that Machaut would have encountered it in the French: there are
no fewer than 13 medieval French translations of the Consolatio surviving, of which 11 are from the 13th
and 14th centuries. Of these, the most famous is by Jean de Meun; see Kaylor, The Medieval Consolation of
Philosophy, Chapter 4.
19
This mediation often leads to her degradation, but in at least two isolated cases it causes her exaltation
and identiication with divine Providence; see Hunt, “The Christinization of Fortune,” 99–100, 105–13.
183
SINGING FROM FORTUNE’S WHEEL
Behind every medieval description of Fortune lies the image of the tool through
which she interferes in human affairs: her ever-spinning wheel. Its four inhabitants articulate the cardinal axes of the wheel: at the top is placed a king, labelled “regno” (“I reign”); at
the bottom, a powerless fool or drunkard “sine regno”— powerless. On the left and rising to
the top is the aspirant who will reign, “regnabo,” and on the right, falling towards the bottom
is the has-been, “regnavi.” That the wheel is symbolic is clear; its inevitable turning means
that the felicity of those on it is forever in a state of lux. And while Boethius and those
following in his tradition often draw upon the metaphor’s explanatory power, there is also a
physical aspect to the turning of the wheel: the vertical motion, in real space, of those on it.
It is this motion that is on the mind of the narrator of the Roman de la Rose after Jealousy
has imprisoned his beloved Fair Welcome: “She has a wheel that turns, and when she wishes
she raises the lowest up to the summit, and with a turn plunges him who was on top of the wheel
into the mud.”20
In fact, these words are an apt description of a voice crossing, where a normally low
voice is raised to the highest place, while the highest voice is plunged downwards. The image of Fortune’s wheel aligns happiness and sadness with the vertical extremes of the circle
itself, and the words of the motetus in the central stanza echo this alignment: The strongly
articulated musical mid-point (marked “|” below and in breves 80–81 of the edition in Appendix 4C) is centered between “malis” (the evil men) and “bonis” (the good). And because
of the voice crossing, “evil” is indeed raised up, while “good” is sung at the motetus’s normal
range, below the newly restored triplum (compare bars 80 and 82-3).
20
Lorris and Meun, The Romance of the Rose, 87; emphasis mine.
184
Meanwhile, Fortune herself is close at hand. She appears twice in the text, once before and once after the midpoint, irst helping the mali, then hindering the boni:
In derisum
Das arrisum
Et obrisum
Tollis risum
Spernens cece
Fortuna te ponis.
Expers rationis,
Malis; sed | a bonis
Et abis cum donis.
Fortune tedia
I suggest that the extended crossing and uncrossing of voices in Hélas/Corde mesto
actually depicts the effect of Fortuna upon her victims and thus achieves a musical representation of the goddess’s spinning wheel. The moment of un-crossing is perfectly centered
between the “evil” men whom she has placed at the top, and the “good,” who are relegated
to the bottom. In the irst stanza, while she has inluence over the speaker, his world is, as it
were, inverted, and it is only with his refutation of Fortune’s claim on him that the speaker
can see things as they are. The motet stages the change from a world controlled by Fortune
to one that is free of her wickedness by returning to its own natural state (triplum above
motetus) in the center of the pivotal Boethian stanza.
Can we not see in all this the lover, sitting on Fortuna’s wheel and singing of his
woes, as he and his song are raised up to the highest level, only to be plunged downwards
into the mud? The singer is doubly unlucky: unlucky in having the woes of which he sings,
and unlucky in that the very notes of his song seems to be controlled by Fortune: while
speaking about her unfairness, he inds himself subject to it; while singing that the good are
thrown down, he and his voice are cast into the abyss.
Just such a scene—that of the lover sitting on Fortune’s wheel—is depicted in the
famous illuminated miniature that accompanies Machaut’s Remede de Fortune in Machaut
Manuscript C. While “the lover composes a complainte about Fortune and her wheel” in the
185
top frame of the image, the contents of his complainte play out in the bottom frame (see
Figure 4.3).21
Figure 4.3: The lover composes a complainte about Fortune and her wheel
(Machaut MS C, fol. 30v)
21
“Comment l’Amant fait une complainte de Fortune et de sa roe.”
186
Here, Fortune cranks a wooden gear which causes her own wheel to turn. The machine is at once fantastical and practical, perhaps reminiscent of a real Fortune’s wheel built
for clerical or courtly entertainment and apparently giving the goddess a 4:3 mechanical
advantage.22 In addition to the rare iconography of the gears, another departure from the
usual awaits the viewer in the person representing “regno” on top of the wheel. Though usually depicted as a crowned king, the igure here wears a small pink cap. As Dominic Leo has
shown, this garment is rare in 14th-century iconography and seems in the Machaut manuscripts to be reserved for the author and his lady.23
The complainte being illustrated, Tels rit au main qui au soir pleure, is a discursive tourde-force whose 576 lines in 36 strophes focus obsessively on Fortune.24 Though eventually the tone settles down into a courtly lover’s complaint, the irst strophe is clerical in tone,
focusing on the character and habits of Fortune. Here, the action of turning dominates the
text. The use of “—ourne” as one of the strophe’s two rhymes echoes that choice, causing
the sound as well as the sense of the phrase to turn constantly:
Car Fortune tout ce deveure
Quant elle tourne
Qui n’atent mie qu’il ajourne
Pour tourner; qu’elle ne sejourne,
Ains tourne retourne et bestourne
[Fortune does all this harm as she turns her wheel,
and she doesn’t wait for daybreak to turn it; she doesn’t stop,
but turns it, turns it some more, and turns it upside down]25
22
See Nelson, “Mechanical Wheels of Fortune,” 227.
23
Leo, “Looking at Illuminated Machaut Manuscripts.”
24
The complainte’s structure and contents are treated in more detail in Chapter 6.
25
ll. 911–915, Machaut, Jugement and Remede, 218–9.
187
The musical setting highlights the “-ourne” rhyme-sounds and adds its own circularity: the irst appearance of “tourne,” (in “et mal l’atourne”) coincides with a repeat, and
thus leads immediately to a return to the beginning (Example 4.3, longae 15–17). Such
emphasis is no accident in the important irst stanza of the complainte, and speaks to Machaut’s tendency to foreground this aspect of the goddess’s character.26
Example 4.3: The Lover’s complainte about Fortune—irst stanza
On the other side of the parchment page (in MS C) the image echoes this arrangement.27 Representing the contents of the complainte, it shows us the lover, and therefore the
singer, momentarily perched on top of the wheel. I picture the singer situated exactly thus
within the imaginary world of Hélas/Corde mesto: as Fortuna’s wheel goes round, his notes
follow suit, their pitch at the mercy of a sort of allegorical Doppler effect.
26
The choice may seem like an obvious one, but there are other possible loci of attention, such as Fortune’s
embodiment of opposite states, or her falseness—qualities discussed in later stanzas of the complainte.
27
In fact, the dark image bleeds through considerably, which adds to an effect of unity between the depiction of the creation of the complainte, and that piece itself. The irst appearance of “tourne” is in fact overlapped with the top of the wheel, and with the lover—a fortuitous coincidence.
188
But if in one sense the structure of Hélas/Corde mesto depicts the effect of a spin of
Fortuna’s wheel, in another it depicts that wheel itself by invoking circular imagery. There are
several contemporary precedents for connecting music and the visual. Guillaume tells us in
his Prologue that “Musique est une science.”28 Not only can it morally inluence the hearer
in an Aristotelian manner, it can also have visible manifestations: “ce sont miracles apertes/
Que Musique fait.”29 The circle is inherent in the name of the rondeau, a relationship which
Machaut underlines in his famous Ma fin est mon commencement et mon commencement est
ma fin. Though the words describe the retrograde canon that forms the piece, they are also
a riddle that has a circle as its answer—any point on a circle is its end and its beginning.
The analogy of 14th-century musical forms to geometric patterns is evocatively
summarized by Daniel Poirion:
the formal structure [of the formes fixes] provides the language with a parallel
to the system of the universe. The ballad looks like a trefoil… the rondeau
has a small circle inscribed around a larger one; the virelai has three circles
bound together… the motet, which distributes text among different levels, or we
could say different spheres… [has] the story of the lover circling about a religious
prayer... The polyphony relects the cosmos’ hierarchy, with its homocentric
spheres. Man himself is subject to similar movements.30
In other words, the circular movement of the heavens is mirrored in man’s trajectory through
a motet. As he circles around its sacred tenor, his motion might well trace out the outlines
of a ruthlessly turning wheel.
Is a listener meant to see a circle in his mind’s eye while listening to such a piece?
It could certainly be part of the experience. Right around this time—in the irst half of
the 14th century—visualization seems to have emerged as a new and persistent mode of
28
Line 199; Machaut, The Fountain of Love, 12–3.
29
Ibid., lines 259–260 (pp. 16–17), emphasis mine.
30
Poirion, “The Imaginary Universe,” 199, emphasis mine.
189
cognition. Johan Huizinga already saw the importance of this change, noting that “the basic characteristic of the late medieval mind is its predominantly visual nature,” though he
characteristically linked this tendency “to explain images through images, and to hold up
mirrors to mirrors” with “the atrophy of the mind.”31 More recent studies have celebrated
the change, connecting it instead with broader developments in quantitative reasoning,
painting, and composition.32 And as I have argued in Chapter Three, some motets seem to
have had shapes for their creators. Others, like In virtute/Decens (which will be the focus of
Chapter Five), were clearly intended to evoke colorful imagery of a different nature.
As visualize-able ideas go, Fortuna is perhaps one of the more attractive. The link
between the goddess and the notion of circular movement through different spheres is explicated by Boethius in the Consolatio. When the narrator asks Philosophy about the relationship between Fate (Fortune) and divine Providence, her answer is geometric in its
precision:
Imagine a set of revolving concentric circles. The inmost one comes closest
to the simplicity of the center, while forming itself a kind of center for those
set outside to revolve round… anything that joins itself to the middle circle
is brought close to simplicity, and no longer spreads out widely. In the same
way whatever moves any distance from the primary intelligence becomes
enmeshed in even stronger chains of Fate, and everything is the freer from
Fate the closer it seeks the center of things. The relationship between the
ever-changing course of Fate and the stable simplicity of providence is like
that between reasoning and understanding, between that which is coming
into being and that which is, between time and eternity, or between the moving circle and the still point in the middle.33
Here, circular imagery is used as an exemplum to explain a universe in which bad
31
Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, 248, 341.
32
On the relationship between visualization and the emergence of Quantiication, see Chapter 7, “Visualization: An Introduction” Crosby, The Measure of Reality. For Visualization as it applies to music, and
especially to 14th-century motets, see Berger, Medieval Music, 210–51.
33
Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, 105.
190
things often seem to happen to good people. The smaller circle represents divine providence, while the larger is the means by which Fortune inlicts pain on those who stray too
far from the divine “simplicity of the center.”
In light of all this, I suggest the motetus of Hélas/Corde mesto may be seen as moving
between Boethian spheres. Before the midpoint, Fortuna is being endured and implored by
the unfortunate narrator. While he is in her power, he necessarily inhabits Boethius’s outer
circle, where he is subject to the goddess’s ickle whims. But over the course of the work
Fortuna is spurned and nulliied by the speaker’s religiosity. Refuting the goddess’s claim
on him, the Lover is able to move inwards to the circle of Providence, where he is musically
and semantically closer to the motet’s sacred tenor.
Figure 4.4 diagrams the proposed reading which equates the voice crossings in Hélas/Corde mesto with shifts between Boethius’s concentric circles. Here, pitch and virtue ind
themselves on the same axis: the outermost circle, a space for the topmost voice, is Fortune’s
realm. The inner circle, providence’s domain, contains the middle voice. And the tenor, the
only voice in this motet which is unmoving in terms of its relative register, is in the center
of the circle, sharing space (appropriately, given its origin in chant) with divine simplicity.
Triplum does not participate as obviously in the shifts of meaning—its text remains courtly
throughout and therefore (presumably) in the realm of Fortune. However, Boogaart has
argued that the Triplum can in fact be split into two semantic halves:
In the triplum text of M12 a process can also be seen but here the argument
is divided in two contrasting halves. The text begins as a wrathful complaint
about the lady; in its second half, from l. 18, the lover accepts her harshness
and wishes nothing else.34
34
Boogaart, “O series summe rata,” 139.
191
Figure 4.4: The Voices of Motet 12 mapped on to Boethius’s Concentric Circles
Thus the triplum may be shifting spheres as well. Nearer to the center, he perceives
his lady’s unjust ways and complains bitterly. But after the shift, back in the realm of cruel
Fortune, he is forced to put up with ill treatment in silence. Both voices, then, undergo a
transition that is at once registral and philosophical.
If the analogy between circular spheres and pitch seems far-fetched, we need only
recall Baude Cordier’s Tout par compas. This famous rondeau is notated on two concentric
circular staves: the outer transmits a canon for the upper voices; the inner contains the
tenor. The arrangement of a smaller circle within a larger one is reminiscent of Boethius’s
description and also powerfully evokes (or provoked?) Poirion’s idea of the song as inhabiting several different spheres.
192
We see a similar arrangement in an earlier and less often-cited example of circular
notation, the canonic ballade En la maison Dedalus preserved in Berkeley’s Music MS 744
(See Figure 4.5).35 Whereas Tout par compas refers simply to a circle, “as beits a rondeau,”
this earlier ballade evokes Daedalus’s labyrinth, in which the singer’s lade is imprisoned:36
My lady is enclosed in
the house of Daedalus where
I cannot go, for I see no exit
or entry by means of which I
may commune with her comely form.
And thus I am compelled to stile
many a sigh, and languish in torment;
If I do not see her soon I must die. 37
The arrangement of the piece in the manuscript cleverly takes up the idea of the
labyrinth, so that the return to the beginning that a singer normally makes in a ballade is reconstrued as part of the labyrinth’s winding path.38 And given the dificulties in this outer
staff, it is easy to imagine that that singer’s striving is inwards, towards the bright red center,
where his love is presumably imprisoned. In fact, he almost gets there: since the canonic
upper voices do not it completely onto the outer circle only, they must move inwards for
their last line. In the inner circle they encounter the tenor, and share a staff with it for long
enough to say that the lover will die if he does not ind his lady soon. The spinning of the
irst part of the song seems resolved, and the move inwards is the only one that would allow
stillness, while bringing the singer—literally—close to the simplicity of the center; in this
35
The music theory treatise to which the ballade is appended is dated 1375, making this the earliest example of circular notation, and one contemporaneous (though just barely) with Machaut. Richard Crocker
points out that there may be some connection between Machaut’s oeuvre and En la maison: “In melodic
inlection it bears a striking similarity to Guillaume de Machaut’s ballade, ]e puis trop bien.” “A New Source,”
166.
36
“En ceste ronde proprement,” Tout par compas, l. 2.
37
Trans., Wright, The Maze and the Warrior, 242.
38
Wright, The Maze and the Warrior, 240–2.
193
case, perhaps, the stillness of death. But then a new strophe begins, and the lover must again
move outwards, cast back to the entrance of the labyrinth by a pitiless and unrelenting form.
Figure 4.5: En la maison Dedalus39
What both circular chansons have in common is the association of the center of a
circle with the tenor of a work—an arrangement I am suggesting also for Machaut’s Motet
39
Berkeley, University of California, Berkeley, Music Library MS 0744, p. 62. http://scriptorium.columbia.edu.
194
12. En la maison Dedalus goes a step further than Tout par compas, in that its outer/upper
voices profess a desire to leave the outer circle and move inwards—to be, in other words,
closer to the tenor. Even more so than the later rondeau, the ballade illustrates the tension
between a poetic yearning for stillness and the same musically induced perpetual motion
that is dramatized by different compositional means in Hélas/Corde mesto.
And entirely apart from symbolic considerations, layout also helps explain the
choices made by scribes and composers for the circular pieces: upper/outer voices have more
notes than lower/inner ones. The same holds true for Machaut’s motets: the tenor, motetus,
and triplum operate on respectively increasingly complex levels of rhythmical activity, with
the result that the triplum has the most notes, the motetus fewer, and the tenor fewest. So
that by the same reasoning the three voices of a motet could it on three concentric circles,
with the tenor at the center (as in Tout par compass) and the triplum on the outermost orbit. It is not hard to imagine these motets curling up around their own tenors, even as they
evoke the “order perfectly proportioned” that their texts describe.40
CECE FORTUNA AND BLIND ISAAC
Though the Motetus is able to escape “cum penitencia,” a closer look the other two
voices of Hélas/Corde mesto reveals that they do not get off so easy. The triplum text is a
seemingly standard courtly text, in which the lover bemoans his lady’s harsh treatment. It
is built around the oft-repeated paradoxical problems of courtly love: the lover desires the
lady, but in doing so he desires that which may hurt him. Though the theme is a fundamental one, it receives almost too much emphasis in this text:41
40
“series summe rata,” M17, motetus l. 1.
41
Three of these four paradoxical statements are found after the midpoint of the motet—a circumstance
195
nor can I even now hope for anything/that would not be wholly to my despair. (l. 7-8)
we often pursue/that which we have no wish to possess (l. 21)
I most want that by which I am most grieved (l. 32)42
I love above all else that which does not care about me (l. 34)
By stressing unfair duality, the lover is strengthening the afinity between his lady and Fortune, who is indeed cruel to the good.
Equally telling is the fact that the triplum text twice mentions the eyes: “Why did my
eyes ever see my dear… lady?” (l. 1) and “if I had been/without eyes” (l. 11). Though Machaut’s motet texts often mention seeing, nowhere else does he name the organs of sight.43
Meanwhile, the motetus complains of cece Fortuna—blind Fortune. The depiction of Fortune as blind is common in medieval art and literature. In fact, we have already seen her
in this guise in Figure 4.3, where she is blindfolded. The Roman de la Rose proclaims that
Fortune is not only blind herself, but also blinds her victims44—a theme taken up by Machaut in his Voir Dit:
The goddess did not see all,
Although Cato did not doubt…
That Fortune had poor vision;
which support’s Boogaart’s reading of the triplum’s two halves as different.
42
Boogaart has identiied this and other lines in the motetus as textual quotations from Gace Brulé’s Ire
d’amour qui en mon cuer repaire; see “Encompassing Past and Present,” 31.
43
The link between Fortune and the lover’s eyes is present also in Machaut’s ballade Amours, ma dame, et
Fortune et mi oueil (Love, my lady, and Fortune, and my eyes). In the second stanza, the lover complains that,
though his eyes have formerly been the venue for attaining earthly joy, Fortune has extinguished his sense
and now he does not often see his lady. The third stanza clariies that the narrator’s not seeing his lady, encapsulated in the refrain “Quant seur tout l’aim et souvent ne la voy,” is a result of distance rather than of his
blindness—and indeed, the Ballade is interpolated into the Voir dit before Guillaume has seen Toute Belle.
But Leonard Johnson points out that the pervasive presence of eyes also draws our attention to the physical
act of seeing—or not seeing (Poets as Players, 49). The uniqueness of eyes is signiicant precisely in light of
the frequency with which sight is mentioned; in fact, Robertson sees sight as “central to Motets 1–17 [and]
especially important to [Motets 11–14], as they foreshadow the leeting vision that is inally granted in the
tenor of Motet 15, ‘I have seen the Lord’ (Vidi dominum)” (Guillaume de Machaut and Reims, 154).
44
She blinds them with riches (“Les uns de richeces avugle,” Rose, l. 5904), though in her typical paradoxical fashion, she can also makes people see clearly (Rose, l. 4952).
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That she was blind and could hardly see.
But in any case she deceives and blinds
Her own… 45
By focusing on eyes and on paradox, the triplum glosses two important aspects of
Fortune’s nature, but does so from within its own courtly world. And yet, if we remember
the ambiguity as to the lady’s identity in the irst stanza of the motetus, where the offending
goddess has not yet been named, the similarities between the two voices are brought once
more into focus. Triplum’s lady might well be Fortune; motetus’s Fortuna might well be a
lady.46
Not surprisingly, the tenor of Hélas/Corde mesto, “Libera me,” also its into this web
of associations. Its text is Jacob’s plea from Genesis 32:11: “Libera me, domine, de manibus
Esau, quia valde contremit cor meum, illum timens” (Free me, Lord, from the hands of
Esau, for my heart quakes greatly, fearing him).
Esau indeed had cause to be angry with Jacob, who had tricked their father Isaac
into blessing him, even though the honor properly belonged to Esau as irstborn. Jacob
accomplished his trick because his father was not only old, but also blind. Thus Isaac, like
Fortune, blesses the “wrong” person. Giving riches to the false Jacob, he leaves Esau to fend
for himself.
Thus Fortune invades the contents of all three voices of Hélas/Corde mesto. Obviously present in the motetus and dividing that voice in two, she affects a similar division in
the triplum, lending that voice her paradoxical nature and suggesting that there is a likeness
Ll. 8713–8719, Machaut, Le Livre dou voir dit, 599. Dominic Leo discusses this passage of the Voir Dit
in reference to the cross-eyed depiction of Machaut in the images accompanying the Prologue in Manuscript
A, “Authorial Presence,” 245–9.
45
46
On the relationship between Fortune and the courtly Lady in Machaut’s work, see Attwood, “The Image
in the Fountain.”
197
between herself and the desired lady. And as for the tenor, a new dimension is now added
to its telling of the biblical story. We are very used to reading the upper voices of medieval
motets as derivative of the sacred tenor: in Anne Robertson’s estimation, Machaut’s motets
are “secular-looking” but are at heart the description of a spiritual journey.47 But if the upper voices of Hélas/Corde mesto are a gloss on the tenor, they are not a particularly orthodox
one. Recasting the biblical story in a new light, the triplum and motetus offer a reading
that stresses Isaac’s blindness and his unfairness and casts Jacob and Esau as Regno and
Regnavi. The result is as much a reading of the biblical source in a secular vein as it is the
opposite. Nor is the comparison between Fortune’s actions and the story of Jacob and Esau
limited to Hélas/Corde mesto, as I will argue in the following discussion.
Amours/Faus Samblant (M15)
A inal glance at Figure 4.1 and its shaded beams reveals that there is another motet
in which voice crossings seem to be more prevalent in one half than in the other. This is
Amours/Faus Samblant (M15). Here the pattern is reversed: it is in the second half that the
motetus tends to sing above the triplum. Granted, there is no strongly articulated midpoint
here, and the frequency of crossing is not as great. If it were not for the case of Hélas/Corde
mesto, there would perhaps be no reason to paying any special attention the voice crossings
in the second half of Amours/Faus Samblant. But given the program of Hélas/Corde mesto,
we can ask: is there any kind of reversal at the heart of Amours/Faus Samblant?
In fact, there is. We have a good deal of analytical perspective into Amours/Faus
47
In Roberston’s reading, Libera me in this tenor has resonances with Libera mede morte aeterna, from the
ofice of the dead, and Machaut “clearly relished the double associations,” see Guillaume de Machaut and
Reims, 90.
198
samblant thanks to a pair of articles by Margaret Bent and Kevin Brownlee.48 Their full
reading of the motet need not be rehearsed here, but two important points of similarity
between Hélas/Corde mesto and Amours/Faus Samblant concern us here: one in the motetus,
and one in the tenor.
What is perhaps most striking about Amours/Faus samblant are the two semantically
opposite halves of its motetus. In the irst half (lines 1–6), False Seeming has deceived the
lover, causing him to hope. In the second half (lines 7–12) he undeceives, showing the lover
his true unhappy fate. Thus, the motetus text of Amours/Faus samblant, like that of Motet
12, cuts nicely in half to reveal two contrasting states of courtly being: irst elated, then
dejected: 49
Faus Samblant m’a deceü
Et tenu en esperance
De joie merci avoir;
Et je l’ay com fols creü
Et mis toute ma iance
En li d’amoureus vouloir.
Las! or m’a descongneü,
Quant de moy faire aligence
Ha heu temps et pooir;
N’en riens n’a recongneü
Ma dolour ne ma grevance,
Eins m’a mis en nonchaloir.
False Seeming has deceived me and has held
out the joyful hope of my obtaining favour. And
I like a fool believed him, and put all the trust
of my loving desire in him.
Alas! now he has undeceived me, after having had the time and the power to win my allegiance; In no way has he rewarded my pain
and my suffering, rather he has treated me
badly.1
And if our experience with Hélas/Corde mesto leads us to posit that the point of
voice crossing would fall at the division between the two texts, we are not far off. In fact,
the uncrossing occurs not at the exact midpoint, but on the words “m’a descongneu”—“Has
48
Brownlee in “Machaut’s Motet 15,” and Bent, “Deception, Exegesis, and Sounding Number,” 15–27.
49
As Bent has pointed out, the triplum is also divisible into “two parallel textual halves,” not in terms of
textual content but as regards “line count, metrical and rhyme scheme,” Ibid., 21–2.
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undeceived me.” This seems to me to be an appropriate place for a crossing, in that it represents reversal. Another kind of articulation falls at the exact midpoint of the work: as we
saw in Chapter Three, Amours/Faus samblant is split in half by two supertaleae in the upper
voices, which combine two tenor taleae each (see Figures 3.2 and 3.3). A structural point
of articulation thus coincides with the poetic undeception.50
The biggest obstacle to reading Amours/Faus samblant as a parallel to Hélas/Corde
mesto is, of course, the absence of Fortune. However, it seems that she is there in spirit.
Indeed, the Tenor voice here, as in Hélas/Corde mesto, is in the words of Jacob—that same
deceitful son whose blind father aught not to have blessed him. And his words, “Vidi Dominum facie ad faciem” (I have seen the Lord face to face) recall his duplicity and deceit.
In Bent’s reading:
Jacob is yoked to its false seeming by his own earlier ‘two-faced’ deception of
his father Isaac (by cheating his older twin brother Esau both of his birthright and of his father’s blessing), as he was in turn deceived by Laban when
he served seven years for Rachel and was then given her sister Leah… Jacob’s twinned relationship to deceit, as both a perpetrator and a victim, is
implicit in the choice of his words; his two-faced history is now resolved in
his face-to-face encounter with his God.”51
Though Bent does not link Jacob to Fortune, but only to Faus Semblant, the connection is implicit. Jacob has faced the ups-and-downs of Fortune, irst reaping her beneits
with his undeserved blessing, then being cast down and himself victimized. Furthermore,
the tenor words “facie ad faciem” may in themselves be enough to recall the goddess, since
she is often depicted with two faces (see Figure 4.6). Finally, the theme of deception is
strongly linked with Fortune—a point to which I shall return below.
50
See Bent, ibid.
51
“Deception, Exegesis,” 25.
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Figure 4.6: A Two-Faced Fortuna from the Livre dou Voir Dit
Thus much unites Hélas/Corde mesto and Amour/Faus samblant, and the use
of crossed voices for half of each becomes more than coincidental: it becomes, in fact,
thematic. Is there anything to the fact that the state of undeception is represented in
one as uncrossed voices, and in the other as crossed? Is Amours/Faus samblant an answer to Hélas/Corde mesto, rejecting its vision of a rational world, and reminding us that
even the undeceived lover is still subject to Fortune’s vicissitudes? In this view Amours/
Faus samblant might be a rejection of the Boethian claim. Or is Hélas/Corde mesto the
answer to the question posed by Amours/Faus samblant, arguing that the realization
of a lady’s inconstancy is not enough to set the lover free: he must cease to be a lover.
I do not want to push one answer above the other, especially as they take us into the tricky
realm of compositional order. But clearly there is a kind of conversation going on here, and
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we can listen in, and perhaps weigh in, if we listen carefully enough.
The voice crossings in Amour/Faus samblant have never been commented upon.
Those in Hélas/Corde mesto have been discussed rarely and only tentatively linked to Fortune. And though the extant analyses of the former have placed much emphasis on the
upper-voice texts, most commentators on these motets—indeed, on Machaut’s motets in
general, follow a bottom-up approach, where the tenor text dictates the terms and extent of
the analysis. But though they certainly conirm the ideas expressed in the upper voices, the
tenors of both motets do not have the kind of explanatory power that the motetus wields in
each case. And thus the usual “bottom-up” approach to these motets naturally leads to much
more general readings, since the words “Free me” and “I have seen the Lord,” even with their
exegetical context, are much less detailed and therefore easily adaptable to any reading.
However, if we view these works irst through the lens of their motetus voices, the interesting connection between Isaac’s blindness and that of Fortuna is highlighted in Hélas/Corde
mesto, and the dramatic structural schemes of both motets can be reconciled with the texts
of their other voices.
Am I suggesting that it is the motetus we should look to irst? Indeed not—it seems
that each motet will suggest its own point of entry, perhaps with a textual detail, or perhaps
with a formal device such as voice crossing. Signiicantly, in Hélas/Corde mesto and Amours/
Faus samblant it is not a subtle, but a rather large and obvious formal gesture that takes
center stage in each case.
At the end of such an inside-out analysis, the texts of Amours/Faus samblant, which
already seemed uniied, are enriched by a possible intertextual link with Hélas/Corde mesto.
202
And the three texts of Hélas/Corde mesto, whose content seemed at irst to be unconnected
but not mutually exclusive, are brought into semantic unity. But where the voices in Hélas/
Corde mesto seemed benignly disjointed, the texts of Maugré/De ma dolour, with which I
began, apparently stand in direct conlict. Can an attention to crossings help in a situation
that seems wholly contradictory?
LYING VOICES
Of all of Machaut’s motets, Maugré/De ma dolour (M14) contains the most strikingly contrasting upper-voice texts. Here, the triplum says that those who force him to sing
happy songs cause him to lie, because he is in fact unhappy in love, and endures all manner
of ill-treatment at the hands of his lady: “Never did my noble and gentle-mannered lady
give any joy to my constant and suffering heart” (ll. 15-18; see full texts and translations in Appendix 4B). Meanwhile, the motetus declares his good fortune where matters
of love are concerned: he is “like a pauper richly given aid, like a famished man generously fed with all the favors that lady and good Love can honorably bestow upon a lover”
(ll. 8-11). Then, in the inal line of each text, both speakers seem to negate everything
that they have said: “everyone can well understand that I have lied,” admits the triplum in
an echo of the motetus’s confession of the previous breve: “by my soul, I’m lying through
my teeth.” A large amount of shared vocabulary at this and other points conirms that
the two voices were clearly conceived together. And indeed, unlike the voices of Hélas/
Corde mesto, which occupy different linguistic and semantic spheres, the triplum and motetus of Maugré/De ma dolour are similar in tone. Yet their contradiction is perhaps more
striking than their similarities. Although some have read the voices as being in agreement,
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others see oppositional, or even paradoxical relationships between them.
If the voices are in disagreement, then their inal lines must be read as mutually
contradicting. Thus, for the triplum, the reality would be the state of affairs described by
the motetus, while for the motetus the triplum’s complaints are the truth. This arrangement
has been described by Marie-Bernadette Dufourcet as “opposition symétrique,” and would
strongly suggest two speakers, or one speaker in two distinct situations. This dual opposition is represented in Figure 4.7.
Figure 4.7: Motetus and Triplum of Motet 14 in Opposition
However, another interpretation of the relationship between the voices is possible—
one which neither pits them against each other, nor equates them. The triplum complains
of having to sing that he is comforted by good love. Could the motetus be an example of the
kind of song the triplum is forced to sing? Indeed, an indication that the motetus text may
well be the triplum’s falsely written song is found in the fact that the motetus text contains
the two speciic admissions that the triplum bemoans being forced to make. “They make me
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say,” says the triplum, “that I have consolation from good love,” (l. 2–3) and the motetus
indeed claims that “Love is helping me in everything” (l. 10). The triplum is also forced to
sing that “from the favors of love (biens amoreus) I often reap great sweetness” (l. 6–7). The
motetus incorporates this sentiment too, saying that he is well provided “with all the favours
that lady and good Love (biens que Dame et bonne Amours) can honorably bestow upon a
lover” (l. 8–9). Thus the triplum’s description of one of his obligatorily happy chans aptly
describes the motetus text (see Figure 4.8).
Figure 4.8: Motetus and Triplum In Agreement; Motetus as a Song
The idea of the motetus as the triplum’s song is strengthened by its stylized and
rhetorical structure, with repeated initial line sounds and internal rhymes: “De ma dolour…,” “De mon labour…,” “De grant tristour…,” “De grief langour…,” etc. The parallel
grammatical construction of the irst four lines of the motetus and the intricacy of the
single sentence that takes up lines 7–11 also serve to heighten our sense of the artfulness of the text. Within this careful structure, the content and diction are well in line
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with the amorous register of the lyric je of Grand chant courtois, whose own poetic persona is, in Kevin Brownlee’s formulation, “identical with his song and with his love.”
The triplum, in contrast, adapts the identity of “Poet-Narrator as Lover-Protagonist”.
Not only does he tell us in lines 4–5 that he has written songs (“j’ay fait… mes chans”),
but his text opens and closes with allusions to his audience: In the beginning, it is they who
make the poet say that he is happy, and in the last line, each of them (chascuns) can well
know that the poet has lied.
A very physical example of the relationship I am proposing between triplum and
motetus can again be seen in the Remede de Fortune image in Figure 4.3 above. There, one
frame shows the lover composing a complainte, while the other shows the scholar/narrator
participating in his own creation. The lower image of the illumination is a product of, and
provides more information about, the upper. Machaut’s Motet 14 works in exactly this way:
the amatory motetus is generated by the authorial triplum and acts as a thematic expansion
of it.
A inal corroboration of this proposed relationship between motetus and triplum is
found in the tenses of the statements of lying that conclude each text. The motetus lies in
the present—”je mens”—while the triplum notes a past lie one breve later, using a perfect
tense—”j’ay menti.” Thus both confessions can easily refer to the same lie, and the concluding remarks of the upper voices are not opposite, but equivalent. In both cases, the lover is
unhappy in his love.
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The Dishonesty of Poets
It is precisely the question of truthfulness that aligns Triplum 14 so strongly with
the poetic voice, since the veracity of poetry, and therefore of poets, was traditionally in
doubt. We ind perhaps the pithiest presentation of this attitude in Conrad of Hirsau’s
12th-century Dialogue on the authors. Here, the grammarian deines a “poet” as a “maker (fictor), or one who gives shape to things (formator), because he says what is false instead of the
truth, or else sometimes intermingles truth with falsehood.”52 For 14th-century French literary circles, Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet has demonstrated the centrality of the concern
that a “professional” poet’s honesty is compromised by his audience’s demands—a tendency
to question the veracity of the poet-dependant that arose from a conlict between aesthetic
and social conditions for poets who “found themselves faced with the contradiction of having to sing when they felt like weeping.”53
Machaut’s own work shows a continuous awareness of the tension between poetic
authenticity and an entertainer’s lexibility. In a famous passage from the Remede de Fortune, the narrator endorses the authenticity of the lover: “Car qui de sentement ne fait/Son
oeuvre at son chant contrefait” (for he who does not write his sentement counterfeits his poems and his songs).54 Later in the Remede, the poet-lover conirms that the truth of a work
52
Minnis et al., Medieval Literary Theory, 43. For a broader discussion of poetry and veracity, see ibid.,
112–26.
53
One solution to the emotional inauthenticity of commissioned poetry was the notion of the real or
metaphorical “coffer”—a place where heartfelt works could be kept until such a time as they were needed;
see Cerquiglini-Toulet, The Color of Melancholy, 37. On the topic of poets as liars, see Huot, “Reading the
Lies of Poets.”
54
Ll. 407–409, Machaut, Jugement and Remede, 188–189. To say, as we often do, that this is Machaut’s
own opinion is perhaps over-simplifying, since it is not the aging poet, but his young protagonist who makes
the assertion. The lover, as yet untortured by Fortune, could even be saying the opposite of what Machaut
himself thinks. I thank an anonymous reader for offering this important caveat.
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is guaranteed by its authentic authorship:
And if you will kindly, my dear lady,
Look at the last little
song that I sang,
whose words and music are my own,
you will easily be able to know
whether I am lying or telling the truth.55
The implication here is that when the words and music are a poet’s own, truth is
guaranteed. And yet, the need is there for the assertion. Perhaps default incredulity is expected of the lady. Machaut explores this issue of authorial authenticity in several of his
musical works, most notably Pour ce que tous (Ballade 12) and Aucune/Qui plus (M5). In the
former, Elizabeth Eva Leach has discussed the tension set up when the poet apologizes for
singing less than he used to because his honest but sad songs are not in line with the idealized use of music to celebrate the joy of love.56 The triplum of Aucune/Qui plus also “refuses”
to sing but, like the singer of Ballade 12, does so in song:
Some people have asked me what is wrong,
why I do not sing and my heart is not merry…
and I say to them that truly, I do not know
But I have lied, for in my heart I have
a great sorrow which is never erased.57
Ballade 12, the triplum of Aucune/Qui plus, and the triplum of Maugré/De ma dolour
all complain of their inability to sing happy songs, but the motetus of Motet 14 actually
attempts to do just this. Yet he admits that he is lying, putting, in essence, a giant set of
55
“Et s’il vous plaist, ma dame chiere,/A resgarder la darreniere/Chansonnette que je chantay,/Que fait en
dit et en chant ay,/Vous porrez de liegier savoir/Se je mens ou se je di voir” (lines 3705–10); trans. Brownlee,
Poetic Identity, 56–7.
56
“Singing More About Singing Less,” 111–24; the relationship between love and falsehood is further
explored in Brownlee, “Machaut’s Motet 15,” 1-14.
57
“Aucune gent m’ont demandé que j’ay/Que je ne chant et que je n’ay cuer gay,/Si com je sueil chanter de
lié corage;/Et je leur di, certes, que je ne sçay./Mais j’ay menti, car dedens le cuer ay/Je trop grief dueil qui
onques n’assouage” (lines 1–2, 4–6), trans. Robertson, Gullaume de Machaut, 301.
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quotation marks around all but the last two lines of his text. Since we know that the words
of the motetus are not, in spirit, authentic, we do not take them at face value. It is a testament to Machaut’s self-awareness that the motet’s ambiguity is both a result of the dificult
situation into which its faiseur has been placed, and a solution to the problem caused by that
situation. By remaining ambiguous with regard to his own truthfulness, the narrator actually avoids lying.
FAUSSE FORTUNE AND AMOUR LANGUOUR
Thus we arrive (full circle) back at the passage with which we began—the crossing
on the words “et de Fortune amis et a mon gré” on breves 49–60. That Fortuna should be
present in the seemingly contradictory Maugré/De ma dolour is not surprising. After all,
she is the epitome of duality, an embodiment of opposites. She is often described as having two faces—one happy, one sad—or two eyes of which one laughs and the other weeps.
Fortuna’s right hand does good; her left, evil. This contradictory status is not conined to
her person—it invades everything with which she associates, and is most manifest in the
description of her dwelling. In her forest, even the trees contradict each other:
One is sterile and bears nothing; another delights in bearing fruit. One never
stops producing leaves; another is bare of foliage… every tree is deformed in
some way; one takes the shape of another. The laurel, which should be green,
has tarnished leaves; the olive in its turn dries up when it should be fecund
and living; the willows, which should be sterile, lower and bear fruit.58
In the midst of these false woods stands Fortune’s house—a structure built half out
of gold and precious stones, half out of mud. Duality leads to duplicity, and the Roman de
la Rose warns that Fortune is not to be believed: “Pleasant, agreeable Fortune lies to men,
58
Lorris and Meun, The Romance of the Rose, 119.
209
tricks them, and makes fools of them [as] she confuses their understanding.”59 Machaut’s
detailed description in the Remede’s complainte (Figure 4.3 and Example 4.3, above) retains the arborial metaphor of the Rose and makes an even more explicit liar of the goddess
in stanza 16: “she is split between gold and excrement… She is the tree of inhumanity,
rooted in falsity,/The trunk signiies that in her truth, she lies.”60
It should by now be clear that the duality that infects everything Fortune touches is
relected by the upper voices of Machaut’s Motet 14. On one level, this results in the seemingly contradictory emotional states of the triplum and motetus, who simultaneously evoke
a frustrated and a satisied lover. As I have argued above, this contrasting state is dramatized
by the presence of Fortuna, enacted by the voice crossing in Example 4.1.
But long before the crossing, which comes near the mid-point, the motet’s opening
explores the contrast between opposing emotions. Given that the motetus and triplum voices are in seeming opposition, the appearance of these two together in a bitextual framework
is surprising. Where we would expect actual, mutual disagreement such as that in Example
4.1, we ind instead that words of happiness and sadness coincide. Some striking examples
include the sad sentiments in both voices in measures 1–4, the happy text in both for measures 7–10 and the co-utterance of “dolour” and “tristour” in measure 22, and “dolens”
and “languor” in 33. Thus a signiicant amount of semantic correspondence links the two
seemingly opposite voices (these instances of vertical semantic correspondence are circled
in Example 4.4).
59
Ibid, 103.
60
“Et mi partie est par deduist/D’or et de iens… C’est l’arbre de inhumanité,/Entraciné seur fausseté;/
L’estoc est qu’en sa verité/Est mensonguese” (ll. 1127–8, 153–6), Guillaume de Machaut, Jugement and
Remede, 230–2.
210
211
Example 4.4: Maugré/De ma dolour, breves 1–36
Such a unity between two seemingly opposite voices is made possible by the structures of both texts: the motetus is a list of the grievances that love has righted, while the
triplum, though dejected, nevertheless gives voice to joyful utterances as examples of the
words he is forced to sing. This carefully crafted structural plan must have come early in the
plans for the motet. In fact, the irst four lines of the motetus text can actually be divided
vertically into regions employing sad and happy vocabulary:
âč
De ma dolour
De mon labour
De grant tristour
De grief languor
âș
confortés doucement,
meris tres hautement
en toute joie mis,
eschapés et garis
The poetic skill required to write a poem that can be split down the middle to result
in differing semantic zones is great, and it is this aspect of Machaut’s artistry that would
later appeal to the grands rhétoriqueurs. But within the context of a motet about Fortuna, the
endeavour is more than a formal game. The texts are set in a way that allows the motetus’s
righted wrongs to coincide with the triplum’s wretchedness, while the triplum’s examples of
the joyful lies he is forced to tell match up with the motetus’s “real” happiness. Rather than
projecting the seeming contradiction that a simple reading of the texts might give, their
combination in the motet’s opening measures gives the effect of a constant teeter-totter
between two opposite states.
The Lover’s changes of mood are especially signiicant in light of the motet’s tenor,
“quia amore langueo” (for I languish with love). This emotionally charged phrase appears
twice in the Song of Songs. First, it is accompanied by sweetness. The bridegroom has taken
his amica to his wine-cellar, and there, having overwhelmed her with love, he elicits from her
212
a request for sustenance: “fulcite me loribus, stipate me malis, quia amore langueo” (“support me with lowers, ill me with apples, for I languish with love” v. 2.5). The second time
the words appear, the mood has darkened—the Lovers are separated. Amica calls for her
bridegroom, but cannot ind him anywhere (v. 5.7). Running out into the street, she inds
only the guards, who strike and wound her, and take away her veil. Again using the imperative, the sponsa makes a desperate plea: “Adjuro vos, iliæ Jerusalem, si inveneritis dilectum
meum, ut nuntietis ei quia amore langueo” (“I implore you, daughters of Jerusalem, if you
ind my beloved, to tell him that I languish with love”) (v. 5.8). The striking contrast between the two passages is put into sharp relief by their use of the same phrase. Though the
sponsa languishes in both, we must assume that these are two very different kinds of languor.
The chant used for the tenor of Motet 14 is taken from the Marian antiphon Anima
mea liquefacta est, which incorporates the second of these two passages.61 But the earlier,
sweeter context for the languor was surely known to Machaut, and he may well have enjoyed
the resulting juxtaposition—manifest in his motet in the seeming opposition between the
upper-voice texts. But as important as the scriptural context of the tenor text is that text
itself. “Quia amore langueo,” often translated also as “for I am sick with love,” often refers
speciically to the state of lovesickness. In fact, this passage in particular from the Song of
Songs served as a key biblical source for medieval discussions of lovesickness.62 Certainly
the association was already a valid one for Baldwin of Ford, the 12th-century archbishop
of Canterbury who based his sermon on lovesickness (amor languor) on the irst of the Song
61
The antiphon is used for various Marian feasts, but especially the Assumption. For a comparison of
sources and discussion of variants, see Clark, “Concordare cum materia,” 196, 246–7.
62
Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages, 21–24, 110–11.
213
of Songs appearances of “quia amore longueo.”63 Machaut makes this connection explicit in
the motetus when the lover echoes the tenor’s choice of words while complaining that his
lady’s heart delights in the things from which he suffers: “se delite es maus dont je langui”
(l. 26).
And indeed, the ups-and-downs of the combined texts of Maugré/De ma dolour show
all of the symptoms of that most courtly of maladies. In this unenviable state, which had
a rich pathology in antiquity and the Middle Ages, a lover suffering from his beloved’s absence or neglect suffers bodily and psychological harm. Some of the symptoms associated
with the disease still contain a modern ring: the patient loses weight, his or her breathing
becomes erratic, and the face blushes and goes pale in turn.64 In line with the physiognomic
oscillation there is an instability of mood. Richard de Fournival (d. 1260) writes that the
true lover “looks at you as though he will cry while laughing,” while Avicenna, the 11thcentury Persian physician cited in Gerard of Berry’s inluential commentary on the Viaticum, prefers alternation to simultaneity, noting that lovers “easily swing between crying and
laughing.”65 Other commentators singled out the story of Amnon and Thamar (2 Kings),
in which a sudden shift from love to hate accompanies the satisfaction of a lovesick man.66
Nor can the sanity of the lovesick be trusted: “Amour rend fou” (Love makes us foolish) is
a common proverb of the time, and one quoted by Machaut, but “Amour rend sage” (Love
63
Bell, ed. Balduini De Forda Opera, 331–9; See the discussion of this sermon in Robertson, Guillaume de
Machaut and Reims, 92, where the tenors of the irst seventeen of Machaut’s motets are mapped onto the
sermon’s text.
64
Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages, 18.
65
Ibid, 63.
66
Ibid., 20.
214
makes us wise) is another.67
This emphasis on coinciding and alternating extremes goes a long way towards explaining the relationship between the disparate voices of Motet 14. In accordance with the
subject-matter of the tenor, the Lover suffers from a restless delirium in which he cannot
tell wish from fear, luck from misfortune, or lies from the truth. The duality of love and the
ardour of his feelings have turned the speaker’s rhetoric into a confused babble of alternating emotional states. It is curiously apt that this condition of the amans—a constant alternation between elation and anguish, between smiles and tears—makes him well resemble
that tormentor of lovers, fausse Fortune herself. In the words of the Remede:
The heart of a lover who loves deeply
Is now joyful, now mournful
Now laughing, now crying, now singing, now lamenting,
now happy in its plaint,
now trembling, now sweating, now hot,
now cold, and no longer cares
what assault love may make upon it;
now it is pleased, now it cannot be pleased,
for the lover’s heart is happy or sad
Depending on whether Love wishes to console it
And depending also on the mood of Fortune.68
Here we have, in Machaut’s own words, the link between Fortune and lovesickness:
the opposites embodied in the goddess are the very symptoms of the malady, and a man under the control of Fortune is particularly susceptible to amor languor. This connection is underlined further by the composer’s use of the voice crossing in Example 4.1. While in itself
explicable as simply a way of making Motetus’s comment about Fortune more audible, what
67
Hassell, Middle French Proverbs, A119–A120.
68
“Que cuer d’ammant qui aimme fort/Or a joie, or a desconfort,/Or a rit, or pleure, or chante, or plaint,/
Or se delite en son complainte,/Or tremble, or tresu, or a chaut,/Or a froit, et puis ne li chaut/D’assaut
qu’Amours li puisse faire;/Or li plaist; or ne li puet plaire;/Car selonc ce qu’Amours le veult/Deduire, il
s’esïoist ou duet,/et selonc l’estat de Fortune,” (lines 875–87) (Machaut, Jugement, 216–17).
215
we know about the symbolism of voice crossings in Hélas/Corde mesto and Amours/Faus
samblant suggests that the gesture is here also evocative of the set of ideas that surrounds
Fortune, who raises the low and casts down the high. So involved is she in the piece when
her connection with lovesickness is explored that we might even see her as a character in its
action.69 It is in Machaut’s own Voir Dit that we ind, in Fortune’s own voice, an admission
that could easily pass from the lips of either of the upper voices in Maugré/De ma dolour:
Fortune:
I sing and disport myself falsely
My song deceives, falsiies, and lies.70
OTHER “FORTUNA CROSSINGS”
Dramatic as the crossings in the irst half of Hélas/Corde mesto, the second half of
Amours/Faus samblant, and the “Fortune” passage of Maugré/De ma dolour are, they are in
fact participating in a wider trend. One of the few voice crossings that happens after the
midpoint of Hélas/Corde mesto, for example, is exactly long enough to allow the motetus to
sing “Fortune” during the goddess’s second and inal appearance in the motet (see Example
4.5). We ind a similar moment in Motet 8, where the words “Fausse Fortune” are pro69
The opposition of the texts, the self-proclaimed lies, and the invocation of Fortune herself are all enough
to signal the important presence of the goddess in the piece, and yet Robertson has excluded it from her list
of motets in which the image of lady fortune is employed, focusing instead on the link between the Song
of Songs and the Assumtion liturgy: “The time of no more lying for the Lover in Motet 14 is… analogous
to the moment when Mary tells the truth in the story of the Assumption” (Guillaume de Machaut and Reims,
84, 162). The link implied here seems slightly forced; indeed, there is no real reason why Mary would not
tell the truth in the assumption. We assume that she is truthful in anything she says because she is Mary.
Precisely for this reason we are not justiied in comparing her with the motetus here: she had never lied to
begin with. A different Mary, Mary Magdalene is identiied as truthful in the sequence Victimi paschali
laudes, but even here there is no implication that she has lied recently; she is truthful only by comparison:
“Credendum est magis soli Mariae veraci quam iudaeorum turbae fallacy.” David Rothenberg suggests that
the identity of Mary was left purposely ambiguous in the sequence and could refer to the virgin, but the occasion for its singing was still Easter and the feast of Mary Magdalene (22 July), not the assumption. See
“The Marian Symbolism of Spring,” 368–9. I am grateful to David Rothenberg for his help in navigating
the Assumption.
70
Ll. 8300–1, Machaut, Le Livre dou voir dit, 567.
216
nounced by a motetus singing above the triplum (Example 4.6):
Adding to this the crossed “Fortuna” during the irst half of Helas/Corde mesto (Appendix 4C, breves 60–64) and the “Fortune” who is the friend of the motetus in Maugré/
De ma dolour (Example 4.1, breves 52–3), we arrive at a short but signiicant list of “Fortuna crossings” (see Table 4.1). In fact, there are only two instances in Machaut’s motets in
which the name “Fortune” is present without a voice crossing, and in one of these a different
kind of emphasis is placed on her because both voices sing “Fortune” together (Example
4.7).71 In the other four instances in which her name is sung, the motetus rises above the
triplum to declaim the name of the ickle, inverting goddess.
Example 4.5: Helas/Corde mesto, breves 115–118
Example 4.6: Qui/Ha! Fortune, breves 100–6
71
A comparable passage with identical words simultaneously declaimed occurs at the beginning of Bone
Pastor Guillerme/Bone Pastor qui pastores (M18). Here, the triplum and the motetus begin to sing the words
“Bone pastor” together, but immediately diverge due to the former’s slower verbal rhythm. This passage is
punctuated by a voice crossing, which draws additional attention to the common subject-matter of the upper
voices—and in fact of all three voices.
217
Table 4.1: Occurrences of “Fortune”/“Fortuna” in Machaut’s Motets
Motet
M3
M8
M8
M8
M12
M12
M14
Voice
motetus
triplum
motetus
motetus
motetus
motetus
motetus
Breve(s)
74–5
4
4-9
102
60–4
116–7
52–3
Crossed Upper Voices?
no
}no; simultaneously declaimed
yes
yes
yes
yes
Example 4.7: Qui/Ha! Fortune, breves 4–9
In the case of Hé! Mors/Fine amour (M3), it may well be argued that Fortune, though
present, is not a key element in that motet’s text. But in the other examples, Machaut’s
treatment of the theme is compelling. Furthermore, the use of crossings to enact Fortuna’s
actions in motets may not be unique to Machaut: the anonymous Fortune/Ma dolour which
survives in the Ivrea Codex has a deliberate voice crossing between the triplum and motetus
during the last two of its ive taleae.72 And Vitry’s Tribum/Quoniam mentions Fortuna and
72
Breves 76–110. There is also a six-breve crossing near the beginning of the motet (breves 4–10). Otherwise, the voices hardly cross: again proof of careful and deliberate control of range. In light of its Fortunarich content, it is also interesting that the motet is notated upside-down in the Ivrea codex. This may be, as
Kügle cautiously suggests, a result of the refolding of a folio across its central crease—see The Manuscript
Ivrea, 6. However, as Kügle cautions, there is no real evidence that this was done. It is just possible that ideas
of Fortune as a goddess who causes reversal and inversion led to the strange notation. There is no direct
evidence for this either, though I have argued that another Fortuna-infused piece, Josquin’s Missa Fortuna
desperata, contains a bassus part notated upside-down; “What Fortuna Can Do to a Minim.”
218
her agency in causing sudden falls and reversals while placing the tenor unusually and consistently above the motetus.73 Another candidate for participation in a network of motets
using signiicant voice crossings is Amer/Durement, which has sometimes been attributed
to Vitry on stylistic grounds.74 This piece has the tenor color “dolor meus” in common with
Fortune/Ma dolour, while sharing with Tribum/Quoniam the technique of crossing tenor and
motetus. But here the tenor’s place is not permanent. Rather, the motet’s color is transposed
up a ifth for its irst iteration, which results in a voice crossing lasting for the irst half of
the motet and uncrossing at the midpoint, just like the motetus and triplum in Machaut’s
Hélas/Corde mesto. This circumstance is all the more remarkable given that, due to the presence of an introitus, the end of the irst color is not the center of the piece. The composer
actually manipulates the motetus voice so that the irst moment of uncrossing occurs not
when the tenor is transposed back downwards, but earlier. Furthermore, this moment of
uncrossing occurs on the word “contraire,” located on breves 58–60 of the motet: these
three breves are preceded and followed by 57 breves, with the result of perfect symmetry.
While it is too early to decide whether some of these motets might be modeled on
other ones, I am convinced that they all participate in the general phenomenon of illustrating Fortuna’s actions with reversals of standard contrapuntal procedures. Can we begin to
speak of a musical iconography?
Probably not. In most cases it is the motetus voice that pronounces the goddess’s
name, and the crossings could be interpreted simply as devices that bring an important
73
A rich and thorough analysis of this piece is available in Bent, “Polyphony of Texts and Music,” 137,
164.
74
For the attribution to Vitry, see Leech-Wilkinson, “Related Motets,”13–4 and Kügle, “The Manuscript
Ivrea,” 130–8.
219
word to the forefront of the texture. Furthermore, most of Machaut’s voice crossings have
nothing to do with Fortune. Meanwhile, there are many other ways of treating the theme of
Fortune in music. For example, Machaut’s ballades on this theme gave him a mono-textual,
strophic medium in which to explore the subject at length, and Jacques Boogaart has argued
that particular rhythmic igures in the tenor taleas of the motets signal her presence.75 In
the Lai de la confort, Virginia Newes has shown that the form of the piece itself—a 3-voice
canon or rota—symbolizes Fortune’s ever-turning wheel, and in that same Complainte from
the Remede, the important “–ourne” words of the irst stanza signal both the actions of the
goddess and those of the singer, who returns to the beginning after singing his irst “–ourne”
word (“attourne,” breves 15–17 in Example 4 above).76 Text, rhythm, form, and range—as
the elements of a purported iconography these are impractical, because Machaut uses these
tools to indicate the presence not only of Fortune, but also of everything else: musical parameters can’t be consistently relexive.
And in the group of motets I have discussed, voice-crossings are not the only way
in which Fortune is evoked. The isorhythmic division of Amour/Faus samblant into two
supertaleae also evokes the goddess’s two halves and two faces, as do the poetic divisions
within several of the texts discussed. And in Maugré/De ma dolour, the semantic teetertotter with which the motet begins serves as a powerful image of Fortune’s own instability.
What unites all of these parameters it is their careful staging of contrast, with the result that
compositions which we would expect to be uniied (by texture, poetic voice, or scenario) are
fragmented. The divisions in half are especially compelling in this regard, because in their
75
See note 3, above.
76
“atourne,” breves 15–17; Newes, “Turning Fortune’s Wheel,” 95–121.
220
simplicity they most enact Fortune’s split body. It is not so much that particular words are
painted, but that the broader idea of Fortune is imprinted on entire composition when her
inconsistency and monstrosity are mirrored in disjunct and contradictory musical forms
and procedures. And it is in this thematization of disjunction that the motets about Fortune join a broader discourse. For there are other, more complicated monsters lurking in
the texts of ars nova motets, and their effects on the musical forms that engage with them
are even mere extreme. Their stories are told in the chapters that follow.
221
APPENDIX 4A:
HELAS/CORDE MESTO, TEXTS AND TRANSLATIONS77
TRIPLUM
5
10
15
20
25
30
Helas! pour quoy virent onques mi oueil
Ma chiere dame au tres plaisant accueil,
Pour qui je vif en tel martire
Que je ne congnois joie de ire?
N’onques Amour ne me vost enrichir
Tant que j’eüsse un espoir de joïr,
Ne je ne puis encor rien esperer
Que tout ne soit pour moy desesperer.
Dont vraiement plus chier eüsse,
Quant ma dame vi, que je fusse
Sans yex ou que mes corps tel cuer eüst
Que ja mais jour dame amer ne peüst
Qu’en li veoir je conquis mort crueuse
Et mon vivant vie avoir dolereuse,
Puis qu’einsi est que pité ne merci
Ses crueus cuers ne vuet avoir de mi.
Las! elle het mon preu et ma santé,
Pour ce que j’ain s’onneur et sa biauté,
Et si la serf de cuer en tel cremour
Que nulle riens ne li pri, eins l’aour.
Et c’est raisons c’on quiert souvent
Ce qu’on n’a de l’avoir talent.
S’aim miex einsi ma dolour endurer
Qu’elle me fust plus dure par rouver;
Car s’el savoit que s’amour souhaidier
Eüsse osé, ja mais ne m’aroit chier.
Et se l’aim tant que s’en ce monde avoie
Un seul souhait, einsi souhaideroie
Que s’amour fust envers trestous d’un fuer,
Fors vers celui qui l’aimme de mon cuer.
Par tel raison suis povres assizes:
Quant je plus vueil ce dont plus sui grevés;
Dont ne doit nuls pleindre ce que j’endure,
Quant j’aim seur tout ce qui n’a de moy cure.
77
French and Latin texts are taken from Vladimir Chichmaref’s edition of Guillaume de Machaut, Poesies
lyriques, vol. II, 509–510. The triplum translation is my own. For the translation of the Latin motetus Corde
mesto cantando conqueror I am indebted to Rob Getz.
222
1–4
Alas, why did my eyes ever see my dear lady with her most pleasant welcome,
for whom I live in such torment that I cannot tell joy from sorrow?
5–8
Never did Love want to enrich me enough that I should have any hope for joy,
nor can I even now hope for anything that would not be wholly to my despair.
9–16
So truly I wished, when I saw my lady, that I had been eyeless, or that my body
had possessed such a heart as could never love a lady, since in seeing her, I
earned a cruel death and a mournful life while yet I live, since it so happens
that her cruel heart does not wish to grant me either pity or mercy.
17–20
Alas, she hates what’s to my proit and my health because I love her honour
and her beauty, and thus I serve her with a heart so much afraid that I ask
nothing of her, and simply adore her.
21–2
And it is true that we often pursue that which we have no wish to possess.
23–6
And so I would rather endure my suffering than cause her to be harsher by
imploring; for if she knew that I had the audacity to desire her love, she would
never hold me dear.
27–30
And so much do I love her that if in this world I had a single wish, thus would
I wish: that her love were of equal measure toward all but him who loves her
with my heart.
31–4
For that reason I am poorly situated: because I most want that by which I am
most grieved; thus no one should deplore what I endure, since I love above all
else that which does not care about me.
223
MOTETUS78
Corde mesto Cantando conqueror,
Semper presto Serviens maceror,
Sub honesto Gestu totus terror
Et infesto
Causu remuneror.
5
10
In derisum
Das arrisum
Et obrisum
Tollis risum
Fortuna te ponis.
Expers rationis,
Malis; sed a bonis
Et abis cum donis.
Spernens cece
Utor prece
Culpe fece
Michi nece
Fortune tedia,
Cum penitentia
Ut lauto venia
Promatur gloria.
Sad-hearted, I make lament in song:
An ever ready servant, I am distressed:
Beneath a fair exterior, I am outworn,
And am rewarded with unfriendly chance.
5
10
You put yourself to scorn, o Fortune:
You give favour, without sense,
And gold, to evil men; but from the good
You take laughter away, and depart with your gifts.
Spurning blind Fortune’s hateful ways,
I turn to prayer and penitence,
That, washed through pardon from the ilth of sin,
I may, in death, win glory.
Tenor: Libera me [Free me]
78
Reading 3. terror, 4. casu, 7. obryzum
224
APPENDIX 4B:
MAUGRE MON CUER/DE MA DOLOUR, TEXTS AND TRANSLATIONS79
TRIPLUM
5
10
15
20
25
1–7
79
Maugré mon cuer, contre mon sentement
Dire me font que j’ay aligement
De bonne Amour
Ceaus qui dient que j’ay fait faintement
Mes chans qui sont fait dolereusement
Et que des biens amoureus ay souvent
La grant douçour.
Helas! dolens, et je n’os onques jour,
Puis que premiers vi ma dame d’onnour
Que j’aim en foy,
Qui ne fu nez et fenis en dolour,
Continuez en tristesse et en plour,
Pleins de refus pour croistre mon labour.
Et contre moy.
N’onques ma dame au riche meintieng coy
Mon dolent cuer, qui ne se part de soy,
Ne resjoy,
Ne n’ot pitié dou mal que je reçoy.
Et si scet bien qu’en li mon temps employ
Et que je l’aim, criem, serf, desir et croy
De cuer d’ami;
Et quant il n’est garison ne merci
Qui me vausist, se ne venoit de li
A qui m’ottry,
Et son franc cuer truis si dur anemi
Qu’il se delite es mauls dont je langui,
Chascuns puet bien savoir que j’ay menti.
In spite of my heart, contrary to my feelings they make me say that I have
support from good Love, they who say that I have deceitfully composed [those
of] my songs which are sadly written and that I often reap great sweetness
from the favors of love.
French texts taken from Chichmaref, Poesies lyriques, vol. II, 511–512. Translations are my own.
225
8–14 Alas, woe is me! and since I irst saw my honored lady, whom I love in faith,
I have not had a single day which was not born and did not end in sorrow,
and did not pass in sadness and in tears, illed with rejection to increase my
efforts and counter me.
15–8 Never did my noble and gentle-mannered lady give any joy to my constant
and suffering heart, nor did she take pity on the hardship I endure.
19–21 And yet she well knows that I devote my time to her, and that I love, reverence, serve, desire and believe her with a lover’s heart;
22–7 And since there is neither aid nor mercy which would comfort me if it did
not come from her to whom I devote myself, and I ind her worthy heart so
hard a foe that he delights in the pains from which I suffer, everyone can well
understand that I have lied.
226
MOTETUS80
De ma dolour confortés doucement,
De mon labour meris tres hautement,
De grant tristour en toute joie mis,
De grief languor eschapés et garis,
5
De bon eur, de grace, de pitié,281
Et de Fortune amis et à mon gré,
Com diseteus richement secourus
Com familleus largement repeüs
De tous les biens que dame et bonne Amours
10 Pueent donner à amant par honnour
Suis, et Amours m’est en tous cas aidans;
Mais, par m’ame, je mens parmi mes dens.
5
10
For my pain tenderly consoled
for my toil very highly compensated
from great sadness led into greatest bliss
from heavy sickness released and recovered,
of success, of grace, of mercy
and a friend of Fortune to my satisfaction,
like a pauper richly given aid,
like a famished man generously fed
with all the favours that lady and good Love
can honorably bestow upon a lover
am I, and Love is helping me in everything;
but, by my soul, I’m lying through my teeth.
Tenor
Quia amore langueo [For I languish from love]
80
Trans. Brownlee, “Machaut’s Motet 15,” 2.
81
Most editions place a period after line 5, but this has no basis in the manuscript tradition and I have
chosen to omit it, since it spoils the clever structure of this text: in fact, the entire motetus is one sentence,
and the main verb for its irst 10 lines is “suis” in line 11.
227
APPENDIX 4C
HÉLAS/CORDE MESTO/LIBERA ME82
Philippe de Vitry
82
The edition follows Ferrell-Vogüé, except for the motetus at breve 147, which is missing there and
supplied from Manuscript C. Vertical bars mark the midpoint of the motet at breve 81.
228
229
230
231
232
233
CHAPTER FIVE
THE MONSTER IN THE MOTET
B
EGINNINGS ARE IMPORTANT.
No one knew this better than Horace. At the start of the
Ars poetica, his inluential treatise on the writerly craft, we ind, instead of the ex-
pected introduction or deinition of poetics, these famous lines:
Humano capiti ceruicem pictor equinam
iungere si uelit et uarias inducere plumas
undique collatis membris, ut turpiter atrum
desinat in piscem mulier formosa superne,
spectatum admissi, risum teneatis, amici?
[If a painter were willing to join a horse’s neck to a human head and spread
on multicolored feathers, with different parts of the body brought in from
anywhere and everywhere, so that what starts out above as a beautiful woman
ends up horribly as a black ish, could you my friends, if you had been admitted to the spectacle, hold back your laughter?]1
Horace begins in medias res (to use his own expression), but the reader doesn’t have to wait
long to get her bearing. In the ensuing lines the speaker explains that this picture is a
metaphor for “a literary work in which meaningless images are fashioned, like the dreams
of a sick man, so that neither the foot nor the head can be attributed to a single form.”2
Although he grants some space to poetic licence, the author goes on to make a case for simplicity and propriety in style, evenness in voice, and continuity in subject—the opposite, in
short, of the confusing monster with which he began.
This chapter concerns itself with an intersection between the Ars poetica and music
history embodied in the motet In virtute nominum/Decens carmen edere/Clamor meus—a four1
Trans. Golden and Hardison, Horace for Students of Literature, 7 (modiied). All further Ars poetica quotations are from Golden. On the novelty of Horace’s beginning, see Greenberg, “The Use of Poiema and
Poiesis,” 266–7.
2
Verses 6–9, translation modiied.
234
voice work tentatively attributed to Philippe de Vitry and preserved in the Ivrea Codex and
in a fragmentary source now in Paris.3 While there is nothing so extraordinary in the fact
that a motet—a genre known for its elite audience—should quote Horace, a staple of the
university education from the 11th century on, I will suggest that this motet’s use of the Ars
poetica goes well beyond literary reference.4 The author of In virtute/Decens does not merely
mention Horace’s monster, he actually manages to depict it, using the basic building blocks
of talea length and hocket. Such depiction, in turn, raises questions about other motets in
the repertory, the function of isorhythm, the relationship between content and form, and
the aesthetics which underlie late-medieval composition.
THE TEXTS OF IN VIRTUTE/DECENS
Both upper voices of Vitry’s motet are derived from Horace (their texts are given in
full in Appendix 5A). The motetus, as the more concise of the two, limits its observations
to two points. First, that those wishing to write a song should be it to put forth an appropriate topic. This brings to mind several passages in Horace’s text, especially the observation
that “wisdom is the source and fount of writing well,” and the discussion in lines 416–18
of bad and mediocre poetry.5 The motetus’s second point expands upon the triplum’s ob3
Ivrea fol. 55v and BN 2444, fol. 48; the latter may offer a better reading. In virtute/Decens is also listed
in the index of Trémoïlle, but the folios on which it was located have not survived. Daniel Leech-Wilkinson
has argued that the motet can be “conidently be attributed to Vitry,” on technical, textual and stylistic
grounds, see “Related Motets,” 5–8, 18. Karl Kügle is more cautious, categorizing In virtute/Decens as “possibly” by Vitry; The Manuscript Ivrea, 36, 52n12. Further support for the attribution to Vitry will come
to the fore when the analysis below is compared with that of the securely attributed Cum statua/Hugo in
Chapter 6.
4
On the motet’s audiences cf. Page, Discarding Images, 65–84 and see Chapter 2, above. On the place of
Horace and especially the Ars poetica in the medieval education, see Friis-Jensen, “The Reception of Horace,” 300–2.
5
“Scribendi recte sapere est et principium et fons,” l. 309.
235
jections as to the mixing of incompatible registers: “If the tragic style of writing is at the
outset,” it warns, “let the comic not be in the middle or at the end; For one is humble, the
other; elevated” (ll. 9–14). This too is emphasized by Horace:6
If I fail to keep and do not understand these well-marked shifts and shades
of poetic forms, why am I hailed as a poet? Why through false shame do I
prefer to be ignorant rather than to learn? A theme for comedy refuses to
be set forth in verses of tragedy; likewise the feast of Thyestes scorns to be
told in strains of daily life that well nigh beit the comic stock. Let each style
keep the becoming place (locum…decentem) allotted to it.
The theme of decency and itness also permeates the triplum text, which in fact begins with “decens.” It accuses certain ignoramuses of trusting too implicitly in the inherent
virtues of words while writing inappropriately (ll. 1–6). Their sin is to combine incompatible stylistic categories (e.g., the obscure with the clear) and subjects (sadness with joy; ll.
7–14). These inexperienced people also misjudge the extent of elaboration required, giving
too much space to things that should be concise (ll. 14–16). The text ends, like many motet texts, with a borrowing from the auctoritates (ll. 17–26). In this case, the inal ten lines
of the triplum—over a third of the entire poem—are devoted to paraphrasing the famous
opening of the Ars poetica:7
Heccine congeries
verborum enormis
est picture species
picta multiformis,
ut si pictor faciat
caput femininum,
cui plumas adiciat
et collum equinum,
6
“descriptas servare vices operumque colores / cur ego si nequeo ignoroque, poeta salutor? / cur nescire,
pudens prave quam discere malo? / versibus exponi tragicis res comica non volt; / indignatur item priuatis ac
prope socco / dignis carminibus narrari cena Thyestae. / Singula quaeque locum teneant sortita decentem,”
ll. 86–92.
7
Beginnings and endings of motet texts are the places in which quotations are most often located. For a
discussion of a particularly quotation-rich motet, see Bent, “The Vitry motet Tribum que,” and “Polyphony
of Texts and Music.” On quotations in Machaut’s motets, see Boogaart, “Encompassing Past and Present.”
236
residuum iniat
in piscem marinum?
[Is not their pile of shapeless words a kind of picture painted with many
shapes, as though the artist were to draw a female head, to which he might
add feathers and the neck of a horse, and then to inish the rest out as a seaish?]
The poet of the motet ends where Horace began. The description of the monster, rather
than acting as an intriguing ice-breaker, is here fully integrated into the text, which irst
describes the villainy of the inept poets and then likens their creations to the picture of a
multipartite beast.
The texts of In virtute/Decens would seem to mark it as belonging to a group of invective motets that blame corrupt oficials or personal enemies.8 But these works take on
the deeds and morals of princes, popes, and courtiers. In virtute/Decens instead directs its
well-organized rant toward a group of bad poets. Furthermore, it gives them advice drawn
from one of their most important didactic texts. While this subject-matter is consistent
with the clerical and university milieux to which a motet like In virtute/Decens inevitably
belongs, the decision to set it to music is still surprising. Musical texts sometimes give advice to composers—several songs and motets from the later middle ages comment on issues
related to performance and composition.9 But In virtute/Decens seems to stand alone in setting rhetorical and stylistic injunctions to music.
The opposite scenario—music theory in a poetic guise—is more common.In addition to the Regulae rhythmicae that head Guido’s antiphoner, there are two short and little-
8
See especially Cum statua/Hugo and Colla/Bona, both found in gathering II of Ivrea, and Garrit Gallus/In
nova fert, Floret/Florens, and Aman novi/Heu, Fortuna in Fauvel.
9
See, for example, the pieces discussed in Günther, “Fourteenth-Century Music with Texts.” See also the
comments on Musicalis/Sciencie, below.
237
known music-theoretical works in Leonine hexameter from the fourteenth century.10 Two
further treatises mix prose and poetry: the 1279 “Anonymous of St. Emmeram” presents
itself as a prose commentary on verse, while Johannes de Muris’s Summa is a prosimetrum
in emulation of Boethius’s Consolatio, ending each of its prose chapters with a lengthy poem.
Otherwise, the role of verse in music-theoretical texts was limited to the occasional couplet
or short poem (usually an excerpt of the Regulae) intended to help the learner memorize a
musical or moral rule.
To this body of late-medieval music theory in verse In virtute/Decens stands as a
mirror example: poetic doctrine in song. This is surprising. If music sometimes sets poetry
about music, it is because music so often sets poetry, and some poetry is about the musical
craft. But poetry about poetry doesn’t need song—a musical setting would only slow down
the text and perhaps make its delivery less effective by drawing attention to the music and
away from the prosody. In setting poetic doctrine to music, In virtute/Decens would seem to
be unique among songs.11 But I suggest that the composer has musical motives for treating the topic of poetry—that the motet texts are relevant not only to the art of writing in
general, but to the composition of motet texts in particular. Such a reading is suggested by
speciic elements of the texts’ diction, and further supported by the uses to which poetry is
habitually put in motets.
In the motetus of In virtute/Decens we ind several words that refer to the musical
10
Ed. Pesce, Guido D’Arezzo’s Regule rithmice. The two short treatises are Erfurt, Wissenschaftliche Bibliothek der Stadt, Ca 8° 94, ff. 70V-71 (Ars discandi datur hic et dulcisonandi) and Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica
Vaticana, Regin. lat. 1146, ff. 47-48 (Discantare volens normas istas bene seques). See Yudkin, “The Anonymous Music Treatise,” 177–8.
11
David’s aria “Mein Herr! Der Singer Meisterschlag” in Act I, Scene II of Die Meistersinger von Nüremberg
lists the kinds of things there are to know about poetry, but gives no actual points of doctrine.
238
realm. First, there is the use of carmen, which often means song, to identify the object being composed; Horace’s example is a liber.12 Next, there is “ymis” in the motetus for the
progression “in primis”—“in medio”—“in ymis” which refers most obviously to the beginning, middle, and end of the carmen. While rhyme does place some constraint on the poet,
it is also true that “imus” really means “lowest,” “deepest” and “bottommost,” and Horace
and Quintilian, along with a number of music theorists, use “vox ima” or “vox inima” to
designate the lowest voice.13 The poet could thus be talking about simultaneous voices as
well as the traditional beginning—middle—end divide. The “primus” could be the triplum,
and the “vox media” would be the motetus, which is located between the tenor and triplum.
More significantly, the idea that different voices might be in different poetic registers
is very relevant to the motet. While a few sacred motets may be considered “pure,” any
motet mixing a plainchant tenor with a newly written or secular text is technically mixing
high and low. A motet with French upper voices is also mixing languages, since the label
of its plainchant tenor, though unheard, is in Latin. Furthermore, some motets contained
simultaneously declaimed texts in two different languages—a combination that could be
found objectionable under Horatian guidelines of stylistic purity and appropriateness.
Placed in the voices of a motet, these poetic guidelines take on added signiicance, and In
virtute/Decens seems to be participating in a broader conversation not only about rhetoric,
but about rhetoric as it applies to motet poetry. A comparison with the texts of the so-called
12
“Credite, Pisones, isti tabulae fore librum persimilem” (6–7).
13
Examples of this usage in music theory abound. From Marchetto, “nam sicut diversa protractio vocis
vel soni alta vel ima facit consonantiam in cantu...” to Johannes de Muris, who actually rhymes “ima” with
“prima” in analogy to the motet’s “primis” and “ymis”: “Sic est in reliquis, it clavis littera prima / De notulis
quaedam scandit, quaedam petit ima”; Vecchi, ed. Marcheti de Padua Pomerium, 55; Muris, Summa, 3:208,
237. The word does mean “last” as well, but in that case it is often used in opposition to summus, “to express
a whole from end to end,” Lewis & Short, A Latin Dictionary, 910–11.
239
“musicians’ motet” Musicalis/Sciencie strengthens the case for such a discourse.
Hockets and Rhetoric
Musicalis/Sciencie is the ars nova motet whose texts most obviously engage with compositional questions. It seems that some composers were allowing hockets to split words,
and others considered this a crime against music and rhetoric.14 The two voices of the motet thus purport to carry out an epistolary intervention. The triplum, famous for its long list
of singers’ and composers’ names, is in the form of a letter from Music to her favorites. The
text adheres to the classical form: the writer identiies herself, gives a long list of the letter’s
recipients in the dative, and sends greetings to them (“salutem [dicit]”) in line 26. Finally,
Music gets to the point of her letter, which is to ask a favor of her disciples:
26
28
30
32
34
salutem et observare
sua precepta mandare
vestrum cuilibet cupio,
ne sit erroris motio
in dominam rethoricam,
neque contra grammaticam
lingua secans incomplexa
sit in silentio nexa;
cuncta vicia cavete;
in melodia valete.
[[I send] greetings, and desire each of you to heed your lessons, so that there
might not be a false step against Lady Rhetoric, nor against Grammar, in
severing simple speech that it might be bound in silence. Entirely avoid this
vice; in melody, farewell!]
If we are not sure what exactly the vice of “severing simple speech” might be, we
need only look at the motetus for clariication. This voice is also an epistle, this time from
Rhetoric to Music:
14
On the text underlay of hocketed passages and what it can tell us about the splitting of words, see Chapter
1.
240
2
4
6
8
10
12
14
Sciencie laudabili
musice venerabili
rethorica sciencia
cum omni reverencia
salutem, O dulcissima
subiectisque gratissima,
tali conquerens nuncio
quod maxima corruptio
it a multis canentibus
in nostris dictaminibus.
nam dividunt simplicia,
faciendo suspiria.
Quare pietate rogito
remedium his audito.
[To the praiseworthy, venerable science of Music, the science of Rhetoric
with all respect [sends] greetings. Oh sweetest and most pleasing of subjects,
lamenting I relate such a message: that the greatest corruption is committed by many singers under your command. For they divide single [words] by
making sighs. Whereby I politely request that you attend to a remedy for
these things.]
“Dividing single words by making sighs” refers to hocket, using a terminology that, as Harrison points out, “is still preserved in the Italian sospiro, a short rest in music, and in the
French soupir, a crotchet rest.”15 Hockets do not occur in poetry, and are almost never
texted in songs.16 Thus this motet is self-relexive: in motet form it addresses what it sees as
a problem with motet composition. This of course raises the question of whether Musicalis/
Scientie follows its own injunctions. Indeed it does. The six-breve hockets at the end of each
of the motet’s taleae are never texted in either voice (see Example 5.1).
15
Harrison, ed., Musicorum collegio, 40.
16
As Leach has noted, when hockets are texted in song, it is usually with nonsense syllables intended to illustrate “vox confusa”—the inarticulate sounds of men and animals. As such, these hockets are in no danger
of splitting words to create nonsense—their texts are already nonsensical. To this group belongs the chasse
“Se je chant mains que ne seul…”; Sung Birds, 180–197.
241
Example 5.1: Musicalis/Scientie, talea 1 (breves 1–24)17
Looking back at In virtute/Decens, it seems likely—even probable—that here too
the “conditores criminum” are not just poets, but the poet-composers of motets. But where
the message of Muscalis/Sciencie is clear, the grievances voiced in In virtute/Decens are much
more general. Could it be that In virtute/Decens is also campaigning against splitting up
words with hockets, in addition to its more explicit messages about appropriateness of subject and unity of style? As it happens, In virtute/Decens also has hockets which, like those
of Musicalis/Scientie, remain untexted and therefore do not split words.18 But that does not
mean that the Horatian motet is lobbying for the same rules. In fact, a look at the motets
safely attributed to Vitry, the probable author of In virtute/Decens, shows that he rarely
17
Reproduced from PMFC 5:181; layout and annotations modiied.
18
Though this is not apparent from the PMFC edition, which gives incorrect text underlay for the triplum
in measures 76–7. Neither source supports this underlay and I have remedied it in my edition.
242
texted his hockets and almost never split words.19 As we shall see, the hockets of In virtute/
Decens are unusual not for their lack of text, but for their position within the motet.
THE ISORHYTHMIC SCHEME OF IN VIRTUTE/DECENS
At irst glance, the construction of In virtute/Decens seems completely straightforward. The tenor color is made up of 21 notes from the tract for Wednesday of Holy Week,
Domine exaudi orationem meam.20 Each tenor talea comprises 3 notes, for a total of seven
taleae per color. The color is repeated once without diminution, yielding 14 taleae in total:
talea:
A1
A2
A3
A4
A5
A6
A7
B1
B2
B3
B4
B5
B6
B7
color A:
talea:
color B:
Example 5.2: Color disposition of In virtute/Decens
The tenor talea rhythm is similarly straightforward, composed of three longs (two imperfect and one perfect) followed by three breves of rest (L L L . 1 1 1 ).21 An isorhythmic contratenor executes the same rhythmic pattern at a ive-breve delay, so that one of the lower
19
An important exception is Cum statua/Hugo, discussed in Chapter 6. See also the comments on Petre/
Lugentium in Chapter 1. This observation deserves further contextualization, since the different texting
practices of ars nova motet composers have not yet, to my knowledge, been a focus of inquiry. It may well be
possible to read in the texts of Musicalis/Scientie a feud about the proper way to text hockets, and Vitry’s practices may proitably be contrasted with those of Machaut and some others whose names appear in the motet.
20
Clark argues that the composer probably changed the original chant source by omitting two notes near
the beginning of the excerpt and adding one near the end, “Concordare cum materia,” 68, 107, 218, 262.
21
This is the notation in Ivrea. BN 2444 uses coloration on the irst two notes instead of a dot on the thirs.
Leech-Wilkinson has argued the latter to be original; Compositional Techniques, 193. I have used the former
notation here and in my edition of the work to avoid ambiguity in the case of monochrome reproduction.
243
voices is always singing. The resulting taleae are 5 imperfect longae (10 breves) each. There
is no diminution.
But while the tenor and contratenor rhythms are unchanging over the course of the
motet’s 14 taleae, the upper voices are subject to an important modiication. Where taleae
A1–7 contain smooth, melodic parts for both voices, the second half of the motet includes
two breves of hocket which bridge the third and fourth longs of each talea (Example 5.3).
Example 5.3: In virtute/Decens, talea B1
This circumstance in itself may not seem particularly remarkable. After all, many
motets have hockets only in their second color. In fact, a irst color without hockets followed by a second with them is perhaps the most common Ars nova motet form. The hockets signal that a structural landmark has been reached in the motet, and help to add to the
feeling of acceleration caused by diminution.
There are at least seventeen other roughly contemporaneous motets in which hockets are introduced only partway through. But all of these differ from In virtute nominum in
an important way: these motets have a diminution section, in which the tenor’s notes are
244
sped up. And the hockets appear only in that diminution section, where their aesthetic
function is to heighten the effect of acceleration produced by the tenor’s smaller note values. In virtute/Decens is the only motet in the repertory whose second-color hockets do not
correspond with a diminution section (see Figure 5.1). In virtute/Decens thus emerges as
something of taxonomic anomaly: its two different structural feaures—two colores without
diminution and hockets in the second color only—belong to two lists of motets which otherwise have no overlap (see Figure 5.1). The two halves of In virtute/Decens might as well
come from two different motets.
Figure 5.1: Overlap of diminution and second-color hockets in ars nova motets22
22
Full incipits and edition information for the motets in this igure is available in the Catalog of Ars nova
Motets at the end of this study.
245
This fact has not gone unnoticed or uninterrogated. We can tell from Heinrich
Besseler’s summary of this work’s form that he considered its hockets an anomaly.23 Ursula Günther has called this a “bipartite hybrid” where “hockets in the [second color] give
the impression that this is a bipartite work.”24 And Daniel Leech-Wilkinson has described
the result as an “illusion of a typical two-section motet whose second color proceeds in
diminution.”25
And indeed the impression, pretense, or illusion of diminution is upheld by the upper voices, which seem to be structured in supertaleae during the irst color.26 The scheme
suggested by Besseler, Günther, and Leech-Wilkinson is one of three-and-a-half supertaleae
followed by seven shorter taleae.27 Example 5.4 shows the upper voices of In virtute/Decens
arranged according to this plan, with resulting isorhythm shaded. The result is indeed the
shape and semblance of a motet with diminution. Taleae A1–6 fall neatly into three groups
of two, where the isorhythmic correspondence between supertaleae is more pronounced in
23
“Studien II,: 222. Besseler’s standard way of notating a motet whose second color is in diminution is
to use the “greater than” sign; hockets are indicated with a superscript zero. Thus, the following represents
Altissonis/In principes, the second motet in the Ivrea codex, as depicted in Besseler’s formidable table: 4 > 04.
This means that the motet has two colores, each with four tenor taleae, and with the second in diminution;
the diminution section has hockets, while the irst color does not. Where there is no diminution but adjacent sections of a motet are nevertheless not isorhythmic (in Margaret Bent’s more speciic use of the term),
Besseler sometimes used “+” between colores, so that we might expect In virtute/Decens to be summarized as
“7+07.” The problem is that such a motet should not exist—that without diminution there is no way to explain the hockets of the second color. Instead, Besseler notates it thus: 3 ½ (>) 07. “(>)” is Besseler’s symbol
for “pseudo-diminution,” in which the tenor is freely re-rhythmicized to create the illusion of diminution,
instead of being mensurally or proportionally transformed. For a useful summary of Besseler’s system, see
Turner, “Proportion and Form,” 93–4.
24
“The 14th-century Motet,” 37. In virtute/Decens is “No. 71.”
25
Compositional Techniques, 194.
26
Supertaleae are discussed in Chapter 3.
27
Günther notes that “the upper voices have 3 1/2 periods to the irst half of the tenor and 7 short taleae
to the second,” “The 14th-century Motet,” 37. Leech-Wilkinson has also described the disposition of the
irst color in the upper voices as “three and a half double-length taleae,” Compositional Techniques, 194. These
evaluations match Besseler’s formula of 3 ½ (>) 07.
246
Example 5.4:
The triplum and motetus of In virtute/Decens arranged in supertaleae for
the irst color, and simple taleae during the second. Taleae marked as in
Example 5.2 above.
247
the second half—that is, in taleae A2, A4, and A6. And there can be no doubt that the
hockets of color B easily align vertically when the taleae are stacked individually—it would
seemingly make no sense to rearrange these.
The only glitch is in talea A7. According to the pseudo-diminution scheme, this
should be a inal half-talea in the integer valor section. But if talea A7 is the irst half of
a supertalea, then it should correspond to talea A5. Instead, the upper voices of this color
have more in common with the one that follows it—B1. These correspondences are shaded
in blue in Example 5.5. Naturally, the correspondence between the two taleae stops at the
hocket (gray in Example 5.5), since talea A7 has no hocket section. But the second half of
A7 does have a correspondence with the end of talea A6 (shaded yellow in Example 5.5).
Rather than being the irst half of a fourth supertalea, then, A7 acts as a join between the
isorhythmic scheme of the irst and second sections of the motet.
The surprising correspondences do not stop there. Example 5.6, below, highlights
two more points of rhythmic congruence between taleae that should be unrelated according
to Besseler’s scheme. Taleae B2 and B3, whose non-hocket correspondences are shaded in
green, turn out to be almost rhythmically identical. A further noteworthy correspondence
is between taleae B4 and B6, especially in the triplum voice.
There is a way to line up the upper voices in this motet so as to allow these correspondences to be aligned, and I will suggest an alternate analytical shape for this motet
below. But irst, let us take a closer look at the culprits of all this formal ambiguity—the
hockets of color B. If they make little sense in terms of isorhythmic form, I will suggest that
they make perfect sense when the triplum text of the motet is considered.
248
Example 5.5:
In virtute/Decens, tenor taleae A6, A7 and B1; upper voices only. Isorhythmic correspondences between taleae shaded in blue and yellow. Isorhythmic hocket section shaded in gray.
Hockets and Wordlessness
As hockets go, the ones in In virtute/Decens are not very impressive. When compared with the pyrotechnics of a motet like Vos/Gratissima (Example 5.7 below), whose
hockets take up fully four breves of each ifteen-breve talea, those found in the second half
of our Horatian motet are rather modest. Only two breves per talea are really involved in
hocketing, though the panisorhythmic section around these stretches to 5 breves—half of
each talea (gray in Example 5.8). But the hockets and their surrounding isorhythmic sections—made up mostly of tame breves and breve rests—do have something in common:
they are distinctly under-texted when compared to the rest of the motet. The irst or last
note within the isorhythmic region may be used by either voice to complete or begin a word,
249
Example 5.6:
In virtute/Decens, upper voices. Isorhythmic correspondences not accounted for by Besseler’s form (“3 ½ (>)07”) are shaded in colors; those
accounted for are shaded in gray.
250
but the central section, which includes the hockets, is consistently untexted.
Example 5.7:Vos/Gratissima, breves 115–123, hockets boxed28
Example 5.8: In virtute/Decens, talea B3, upper voices; isorhythm shaded, hockets boxed.
As noted in Chapter 3, it is not unusual for hockets to be untexted, and the injunction against splitting words articulated in Musicalis/Sciencie goes a long way to explain this.
However, it is possible to plan texts in such a way that they it hockets without splitting
words (as in the excerpt from Vos/Gratissima in Example 5.7, above). And indeed the short
hockets of In virtute/Decens could carry more text than they do, and still not split words. For
instance, the upper voices in Example 5.8 could have accommodated the next two words
of each text —“cui plumas” in the triplum and “et collum” in the motetus. A hypothetical
re-texting for this talea is shown in Example 5.9.
28
Edition reproduced from PMFC 1:80.
251
Example 5.9: In virtute/Decens talea B3, upper voices; alternate text-setting
But even though the hockets of In virtute/Decens might have been texted without doing offense to Rhetorica sciencia, none of them carries text. Indeed, this textlessness spreads
beyond the hockets, so that four or even sometimes ive breves of each ten-breve talea in the
second half of the piece are without text. And even given the dificulties of text underlay
presented by hockets (discussed in Chapter One), the distinctions between texted and textless regions of music are clearly maintained in both sources for this motet. In BN 2444
the scribe has even gone so far as to ill in the spaces below hockets with decorative red and
blue doodles (see Figure 5.2).29 Clearly the absence of text in and around the hockets is
intentional—in fact, I will suggest that the hockets are there for the purpose of textlessness,
and not the other way around.
Figure 5.2: Hockets and inal motetus melisma in In virtute/Decens (Paris 2444, fol. 48)
29
In this source, but not in Ivrea, the motet also ends with untexted notes after the last hocket. This is
relected in my edition in Appendix 5B, but not in other existing editions or performances.
252
The avoidance of text during hockets and the music around them leads to a motetwide crunch. Comparing the midpoint of the piece with those of the texts, we ind that
about 2/3 of the poetry has been squeezed into the irst talea: lines 1-18 of 26 in the
Triplum, and lines 1-15 of 22 in the motetus. The reason for this crunch cannot be to accommodate the hockets since, as we have seen, they could in fact carry more text than they
do. Rather, the textual silence in and around the hockets is so engineered that the only lines
of the triplum text remaining for the second color are those paraphrasing Horace.
The subdivision of these lines in the motet is telling. There are eight triplum lines
but seven taleae in the second half of the motet, which seems inconvenient. But this too is a
compositional choice; the motetus is quite regular, having only 7 lines of text in this section
of seven taleae. The composer is therefore interested in varying the rates of declamation of
text. He squeezes the irst two lines, which set up the “pictura species picta multiformis” into
the phrase before the irst hocket (measures 71–6 of the edition in Appendix 4B). Thereafter, he sets the remaining six lines separately, dividing each from the next by a hocketed
section. The division of text renders each line separate and distinct. The result is that in
each section of music set off by hockets we learn something more about the hybrid creature.
Since the hockets are untexted and texturally distinct, the effect is quite audible, and much
attention is given to each new part of the text, and thus of the monster. The hockets, then,
act as oversized ellipsis, controlling the singer’s pronuntiatio and the mental image of the
text as it emerges for the listener. In effect, the hybrid is built in real time, from head to
tail:30
30
For a similar case of hockets setting of poetic lines from each other, and thus acting as punctuation, see
the motetus voice of Tuba/In arboris during the diminution section.
253
... as though the artist were to draw ...
a female head ...
feathers ...
a horse’s neck...
a sea-fish
(and to finish the rest out ...)
Written thus, the motet’s hocket sections can be apprehended in a glance. But in performance hockets take up time rather than space. The declamation is relatively clear in both
voices, and especially in the triplum. And for a listener who knows some Latin, and knows
his Horace (and most in the clerical-intellectual audience for which this motet was written
certainly knew both), the words would evoke pictures. The listener would imagine—perhaps
even without meaning to—a jumble of human and animal parts that is disorienting as well
as humorous. Like the proverbial pink elephant, a woman-bird-horse-ish would force itself
on the listener’s mind.
I have not been able to ind a drawing of Horace’s chimera,31 but without a visual
aid, it may even be hard to call to mind a hybrid as complex as the one Vitry builds. The
following is therefore offered as a poor but faithful rendition:
Figure 5.3: “picture species picta multiformis”
31
This may in part be a function of the text’s ambiguity about the creature’s nature—a point I discuss below.
254
It’s easy to forget how strange hybrids are to contemplate—at once implausible and
compelling, they live somewhere between the amusing and the disgusting, challenging our
taxonomic and imaginative faculties. Fourteenth-century thinkers delighted in such unnatural beasts, depicting them frequently in the margins of illuminated manuscripts and
dwelling on their natures in bestiaries and books of marvels, which placed fantastical creatures such as mermaids and basilisks alongside elephants, beavers, and hedgehogs. The lines
between fantasy and reality were not so irmly set, nor would they yield to ossiication easily:
the 19th century saw a boom in the exhibition of dead, dried-out “mermaids.” The most
famous of these—the so-called Feejee mermaid—was accepted as real by doctors and zoologists alike as she took London and the US by storm.32
In the third millennium, when the “natural” of “natural wonders” has become more
strictly deined, we nevertheless continue to ponder hybrids in books and ilms, where depictions of the creatures have become ever more realistic. Though few have had the occasion to contemplate a hybrid as complicated as Horace’s chimera, Thomas Grünfeld and
Iris Shieferstein are among a number of hybrid taxidermists who combine pieces of different animals to make fantastical beasts that look challengingly, disturbingly real.33 Their
work serves as a reminder that hybridity is almost inherently disturbing. No matter how
cute or harmless the animals in question, their combinations disturb species boundaries
32
The mermaid was of Japanese origin and was acquired from Dutch sailors by an American captain in
1822. She had the dried-out head and torso of an orangutan skeleton with a jaw and teeth from a baboon
attached to the body of a large salmon. Her face was distorted, as though with pain, and she was 2 feet 10
inches in length. The curious history of her very successful career is chronicled in Bondeson, The Feejee
Mermaid, 36–63.
33
Grünfeld’s “Misits” is a series of two-animal hybrids including lamingo-cow and parakeet-piglet. Shieferstein mixes even more animals in her work, and her creations come closer to approximating chimeras by
mixing the parts of three, four, and sometimes more characters. Representative of this approach is her series
“Life Can Be So Nice,” which uses chimeras to spell out the refrain from Prince’s song. Images of the work
of both are readily available online.
255
while blurring the difference between reality and imagination.
The idea that the motet is designed to emphasize the hybrid creature in its text leads
us to the crux of a contradiction: though the creature is abhorrent, the entire second half of
the piece is engineered so as to give it prominence. And if we remember that the two halves
of the motet are different enough to belong to two different pieces, then the entire motet
can be viewed as a pictura—on several simultaneous levels—of a hybrid being. Vitry (if it
is indeed he) may be nominally denouncing hybridity, but he is indulging musically and
formally in the image his texts denigrate.34
A MONSTER-SHAPED MOTET
There is yet another level of the piece at which the hybrid is depicted: the level of
isorhythm. Looking back at Example 5.6, we ind that it does not bring into direct alignment many of the isorhythmic correspondences between the motet’s upper voices. My proposed solution to this riddle is given as Example 5.10.
The arrangement I propose may seem chaotic at irst, but I believe that it is implicitly suggested by the correspondences highlighted in Example 5.6. As Besseler suggested, the
irst six taleae need to be arranged into supertaleae, which highlight the congruence of taleae
A2, A4, and A6 (these upper-voice rhythmic correspondences are highlighted in purple
in Example 5.10). This is equally clear of the last four taleae, where the correspondences
between B4 and B6 (highlighted in pink) are most clearly brought out by this arrangement.
The middle of the motet is slightly more complicated, but also dictated by the rhythmic rep34
Cf. Leech-Wilkinson, who argues that “this is a remarkably straightforward and clearly-organized piece.
It is, perhaps, just this simplicity and regularity which represents the composer’s main achievement, given
the apparently irreconcilable quantities of the initial material,” Compositional Techniques, 195.
256
257
etition between upper voices. Here, correspondences between voices cross talea boundaries
(as between taleae B1 and B2, or B2 and B3), which are accordingly adjusted on the graph.
Finally, Section b now makes sense: the two sets of correspondences represented as Yellow
and Blue in Examples 5.5–6 are in fact one (colored blue).
What is the ontological status of Example 5.10? Is it a creation of the analyst’s
brain, “conceived fantastically like a sick man’s dreams”? I rather hope not, and I think the
clarity of elements in the motet structure revealed by this alignment speaks against its being
only my conceit. First, only this alignment can make some sense of the otherwise confusing isorhythmic correspondence in the upper voices around the joints of taleae A6–A7 and
A7–B1 while also showing the correspondence between taleae A6 and A4. The periodicity in these returns of this rhythmic material is regular enough that it seems unlikely to be
coincidental and more likely to be an element of compositional design.
Furthermore, the re-arrangement of taleae into these four sections keeps poetic
lines together, unlike the sections in Examples 5.4 and 5.6 above. This is because the lines
of poetry in In virtute/Decens are out of alignment with the tenor taleae beginning with A7.
And yet, when we listen, it is the declamation of lines that forms natural units, while the
hockets, with their abrupt rhythms, form natural boundaries between phrases. Thus the
structure suggested in Example 5.10 more closely approximates the experience of the motet as heard.35
I don’t mean to imply that anyone would be expected to “hear” the quadripartite
35
Such a structure would also give the motet a better grade in Harrison’s Table IV (PMFC5, p. 204), which
assigns a grade of A+ to D to each motet text based on how well it corresponds with the isorhythmic structure of the motet. In virtute nominum has earned a “C-” and Decens carmen edere a “C.” See further discussion
of Harrison’s grading scheme, and other motets whose grades would have been affected by rearrangement of
taleae, in Chapter 3.
258
structure of the motet. But a listener could easily be aware that there was hybridity afoot.
Apart from hearing the words, possibly even of both voices—an activity which I believe is
not beyond the careful listener in live performance—one would certainly hear the shift into
hockets, and the careful isolation of each of the chimera’s body parts. As they listened to
the irst half of the motet they might think abstractly about poetic vice. And as the second
color came about, Horace’s bizarre creation would slowly insinuate itself on the listener’s
imagination.
But if for the listener the important divisions occur in the hockets and in the semantically disjointed creature, the composer’s challenge is elsewhere, and I believe that it
is to his domain that the arrangement in Example 5.10 belongs. This shape, which consists of four differentiated rhythmic regions—could easily have served as a mnemonic aid
for composition. Anna Maria Busse Berger has argued that isorhythmic repetition was in
part a mnemonic device used to organize motets.36 As I argued in Chapter Three, motets
with supertaleae support this idea, since their “shapes” are often made more memorable
by the units of repetition in the upper voices.37 The four regions a b g d of Example 5.8
may look foreboding, but are in fact perfectly suited to memorization due to the simplicity of their dimensions. a is 20 breves wide, and so is d. b and g are 10 breves wide. This
scheme—20-10-10-20—is simple. a has three iterations; the others only two. Hence,
20x3, 10x2, 10x2, 20x2. There is only one small glitch: the 20 breves of a overlap by 4
breves with the 10 of b (measures 57–60). These four breves are “made up” by a four-breve
“tail” external to d at the end of the motet. The resulting shape is one that can be easily seen
36
Medieval Music, 210–51.
37
See especially the discussions of Vos/Gratissima and Flos/Celsa in Chapter 3.
259
in one glance, whether with the mind’s eye or the head’s. The existence of such a structure
for reference would greatly simplify the composition of the motet, helping the author to reuse metric schemes in a regular manner. If he were instead working with the shape depicted
in Example 5.4 above, his work would be much more dificult. Or rather, the upper-voice
rhythmic correspondences that are observable in the piece would certainly not be present
if the composer’s conception of his work was as a bipartite motet with three-and-a-half
double taleae followed by seven in diminution.
Thus the composer of In virtute/Decens has used a mnemonic aid for his motet whose
structure closely approximates that of the most colorful element of the motet’s text: Horace’s four-part monster. This clever choice reminds us at once of the importance of text in
this motet and the lexibility of form supported by “isorhythmic” procedures. Motets come
in many shapes, and In virtute/Decens, I believe, was chimera-shaped in the mind’s eye of its
creator.
Intensified Monstrosity
Returning to the Ars poetica, we can make one inal observation about Vitry’s texts.
A comparison of the triplum’s paraphrase with Horace’s original (quoted at the start of this
chapter) reveals a subtle but important transformation: the motet’s texts actually intensify
the hybridity of the metaphorical igure. Although there is some ambiguity in the text due
to Horace’s complex grammatical structure, commentators agree that the lines opening the
Ars poetica bring to mind not one creature, but several, each of them resulting from the
mixture of two separate animals or categories:38
38
Oliensis, Horace and the Rhetoric of Authority, 199–200.
260
The painting contains the proiles, blurred but unmistakable, of thoroughly
familiar monsters, in particular the horse-man Centaur and ish-woman
Scylla. Although Horace’s ut-clause superimposes one proile upon the other, retroactively specifying the “human head” of line 1 as the head of a beautiful woman… this syntactical logic is countered by the powerful descriptive coherence of the inal igure—a igure reminiscent, as commentators
note, of Virgil’s biform Scylla, fair maiden above and sea–monster below…
Rhetorically, if not syntactically, Horace’s pictured mermaid displaced the
centaur-like igure of the opening lines.
Hardison, in his helpful commentary, also sees “a human head on the neck of a
horse and a lovely woman with the lower parts of a ish,” while Dorsch reads three hybrids,
imagining a painter who would depict “a human head on a horse’s neck, or to spread feathers
of various colours over the limbs of several different creatures, or to make what in the upper
part is a beautiful woman tail off into a hideous ish.” 39
The motet, in contrast, explicitly creates a being with a woman’s head, feathers, a
horse’s neck, and a ish tail. Having analyzed the motet, we may see why Vitry would chose
to disambiguate and intensify the creature’s hybrid structure: his motet is made up of four
connected parts that echo the chimera’s quadruple nature.40 Naturally, a poet’s adaptation
of a text is the result of a personal reading of the original, and this case serves as a good
reminder of the creative and at times transformative potential of citation. At the same time,
the rest of the triplum text, and the entire motetus text, intensify a different message.
The Ars poetica is notoriously cryptic and several commentators have noted the dificulty scholars encounter when they attempt to draw maxims out of Horace’s text. Bernard
Frischer even went so far as to say that the poem is “illed with advice and rules as useless
39
Emphasis mine; Hardison and Golden, Horace for Students of Literature, 42. Aristotle et al., Classical
Literary Criticism, 79.
40
Then again, the bipartite division is present as well, in the more audible division of the piece into two
halves, one without hockets and one with. In this sense the motet’s form, if not its texts, preserve the ambiguity in Horace.
261
as they are dull and jejune.”41 Whether we will agree so far, it is undeniable that Horace’s
most central points are often contradicted within the poem itself. Even the clear distinction between tragic and poetic style referenced in the motetus and quoted above is immediately undermined: “nevertheless sometimes even Comedy raises her voice.”42 Not so with
the motet texts. Clinging to a message of propriety and evenness in tone and style, they
out-Horace Horace to present a completely cohesive set of instructions.
Hybridity’s Ambivalence
We come to a seeming conundrum. Formally, In virtute/Decens seems almost obsessed with the hybrid it depicts, and it shows that obsession simultaneously on several
levels: the two halves of the motet are mismatched in their use of hockets, and the more detailed isorhythmic scheme presents four separate areas of rhythmic correspondence. Meanwhile, the motet’s texts seem fully committed to their Horatian injunctions against hybridity. Mixes in style and content can only be the work of unskilled poets and are in no way to
be tolerated according to the stern voices of the triplum and motetus. The tenor agrees: its
text, “clamor meus” should probably be read as “my noise” or, literally, “my clamor,” rather
than the biblical “my cry” of “Lord, hear my cry.” The use of the phrase is in fact a pun, and
“clamor” is the result of sins against rhetoric that resemble the monstrous creature. The
chimera, we are to remember, is a negative exemplum. So why did Vitry (or whoever) dwell
on it in so much detail?
The question is an important one, but there is no easy answer. Beyond identifying
special occasions, we rarely ask why a composer has chosen to write a motet on a particular
41
Frischer, Shifting Paradigms, 68.
42
“interdum tamen et vocem Comoedia tollit,” l. 93.
262
topic. And in this case, the answer offered by the texts alone (to encourage poets to write
more responsible motet texts) is undermined when words and music are considered in tandem.
It is even possible that the rest of the work’s textual content—poetic advice—is
present only because it accompanies the creature in its original context. The fact of the
matter is that it is unclear from Horace’s text what exactly it is that the chimera is supposed to represent, and commentators both ancient and modern have disagreed in their
interpretations.43 For some, the monster represents disunity in style; for others, incongruence in form; for 2nd-century grammarian Pomponius Porphorio the monster is a warning against writing that is contrary to nature and lacks verisimilitude. For Pseudo-Acro,
another 2nd-century commentator, the creature lacks unity of subject. For Quintilian, the
hybrid represents the sin of mixing incompatible types of vocabulary. Modern commentators have tended towards broader interpretations. For Brink, the image “lacks verisimilitude” and Horace is campaigning for unity in general—“the unity of a work of poetry seen
by a poet.”44 For Hardison and Golden, the warning is against “unnatural combinations”
which threaten unity and homogeneity.45 These divergent readings rightly led Frischer to
complain that “even after two millennia of trying, we still cannot be certain we understand
what the speaker is trying to say in the opening lines of the poem.”46
Thus, if the poet–composer had instead decided to write a motet about the best way
to write a (motet) text, it is not at all clear that he would have ended by referencing Horace’s
43
For what follows, see Frischer, Shifting paradigms, 70–2.
44
Brink, ed., Horace on Poetry, 85, 81.
45
Hardison and Golden, Horace for Students of Literature, 42.
46
Frischer, Shifting Paradigms, 72.
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monster. He might well have based his texts on the clearer and less enigmatic Poetria nova by
Geoffery of Vinsauf.47 In view of the disposition of triplum text in the second half of the
motet, there can be no doubt that the decision to write a formally hybrid motet that used
hockets between pieces of the monster was a very early pre-compositional choice—perhaps
the “materia” with which the motet’s subsequent form, texts, and tenor had to concord.48 It
seems that the monster, and not poetic theory, that was foremost in the composer’s mind.
Vitry and the Zytiron
Why choose a monster as the starting point for a musical work? It is just possible
that Vitry wrote a hybrid motet because he liked hybrids and motets—or to put it more
palatably, because he was participating in what Madeline Caviness has termed a medieval
“intellectual preoccupation with the problem of the unnatural.”49 Such a reading of the
situation would suggest that, although we have no reason to doubt the poet’s sincerity where
his injunctions against uneven motet poetry are concerned, he chose this subject for the
chance that it gave him to illustrate the hybrid, and not the other way around.
Indeed, an enigmatic biographical reference improbably creates a link between Vitry and a marine monster. Pierre Bersuire (c. 1290–1362), the author of the inluential
Ovide moralisé, who elsewhere described Vitry as “an exceptional ardent lover of moral philosophy, history, and also antiquity, and learned in all the mathematical sciences,” also cited
47
Visnauf starts with a dedication to Pope Innocent III made humorous by his calling the pope ‘Nocent
“because if I attach the beginning it will be unfriendly to my meter.” After this, the introduction begins, as
does Horace’s with a metaphor, but a less confusing one: just as a builder must plan out a whole house before
he begins to build, so must “not the hand be in a rush toward the pen.” See Murphy, Three Medieval Rhetorical
Arts, 32–4.
48
Bent makes a similar argument about the formal signiicance of a quotation in “Polyphony of Texts and
Music,” 89.
49
“No laughing matter,” 93.
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the composer as an eyewitness to a human-ish hybrid. The comment comes in the course of
his discussion of the zytiron—a creature with the tail of a ish and the body of an armored
knight. This monster is not included in most medieval bestiairies, but it is described with
other marine monsters in book six of Thomas de Cantimpré’s encyclopedic Opus de natura
rerum (c. 1230–45). There, we learn that the beast is “cunning, and very strong...”:
Its front part in form makes it look very like an armed man, and on its head
is a helmet made of skin which is rough and hard and very strong From its
neck hangs a shield that is long and broad and thick and hollow within, so
that the monster can use it to defend itself against blows from attackers. The
veins and nerves of its neck are particularly strong, and a hard spur of bone
protrudes from its shoulders; the shield I mentioned earlier hangs from its
collar-bone. The shield is triangular, particularly hard and strong, so that it
is almost impossible for a weapon thrown at it to penetrate it. Its arms are
remarkably strong, and its hands like cloven hooves, so that it can land very
effective blows, and no man can wound it unless the blow is especially carefully aimed. As a result, it can only with the greatest dificulty be captured,
and, if it is captured, it can be killed only with blows from a mace or a hammer.50
Bersuire begins by speaking of the zytiron and citing De natura rerum, but then
moves on to describe a smaller marine monster:51
From another man I heard once in the same sea near the isle of Cioca a tiny
ish [was] taken, shaped to the form of an armed knight, armed with a helmet
and shield and breastplate. The like of which I have heard from the venerable man master Philippe de Vitry, asserting that he had seen in Normandy
a similar knight.
It is curious indeed to read such details about a igure like Vitry, whom we imagine
contemplating the stars as an astronomer and tending his lock as a bishop. Here we have
50
The description continues: “These beasts seem to imitate the conlicts of the human race, so they wage
war among themselves, and their battles under the sea cause such a commotion and such turbulence, that it
is sometimes supposed that there is a violent storm. And these monsters are to be found in the British Sea”;
trans. from Taylor, “Pursuing the Parrot,” 184n10.
51
“Zytiron, id est miles marinus: monstrum est marinum sicut dicit liber de natura rerum . . . Ab altero
viro audivi semel in eodem mari [Britannico] prope insulam ciocam parvulum piscem captum, ad formam
armati militis iguratum, casside et scuto et lorica armatum. Cuius simile audivi a venerabili viro magistro
Philippo de Vitriaco, asserente in Normandia similem militem vidisse” Pictaviensis, Reductorii moralis, 310.
Cited and trans. Wathey, “The Motets of Philippe de Vitry,” 145.
265
a glimpse of him marvelling at… an armored merman? Although the illustrators of bestiaries followed Cantimpré’s description to produce improbable creatures like the one in
Figure 5.4, in all likelihood Vitry was not experiencing a vision. Leo Daniël Brongersma
has convincingly argued that the Zytiron was probably a sea turtle, speciically the leatherback (Dermochelys coriacea), whose head “is indeed like that of the conical helmets used in
the middle ages” and whose shell resembles a shield when the creature is examined from the
top as though standing up (Figure 5.5).52 When viewed thus it is by no means beyond the
imagination that a scholar steeped in naturalistic texts such as De natura rerum would see a
knight in armor.53
Figure 5.4: A zytiron pictured in MS Prague Metropolitan
Library L. 11 (dated 1404)
52
European Atlantic Turtles, 221–3.
53
Though it is easy to see texts like De natura rerum as whimsical, especially in light of the quotations I
have given, they were in fact encyclopedic texts aimed at, and used by, scholars. A copy of excerpts from De
natura rerum housed at Harvard (Houghton library MS Lat 125) brings this point home: the book is very
small—its untrimmed folios only 10cm by 13.5 cm, with a text block of 7 cm by 10 cm. It contains no pictures, and only red rubrication in addition to small, clear black text. Annotations in the margins, an index
with corrections and erasures, and well-worn pages all point to heavy use. The section on marine monsters
does not include the zytiron, but it does list the dolphin, siren, crocodile, and hippopotamus, among other
creatures.
266
Figure 5.5: Dermochelys coriacea, dorsal view54
The leatherback is the largest living sea turtle, with one recorded specimen measuring over 9 feet in length and weighing more than a ton: a creature of such dimensions would
truly seem monstrous. The “tiny ish” Vitry saw might have been a baby leatherback, or a sea
turtle of another species. Clearly the sight was a memorable one, and writing a motet about
a chimera may have been a commemoration of the fact, or a chance to explore in music an
encounter with nature so unusual that Vitry thought it worth mentioning to Bersuire.
And even if the evidence provided by Bersuire’s citation does not take us straight
to the genesis of the piece, it is still possible that it speaks to Vitry’s interest in such matters and suggests even more strongly that the composer is using Horace not for the sake of
54
Reproduced from Brongersma, European Atlantic Turtles, Plate 1.
267
poetics but for his own purposes, even if he does pay lip service to the Ars poetica’s broader
contents.
Am I accusing Vitry of sarcasm or insincerity? Of saying one thing and (as it were)
painting another? Nothing so serious, but I think it is possible that there is an element of
fun built into the motet. Indeed, as Bernard Frischer’s provocative 1991 study suggests,
Horace himself may not have been wholly serious. Frischer’s parodic reading of the Ars
poetica is prompted by an earlier dating of the work and careful scrutiny of the critical
voices mentioned in Horace’s text. Reacting in part to the treatise’s strange beginning with
its “multiply mixed metaphor,” he argues that Horace “portrays the speaker of the poem
as a pedant and an ignoramus.”55 New art-historical indings that Horace’s villa was itself
decorated with hybrid creatures support such a reading: “right from the start of the poem
Horace gives us and his contemporary reader ample reason to suspect that the Ars poetica is
to be the inept ramble of an unreliable narrator.”56
I am by no means suggesting that Vitry would have read the Ars poetica as a satire.
Like any school-trained medieval youth, he would have come across this text before his
own critical faculties were fully formed, and might well have learned to revere it before he
learned to question it—such is the fate of school texts.57 But it is possible that the ambiguity of the text was not lost on Vitry. Like Horace’s narrator, Vitry revels perhaps a bit too
much in the negative exemplum.
55
Frischer, Shifting Paradigms, 52, 72–3.
56
Ibid., 85.
57
Horace was an author that a medieval student could take with him through his whole life, since his four
works were considered to be appropriate to the four ages of man: boys could read the Odes, young men could
learn from the Ars poetica, the Satires were for the mature, and the Epistles for the old. See Friis-Jensen,
“The Reception of Horace,” 291–3.
268
*
*
*
But it is unlikely that the composition of this complex piece was entirely a matter
of fun for Vitry.58 If for Horace the image is merely laughable, the later middle ages saw
chimeras as morally and conceptually challenging. On the moral front, Madeline Caviness has argued that chimeras, in referring to the serpent who spoke to Eve (often depicted
with a human head), could represent sin personiied, and thus the devil.59 But chimeras
also represented a logical puzzle, summarized in the sophism “a chimera is chimera.” This
problem—that the term “chimera” signiies nothing that actually exists but can still be used
to create seemingly logical sentences—received a detailed analysis involving the nature of
signs and signiiers in the Sophismata of John Buridan, one of the fourteenth century’s most
famous philosophers and a professor at the University of Paris.60
To Burdian, a “chimera” (insofar as it was anything) was a mixture of a goat, a lion,
and a snake. But any creature made of various animal and human parts could be so termed,
and among these Horace’s monster stands out as one of the more complicated. No other
monster mixes human, bird, ish, and horse. But this very collection of parts might have
recommended itself to Vitry not only as a general reference to marine hybrids or to the
intellectual problem of the chimera, but as containing a potentially musical dimension.
Horace’s collection of parts may have been reminiscent of an important musical creature—
the siren.
58
Nor was the contemplation of hybrids entirely a safe enterprise. Albertus Magnus’s De secretis mulierum
(13th-c.) reports that if a human-animal hybrid is on a woman’s mind during intercourse, the fetus may be
formed in accordance with the monster; cited in Caviness, “No Laughing Matter,” 87.
59
Caviness, “No Laughing Matter,” 89–90.
60
See Roberts, “A Chimera is a Chimera,” 273–8.
269
Though classical and early medieval artists depicted sirens as human-headed and
human-torsoed birds with wings and talons, their connection with the sea, from the rocky
cliffs of which they sang their dangerous songs, led to a transformation.61 Already in the
early eighth century, the Liber monstrorum gives these musicians “the body of a maiden...
from the head to the navel... but scaly ishes’ tails, with which they always lurk in the sea.”62
The result was sometimes a group of three sirens, some of which were part bird, and some
part ish. Other medieval sources split the difference, describing a creature with a woman’s
head and torso, falcon’s feet, and a ishtail.63 Medieval bestiaries tend to draw freely upon
these various aspects of sirens, betraying what Debra Hassig characterizes as a “relative uncertainty concerning the siren’s physical characteristics”: although most texts describe the
creature as part-woman/part-bird, “the majority of images represent a creature that is either
half ish, or at best, a woman-ish-bird.”64 These latter types of illustration show sirens with
human torsos, bird elements (webbed feet and/or feathered wings), and ishtails. All but the
horse neck of Horace’s chimera is accounted for (see Figure 5.6).
“Is the siren a beast, bird, ish, or monster?” Hassig poses the question rhetorically,
arguing that the siren is all of the above, while Elizabeth Eva Leach focuses on the avian
nature of sirens in her recent exploration of bird song, sometimes even calling the creatures
birds. Yet their ishiness is equally important to her argument, since she posits that fe-
61
Holford-Strevens, “Sirens in Antiquity,” 16–29.
62
Trans. ibid., 29.
63
For example, Philippe de Thaon wrote in the early 12th century that “Serena en mer hante/Cuntre tempeste chante/ E plurë en bel tens,/ Itels est sis talenz;/E de feme at faiture/Entresqu’a la ceinture,/E les piez
de falcun/E cue de peissun,” Walberg, ed., Le bestiaire de Philippe de Thaün, 51.
64
Hassig, Medieval Bestiairies, 105, 108. See also McCulloch, Medieval Latin and French Bestiairies, 167–9.
270
males—naturally moist and cool as a function of their
Figure 5.6: Woman-Fish-Bird sirens in Cambridge, Corpus Christi MS 53, f. 201v
(left) and Cambridge University Library, MS li. 4. 26, fol. 39r (right)65
males—naturally moist and cool as a function of their sex—are implicated in any discussion of music as wet or sirenic.66 In virtute/Decens allows us to have our cake and eat it too,
since it has the makings in it for any kind of siren—the woman, feathers, and ishtail are
all there, and they can be recombined as necessary in the reader’s/listener’s/singer’s imagination to construct the sirens in all their complexity and instability.
Sirens are, of course, musical creatures—singers and often instrumentalists. While
their song is deadly, it is also beautiful.67 Indeed, a rare bit of praise for female singers from
Arnulf of St. Ghislain’s Tractatulus de differentiis et gradibus cantorum (c. 1400) calls these
skilled performers “goddesses, or indeed rather earthly Sirens.”68
65
Reproduced from Hassig, Medieval Bestiairies, 110 and Holford-Strevens, “Sirens in Antiquity,” 33.
66
Leach, Sung Birds, 264.
67
There are positive characterizations of sirens in Guillaume de Lorris, Gottfried von Straßburg, Dante,
Petrarch, and Tinctoris—see Holford-Strevens, “Sirens in Antiquity,” 28–9.
68
“Dee ymo verius syrene terrestres”; for an edition and translation of the treatise and an analysis of Arnulf’s attitude towards female singers, see Page, “A Treatise on Musicians,” 13–14, 16, 20. See Also Leach,
271
Arnulf’s use of sirens within a music treatise is not entirely unprecedented. Leach
has discussed the “sparse” presence of sirens in medieval music theory, where they are sometimes present out of etymological need: when musica is derived from moys (water), sirens are
mentioned as being both musical and aquatic.69 In addition, there is a parallel between the
iconography of the three sirens—often depicted singing, playing a wind instrument, and
plucking a harp—and the species of musica instrumentalis outlined by Isidore: musica harmonica (singing), musica organica (wind instruments) and musica ritmica (plucked and percussive instruments).70 Leach’s goal is to situate sirens within the broader medieval discourse
about birdsong, which has a more robust presence not only in music theory, but also in
late-medieval compositions. But sirens are not treated by composers: “unlike most other
birds to which singers are compared, the siren is not directly represented in contemporary
musical pieces.”71
This is true if by directly we mean mimetically: while cuckoos, larks, and nightingales are evoked with stylized versions of their cries in late-medieval songs, we have no
sirenic equivalent to the lark’s “que te dit que te dit” or the nightingale’s “oci oci.”72 But such
stylized mimesis is only one mode of representation available to the medieval composer.
“Representation” is a broader category and can include the manipulation of formal ele-
Sung Birds, 265–6.
69
Ibid., 264 and ead., “‘The Little Pipe Sings Sweetly,” 197.
70
Sung Birds, 264–5 and “The Little Pipe Sings Sweetly,” 198.
71
She goes on to suggest that this lack of musical representation of sirens is only seeming, if we read a resonance between trahat, Johannes Boen’s word for the way in which pitches outside of the guidonian hand that
are necessary for directed progressions attract the ear, and Aribo’s use of “contrahere” as the Latin equivalent
of “Siren”: “this interpretation would make the whole notated repertory of fourteenth-century song—sacred
and secular—sirenic,” Sung Birds, 270.
72
For these cries set to music, see, for example, Vaillant’s Par maintes foys and the anonymous Or sus vous
dormes trop and Sung Birds, 141–65.
272
ments such as isorhythm and hocket. As such the form of In virtute/Decens is representative,
though certainly in a broader way, of a creature not very different from a siren.
UT PICTURA MOTETUS?
The siren’s presence in music theory, on the one hand, and this particular chimera’s
origin in a treatise, on the other, become signiicant when we consider that the citation of
text from a treatise strengthens the authority of the motet as itself a treatise.73 Quoting
from the auctoritates was a time-honored way to gain authority for oneself, and music’s
kinship with poetry—still undisputed at mid-century—would make the treatise on poetic
composition an obvious candidate for inclusion in a motet trying to fashion itself as a didactic object.74
If In virtute/Decens is a treatise, what are its precepts? It is conceivable that Vitry,
like Porphyrio, saw in the mishmash of animal and human parts the analogue to a poem that
lacks verisimilitude because its “formal qualities [are] inappropriate to its subject matter.”75
Under a doctrine of verisimilitude, a motet about a chimera would actually need to embody
73
I am grateful to Professor Lewis Lockwood for pointing this out to me.
74
The fact that In virtute/Decens quotes from the a poetic treatise underscores the extent to which motets
were poetic as well as musical creations. For more on the literary presence of motets, see Chapter One.
The other obvious direction would have been to quote from a music treatise. The earliest motet that does
this seems to be the fragmentary Musicus est ille from London PRO E24 (ifteenth century). This work
paraphrases lines from the inal chapter of the irst book of Boethius’s De musica and references its source
explicitly. This motet forms part of an unpublished study on the musician motets by Margaret Bent and
David Howlett, and I thank Dr. Bent for bringing it to my attention. There are not many later examples:
John Adams’s Harmonielehre (1984–85) takes its title from Schoenberg’s famous textbook, but is an orchestral work that sets no text. Therefore the next work to set a treatise to music is Tom Johnson’s 1988
Riemannoper—“eine Oper in zwei Akte für Bariton, Tenor, Primadonna, Primadonna assoluta, und Klavier,
mit Text direkt aus dem Riemann Musik Lexikon.” The opera uses exact quotations, and even sets bibliographic information to music, such as when the tenor sings “Hugo Riemann Musiklexikon Sachteil Seite
neunhundert sieben-und-vierzig” in the Vorspiel.
75
Frischer, Shifting paradigms, 70.
273
a chimera in some ways, just as a poem needs to formally agree with its topic.
And that, after all, is the point: I have argued in this and previous chapters that
14th-century motet composers were interested not in text painting but in a broader congruence of textual content and poetic form, and further that this form often has a visual component: motets have shapes. Often these shapes are rather simple, such as the rectangles and
sets of parallel lines described in Chapter 3. Sometimes, as in the Fortuna motets analyzed
in Chapter 4, the shape evoked is circular. In the case of In virtute/Decens, the shape is a
more complicated one—a set of four rectangles of two different sizes that are adjacent and
in one case overlapping. But it seems fully itting that a more complicated visual image
would represent a more intricate subject.
Horace’s work leads us easily to such pictorial metaphors. He himself was interested
in linking the visual and the poetic—a union summarized in his famous dictum “ut pictura
poesis.”76 Nor are the Ars poetica’s pictures limited to the chimera at its head; the lines immediately following the description of the monster unite poem and image by grouping their
creators when they argue that painters and poets (pictoribus atque poetis) are entitled to artistic license. Only a few lines later, Horace makes another set of analogies which combines
references to embroidery, drawing and pottery in a passage teeming with images:77
Often, one or two purple patches are stitched onto works that have begun in
high seriousness…but this was not the place for such embellishments. And
perhaps you know how to draw a cypress tree. What does it matter if you have
been paid to depict a desperate sailor swimming away from a shipwreck? You
76
Horace’s saying is a distillation of the theories of the greek poet Simonides (c. 556 BC-468 BC) who
(according to Plutarch), “calls painting silent poetry, and poetry speaking painting.” See Cook, The Art of
Poetry, 249. On the link between Simonides, visualization, and medieval memory, see the introductory
comments in Carruthers and Ziolkowski, The Medieval Craft of Memory, 29.
77
Ll. 9, 14–23.
274
started out to make a wine-jar. Why, as the wheel turns, does it end up as a
pitcher? In short, let the work be anything you want, but let it at least be one,
single thing.
Woman, horse, bird, purple patch, cypress, shipwreck, drowning man, wine-jar and
pitcher: all these images are to be found in the irst 25 lines of Horace’s text, and they remind us that Horace is a painter’s poet, and a poet for anyone who calls up an imago in the
act of imagining and remembering. Thus he is the perfect poet on which Vitry might pin
his own theoretical discussion, the one embedded into the structure of In virtute/Decens, a
sort-of Ars motetrum in form of an exemplum—ut pictura motetus.
* * *
If, with its congruence of form and topic, In virtute/Decens is Horatian in spirit, it
yet deies the only clearly stated rule in Horace’s introduction, since it is blatantly not “one,
single thing.” The placement of hockets in the second color and the resulting change in texture, coinciding with the triplum’s abrupt switch of subjects from poetry to painting, result
in a work that is as close to being two different things as one ars nova motet can get. Unless
that single thing is itself a disjunct creature. We land in the usual logical troubles into which
hybrids lead us: “a chimera is a chimera,” and what is that?
Anthropologically speaking, the solution to this riddle may be the statement of it.
Drawing on evidence from Ethiopian, biblical, and Western folk taxonomies, Dan Sperber has argued that hybrids and monsters exist precisely because they encourage symbolic
thought. Nor do they ever actually succeed in confusing us: rather, their anthropological
function may be to reinforce taxonomic boundaries by standing outside of them.78
Disagreeing with Mary Douglas, who posited that “[a]ny given system of classiica78
Sperber, “Why are Perfect Animals,” and “Pourquoi les animaux parfaits.”
275
tion must give rise to anomalies,” Sperber argues that anomalies are not inevitable, but are
built into folk taxonomies to stengthen the boundaries of those systems of classiication.79
When we judge an animal to be less representative of a genus than another animal (the crow
is more of a bird than the ostrich; the sea horse is less of a ish than a trout), “a normative
judgment is considered as modifying the taxonomic identiication which it logically presupposes.”
For our purposes, this means that we have to know what a motet is to say that In
virtute/Decens is a strange one, so that our idea of the motet will not be signiicantly modiied by the strangeness of a hybrid case: the identiication of the genre’s normal state must
come irst.80 All this is reasonably obvious without turning to anthropology, but what is
important here is the symbolic thought that necessarily results: a formally hybrid motet is
guaranteed to make us think about motets in the abstract, and would probably do so even
if the texts were not there to guide us—with their reference to theoretical treatises—into
deeper consideration.
In mixing two different aspects of motets, In virtute/Decens actually allows us to
understand the workings of “standard” motets more clearly. We can only recognize it as the
exception if we pay attention to the rules. By its very disjunction, it helps us to see “normal”
boundaries.
79
Douglas, Purity and Danger, 39.
80
We sometimes talk about pieces of music as individual members of a species. When Michael Scott Cuthbert read a paper which employed statistical methods normally used to count animal populations in order
to estimate the number of lost Trecento sources, I could not help but imagine wild ballate, madrigals, and
motets hopping about in the forest and occasionally being tagged by researchers, only to be released again.
Cuthbert, “Counting Our Losses” and “Trecento Fragments,” 53–86. Julie Cumming has also taken a
taxonomic approach to motets from the ifteenth century, even referring to some as hybrid: see The Motet
in the Age of Du Fay.
276
In virtute/Decens is a motet about motets, seemingly about texts but also—it turns
out—about structure, and ultimately about the connection between text and structure. It is
unusual—and even extraordinary—and has deserved its own chapter. But In virtute/Decens
is not alone, which is perhaps the most extraordinary thing.
Not only is it not the only motet to deal with a hybrid creature, it is also not unique
within Vitry’s oeuvre in referencing Horace’s chimera. Nor is it even alone in deploying
hockets unusually to create a strange shape which accommodates hybrid-themed uppervoice lyrics. In the inal chapter I will discuss several more motets that contain—and in
some way embody—hybrid content, and do so in formally hybrid ways. If In virtute/Decens
is a distillation, the raw materials from which it is distilled are in relative abundance within
the Ars Nova motet repertory.
277
APPENDIX 5A
IN VIRTUTE/DECENS CARMEN/CLAMOR MEUS, TEXTS AND TRANSLATIONS
TRIPLUM
5
10
15
20
25
In virtute nominum
quamplures ignari
conditores criminum
falso predicari
gaudent dictis hominum
putantes equari.
Many ignorant authors of crimes rejoice
in the virtue of words to preach falsely,
thinking that the writings of [all] men
are equal.
Miscet impericia
talium delusa,
non evitans vicia
scribendi preclusa,
placidis immicia
sinceris obtusa,
alba nigris, tristia
letis, et profusa
nimis arat brevia
sub inepta forma.
The foolish inexperience of these people,
not avoiding forbidden vices of composition, mixes the rough with the gentle,
the obscure with the plain, white things
with black, the sorrowful with the joyous,
and the excessive with the very brief and
they grow concise things into overly excessive ones within an ill-itting form.
Heccine congeries
verborum enormis
est picture species
picta multiformis,
ut si pictor faciat
caput femininum,
cui plumas adiciat
et collum equinum,
residuum iniat
in piscem marinum?
Is not their formless heap of words a kind
of picture painted with many shapes, as
though the artist were to draw a female
head, to which he might add feathers and
the neck of a horse, and then to inish the
rest out as a sea-ish?
278
MOTETUS
5
10
15
20
Decens carmen edere
quicumque volentes,
thema decens capere
debent et decentes
esse thema promere.
Posse mencientes,
honeri subcumbere
non liquunt prudentes.
Anyone wishing to write an appropriate
song should take a itting subject and
themselves be it to put forth a topic.
Si scribendi tragicus
stilus est in primis,
in medio comicus
non sit, nec in ymis:
unus enim modicus,
alter est sublimis.
If the tragic style of writing is at the outset, let the comic not be in the middle or
at the end: for one is humble, the other;
elevated.
Verborum coniugium
rite celebretur
adeo quod vicium
minime causetur,
et nichil inproprium
eminus aptetur,
secus enim precium
carmen non meretur.
Let the marriage of words be duly celebrated, so that error may hardly be
blamed, and nothing improper should be
accommodated from afar, otherwise the
song will not merit reward.
Those counterfeiting the ability are
clearly not wise to take on the burden.
TENOR:
Clamor meus
Domine, exaudi orationem meam, et
clamor meus ad te veniat.
-Psalm 101, i.
279
Lord, hear my prayer, and let
my cry come to you.
APPENDIX 5B
In virtute/Decens carmen/Clamor Meus1
?Philippe de Vitry
1
Edition based on Ivrea fol. 55v. Text underlay adjusted based in part on BN 2444, fol. 48. For a listing
of variants see PMFC 5:197.
280
281
282
283
284
CHAPTER SIX
VITRY’S CUM STATUA/HUGO AND LATE-MEDIEVAL INTERPRETATIONS
OF NEBUCHADNEZZAR’S DREAM
“N
E FAIS DE MOY HUGO S’EN ALBION SUIS”— “do not make a Hugo of me because I am
in England.”1 In these words Jean de le Mote pleaded his defense against an attack
on his abilities, his politics, and his understanding of classical references by fellow poet and
composer Philippe de Vitry. The seemingly enigmatic idea of “making a Hugo of someone” is
a reference to one of Vitry’s most irmly attributed works—the motet Cum statua Nabugodonasor/Hugo, Hugo, princeps invidie/Magister invidie.
It is no wonder that the motet in question would have made an impression on Jean. It
is an angry diatribe on the faults of a man named Hugo whom it paints as an envious hypocrite. Though he may seem like a holy man, “a man of peace, a son of virtues,” the motet warns
that he is a false prophet and “prince of envy” whose impious tongue has wounded Philippe
with slander (full texts and translations are included in Appendix 6A).
The motet seems to have been well known, as evidenced by its survival in two extant
sources, a listing in the index of a third source now lost, and a mention in a theoretical treatise.2 Jean de le Mote’s passing reference to the motet also attests to its fame: as Schrade has
written, the motet “must have had a powerful echo since it impressed Jean de le Mote almost
1
Trans. Diekstra, “The Poetic Exchange,” 509–10.
2
Cum statua/Hugo has survived in the Ivrea codex (fols. 14v–15) and in the Cambrai Fragments (CaB,
fol. 11v). It is also mentioned in Trémoïlle, where it occupied fols. 2v-3 (now lost). The motet is cited and
attributed to Vitry by John of Tewkesbury in Quatuor Principalia, where it serves as an example of imperfection in part of a longa by a preceding note: “Posset tamen prima longa imperici a parte ante, nisi punctus
immediate eam sequatur, ut patet in moteto qui vocatur Hugo quem edidit Philippus de Vitriaco,” Coussemaker, ed., Scriptorum 4: 268.
285
with the force of a proverb.”3 Indeed, recent work by Andrew Wathey shows that this echo resounded even into the ifteenth century.4
The motet’s fame and secure attribution have led to stylistic commentary and much
discussion of its date, but no detailed analysis of the work exists.5 As regards the texts, they
are often summarized as examples of vitriolic poetry set to music: the work has been called
“ein literarisch-musikalischer Angriff auf einen bis jetzt noch unbekannten Gegner”; “Oeuvre
polemique contre un calomniateur nommé Hugo”; “a direct and violent attack on a personal
3
Schrade, “Philippe de Vitry,” 341.
4
Evidence of the continued resonance of Cum statua/Hugo is presented by a Bohemian humanist miscellany from the mid-ifteenth century, which elaborates the text of this motet and of Vitry’s Colla/Bona in the
119-line poem Quondam colla iugo veneris submisserat Hugo. See Wathey, “The Motets of Philippe de Vitry,”
142n51.
5
The dating of the motet has rested on that of the the ballade quoted above, in which le Mote refers to
“Hugo,” thus prividing a terminus ante quem. Pognon, who irst edited the poems, placed the exchange between 1328 and 1339 because of a line in which he read to mean that le Mote had never found in France
such approbation as he receives in England (l. 8, “Onques n’oy; ailleurs bont ne volee”). This resulted in a
terminus ante quem of 1340, since in 1340 le Mote wrote two poems popular in France. Musicologists have
followed this dating, placing the motet in “the Early 1430s, if not earlier” (Schrade), 1337 (Reany et al.),
and 1325 (Blachly); see the summary in Kügle, The Manuscript Ivrea, 86n22. Kügle also argues for “an early
date” for the motet, in the range of “1315 and 1320, possibly extending to c. 1325,” ibid 118. In 1986
F. N. M. Diekstra published a careful re-edition of the poems, which argues that Pognon’s original dating
was based on a misreading. In fact, Diekstra convincingly argues, “the line [in question] means that he has
never heard anywhere else accusations such as Philippe is now directing at him” (“The poetic exchange,”
516). Schrade also cites evidence that le Mote returned to France after 1339 (“Philippe de Vitry,” 342).
Although he was probably in Paris in 1340, le Mote was back in England on 21 July 1343, when he was
paid for entertaining King Edward (Wilkins, “Music and Poetry at Court,” 192). All evidence points to this
as the beginning of an extended English stay and a close connection with Edward’s court. Wimsatt places the
poetic exchange between le Mote, Campion, and Vitry in the years following 1343, based on the evidence
of the ballade texts, as well as external characteristics of the poetry such as Le Mote’s long ballade strophes
and extensive use of literary exempla—features of the ballade in the 1350s (Chaucer and his French Contemporaries, 50, 63, 69). Diekstra’s re-reading combined with Wimsatt’s evidence and the work of Wilkins
has resulted in a re-dating of the poems for literary scholars; MacDonald tentatively dates the debate to the
1350s (“Doubts about Medea,” 262). This would give a much later terminus ante quem for Cum statua/Hugo,
though of course it does not necessarily argue that the motet itself is later. It does, however, mean that the
“evidence” by which the motet’s dating has been calculated is entirely inconclusive and that biographical and
stylistic arguments resting on it are open to revision.
286
enemy.”6 Surely it is all those things. But these summaries fail to mention an important presence in the motet—the elephant in the room that is cued by the triplum’s irst line, “Cum
statua Nabugodonasor.” This is a reference to a dream-statue from the book of Daniel which
Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babyon saw in a dream. Its head was gold, and the rest of its body in
turn made of silver, bronze, iron, and clay. The listing and description of these materials takes
up the irst half of the triplum text:7
Like the metal statue of Nebuchadnezzar, the Lord allowed Zion to be successively and by stages reduced to pieces, which when it was gold (Zion was)
virtuous, then silver (and Zion was) clean in body, following this copper…
earthen iron, and mud.
Only after this extended biblical paraphrase does the triplum text settle into its blame of
Hugo. What is Nebuchadnezzar’s dream statue doing in Vitry’s motet? No obvious answer
comes to the fore, and thus the statue has been relegated to the status of an allegorical
“aside.”8 But I hope my study of In virtute/Decens in the previous chapter showed that such
“asides” can actually be central to the meaning of a motet.
Indeed Cum statua/Hugo has much in common with the Horatian motet. In the
course of a rant (whether against Hugo or against inept poets more generally), each motet
makes use of an extended literary allusion notable for its physical incongruence. In the
case of In virtute/Decens, we have seen that the last ten lines of the triplum are dedicated
to describing the chimera from Horace’s Ars poetica, and that they carefully name its body
6
Besseler, “Studien zur Musik des Mittelalters II,” 204; Zwick, “Deux motets inedits,” 32; Gallo, Music
of the Middle Ages II, 36.
7
The statue is discussed in lines 1–9, of 20. Since the second half of the motet includes some shorter lines
(discussed below), its presence accounts for very nearly half of the text: the irst 34 words, of 69 total.
8
See, for example, Besseler, “Studien zur Musik des Mittelalters I,” 192. But Besseler is unusual in even
mentioning the statue while discussing the motet.
287
parts piece by piece, from human head to ishtail. The opening nine lines of the triplum
Cum statua Nabugodonasor are similarly engaged in listing and characterizing the parts of a
hybrid creature—this time hybrid in materials—and naming them in order, from golden
head to muddy toes.9 It will therefore be important to explore this motet’s musical engagement with its hybrid statue, paying careful attention to text-setting and isorhythmic regions—compositional aspects which proved to be expressive in the case of In virtute/Decens.
Two other musical works from the fourteenth century—another motet by Vitry
and a complainte by Machaut—concern themselves in part with Nebuchadnezzar’s dream,
and analysis of these will reveal interesting links among the statue’s musical incarnations.
But while the interpretation of Horace’s monster was relatively straightforward since its
source—a treatise on poetics—matched the theme of the motet, the biblical icon at the
center of Cum statua/Hugo is more resistant to interpretation. As a result, it forces us to ask
a broader set of questions. What might Nebuchadnezzar’s statue have meant to Vitry and
to his listeners? Was it commonly invoked in the course of blaming an adversary? To what
extent is Vitry’s reading of this passage consistent with those of his contemporaries?
Answering these necessarily leads to an exploration of the uses of this particular
allegory in the work of fourteenth-century intellectuals, among them Guillaume de Deguilleville, Philippe de Mézieres, Dante, Boccaccio, and John Gower. A look at the statue’s
depictions in music, poetry, and art can serve as a useful case study of how one idea found
cross-medial resonances in late-medival culture, while also allowing us to ask in what ways,
if any, musical treatments of this theme differ from poetic and artistic ones.
9
The motets also share a source—the Ivrea Codex—where they are part of a small group of similarly angry
motets including Colla/Bona, Rachel/Ha fratres, and O canenda/Rex.
288
THE STATUE’S LAYERS: A METALLURGICAL SUMMARY
It will be useful to begin with the biblical dream and it explication, since the irst
line of the motet’s triplum, “Like the statue of Nebuchadnezzar,” tacitly assumes that its
listener knows the story. Vitry’s source is Daniel 2, which begins in the second year of
Nebuchadnezzar’s reign as king of Babylon. One night he dreams a dream whose meaning
is unclear and whose contents he imperfectly remembers. Terriied, he orders his magicians to tell him tell him what, and why, he dreamt. But his team is unable to comply and is
sentenced to death barring the appearance of a more powerful prophet. Enter Daniel, who
tells the king that his dream was of an enormous statue made of various materials that is
shattered by a stone:
Thou, O king, sawest, and behold a great image. This great image, whose
brightness was excellent, stood before thee; and the form thereof was terrible. This image’s head was of ine gold, his breast and his arms of silver, his
belly and his thighs of brass, his legs of iron, his feet part of iron and part
of clay. Thou sawest that a stone was cut out without hands, which smote
the image upon his feet that were of iron and clay, and brake them to pieces.
Then was the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold broken to pieces together, and became like the chaff of the summer threshingloors; and
the wind carried them away, that no place was found for them: and the stone
that smote the image became a great mountain, and illed the whole earth.10
This vision, sometimes referred to as the “Dream of Precious Metals,” easily captures the imagination: the irst half of the description is still, giving a vertical and focused
account of the statue from its head to its hybrid feet. Then suddenly a lurry of motion
erupts when the stone is carved inexplicably from the mountain and hits the iconic “feet of
clay,” scattering the statue and itself illing the whole world.
The apocalyptic imagery of this symbol is all but inescapable. Daniel’s interpretation of the dream, which follows, explicates this image of decay through time and sudden
10
Daniel 2:31–5.
289
upheaval. He equates Nebuchadnezzar’s reign with the statue’s golden head and a series of
three successively worse kingdoms with its less precious lower divisions:
Thou, O king, art a king of kings…Thou art this head of gold. And after thee
shall arise another kingdom inferior to thee, and another third kingdom of
brass, which shall bear rule over all the earth. And the fourth kingdom shall
be strong as iron…and as iron that breaketh all these, shall it break in pieces
and bruise. And whereas thou sawest the feet and toes, part of potters’ clay,
and part of iron, the kingdom shall be divided; but there shall be in it of the
strength of the iron, forasmuch as thou sawest the iron mixed with miry clay.
And as the toes of the feet were part of iron, and part of clay, so the kingdom
shall be partly strong, and partly broken…and in the days of these kings
shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed:
and the kingdom shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces
and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand for ever. Forasmuch as
thou sawest that the stone was cut out of the mountain without hands, and
that it brake in pieces the iron, the brass, the clay, the silver, and the gold; the
great God hath made known to the king what shall come to pass hereafter:
and the dream is certain, and the interpretation thereof sure.11
That the dream is political is hardly in doubt, and although only the gold part of
the statue is explicitly linked with a real kingdom, the book’s writers intended to convey
other kingdoms (Media, Persia, and Greece) through the rest of the metals, so that the
stone striking the statue could signify an end to the reign of Antiochus in the Maccabbean
revolt.12 Christian writers from Jerome’s inluential commentary onward have extended the
story, reinterpreting the Kingdoms as the Medo-Persian, Greek, and Roman empires and
understanding the stone as Christ’s irst coming.13
In these commentaries the dream’s interpretation received more attention than the
dream itself, but we can get some hint of the statue as it must have been present to the
late-medieval cultural imagination from illustrated bibles, which almost always depict it as
11
Daniel 2:37–45.
12
Kratz, “The Visions of Daniel,” 92–3.
13
Trans. Archer, Jerome’s Commentary on Daniel, 633-4.
290
whole, with the stone resting ominously at its feet. Illuminators usually include Nebuchadnezzar, either dreaming or awake, and often Daniel as the intermediary between dreamer
and dream (see Figure 6.1).
Figure 6.1: Daniel narrates the king’s dream, Bible moralisée (1234)14
In many depictions the artists have gone to great pains to reproduce the bible’s
description exactly, switching ink colors at each new level of the statue’s composition. This
often means using gold paint for the head, and sometimes silver for the chest (which has
tarnished to black). Beyond that, some illuminators forego verisimilitude: rather than approximating the colors of bronze, iron, and clay, they use contrasting pigments to ensure
that the difference between materials is conveyed (See Figure 6.2).15
14
The illustration reproduced here, which also shows the counselors who were not able to tell the king what
he dreamt, is from Toledo, Cathedral Treasury, Mss. 1–3, fol. 204. In this famous Bible moralisée which
belonged to Saint Louis we have the unusual opportunity to see the statue depicted twice: once whole (reproduced here), and then in pieces. This is due to the heavily illustrated format of the Bibles moralisées, which
contain eight round images per page, accompanied by biblical summaries. The statue’s layers are depicted
carefully here, and preserved when we see it shattered into pieces. A lavish facsimile of the manuscript is
published as Biblia de San Luis (Barcelona: M. Moleiro, [2000-2004]). But note that the facsimile applies
gold and silver paint indiscriminately to the image of the statue on fol. 204, so that the individual striations
are not visible. Fortunately, volume 1 of the commentary reproduces an unadulterated photograph of this
folio on page 396, a detail from which is shown above as Figure 6.1.
15
When a lack of pigment, time, or interest leads to a less precise delineation of the statue’s levels than the
291
Figure 6.2: Daniel narrates the king’s dream, Bible historiale (1372)16
This arbitrary use of color (as in the orange-ish thighs which are meant to depict
iron in Figure 6.2) suggests that it was more important to depict the difference in the
statue’s makeup than its actual materials. Its many internal boundaries deined it and differentiated it from other biblical visions and dreams (including a story later in the book
of Daniel in which Nebuchadnezzar raises a golden idol). This emphasis on the statue as
a markedly fragmented object, even prior to its destruction, will also be pervasive in the
motet, on various levels .
bible prescribes, the boundaries most consistently depicted are those at the head and feet of the image. See,
for example, the emphasis on the statue’s head placed by the Maitre de Fauvel and his collaborators in Paris,
Fr. 8, a Bible Historiale illustrated c.1320-30, fol. 189.
16
Den Haag MMW 10 B 23, fol. 254v.
292
THE MOTET’S LAYERS: A FORMAL SUMMARY
Let us look briely at the organization of Cum statua/Hugo so as to get oriented for
more detailed analysis (see Appendix 6B for a complete edition). The motet is for three
voices, the upper two texted throughout and the bottom an untexted isorhythmic tenor. The
tenor color is 24 notes long, and each statement is divided into three taleae ifteen breves in
length. The color is repeated three times, for a total of 9 taleae and 135 breves (see Example
6.1).
Example 6.1: Cum statua/Hugo Tenor color and talea pattern
While the tenor’s ninefold repetition of the same rhythm without change or diminution suggests a simple structure, upper-voice rhythmic congruences complicate the picture. Cum statua/Hugo divides into four isorhythmic regions made up of two nearly panisorhythmic pairs of taleae at the beginning and end of the piece, with less structured material
in the middle (see Example 6.2). The material in region a (taleae A1 and A2) is marked by
nearly identical triplum rhythms which are proiled enough to be memorable. This material
is also partially isomelic (see the boxes labeled x and x’ in Example 6.2). The experience of
listening to these is thus almost strophic. The following four taleae (A3, B1, B2, and B3)
form two supertaleae of 30 breves each (labeled b1 and b2 in Example 6.2). These again
share several areas of rhythmic congruence and some marked isomelism in the triplum
(boxed and labeled y and y’). Next comes a single talea—C1 (g under the new scheme). The
motet concludes with another pair of taleae (labeled d1 and d2) distinguished by the use
293
of hockets and by a high rate of rhythmic congruence (highlighted yellow in Example 6.2).
Thus the motet, like the statue, has its internal divisions—it has, arguably, four of
them.17 While there is nothing like a simple equation between the bodies of the dream image and the piece of music, these regions will have analytical signiicance and we shall see
different compositional priorities in each. Moreover these divisions, when seen in light of
the structure of In virtute/Decens, suggest that the allegorical statue described in the triplum
may play an important role in the motet’s meaning, as constituted by text-music interactions. Indeed the fragmentation which characterizes the motet’s rhythmic structure also
plays a pervasive role in other aspects of its composition, from local text-setting decisions
to the very choice of the tenor color.
17
Section g (talea C1) is the odd one out. While it shares some rhythmic characteristics with the second
half of d2, especially the longa in triplum in mm. 97–9, it lacks the memorable and proiled triplum
rhythms that are present in mm. 46–50 and 76–80. Besseler’s reading of the upper-voice isorhythm in this
case was “2 (5 c)t+ 2 ½ (5 c) + 2 (5 c),” which implies that C1 is aligned with B2. There is certainly some
correspondence in triplum rhythms between the two taleae, but the isomelism which links A3 and B2 is not
present in C1. As such I have labeled it as a separate section.
294
295
The Composite Tenor of Cum statua/Hugo
The tenor of Cum statua/Hugo is something of a mystery. In the Ivrea codex, it is
labeled simply “Tenor Cum statua”—an indication that the scribe either did not know the
tenor’s source or that the tenor is newly composed for the motet.18 In the other source for
this motet, a set of fragments now in Cambrai, the tenor is labeled “Magister invidiae”
(master of envy), but no chant with this text has yet been identiied. Alice Clark has shown
that there is a partial match between the color and the antiphon Salve crux pretiosa for Saint
Andrew. Here, the last nine notes, which are sung to the words “te magister meus Christus,”
correspond to the beginning of the color (see Example 6.3).19 After this the antiphon ends,
but the motet tenor continues. Clark reasonably proposes that the rest of the color is freely
composed.
Example 6.3: Chant concordance for notes 1–9 of the color of Cum statua/Hugo
It is very rare for a motet tenor to begin with chant and continue with newlycomposed material, and rare also for the text of the tenor to be changed from that of the
18
Schrade hesitantly put forward the hypothesis that “since the motet is composed against a certain Hugo,
a personality not yet identiied, the [tenor] might be a melody of Philippe himself rather than borrowed
material,” Commentary to Volume 1, 106.
19
“Concordare cum materia,” 181, 207. Clark does not include the motet tenor’s irst note in her discussion,
and it is omitted in the table which lines up chant sources against the motet tenor. Thus she has argued that
the motet’s irst eight notes align with the words “magister meus Christus.” In fact, the irst nine notes are
concordant with “te magister meus Christus.”
296
plainchant (as must happen if “Et magister meus Christus” becomes “magister invidiae”).20
Thus Clark has called Cum statua/Hugo “an extreme case of alteration of chant-based materials, where the text is modiied and the melody takes its chant source only as a point of
departure.”21 She suggests further that that the change of “meus Christus” to “invidiae” (a
word found in the irst line of the motetus text) “would be in keeping with what is known of
[the] erudite and witty” Vitry.22
However, keeping in mind the statue that stands at the center of this work—a
strongly piecemeal creation—it is worth asking whether the tenor notes that follow this
fragment are necessarily newly composed, or whether they may be pieced together from
various chants. Even without consulting chant sources it is clear that the 24-note tenor is
divisible into three sections 9, 8, and 7 notes long, respectively, which are differentiated
by range and modal orientation (see Example 6.4). Region 1, which corresponds with the
excerpt from Salve crux, is set apart from the following notes by the cadential igure D-C-C.
It is also the highest part of the tenor, possibly a mode 7 or mode 8 melody transposed up a
fourth (if the C is indeed inal). Notes 10–17, which form a unit that begins and ends with
D, inhabit a signiicantly lower range. The use of B-lat hints at a transposed D-mode piece,
though the scalar descent followed by a gapped ascent in this fragment does not resemble
a typical Gregorian melody. Finally, notes 18–24 seem to be a group on their own, with a
20
As a precedent for the latter, Clark points to Detractor/Qui from the Roman de Fauvel, whose tenor, “Verbum iniquum et dolosum abhominibitur dominus” is based on the chant “Verbum iniquum et dolosum longe
fac a me, Domine”; “Concordare cum materia,”162, 181–2. It may be worth asking whether the change of text
is in this case a result of normal compositional practice, or of the Fauveline context, in which contrafacta
abound and the perversion of texts is common. For a motet whose tenor begins with several notes of chant
and then continues as freely-composed material, see the discussion of Petre/Lugentium in ibid., 174–81.
21
Ibid., 162.
22
Ibid., 182.
297
range still lower than the previous two, and a melodic shape that suggests mode 6.
Example 6.4: Range and modal regions in the tenor “Magister invidiae”
If these regions do come from different chants, what kind of chant might they be?
In fact the text of the color incipit is from a late-medieval rhyming ofice for Saint Benedict.
There the words “magister invidie”occur in the fourth antiphon for the irst nocturn—Sanctum Romanus habitum.23 It is clear that this chant alone cannot be the source for the tenor
color, whose irst part concords with Salve crux. But the notes sung to the irst two syllables
of “magister” do ind a match in notes 11–16 of the tenor (See Example 6.5). That is, they
account for fragment 2 of the chant, excluding the Ds on either end (indeed the fragment
makes more sense as a gregorian melody without the Ds). It seems, then, that a chant with
the words “magister invidiae” is indeed represented in the tenor of Cum statua/Hugo, if only
by its own incipit—”Magi[ster].” After this the color jumps again.
It turns out that the tenor for Cum statua/Hugo is a collection of three chant fragments, all taken from internal sections of their respective chants, which in turn come from
disparate parts of the liturgical year. They are linked only by their local textual content:
23
This ofice appears in numerous manuscripts from the 12th to 14th centuries. The current edition is
from a 15th c. sanctorale from the Benedictine monastery of SS. Ulrich and Afra in Augsburg (Mbs 4305).
For an edition of the ofice text and a listing of sources see Analecta hymnica 25:145-9. An edition of the
music and brief commentary is available in Heckenbach, “Das mittelalterlichen Reimofizium Praeclarum
late,” 189-210. The ofice is not included in the Corpus Antiphonalium Officii.
298
Vitry seems to have gone on a scavenger hunt for “magister” chants.24 The only two notes
not accounted for are the Ds that frame the second fragment. These perhaps function as
boundaries between the three chants while also extending the range of the middle section
(see Example 6.7).
Example 6.5: Sanctum romanus habitum (Mbs 4305, fol. 47); notes concordant with the
tenor of Cum statua/Hugo are boxed and numbered
Given that the irst two sections of the tenor combine two consecutive chant fragments that involve the word “magister,” it seems likely that its inal section is also from a
chant. Indeed, the inal seven notes of the color seem to be drawn from the Maundy Thursday antiphon Vos vocatis me magister. The word “magister” appears twice in this chant, and
the notes set to it and to the words around it are in both cases concordant with notes 18–
24 of the chant tenor, barring repeated notes. In the irst case, the match encompasses the
text “[vo]catis me magister et”; in the second, “et magister, et” (See Example 6.6).25
24
It was Professor Thomas Kelly who suggested that I look for more “magister” chants when “invidie” was
not turning up, and I am grateful to him for his insight. “Magister” is not a particularly common word in the
liturgy—I have located it in ifteen chants. Of these, three are from Holy Week, three more are for Saint
Andrew, two are for Saint Benedict, and one each is for saints Agatha and Udalric. The other ive chants
come from the 12th, 17th, 19th, and 22nd Sundays after Pentecost, and from a Tuesday in the second
week of Lent. Vitry has thus chosen his three chant fragments from the three most common contexts in
which “magister” appears—Saint Andrew, Holy Week, and Saint Benedict.
25
The chant’s F would transpose as a B-lat. In the motet this is unsigned, but in color 3 the tenor must sing
B-lat as ficta in mm. 131, corresponding in that case with the chant’s intervallic structure. I am grateful to
Dr. Jeffrey Dean for bringing the second match to my attention.
299
Example 6.6: Chant concordance for notes 18–24 of the tenor of Cum statua/Hugo26
Example 6.7: The tenor of Cum statua/Hugo with sectional concordances
The emphasis on “magister” is puzzling, especially as the word does not appear in
the upper voices. However, perhaps the color hints that Hugo is a university man—a possibility strengthened by the motetus’s comment that it is better that Hugo should teach the
ignorant (“ignarum doce te pocius,” l. 6) than go on spreading slander. In light of this we
might propose as a possible candidate the Dominican friar Hugo di Castello who lectured
26
Edited from BN 1112, fol. 82v; the source is a Parisian missal from c. 1225.
300
at Paris in 1337 on astronomy—a topic dear to Vitry.27 The mocking air with which the
triplum text uses the term “mendicant” would be consistent with a Dominican target. It is
possible that in a lecture Hugo disagreed with Vitry (who would likely have been in Paris at
the time) on some point of astronomical or religious doctrine and thus provoked Vitry’s angry musical response. But this must remain a point of conjecture, awaiting further evidence.
Quite apart from the biographical implications of its focus on “magister,” the fact
that the color is sectional must have consequences for our understanding of the motet. I
believe that this unusual construction, like the sectional arrangement of the upper voices,
calls to mind the statue of Nebuchadnezzar. Just as the statue is made up of different materials, so the tenor is put together from different chants—a Frankenstein among colores. Nor
does the composer try to hide his seams: the tenor’s discontinuity is marked by its various
ranges and modal orientations.
The direct textual context of the chants may also be pertinent here. In Sanctum
Romanus habitum, there is mention of a stone (“sed magister invidiae/saevit in illum lapide)
which may bring to mind the stone which struck the statue’s feet. Even more suggestive is
the text of Vos vocatis me magister, in which Christ bids his disciples wash each other’s feet, as
he has just washed theirs.28 But these references to a stone and to feet may well be felicitous
accidents.29
27
While in Paris, Hugo began a commentary on Sacrobosco’s De Sphaera at the insistence of his students.
See Thorndike, A History of Magic, 3:217. I am grateful to Gabriela Ilnitchi Currie for suggesting that I
consider Hugo di Castello.
28
“Vos vocatis me Magister et Domine, et bene dicitis: sum etenim. Si ergo ego lavi pedes vestros, Dominus
et Magister, et vos debetis alter alterius lavare pedes,” [Ye call me Master and Lord: and ye say well; for so I
am. If I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet; ye also ought to wash one another’s feet,” John
13:13–4.
29
Responding to the liturgical context of Salve crux pretiosa, Clark has suggested that the motet’s dedicatee,
called Hugo in the text, may in fact be an Andrew—either Andrew of Hungary (assassinated in 1345), or
301
The tenor’s unusual construction has several compositional consequences worth
noting. First, there is the issue of range. The chant fragments are lined up so as to be consistently lower, which involves the upward transposition of “Salve crux” and the downward
transposition of the last fragment. The gradual descent is thus intentional, and the resulting color covers the wide range of an octave. As the upper voices adjust to tenor, they are
forced to stretch upwards and downward with the result of an even wider range—an eleventh in both triplum and motetus.30 But even given this wide range the tenor sometimes
sings above the motetus.
The composite tenor also has modal ramiications. Kügle has argued that “ambiguity is…the hallmark of the modal orientation of the tenor” in which “the finalis f appears
only at the very end of each color statement, resulting in an uncertain modal character
throughout the irst two talea statements.” For him, this ambiguity is a metaphor for “the
hypocrisy and deceit of an unidentiied adversary named Hugues.”31 But that ambiguity
itself—though not in conlict with the motet’s message—is again a function of the color’s
unusual piecemeal construction. And this construction is evocative of the statue’s divisions,
rather than the more vague negative attributes we can associate with Hugo.
“perhaps a friend named Andrew,” “Concordare cum materia,” 182). But the second fragment of chant would
make him a Benedict, and the third a Peter or a Jesus. It seems likely that Vitry has brought together these
fragments of chant not for the holy men whom they laud, but because they have the word he wants. This
magpie sensibility coming from the pen of the man who “mieux ist motés que nulz hom” challenges some of
our most cherished notions about the role of tenor sources in motets (the epithet is from Buigne, Le Roman
de Deduis, l. 6356). A few other examples readily come to mind (Vitry’s “clamor meus,” Machaut’s “amara
valde”) where the use of chant text seems to be more of a pun than a liturgical reference. Clearly the liturgical context of some chants would have been present to the minds of listeners—but it seems equally clear
that sometimes chants are used simply because they have the right words. In these cases exegesis based on
the liturgical occasion may well lead us beyond the interest of the piece.
30
See comments in Kügle, The Manuscript Ivrea, 153.
31
Ibid., 115.
302
Thus the statue emerges as a prevalent metaphor and shaping idea for the motet on
two broad, precompositional levels: the isorhythmic form and the color construction. And
yet Hugo stands at the forefront of every discussion of the piece. How does Hugo relate to
the statue? This question is answered at the head of the composition.
The Beginning of the Motet: “Cum statua... Hugo [est]”
The opening measures of Cum statua/Hugo are intentionally confusing with respect
to texture. Since the tenor talea starts with a rest, the motetus and triplum begin alone.
When the tenor enters in m. 2, it sings above the motetus (see Example 6.8). This sequence
of entries is repeated in mm. 4–6. After this the tenor returns to the bottom of the texture
for three breves, hovers around the motetus in mm. 10–13, and then settles down into its
normal contrapuntal place at the bottom of the texture, where it remains for the rest of the
piece with few exceptions. It is not surprising that the tenor should cross with the motetus
at the beginning of the color given the nature of the piecemeal color melody, which starts
high and then descends gradually with each segment. But, as I argued in Chapter 3, voicecrossings can be highly controlled in the motet repertory. Although the tenor’s place in the
middle of the texture is a result of the unusual color design, it is not an unavoidable one: at
the start of color 2, the tenor is in the middle of the texture for only one breve (m. 46).32 So
we must view this voice-crossing as a deliberate musical gesture. What does it accomplish?
32
The crossing accompanying the beginning of color 3 is slightly longer (mm. 92–6). Kügle argues that
“the color melody, which shifts between the middle and the bottom of the texture throughout most of the
setting... [creates] deliberate subversion of the listener’s expectations,” and that the design of this piece is
related to Tribum/Quoniam, which places its tenor consistently above the motetus (ibid., 116–8). However,
the actual amount of time that the tenor spends in the middle of the texture in Cum statua/Hugo is small, and
the voice crossings between tenor and the upper voices are probably a function of the tenor’s unusual shape,
rather than a precompositional decision as in Tribum/Quoniam.
303
Example 6.8: Cum statua/Hugo breves 1–27
Kügle has identiied the placement of the tenor in the middle at this and other
points in the motet as “an allusion to [the] subject matter [of falsehood and deceit] (the
motetus temporarily “posing” as the tenor, and vice versa)”.33 And indeed, the opening measures of Cum statua/Hugo feature a voice-crossing that is very different and potentially even
more “false” than those I have explored in Machaut. In motets 12 and 14, voice-crossings
between the triplum and motetus created inverted-sounding music because, although they
switched ranges, the upper voices held on to their normal rhythmic proiles and modes of
text-declamation. But in the opening measures of Cum statua/Hugo, there is indeed pretense
and “posing,” because the motetus hardly sings a word. Or rather, it sings one word: Hugo.
We can instantly see what is unusual about the opening measures when we look at
how the motetus text is distributed over the motet’s nine taleae. Starting with B1, the dis33
Ibid., 115–6.
304
tribution of text to music is regular, with one-and-a-half full-length lines per talea.34 But
for the irst seventeen measures (all of talea A1 and part of A2), the motetus sings “Hugo.”
The same word is then immediately repeated, and again stretched out (mm 19–23). For
the irst 23 breves of the motet, then, the motetus sings the name of the offending person.35
The result is a very un-motet-like texture. If we would usually expect the motetus
to carry text at a rate a little slower than the triplum’s, here we instead ind it singing melismatically, and at the bottom of the texture to boot. Nor is there much of “Hu-” to “Hugo”—
the irst syllable lasts only two breves and is split off from the rest of the name by a rest.
Thus for measures 4–17, the motetus sings only “-go”—truly a tenor-like rate of declamation which also brings to mind the large number of clausulae with the tenor [-GO].36
The moment of highest confusion comes in measures 10–15, where the tenor starts
out in unison with the motetus but then moves faster than that voice, singing two breves
while motetus sings a long (mm, 10–11) and continuing above the motetus in parallel
thirds until the cadence back to the unison in m. 15. This is a clear instance of the kind of
“posing” described by Kügle.
But whether such posing is meant to represent hypocrisy, the opening texture resulting from the loosely texted motetus imparts a clarity to the triplum above “Hugo,” so that
34
This means two lines per talea once the hockets begin, since they alternate half-lines with full-length
lines. Thus, C2: “Stupeo et eo/cum invidus sic sis palam pius;” C3: “perpere dicere/ ipocritam te possum
verius.”
35
Talea A2 goes on to set the rest of the irst motetus line, “princeps invidie.” Then talea A3 rushes through
two full lines of poetry, seemingly in order to catch up.
36
I am positing no connection whatsoever between [Hu]go [princeps invidiae] and the [Vir]go [salutiferis]—
I only suggest that a long melisma on –GO would probably be marked easily enough as a tenor for a latemedieval musician. On the availability of the Nôtre Dame repertoire during the later middle ages and the
possibility that the source F was in the French royal library during the fourteenth century, see Haggh &
Huglo, “Magnus liber—Maius minus,” 224–9 and Appendix I.
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“Cum statua Nabugodonasor metallina” is delivered in an effectively monotextual space.37
“Statua” especially emerges as clearly declaimed, its B supported by one an octave below it
in the motetus (m. 4).
While such a texture is in some ways reminiscent of a chanson, the motet is not trying to be a song—rather, these measures are accomplishing a very motet-like juxtaposition
of two simultaneous texts. The co-existence of “Hugo” and the cum clause allows for an
equation or a sentence: “Hugo is like the statue of Nebuchadnezzar.” We know that motets
can do this, and indeed we revel in their ability to connect like with like.38 Nor is it a big
surprise that Hugo, the focus of the motetus, is like the statue of Nebuchadnezzar, which
the triplum is busy describing. This superimposition during the motet’s opening creates an
elegant summary, and the parallel octave motion between the upper voices in measures 1–6
strengthens the connection: “Cum” and “statua” are aligned with “Hu”-“Go” in terms of
both time and pitch-class, effectively equating the courtier and the biblical statue.
Talea A3 even equates the face of the former with the head of the latter. Here,
triplum sings (of the statue) that it was irst of virtuous gold (“quecum primo fuerit aurea
virtuosus”) and motetus (of Hugo) that he initially appeared to be “a man of peace, a son
of virtues” (“tu cum prima pateas facie homo pacis virtutum ilius”). The musical setting
of these lines highlights their similar sounds—cum primo/cum prima and virtuosus/virtutum
(boxed in Example 6.9). But it also superimposes facie—“face” on aurea—gold, the material
of which the statue’s head was made (circled in Example 6.9). These measures conirm even
more explicitly the identity between Hugo and the statue suggested by the motet’s opening.
37
This is especially the case in the motet’s opening, where “Hu-” and “Cu-” amplify the same vowel.
38
As in the opening of Machaut’s Motet 18, where “Bone pastor” sounds in both voices.
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Example 6.9: Cum statua/Hugo, breves 31–42
This construction of Hugo-as-statue in the motet’s opening taleae is far from subtle, but it
is only the beginning of the story.
“Gradatim deduci ac minus”: The Statue’s Layers in the Motet, mm. 31–63
If vertically within the polytextual world of the motet “cum statua” refers to Hugo,
within the triplum text the simile drawn is between Zion and the statue. Zion, like the image
in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, was “successively and by stages reduced and made less” (“successive... ac gradatim deduci ac minus,” triplum lines 2–3). With reference to the biblical
story, this summary of things does not quite seem to it. True, the statue decreased in value
as it went down, but it was not “made less by stages”: it shattered instantly into a thousand
pieces. Reading the triplum, we would think it had shrunk several times.39 And Zion, if we
take it to stand for the world, was debased gradually according to Daniel’s interpretation
but also did not shrink. On the contrary: the brass kingdom expanded to “rule over all the
earth.”40
The phrase “successive... ac gradatim deduci ac minus,” then, does not clearly de39
For instance, Clark has written about “the slow deterioration of the statue of Nebuchadnezzar, described
in the triplum,” “Concordare cum materia,” 183.
40
Daniel 2:39.
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scribe the biblical statue. And yet it consists of two sets of synonyms that hint precisely at
gradual diminution. The temptation is strong to look for a musical interpretation of these
words expressed perhaps as diminution in the motet. But the tenor of Cum statua/Hugo does
not undergo any diminution, even though the inal two taleae involve hocket.
There is, however, a sort of poetic diminution that occurs in lines 5–8 of the triplum
text. Here, the metals that make up the statue are listed at the end of each line: aurea (gold,
line 5), argentea (silver, line 6), herea (bronze, line 7), ferea (iron, line 8).41 Line 9 adds a
rhyme mid-line (lutea—mud) to complete the series. Each metal seems to have its own line
of the triplum text, but the rhyme scheme is misleading. The semantic zones allotted to
each material are not congruent with the line-breaks; rather, they are enjambed, leading to
a less even division of text.
5
7
9
que cum primo fuerit aurea
virtuosus, inde argentea
carne mundus, deinceps herea
sancti loquis,
ictilis ferea
ac lutea pater novissime
← which (statue) was gold (and Zion) virtuous
← then silver (and Zion was) clean in its Flesh
← next bronze (and Zion was) holy in speech
← then (the statue was) earthen iron
← and mud
With fourteen syllables, gold has the most poetic air time. Silver and bronze each
have ten syllables. The internal rhymes “virtuosus” (l. 6) and “mundus” (l. 7) placed at the
ends of these two successive sense units helps to articulate the poetic change of gears. After
this, the degree of description allotted to each metal drops: iron (ferea) is modiied only by
“ictilis,” and mud (lutea) recieves no gloss at all.42
41
The resulting monotonous rhyme creates a moment or relative poetic stillness against the background
of couplets which makes up the rest of the text (except in lines 1–2 where “Nabugodonasor” and “Syon” do
not rhyme): ab|cc|dddd|eeffgg|hhjkkj. The stasis labeled dddd marks those four lines in which the metals of
the statue are listed.
42
While the biblical text names ive materials—gold, silver, bronze, iron, and clay—it is worth pointing
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This gradual decrease in the amount of poetic space allotted to each metal is heightened when the text is set to music. Here, the sections describing gold and copper, though
equal in syllabic length, become differentiated, while the other phrases are set in accordance
to their length. The result is that the amount of musical time lent to each material’s description is indeed successively reduced (see Table 6.1).
Table 6.1: Poetic and Musical Space allotted to each material of the statue
Phrase:
que cum primo fuerit aurea virtuosus
inde argentea carne mundus
deinceps herea sancti loquis
ictilis ferea
ac lutea
Syllables:
14
10
10
6
4
Measures of music:
11
9
6
4
3
What we see here is a kind of diminution, but one carried out on a smaller, arguably
more audible scale. Rather than shortening the amount of time allotted to each fragment of
the color, the unit that is reduced here is the triplum text itself. This device seems unusual
enough to warrant suspicion, and two questions need to be asked. First: how might Vitry
have gone about composing such a text? Second: to what extent is the text setting in this
section manipulated to make this work?
To answer the second question irst, it is worth noting that no special text-setting
tools seem to have been used, nor have the boundaries between the enjambed segments been
out that there was in fact no pure clay element of the statue, which is correctly identiied as metal (“metallina”) in line 2 of the triplum. But there seems to have been some confusion about the statue’s feet. In the
vulgate they are clearly a mix: “pedum quaedam pars erat ferrea quaedam ictilis” (Daniel 2.33), and Petrus
Comestor follows suit in his Historia scholastica: “pedum quaedam pars ferrea, quaedam ictilis” (“Historia
scholastica,” Patrologia Latina 198:1448). But the Bible historiale, the most popular French translation of
the bible, though based on the Historia scholastica, splits up the mix, assigning one material to each of the
feet: “une jambe de fer et lautre de terre.” We see this interpretation of the statue depicted in Houghton Library’s Bible historiale (MS Typ 555), fols. 109v–110.
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stressed by the musical setting. The text has simply been written with this built-in device of
successively diminished poetic space, and then it has been set to music in the normal way,
obeying syllable count and poetic syntax. And yet the idea of writing such a text is musical
at heart: only a poet thinking musically would arrive at this peculiar type of diminution,
which aligns the statue’s materials’ decreasing values with increasingly smaller intervals
of time. And only when set to music, which controls declamation, can this metaphorical
diminution of the statue’s parts be ensured without peril from alteration based on a reader’s
whims, as would be more the case in a verbal performance of poetry.43
One other factor makes it seem likely that Vitry wrote this section of the text—and
of the motet—with such a scheme in mind. The text of the triplum here is unusually dificult. We know from other works that Vitry was more than capable of writing clear poetry
and making unambiguous references. But here, everything but the list of metals seems to
be open to interpretation and the phrases “carne mundus” and “sancti loquis,” especially do
not yield easily to translation. A comparison of three available translations of these lines
illustrates the point:
Howlett: “which (statue) though was gold (and Zion was) virtuous, then silver (and Zion was) clean in its Flesh, next bronze (and Zion was
holy in speech, then (the statue was) earthen, iron, and muddy.”44
Ilnitchi: “a statue which at irst was made of gold (by analogy, of the virtuous), then of silver-like lesh (like the world) afterwards of bronze
(like the vessel of the Holy Word), iron, and mud”45
43
This section bears comparison to the inal section of In virtute/Decens, which also controls declamation,
though with a more obvious goal.
44
Trans. Howlett in Orlando Consort, Philippe de Vitry and the Ars Nova, liner notes p. 21.
45
trans. Gabriela Iinitchi in program notes for Sequentia, “Philippe de Vitry: Motets and Chansons”
(Deutsche Harmonia Mundi, 1991), 19.
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Blachly: “the statue was gold irst, then silver. The virtuous elements constituting its lesh up to this point. Then bronze, and inally, to repeat
what is known, clay and mud and iron”46
If something like a successive diminution of space allotted to each material was
indeed on the poet’s mind, this would perhaps help to explain the enigmatic nature of these
lines. In that case, the dificult expressions and strange adjectives in the triplum might be
there more for the sake of taking up space and making rhymes than for their clarity. And
the goal might not have been an entirely coherent narrative, but rather the creation of a text
that, when put to music, will last a certain amount of time and thereby help to build up the
statue that it describes, in successively diminished pieces.47
THE MOTET’S LAYERS: QUESTIONS OF ISORHYTHMIC FORM
With the “lutea” (mud) in m. 63, the discussion of the statue is over and the triplum
shifts focus, joining the motetus in its blame of Hugo. But the statue is still present as an
agent of disjunction in the tenor with its multiple sources, and perhaps in the motet’s isorhythmic divisions. It is to these that I would like briely to turn. Although it is possible to
construct an argument in which the four regions of the motet represent the four kingdoms
in Daniel’s interpretation, I think it will be useful to think of the musical and textual reasons the composer might have had to divide the motet as he did.
Looking back at the two sections of the motet I have so far analyzed (a and b),
we can see that they align with different compositional goals and textures: the equivalence of Hugo with the statue takes place in section a, during which the motetus sings
46
rev. and trans. Alexander Blachly, Medieval Music Database, <http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/MMDB/composer/H0028008.HTM>. Blachly reads “scitum loqui” in line 8 and changes “Zion” in line 2 to “minor”
for the sake of rhyme.
47
I am grateful to Leofranc Holford-Strevens for discussing this issue with me.
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its long “Hugo,” eventually followed by the rest of line 1—“princeps invidiae.” Meanwhile
the triplum sets out the statue’s presence and the idea that it was successively reduced and
made less. The opening isorhythmic section of each of these taleae, with its slightly stilted
declamation, is very memorable, and lends emphasis to the words “statua” and “gradatim”
(mm. 3–4, 18–9). But if this scheme were to continue—that is, if talea A3 were to act as
a3—the next emphasis would be placed on “cum primo”; hardly an important sentiment.
And the motetus carries far too little text in section a—presumably a deliberate decision
on the composer’s part but one that can only work in these opening taleae.
Thus section b begins. Here the upper-voice taleae are twice as long, and much less
upper-voice rhythmic congruence is present. This is the section that presents the statue’s
materials in the triplum voice in ever smaller numbers of measures, and the choice to switch
to longer taleae may have been motivated by the constraints of text-setting necessary to
make the trick work. Alternately, the composer might have been driven by a desire to avoid
sonic monotony, since the rhyme scheme of the motet lags during this section, stuck on
“-ea.” Such a rhyme scheme combined with short, congruent taleae like those in section a
would surely have been tedious.
Section g has nothing to be congruent with—it is a single talea of 15 breves (see example 6.10). Textually it contains personal material in each voice. In the motetus, it begins
with “mihi”—a pronoun relating to Vitry, who defends himself of these crimes imputed to
him while he remains “unconsulted and ignorant of the cause” (line 9). And in the triplum
we ind here the authorial signature “haec concino Philippus publice”—“I, Philip, sing these
things publicly.”
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Example 6.10: Cum statua/Hugo breves 91–105 (Talea C1/section g)
To highlight this important line Vitry changes texting strategies partway through the
talea. In breves 91–4 triplum and motetus are roughly equal in terms of the rates at which
they declaim text. Then they take turns. In mm. 97–99, the motetus is given the spotlight
while the triplum holds a longa. Then the triplum takes over to deliver its important authorial message beginning in measure 100.48 During these pockets of text-declamatory primacy, motetus and triplum deliver what together amounts to a rhyming couplet overlapping
by a breve: “inconsultus causamque... hec concino Philippus publice.” The strongly proiled,
catchy melodies that accompany these texts hint at an antecedent-consequent kind of relationship, further strengthening their intertextual link. If the composer chose to write
this talea afresh, rather than itting it into an available mold, it is because it has different
aesthetic aims than other sections of the motet.
Thus we come to section d of the motet, which is in some ways the most unusual.
That the two inal taleae of the motet constitute a separate region is clear: they are nearly
identical rhythmically, and are the only two taleae to contain hockets, which here ill a majority of each. Furthermore these two taleae take an approach to texting that is not found
elsewhere in the motet.
48
Although the motetus has some text here, it declaims only on the level of breve or long, resulting in a
texture similar to that of the opening.
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Feet of Clay: Hockets and Fragmentation
As we saw in Chapter 4, hockets that begin partway through an ars nova motet normally coincide with a diminution section. In virtute/Decens, which contains hockets without
diminution in its second color, emerged as a taxonomic anomaly among motets. But Cum
statua/Hugo is an even stranger animal than In virtute/Decens. Where in the latter work
hockets were introduced at a color break, the change in texture in Cum statua/Hugo takes
place one-third of the way through color C. No other ars nova motet uses hockets in this way,
and this uniqueness invites a closer look at the inal two taleae of the work.
Not only do the hockets in Cum statua/Hugo carry text, they split words. Elsewhere
in his oeuvre, Vitry is very careful to construct both music and poetry in such a way as
to keep words together, thus avoiding what a contemporary calls a “vice” and sin against
Rhetoric—the division of indivisible words.49 It cannot be said that the texts of Cum statua/
Hugo make no provision for the hockets—the line lengths and rhyme schemes change for
the inal two taleae (at line 15 of the triplum and line 10 of the motetus), switching from
decasyllabic couplets to uneven tercets in the scheme a3a3b10c3c3b10, where the shorter lines
are set to hockets. But though the text takes account of the hockets, its musical setting
does not accommodate them. Rather than making opportunities for two- and three-syllable
words to remain whole, like they do in Vos/Gratissima (Example 5.7), Vitry has written the
hockets of Cum statua/Hugo as isolated notes in both voices, viciously forcing the threesyllable lines to be divided.
The result is nonsense. While any texted hocket has the potential for a certain level
of confusion, the two voices here are deliberately conlated to produce one by successive
49
See the discussion of Musicalis/Sciencie in Chapter Five.
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unisons (circled in Example 6.11). A further mingling is effected by frequent assonance
and alliteration between syllables from alternate voices (boxed in Example 6.11). This
treatment results in the improbable, even comedic intertexts “Stupeo et-et-e-qui-o-a-cum
in-im-vi-pi-dus” (mm. 108–14) and “perpere-pro-di-ce-ve-re-ro” (mm. 121–6). The
composer who is careful elsewhere in his oeuvre not to split words is here launting his division of indivisibles with purposefulness that begs for explanation.
Example 6.11: Assonance, alliteration, and pitch repetition in Cum statua/Hugo mm. 106–35
It is possible that the nonsensical syllables are meant to evoke a state of surprise or
indignation, illustrating “stupeo” (“I am astounded”), the last coherent word before the irst
hocket (mm 106–7). The inal two taleae could then be seen as a a text-driven, madrigalistic device where the composer, having named himself and charged his accuser, becomes
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stupeied and ceases to make sense.
But the hockets may have more profound implications relating to the motet’s broader
structure and meaning. If the motet’s form as a whole is in some inexact way representative
of the statue, then this symbolic correspondence must proceed from the head down. This we
know from the internal listing of elements in b1, which progresses from gold to mud, thus
aligning musical time with the vertical axis. Without worrying about the statue’s middle
divisions (and indeed Daniel does not worry too much about them), this would result in
some afinity between the end of the motet and the bottom of the statue. Can we read these
hockets as evocative of the statue’s hybrid feet?
Perhaps, if we remember that the inal kingdom is a divided one despite its best effort to unite two races into one. In Daniel’s explanation, “whereas thou sawest iron mixed
with miry clay, they shall mingle themselves with the seed of men: but they shall not cleave
one to another, even as iron is not mixed with clay.”50 This unsuccessful attempt at intermingling seems to be illustrated by the hockets. Two separate texts suddenly ill the same
range, often alternating on the same notes, and switching syllables which resemble each
other. But the result is not some new alloy which is stronger and more resilient. As iron and
clay do not mix, so these two texts combine not to create some clever intertext, but rather a
muddle of notes and syllables that fail to signify.
And there is a third viable reading of these unusual hockets. Rather than illustrating the attempted and futile intermingling of two incompatible materials, they may instead
evoke the fragmentation of the statue when the apocalyptic stone has struck its feet. The
poetic diminution of materials in b1 aligns the axis of time with the statue’s body, from the
50
Daniel 2:43.
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top down, but in doing so it also aligns performance time with the passing of human history,
since the statue’s parts signify cultural decline through the ages. As such the hockets may in
fact be a comment on the statue’s inal state—fragmented into pieces and scattered all over
the earth.51 I do not think that we need to choose between these interpretations. All three
readings are viable, and it is left to us to wonder whether the hockets are meant to evoke the
futile mingling of incompatibles, the breakdown of sense, or the end of everything.
* * *
However we interpret the inal hockets, a reading of Cum statua/Hugo as a whole
must allow a large role to Nebuchadnezar’s dream in shaping the motet, from its unprecedented hybrid tenor, to the sectional correspondences in the upper voices, to the unusual
conception of musical time hinted at by the section following “gradatim successive minor.”
But the motet does not make clear why the statue is like Hugo. Is it because Hugo, like the
statue, started out good but got worse? Does he, like the statue, stand on feet of clay and
face an imminent downfall? Or does the reference to the statue represent Vitry’s general
pessimism about human history, of which Hugo acts as a reminder? As it turns out, we can
learn more about the statue’s meaning for Vitry through a wider consideration of his oeuvre.
For Cum statua/Hugo is not alone in including Nebuchadnezzar’s dream. The texts of another motet, Phi millies/O creator, also refer to the this biblical story. And while the statue’s
presence in this work might look at irst sight like a passing reference, closer analysis reveals
that it is central to the work’s upper and lower-voice texts.
51
In light of this it is worth noting that the name Hugo is split in two during its irst appearance. Again, Vitry does not split words often, and this fragmentation of Hugo further aligns him with the fragmented statue.
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PHI MILLIES/O CREATOR/IACET GRANUM/QUAM SUFFLABIT
Although its music has not survived, the motet Phi millies/O creator/Iacet granum/
Quam sufflabit has come down to us as four texts labeled “Triplum,” “Motetus,” “Tenor,” and
“Contra” in a ifteenth-century Latin miscellany (for full texts and translations see Appendix 6c).52 The texts are attributed to attributed to “Meldensis episcopus Philippus de Vittriaco,” but even without the attribution it would be easy to see that this is a motet by Vitry;
the content of Phi millies/O creator is reminiscent of both In virtute/Decens and Cum statua/
Hugo (and to a lesser extent of Musicalis/Sciencie).53 The triplum text is an unrestrained
tirade criticizing its target with rhetorical force and emotional venom. The offending person is unnamed, but is clearly a poet or composer, since he dares to “write in the tongue
of the Franks, their glory, things that [he doesn’t] know how to express” and manages “to
vomit bellowing instead of song.”54 Like In virtute/Decens, Phi millies/O Creator references
the opening of Horace’s Ars poetica, claiming that the “monsters’ member” of a poet “has
not blushed to publicly present the chimerical song (“carmen chimericum”) which Horace
damns in his irst verses.”55 As a “promulgator of public lies,” the “sad brute” is also compared to Tantalus, who here plays the role of a fellow “chatterer.”56
But by far the most developed allusion in the motet is to the dream from Daniel 2.
52
For information on the source (F-Pn lat. 3343, fols. 71v–72), see Wathey, “The Motets of Philippe
de Vitry,” 148. The texts were irst discussed and edited in Pognon, “Du nouveau sur Philippe de Vitri,”
48–52. Pognon’s edition is reprinted in Vitry, Complete Works, 54.
53
These connections have yet to be explored, though Schrade invites us to compare the triplum of Phi
millies/O creator with the motetus and triplum of Cum statua/Hugo, ibid.
54
Triplum ll. 2–4.
55
Triplum ll. 1, 6–8. The reference, by author and line, to the opening of the Ars poetica, followed four
lines later by one to the statue of Nebuchadnezzar strengthens the attribution of In virtute/Decens to Vitry.
56
Triplum ll. 1, 11.
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The explicit reference is in lines 12–14:
et garriens velut Tantalides
tuos Nabugodonozorides
egre credis non posse cadere
et oppressum numquam resurgere.”
[and chattering like a Tantalus you hardly believe that it is possible for your
Nebuchadnezzar’s [statue] to fall and, crushed, never to rise up again.]
“Tuos Nabugodonozorides” is ambiguous in that it links the statue both with the
poet, and with England, which Vitry accuses him of championing. The former connection
is made through Tantalus, who, as part of his punishment, had a stone suspended above his
head and ever threatening to fall on him. If the poet chatters like Tantalus, then he is the
statue whom the rock will strike. But there are also political implications to “Tuos Nabugodonozorides” which is brought out by the rest of the triplum text.
While the explicit reference to the statue seems to end in line 13, the image in fact
controls the following eight lines of the triplum. We have seen that the reference to Nebuchadnezzar in Cum statua/Hugo is followed by a listing of the statue’s metals. In Phi millies/O
creator we see instead the succession of empires which those metals were thought to represent. These are listed as a series of conquests, emphasizing the transience of all empires.
The conceited Belshazzar (a king of Babylon, represented by gold) is conquered by Cyrus
(the founder of the Persian monarchy, represented by silver).57 The fall of Greece, identiied
with bronze, is represented by the poetic evocation of its crumbling walls: “those things fell
which Amphion built.”58 Finally, the most famous fallen empire and the one classed with
57
Triplum l. 16.
58
Triplum l. 17. The following three lines seem to depart from the scheme since they talk of England’s own
series of conquests (“ad Troiquos transiit Albion/post oppressa diris Saxonibus/post a Danis obtenta trucibus”). Legend had it that the survivors of Troy founded England, hence the mention of the fall of Greece
leads to this “aside” from the historical scheme (though of course it is very pertinent to the motet’s larger,
English-bashing point). After naming England’s successive conquerors (the Trojans, the Saxons, and then
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iron is alluded to: “Think yourself of the city, that conquered the world, which fell to the
conquering Germans!”59 This mention of the Germans introduces another empire to the
list, probably the Holy Roman Empire under Otto I. Even Rome fell, and so will England,
whose very name Vitry attempts to silence at the end of his text.
The triplum texts “Cum statua Nabugodonasor” and “Phi millies” thus emerge as
similarly constructed, in that both mention Nebuchadnezzar’s statue and go on to discuss
its layers: the former in materials; the latter in empires. The motetus texts are more different in that Hugo forms the focus of one, while the other is a prayer. But it is a prayer with
teeth, and one which allows Philippe to identify himself as he did in Cum statua/Hugo:
O creator Deus pulcherrimi...
ora claudas isti fantastico
adversus quem Philipus dimico,
ne polluto ledatur labio
regnum partum Francorum gladio,
O God maker most noble... close up the mouth of that false visionary against
whom I, Philippe, ight, lest the kingdom of the French fathers be injured by
the infected sword [of his] lips.
Vitry’s rhetoric in signaling his authorship is reminiscent of Cum statua/Hugo, and even
the placement is similar: “hec concino Philipus publice” comes in line 14 of a twenty-line
triplum; “adversus quem Philipus dimico” in line 16 of a twenty-line motetus.
A further link between the two motets comes from their use of tenor material. As
we saw, the tenor of Cum statua/Hugo, takes its incipit, “magister invidiae,” from a rhymed
ofice for St. Benedict. For Phi millies, only the tenor text survives, but it suggests that Phi
millies too might have taken some or all of its tenor from a late-medieval rhyming ofice.
the Danes) the triplum returns to Rome, next on the list of empires thought to be symbolized by the statue.
On the legend of England as Trojan, see Ingledew, “The Book of Troy and the Genealogical Construction
of History.” I am grateful to Steven Rozenski for discussing this question with me.
59
Triplum ll. 21–3.
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The manuscript which transmits the texts for Phi millies assigns one decasyllabic line to the
tenor and another to the contratenor. Pognon, who irst edited the text, observed that the
texts of tenor and contra form a rhyming couplet, matched in meter and making grammatical sense:60
T: Jacet granum oppressum palea
C: Quam suflabit Francus ab area.
[T: The grain lies smothered by chaff
C: Which the Frenchman will blow from the threshing-loor.]61
Pognon was surprised by the texted contratenor and unable to ind a liturgical source for the
tenor, and Schrade followed him in his commentary to PMFC, commenting that “the verse
of the Tenor seems to indicate that Philippe de Vitry composed the melody of the Tenor;
i.e. he did not draw upon borrowed material.”62
The assumption that metered verse precludes a chant identiication must be revised
in light of increased recent attention to late medieval rhymed ofices. Indeed, Denis Stevens
has identiied Phi millies as one of two medieval motets to use material from Jacet granum,
the ifth matins responsory for St. Thomas of Canterbury.63 The tenor text, “Jacet granum
60
Pognon, “Du nouveau sur Philippe de Vitri,” 49.
61
Trans. Stevens, Music in Honor of St. Thomas, 332.
62
“Les musicologues trouveront certainement surprenant que le contratenor comporte un texte, et
s’etonneront de ne pouvoir reconnaitre dans le tenor les paroles d’aucun chant preexistant, mais cette question dépasserait le cadre de cette Revue et les bornes de ma competence, et je me contente de donner le texte
du motet tel qu’il est,” Pognon, “Du nouveau sur Philippe de Vitry,” 49n1. Schrade, Commentary to Volume
1, 119–21. The use of a texted contratenor may not be unique to this motet: a (now lost) four-part version
of Colla/Bona seems also to have had a texted contratenor—Wathey, “The Motets of Philippe de Vitry,” 143.
63
St. Thomas of Canterbury was canonized in 1173 and this ofice probably dates from the later 12th
century. The text of the responsory in question is edited in Dreves and Blume, Analecta hymnica medii aevi
13:239. Hughes comments on the musical style of the chants and on their wide dispersion on the continent
and in England in “Chants in the Rhymed Ofice,” 185, 192–6. Of the two other polyphonic works built
on Jacet granum one is a four-part motet surviving in an English source from c. 1320, Oxford, New College
MS 362. Januam quam clauserat/Jacinctus in saltibus/’Quartus cantus’/Jacet granum uses the entire respond (111
notes), sung once, as a tenor. See Harrison, “Ars nova in England,” 70–1 and Stevens, “Music in Honor of
St. Thomas,” 328–31. There is also a polyphonic responsory from the Notre Dame school which sets only
321
oppressum palea” quotes the irst line of the responsory verbatim, strongly suggesting that
the color of the motet was taken at least in part from this chant:64
R: Jacet granum oppressum palea,
Justus caesus pravorum framea:
Caelum domo commutans lutea.
V: Cadit custos vitis in vinea,
Dux in castris, cultor in area:
R: Caelum domo commutans lutea.
[The grain lies smothered by chaff,
A good man lies slain by the lance of wicked men:
Exchanging heaven for a lowly dwelling-place.
The keeper of the vine falls in the vineyard,
The leader falls in camp, the laborer on the ield:
Exchanging heaven for a lowly dwelling-place.]65
The contratenor text, on the other hand, is newly composed in purposeful opposition to the source. The original message of the responsory (and much of the rest of the St.
Thomas liturgy) is that of the shepherd giving his life for the sheep. The responsory is a list
of good things sacriiced to worse: the grain to the chaff, or the vintner to a hostile vineyard,
or the laborer to his ield. But the contratenor’s completion of the couplet changes the message to a “food chain” scenario: The grain is smothered by the chaff, and the chaff will fall
to the French. Such a continuation of the rhyme makes the tenor text a kind of pun, while
remaining rooted in the pro-French sentiments of the motet and echoing the triplum text’s
repeated assertions that all great empires will fall.66 The contratenor’s half of the couplet
“Jacet” surviving in Manuscript F; see Haggh and Huglo, “Magnus Liber—Maius minus,” 208–9.
64
Clark cites two “tenors with liturgical texts that do not use the corresponding melody,” both in Chantilly;
“Concordare cum materia,” 161.
65
Trans. Stevens, “Music in Honor of St. Thomas,” 324.
66
I think that we should not read too much into Vitry’s use of a chant from the ofice of St. Thomas of
Canterbury in this motet. The saint’s ofice was celebrated all over Europe, and while his Englishness can
align with the England that is the target of the motet, it would perhaps be going too far to suggest that the
upper voices direct their tirade at him, or that the fall of a popular English saint should stand for England’s
ultimate fall as predicted in the triplum. Much more likely, the tenor here has been chosen for its text,
and probably some musical characteristics. The re-reading of the tenor prompted by the contratenor’s text
322
also links the lower voices with the idea of Nebuchanezzar’s statue, since its threat that “the
Frenchman will blow [the chaff] from the threshing-loor” echoes Daniel’s description of
the statue’s broken pieces which “became like the chaff of the summer threshing-loors; and
the wind carried them away.”67 In an elegant move, the composer has cast the Frenchman
in the lattering role of the wind, and this intertextual reference underscores the extent to
which here, as in Cum statua/Hugo, Nebuchadnezzar’s statue is central to understanding the
motet.
It is frustrating that we cannot know whether Phi millies/O creator and Cum statua/
Hugo contained musical parallels along with these textual ones. Very likely one motet borrowed structural devices or textures from the other. Given its extended scope, the incorporation of a countertenor, and the political climate it evokes, Phi millies/O creator seems to
be the later of the two. The likeliness of this chronology is strengthened when we consider
its manuscript context. The ifteenth-century miscellany in which the motet’s texts survive
also contains a series of six French Ballades recording an argumentative exchange between
Philippe de Vitry, fellow French poet Jean Campion, and Jean de le Mote, employed at the
time of the exchange at Edward III’s court.68 Campion and Vitry accuse le Mote of crimes
both political and poetic: at a time of peak hostility between England and France they call
him a traitor for serving the English court and a fool for his excessive and irregular use
of classical exempla. In his defense, le Mote pleads that he should not be criticized for his
further discourages me from looking for a connection between St. Thomas of Canterbury and the motet’s
message.
67
Daniel 2:35.
68
Campion was a chaplain at Notre-Dame in Tournai whose interest in music is attested by his receipt in
1357 of rolls of motets and songs. See Wilkins, “Music and Poetry at Court,” 191–2.
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defection from France to England since he is not a native Frenchman.69 He thus does not
deserve such censure, and it is here that the plea with which I began the chapter comes in:
“Ne fais de moy Hugo s’en Albion suis.” Le Mote feels it unfair that Vitry should treat him
like a personal enemy just because he, Jean, is in England. Phi millies/O creator follows some
folios later in the manuscript, and its clear relation to this debate makes it all but inevitable
that that Vitry’s target in the motet is le Mote. The poet at fault may not be French, the
triplum tacitly concedes, but he still writes in that language which is France’s glory, using
it to express things he does not understand. The other charge against le Mote—that he is
sloppy and excessive with his allusions—helps to explain the motet’s unusually long roster:
teasingly, Vitry brings in Horace, Tantalus, Nebuchadnezzar, Cyrus, Belshazzar, and Amphion. The thematic and structural similarities I have outlined between Cum statua/Hugo
and the texts of Phi millies/O creator add an interesting twist to this exchange. In many ways
the later motet seems to be a variation on the former one, from which it borrows the image
of the statue, the authorial signature in the motetus, and perhaps an unusual approach to
lower-voice construction. If the target of Phi millies/O creator is indeed Jean de le Mote, then
it seems that his plea fell on deaf ears: Philippe has indeed made another Hugo of him.
NEBUCHADNEZZAR’S STATUE IN MACHAUT’S COMPLAINTE
One other appearance of Nebuchadnezzar’s statue in fourteenth-century music remains to be accounted for, and this in a song rather than a motet. The context is Machaut’s
Remède de Fortune, a narrative dit with lyric insertions that is already present in the earliest
69
Le Mote was from Hainault or Ghent hence the reply “Ne je ne sui point de la nacion/De terre en Grec
Gaulle de Dieu amee” (Nor do I belong at all to the nation of the land in Greek called Gaul, loved by God),
“La reponse,” ll. 9–10, ed. and trans. Dikestra, “The Poetic Exchange,” 509–10.
324
redaction of his complete works.70 About a quarter of the way through the poem, the poetnarrator inds himself in a secluded garden, contrasting his previously happy state with his
current despondence. While in this mood, he decides “to compose about Fortune and my
sorrows, my thoughts and my griefs, a piece called a complainte, in which there would be
many rhymes and a sad subject.”71 The result is a 36-strophe, 576-line poem which begins
Tels rit au main qui au soir pleure (He laughs in the morning who weeps in the evening). Celebrated within Machaut’s oeuvre for its poetic virtuosity and treatment of Fortune in terms
dependent on Boethian tradition as well as courtly traditions, the complainte is also famous
for the image with which it opens in its earliest source—a double panel illustration in which
the lover sits on top in a walled garden writing, while in the bottom frame Fortune turns her
wheel using a series of gears (see Figure 4.3, above).72
But this striking image of Fortune is unique to Manuscript C. In the three other illustrated sources of the Remède the only image which accompanies Tels rit au main is one of
Nebuchadnezzar’s dream statue (see Figure 6.3). And in Manuscript C as well, a depiction
of the statue supplements the more famous one of Fortune.73 This may be a surprise given
the complainte’s subject, but as we shall see the statue plays an important structuring role in
70
The Remède is present in MS C, and is cited in the Conford d’ami which can be dated to 1357. This occurrence of Nebuchadnezzar’s statue may thus be earlier than, later than, or contemporaneous with Vitry’s use
of the symbol. On the dating of Cum statua/Hugo, see note 5 in this chapter. On the dating of the Remède
and Confort, see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 189–91, 213, 218–9
71
“Et en ce penser ou j’estoie/Je m’avisai que je feroie/De Fortune et de mes doulours,/De mes pensers et
de mes plours,/.I. dit qu’on appelle complainte,/Ou il averoit rime mainte,/Qui seroit de tristre matiere” (ll.
897–904). This and all future citations from Remède refer to Machaut, Le jugement du roy de Behaigne and
Remède de Fortune, trans. Wimsatt and Kibler, and will be cited by line in the text.
72
For bibliography on Tels rit au main, see Earp, Guillame de Machaut, pp. 380–1. On the double-panel
illumination see especially Huot, From Song to Book, 252, Nelson, “Mechanical Wheels of Fortune,” 227,
and Chapter 3, above.
73
Manuscript C is the only source to illustrate the complainte with a program of ive miniatures; see Earp,
Guillaume de Machaut, 139–40, 153.
325
the poem and provides a novel framework for poetic treatment of the goddess.
Figure 6.3: Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream in Machaut MS J (fol. 53)
Recent scholarship on the complainte as genre has stressed its lexibility, manifest
in stanzas that are thematically linked but formally separate.74 The dificult symmetrical
rhyme scheme a8a8a8b4a8a8a8b4|b8b8b8a4b8b8b8a4 gives each sixteen-line stanza a closed internal structure that is further reinforced by the non-repetition of rhymes across strophes.
Hence Machaut’s promise of “many rhymes”: the 36 stanzas of Tels rit au main contain 72
unique rhymes. However, these formally distinct units are connected by a mournful theme
74
Margolis, “Clerkliness and Courtliness,” 137–8, Ferrand, “Aux frontières de l’écriture,” 105–8, Deschaux, “Le lai et la complainte,” 77–83.
326
that is developed over the course of the poem. Complaintes are sometimes mini dits, and
Machaut and Rotebeuf before him equated the terms, as in the example cited above, where
Machaut promises us “un dit qu’on appelle complainte.”75 As micro-dits, complaintes can exhibit their own internal structures and narrative shifts, and can even, as I shall argue, hint
at lyric interpolation.
Tels rit au main is divided neatly into two halves by a shift in poetic voice: in strophes
1–18, the narrator speaks in what Brownlee has called a “clerkly didactic tone,” marked
by a proverbial opening, biblical paraphrase, citation of Boethius by name, and generally
moralizing tone (“I don’t consider someone very clever who...”).76 At the start of stanza 19,
however, “je” suddenly morphs into the irst person lover-protagonist: “Fortune has treated
me, I believe, just as I’ve told you here; for once I abounded in every sort of joy, but now…
all the good I had is left behind.”77
This split is the starkest structural break in the complainte, but the work’s irst half
is further subdivided by shifts in voice and subject. The opening strophes are the most frequently discussed, since they are the ones underlaid to the notation in all editions of the
piece.78 Here, the poet describes Fortune’s actions—the turning of her wheel—and warns
that she can never be trusted because she is fundamentally false. After a long tirade the
poem seems to wind down in Stanza 6, summarizing (or repeating—it’s hard to make the
75
Ferrand, “Aux frontières de l’écriture,” 102–6.
76
L. 1097. See Brownlee, “Guillaume de Machaut’s Remède de Fortune,” 5–6.
77
“Einsi m’a fait, ce m’est avis,/Fortune que ei vous devis;/Car je souloie estre assevis/De toute joye,/Or m’a
d’un seul tour si bas mis/Qu’en grief plour est mué mon ris,/Et que tous li biens est remis/ Qu’avoir souloie,”
ll. 1193–1200. This phrase also has the function of equating the two contrasting voices, since “m’a fait”
refers to the lover, while “vous devis” implies the clerkly poet who has been speaking up to this point.
78
For editions, see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 380 and Example 4.3 above, which sets the irst verse.
327
distinction here) Fortune’s contrary actions and seemingly ending: “She never keeps her
promises and, to conclude (pour conclure), she’s always trying to knock you down” (998–
1000).
It is at this point that Nebuchadnezzar’s story enters Machaut’s complainte, and it
seems to do so almost as an interpolated lyric, set off from what came before by “pour conclure” and introduced by its own illustration. There is also an apparent topical rift: Stanza
7 is the irst in the poem that does not mention Fortune by name or pronoun. Instead, we
ind the story of Daniel 2 molded here into the poetic form of the complainte:
1005
1010
1015
Nabugodonosor igure
Qu’il vit en songe une estature
Grande et haute, qui la igure
Horrible avoit,
Et la teste d’or riche et pure,
Les bras, le pis d’argenteiire,
Ventre, cuisses de sa faiture
D’arain portoit,
Jambes de fer sus qu’elle estoit,
Des piez l’une part fer estoit,
L’autre terre. Et encor veoit
Que d’aventure
D’une pierre sans main venoit
Qui parmi les piez la feroit,
Si qu’en pourre l’acraventoit
Et en ordure.
Nebuchadnezzar relates
that in a dream he saw a statue,
large and tall, with a
hideous face,
its head of rich, ine gold,
its arms and chest of silverwork,
its belly and thighs were made
of bronze;
it was standing on legs of iron,
its feet were part iron and
part earthenware. And then he saw
that by chance
a stone, untouched by any hand,
came down and struck its feet,
and shattered it to dust
and refuse.
Radically different in theme from the complainte’s irst six stanzas, these lines also
seem to break the rules by repeating a rhyme. The a rhyme “-ure,” which permeates the irst
half of Stanza 7, recalls “–eure” in the complante’s irst (and therefore most memorable)
strophe.79 In performance, the melodic setting would add to this similarity (stanza seven
79
The intervening a rhymes are -able, -oing, -une, -uis, and -ique. The closest A-rhyme to -eure/-ure from
later in the work is -euse in stanzas 15 and 16, which share a rhyme scheme and the pervasive use of “C’est”
at the beginning of lines, clearly acting as a single poetic unit and the work’s climax. For a full list of rhymes
328
is shown in Example 6.12).80 Given this afinity between the irst and seventh stanzas (an
afinity that is not in keeping with the poetic rules of the complainte) and the radical change
in theme, the complainte may seem momentarily to have ended and given way to an interpolation (an interpolation within an interpolation—the mind boggles).
Example 6.12: Tels rit au main qui au soir pleure, Verse 781
in the complainte, see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 380.
80
Though the repetition of melody in strophic song in some sense acts to equate all stanzas, the added
similarity caused by a prominent rhyme might well recall the irst stanza during the seventh.
81
As transmitted in Manuscript C, fol. 30.
329
But the rift is temporary. The connection between the statue and what came before is explicitly laid out in Stanza 8, where the narrator equates Nebuchadnezzar’s dream
with Fortune herself: “L’estature que ci pourpose / Estre ne me semble autre chose / Que
Fortune.”82 During this and the following four stanzas, the comparison is laid out in detail,
assigning the statue’s metals in turn to Fortune’s body. “Her head, in which all wealth is enclosed, is gold, if I dare say so, or so it seems to the fools she latters,” “her arms and chest
are silver, but it’s only an illusion,” “her belly and thighs are bronze,” and although “she’s set
on legs of iron... it’s a covering or deception, for her feet are of mud, slippery and soft.”83
This anatomy of Fortune as statue takes up the central six stanzas of the complainte’s irst
half.
The inal six stanzas serve to reconcile the interpolation of Fortune-as-statue with
more traditional discourse surrounding the goddess. Stanza 13 neatly ties in the statue and
the Fortune on a symbolic level with a discussion of weak foundations: “I don’t consider
someone very clever,” the clerkly narrator preaches, “who expects to build a tall structure
on a worthless foundation, for when he is in the midst of construction the foundation fails,
which causes the whole ediice to tumble and fall” (1099–1104). A well-known parallel is
implicit, since according to the Roman de la Rose Fortune herself has built a house on such
a foundation: “On high, at the top of [a] mountain, on the slope, not on the plateau, always
threatening ruin and ready to accept a fall, the house of Fortune stands aslant.”84
This house is split in every way—part of it mounts upward, the rest slopes down; half
is decorated with brilliant stones, the rest has walls made of mud. As we saw in Chapter 3,
82
“The statue he presents here seems to me to be none other than Fortune,” ll. 1017–9.
83
Ll. 1021–3, 1049–50, 1065, 1081, 1086–8.
84
Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, 121.
330
the split nature of her surroundings infests Fortune’s own body. Stanza 14 of the complainte
details this rift between Fortune’s right side and her left, which is the traditional alternative
to Machaut’s new scheme of splitting her horizontally into layers::
her right side is soft, the other sharp;
her right holds lowers, leaves, and fruit,
the other is empty, sterile, and void
of earthly goods.
The right shines brightly,
the other resembles darkest night,
and she’s split between
gold and excrement (121–8).
This more familiar treatment of Fortune’s body takes on new meaning now, following the
comparison with the statue. Machaut seems to be tacitly arguing here that his new idea—
that the statue is Fortune—inds support in old conventions. The mention of gold—here
used simply as a superlative substance to be contrasted with feces—is now reminiscent of
the statue’s head. The two following stanzas, notable for their use of anaphora, oxymoron,
antithesis, and paradox, serve as a rhetorical climax to the complainte’s irst half while placing Fortune’s opposite qualities in dramatic relief (1129–60).
These different ways of splitting Fortune are reconciled in the penultimate stanza
of the complainte’s clerkly half. Here, a description which calls the statue to mind because of
its direction (head-to foot) also incorporates elements of a right-left divide. The discussion
of Fortune’s feet especially resonates with the idea of weak foundations evoked by Nebuchadnezzar’s dream:
Her head is half bald;
with one eye she laughs, and with the other weeps;
one cheek has the color of life,
the other is like death;
if one of her hands is your friend,
the other will be your mortal enemy;
331
one foot is straight, the other lame;
she twists the straight (1161–7).
After one further stanza in which the narrator reminds us that Fortune is above the courts
and above those popes and kings whom she elevates, the clerkly half of the poem concludes.
The image of Nebuchadnezzar’s statue is centrally and carefully placed in the complainte. The irst six stanzas present a traditional view of Fortune, describe her turning
wheel, and provide the expected warnings, especially that of Boethius (982–4). Then the
statue makes its appearance in Stanza 7, and its parts are analogized to Fortune’s body in
stanzas 8–12. In the inal third of the clerkly the weak foundations of Fortune’s house are
compared to the statue’s unstable feet, and her body is characterized by a mix of the traditional vertical split and Machaut’s new horizontal scheme.85
An appreciation of the statue’s centrality—both narrative and structural—in the
complainte’s irst half helps to explain the emphasis, at irst puzzling, placed on it by the ileluminators under Machaut’s direction. The statue is able to represent the complainte alone
in Manuscripts A, J, and Pm because the integration of the biblical account of the King’s
dream with classical and medieval descriptions of Fortune constitutes the main event of the
85
Machaut comments wryly on the length of his treatment of the statue in the Remede when he returns
to the theme of Daniel in the Confort d’ami. Though he introduces the subject of the dream which Daniel
interpreted after all others in the kingdom had failed to do so, the Confort narrator neatly sidesteps that
dream’s content, explaining that he does not “intend to treat the dream which was faithfully interpreted,
since it would be too long a subject, whoever would rhyme it” (“Mais ne vueil pas dire le songe/Qui fu exposez sans mansonge/Car trop longue chose seroit/Qui en rime le metteroit”), ll. 446–50. But the Confort
cites the Remede by name in l. 2248 and must therefore be the later poem; see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut,
191, 218–9. The reference to the lengthy task that awaits “whoever would rhyme it” is therefore tongue-incheek. The mention of rhyme in particular may evoke the dificulties of the complainte as a form in which no
rhyme is used in more than one stanza. This statement also attests to Machaut’s desire to avoid redundancy
across dits.
332
poem’s clerkly section.86
In terms of the broader line of inquiry I am conducting here, it is interesting to
see Machaut explicitly linking Fortune and the statue. The complainte hints at the root of
his interest in both subjects: they are allegories of opposition and disjunction. This link
strongly suggests that a consideration of this goddess as a hybrid, piecemeal creature may
have useful analytical implications. And indeed, as we saw in Chapter 3, musical treatments
of Fortune in motets emphasize her disjunct and contradictory nature using isorhythmic
and textural tools.
The statue’s importance in the complainte also raises broader questions when viewed
in tandem with our analysis of Cum statua/Hugo. On the one hand, two works in two different genres by two well-known composers both treating the same subject hardly constitute a
trend—or rather, it would be dificult to evaluate chronology or inluence in a case where
the two works in question are so different from each other. On the other hand, the topic of
the statue is an unusual one, and both Vitry and Machaut use it in unexpected places and
ways—a point that becomes apparent only when we consider the cultural function of the
86
Perhaps as a response to the puzzling emphasis given to Nebuchadnezzar’s dream by illuminators, Sylvia
Huot has suggested that although the iconography of the depictions in Manuscripts C and J is based on the
bible narrative, “in its present context of courtly lyricism, it additionally recalls the miniature at the head of
so many manuscripts of the Rose: the dreamer asleep in bed, with the menacing igure of Dangier standing
beside him,” From Song to Book, 258. This visual parallel equates the dreaming Nebuchadnezzar with the
lover-dreamer of the Rose, and thus the irst-person narrator of the complainte (l’amant) with Jean de Meun.
Such an interpretation of the image is of course possible, but it precludes the possibility of an extant pictorial tradition for Nebuchadnezzar’s statue that might have been stable enough to refer to itself, as opposed to
outward. In fact, as Michael Camille notes, the image was “a favorite subject in medieval bible iconography”
(The Gothic Idol, 281), and Joel Freddell suggests that “this iconographic form may have been drawn from
the same stock of conventions used for images of Nebuchadnezzar in illustrated Bibles; one such Bible was
produced for Jean le Bon by the illuminator who did the miniatures for the Remède in [Manuscript C]”;
“Reading the Dream Miniature,” 71. Attesting to the relative antiquity of the iconography in question we
can cite the twelfth-century Lambeth Bible (reproduced in Camille, The Gothic Idol, 282), the 1220 facade
of the cathedral in Laon, and the story’s depiction in the 1234 Toledo Bible Moralizé reproduced in Figure
6.1 above.
333
statue more broadly. While the genres are different, the extent to which the statue comes to
permeate the poetry of both the motet and complainte is remarkable.
The link provided between the statue and Fortune also allows us to compare Vitry’s
treatments of Nebuchadnezzar and Machaut’s treatments of Fortune in motets (See Chapter 3). In this sense the complainte its into an emerging cloud of ideas with which Vitry
and Machaut seem to have engaged in distinct but related ways (see Figure 6.4). Fortune
and Nebuchadnezzar’s dream mean something similar to Machaut, just as the link between
the chimera and the statue made explicit in Phi millies/O creator conirms that Vitry saw a
connection between those two—a connection borne out in similarities of musical structure
and theme between In virtute/Decens and Cum statua/Hugo. And segmentation—whether
isorhythmic or textural—characterizes many of the works involved.
Figure 6.4: Ideas and Devices connecting several works discussed in this study
334
It is certainly possible that these connections between works of different genres by
two different composers are a function of shared intellectual climate. After all, the statue
is a biblical story and therefore available to any thinker at any time. On the other hand,
the similarities with which Nebuchadnezzar’s dream functions poetically in Machaut’s complainte and musically in Vitry’s motet(s) might be a result of possibilities inherent in musical
depiction, and thus more connected to a music-making mind-set. In order to understand
to what extent this is a musical phenomenon, it will be necessary to compare Vitry’s and
Machaut’s uses of the image with those of their contemporaries.
NEBUCHADNEZZAR’S STATUES
A cultural history of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of precious metals has yet to be written. Most studies of the icon have come from the direction of either Dante or Gower studies, since the former poet uses a modiied version of it in Canto 14 of the Inferno, and
the latter structures the prologue of his Confessio amantis around the dream’s symbolism.
But these two discussions have taken place in isolation, using classical texts, the bible, and
early medieval commentary to explore the statue’s meaning within each work.87 The idea
that there is anything like a cultural “presence” for this colorful but elusive symbol beyond
its place in the bible has not been put forward. But although the statue is infrequently
referenced in secular literature when compared to other parts of the book of Daniel and
more famous bible stories, Nebuchadnezzar’s irst dream was certainly never entirely absent
from medieval intellectual life.88 In the fourteenth century, we ind the statue in contexts
87
Dante’s interpretation of the symbol diverges markedly from Gower’s and is unlikely to be an inluence.
James M. Dean’s The World Grown Old comes closest to putting the statue in broader context, but his concern
is still primarily with Dante and Gower, who occupy separate chapters.
88
More popular are the feast at which Belshazzar sees the writing on the wall (Daniel 5) or the story of
Daniel in the lions’ den (Daniel 6).
335
as diverse as hagiography, amorous dits, pilgrimage of life poems, and dream allegories,
not to mention the motet texts discussed above. And these poetic treatments diverge from
earlier biblical commentary in important and often surprising ways. Sketching—however
briely—the statue’s medieval life will thus help us to situate Machaut’s and Vitry’s readings of the story, showing to what extent their treatments of the theme are consistent with,
derivative from, or perhaps even formative of contemporary intellectual trends and modes
of depiction.
* * *
The biblical story of Nebuchadnezzar’s irst dream is rich, and various elements of it
have been drawn on at different times, depending on the needs and aims of its readers. The
commentary tradition, beginning with Jerome’s fourth-century Commentario in Danielem,
focused on a Christian interpretation of the dream.89 Jerome is not interested in the statue
as such—his commentary skips the dream’s initial telling and moves directly from verse 32
to verse 38, “thou art the head of gold.”90 As noted above in the discussion of Phi millies/O
creator, he interprets the gold, silver, bronze, and iron parts of the statue as the Babylonian,
Medo-Persian, Alexandrian, and Roman empires. As a result the statue’s downfall becomes
Christ’s irst coming:
However, at the inal period of all these empires of gold and silver and bronze
and iron, a rock (namely, the Lord and Savior) was cut off without hands,
that is, without copulation or human seed and by birth from a virgin’s womb;
and after all the empires had been crushed, He became a great mountain and
illed the whole earth.
Thus began a long medieval tradition of putting emphasis on the conclusion of the
89
Jerome, “Commentariorum in Danielem prophetam,” Patrologia Latina 25:491–584. The following citations are to the English translation in Archer, Jerome’s commentary on Daniel.
90
Ibid., 32.
336
dream: the apocalyptic idea of the stone which struck the feet of the statue illing the world
as a mountain. We can see this idea explicitly illustrated in copies of the Beatus of Liébana’s
8th-century commentary on the Apocalypse, which was often transmitted together with
Jerome’s commentary.91 Here the statue receives two strikingly similar illustrations (Figure 6.5). First it stands with the stone at its feet. To the right, the mountain from which
the stone was carved is depicted, its space clearly labeled. Below, that same mountain (still
missing its original stone) has grown to ill in what is clearly a representation of the world
in the so-called T-O style.92 In the second depiction of the story, the statue has been cut
away, but it seems to be in pieces; the “before” and “after” mountains still dominate the page.
Figure 6.5: Saint-Sever Beatus (12th c.)93
91
The work was composed in Spain in 784, and revised in 784 and 786. It takes part of its pictorial program, including the depictions of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, from illustrated copies of Jerome’s commentary
on the book of Daniel; see Steinhauser, “Narrative and Illumination in the Beatus Apocalypse,” 185–90.
92
See Edson and Savage-Smith, Medieval Views of the Cosmos, 50–1.
93
BN ms lat. 8878, fols. 51v (left) and 220(right).
337
The emphasis placed on the stone and the mountain hint at a careful illuminator
whose literal approach seems at odds with his depiction of the statue as entirely golden. But
the emphasis is theological: the apocalypse, not the succession of kingdoms leading up to it,
was Beatus’s focus, and the image of a mountain coming to ill the whole world is terrifying
and evocative enough to be worth depicting in detail.
The lasting impact of Jerome’s identiication of Christ with the “Lapis abscisus de
monte sine manibus” is illustrated in Honorius of Autun’s popular Speculum Ecclesiae, a collection of twelfth-century sermons.94 This reading appears in the Aquitanian versus Resonemus hoc natali and De monte lapis scinditur (from c. 1100 and 1200, respectively).”95 In
the irst of these the stone carved from the mountain is supplemented with the sympathetic idea of the “lapis angularis”—a cornerstone safe to build on—from Isaiah 28:16.96
Sometimes the two stones are conlated, as in some copies of the so-called Biblia pauperum, where the nativity is glossed with the words “lapis angularis sine manibus abscisus de
monte.”97 This complex of ideas, which puts more emphasis on the end of the dream and
94
“Lapis autem abscisus de monte sine manibus praecidentium est Christus, natus de Virgine sine manibus
amplectentium,” Honorius, “Speculum Ecclesiae,” 905. Trans. in Raby, The History of Christian-Latin Poetry,
374. For an abridged English summary of this sermon, see Male, The Gothic Image, 148–9.
95
Rachel Golden Carlson has argued that the earlier setting focuses on Christ as the stone, while the later,
in accordance with a growing Marian cult, pictures Mary as the mountain; “Two Paths to Daniel’s Mountain,” 620–46.
96
The new testament identiies Christ as the cornerstone in Acts 4:11 and 1 Peter 2:6–8. This connection
is made explicit in the St. Martial versus Resonemus hoc natali: “the stone not cut by hand, which Daniel sees,
which Gabriel predicted would come. He is our cornestone” (lapis manu non precisus/quem videt Daniel/
quem venturum predixit Gabriel/Hic est noster angularis), ed. and trans. Carlson, “Two Paths to Daniel’s
Mountain,” 629. This cornerstone is in turn linked with the stone rejected by the builders, the “caput anguli”
of Ps. 118:22. Jesus quotes the latter in Mark 12:10.
97
See, for example, the irst plate reproduced in the late ifteenth-century Biblia pauperum; Faksimileausgabe
des vierzigblättrigen Armenbibel-Blockbuches in der Bibliothek der Erzdiözese Esztergom (Hanau/Main, W. Dausien: [1967]). See also BAV Codex palatinus latinus 871, reproduced in Christoph Wetzel, ed., Armenbibel:
die Bilderhandschrift des Codex Palatinus latinus 871 im Besitz der Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (Stuttgart:
Belser, c1996), fol. 4.
338
reads it in a Christological and Marian way, constitutes one important way of interpreting
the dream which would have been familiar to authors both clerical and lay.
Another reading of the biblical story emphasized its description of dream interpretation. As Antonina Harbus has written, “Nebuchadnezzar’s dreams and Daniel’s prophetic
abilities held a fascination for medieval people,” and Somniale Danielis was the name given
to popular alphabetic dream-interpretation handbooks.98 But sometimes the dreams were
less important than their interpretation: the author of the Old English Daniel, for example,
entirely omits mention of the statue, “summarizing the general import of the dream rather
than reporting its images.”99 To the Daniel-poet, the dream signiies “how the world would
be made wondrously to a new creation unlike in previous ages.”100 The statue, in a sense, is
a moot point.
These Christological, Marian, and dream-centered interpretations continued to be
inluential over the course of the middle ages. But two scholastic treatises on Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of precious metals hint at a new direction, and one which will have more bearing
on fourteenth-century literary occurrences of the statue.
The most original treatment of the topic is De somnio regis Nabuchodonosor by the
Premonstratensian theologian Philip of Harveng (d. c. 1182).101 Though he begins with
the unquestioned assertion that the stone is Christ, he goes on to consider the igure that
the stone hit. This is an unusual enough move that Philip seems to feel the need to defend
98
“Nebuchadnezzar’s Dreams,” 489.
99
Ibid., 493. The date of the poem is uncertain, but often given as c. 700 or earlier. It survives in a single
source from c. 1000: Oxford, Bodleian Library Junius 11. See Remley, Old English Biblical Verse, 1–2.
100
Harbus, “Nebuchadnezzar’s Dreams,” 493.
101
All further citations are to the edition in Patrologia Latina 203:585–92.
339
it, explaining its importance both in reference to the stone and to the sanctity suggested by
the vision’s strangeness: “But now let us see what this statue means, which the stone hit and
shattered, for so remarkable a dream, and so unusual a vision, would not have been revealed
to the king of Babylon except under the weight of a great blessing.”102
Philip inds that the statue consists of ive materials and can be divided into seven
parts. He correlates these numbers with stages in the history of mankind: the ive with oldtestament time, and the seven with Judaeo-Christian time. In the irst scheme, Adam lived
in the age of gold, the silver age begin in the time of Noah, the third age lasted from Abraham to Moses, the fourth from Moses to David, and the ifth from David to the coming of
Christ.103
Then Philip starts over. He divides the statue’s body into seven parts, representing
seven spiritual ages of this world—the head and the chest remain unchanged from the
irst scheme, the arms represent the third age (from Abraham to Moses), the brass belly is
the time from Moses to the Apostles, and the legs are the apostles and early church fathers
(iron is resonant, as were their teachings).104 For toes of the statue, “we can understand that
age in which we are”—a time that is the last age, as the toes are an extremity to the body;
the Antichrist is close at hand.105 The stone which comes to knock down the statue in this
102
“Sed jam nunc videamus quid signiicet illa statua quam lapis iste percussit et comminuit, quia tam admirabile somnium, et tam insolita visio, sine pondere magni sacramenti regi Babylonis nullatenus ostensa
fuit,” ibid., 585.
103
He then returns to the traditional gloss: “in sexta igitur aetate abscisus est lapis sine manibus de monte,
id est Christus natus est absque tactu hominis de Maria Virgine...Christus, qui est angularis lapis,” ibid.,
586.
104
Ibid., 587–8.
105
“Ista aetas intelligitur in qua nos sumus. Per pedes autem ferreos et ictiles qui solent esse extrema pars
corporis nostri, recte intelligenda est ultima aetas, quae futura est sub tempore Antichristi,” ibid., 588.
340
interpretation is still Christ, but this time in his second coming.106
Following these two historical interpretations of the statue, Philip provides three
further allegories. First the statue’s body represents the Church, with Christ as its head, the
apostles as its the silver chest, martyrs as arms, confessors and doctors of the contemporary
church for a belly, etc.107 In the second allegory “the igure of this statue [is] the entire divine scripture,” where genesis and the gospel together make up the golden head, the books
of the prophets make up the chest, and so forth down to the mixed feet of iron and clay,
which are the modern doctrines of the Catholics and the heretics.108 The inal allegory is a
moral one, where wisdom is the head; sincere thinking and holy works, the chest and arms;
the stomach, holy thought; the thighs, chastity; and so on. It is interesting that the bible’s
diachronic interpretation of the symbol doesn’t stop Philip from treating it as synchronic:
holy thought does not end before chastity begins—they are interdependent. In Philip’s
hands the statue is separated from the historical scheme imposed upon it by the apocalyptic
rock and transformed into a lexible mnemonic device which can accommodate various
kinds of content organized vertically and hierarchically. Nor was Philip alone in taking
this approach: the inluential biblical exegete Richard of St. Victor composed a long commentary on the dream in which the statue is used to organize a wide range of content both
good and bad.109
106
Ibid., 588–9.
107
Ibid., 590–91.
108
“iguram hujus statuae allegorico sensu referremus ad textum totius divinae scripturae,” ibid.
109
Richard of St. Victor, “De eruditione hominis interioris libri tres.” It is impossible to characterize this
long text simply. The exegesis is detailed and deliberate, covering the same territory many times and, like
Harveng’s allegorizations, re-drawing its meanings. At one point, Richard glosses the parts of the body and
the metals separately, assigning activities to the body parts and virtues to the metals (“In auro intelligitur
charitas, in argento veritas, in aere simultas, in ferro crudelitas, in testa ictili fragilitas,” p. 1269) before
combining his glosses (“Si ergo caput intentio, et aurum devotio, quid aliud est aureum caput, nisi devota in-
341
Outside of the bible itself, the commentaries discussed so far (by Jerome, Beatus
of Liébana, Philip of Harveng, and Richard of St. Victor) are the primary mode in which
discussion of our statue occurs during the early and high Middle Ages. But with the advent
of the fourteenth century the Dream of Precious Metals enters the secular sphere, where it
makes infrequent but signiicant appearances irst in Italian, then in French, and inally in
English works (see Table 6.2).
Table 6.2: The Statue Outside of Biblical Commentaries (to 1400)
c. 1308
Dante, Inferno (Canto 14)
1328–37
Ugolino Boniscambi of Montegiorgio, Actus Beati
Francisci et sociorum eius
?1340s
Vitry, Cum statua/Hugo
?1350s
Vitry, Phi millies/O creator
Before 1357
Machaut, Remède de Fortune
1357
Machaut, Confort d’ami
1355–8
Guillaume de Deguileville, Pélerinage de l’âme
c. 1375
Boccaccio, commentary on Dante’s Inferno
1385
John Gower, Vox clamantis
1386–90
John Gower, Confessio amantis
1388–9
Philippe de Mézières, Songe du vieil pelerin
To my knowledge, Dante is the irst to treat the dream of precious metals in a secular context, and his reading remains among the most idiosyncratic. We meet the statue in
Canto 14 of the Inferno in the guise of an old man who stands weeping on a desolate mountain on the ruined island of Crete:
Within the mountain stands erect a great old man, with his back toward
Damietta, looking toward Rome as to his mirror. His head is formed of ine
gold and pure silver are his arms and breast; then he is of brass as far as the
fork; from there downward he is all reined iron, except that his right foot is
baked clay; and on that one, more than on the other, he stands erect.
tentio?,” p. 1273). After this he re-glosses the metals to carry vices rather than virtues: (“per aurum potest
intelligi arrogantia. per argentum jactantia, per aes pertinacia, per ferrum saevitia, per testam impatientia,”
p. 1274), and so forth.
342
Each part of him, except his golden head, is broken by a crack that drips
tears, which, gathering, bore through that cave. Their course plunges into
this valley; they become Acheron, Styx, and Phlegethon.110
Here is the statue as we have never seen it before. Looking longingly to Rome as a seat of
historical and spiritual authority, it stands on a desolate and fallen Crete “under whose King
the world was once chaste,” and the deterioration of the world is signaled in the statue’s own
body.111
This veglio di Creto has been called “one of the most elaborate and interpreted symbols in the Inferno,” and analyses of his signiicance in the broader narrative of the poem are
numerous.112 For our purposes I think it is important to note that Dante takes the statue out
of the dream context, removing both Daniel as interpreter and Nebuchadnezzar as dreamer
(two aspects of the story which played an important role in earlier commentaries).113 And
of course the rock which is to strike the statue is nowhere to be found—it stands on its clay
foot, unsteadily to be sure, and certainly unhappily, but presumably will stand for all human
time, since its tears low down to make the rivers of hell.
Dante’s statue is more symbol than allegory: its four metals remain unglossed and
stand together to show a general degradation through time rather than signifying any particular ages. Boccacio interpreted the metals more speciically in his commentary on the
110
Ll. 94–6; Dante, Inferno, ed. Durling, 223–5.
111
Ibid., 223. See Dean, The World Grown Old, 175–95.
112
Dante, Inferno, ed. Mark Musa, 203. See also notes in Dante, Inferno, ed. Durling, 555–7. For a summary of the accepted symbolism of the statue with bibliography, see Di Scipio, “Old Man of Crete,” 658–9.
113
Dante returns to the issue of Nebuchadnezzar as dreamer in Paradiso 4:14, where Beatrice compares
herself to Daniel and him to the sleeping King. The statue is not mentioned, but it is depicted in the deluxe
copy of the work illuminated by Giovanni di Paolo (British Library Yates-Thompson MS 36, c. 1445); see
reproductions in John Pope-Hennessy, ed., Paradiso: The Illuminations to Dante’s Divine Comedy by Giovanni
di Paolo (New York: Random House, 1993), 78–81.
343
Inferno, part of the Esposizioni sopra la commedia left uninished at his death in 1375. His
gloss, which Tobias Foster Gittes has called a “subtle” and “dramatic revision of the conventional model,” seems to imply progress as well as decline between the stages.114 Thus although the second generation will not retain the purity of Eden (because gold is more valuable than silver), Boccaccio indicates that the silver generation was more beautiful than the
previous, as silver is more lustrous than gold. Similarly, the citizens of the bronze age shall
be distinguished by its learning which will resonate, just as bronze is a resonant metal. But
bronze is still worse than both silver and gold, and this learning shall be put to vile ends.115
While Boccacio’s reading is certainly a revision of Dante, it is not, in fact, original: there is a similar account of the metals in the popular Actus Beati Francisci et sociorum
eius (Deeds of Blessed Francis and His Companions), written between 1328 and 1337
by Ugolino Boniscambi of Montegiorgio.116 Chapter 25, one of those focused on the origins of Francis’s fraternity, relates how “A Statue Like the Statue of Nebuchadnezzar, but
Dressed in a Sackcloth, Speaks to Blessed Francis and Tells Him About the Four Stages
of His Order.” Ugolino’s reading, which precedes the Espositioni by many decades, shows an
almost identical treatment of the successive generations (here the stages of the Franciscan
order) as both degenerating and improving:
“The chest and arms of silver will be the second stage of the Order…And
just as silver has great value, brightness and melodious sound, so in that
second stage there will be those of value in the divine Scriptures, brilliant in
114
Gittes, Boccaccio’s Naked Muse, 69.
115
Papio, ed. and trans., Boccaccio’s Expositions, 550–1.
116
The collection of stories was translated into Italian after 1337 (and possibly much later in the century)
as Fioretti di San Francesco (The Little Flowers of Saint Francis). I quote from the English translation of
Ugolino’s text in Armstrong and Short, eds., Francis of Assisi: Early Documents 3:435–65.
344
the light of sanctity and melodious in sounding the word of God…But even
though that will be a remarkable generation, it will not reach that most perfect stage of those who came irst, but will be to it what silver is to gold.”117
The passage on bronze is also reminiscent of Boccaccio’s treatment, touching both on
the resonance of the metal and the learning associated with the third generation: “Just as
bronze is considered less valuable than silver, so those of the third stage will be less than
those of the irst and second stages… Because of their learning, they will have tongues with
a wonderful sound, like brass.”118 It seems that Boccaccio’s interpretation of Dante is not
of his invention and indeed that it follows established modes of thought which are perhaps
Italian in their origins.
Dante’s statue cries while looking longingly towards Rome, and Ugolino’s also commands an emotional response due to its beauty and poor mode of dress: “Blessed Francis,
gazing at the statue, was thoroughly amazed by its almost indescribable beauty, its extraordinary size, and the embarrassment it seemed to have about the cheap sackcloth which it
was wearing.”119 No rock strikes the statue; it simply disappears, having delivered its holy
message about how the Franciscan order will decline.
Ugolino’s reading certainly departs from the biblical statue, which stands only to
be demolished, and whose face, which could as little talk as cry, it terrible to behold. The
sad, humanized statue seems to be an Italian phenomenon, and it differs markedly from
what we have observed in the commentary tradition and in Machaut and Vitry. It serves as a
reminder of the variety of ways in which this exemplum can be read, underlining the extent
to which any reading is an authorial decision rather than biblical paraphrase.
117
Ibid., 3: 487.
118
Ibid.
119
Ibid., 3:486.
345
We next encounter the statue back in France, in Guillaume de Deguileville’s popular
Pélerinage de l’âme. Here, in a plot typical of the allegorical dream vision, the soul, naked and
bearing the burden of sin, is shown a series of sights by an angel who leads it through heaven
and purgatory before seeing it safely to heaven. Near the end of the soul’s long journey, it
sees a statue that “in all things resembled the one Nebuchadnezzar dreamed.”120 The angel’s
description of the statue is entirely biblical as pertains to its appearance, but the framing
is Deguileville’s own. It seems that as Nebuchadnezzar lay in bed he was thinking about his
state, musing over the best way to govern his people and wondering who might rule after
him.121 The dream that follows is cast as an answer to these political questions. Deguileville
devotes over a thousand lines to a detailed allegory of the statue as the body politic, with
the king at its golden head, the arms and breast representing barons and counsellors, and so
forth down to the feet, which stand allegorically for the laborers and craftsmen.122
Deguileville’s scheme is similar to some of the allegories proposed by Philip of
Harveng, but it goes even further away from the notion of degeneration. Most of Philip’s
schemes, whether diachronic (such as the succession of ages) or synchronic (the statue as
the holy scriptures, the statue as the body of the church), imply some kind of decay. But
Deguileville’s allegory is organic, and he explains why each part of the body and each material is suited to represent its part in the social order. For example, the head represents the
King because the head rules the body. And gold represents the king as a metal both pre120
“Qu’a l’estatue que jadis Nabugodonasor songoit/En toutes choses ressembloit,” Deguileville, Pélerinage
de l’âme, ll. 7218–20. All following citations refer to this edition.
121
“Comment dedens son lit jadis/Nabugodonasor pensis/Estoit de son gouvernement/Comment son royaume et sa gent/Estoient traities et menes/Et par quelles loys gouvernes,/Et comment seroit apres li/I.e regne
garde et de qui,/Et quel en la in it seroit/Et en quel main il escheroit,” ll. 7235–44.
122
The discussion of the statue takes up ll. 7205–8344. On the head, see l. 7385ff.; the neck, 7661ff.;
the arms, 7709ff.; the breast, 7795ff.; the stomach, 7939ff.; the thighs, 8013ff.; the calves, 8121ff.; the
feet, 8213ff.
346
cious and ductile, appropriate to the good ruler’s lexibility with regard to his councilors’
advice. Though its parts are made of different materials, Deguileville’s statue is as uniied
as the ideal state it represents. The idea of biological unity is emphasized by mention of the
joints—the knees are used as a point of reference, and a description of the neck is provided.123
The discussion of the feet of iron and clay is a particularly good example of Deguileville’s novel interpretation. For him, the feet of the statue represent the “tresnecessaires” craftsmen (iron) and laborers (clay), who “bear the limbs above and support the
kingdom.”124 The bible is explicit that iron does not mix with clay, but Deguileville revises
this interpretation:
Or voit on que mipartis sont
Les pies et entremelles sont
De deux matieres qui entr’eux
Semblent estre moult despareux,
Mes tant n’est pas, com il semble,
Car nees furent ensemble.
Le fer de la terre est issu
Et de terre est et terre fu
[Now we can see that the feet are divided in two and mixed of two materials which seem to be very different from each other, but it’s not as it seems,
because they were born together. Iron is extracted from the earth, and clay is
made from earth.]125
Having a common source, iron and clay do belong together, and on these mixed but natural
feet, the government is stable—all of its parts support each other, and the statua upholds its
123
Deguileville admits that the book of Daniel does not specify the material of the neck, but reasons that it
should be gold like the head. The neck represents the royal family, which serves as the link between the king
and the rest of the body politic (ll. 7661–7708).
124
“Les membres d’amont soustiennent/Et le royaume maintiennent,” ll. 8219–20.
125
Ll. 8239–46.
347
etymological link with the latin status (stand).126 Nebuchadnezzar’s statue as it stands in the
Pélerinage de l’âme is not in danger of being hit by the stone, which is nowhere mentioned in
the poem. The very sign and symbol of a well-governed state, it represents not the deterioration of society but its stability.
Such an interpretation of Deguileville is conirmed by another allegorical dream
vision, the epic Songe du vieil pèlerin of Philippe de Mézières (1327-1405).127 Here Nebuchadnezzar’s dream makes its appearance when Lady Justice is talking about the danger of
rising too fast through the ranks, as when the son of a poor man becomes very rich. First
she cites Aristotole as an advocate for a government in which a prince maintains the difference between ranks and ofices so that “one cannot usurp the authority or the ofice of
another.”128 And then as further proof for her claim, Lady Justice turns to “une belle igure”
whose interpretation she attributes to Deguileville, “en son Pélerinage de l’åme”: “la statue du
roy Nabugodonosor.”129
In summarizing Deguileville’s plan for the statue (which he calls “assez prolixe”),
Mézières entirely leaves out the metals of the statue, both because he assumed that his
readers would know them, and, more importantly, because the metals do not matter to his
reading of Deguileville. What is important is the metaphor of the stable body politic, with
126
“Et estatus sont estables/En monstrant que de sto sont nes,” ll. 7316–7.
127
Written some 30 years after the Péleriange de l’âme, Mézières’s work describes a sea journey through
Christendom undertaken by the narrator with Queens Truth, Justice, Peace, and Mercy. On the way they
describe conditions and recommend political and religious reforms in the countries they visit, eventually
focusing on France. An edition of the French text with detailed English summary is available: Mézières, Le
songe du vieil pèlerin, ed. G. W. Coopland. See, however, the review by Janet M. Ferrier in The Modern Language Review 65 (1970), 620–2.
128
“En son livre de Politique clarement le devise, et dit ainsi en substance: que qouvernement et police d’un
royaume est tres bon quant le prince maintient les habitans du royaume chacun en son ofice: c’est assavoir
que l’un ne doit pas usurper la dignite ou ofice de l’autre,” Mézières, Le songe du vieil pelerin, 1: 572.
129
Ibid.
348
each member assigned to its own part: “le corps d’un royaume est bien dispose quant chacun
membre fait bien son ofice, et l’un ne s’empesche de l’ofice de l’autre.”130
Deguileville’s Pélerinage de l’âme is roughly contemporary with Machaut’s Remède,
and also probably with both Vitry motets. But these three French poets use the statue very
differently from each other, as well as from the slightly earlier Italian examples discussed
above. Gittes, in commenting on Boccacio’s use of the symbol, has commented on its lexibly in signifying decline: “Like so many abstract, artiicial schemes, the classical pattern
of epochal degeneration proves an ideological scaffolding amenable to a wide variety of
agendas.” But what is interesting is that Deguileville and Mezieres following him decades
later use the exemplum entirely separately from any degeneration. In their hands the king’s
troubling apocalyptic vision is re-interpreted to signify stability and natural balance.
These contemporary uses of the statue in France and Italy do little to contextualize Vitry’s calling it up in invective, or Machaut’s related comparison of the statue to the
despised and unreliable Fortune. In fact the closest analogue to both Machaut’s and Vitry’s
uses of the statue is found in the symbol’s most famous fourteenth-century appearance—
the prologue to John Gower’s Confessio amantis.
130
Ibid. To make his point, Mézières includes a detailed allegory of the arms of the statue that is not found
in Deguileville: the upper arms are the great oficers and chieftains of the Kingdom, the forearms are the
nobility and squires, and the ingers are the valets and servants who attend to the king’s person. If a servant
exceeds his rank, Mézières suggests, it is like a inger that grows to the girth of an arm, and the deformed
hand that results can in no way be useful to the King (ibid., 1:537). The one other appearance of the statue
in the Songe is on the same theme. In Book 3, “la igure du roy Nabugodonasor” is summoned to support a
description of “bons conseilliers, serviteurs et oficiers, et chacun en son degre ne passera pas les termes de
son ofice, ne ce qui lui sera ordonne,” 2: 330.
349
GOWER’S “DIVISIOUN” AND THE MUSICAL STATUE
Begun in 1386 and inished four years later, Gower’s long middle-English poem
collects stories, moral instruction, and social commentary within the framing narrative of
a middle-aged lover confessing to Genius. The prologue of this amorous and clerkly work
(“somwhat of lust, somwhat of lore,” as the author characterizes it) is devoted to equalopportunity inger pointing, as Gower criticizes each of the three estates in turn.131 For
government, clergy, and commons he irst evokes a golden age (in which rulers were welladvised, lawyers were fair, friars were meek and honest, etc.) and then presents the pitiable
conditions of the current day, in which “it wel nyh stant al reversed” (30).
Much is wrong with the world, but the diagnosis is simple. Corruption, tyranny,
hypocrisy, war, and schism—all are caused by division, which is, in Russell Peck’s analysis, Gower’s “cause of all forms of psychological, social, ethical, linguistic, and political
disjunction.”132 “Divisioun” is the “moder of confusioun” and ultimate cause of anarchy and
apocalypse (852):
Division, the Gospell seith,
On hous upon another leith,
Til that the regne al overthrowe.
And thus may every man wel knowe,
Division aboven alle
Is thing which makth the world to falle (974–9).
Gower’s symbol of all this worldly division is none other than the statue from Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, which tells “hou that this world schal torne (change) and wende (decay)/ Til
it befalle to his ende” (591–2).
131
This and all following quotations are from Gower, Confessio amantis, ed. Russell A. Peck. Subsequent
references will be cited in the text by line number.
132
Peck, “The Politics and Psychology of Governance,” 218.
350
The prologue’s treatment of the allegory is trifold. First described in biblical paraphrase, then as a series of progressively worse ages, the statue is inally interpreted as a succession of empires reaching into the present day, in which Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece,
Rome, and the Holy Roman Empire all succeed each other. Overall some 500 lines of
Gower’s prologue are devoted to the statue and its embodied property of division, and these
provide a frame for viewing the Confessio as a whole as a story de senectute mundi in which
the aging lover represents the aging world.133 The allegory’s centrality to the work is further
underscored by an image of the statue, which often heads copies of the Confessio amantis
(see Figure 6.6).134
Figure 6.6: Statue Miniature in Confessio amantis (irst quarter 15th c.)135
133
On senectus mundi, see Dean, The World Grown Old, 233–70. For commentary prior to 1989 on Gower’s use of the statue, see Nicholson, An Annotated Index, 65–7, and especially Peck, “John Gower and the
Book of Daniel.” Se also Freddell, “Reading the Dream Miniature,” and Williams, “Gower’s Monster.”
134
The image appears either at the beginning of the poem or at line 585, where the dream is mentioned.
See discussion in Grifiths, “Confessio amantis: The Poem and its Pictures,” and Freddell, “Reading the
Dream Miniature in the Confessio amantis.” Camille wonders that the image is “chosen for depiction even
though it is a very small part of the work,” but this view does not acknowledge the importance of the prologue
in framing the narrative that follows; The Gothic Idol, 285.
135
Columbia University, Rare Book and Manuscript Library MS Plimpton 265, fol. 1v.
351
Although Deguileville is sometimes cited as a precedent to Gower’s use of the statue,
it should now be clear that their treatments have little in common, and that Gower’s reading
is more reminiscent of Vitry’s and Machaut’s interpretations.136 Michael Camille has noted
this latter afinity: “For Gower and Machaut, the statue signiies physical impermanence,
while for Deguileville is it a public image of enduring stability.”137 In addition to this general similarity of connotation, several speciic parallels may be drawn between the statue as
it is used and interpreted in Gower and its earlier musical incarnations. The irst of these
has to do with Fortune.
The idea of a world that is not as it has been, but reversed, naturally brings Fortune
to mind. And indeed she is a pervasive presence in Gower’s text.138 Nor does it escape him
that the topos of Fortune causing a change for the worse is compatible with the statue’s
meaning. In fact, it is Fortune who prepares the way for the irst mention of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, and the link between her and the biblical story is seamless:
For every worldes thing is vein,
And evere goth the [wheel] aboute,
And evere stant a man in doute:
Fortune stant no while stille,
So hath ther no man al his wille.
Als fer as evere a man may knowe,
Ther lasteth nothing bot a throwe.
The world stant evere upon debat,
So may be seker non astat:
Now hier now ther, now to now fro,
136
It seems likely that Gower read Deguileville. He indicates that the neck of the statue was gold (605–
7)—a detail found (to my knowledge) only in the Pélerinage de l’âme, although Deguileville cites some other
unnamed authority.
137
Given this difference it is interesting that Camille characterizes Gower’s engagement as a “re-use” of
Deguileville’s image: The Gothic Idol, 285, 287.
138
Though he is loathe to put all the blame on her and criticizes those who blame Fortune or the stars for
things that are really their own fault: “For man is cause of that schal falle/And natheles yet som men wryte/
And sein that fortune is to wyte, /And som men holde oppinion/That it is constellacion,/Which causeth al
that a man doth./God wot of bothe which is soth” (ll. 528–34).
352
Now up now doun, this world goth so,
And evere hath don and evere schal,
Wherof I inde in special
A tale writen in the Bible,
Which moste nedes be credible (560–78).
This tale, of course, is from Daniel 2. In light of our analysis of Machaut’s complainte, the
only other work to connect Fortune and Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, this transition is particularly interesting. Gower does not compare Fortune’s body to the statue’s, as Machaut
does. Instead he uses her as a way to move from people’s unhappiness to the cause of that
unhappiness—division. And he continues to use the wheel as metaphor throughout the
prologue, especially in navigating between sections of the statue, where turns of the wheel
cause the successive empires to fall.139
Reacting to similar iconography in certain manuscripts of the Confessio amantis and
some versions of the Remède, Joel Freddell has pointed to a congruity of approach between
Machaut and Gower.140 The Remède, he argues, presents “a clear precedent, and one well
known in Gower’s literary world, for using Nebuchadnezzar’s dream statue as a literary icon
for Fortune.”141 The relationship between these texts is perhaps a bit more complicated: in
Machaut the statue is undoubtedly an icon for Fortune, but in Gower, where the statue is the
main character, Fortune becomes an agent by which we might navigate and assimilate that
more unusual symbol. But regardless of these differences, Grifith’s point that the Remède
139
For example in navigating between brass and steel (“Tho goth the regne of bras aweie,/And comen is the
world of stiel,/And stod above upon the whiel,” l. 730–3) or steel and steel-clay (“Bot a long time it stod
so stille/Under the Frensche kynges wille,/Til that Fortune hir whiel so ladde,/That afterward Lombardy it
hadde,” ll. 769–72).
140
“Reading the Dream Miniature,” 70–7. Freddell is concerned with those miniatures which depict the
statue without Nebuchadnezzar or Daniel: Manuscript A fol. 56v and Manuscript Pm fol. 53 v. On the
interpretive differences between these depictions and the earlier, more traditional scheme represented in
Manuscripts C and J, see Huot, From Song to Book, 252–4, 275–80.
141
Freddell, “Reading the Dream Miniature,” 65.
353
serves as an antecedent to certain ideas in Gower is well taken and may be supported by
several more observations.
In addition to the borrowed theme of Fortune, the Confessio amantis may be linked
to the Remède by a rhetorical device. Towards the end of his discussion of the statue Gower
complains that even the weather is affected by division: the sunshine and clean air of ages
past have been replaced by a ickle climate where everything is in lux. His discussion takes
anaphoric form:
Now be the trees with leves grene,
Now thei be bare and nothing sene,
Now be the lusti somer loures
Now be the stormy wynter shoures,
Now be the daies, now the nyhtes (935–9).
This contradictory and changing world, which mirrors “man and his condicioun,”
(944) has a rhetorical analogue in a passage from the Remède leading up to the complainte.
Enumerating the usual symptoms of amour langour, Machaut writes that the heart of a lover:
Or ajoie, or a desconfort,
Or rit, or pleure, or chante, or plaint,
Or se delite en son complaint,
Or tremble, or tresue, or a chaut,
Or a froit, et puis ne li chaut
[is now joyful, now mournful, now laughing, now crying, now singing, now
lamenting, now happy in its plaint, now trembling, now sweating, now hot,
now cold (875–81)]
Gower’s frame is geological and Machaut’s is biological, but the root of both is Fortune and
even the thermal effects are similar.
Gower may have acknowledged the inluence of Machaut’s work: while describing
the noisy disapproval of the common people shortly before his irst mention of Fortune, the
354
poet remarks that “eche in his compleignte telleth/How that the world is al miswent.”142 It is
just possible that these lines refer not only to the act of complaining but also to the genre
of complainte.
In other ways, Gower’s prologue brings to mind Vitry’s reading of the statue as manifest in Cum statua/Hugo and, to an even greater extent, Phi millies/O creator. The most
obvious link with the latter motet is the list of empires as it appears in Gower. Now, the
association of the statue’s empires with a Christian time-line that matches gold with the
Babylonian, silver with the Medo-Persian, Bronze with the Greek, and Iron with the Roman empires goes back at least to Jerome’s commentary and was prevalent enough that its
use by Gower and Vitry need not be related. However, the prologue to the Confessio amantis
shares its approach to naming these empires with the triplum “Phi millies,” indicating each
age by the conqueror who began it, so that Cyrus, Belshazzar, and Alexander are mentioned
in both texts. More signiicantly, Gower has brought the King’s dream “up to date,” in that
the Lombard and ultimately German takeovers of Rome constitute a ifth age which continues to this day.143 From the time of Otto, he explains,
Th’empire of Rome hath ben and is
To th’Alemans. And in this wise,
As ye tofore have herd divise
How Daniel the swevene expondeth
Of that ymage, on whom he foundeth
The world which after scholde falle,
Come is the laste tokne of alle.
Upon the feet of erthe and stiel
So stant this world now everydiel
Departed, which began riht tho,
Whan Rome was divided so (820–30).
142
Ll. 516–17, emphasis mine.
143
Peck, “John Gower and the Book of Daniel,” 174.
355
This extension of the statue’s scheme into the present day has been lauded as an
unusual step: Dean inds it noteworthy that “Gower does not dwell on the early Roman
Empire but moves on to the Christian Roman Empire, especially of Charlemagne and the
French.”144 But in fact we see his same extension of kingdoms reaching into the present
time in Vitry’s triplum: “Think yourself of the city, that conquered the world, which fell
to the conquering Germans!”145 To be sure the triplum acts on a much smaller scale than
Gower’s prologue, so that its engagement with any idea must be brief. But it still seems that
the updating for which Gower is praised is adumbrated in Vitry’s motet. We might even hear
the hint of an echo: wondering that Rome should fall, Gower complains that “the chaff is
taken for the corn”—a sentiment reminiscent of “The grain lies smothered by chaff” from
the tenor of Vitry’s motet.
Finally, Gower shares with Vitry the idea that the statue can represent an individual. In the Confessio amantis the reading of the dream is diachronic and synchronic: in
the most obvious interpretation, the world has undergone the transformations which the
statue embodies and, having already passed through the gold, silver, and copper periods,
has now reached its inal stage “and stant divided ek also/Lich to the feet that were so,/As I
tolde of the statue above” (889–91). But in another sense the world is the statue, and, like
the statue, it stands (and has always stood) on feet of iron and clay: “And now upon his olde
[toes]/It stant of brutel erthe end stiel” (876–7).
Man too represents both the feet and the statue as a whole. The dream image is
shaped like a human (and not some other beast) because it is man who is at fault in all the
144
Dean, The World Grown Old, 258.
145
Ll. 21–3; See Appendix 6A.
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division.146 And man himself represents the world in a microcosmic scheme which Gower
carefully describes, citing Gregory’s Moralia:147
Forthi Gregoire in his Moral
Seith that a man in special
The [smaller] world is properly,
And that he proveth redely.
For man of soule resonable
Is to an angel resemblable,
And lich to beste he hath ielinge,
And lich to trees he hath growinge;
The stones ben and so is he.
Thus of his propre qualité
The man, as telleth the clergie,
Is as a world in his partie (945–56).
The world stands on feet of clay, ready to be knocked down by the apocalyptic stone, and
so does each man, a world in himself. This division is built into the human body, which is
composed of opposite substances: hot and cold, moist and dry. If, Gower theorizes, man
were made throughout of one material, “ther scholde no corrupcioun/Engendre upon that
unité,” and we would be immortal (986–7). But we are not, for man has been divided ever
since the fall. That this condition is not limited to the denizens of the mixed age of the feet
further underscores the extent to which Gower is willing to align the statue with the contrary individual, even while he is connecting it with a succession of empires.
Nicolette Zeeman comments on Gower’s “apparently original move, [in which he]
extends his earlier connection between the world and human beings by comparing people to
146
“Bot al this wo is cause of man,/The which that wit and reson can,/And that in tokne and in witnesse/
That ilke ymage bar liknesse/Of man and of non other beste,” ll. 905–9.
147
The passage is a paraphrase of Gregory’s discussion: “Homo itaque, quia habet commune esse cum
lapidibus, vivere cum arboribus, sentire cum animalibus, discernere cum angelis, recte nomine universitatis
exprimitur, in quo juxta aliquid ipsa universitas tenetur. Unde et discipulis Veritas dicit: Euntes in mundum
universum, praedicate Evangelium omni creaturae (Marc. XVI, 15),” “Moralium Libri, sive Expositio in Librum
Beati Job,” Patrologia latina 75:740.
357
the statue.”148 The move is certainly an unusual one, but we have seen that it is not original:
exactly this combination of interpretations characterizes Vitry’s treatment of the theme in
both motets. Hugo is at fault not simply for being bad, but for seeming good, so that Vitry’s
triplum accuses him above all of inconsistency: “since you seem on irst appearance a man
of peace, a son of virtues, it beits you to wound no man among the people with the javelin
of your tongue.” And the motetus is also concerned with the coexistence of opposites, this
time linguistic: “Most recently hypocrisy gives [the name] “father” to certain young men
...together with the hypocritical fathers to whom antiphrasis sophistically gives the name
“mendicant.”149 Hugo is split—like Fortune, like the statue, like mortal Man in Gower’s
scheme—between opposites. Like the world, he began good and got worse; like the statue,
he is disjunct. And a similar reading underlies Phi millies/O creator. There Jean de le Mote
with his divided loyalties represents the statue which the stone threatens to strike (and the
comparison with Tantalus furnishes a stone, though from a different quarry). At the same
time, Jean acts in the role of the dreamer/spectator who will watch as his beloved England
is wiped out.
* * *
It not the aim of this study to establish any deinite links between Gower and the
musical works of Machaut and Vitry. Certainly such links are possible: English poets would
have had access to Machaut’s Remède, especially after what Wimsatt has described as a
“French cultural ‘invasion’ of London” following the Battle of Poitiers in 1356.150 It is also
148
Zeeman, “The Verse of Courtly Love in the Framing Narrative,” 234. See also Porter, “Gower’s Ethical
Microcosm and Political Macrocosm,” 142-3.
149
Triplum ll. 9–13; see Apendix 5A.
150
Wimsat, Chaucer and His French Contemporaries, 43. See also Wilkins, “Music and Poetry at Court,”
194–7.
358
conceivable that Gower’s close friend Geoffrey Chaucer, upon whom Machaut’s inluence
is well-known, might have been a means of introducing the younger poet to the Remède.151
More broadly, the traditional view that Gower “shows little, if any knowledge” of the French
court poets152 has been subject to revision, and the parallels I have drawn here between his
work and Machaut’s are consistent with an emergent Gower whose “debts to the fourteenthcentury French verse of courtly love are great.”153 As for Vitry’s motets, which sit outside of
that tradition, it seems likely that an English poet with international leanings would have
been aware of Phi millies/O creator. The work’s target, le Mote, was prominent at the English
court, and such disagreements as those commemorated by the series of ballades and the
motet, in which famous, accomplished poets strike out at their colleagues with all of their
sharpest arrows, would surely have been the stuff of juicy gossip, if not of legend.154
But for present purposes I am equally happy with Gower as a reader of Vitry and
as a fellow thinker contemplating the same symbol at a remove of several decades. The
similarities between their approaches—whether the result of actual interaction (as seems
probable) or simply Zeitgeist—are useful in helping us to think about the symbolism operating in Vitry’s motets. We have seen that even within the sparse history of the statue’s
use in secular and poetic contexts, Machaut’s and Vitry’s interpretations stand aside from
Italian and French poets who use the statue as a more positive and sometimes even stable
symbol. The decision to use it in a negative light thus becomes exactly that: a decision,
rather than a mechanical reproduction of the bible. And Gower makes the same choice,
151
Chaucer dedicated Trolius in part to Gower, giving him the much-quoted epithet “moral Gower.”
152
Fisher, John Gower, 74.
153
Zeeman, “The Framing Narrative,” 223. See also Burrow, “The portrayal of Amans,” 6, 10–11, 19–21,
who argues that the use of an elderly lover as a narrator links the Confessio with Machat’s Voir dit.
154
The presence of the exchange in a ifteenth-century manuscript attests to its longevity.
359
dwelling upon the same symbolism on the more expansive scale allowed by his medium. His
idea of “division” emerges as especially useful because it allows us to navigate semantically
between things which seem to have musical connections: Horace’s chimera, Nebuchadnezzar’s statue, and Fortune. Not all three are false (though falseness has been cited as a reason
for much of what is unusual about Cum statua/Hugo), but all three are divided.155 I believe
that this idea of “division,” which (to put it most contentiously) Gower may have distilled
from the musical incarnations of a biblical icon, stands at the heart of an aesthetic that we
can see in many of the most famous motets in the repertory.
155
See Kügle, The Manuscript Ivrea, 115–8, and the discussion above.
360
Epilogue: ARS NOVA and Disjunction
This study set out to explore text-music relations in ars nova motets, but it has ended
as an exploration of musical monstrosity. Admittedly this is partly because I have found
monsters irresistible. But I have also found them useful, and in this I am not alone. In
the later middle ages “monster” was frequently etymologized as deriving from “monstrare”
because these creatures are able to show how things are by showing how they are not.156 Indeed, in the process of exploring these unusual works we have perhaps become more attuned
to the “normal” state of affairs in motets. In inverting the contrapuntal order of voices, for
example, Machaut’s Helas/Horde mesto (M12) has reminded us of the extent to which differences in range and declamation between the voices in motets are involved in establishing
a “default” sound-world. And yet this sound-world also emerged as mutable. Observing the
distortion of this “normal” order in Helas/Horde mesto, we can ind similar rifts in a number of other works. Similarly, In virtute/Decens and Cum statua/Hugo, with their unusual
introduction of hockets partway through a motet without accompanying diminution, have
clariied the relationship between hockets and diminution. But even more importantly, in
dividing a work into multiple isorhythmic regions without the participation of the tenor,
In virtute/Decens and Cum statua/Hugo can lead us to a larger group of works whose internal divisions are dictated by upper-voice isorhythmic congruences rather than tenor taleae.
Even though monstrous works may hint at a “normal” state of the genre, they do not simply
reinforce the boundaries—they expand them. For once we are on the lookout for generic
subversion we ind that they are not limited to these monstrous works. (And indeed I must
156
Williams, Deformed Discourse, 4.
361
admit that it was the strange forms of the motets analyzed in Chapters 4–6 which led me to
wonder about the supertaleae discussed in Chapter 3, and not the other way around.)
And conversely, once we have been alerted to the possible importance of stratiied subjects and texts, we ind them in unexpected places. To take just one example, let us
consider Vitry’s famous Tuba/In arboris, whose motetus begins with the couplet “In arboris
empiro prospere/virginitas sedet puerpere”—“At the top of the tree virginity sits pleasantly,
bearing a child.” To ind the Virgin in a tree is not surprising—this iconography is related
to the association of the Tree of Jesse—used to depict Christ’s genealogy—with the nativity
scene (virga yields easily to virgo).157 Often the tree in question is an apple tree, casting Mary
as the second Eve. We can see this set of associations played out in Deguileville’s Pelerinage
de l’ame, with which we are already familiar. Near the end of its journey, the soul is shown two
trees, of which one is verdant and the other barren. In the verdant tree—an apple tree—sits
Virginity (see Figure 6.7).
Figure 6.7: Virginity sits in a tree while Justice petitions that she give up the apple in her
lap (detail right), Deguileville’s Pelerinage de l’ame158
157
Levi D’Ancona, The Iconography of the Immaculate Conception, 48–50.
158
Paris, Bibl. Sainte-Geneviève, ms. 1130, fol. 127v.
362
But when we compare Deguileville’s tree with Vitry’s, we ind the latter to be a more
complicated object. For where Deguileville gives us two symbols—one verdant and the
other barren—Vitry puts everything in the same tree. Virginity sits on top, Faith in the
middle, and Reason (here blind and unsuccessful) at the bottom:
In arboris empiro prospere
virginitas sedet puerpere
mediatrix ides in medio
cum stipite cecata ratio
insecuta septem sororibus
sophismata sua foventibus
hec ut scandat dum magis nititur
debilitas ramorum frangitur
petat ergo idei dexteram
vel eternam nitetur perperam.
[In the top of the tree virginity sits auspiciously. Faith, the mediatrix of the
one who has borne the child (sits) in the middle. With the stump (is) blinded
reason followed by seven sisters promoting their sophisms; while she strives
more that she should ascend, the weakness of the branches is broken. Therefore let her seek the right hand of faith or strive wrong-headed forever.159]
Thus Vitry’s is at once the dry tree, the verdant tree, and something in between. Meanwhile,
the progression “at the top”—“at the middle”—“at the foot” is reminiscent of “in primis”—
”in medio”—”in ymis” from In virtute/Decens. Indeed, the tree breaks the rules as much as
Horace’s chimera, and it impossible not to read this motet as engaging with similar ideas,
though in different ways. The weak branches at the bottom of the tree even call to mind the
unstable foundations on which Nebuchadnezzar’ statue—and, for that matter, Fortune—
rest. The triplum continues the vertical and incremental dialogue, calling reason “the root
of sin” (“basis peccatorum,” l. 6) because it, unlike faith, is acquired by degrees (“gressi159
Trans. Howlett in Orlando Consort, Philippe de Vitry, 16.
363
bus,” l. 23). Only faith can give us an understanding of mysteries (“archana”), and there
are mysteries present. For while Virginity sits at the top of the tree, it is the motet’s lowest
voice—the tenor—that sings “Virgo sum” (“I am the Virgin”). If this seems irrational, that
may well be the point: reason is blind. David Williams has argued that Christian Neoplatonic thought “valorized the grotesque and the monstrous,” using “concepts such as paradox,
negation, contrariety, nonlimitation, and related ideas” to “propose a fundamental critique
of rational discourse.”160 A critique of reason is the explicit goal of the triplum text,161 and
the strange tree in the motetus acts here as a kind of hybrid whose contrariety can help us
see past reason.
This uselessness of reason may also account for a notational peculiarity of the motet. It is indicated by rubric that in the tenor, “nigre notule sunt imperfecte et rube sunt
perfecte”—“the little black notes are imperfect, and red ones are perfect” (see Figure 6.8).
This is unusual: during the fourteenth century, red notes were normally used in the opposite
way—to transform perfect mensuration to imperfect.162 Granted, Tuba/In arboris comes at
a point in the tradition when coloration was still new and its functions may not have been
fully set. On the other hand, its very use of a rubric indicates that something unusual may
be going on. In the other two early motets that use red notation, perfect is turned to im-
160
Williams, Deformed Discourse, 4.
161
It warns that “because reason is acquired in nature by degrees, it begets uncertainty at the beginning
and will therefore lean upon guesswork,” (“nature quod gressibus/ratio potita/in premissis dubium/gignat et
augurium/igitur nitetur),” ll. 23–7.
162
Compare Machaut’s rubric for Felix/Inviolata (M23): “Nigre sunt perfecte et rubee imperfecte.” Apel
writes that “in early fourteenth-century music the use of red notes occurs chiely, if not exclusively, in perfect mensuration, which is thus temporarily changed into imperfect mensuration,” The Notation, 348. Parrish notes that “red notes were almost never used in imperfect mensurations in French Ars Nova sources,”
The Notation, 147.
364
perfect with no verbal commentary required.163 The use of red notation to shift notes from
perfect to imperfect continued to be the standard for most of the fourteenth century, and
Tuba/In arboris remained a sort of counter-example, mentioned in treatises but not emulated.164 In retrospect it is tempting to see it as a reasonable extension of the system. But I
suggest that at the time of writing it was meant to be an unreasonable extension.
Figure 6.8: Tuba/In arboris, tenor (Ivrea, fol. 15v)
Leech-Wilkinson has argued that “that particularly ine motet Tuba/In arboris,
which is cited so often by medieval theorists as typifying the innovations of Ars nova” occupies a “crucial position” within the ars nova repertory, where it functions as a nexus point
for emulation.165 It is interesting to see this same motet here re-aligned to relate to works
such as Cum statua/Hugo and In virtute/Decens—works that are peripheral to the scheme
proposed by Leech-Wilkinson.166 And yet, attention to the common ideas that the three
163
Neither Garrit/In nova nor Douce/Garison uses a rubric, but the notation of longa rests makes the difference clear (Apel, The Notation, 328–30). By analogy, the imperfect longa rests in Tuba/In arboris should
also be suficient to indicate that the black notes are imperfect. The rubric draws extra attention to the
notation here, marking it as a reversal.
164
Consider, for example, the author of the anonymous De musica mensurabili who writes that “rubrae vel
vacuae sunt imperfectae, ut in tenore de In nova, et pluribus aliis cantibus mensuratis; et si mensura sit
<im>perfecta, dictae rubrae vel vacuae sunt perfectae, ut in tenore de In arboris, et pluribus aliis cantibus
mensuratis,” Sweeny, ed. Anonymous: De musica mensurabili, 44. Here the second use of “et pluribus aliis
cantibus mensuratis” has a formulaeic ring—there are in fact not very many examples.
165
It is “V10” in Leech-Wilkinson’s beautiful Example 9, where it is located at the center of the crossshaped igure, “Related Motets,” 16.
166
In virtute/Decens is IV71, which stands in a box of its own to the left of the cross. Cum statua/Hugo is V8,
which appears in the left arm of the cross. Ibid.
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works share stands to give us insight into formal and notational features of each that have
heretofore remained unexplored.
And Tuba/In arboris is only one example. In fact a number of important ars nova
works are in some sense monstrous, hybrid, or disjunct in content or in form. Homing in
on them as manifestations of musical division may well cast the entire ars nova in a rather
different light. Not least it would reconcile the later repertory with the movement’s irst
incarnations, which come down to us accompanied by the colorful Fauvel. And, as I have
suggested above, works with monstrous content can give us fresh insight on the question
of text-music relations, encouraging us to recast them more broadly as the interaction of
forms and ideas. But beyond this, focusing on moments of fragmentation, reversal, and
paradox—of division in its broadest sense—will ultimately force us to question the nature of repertorial center and periphery, the role of musical unity, and the function and
deinition of form as we explore the implications of an ars nova built upon an aesthetics of
disjunction.
366
APPENDIX 6A
CUM STATUA/HUGO/MAGISTER INVIDIE, Texts and Translations
TRIPLUM
5
10
15
20
Cum statua Nabucodonasor
metallina successive Syon
ac gradatim deduci ac minus
ieri colis passus est dominus,
que cum primo fuerit aurea
virtuosus inde argentea
carne mundus, deinceps herea
sancti loquis ictilis ferea
ac lutea pater novissime
novissimis quibusdam maxime
corde dantis una cum patribus
ipocrisis antifrasis quibus
dat mendici nomen sophistice
hec concino Philippus publice
et quia
impia
lingua ledor unius territe
pro vero
refero:
“A prophetis falsis attendite.”
ll. 1–4 Like the metal statue of Nebuchadnezzar, the Lord allowed Zion to be successively
and by stages reduced to pieces,
5–9 which when it was gold (Zion was) virtuous, then silver (and Zion was) clean in
body, following this copper of holy speech, earthen iron, and mud.
9–13 Most recently hypocrisy gives [the name] “father” to certain young men by the great
spirit of giving together with the hypocritical fathers to whom antiphrasis sophistically gives the name “mendicant.”
14
I, Philippe, sing these things publicly.
15–20 And because I am terribly wounded by an impious tongue, I say the truth: beware
of false prophets!1
1
English translation modiied from Howlett’s in Orlando Consort, “Philippe de Vitry and the Ars Nova,”
21. Any errors resulting from the modiications are my own.
367
MOTETUS
5
10
15
Hugo, Hugo princeps invidie
tu cum prima pateas facie
homo pacis virtutum ilius
te neminem decet in populo
lingue tue ledere iaculo
set ignarum doce te pocius.
qua me culpas igitur rabie
assignata mihi nulla die
inconsultus causamque nescius?
Stupeo
et eo
cum invidus sic sis palam pius
perpere
dicere
ipocritam te possum verius.
ll. 1–3 Hugh, Hugh, prince of envy, since you seem on irst appearance a man of peace, a
son of virtues,
4–6 it beits you to wound no man among the people with the javelin of your tongue,
but rather to teach the ignorant.
7–8 With what madness do you therefore charge me, imputed to me on no day?
9–15 Unconsulted and ignorant of the cause, I am astounded, and therefore, since
though so envious you seem outwardly to be holy, I can quite truly say, perverse
man, that you are a hypocrite.2
TENOR:
Magister invidiae
2
Master of envy
Trans. ibid.
368
APPENDIX 6B
Cum statua Nabugodonasor/Hugo, Hugo3
Philippe de Vitry
3
Particulars of edition, including sources used, variants, any signiicant differences from PMFC.
369
370
371
APPENDIX 6C
PHI MILLIES/O CREATOR/IACET GRANUM/QUAM SUFFLABIT,
Texts and Translations
TRIPLUM4
5
10
15
20
25
30
Phi millies ad te, triste pecus,
Cauda monstri, quod in Francum decus
Linguam scribis quam nescis promere!
Quid? Mugitum pro melo vomere
quod musicus horret ebmelicum!
Non puduit Carmen chimericum
palam dare quod Flaccus versibus
primis dampnat. Ve! Qui tot fecibus
Danos pascis, olei venditor
Mendacii publici conditor,
et garriens velut Tantalides
tuos Nabugodonozorides
egre credis non posse cadere
et oppressum nunquam resurgere.
At Bathazar doxosus cecidit
Carthaginem Cyrus et condidit,
cecidere quas struxit Amphion,
ad Troiquos transiit Albion
Post oppressa diris Saxonibus,
post a Danis obtenta trucibus;
Urbem cernas, que mundum domuit,
que Germanis victis succubuit!
Hinc desine superbire, quia
Dana manus non fecit omnia,
sed spiritus ipse vertiginis
quem miscuit ilius Virginis
in nos lapsos peccati scoria;
quibus pulsis resurget Francia,
et gregabit virilem synodum,
et diriget Denis periodum
Quem decrevit lex Albumazaris,
Et cessabunt canere citharis,
et cessabit horum peridia,
nec plus erit hoc nomen: Anglia.
4
The edition of the Latin text follows Pognon (“Du nouveau sur Philippe de Vitri,” 52) with the following
changes: “monstri” for “monstrorum” (l. 2), “nunquam” for “mumquam” (l. 14) and “cecidit” for “cecedit” (l.
15). I am indebted to Leofranc Holford-Strevens for generous assistance with the translations below.
372
ll. 1–3
Fie! a thousand times on you, sad brute, monster’s member, who write to honor
the French language things that you don’t know how to pronounce!
4–7
What! Instead of song to vomit unmusical bellowing which makes Music shudder!
He has not blushed to present in public the chimerical song which Horace damns
in his irst verses.5
7–10
Woe! you who feed the Danes (English?) with so many dregs, vendor of oil, promulgator of public lies!6
11–4
And chattering like a Tantalus7 you believe in your sickness that it is hardly possible for your Nebuchadnezzarids to fall and, crushed, never to rise up again.
15–7 And conceited Belshazzar fell, and Cyrus restored Carthage,8 [then] those things
fell which Amphion built,9
18–20 England went over to the Trojans,10 then was oppressed by the cruel Saxons, and
then occupied by the savage Danes;11
21–3
Look at the city that conquered the world, which fell to the Germans they had
conquered!
24–7 So stop being prideful, for it was not the Danish war that did all [these things],
but the spirit of giddiness12 itself, which the son of the Virgin stirred up against
us fallen in the dung of sin;
28–31 When they have been driven out France will rise again, and will gather a mighty
council and (St.) Denis will direct the age which the law of Abu Ma’shar13 decreed,
32–4 and they will cease to play lyres, and the treachery of these men shall stop, and
there will no longer be such a word as “England.”
5
i.e., the Ars poetica, ll. 1–4.
6
The translation of ll. 4–7 is modiied from Wimsatt, Chaucer and his French Contemporaries, 74.
7
Among the crimes of Tantalus was revealing secrets of the gods, hence chattering. As part of his punishment a stone hung above his head, which might explain the link here between him and Nebuchadnezzar’s
statue.
8
Nebuchadnezzar’s grandson and the last king of Babylon.
9
i.e. the walls of Thebes, which Amphion caused to come together by his singing.
10
Reading Troiquos as Troicos.
11
i. e. before the Norman conquest.
12
Cf. Isaiah 19:14, “Dominus miscuit in medio ejus spiritum vertiginis; et errare fecerunt Aegyptum in
omni opere suo, sicut errat ebrius et vomens.”
13
Abu Ma’shar al-Balkhi, 8th century astronomer. Vitry’s interest in his work is revealed by annotations in
his copy of Guillaume de Nangis’s Chronicon. See Wathey, “Philippe de Vitry’s Books,” 148.
373
MOTETUS
5
10
15
20
O creator Deus pulcherrimi
universique perfectissimi,
rex cum matre super empireo
angelorum stipatus cuneo,
nove spere sculptor, ymaginum
mobilium mater et luminum,
organo quo te dicunt vertere
clementia vatis tribuere,
tractum vite, mores, et cetera,
sectis vices regnisque propera,
indulgeas humano sanguini,
pacem donans et lumen lumini,
id est regno quod tulit humeris
Arrianum multis cum ceteris;
ora claudas isti fantastico
adversus quem Philipus dimico,
ne polluto ledatur labio
regnum partum Francorum gladio,
quod preferri ceteris meruit
dono tuo quo felix claruit.
1–4
O God maker of the most noble and most perfect universe, king together
with thy mother above the empyrean heaven surrounded by a battalion
irey batallion of angels,
5–9
sculptor of the new universe, mother of mobile images and of lights, with
the instrument (with) which they say that that you cause upheavals and by
the clemency of the prophet, grant length of life, habits, and the rest,
10–14 be quick with changes to sects and kingdoms, be kind to human blood,
granting peace and light to light, that is to the kingdom that bore the Arian14 on its shoulders along with many others;
15–8 close up the mouth of that false visionary against whom I, Philippe, ight,
lest by his infected lip[s] the kingdom won by the sword of the French be
injured,
19–20 which [kingdom] has deserved to be preferred to the rest with your gift, by
which it has become renowned in happiness.
TENOR:
Jacet granum oppressum palea
CONTRATENOR: Quam suflabit Francus ab area.
14
This is probably a reference to an illustrious Frenchman.
374
The grain lies smothered by chaff,
which the Frenchman will blow
from the threshing-loor.
Catalog of ARS NOVA Motets, their Sources, and Editions
T
HE FOLLOWING IS A LIST OF MOTETS
which may be called ars nova in the most conser-
vative sense of that term—each is, or shares a share a source with, a work cited in
the network of treatises from the irst half of the century that discusses a “new” manner of
composition practiced by Vitry and others. In practice, this means the Fauvel manuscript
(excluding ars antiqua works), the Machaut corpus, the Ivrea codex, and works listed in the
index to the lost Trémoïlle manuscript. Unica surviving in fragmentary sources are included if that source has a concordance with one of the above-listed manuscripts, and if those
unica seem stylistically related to the ars nova corpus (i.e., French language and/or style if in
an insular source). By making such a list I do not mean to imply that works that have been
excluded from it are necessarily part of a different tradition, or that all of the works on the
list are equally representative of some ideal ars nova “type.” But the extremely high level of
concordance between Ivrea and Trémoille—both retrospective collections—strongly suggests that there existed in the minds of some scribes, editors, singers, indexers, or patrons,
a category into which these works would it reasonably well.1 To avoid thorny issues of the
identiication and indexing of fragmentary works, only works surviving complete in one or
more of their sources are included.2
Motets are listed irst by a short title (Triplum/Motetus) and then by a more detailed
1
Excluded from this list are works from the end of the century which, because of the inadequacy of the
term “ars subtilior,” are sometimes referred to as a “late ars nova.” The obvious contradiction inherent in the
term is not much of a problem, and it has the advantages of emphasizing the very real poetic and formal
continuities that characterize the century. However, the notational advances which were synonymous with
the new art were old news by the 1380s, and subject to further innovation.
2
With the exception of Cede locum/Nam, which survives uniquely in CaB. Its tenor is missing for measures 32–9, but can be reconstructed becsuse it is isorhythmic. See Lerch, Fragmente aus Cambrai, 85.
375
list of voices. Incipits are italicized, while unsung text (such as tenor labels) are in quotation marks. Ellipses within labels indicate that the label continues but is too long to be
included here in full. Sources are identiied by sigla listed at the beginning of this dissertation. Trémoïlle is placed in parenthesis if the work survives only in the index and not on the
surviving folios. Strasbourgasbourg is placed in parenthesis unless the work in question was
copied out by Coussemaker. Text-only sources and contrafacta are not included. Editions
listed are from easily accessible collections organized by manuscript or genre. Editions
in teaching anthologies, articles, and dissertations are not listed, unless they are the only
available ones. A much more comprehensive catalog of this repertory, including fragmentary works and more detail about the content of fragmentary sources is badly needed, and I
hope that the following can at least provide a starting point.
A vous/Ad te
A vous vierge/Ad te virgo clamitans/T: “Regnum mundi”
Source: Ivrea 19v–20. Edition: PMFC 5:74–7.
Almifonis/Rosa
Almifonis melos/Rosa sine culpe spina/T
Sources: Ivrea 11v–12; Cort [fragment 1], verso (frag); (Trémoïlle).
Edition: PMFC 5:46–9.
Altissionis/Hin
Altissonis aptatis viribus/Hin principes qui presunt/T: “Tonans”/CT
Source: Ivrea 2v–3. Editions: PMFC 5:7–12; Lefferts, Three
14th-Century Motets, 1–6.
Aman/Heu
Aman novi/Heu, Fortuna/T: “Heu me, tristis est anima mea”
Source: Fauvel, 30. Edition: PMFC 1:48–50.
Amer/Durement
Amer amours est la choison/Durement au cuer/T: “Dolour meus”
Sources: Ivrea 56v–57; Durham 336 (frag.); PPic 67 (frag.),
recto; (Trémoille). Edition: PMFC 5:100–3.
376
Amours/Faus Samblant Amours qui a/Faus Samblant m’a deceu/T: “Vidi dominum”
(Machaut, M15)
Sources: Machaut MSS, Ivrea 20v–1, Trémoïlle 8.
Editions: see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 292.
Apollinis/Zodiacum
(Bernard de Cluny)
Apollinis eclipsatur/ T: “In omnem terram”/Zodiacum signis
Sources: Ivrea, 12v–13; Strasbourgasbourg, 64v–65 (with
added voices); Leiden 2512, 1 (frag.); PadC, 2v (frag.);
Barc853, 1; Barc971, 11v–12; Tarr(2), verso (frag.); SL2211
69v/79; Lpr 163, 2 (frag., with added voices and motetus
contrafact); Oas 56, Ar (frag.); (Trémoïlle). Editions: PMFC
5:50–3; Bent, Two 14th-Century Motets, 8–13; Harrison, Musicorum Collegio, 7–10.
Apta/Flos
(?Vitry)
Apta caro plumis ingenii/Flos virginum/T: “Alma redemptoris”/CT
Sources: Ivrea, 5v–6; Chantilly, 60v–61; Durham, 338v–
339; ModA 18v–19; CaB 10v–11 (frag.); SL2211 61v/70r
(frag.); (Trémoïlle). Editions: PMFC 5:17–23; Günther, The
Motets of the Manuscripts Chantilly, 8–13; Lerch, Fragmente aus
Cambrai, 2:109–18.
Aucune/Qui plus
(Machaut, M5)
Aucune gent/Qui plus aimme/T: “Fiat voluntas tua”/CT
Sources: Machaut MSS.
Editions: see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 293.
Bone pastor/Bone pastor
(Machaut, M18)
Bone pastor Guillerme/Bone pastor qui pastores/T: “Bone pastor”
Sources: Machaut MSS.
Editions: see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 296.
Bonne/Se me desirs
Bonne est amours/Se me desirs/T: “A”
Source: Fauvel, 29v. Edition: PMFC 1:45–7.
Cede locum/Nam
Cede locum cede/Nam sum qui/T: “Beati qui persecutionem”
Source: CaB, 9.
Edition: Lerch, Fragmente aus Cambrai, 2:79–84.
Celi domina/Maria
Celi domina/Maria, virgo virginum/T: Porchier mieuz estre
Source: Fauvel, 42v. Edition: PMFC 1:57–8.
377
Christe/Veni
(Machaut, M21)
Christe qui lux/Veni creator spiritus/T: “Tribulatio proxima est…”/CT
Sources: Machaut MSS.
Editions: see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 298.
Clap/Sus Robin
Clap, clap par un matin/Sus Robin, alons/T
Source: Ivrea, 60v. Edition: PMFC 5:113–15.
Colla jugo/Bona
(Vitry)
Colla jugo subdere/Bona condit cetera/T: “Libera me [de sanguinibus]”
Sources: Ivrea, 17v–18; Trémoïlle, 1v; CaB, 13r; Apt16bis,
20v–21; Arr983, 62 (frag.); Tarr(1), recto (frag.); Tarr(2), recto
(frag.); WrocĆaw, 1v, 2v (frag.); (Strasbourgasbourg). Editions:
PMFC 1:85–7; Lerch, Fragmente aus Cambrai, 2:155–60.
Cum statua/Hugo
(Vitry)
Cum statua Nabugodonasor/Hugo, Hugo/T: “Magister invidie”
Sources: Ivrea, 14v–15; CaB, 11v; (Trémoïlle).
Editions: PMFC 1:82–4; Lerch, Fragmente aus Cambrai 2:129–
33; Appendix 6B, above.
Dame/Fins
(Machaut, M11)
Dame, je sui cils/Fins cuers dous/T: “Fins cuers doulz”
Sources: Machaut MSS.
Editions: see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 305.
Dantur/Quid
Dantur officia/Quid scire poderit/T
Sources: Ivrea, 5v–6; Apt16bis, 21r; (Strasbourg).
Edition: PMFC 1:104–5.
De bon espoir/Puis que De Bon Espoir/Puis que la douce/T: “Speravi”
(Machaut, M4)
Sources: Machaut MSS.
Editions: see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 298.
Degentis/Cum vix
Degentis vita/Cum vix artidici/CT/T: “Vera pudicitia”
Sources: Chantilly, 62v–63; Barc971, 8v–9; Br5170, 53v
(frag.); Nür9, 1 (frag.); Yox, iiv (frag.); (Strasbourg); (Trémoïlle).
Editions: PMFC 5, nos. 23&23a, 116–127; CMM 39:4–7.
Desolata/Que nutritos
Desolata mater ecclesia/Que nutritos filios/T: “Filios enutrivi...”
Source: Fauvel, 8v. Edition: PMFC 1:24.
378
Detractor/Qui
Detractor est nequissima/Qui secuntur castra/T: “Verbum iniquum...”
Sources: Fauvel, 4; Paris 571, 144v–45.
Edition: PMFC 1:16–7.
Douce/Garison
(Vitry)
Douce playsence/Garison selon nature/T: “Neuma quinti toni”
Sources: Ivrea, 23v–24; (Trémoïlle).
Edition: PMFC 1:72–5.
Facilius/Alieni
Facilius a nobis vitatur/Alieni boni invidia/T: “Imperfecte canite”
Source: Fauvel, 13. Edition: PMFC 1:35–7.
Febus/Lanista
Febus mundo oriens/Lanista vipereus/T: Cornibus equivocis
Source: Ivrea, 3v–4. Editions: PMFC 5:13–16; Lefferts, Three
14th-Century Motets, 7–12.
Felix/Inviolata
(Machaut, M23)
Felix virgo/Inviolata genitrix/T: “Ad te suspiramus gementes…”/CT
Sources: Machaut MSS; (Trémoïlle).
Editions: see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, p. 321.
Firmissime/Adesto
(Vitry)
Firmissime fidem/Adesto, sancta trinitas/T: “Alleluya, Benedictus”
Sources: Fauvel, 43; Br19606, recto; Rob, 43v–44 (intabulation). Edition: PMFC 1:60–3.
Floret/Florens
Floret cum vana gloria/Florens vigor ulciscendo/T “Neuma quinti toni”
Sources: CaB, 16r; Br19606, verso.
Editions: Sanders, “The Early Motets,” 37–42. Lerch, Fragmente
aus Cambrai, 2:205–12.
Flos/Celsa
(?Vitry)
Flos ortus inter lilia/Celsa cedrus/T: “Quam magnus pontifex”
Sources: Ivrea, 9v–10; CaB, 20v; Paris 2444, 49; SL2211, 62v;
(Trémoïlle). Editions: PMFC 5:42–5; Lerch, Fragmente aus Cambrai, 2:175–80.
Fons/O livoris
(Machaut, M9)
Fons tocius superbie/O livoris feritas/T:“Fera pessima”
Sources: Machaut MSS; (Trémoïlle).
Editions: see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 322.
379
Fortune/Ma dolour
Fortune, mere a dolour/Ma doulour ne cesse pas/T: “Dolour meus”
Sources: Ivrea, 53v; CaB, 11v; PPic 67, recto (frag.); (Trémoïlle).
Editions: PMFC 5:92–4; Lerch, Fragmente aus Cambrai, 2:
184–8.
Garrit/In nova
(Vitry)
Garrit Gallus flendo/In nova fert animum/T: “N[euma quinti toni]”
Sources: Fauvel, 44v; PPic67, recto.
Editions: PMFC 1:68–70.
Hareu/Helas
(Machaut, M10)
Hareu! hareu!/Helas! ou sera/T: “Obediens usque ad mortem”
Sources: Machaut MSS; (Trémoïlle).
Editions: see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 323.
Hé! Mors/Fine amour
(Machaut, M3)
Hé! Mors com tu/Fine Amour/T: “Quare non sum mortuus”
Sources: Machaut MSS.
Editions: see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 325.
Helas/Corde mesto
(Machaut, M12)
Helas! pour quoy virent/Corde mesto cantando/T: “Libera me”
Sources: Machaut MSS.
Editions: see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 328.
Ida/Portio
(Egidius de Pusiex)
Ida capillorum/Portio nature/CT/T: “Ante tronum trinitatis”
Sources: Iv, 6v–7; Chantilly, 61v–62; Strasbourg, 74v-75;
Leiden 342A, 2v; (Trémoïlle). Edition: PMFC5 nos. 5&5a,
24–35.
Impudenter/Virtutibus
(Vitry)
Impudenter/Virtutibus/T: [Alma redemptoris mater]/CT/ST
Sources: Ivrea, 4v–5; Strasbourg, 20v; Leiden 342A, 1v
(frag.); Apt16bis, 13v–14; SL2211, 79v; Be421, 18 (frag.);
Br5170, 53 (frag.); Br19606, 53 (frag.); Tro1397, 230
(frag.). Edition: PMFC 1:91–6.
In virtute/Decens
(?Vitry)
In virtute nominum/Decens carmen edere/T: “Clamour meus”/CT
Sources: Ivrea, 55; Paris 2444, 48; (Trémoïlle).
Editions: PMFC 5:95–9; Appendix 5B, above.
Inflammatus/Sicut
Inflammatus invidia/Sicut de ligno/T [“Victime paschali laudes”]
Source: Fauvel, 22. Edition: PMFC 1:43–4.
380
Inter/O livor
Inter amenitatis tripudia/O livor anxie/T: “Revertenti”
Sources: Fauvel, 21v–22; YM3, 10v (frag.); (Trémoïllé).
Edition: PMFC 1:42.
J’ai tant/Lasse
(Machaut, M7)
J’ai tant mon/Lasse! je sui/ T: “Ego moritar pro te”
Sources: Machaut MSS
Editions: see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, p. 329.
Je comence/Et je
Je comence ma chancon/Et je feray li segons/T: “Soules viex”
Sources: Ivrea, 61v–62; McVeigh, 27 (frag.); (Trémoïllé),
Edition: PMFC 21:73–80.
Je Voi/Fauvel
Je voi douleur/Fauvel nous a fait/T: “Fauvel:” Autant m'est si
Sources: Fauvel, 9v. Edition: PMFC 1:p. 25.
L'ardure/Tres dous
L’ardure qu’endure/Tres dous espoir/CT/T: “Ego rogavi deum…”
Soures: Chantilly, 66v–67; (Trémoïlle).
Editions: PMFC 5:149–54; CMM39, 29–33.
L’amoureuse/En l’estat
L’amoureuse flour d’esté/En l’estat/T [Sicut fenum arui]
Sources: Ivrea, 59v–60; Durham, 338 (frag.); (Trémoïlle).
Edition: PMFC 5:108–12.
La mesnie/J’ai fait
La mesnie fauveline/J'ai fait nouveletement/T: Grant despit ai ie
Source: Fauvel, 15v–16. Edition: PMFC 1:40–1.
Lasse/Se j’aim
(Machaut, M16)
Lasse! comment oublieray/Se j’aim/T: Pour quoy me bat
Sources: Machaut MSS; (Trémoïlle).
Editions: see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 336.
Les l’ormel/Mayn
Les l’ormel a la turelle/Mayn se leva sire/T: Je n'y saindrai plus
Sources: Ivrea, 22; CaB, 17; Torino 42, 34–5; Udine, recto
(frag.). Editions: PMFC 5:78–9; Lerch, Fragmente aus Cambrai,
2:122–4.
Li enseignament/De tous
Li enseignament de Chaton/De tous les biens/T
Sources: Ivrea, 26v–27; FriZ, 86; (Trémoïlle).
Edition: PMFC3, 34–6.
381
Martyrum/Diligenter
(Machaut, M19)
Martyrum gemma/Diligenter inquiramus/T: “A Christo honoratus”
Sources: Machaut MSS; Ivrea, 10v–11; (Trémoïlle).
Editions: see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 342.
Mater/Gaude
Mater formosa/Gaude virgo/T
Source: Br19606, recto. Edition: none.
Maugré/De ma dolour
(Machaut, M14)
Maugré mon cuer/De ma dolour/ T: “Quia amore langueo”
Sources: Machaut MSS; (Trémoïlle).
Editions: see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 343.
Mon chant/Qui doloreus Mon chant en plaint/Qui doloreus/T: “Tristis est anima mea”
Sources: Ivrea, 22v–3; Durham, 339v (frag.); (Trémoïlle).
Edition: PMFC 5:80–3.
Musicalis/Sciencie
Musicalis sciencia/Sciencie laudabili/T
Source: PPic 67, verso. Editions: PMFC 5:p. 181–4; Harrison,
Musicorum Collegio, 32–5.
Nulla/Plange
Nulla pestis est gravior/Plange nostra regio/T: “Vergente”
Source: Fauvel, 3.
Edition: PMFC 1:12–5.
O canenda/Rex
(Vitry)
O canenda vulgo/Rex quem metrorum/CT/T: “Rex regum [regi ilio]”
Sources: Ivrea, 55; Paris 2444, 48v; Durham, 337v (frag.); FriZ,
86v; (Trémoïlle). Edition: PMFC 1:106–9.
O Philippe/O bone
O Philippe franci/O bone dux indolis/ST
Sources: Ivrea, 1v–2; (Trémoïlle).
Edition: PMFC 5:1–6.
Orbis/Vos pastores
Orbis orbatus/Vos pastores adulteri/T: “Fur non venit...”
Source: Fauvel, 7.
Edition: PMFC 1:22–3.
Petre/Lugentium
(Vitry)
Petre clemens/Lugentium siccentur/T [Non est inventus similis illi]
Sources: Ivrea, 37v–38; (Trémoïlle).
Edition: PMFC 1:97–105.
382
Portio/Ida
see Ida/Portio
Post missarum/Post misse
Quant en moy/Amour
(Machaut, M1)
Post missarum/Post misse modulamina/CT/T cum C/solus T
Sources: Ivrea, 7v–8; (Trémoïlle).
Edition: PMFC 5:36–41.
Quant en moy/Amour et biauté/T: “Amara valde”
Sources: Machaut MSS
Editions: see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 361.
Quant je le voi/Bon vin Quant je le voi/Bon vin doit/T: Cis chans veult boire
Sources: Fauvel, 45. Edition: PMFC 1:p. 71.
Quant vraie/O series
(Machaut, M17)
Quant vraie amour/O series summe/T: “Super omnes speciosa”
Sources: Machaut MSS.
Editions: see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 364.
Quasi/Trahunt/Ve
Quasi non/Trahunt in precipia/Ve qui gregi/ T: “Displicebat ei, etc.”
Source: Fauvel, 6v. See also Trahunt/An dies.
Edition: PMFC 1:18–21.
Qui/Ha! Fortune
(Machaut, M8)
Qui es promesses/Ha! Fortune/T: “Et non est qui adjuvet”
Sources: Machaut MSS; Ivrea, 24v–25; CaB, 16v; Trémoïlle, 8.
Editions: see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 367.
Rachel/Ha fratres
Rachel plorat filios/Ha fratres, ha vos domini/T
Source: Ivrea, 16v–17. Edition: PMFC 5:66–9.
S’il estoit/S’Amours S’il estoit nulz/S’Amours tous/T: “Et gaudebit cor vestrum”
(Machaut, M6)
Sources: Machaut MSS.
Editions: see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 371.
Scariotis/Jure
Scariotis geniture/Jure quod in opere/T: “Superne matris gaudia etc.”
Sources: Fauvel, 2; (Trémoïlle).
Edition: PMFC 1:8–9.
Se cuers/Rex beatus Se cuers ioiaus/Rex beatus confessor Domini/T: “Ave”
Sources: Fauvel, 10v; Br19606, verso; McVeigh, 26v (frag.);
(Trémoïlle). Edition: PMFC 1:26–8.
383
Se grace/Cum venerint
Se grace n’est a mon/Cum venerint miseri/T: “Ite missa est”
Sources: Ivrea, 21v–22; WrocĆaw, 2v (frag.); Tou 476,
33v; (Trémoïlle). Editions: PMFC 1:129–31; CMM
13:32–3; Doumoulin et al., La Messe de Tournai, 104–7.
Se paour/Diex
Se paour d’umble astinance/Diex tan desir estre amés/T: “Concupisco”
Sources: Ivrea, 25v–6; CaB, 17v–8; (Trémoïlle).
Edition: PMFC 5:84–7; Lerch, Fragmente aus Cambrai, 2:137–
42.
Servant/Ludowice
see Servant/O Philippe
Servant/O Philippe Servant regem misericordia/O Philippe, prelustris/T: “Rex regum...”
Sources: Fauvel, 10v–11; Paris 571, 144 (Motetus “[L]udowice”
for “O Philippe”); (Trémoïlle). Edition: PMFC 1:29–31.
Super/Presidentes
Super cathedram Moysi/Presidentes in thronis seculi/T: “Ruina”
Sources: Fauvel, 1v; CaB, 8v; Br19606, recto; Ox271, Ar (frag.).
Editions: PMFC 1:5–8; Lerch, Fragmente aus Cambrai, 2:71–5.
Tant a soutille/Bien Tant a souttille/Bien pert qu’en moy/T: “Cuius puichritudinem sol…”
Sources: Ivrea, 18v–19; Chantilly, 71v–2; Arr983, 62v (frag.).
Editions: PMFC 5, 70–3; CMM39, 1–3.
Tant doucement/Eins
(Machaut, M13)
Tant doucement m’ont/Eins que ma dame/T: “Ruina”
Sources: Machaut MSS.
Editions: see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 379.
Tous corps/De souspirant
(Machaut, M2)
Tous corps/De souspirant cuer/T: “Suspiro”
Sources: Machaut MSS.
Editions: see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 381.
Trahunt/An diex
Trahunt in precipicia/An Diex/T
Sources: Br19606, verso; Fauvel, 26v (motetus only). See also
Quasi/Trahunt/Ve.
384
Tribum/Quoniam
(Vitry)
Tribum que/Quoniam secta latronum/T: “Merito hec patimur”
Source: Fauvel, 41v–42; StrasbourgStrasbourgourg, 71v; Rob,
44–44v (intabulation); Br19606, recto; Munich 31 (frag.), RosL,
43 (frag.).
Edition: PMFC 1:54–6.
Trop/Par sauvage
Trop ay dure destinée/Par sauvage retenue/CT/T
Source: Ivrea, 57v–8.
Edition: PMFC 5:105–7.
Trop plus/Biauté
(Machaut, M20)
Trop plus/Biauté parée de valour/Je ne sui mie certeins
Sources: Machaut MSS; (Trémoïlle).
Editions: see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 383.
Tu qui/Plange
(Machaut, M22)
Tu qui gregem/Plange, regni respublica!/T: “Apprehende arma...”/CT
Sources: Machaut MSS.
Editions: see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 383.
Tuba/In arboris
(?Vitry)
Tuba sacre fidei proprie/In arboris empiro prospere/T: “Virgo sum”
Sources: Ivrea, 15v–16; (Trémoïlle).
Edition: PMFC 1:32–4.
Vos/Gratissima
(Vitry)
Vos quid admiramini/Gratissima virginis/T: “Gaude gloriosa”/CT
Sources: Ivrea, 8v–9; Durham, 336v–337; CaB, 15v; Br5170,
67bisv (frag.); (Trémoïlle).
Edition: PMFC 1:76–81; Lerch, Fragmente aus Cambrai, 2:192–
201.
Zelus/Jhesu
Zelus familie/Jhesu, tu dator venie/T
Source: Fauvel, 44. Edition: PMFC 1:65–7.
Zolomina/Nazerea
Zolominia zelus/Nazarea que decora/T: “Ave Maria”
Sources: Ivrea, 13v–14; Barc853, 4 (frag.); (Trémoïlle).
Editions: PMFC 5:62–5.
385
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A dissertation presented
by
ANNA ANATOLIEVNA ZAYARUZNAYA
to the Department of Music
in partial fulillment of the requirements
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
in the subject of Music
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts
August 2010
© 2010, Anna Anatolievna Zayaruznaya
All rights reserved.
Professor Sean Gallagher, advisor
Anna Zayaruznaya
Form and Idea in the ARS NOVA Motet
ABSTRACT
Although ars nova motets have traditionally been viewed as “purely mathematical”
due to their highly structured forms, recent studies by Margaret Bent, Jacques Boogaart
and others have challenged this notion, arguing that text and music are sometimes intricately linked. Building upon these analyses of individual works, the present study aims at a
broader evaluation of text-music relations within the repertory.
Part One is dedicated to identifying the units and mechanisms of text-music relations. This involves exploring the reception of motet texts, on the one hand, and the variety
of their musical forms, on the other. I ind that motet reception, as revealed by citation
practices, manuscript transmission, and literary engagement favors the upper voices, which
in turn inluence the structures of motets in ways often audible to audiences. Such emphasis
seems in conlict with the commonly held view that polytextuality masks texts in performance. However, cognitive science and historical evidence can both show that the supposed
limitations of polytextuality need not hinder understanding. The idea that upper-voice
texts may generate musical forms also grates against the notion that motets are structured
from their tenors upwards, but a closer look at upper-voice rhythmic organization reveals
that a signiicant number of motets in the repertory have upper-voice structures that supersede those of the tenor.
Part Two consists of a series of case-studies focusing on a group of motets whose
main ideas are disjunct or hybrid: the goddess Fortune, a chimera, a piecemeal statue. In
iii
these works, the musical settings turn out to be as fragmented as the creatures with which
they are paired, showing segmentation on textural and isorhythmic levels. These hybrid
ideas and their far-reaching effects on musical forms inlect our understanding of latemedieval modes of musical depiction. More than this, when viewed as a group these motets
have the potential to radically alter our understanding of ars nova aesthetics, suggesting that
disjunction, rather than unity, may sometimes have been the highest aim of composition.
iv
FOR MY PARENTS,
without whose courage and foresight
none of this would have been possible.
v
CONTENTS
ix
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
xiii
ABBREVIATIONS, SIGLA AND EXAMPLES
INTRODUCTION
1
PART ONE: FORM AND IDEA
1. MOTETS AS IDEAS
9
The Ontology of Motets
The Indexing of Motets and Manuscript Layout
Motet Citations in Theoretical Treatises
The Transmission of Text
Upper-Voice Texts
Tenor Texts
Intabulations
Motets and/as Literature
Reception of Ars nova Motets Outside of Ars nova Circles
Appendix 1A: Citations of Surviving Ars nova Motets in Treatises
2. HEARING VOICES
17
17
24
32
33
48
50
54
63
68
73
Medieval Listening Practices and Modern Ears
Timbre
The Cocktail Party Phenomenon
3. WHAT IS A TALEA? UPPER-VOICE PERIODICITY IN ARS NOVA MOTETS
The Tenor as Foundation?
The Evidence for Independent Upper-Voice Taleae
Terminology and Diagrams
Supertaleae as Grouped Tenor Taleae
More Intricate Upper-Voice Arrangements
Isorhythm and Memory
Shifts Between Upper- and Lower-Voice Taleae
Upper-voice Structures and Hermeneutics in S’il estoit/S’Amours (M6)
Conclusions: Independent Upper-Voice Structures in the Ars nova Motet
vi
75
84
93
106
108
115
118
119
127
134
144
152
167
PART TWO: MUSICAL DISJUNCTION
4. VOICE-CROSSINGS AND FORTUNA IN MACHAUT’S MOTETS
The Motetus Corde mesto cantando conqueror
Singing from Fortune’s Wheel
Cece Fortuna and Blind Isaac
Amours/Faus Samblant (M15)
Motet 14’s Lying Voices
The Dishonesty of Poets
Fausse Fortune and Amour languour
Other “Fortuna Crossings”
Appendix 4A: Helas/Corde mesto, Texts and Translations
Appendix 4B: Maugre/De ma dolour, Texts and Translations
Appendix 4C: Hélas/Corde Mesto/Libera me, Edition
5. THE MONSTER IN THE MOTET
173
181
183
195
198
203
207
209
216
222
225
228
234
The Texts of In Virtute/Decens
Hockets and Rhetoric
The Isorhythmic Scheme of In virtute/Decens
Hockets and Wordlessness
A Monster-Shaped Motet
Intensiied Monstrosity
Hybridity’s Ambivalence
Vitry and the Zytiron
Ut pictura motetus?
Appendix 5A: In virtute/Decens, Texts and Translations
Appendix 5B: In virtute/Decens, Edition
6. VITRY’S CUM STATUA/HUGO/MAGISTER INVIDIE AND LATE-MEDIEVAL
INTERPRETATIONS OF NEBUCHADNEZZAR’S DREAM
The Statue’s Layers: A Metallurgical Summary
The Motet’s Layers: A Formal Summary
The Composite Tenor of Cum statua/Hugo
The Beginning of the Motet: “Cum statua... Hugo [est]”
“Gradatim deduci ac minus”: The Statue’s Layers in the Motet
The Motet’s Layers: Questions of Isorhythmic Form
Feet of Clay: Hockets and Fragmentation
Phi millies/O Creator/Iacacet granum/Quam sufflabit
vii
235
240
243
249
256
260
262
264
273
278
280
285
289
293
296
303
307
311
314
318
Nebuchadnezzar’s Statue in Machaut’s Complainte
Nebuchadnezzar’s Statues
Gower’s “Divisioun” and the Musical Statue
Epilogue: Ars nova and Disjunction
Appendix 6A: Cum statua/Hugo, Texts and Translations
Appendix 6B: Cum statua/Hugo, Edition
Appendix 6C: Phi millies/O Creator, Texts and Translations
324
335
350
361
367
369
372
CATALOG OF ARS NOVA MOTETS, THEIR SOURCES, AND EDITIONS
375
BIBLIOGRAPHY
386
viii
Acknowledgements
I
F, AS BOETHIUS JUDICIOUSLY WARNS, good Fortune is to be mistrusted and can be counted
on only in its inconstancy, then I’m in for it. While writing this dissertation I have been
astronomically fortunate in the help and support I have received from a list of colleagues,
friends, and family so long that it can only signal my eventual demise. That is, unless we can
consider their inluence Providential rather than merely Fortunate.
Even before I had fully settled on a topic, my colleagues in the thriving ield of medieval and renaissance studies were unfailingly generous with their time, energy, and expertise. Margaret Bent set things in motion in 2004 by suggesting that I look at a few motets
by Machaut. And she has stood by me since then, productively challenging and encouraging
me in turn and providing access to unpublished work and other invaluable resources.
Alejandro Enrique Planchart has also been an ally for many years, and I thank
him for sharing his insight and enthusiasm on a range of topics, and for the very material
loan of the fourteenth century’s most important equine Antichrist. To Jacques Boogaart
I am grateful for his generosity with unpublished work and for saving me from several
embarrassing errors. Jane Alden, Bonnie Blackburn and Dorit Tanai were instrumental in
bringing Chapter 4 to its inal form. Lawrence Earp kindly offered advice on Chapter 1.
Michael Scott Cuthbert, my closest colleague in geographic and temporal terms, has helped
and advised me at various points in my career. On the eve of my dissertation printing I wish
I had heeded his earliest piece of advice: to buy a color laser printer. For discussing dificult
texts that would have been nonsense to me without their expertise I thank Leofranc Holford Strevens and Gabriela Currie. And for his help with a text that is actually nonsense, I
thank Michael Randall.
ix
At the beginning and again at the end of my writing I was bolstered in my resolve
by the warm and knowledgeable group of colleagues that gather in the dolomites to think
about medieval music. By organizing these conferences at Novacella Karl Kügle does our
discipline an enormous service. I thank him for this as well as for his help with motetrelated things.
In Massachusetts, Jane Bernstein, Joseph Dyer, Lewis Lockwood, Virginia Newes,
and Joshua Rifkin have provided support, encouragement, and a steady stream of dificult
questions. In Californa, Anna Maria Busse Berger, Beth Levy, and William Mahrt made me
feel welcome. Jesse Rodin has been a friend, colleague, and co-conspirator on both coasts.
Members of Harvard’s medieval studies community have had a profound inluence
on the extent to which I have felt interested and able to deal with the ideas and images behind the music. I am especially grateful to Jeffrey Hamburger, Michael McCormick, James
Simpson, Hugo van der Velden, and Jan Ziolkowski. My fellow students in medieval studies seminars, Steven Rozenski, Anna Huber, and Beatrice Kitzinger, shared with me their
enthusiasm and some very useful references.
This project would not have been possible without the tremendous aid offered by
librarians: at Harvard’s invaluable Isham library, Sarah Adams and Doug Freundlich tolerated my perpetual residency and offered continuous held and support. At Loeb Music
Library, Virginia Danielson, Kerry Masteller, and Andrew Wilson made me feel welcome
despite my propensity to leave at 9:59 PM (and sometimes, if I’m to be honest, at 10:01).
I am also thankful to William Stoneman and the staff of Houghton Library for granting
me access to several treasures. Digital access to other treasures was facilitated by the Digital
Image Archive of Medieval Music, and I thank Dr. Julia Craig-McFeely for making this
x
invaluable resource available, and especially for allowing me to consult images of the MS
Ferrell–Vogüe, and to reproduce below a few details from this fascinating source. Thanks
also to John Shepard of the Jean Gray Hargrove Music Library at UC Berkeley for making
the beautiful image of En la maison dedalus available to me.
Administrative, emotional, and chocolate support were provided by the powerhouse
staff of the Harvard music department: thank you Kaye Denny, Mary Gerbi, Jean Moncrieff,
Nancy Shafman, Karen Rynne, Charles Stillman, and Fernando Viesca. Several sources of
funding made my research and writing possible: among them a Ferdinand Gordon & Elizabeth Morrill Graduate Fellowship, a Richard F. French Prize Fellowship, a Presidential
Fellowship from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, and an
Alvin H. Johnson AMS 50 Dissertation Fellowship from the American Musicological Society. As a director of graduate studies and later chair of the department, Professor Anne
Shrefler has provided much sound advice and encouragement.
Friends don’t let friends write alone, and I am grateful to Emily Abrams Ansari,
Andrea Bohlman, James Blasina, Carolann Buff, Daphna Davidson, Louis Epstein, Ellen
Exner, Bonnie Loshbaugh, Heather Marlowe, Drew Massey, Carrie Menke, Evan MacCarthy, John McKay, Rowland Moseley, Matthew Mugmon, Andrew Oplinger, Gina Rivera,
David Trippett, Emily Zazulia, and Hillary Zipper for support, encouragement, and calming words and deeds. Michelle Atwood deserves special mention for reminding me from
time to time that, after all, it’s only musicology. And to Ryan Bañagale, Corinna Campbell,
and Katherine Lee—the other members of the small but mighty (ethno)musicology G3s of
2007-8—I owe warm thanks for their patience and friendship, and for making me zoom
out at key points.
xi
Where I come from, “committee” has a harsh ring to it, and usually implies some
body of people whose purpose is to undermine individuality and uphold the status quo. The
committee that advised this dissertation could not have been further from those committees of old. They acted as three distinct voices that together had an undeniable shaping role
to the content and form of the present work, but they also let me pursue my own instincts,
make my own mistakes, and write in my own style (sometimes ill-advised, but never by
them).
Suzannah Clark has shown me what it means to be a reader. Her careful and honest
feedback has led to much fruitful revision, and the subtlety of her thinking has pushed me
to greater care and creativity in my analytical pursuits. To Thomas Forrest Kelly I am grateful for his generosity, his enthusiasm, and his scepticism. His questions, which sometimes
seemed deceptively simple, have acted as important stimuli. No part of this study has not
beneitted from them, and Chapter 1 is their direct result. And to my advisor, Sean Gallagher, I am indebted for asking the right questions at the right times, for thoughtful comments, and for continuing to encourage me when the topic or the circumstances seemed too
daunting. He has lent this work correctness and added style and dignity to many passages.
As a course head and seminar leader he has shown me what it is to inspire and challenge
students. And as I have begun the transition from student to teacher, he has given honest
and helpful advice at every turn.
My family on both coasts (and in the middle) have been loving and supportive
throughout this long process. I thank them for their patience and understanding. And most
of all I thank my husband Yarrow, whose ways of supporting, knowing, reading, questioning,
and loving are as numerous as the leaves of the achillea millefolium.
xii
Abbreviations, Sigla, and Examples
Abbreviations
CMM
Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae. 111 volumes. American Institute of Musicology, 1947– .
Volumes cited:
13. Charles Van den Borren, ed. Missa Tornacensis. 1957.
39. Ursula Günther, ed. The Motets of the Manuscripts Chantilly,
Musée condé, 564 (olim 1047) and Modena, Biblioteca estense, a. M. 5,
24 (olim lat. 568). 1998.
M1–M32
Machaut’s motets, by number. See PMFC2–3.
PMFC
Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century. Leo Schrade, Frank Ll. Harrison, and Kurt von Fischer, general editors. 25 volumes. Monaco: Éditions
de l’Oiseau-Lyre, 1956–1991.
Volumes cited:
1. Leo Schrade, ed. The Roman de Fauvel; The works of Philippe de
Vitry; French cycles of the Ordinarium Missae. 1956.
2–3. ———. Works of Guillaume de Machaut. 1956.
5. Frank Llewellyn Harrison, ed. Motets of French Provenance. 1968.
21. Gordon K. Greene, ed. French Secular Music: Virelais. 1987.
23. ———. French Secular Music: Rondeaux and Miscellaneous
Pieces. 1989.
Manuscript Sigla
Apt16bis
Apt, Cathédrale Sainte-Anne, Bibliothèque du chapitre, Trésor MS 16bis
Apt9
Apt, Cathédrale Sainte-Anne, Bibliothèque du chapitre, Trésor MS 9
Arr983
Arras, Bibliotheque Municipale, MS 983 (olim 766), lyleaf
Barc853
Barcelona, Biblioteca de Catalunya (olim central), MS 853
Barc971
Barcelona, Biblioteca de Catalunya (olim central), MS 971 (olim 946)
Be421
Bern, Burgerbibliothek, A. 471 (lyleaves from A. 421)
BN 1112
Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS fonds latin 1112
Br19606
Brussels, Brussels, Bibliothèque Royal Albert I, MS 19606
Br5170
Brussels, Archives générales du Royaume, Archief Sint-Goedele 5170
(Olim758)
xiii
CaB
Cambrai, Bibliothèque Communale, B 1328 (olim 1176)1
Chantilly
Chantilly, Musée Condé, MS 564 (olim 1047)
Cort
Cortona, Archivio Storico del Comune, 2 fragments without shelfmark
Durham
Durham, Cathedral Library, MS C.I.20, lyleaves
Fauvel
Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS fonds français 146
Ferrell-Vogüé Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, Ferrell-Vogüé MS. Private Collection of James E. and Elizabeth J. Ferrell, on deposit at the Parker Library,
Corpus Christi College, Cambridge
FriZ
Fribourg, Bibliothèque Cantonale et Universitaire, Z 260
Ivrea
Ivrea, Biblioteca Capitolare, MS CXV(115)
Leiden 2515 Leiden, Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit, Bpl 2515.
Leiden 342A Leiden, University Library, MS fragment in group Ltk 342.a, from the
binding of MS Ltk 342A
Lpr 163
London, The National Archives (olim Public Record Ofice), E
163/22/1/24
Machaut A
Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, fonds français 1584
Machaut C
Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, fonds français 1586
Machaut E
Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, fonds français 9221
Machaut J
Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS 5203
Machaut Pm New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, M.396
Machaut Vg
see Ferrell-Vogüé
Mbs 4305
Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 4305
McVeigh
London, British Library, Additional 41667(I)
ModA
Modena: Biblioteca Estense e Universitaria, a.M.5.24 (Latino 568; olim
IV.D.5)
ModB
Biblioteca Estense e Universitaria, a.X.1.11 (Latino 471)
Munich31
Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Handschriften-Inkunabelabteilung,
Latinus monacensis 5362, Kasten D IV ad [31]
1
Foliation as in Lerch, Fragmente aus Cambrai.
xiv
Nür9
Nuremberg, Stadtbibliothek, Fragment lat. 9 (from Centurio V, 61)
Oas 56
Oxford, All Souls College, MS 56, binding strips
Ox 213
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Canonici Miscellaneous 213
Ox 271
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Bodl. 271, binding fragments
PadC
Padua, Biblioteca Universitaria, MS 658
Paris 2444
Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, fonds nouv. acq. latines 2444
Paris 571
Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, fonds français 571
PArs 595
Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS 595
PPic 67
Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Collection de Picardie 67
Robertsbridge London, British Library, Add. 28550
RosL
Rostock, Universitätsbibliothek, phil.100/2
SL2211
Florence, Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana. Archivio Capitolare di San
Lorenzo, ms 2211.2
Strasbourg
Strasbourg, Bibliothèque Municipale (olim Bibliothèque de la Ville), MS
222.C.22 (now destroyed; facsimile of Coussemaker’s transcriptions of
some works in Vander Linden, Le manuscrit musical )
Tarr(1)
Tarragona, Archivo Histórico Archidiocesano, ms s.s. (1)
Tarr(2)
Tarragona, Archivo Histórico Archidiocesano, ms s.s. (2)
Torino 42
Torino, Biblioteca Reale, Vari 42
Trémoïlle
Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, ms fonds nouvelles acquisitions
françaises 23190 (olim Angers, Château de Serrant, Duchesse de la Trémoïlle)
Tou 476
Tournai, Chapitre de la Cathédrale 476
Udine
Udine, Biblioteca Comunale Vincenzo Joppi, ex Archivio Florio 290
Wroclaw
Wroclaw (Breslau), Biblioteka Uniwersytecka Ak 1955/KN 195 (olim MS
fragment 82 from I.Q.411)
Yox
Ipswich, Suffolk Record Ofice HA 30, 50/22/13.15
2
Nádas’s new foliation is used throughout; see “Manuscript San Lorenzo 2211,” 154–68.
xv
Terminology and Titles
Since it no longer seems likely that there was ever a treatise called “Ars nova,” I take
these words as a periodic and stylistic designation that need not be capitalized. I have used
the Latin for “longa” to prevent confusion with the adjective “long,”, but “breve” and “minim” as opposed to brevis and minima, to avoid excessive italicization. Foliation is indicated
with “v” for verso and only the folio number for the recto. “Motetus” rather than “duplum”
is used throughout to designate the middle voice in a three-voice motet, regardless of the
language of its text.
Motets are cited by short incipits in the order Triplum/Motetus. The “Catalog of Ars
nova Motets, their Sources, and Editions” at the end of this study provides longer incipits,
including tenor labels, as well as source and edition information for each motet.
Translations are mine unless otherwise attributed.
Examples and Figures
Unless noted otherwise, musical examples have been newly edited for this study, using the clearest or most complete source available. I have allowed note-values to remain unreduced and preserved original note-shapes, but it should be stressed that these are editions
using simpliied ars nova notation rather than diplomatic transcriptions. Thus ligatures and
multi-bar rests are broken up to make alignment in score possible. Dots of addition are
represented, but not dots of division, since bar-lines are used. In cases where multi-measure
rests affect alteration (such as example 3.9), they are preserved—otherwise not. Modern
clefs are used throughout.
xvi
In some of the examples the music has been shrunk in order to demonstrate larger
points about form. In this case it is not necessary to see the individual notes, but readers of
the higher resolution PDF version should be able to zoom in for details. In some cases color
is used to clarify analytical points. If you are reading this dissertation in a low-resolution
copy scanned by UMI, please contact the author for a PDF.
All images are either reproduced with permission, are under the author’s own copyright, are small details printed under fair use, or are in the public domain. The latter status
for photographic copies of public domain images was reafirmed by the 1999 decision in
the case of Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp.
xvii
INTRODUCTION
“I
REALLY THINK THAT PROSODY AND THE SENSE OF THE WORDS have no importance in the
isorhythmic motet. It proceeds from a purely musical construction; contemporary
music, in this regard, is akin to the ars nova.”1 So opined musicologist Jacques Chailley in
response to the 1955 lecture in which Willi Apel coined the term “pan-isorhythm.”2 He
was not entirely without opposition—Suzanne Clerx had earlier suggested that “alongside the mathematics which is the base of isorhythmic motets there is also the inspiration, the imagination and the necessity of adapting the music…to a text which also has its
requirements.”3 But René Lenaerts countered with a rather categorical reply: “I don’t think
so, due to the fact that relations of text and music only came to life at the end of the fourteenth and in the ifteenth centuries.”4
Chailley and Lenaerts expressed a prevailing view. The relationship between text
and music, which has long been a chief concern in the study of song, is usually referred to
as “word-tone” relations. These units—individual words and small groups of notes—are
1
“Je pense vraiment que la prosodie et le sens des mots n’a aucune importance dans le motet isorythmique.
II s’agit d’une construction purement musicale; la musique contemporaine, a cet égart(sic), est proche aussi
de 1’ars nova et la récente cantate de Leibowitz le montre bien,” published in Apel, “Remarks about the
Isorhythmic Motet,” 145.
2
In drawing parallels between the “purely mathematical” attitude of “Boulez and his partisans” and ars
nova motets, Chailley was not doing either repertory a favor. As a composer, he preferred more conservative
techniques, and used serialism only in the service of satire. For example, in ‘Diafoirus père et ils’ in his Suite
sans prétention pour Monsieur de Moliére (1953). See Spieth-Weissenbacher and Gribenski, “Chailley,
Jacques.”
3
“À côté de la mathématique qui est la base des motets isorythmiques, il y a aussi l’inspiration, la fantaisie
et les nécessites d’adaptation d’une musique, savamment élaborée, a un texte qui a aussi ses exigences,” Ibid.
144.
4
“Je ne le crois pas, car les rapports du texte et de la musique ne deviennent vivants qu’à partir de la in du
XIVe et du XVe siècle,” ibid., 144–5.
the scale on which text and music most obviously interact in later repertories. Word-tone
relations are epitomized in 16th-century text-painting: the well-known melodic ascents on
“skies” and “stars” in madrigals, the upward runs on “et ascendit in caelum” in renaissance
masses, and so forth. When judged by these standards, earlier repertories do indeed seem
to fail in relating words to music. Writing at the same time as Chailley, Alfred Einstein described the addition of voices to a chant as “the smothering new garb” under which the text
“usually disappears.”5 And we can see the same ethos operating thirty years later with Daniel
Leech-Wilkinson’s assertion that “in Machaut’s view, at least, musical form operated, to a
large extent, independently of textual association.”6
In light of the scholarship of the last twenty years such a view is no longer tenable.
A number of careful and sensitive analyses of individual works—mostly from Machaut’s
oeuvre—have shown that the music of ars nova motets can relect their texts through mensural and isorhythmic design, textural manipulation, control of diction, the symbolic use of
number, and a wide array of other techniques.7 Attention to the musical, textual, and contextual content of motet tenors has widened the realm of analysis by increasing the number
5
A. Einstein and E. Sanders, trans., “The Conlict of Word and Tone,” The Musical Quarterly 40, no. 3
(1954): 338.
6
“Machaut’s Rose, Lis,” 13.
7
The earliest analyses that argue for correspondence between form and meaning are Reichert, “Das Verhältnis,” Eggebrecht’s two analyses of Machaut’s Fons/O livoris (M9) (“Machauts Motette Nr. 9,” and “Machauts Motette Nr. 9, Teil II”) and the analyses, especially the one of Sub arturo/Plebs, in Günther, “Das WortTon-Problem.” More recently Margaret Bent has argued that a motet’s texts are manifest in compositional
decisions which have musical, rhythmical, structural, and symbolic-numerical manifestations. In the case
of Machaut’s Amours/Faus Semblant (M15) the texts expressed are ideas of falsehood and deception linked
with False Seeming (“Deception, Exegesis, and Sounding Number”); in Vitry’s Tribum/Quoniam, musical
structure and diction are linked with the Ovidian quotation at the end of the motetus and with the ideas
of sudden downfalls and reversals which it embodies (“The Vitry motet Tribum que); and Machaut’s Fons/O
livoris (M9) shows a number of correlations between musical and textual structure; see “Words and music.”
Jacques Boogaart has explored text-music relations in many of Machaut’s motets; see “O series summe rata,”
and “Love’s Unstable Balance, Part I.” See also Dillon, “The Proile of Philip V.”
2
of texts with which form might interact.8 And consideration of interrelationships between
motets has further expanded the arena in which musico-poetic associations may play out,
allowing for analysis on the level of oeuvre or manuscript.9
The perhaps inevitable side-effect of this is that motets have become “dificult.”
If the ars nova motet of 1955 was a purely musical and sonic object, the ars nova motet of
2010 is almost intimidatingly rich in meaning. In Alice Clark’s summary,
The complexities inherent in the genre—including bitextuality, number
symbolism, allusions to other motets, and other techniques that are inaudible or that cloud the surface comprehension of text and music—can make
us wonder whether anyone listened at all, and if so, what they heard.10
This list of complexities —the result of careful and imaginative studies—is both a boon
and a weakness for our understanding of the genre. For while opening up exciting new
arenas for investigation, the existing readings present us with a challenge. So far, the most
productive approach has been to focus on individual motets, and even analyses of multiple
works may ask a different set of questions, and indeed even call upon a separate set of
methodologies to explore the semantic, cultural, and musical content of each motet. Like
a Mahler symphony, each motet is a world in itself—full of intellectual sophistication, intricate compositional schemes, and deeply coded meaning. But these worlds may well be in
different galaxies.11
8
For studies of how tenors relate to musical and poetic aspects of motets, see Clark, “Concordare cum materia,” Robertson, Guillaume de Macaut, and Maurey, “A Courtly Lover.”
9
Several studies have addressed the ordering of motets within a corpus; on Machaut, see Brown, “Another
Mirror for Lovers?,” and Robertson, Guillaume de Machaut. On a series of motets in Fauvel, see Bent, “Fauvel and Marigny.”
10
Clark, “Listening to Machaut’s Motets,” 487.
11
Boogaart’s analyses are an exception, since he considers Machaut’s motets as an oeuvre and sometimes
applies the same analytical technique—for example, the interpretation of talea rhythms—to several works at
a time. However, his most detailed analyses, such as his analysis of Motet 6 (discussed in detail in Chapter
3 below) focus on the internal poetics of one work. See his “O series summe rata” and “Love’s Unstable Bal-
3
The incommensurability of the existing analyses of ars nova text-music relations is
not necessarily a problem, but it makes it dificult to move beyond the individual work to
consider compositional aesthetics, hermeneutics, and modes of signifying within a repertory. Furthermore, this approach to analysis can leave certain basic questions about genre
unanswered, since an interpretation that stresses the depth and uniqueness of a given work
is more likely to read its properties as individual rather than generic traits. But the opposite approach is perhaps more unpalatable, for in deciding that a given genre is made up of
works that are similar, we will stress the similarities and miss the subtleties of individual
compositions. Indeed, how can we begin to understand the galaxy if we do not know its
worlds?
It is the aim of this study to occupy a middle ground. Though Part II concerns itself
with case-studies that follow in the methodological footsteps of existing work, these casestudies are linked by similar analytical approaches and common units of analysis. It is my
contention that the units of “word” and “tone,” inherited from text underlay discourse and
madrigalisms, are not productive for discussions of musical-semantic relations in the repertory of ars nova motets. Rather, I will suggest that larger phrases or even entire compositions depict the main semantic ideas of texts through bold textural and formal gestures.
Both form and style as possible loci of expression were addressed by Ursula Günther
in an incisive 1984 essay. With the goal of codifying an array of text-music relations in
the middle ages, she built a ive-step ladder whose rungs progress from the most obvious
relations (mimetic) through more complex arrangements, such as pictorial and emphatic
uses of music. On the inal rung of the ladder are located those works which relate text and
ance, Part I.”
4
music “in the formal makeup of a composition, as in motets, canonic works or retrograde
rondeaux.”12 Here Günther includes two works notated on circular staves and three compositions by Machaut: the self-descriptive rondeau Ma fin est mon commencement, the trinitarian three-voiced Lai de le fonteine, and the tritextual canonic ballade Sans cuer/Amis dolens/
Dame par vous, which stages a conversation among its voices.13 Motets are rather underrepresented on all rungs of Günther’s ladder, but it is on this ifth level that the issue comes to
the fore. Though she concedes that “there are even some motets in which form and text are
connected so as to produce meaning,” in the end she cites only one: Sub Arturo/Fons, whose
motetus text summarizes the diminutions which the tenor undergoes.14 “In other motets,”
cautions Günther, “it seems at least less certain, or even questionable whether we can ind
intentional connections between the isorhythmic construction and the numbers mentioned
in the text.”15 In conclusion, she tentatively suggests two possible motets in which a tenor
talea repeated seven times might signify the seven liberal arts.
It is interesting to see how ideas and the forms which depict them change for Günther depending on the genre in question. Theme or subject is interpreted loosely when it
comes to songs: one of the circular rondeaux depicts a labyrinth, Machaut’s ballade evokes
a conversation, the lai enacts the Trinity. And form, too, is a broad enough concept there
to include number of voices, canonic techniques, and page-layout. But in motets the only
12
“im formalen Aufbau einer Kompositon(sic), etwa bei Motetten, kanonischen Werken oder retrograd
aufzulösenden Rondeaux,” Ibid., 236.
13
Ballade 17, edited PMFC 3:88–9. On this work, see Newes, “Dialogue and Dispute,” 71–5.
“Schließlich gibt es sogar einige Motetten, bei denen Text und Form eine Sinnbeziehung aufweisen,”
Günther, “Sinnbezüge zwischen Text und Musik,” 267. Sub Arturo/Fons is edited in Bent, Two 14th-century
Motets.
14
15
“Bei anderen motetten scheint es allerdings weniger sicher oder sogar fraglich, ob man zwischen den
im Text erwähnten Zahlen und der isorhythmischen Konstruktion eine bewußt angestrebte Versinnlichung
sehen sollte.” Günther, “Sinnbezüge zwischen Text und Musik,” 267.
5
valid form is isorhythmic, and thus the only text which can be represented by this form is
one that evokes number. To be sure, numbers were important to the study of late-medieval
motets when Günther wrote, and they remain so today despite challenges to “isorhythm”
as the paradigm for motet construction.16 Günther’s evaluation is instructive here in that
it reminds us that both “form” and “subject” are slippery notions whose deinitions can be
broad or narrow depending on one’s view of the genre.
Part One of the present study is concerned with reining these vague terms as they
might apply to ars nova motets. In Chapter One, I bringing together various strands of reception, from the scribal to the poetic, to explore the ontology of motets for their medieval
listeners. Speciically I focus on the different roles played by upper-voice and tenor texts in
the naming, transmission, and citation of motets. The genre emerges as rather top-heavy:
though tenor melodies undoubtedly have a role in the construction of motets, reception
within ars nova circles repeatedly stresses upper-voice texts, which are more carefully transmitted in both musical and poetic sources. Nor is the situation very different for more
peripheral audiences, though interesting variations in emphasis are evident.
But the idea that motets would be encapsulated for medieval listeners primarily by
their upper-voice texts raises a set of questions about performance. For in combining multiple texts in their upper voices, motets are often charged with rendering those texts inaudible. How, then, can upper-voice texts be a key to reception? The question of intelligibility
is the focus of Chapter Two, where I argue that we may be underestimating the extent to
which texts can be audible in live polytextual performance.
16
See the accounts of the elevation of “isorhythmic” construction and objections to the term “isorhythm”
in Bent, “Isorhythm” and “What is Isorhythm?”
6
But if the ideas of motets come from their upper-voice texts, their forms are usually
thought to come from the tenor. If this is necessarily the case, then the relationship between
form and idea could only be tenuous or retrospective at best. But does all isorhythmic form
come from the tenor? In Chapter Three, I analyze a number of works that use “supertaleae”—upper-voice structures which supersede those of the tenor. The variety of form that
results is in line with Bent’s recent assertion that “isorhythmic” structures are varied rather
than uniied.17 Upper-voice taleae also have interesting implications for the thesis recently
put forward by Anna Maria Busse Berger that isorhythmic composition had a strong mnemonic component.18
Part Two of this dissertation is devoted to the analysis of a number of works whose
forms are closely aligned with the content of their texts. Or perhaps I should say with the
denizens of their texts. For it turns out that form-idea relations play out most dramatically
in works whose hybrid ideas lead to hybrid forms. Thus Chapter Four looks at a group of
works by Machaut that embody the corporeal discontinuities of the goddess Fortune, who
is often depicted as split down the middle. Chapter Five concerns itself with an even more
disjunct creature—the chimera from the beginning of Horace’s Ars poetica. This monster,
who has the head of a woman, a horse’s neck, feathers and a ishtail, turns out to be the main
idea of the Ivrea motet In virtute/Decens. Despite a message that seems to disparage hybridity, this motet highlights the presence of its unusual subject, controlling text declamation
in such a way as to maximally separate the creature into its disjunct parts. Chapter 6 is
concerned with a biblical monster—the statue made of gold, silver, copper, iron, and clay
17
“What is Isorhythm?,” 138–9.
18
Busse Berger, Medieval Music, 212–52.
7
that King Nebuchadnezzar saw in an apocalyptic dream (Daniel 2). This allegorical image of decay through time is present in several works by Vitry and Machaut. But the statue
also has broader cultural signiicance, and can allow us to situate ars nova thought within
contemporary intellectual currents as manifest in the writings of Boccaccio, Deguileville,
Dante, Gower, and others.
When taken together, the analyses in Chapters 4, 5, and 6 show that, in some cases,
semantic contents have been the generating concept for a piece of music. Vitry emerges as a composer particularly interested in disjunct forms and ideas: In virtute/Decens has
been attributed to him by several scholars, and two other motets dealing with hybrids—Phi
millies/O Creator and Cum statua/Hugo are among his most securely attributed works. But a
focus on hybridity and disjunction also allows us to compare the compositional approaches
of Machaut and Vitry, since both dwell on monsters in their works, but they do so using
different devices. Most broadly, the hybrid ideas in ars nova motets—and their far-reaching
effects on musical forms—have the potential to inlect our understanding of late-medieval
musical aesthetics. Viewed as a group, these works suggest that disjunction, rather than
unity, may sometimes have been the highest aim of composition.
8
CHAPTER ONE
MOTETS AS IDEAS
O
N FOLIO
129 of a well-used copy of Guillaume de Nangis’ Chronicon (a history of
the world from the creation until 1300)1, Philippe de Vitry found himself read-
ing about the defeat of the Parthian Army. Their downfall reminded him of another. And
so he picked up his pen and wrote in the margin: “Nota: Post zephiros plus ledit hiems, post
gaudia luctus, etc.”2 With this irst line of a couplet from Joseph of Exeter’s account of the
Trojan war, Vitry linked two parallel scenes of downfall and grief—Nangis’s description of
Orodes I grieving for his son, and Exeter’s account of the death of King Priam, survived by
Hecuba. For both mourners,
Winter harms more after gentle west winds, griefs [harm more] after joys;
whence nothing is better than to have had nothing for the second time.3
For us the annotation is of interest because the same couplet appears at the end of the
triplum voice in Vitry’s motet Tribum/Quoniam.4 Andrew Wathey, who irst discovered the
marginal note, has pointed to a number of thematic parallels between the chronicle and the
motet.5 If, he argues, the motet predates the annotation, then “the later use of the couplet
may well have been intended to recall not only its generalized moral proposition but also
1
Vatican, MS Regin. Lat. 544.
2
Vitry was a frequent annotator who engaged with his books in both personal and erudite ways—the former as when he annotated the year of his birth, 1291, on fol. 361r of this same book. See Wathey, “Philippe
de Vitry’s Books,” 145–8, and “Myth and Mythography,” 95.
3
“Post zephiros plus ledit hyems, post gaudia luctus;/Unde nichil melius, quam nil habuisse secundum,”
trans. Howlett in Bent, “Polyphony of Texts and Music,” 86. See Wathey’s discussion of this quotation in
“Auctoritas and the Motets,” 68–9.
4
For more information on motets cited in the text, see the “Catalog of Ars nova Motets, their Sources, and
Editions” at the end of this study.
5
“Both deal with reprobate tribes, with the excessive ambition and cruelty of their leaders and with their
inal reduction by fortune to misery and death,” Wathey, “Myth and Mythography,” 97.
9
to signal the parallels with the topoi of the motet.”6 But what if the annotation predates the
motet? It is possible that it did.7 If so, I would like to imagine that here Tribum/Quoniam
was born.
And the motet relects its priorities. Writing about an Ovidian couplet (also about
sudden downfalls) that concludes the motetus text, Margaret Bent has argued that the work
is “constructed backward” from these lines, which are as much “starting points and building
materials for both the texts and music” as the motet’s tenor.8 Thus whether Vitrys’ annotation in the Chronicon represents an actual genesis for Tribum/Quoniam or simply a reference to the motet, it does in a sense encapsulate that work, causing us to think of it as a
weaving-together of disparate texts whose juxtaposition is interesting, fundamental, even
germinative: “Nota...”!
That is one way to think about Tribum/Quoniam. Here are two others:
tenor V+12(6ic);
(upper voices 3x24 ic)9
6
Tr: 9L+2(12+ 12L) + 12L+9L
Mo: (3+ 12L) +2( I I + 13L )+ 15L
T: 6L+3[4(6L)]10
Ibid.
7
Wathey is hesitant to put the annotation before the motet, writing that “seems likely [that] Vitry’s motet
predates his annotation of the Chronicon” but notes also that “it remains unclear” when Vitry acquired his
copy of the Chronicon, and that the dateable annotations indicate only that it was “almost certainly in his
hands by 1342” and probably by the late 1320s (“Myth and Mythography,” 97n41 ). Elsewhere, however,
Wathey points out that the name of Louis de Bourbon has been erased from a list of deserters given in the
manuscript under the description of the Battle of Courtrai in 1302, and Louis de Bourbon was Vitry’s
employer “from the early 1320s (or earlier),” so that Vitry may well have been the one to make this early
change. There is no evidence, in other words, that the book could not have been with Vitry before he wrote
Tribum/Quoniam.
8
Bent was writing before Wathey’s indings had been published, and unaware of the quotation in the triplum,
“The Vitry motet Tribum que,” 87, 89.
9
10
Adapted from Besseler, “Studien zur Musik des Mittelalters II,” 223 and 223n12.
Sanders, “The Early Motets,” 27.
10
These are formulae Heinrich Besseler (left) and Ernest Sanders (right) used to describe aspects of Tribum/Quoniam which they found important. Besseler identiies the overall structure of the motet as consisting of a texted introduction followed by 12 periods.11 Sanders
focuses on the length of phrases in each of the work’s three voices, arguing that Tribum/
Quoniam “represents an imaginative ordering of modal tradition to produce a novel, largescale structure” in which “the irst four multiples of the number 3 are all represented.”12
And here is Tribum/Quoniam in yet another guise. In explaining the mechanics of
rhythmic organization to his readers, the author of the Compendium totius artis motetorum
cites an example of each type of meter:
An example of [perfect time with] minor [prolation] is the motet Playn sui
de ameer. An example of imperfect time with major [prolation] is the motet
Adesto sancta trinitas. An example of [imperfect time with] minor [prolation] is the motet [Tribum/]Quoniam secta latronum and many other motets,
rondeaux, and ballades.13
Here the same work that we have already seen characterized as a venue for the juxtaposition
of comments on the idea of sudden downfalls and a mathematical expression of multiples
of three is being invoked as an example of imperfect tempus with minor prolation.
If in that case the upper voices of the composition are being evoked (only they display differences in prolation), other readings of motets evoke their tenors. To take another
piece as an example, Anne Robertson has argued that the key to understanding Machaut’s
11
“V” is for “Vokaleinleitung. The bottom line speciies that the upper voices are arranged in three periods
of twenty-four imperfect longae. The observation is signiicant and I will return to the question of independent upper-voice structures in Chapter Three.
12
Sanders, “The Early Motets,” 26–7.
13
“Exemplum de minori in uno moteto Playn sui de ameer. Exemplum de tempore imperfecto majori in
moteto Adesto sancta trinitas, exemplum de minori in moteto Quoniam secta latronum et in multis aliis
motetis, rondellis et baladis,” Wold, ed., “Ein anonymer Musiktraktat,” 37. On the relationship between
the Compendium totius Artis Motetorum and the treatises which present the ars nova teachings, see Fuller, “A
Phantom Treatise,” 45–50, and Balensuela, “The Borrower is Servant to the Lender,” 12–4.
11
Amours/Faus Samblant (M15) is through its sacred tenor, “Vidi dominum” (I have seen the
Lord), which “illustrates the inherent importance of sight of God at this point in the [allegorical journey].”14 Although the motet’s courtly “upper voices…at irst seem to resist the
sacred implications of the tenor,” their content “does not undermine a sacred reading of
[Amours/Faus Samblant],” since even the Christian pilgrim must sometimes keep bad company.15 Here a motet is rendered a complex object whose main idea—sacred and allegorical—lows from its tenor, which is primary, into its upper voices, which are subordinate in
meaning.
And, inally, here is the same motet in different clothes: In a dream, the narrator
of Jean Froissart’s Joli buisson de jonece (1373) witnesses a competition in which a group
of young allegorical people write and perform wish poems.16 After they have recited their
wishes, the question of who will judge the competition arises, and Desire suggests that the
company go to the God of Love, who happens to be nearby. The narrator’s heart leaps at the
opportunity, and his joy causes him to sing:
And when I heard them say this,
My spirit rejoiced
That I would be going on this trip,
For I greatly desired
To see and also to know
The god of Love, who is so esteemed,
What kind of man he was and of what age.
As I traveled along on this excursion,
In peace, joy, and gaiety,
Singing a new motet
That had been sent to me from Reims,
I was neither in the front nor in the back,
14
Guillaume de Machaut, 164.
15
Ibid.
16
Figg & Palmer, Jean Froissart: An Anthology, 444–61.
12
But very comfortably in the middle,
Dressed in new lace-up shoes,
The way lovers go for a late night out.17
Sylvia Huot has argued that the unnamed motet—clearly by Machaut since it came to the
singer from Reims—may well have been Amours/Faus Semblant.18 Here placed into the lips
of a happy lover who sings while walking, the motet (or one of it voices) acts as a soundtrack to an idyllic courtly scene in which the “Vidi Dominum” of the tenor refers to the
God of Love, upon whom the singer expects imminently to gaze.19 But it is not to be. This
musical euphoria is all the more striking for the denouement which follows it. “Someone
shoves me and then I wake up,” the next line reads, and then the dream that takes up most
of the dit is over, and the lover is, in Sylvia Huot’s evocative summary, “plunged back into
the realities of winter, encroaching age, the waning of desire and penitential concerns.”20
Thus the motet, whichever motet it is, here represents an extreme of emotion encapsulated
by joyful sound that is all the more loud for being suddenly interrupted.
In bringing together these various contexts and readings of Vitry’s Tribum/Quoniam
and Machaut’s Amour/Faus Semblant, I have purposely mingled medieval and modern views
of motets. All of these interpretations it comfortably under the broad category of reception. Between them, motets emerge as intersections of texts and quotations, as mathematical structures and explorations of number, as exemplary representatives of a new notational
17
My emphasis; trans. Figg & Palmer, Jean Froissart: An Anthology, 461–3.
18
Huot, “Reading Across Genres,” 2, 8–9.
19
Huot has suggested that given the poem’s broader narrative, the tenor contrasts “the deceptive appearances of the courtly lady with the unmediated and always salviic vision of God,” ibid., 9. This interpretation
gives the motet broader signiicance within the narrative, but it is also useful to read this as a moment of
diagetic, plot-driven music making in which the narrator sings out of joy, especially given the denouement
that follows, which in fact interrupts the song.
20
Ibid., 1.
13
system, as elaborations of their tenor texts, and even as spontaneous, joyful sound in a
dream. Nor is such a list exhaustive. That all of these different interpretations are possible
is a function of the complexity of motets. For they combine multiple voices, multiple texts,
and sometimes involved structural schemes with textual and melodic quotations in the upper voices and the tenor that lead necessarily outside of the work and into the historical
and intellectual context of its composition. Needless to say, all of these are valid critical
approaches (for even Froissart’s decision to cite a motet at this particular moment is critical
and reveals a particular view of the genre), and motets have at some time been all of these
things, and continue to be all of them in the pluralistic climate of early twenty-irst-century
academia.
But in practice these various views of motets have some trouble coexisting. For example, numerical approaches tend to minimize the role of text, owing to an attitude—often
implicit—that mathematical construction results in “absolute” music which is unable or
unwilling to signify.21 Similarly, approaches that begin with the tenor’s text and liturgical
context tend to interact less with upper-voice texts and quotations, except when these support the sacred message of the tenor.22 Studies focused on texts and the roles of quotations
often do engage with structure, and especially with numerical symbolism, which is able to
render structure semantic by imbuing number with meaning.23 But this approach depends
on an imaginary listener who can appreciate these numerical subtleties because he is in-
21
See the comments of Chailley and others quoted at the beginning of the introduction and published in
Apel, “Remarks about the Isorhythmic Motet,” 145. Other studies that focus on structure include Besseler,
“Studien II,” Sanders, “The Medieval Motet,” and Leech-Wilkinson, “Related Motets.”
22
E.g. Clark, “Concordare cum materia,” Robertson, Guillaume de Machaut.
23
For example, Bent, “Deception, Exegesis, and Sounding Number,” 15-27, and Roesner, “Labouring in
the Midst of Wolves,” 212–45.
14
timately familiar with the work, and presupposing this kind of familiarity in an analysis
in turn gives a less active role to sonority and audible events. None of this is necessarily a
problem: any analysis must decide which factors are to be signiicant and central, and which
peripheral. The alternative—a reading in which text, number, liturgy, sonority, quotations,
culture, and contrapuntal progressions are all expected to signify—threatens to render a
work ininitely complicated.
Thus decisions must be made about what aspects of motets will be more signiicant,
and these decisions will have ramiications at every step of the scholarly and performing
process. How we edit motets, whether we translate their texts, how we group them in editions, what other genres we pair them with in concerts—all of these aspects of our interactions are predicated on attitudes about the nature of the genre and the relative importance
of its competing elements. Even names can be instructive. For example, the same motet
has variously been referred to as “O canenda/Rex/Rex regum,” “Rex quem metrorum,” “O
canenda/Rex/T:Rex regum/CT,” “O canenda vulgo per compita-Rex quem metrorum depingit prima igura-Rex regum,” and “V14.” This is not just a matter of academic fashions
or of the disconnect between modern and medieval notions of what a title is—as we shall
see, the fourteenth century’s naming conventions for motets were very consistent. But “O
canenda/Rex/Rex regum” encourages us to think of a composite entity the different elements of which are kept neatly apart by slashes. “O canenda/Rex/T:Rex regum/CT” with
its complete top-to-bottom listing of voices seems most concerned with indicating that
this is a four-voice motet, and with putting each listed voice on equal terms with the others. “O canenda vulgo per compita-Rex quem metrorum depingit prima igura-Rex regum”
seems rather to be three musical works than one, and “V14” evokes an easy-to-encapsulate
15
element of an oeuvre (here, Vitry’s) ready to be compared to others like it (presumably
V1–V13) and having little to do with any text that may or may not be present.
This variety of naming betrays a difference of opinion about what these works actually are. Are they networks of related compositions or individual creations? Is their meaning contained in the long upper-voice texts or the tenor’s pithy content? To what extent do
the separate voices represent independent musico-poetic statements, and to what degree are
they linked? How deining a characteristic, after all, is text to this genre, and if text, then
which text? Where should untexted voices (such as contratenors) or silently texted voices
(most tenors) stand in our analytical priorities? What is a motet? It may be that not so much
is in a name, but these are the questions that arise from the difference between “O canenda/
Rex/Rex regum” and “V14.”
If our ways of editing, naming, and citing motets can reveal something about competing modern notions of the “essence” of these works, certainly analogous medieval practices can do the same. Though no texts have survived that deal speciically with the questions posed above, a broad range of sources comment upon the cultural and intellectual
presence of motets, hinting at the ways in which they were received. We can begin by considering naming conventions as they are revealed in manuscript indexes and treatises. These
give some compelling hints about where medieval composers or theorists may have located
“the work” within the complex of relationships that constitutes ars nova motets. I will then
look to the manuscript transmission of motet texts—those of the upper voices and of the
tenor—for what they can tell us about the relative importance of different texts. Next I will
turn to the poetic presence of motets. Citations, allusions, and even irreverent re-workings
of motet passages in dits and short poems attest to a role for upper-voice motet texts in a
16
broader literary culture.
Throughout these different arenas, we will see that the reception of motets in ars
nova circles emerges as relatively uniied—especially so in contrast with more peripheral
practices. For the priorities or scribes, theorists, and even poets are surprisingly dependent
on geography. Already in the fourteenth century, it seems, the ars nova motet was different
things to different people.
* * *
THE ONTOLOGY OF MOTETS
It may well be argued that the idea of “naming” a piece of music is a later invention,
and that we should not expect motets to be called anything. But insofar as the medieval
evidence can answer these questions, there were clearly conventions involved in referring to
motets. In almost all contexts, ars nova motets are referred to by the irst few words of their
motetus text. This is the case in both indexes and treatises for the irst three quarters of the
fourteenth century at which point, as we shall see, focus shifted to the triplum. I will discuss
the evidence provided by indexes and theoretical treatises in turn.
The Indexing and Manuscript Layout of Motets
The index to the interpolated Roman de Fauvel (c. 1317) gives its motets pride of
place among the musical examples and divides them into two categories. The three-voice
motets are labeled “motez a treblez et a tenur[es]”; the two-voice works, “motez a tenures
sanz trebles.” This designation may not seem intuitive. We can take it for granted that a motet has a tenor, and in keeping with the construction a modern editor would perhaps re-write
these headings to read “tenors with motetus and triplum” and “tenors with motetus, without
17
triplum.” But this would miss the fact that “motet” means both the genre of “motet” and the
voice “motetus.” The Fauvel headings seem to preserve this distinction. What makes a work
a motet, in other words, is not having a tenor with repeating rhythmic patterns or different
texts in different voices (though these are certainly properties of the Fauvel motets a treblez
et a tenur), but having a motetus. That all motets should be called by their middle voice is
perhaps most surprising in a piece like Tribum/Quoniam, where the triplum comes in irst
and declares its opening text clearly, but the motetus enters only later, echoing the triplum’s
opening notes and singing under it (see Example 1.1). Here the experience of hearing the
piece and of calling it “Quoniam secta latronum” seem rather different, and we may wonder
whether someone seeking to ind this motet would not be looking under “Tribum que non
abhorriut”. Nevertheless, even this work is indexed by its motetus.
Example 1.1: Tribum/Quoniam, mm. 1–624
The only exception in Fauvel serves rather to prove the rule than otherwise. The
motet Zelus familie/Ihesu tu dator is listed in the index as “Zelus familie”—that is, by the
incipit of its triplum voice. But upon examination of the music we ind that the voices are
almost identical in their rhythmic activity, rate of textual declamation, and range.25 In24
Reproduced from PMFC 1:6.
25
Both voices declaim on the level of longa and breve, in a Mode 1 rhythm. Individual semibreves do not
carry text.
18
deed the motetus begins on top, delivering its “Ihesu” above the triplum in mm. 2–3 (see
Example 1.2). Granted, the triplum here is still the one with the smallest possible notevalues, which is a requirement according to theorist Johannes Boen: “nor should a triplum
of some motet be called by that name (triplum) unless it has in it some notes having a triple
proportion to the notes of some, be it motetus or tenor.”26 And indeed the triplum’s notated
semibreves (as in m. 5) are on a rhythmic order higher than both tenor and the motetus for
most of the motet.
Example 1.2: Zelus/Ihesu mm. 1–627
However, towards the end of the piece the motetus suddenly begins to speak more
quickly, while the triplum’s rate of text-declamation crawls at times to a halt for three
to four longae.28 By the inal measures the motetus “Ihesu tu dator” seems really to have
changed roles: it sings semibreves and carries the highest note in the work’s inal sonority
(see Example 1.3).29 The scribe’s confusion in this case is thus justiied. The listing of the
motet in the index suggests that he knew the opening texts of both voices and may have
26
“Nec debet triplum cuiuscumque moteti vocari hoc nomine nisi sit in ipso aliqua notula triplam habens
proporcionem ad notam aliquam puta moteti vel tenoris,” Frobenius, Johannes Boens Musica, 42.
27
Reproduced from PMFC 1:65.
28
See the passages beginning at mm. 56, 87, and 92 in PMFC 1:66–7.
29
This fact alone would not be suficient justiication for indexing the motet with a triplum incipit: Quant
je le voi/Bon vin doit the triplum ends lower than the motetus, but the motet is still listed in the index as “Bon
vin doit.”
19
brought his understanding of their musical functions to bear on his decision in making the
index.
Example 1.3: Zelus/Ihesu mm. 84–end30
Dated 1376 and thus standing near the end of our period of interest, the index of
the Trémoïlle manuscript also separates motets from other genres and, collecting them under the rubric “Motez ordenez et escriz ci aprés,” lists the works by their motetus incipits.31
Within the Machaut corpus, the same approach is taken in the famous index that heads
30
Reproduced from PMFC 1:67.
31
See Bent, “A Note on the Dating,” 222–3. Bent has determined that the date of 1376 only acts as a
terminus ante quem for the irst part of the index and for the contents of folios 1–32. Even though most of
the manuscript has been lost, it can be ascertained from the many concordances which exist that all works
are indeed listed by their motetus. Droz and Thibaut assumed that the motet indexed as “O Philippe” was O
philippe/O bone dux, but is probably the Fauvel motet with the motetus “O Philippe”; see Droz & Thibaut, “Un
chansonnier,” 5. See also comments in Earp, “Scribal Practices,” 66. The Strasbourg codex treats “Portio
nature” as the triplum of the motet elsewhere presented as Ida/Portio, and Trémoïlle’s citation of this work
as “Yda capillorum” may rest on this conception; see Günther, The Motets of the Manuscripts Chantilly, p.
lix. Here the distinction between voices is dificult to make, as it was in the case of Zelus/Jesu: the “Ida capillorum” voice sings a long “Ida” at the opening of the motet, while the “Portio naturae” voice declares more
quickly. That there was some question about what this motet should be called can be gleaned also from the
Ars cantus mensurabilis, whose author normally refers to motets by their triplum voice but in one case calls
this work “Portio nature vel Ida capillorum”; Balensuela, ed., Ars cantus mensurabilis, 256. See also Appendix
1A.
20
Manuscript A. Here a list headed “Les motets” uses a motetus incipit for all the works but
two.32 The irst exception is Quant/Amour (M1), which is entered into the index as “Quant
en moy vint premierement,” with a big decorated Q. Earp has suggested that the triplum is
cited “by virtue of its reference to ‘coming irst’,” but the decision to list it thus could also
be a inding aid, since this motet has a miniature above the triplum voice’s decorated Q, and
the eye would naturally be drawn to the left column on fol. 414v, and with it the triplum
“Quant en moy.” The motetus here has only a one-line initial. In all other cases, however,
the motetus has a two-line initial, while the triplum, tenor, and contratenor (where there
is one) have a one-line decorated letter (as in the beginning of He mors/Fine amour, reproduced in Figure 1.1.33 Thus the manuscript’s decoration is keyed to the index.34
It is a strange aspect of motet reception that sometime during the last quarter of the
fourteenth century the naming convention seems to have changed suddenly and decidedly.
In the Machaut corpus, we may compare the priorities underlying the decoration of He
mors/Fine amour (M3) in Manuscript A (Figure 1.1 above) with the same motet’s layout in
the slightly later Manuscript Ferrell-Vogüé (Figure 1.2). Here and elsewhere in the motet
section of this manuscript, it is the triplum voice that begins with a 2-line capital, while
motetus, tenor, and contratenor parts have one-line capitals.35
32
In contrast, Machaut’s three polytextual ballades are indexed by all of their texts: Sans cuer/Amis/Dame
(B17) and De triste cuer/Quant/Certes (B29) are each listed by three incipits, with brackets added on the left
to show the three texts go together. Quant Theseus/Ne quier (B34) was originally indexed as “Quant Theseus,”
but the hand providing pagination later added “Ne quier veoir” to the right of the irst incipit.
33
Observed in Earp, “Scribal Practice,” 65n146.
34
The other exception is M18, in which all voices begin with “Bone pastor” but the incipit given in the
index, “Bone pastor Guillerme,” refers to the triplum. Earp has suggested that the triplum is cited because
it names the work’s dedicatee; ibid., 67. It is also possible that the scribe had a momentary lapse given the
similarity of the incipits.
35
The only exception is Christe/Veni (M21), where 2-line-high initials in both upper voices allow a clever
trick in texting whereby both the introitus section and the beginning of the motet proper use the same deco-
21
Figure 1.1: The Start of He mors/Fine amour (M3) in Machaut A (fol. 416v)
Figure 1.2: He mors/Fine amour in Machaut Vg-Ferrel (fols. 262v–263)
rated inital (fols. 280v–281).
22
The change of priority demonstrated by these decorations is also relected in manuscript indexes after Trémoïlle. Within the Machaut corpus, Manuscript E (copied in the
early 1390s) lists motets by their tripla. Chantilly’s index lists triplum incipits under the
category “Motes” (fol. 10), and the destroyed Strasbourg manuscript (early 15th c.) enters motets by their triplum under alphabetical headings.36 The same holds true for midifteenth-century sources. In Ox 213 (c. 1426–36) the index is organized by alphabetic
headings and could in theory have accommodated multiple entries for the same work, listing
its different voices under different letters if it were likely that a user should have look for a
work by several of its texts. However this is not done, and each of the motets and polytextual
rondeaux in the chansonnier is listed in the index only once, by its top voice.37 Similarly,
the section headed “Hic Incipiunt Motteti” in the index to ModB (c. 1440–50) gives a
textual and musical incipit for the highest voice of each motet in the manuscript—usually
the triplum, though sometimes a quadruplum.38 These later collections largely transmit a
separate repertory, but there are enough ars nova motets present for us to be sure that the
naming conventions have indeed changed, and not only with respect to newer works but
also retrospectively.39
36
Copied in Vander Linden, ed., Le manuscrit musical, 16–25. Both texts of Ida/Portio are listed in the
index—perhaps the indexer thought it was two compositions.
37
Polytextual motets whose top voices are found in the remaining part of the index are catalog nos. 51,
68, 267, 275, 277, 279, 308, and 321. Polytextual rondeaux listed by their top voice are nos. 202, 208,
219, 254, and 284. No. 77 may be a polytextual ballade or not—it is also listed by its top voice/irst verse;
see Fallows, ed., Oxford, Bodleian Library MS. Canon. Misc. 213, 36.
38
On the ModB index and its category of motet see Cumming, The Motet, 48, 51–4. Q15 also groups
motets together but the indexer does not include them in his list. See Bent, Bologna Q15, 1:89–90.
39
Degentis/Cum vix, Ida/Portio, L’ardure/Tres dous, Tant/Bien, and Apta/Flos are concordances between Trémoïlle or Ivrea and Chantilly, and there are several more concordances between the earlier repertoire and
Strasbourg.
23
Motet Citations in Theoretical Treatises
There is a large number of references to speciic ars nova motets in music treatises
from the fourteenth and ifteenth centuries. Though these have been mined for what they
can tell us about motet authorship and music theory, there is good reason to explore the
rhetorical habits employed by theorists in citing pieces: in referring to particular works of
music, theorists stand to provide valuable hints about the ontology and anatomy of motets
as they were represented in the minds of their early audiences.
References to ars nova motets drawn from 16 treatises are collected in Appendix
1A. The irst 55 or so of these belong to the period before c. 1375. As is the case with
manuscript indexes from this time, theorists identify motets by their motetus text almost
without exception.40 Thus the author of De musica antiqua et nova, when he wishes to refer
to Cum statua/Hugo, writes “in moteto qui vocatur Hugo,” and the Compendium totius artis
motetorum talks of “uno moteto Praesidentes in tronis seculi,” by which we are to understand
Super cathedram/Presidentes.41 This consistent use of the motetus incipit is all the more telling in the presence of formulations such as “in moteto qui vocatur...,” which give the sense
that these incipits functioned as titles. The motetus incipit/title could be employed when a
writer wished to refer to the entire piece (such as in the common cases where a motet serves
as an example of a certain mensuration). But it was also used to reference a speciic voice or
40
This tendency has been noted by Besseler, “Studien zur Musik des Mittelalters II,” 235–6, Earp, “Scribal
Practice,” 65–6, and Bent, “A Note on the Dating,” 223–4. The three exceptions are the Ars (musicae)
citation of Rex/Leticie as “Rex Karole,” the citation of Orbis/Vos as “Orbis orbatus” in the treatise which
begins “Sex minimae possunt poni,” and the reference to Qui es/Ha Fortune (M8) as “Qui des promesses de
fortune se ie” in the treatise “Cum de signis temporibus...” (see Appendix 1A). The latter two treatises are
in fact later (possibly early ifteenth-century) copies of ars nova-era texts, and the scribes may well have been
supplementing their exemplars with new citations, using the naming conventions that were current when
they were copying. The irst exception, “Rex Karole,” appears only in a reworked version of Boen’s treatise;
see Boen, Ars, 14.
41
Coussemaker, Scriptorum, 3:347; Wolf, “Ein anonymer Musiktraktat,” 37.
24
passage in either of the upper voices. Thus in his Musica Johannes Boen uses the formulation “in motheto Florens vigor super verbo ‘Mardocheo’” to identify a particular dissonance
that occurs on the word “Mardocheo” in the motetus text.42 But the motetus incipit could
also be used to reference the triplum. For as Boen is explaining the rules of alteration and
imperfection in his Ars, he offers Impudenter/Virtutibus as an example of the “similis ante
similem...” rule and of the inability of breves to alter minims:
No note before a like note takes on imperfection. And this we can observe
clearly in the irst four little notes of that most excellent motet Virtutibus.
From this we can infer that a minim is never altered before a breve, nor a
semibreve before a long.43
Although the motet is cited by its motetus like Boen’s other examples, the “primis
quatuor notulis” must belong to the triplum, which is the only voice singing at the beginning of the motet. Its rhythm there (SSMB) illustrates both of Boen’s points, since the irst of
the two semibreves is perfect and the minim is not altered by the breve.44
Toward the end of the fourteenth century (and earlier in England and Italy) the
fashion for naming switched to the triplum. Since the word “motetus” still referred to the
genre, this led to some seemingly contradictory statements, such as the reference in the
Tractatus Figurarum “in motetis ipsorum magistrorum videlicet Tribum que non abhorruit
et in aliis” (“to the motet(use)s of those old masters, such as Tribum que non abhorruit, and
others”). The old masters would of course have referred to this work as “Quoniam secta la42
Frobenius, ed., Johannes Boens Musica, 68.
43
“Similis ante similem nullam capit imperfectionem. Et hoc in primis quatuor notulis illius excellentissimi moteti Virtutibus clare possumus contemplare. Ex hoc subinferri potest, quod numquam minima
alteratur ante brevem, item nec semibrevis ante longam,” Boen, Ars (musicae), 26.
44
When the motetus enters it is with the rhythm S.MS B, which does not illustrate either point. Neither
does the tenor whose irst four notes—L B B L in imperfect modus—present no problems of alteration or
imperfection.
25
tronum.” Now the term “motetus” paired with the triplum incipit could refer to the triplum
or motetus voice, as well as to the motet as a whole. For example, in the ifteenth-century
literary miscellany F-Pn lat. 3343 the triplum text of Petre/Lugentium is transmitted with
the annotation “Hunc motetus fecit Philippus de Vitriaco pro papa Clemente.”45 Elsewhere
in the same miscellany, the texts of all four voices of the motet Phi millies/O creator are labeled as “Triplum,” “Motetus,” “Tenor,” and “Contratenor.”46
Across this change from motetus to the triplum as the voice of reference, one aspect of naming stays constant: when referring speciically to the tenor voice, theorists use
an upper-voice incipit but specify the tenor. Thus the author of the Compendium totius artis
motetorum writes “in tenore de In arboris” to cite the tenor of the motet Tuba/In arboris.When
the tenor of the same motet is cited in the early ifteenth century by the anonymous Breslau author, the citation reads “in tenore Tube sacre fidei.”47 After what we have said about
indexes and theorists in general, this should not be surprising. But it is worth noting that
neither author wrote “in tenore ‘Virgo sum’”—he did not give the text of this tenor, though
it is unique in the repertory of motet tenors and would thus have been able to work as a suficient identiier of this particular voice.
Despite the uniqueness of many motet tenors, the tenor text was never used by ars
nova theorists to refer to any part of a motet. This simple fact is potentially meaningful,
though it is not clear exactly what it means. Possibly the theorists themselves did not know
the texts of the tenors. Or more likely they did not count on their readers to know them,
45
Earp has noted this as a contradiction, but it need only be one if we read “motetus” as the name of the
voice part rather than the genre; “Scribal Practice,” 66. See also ibid. for another example of a motet cited
by its triplum in the Illustre Lieve Vrouwe Broederschap (c. 1423).
46
Wathey, “The Motets of Philippe de Vitry,” 126n16.
47
See Appendix 1A. Insofar as I know this is the only case in which a motet title is declined.
26
which would make citing them in a treatise inexpedient. Or even if tenor sources were commonly known, it is possible that theorists did not consider them texts in the same sense
as upper-voice texts, since they never sounded in performance. Indeed, a passage from
the seventh book of the Speculum musicae conirms that tenors were not thought to carry
text. Explaining that some kinds polyphony have one text and some, several, Jacobus cites
cantilenae as an example of the former. And as for a polytextual work, his example is not
simply a motet, but a motet with a triplum:
Some of the discanting [voices] are with the same words, and some with different: the same [words] in cantilenae and other diverse ecclesiastical songs;
different, in motets with a triplum.48
There is even some evidence that the tenor voice, since it belonged to plainchant,
was less fully a part of the motet than the upper voices. For example, Johannes de Muris, in
discussing the terms color and talea, makes a distinction between the tenors of motets and
“motets themselves”:
The placing of one series of similar rhythms repeated several times in the
same voice is called color. But note that some singers make a distinction between color and talea, for they call it color when the same notes are repeated,
48
“Discantuum aliqui sunt cum littera eadem vel diversa: eadem, ut in cantilenis et aliquo cantu ecclesiastico; diversa, ut in motetis triplum habentibus,” Bragard, ed., Jacobi Leodiensis Speculum musicae, 25. This
distinction is preserved and expanded by the author of De musica antiqua et nova, who however seems to
qualify the comment with the addition of the phrase “in quibus tenor equipollet littere,” which may mean
that the tenor is of equal value to a text. Nevertheless, his example of a polytextual work is still a motet with
triplum: “Modus operandi in discantu talis est: aut enim discantus cum littera aut sine; si cum littera, hoc
est dualiter: aut cum eadem littera discantus it ut in cantilenis, rondellis et in quodam cantu ecclesiastico;
aut cum diversis litteris it discantus, ut in motetis qui habent triplum cum tenore in quibus tenor equipollet
littere.” [The manner of executing polyphony is as follows: discant is either with words, or without; if with
words, these are of two kinds: either the discantus is made with the same words [in all parts], as occurs in
cantilenae, rondeaux, and in some liturgical songs; or the discantus is made with diverse texts, such as in
motets which have a triplum with a tenor, in quibus tenor equipollet littere.] Coussemaker, Scriptorum, 3:361.
See also Aluas, Quatuor principalia, 521 and 747, where the inal line is translated “in which the tenor is the
equipollent of the texts.”
27
but talea when the same rhythms are repeated and thus make diverse notes.
This difference, although it may be observed in a great many tenors of motets, is not
observed in the motets themselves.49
What Muris seems to be saying is that the distinction between color and talea disappears in the upper voices, probably because here only rhythms but not pitches are repeated.
Thus the two different kinds of repetition can only be observed in tenors and not in motets
as a whole. For this reason the author prefers to call both kinds color. Muris’s distinction is
preserved in the third treatise of the Berkeley manuscript.50
Keeping in mind that there may be an ontological distinction between motetis ipsis
and motetorum tenores can help nuance our reading of the oft-quoted Tractatus cantus mensurabilis of Egidius de Murino. This text has been interpreted as “detailed instructions for the
composition of motets” and “a precept on motet composition.”51 In fact, the treatise is titled
De modo componendi tenores motettorum (“On the manner of composing motet tenors”).52
Thus when the instructions begin “irst take the tenor from some antiphon or responsory...,”
we can by no means assume that the process of composing a motet begins with selecting a
49
Emphasis mine. “Color in musica vocatur similium igurarum unius processus pluries repetita positio
in eodem cantu. Pro quo nota, quod nonnulli cantores ponunt differentiam inter colorem et tallam: nam
vocant colorem, quando repetuntur eedem voces, tallam vero, quando repetuntur similes igure et sic iunt
diversarum vocum. Que differentia, licet servetur in quampluribus tenoribus motetorum, non tamen servatur in ipsis motetis,” Berktold, ed., Ars practica mensurabilis cantus, 78.
50
“Que differncia licet in quampluribus motetorum tenoribum observetur, non tamen observatur in ipsis
motetis, ut in eis liquidem est videre,” ed. and trans. Ellsworth, The Berkeley Manuscript, 180–3; Ellsworth
translates the line in question “This differentiation may be observed in a great many tenors of motets, but
not in the motetti themselves.” This would imply that the author has shifted from motet as genre to motet
as voice over the course of one sentence, which is unlikely.
51
Leech-Wilkinson, Compositional Techniques, 18; Robertson, Guillaume de Machaut, 146.
52
It is unclear why it is sometimes referred to as “De motettis componendis,” for example in Reany, “Egidius
[Aegidius] de Murino [Morino],” and consequently in a number of general reference works such as Randel,
ed., The Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music, 241, and Kibler, ed., Medieval France: An Encyclopedia,
316. Coussemaker’s title is “Tractatus Cantus Mensurabilis” and his subtitle is “De modo componendi tenores motettorum”; Scriptorum, 3:124. The latter seems to be the correct title of treatise when on its own.
In several sources it is appended to the Tractatus figurarum; see Lefferts, ed., Regule, 72n175, and Schreur,
ed., Tractatus figurarum, 6–7.
28
section from plainchant—though certainly the process of composing a motet tenor must
often have begun there. Murino explicitly states that the tenor is chosen in accordance with
some unspeciied but pre-existing materia, with which its words should concord (“et debent
verba concordare cum materia de qua vis facere motetum”), but this feels like an aside.53
In Clark’s estimation, the theorist seems uninterested in the issue of materia: “it is easy
to overlook this statement “concordare cum materia,” and perhaps even Egidius is more
interested in talea and color formation.”54 Indeed he is, since this is both the stated goal of
his treatise and a personal interest: we know from Apollinis/Zodicaum that Murino had a low
voice, and thus probably sang tenor or contratenor in motets.55
But reading between the lines, we can lean that some materia is already decided
upon when the tenor is chosen, and that indeed the texts of the upper voices may already
be written. (Like reading a recipe from the middle, after the ingredients have been already
measured out, we don’t know where these texts are to be gotten, or what has been done to
them before this—the cook is simply instructed to “take the words which are to be in the
motet and divide them into four parts”.)56 Since the texts of motets are often arranged according to their isorhythmic structures, the possibility that they exist before the tenor has
many implications for the role of the upper voices in determining form—a point which will
be addressed in Chapter Three. For now, it will be enough to note that Muris’a distinction
53
Edited in Leech-Wilkinson, Compositional Techniques, 18.
54
Clark, “Concordare cum materia,” 12.
55
“Egidius de Morino baritonans cum Garino,” triplum ll. 22–3. Gallo reads this as “Egidius de Murino
singing tenorista with Garino, ” Music of the Middle Ages II, 127. Henricus Helene is identiied as one who
“noscit…tonorum tenorem bene,” but this is translated as he “knows well the tenor of the tones” (Bent, Two
14th-century Motets, 10) and “knows well the characteristics of the ecclesiastical modes” (Gallo, Music of the
Middle Ages II, 127). Other singers are indicated as having higher voices, such as Arnold of Martin who is
compared to a nighingale.
56
Ibid., 22.
29
between motetis ipsis and motetorum tenores is preserved both in the organization of Murino’s
treatise and more broadly in the habits that theorists exhibit when citing motets: while
either of the upper voices can be referenced by the incipit of one of them, tenors seem to
stand rhetorically apart.
This is not to say that the tenor was considered unimportant. Johannes de Grocheio’s turn-of-the-century comparison between the tenor of a motet and, on the one hand,
the foundation of a house, and on the other, the skeleton of the body, was echoed by numerous later writers.57 For example, the Quatuor Principalia indicates that singers should sing
the tenor articulately so as to avoid dissonant mis-alignment with the upper voices, then
appends the familiar architectural comparison:
It should be known according to…all musical singers that the tenor which
holds the discant should be sung well and strongly to the beat, lest those
discanting above should meet with a dissonance, and thus [musical] sense
should be expelled. For a stable building cannot be constructed upon an
unstable foundation, nor can a discant be performed over an unstable tenor
without dissonance.58
Jacobus de Montibus invokes the same idea in the seventh book of the Speculum miscae.
In the course of providing a possible etymology for “discantus,” he suggests that the word
comes from “de” (from) and “cantus” (song), since polyphony indeed arises from a song—
namely, the tenor:59
57
“Tenor autem est illa pars, supra quam omnes aliae fundantur, quemadmodum partes domus vel aediicii
super suum fundamentum. Et eas regulat et eis dat quantitatem, quemadmodum ossa partibus aliis,” ed.
Rholoff, Die Quellenhandschriften, 146–7. The implications of this foundational metaphor for our perception of upper-voice structures is discussed in Chapter Two.
58
“Sciendum…omnes musicales cantores quod Tenor qui discantum tenet integre et solide pronunciari
debet in mensura ne supra discantantes dissonantiam incurrant, et hoc ratio exigit. Nam super instabile fundamentum stabile aediicium construi non potest, sic nec instabilem tenorem vix sine dissonantia discantus
pronunciari potest,” “De musica antiqua et nova” in Coussemaker, Scriptorum, 3:362.
59
“Vel potest dici discantus a “dy” quod est “de” et cantu, quasi de cantu sumptus, idest de tenore,” Bragard,
ed., Jacobi Leodiensis Speculum musicae, 7:9.
30
The discant is established upon the tenor, somewhat like a building upon its
foundation; and hence that voice is called “tenor,” since it holds (tenet) and
upholds the discant. For what man sings polyphony without a tenor; what
man builds without a foundation?…The discant is derived from the tenor,
by which it should be should be ruled, and with which it should be in harmony rather than in discord.60
But directly following this clear statement about the tenor’s harmonic dominance and foundational nature, Jacobus turns things on their heads, explaining that the upper voices are as
much a song as the tenor, and hence the “cantus” in “discantus” may well refer to them:
Not only is the tenor set under the discant, but also the opposite; for the
discanting voices can either be compared to the tenor with which they are
obliged to concord (and hence this voice is called discantus), or they can be
considered by themselves: not with respect to the notes of the tenor and sung
at the same time as them, but separately and in turn, one after the other, as
when someone by themselves sings some motetus or triplum or quadruplum
without a tenor, and then the whole work (et tunc absolute). Such notes have
the grammatical sense of an independent song; and in the same way it is said
of the notes of the tenor, that they can be compared to [those of] discantus
and sung together with it, or sung separately on their own.61
There is much to wonder at in this passage. Directly following his traditional statement
about the tenor as a foundation and source of origin for the upper voices, Jacobus now explicitly states that the upper voices are indeed independent entities, as much a song as the
tenor, and hence not really dependent on the tenor at all. He ends by comparing the tenor to
the upper voices, and using their independence as paradigmatic of the tenor’s independence.
Things seem to have gone full circle.
60
“Idest de tenore supra quem discantus fundatur, sicut aediicium aliquod supra suum fundamentum; unde
ille cantus tenor dicitur, quia discantum tenet et fundat. Quis enim sine tenore discantat, quis sine fundamento aediicat?…Discantus igitur a tenore dependet, ab eo regulari debet, cum ipso concordare habet, non
discordare,” Ibid.
61
“Non tenor de discantu sumitur, sed e converso. Possunt autem voces discantus ad voces comparari tenoris cum quibus debent concordare, et tunc talis cantus discantus dicitur. Vel possunt per se considerari,
non per respectum ad voces tenoris et ut simul dicuntur cum illis, sed divisim successive una post aliam cum
aliquis per se cantat motetum aliquem, triplum vel quadruplum, sine tenore et tunc absolute. Tales voces
rationem cantus habent. Et eodem modo dicendum est de vocibus tenoris ut ad voces comparantur discantus
et simul cum illis dicuntur, vel ut per se et divisim decantantur,” Ibid.
31
And then there is Jacobus’s example of this independence—a practice that seems to
have been known to his readers, thus requiring no more than a passing reference: “as when
someone by themselves sings some motetus or triplum or quadruplum without a tenor, et
tunc absolute.” This glimpse of a sort-of dissection of motets constituted in the performance
of the upper voices on their own rings true with the other aspects of motet reception so far
discussed and gives some hint about one way of overcoming the dificulties of a polytextual
texture (though more about this in Chapter Two). Signiicantly, Jacobus does not indicate
that a motet tenor would be sung on its own—his assurance that the notes of a tenor can be
“sung separately on their own” is back in the range of polyphony more broadly deined, or
indeed of discant speciically. Certainly the tenors of discant had their own lives as plainchant. But I believe that it is no coincidence that when he wants to give the upper voices
their full due Jacobus switches from talking about discant in general to motets in particular.
The upper voices of motets, with their separate texts, did indeed represent a new level of
independence for discanting voices.
THE TRANSMISSION OF TEXT
Just because a theorist cites a motet—by whatever voice—does not mean that he
knows its text. Indeed, a few of the incipits listed in Appendix 1A are already corrupt.
Christopher Page has drawn attention to this, arguing that “the decay rate for even the most
obvious verbal subtleties in these pieces was very rapid once the piece moved away from
the composer and his immediate circle.”62 As an example, he notes that the words “In nova
fert animus” at the beginning of Vitry’s Garrit/In nova are “distorted in one manuscript of a
treatise containing Vitry’s teachings, becoming In nova sit animus.” Although such a slip may
62
Page, “A Reply,” 130.
32
reveal only “a commonplace ignorance quite beneath the ‘small circle’ of connoisseurs for
motets,” we could also “regard it as signiicant evidence for an indifference among medieval
listeners to some of the kinds of subtlety that modern critics advocate, and therefore as a
cautionary sign that those advocacies may be in some degree misplaced.”63
The treatise in question was copied around 1400 by an Italian scribe who also misspelled Vitry’s name as “Vetri.”64 Nor can it be said to contain Vitry’s teachings, although
it shares a source with a fragment of a treatise that does.65 But Page’s larger point is well
taken. Certainly the relative importance of various aspects of composition may be gleaned
from transmission insofar as scribes themselves were members of the circles in which motets were written or performed.66 Furthermore, differences between central and more peripheral sources relative to a work’s original context may help to reveal, if not indifference,
then shifts in priorities.
Upper-Voice Texts
To see what can be gleaned from this sort of evidence let us consider the variants of
textual transmission and underlay for Apta/Flos. This motet is an especially good candidate
for such an analysis because survives in four legible sources that range widely in provenance
and date. Its Durham source is from the mid-fourteenth century and thus the earliest, but
its English provenance renders it the most peripheral. The other three sources are French
63
Ibid., 130–1.
64
Fuller, “A Phantom Treatise,” 33.
65
Fuller has characterized it as “a potpourri of conventional topics” copied form a defective exemplum,
Ibid., 24.
66
Though it should be stressed that the care or negligence displayed by scribes in the copying of motets does
not indicate anything about authorial intentions, or indeed about performance: scribal errors, especially
minor ones, do not guarantee errors in performance. See the discussion of scribal intention and the status
of variants as evidence in Bent, “Text Setting,” 292–3.
33
or Italian, but later: Ivrea copied c. 1390; Chantilly from the following decade; Modena
A from c. 1410.67 These four sources will thus allow us to ask questions about textual corruption as a function of time and of place. Furthermore, Apta/Flos has a notoriously dificult text: A. G. Rigg has written that “the exact translation of the [triplum] is doubtful at
all parts, and the syntax is obscure.”68 This motet thus represents an extreme test-case for
the transmission of verbal subtleties. Finally, Apta/Flos is conducive to exploring different
kinds of textures, since it includes syllabic texting as well as hockets and melismatic writing.
Figure 1.4 compares readings for the irst 37 breves of the triplum voice, and Figure
1.5 for the entire motetus.69 Not surprisingly, differences in spelling between the sources
are common, especially as regards doubled letters (barum vs. barrum), “c” for “t,” (segnities/
segnicies), and so forth. There is also one instance of metathesis: “cabarsis” for “carbasis” in
Ivrea’s triplum. Textual corruptions that could threaten sense are few. The most serious one
is in Ivrea’s version of the motetus, where “multa byssus” seems to have become “non multa
abissu” or perhaps “abissus”—it is dificult to tell. This is the only case in which a word has
been added in any of the sources. No words are missing. Ivrea has “indiga” (needy) where the
three other sources have “indigna” (undeserving), though Rigg suggests that the Ivrea reading makes more sense.70 Regarding the inal word in the segment of the triplum reproduced
67
Two more sources—CaB and SL2211—are illegible, or nearly so. The motet is also listed in the index
to Trémoïlle.
68
PMFC 5 supplement, 5.
69
In order to represent the alignment of text and music as faithfully as possible, the relative spacing and
size of text and notes have been adjusted. Thus when a word is written with spaces (“c o n s u m i t o,” etc.) it
is not because the letters are spaced out in the source, but because a large number of notes are squeezed in
over this word in one source, but not in others. Scribal abbreviations and ligatures are indicated with italics,
and boxed areas represent passages which will be analyzed in more detail below, and for which facsimiles are
provided.
70
PMFC 5 supplement, 5.
34
Iv
Mod
Ch
Dur
AP
A
[ ]P
AP
B.SMMMSMSMSSSBSBSMSSS33MS S M33M S M MMM33MMMMS S M SMB1 S MS M S S S M SMB.33M33
ta caro plumis ingenii desidie barum et studii
apta caro plumis ingenii desidie barrum & studii
ta caro plumis ingenii desidie barum se studii
ta ca ro plu mis ingenii desidie bar rum & studii
Laboris que
L a borisque
La borisque
Laboris
foco moli ci es |
foco mollici|es
foco molici es
que foco mollicies
MS M M M M33M33M S M M M M33M S M M M M MMM SMMMMSMSS S M M M S M SML1 S S S M
Iv
nablum tangevocis plus so lito duc pulmonis |
et c o n i u g a centro s egnities quo piscressit plumbm consumi to
Mod
coniuga
centro sengnities quo pigrescit plumbum consumito
nablum tange vocis plus solito |duc pulmonis
Ch
et coniu|ga centro segnicies quo pigrescit plumbum consumito
nablum tange vocis plus solitus duo pulmonis
Dur & coniunga centro segnicies quo pigrescit plumbum c o n s u m i t o nablum tange |vocisplus solito duc pulmonis
35
facsimiles in Figure 1.10
Iv
Mod
Ch
Dur
M M M S M S 33M M MM33M S M M M M 33M33MMMM33M33M33M S M M M M334M4444M M M33MM M M S MS33M S
cabarsis cardinem lingue lini gutris arundinem tua d ? i ? a l i t u r a m littere quam conetur in preces fundere iusto
carbasis cardinem lingue lini guctris arundinem
tua clio
licturam lictere quam| conetur in preces fundere iusto
carbasis|cardinem lingue linigutris arumdinem tuam dio
licturam lictere quam conetur in pre ces fundere visco
carbasis cardinem lingue lini guttris arundinem tua c l i o l itt u<> ram| lñe? quam c on e tur in perces fundere visco
Figure 1.4: Apta/Flos, mm. 1–37; a comparison of triplum text underlay in four sources
Iv
Mod
Ivrea, fol. 5v–6
ModA, fol. 18v–19
Ch
Dur
Chantilly, fol. 60v–61
Durham, 338v–339
“|”
“?”
line-break
unclear text
“<>”
missing notes
Iv
Mod
Ch
Dur
44444BBSSSSSMSSSSMSMBSSMMMSMSSB1B1B1SB S S S S S M S M B1B S BS2S B S B SM SMMMMSMSMMMSMSMSMSM
Flos
F
fLOS
FLos
virginum decus et species
virginum decus et speties
Virginum decus & species
v i r g i n u m d e c u s & species
Los
adultere lucis
con<>nubio
Adultere| lucis connubio non
In
a dultere lucis co nu bis non
in
adultere lucis connu bi o
non in
|non in
di
di ga
facsimiles in Figure 1.9
Iv
Mod
Ch
Dur
36
Iv
Mod
Ch
Dur
SMSMSMS SM SMB4S M S MMMS S M S MB1S2 S B S 1B.2B2B2BS S SB S S S S MB1 S S S B S2SB S SMSSB S
dig na us auri radio si ge marum vesperescat dies te
ga
vel auri radio Si gemmarum vespera|scit dies te
diga
|vel auri radio Si ge ma rum verperescit dies te
vel au ri
|radio si gemmarum vesperescit dies te
surgente de
cor ipse quo nichil gra|tius & agrada gratie l i n e a que
surgente
decor ipse quo nichil gratius Et agrada
gratie linea que|
surgente de
cor ipse quo nichil gracius Et agrada gra|ci e li nea qua
s u r g e n t e d e c o r ip se q u o nichil gratius &a g r a d a gratie l i n e a q u a |
SS4SSMSS4S44S M S MSMSMSM S S S B4 4S44S4M 4SMB1 S2 S B S 1 B. 2B2B2B@S4S44S44B44S4S4M4 S4M 44B4
st?ix atrum sol scalor t r a b e a limus ostrum quo tinxit tiri us
stix a t r u m sol scolor trabea
limbus ostrum quo tinxit tyrius
stix a t r u m sol scalor tra be a
Lumbus ostrum quo tinxit tirius
stix a t r u msolscalor tra be a l i m b u s ostrum quod tinxit tirius
it candente non| m u l t a
it ca den te
sit candentem.Mul |
sit candente m u l t a a
a bis
|multa
ta
bis
su ? virtutam calcu lo
byssus virtutum calcu lo
bissus virtutum calcu lo
s u s virtutum cal|culo nu-
facsimiles in Figure 1.8
Iv
Mod
Ch
Dur
1 S S S444B4S424S44B S SSSBSM S S S S M S S SMSS4SMMMSMS S M S M B S S MMMSMB1S2S B S 2SS1
nunu menummo
mer orum non certa i li a
nati mater patris p l u e pia
rorum n on certa i li a Nati mater patris plue
|pia
merorum non certa i li a
nati mater patris p l u e pia
rum
non certa i li a n a t i mater p r i ? s p l u e pia l a c
la crimarum|nimbos pro po p u l o
Lacrimarum nimbos pro popu
lo
Lacrimarum|nimbos pro popu
lo
r i m a r u m nimbos pro p o p u l o
te p o s c e n t e.
te poscente.
te p o s c e n t e :
te p o s c e n t e.
Figure 1.5: Apta/Flos, comparison of motetus text underlay in four sources (abbreviations and symbols as in Figure 1.4)
in Figure 1.6, the sources are evenly divided between “iusto” and “visco,” as they are about
whether the motetus should read “it” or “sit” before “ca(n)dente(m)” (Figure 1.5, middle
of third line). Finally, two scribes seem to have had problems with the name of the muse
Clio in the triplum (Figure 1.4, middle of line 3). Perhaps not expecting the reference, the
Chantilly scribe has read “clio” as “dio,” while Ivrea has something illegible at this point.71
These are all of the signiicant variants that I have noticed, and some ambiguities
in Ivrea may be the fault of the microilm rather than the scribe. Certainly these kinds of
differences should give us some pause—we might well object, for example, to an argument
that the whole motet is focused around the presence of Clio, which had special signiicance
for listeners in 1380s Ivrea.72 But overall the readings are remarkably similar, especially
given the dificulty of the text. Broadly speaking, I do not see here too many examples of
the kind of corruption that would preclude consideration of texts as analytically signiicant.
This in itself is interesting when we remember the temporal and geographic scope covered
by the sources, which indeed take us far beyond “the composer and his immediate circle.”
A more interesting set of differences is to be found in comparing these four scribes’
approaches to text underlay—or really, I should say with regard to note overlay, since in
all four cases words were clearly copied before notes.73 This order of operations makes the
most sense where text-setting is syllabic or mostly syllabic. But an ars nova motet such as
Apta/Flos also includes passages of melismatic writing and of hocket, and it is here that
alignment becomes a more complicated matter. For if in syllabic textures words take up
71
On the problem of illegible proper nouns (and proper nouns born of illegibility) in Chantilly, see Dulong
& Sultan, “Nouvelles lectures,” 105–7.
72
On the circumstances surrounding the copying of Ivrea, see Kügle, “The Manuscript Ivrea,” 46–79.
73
This seems to have been true of ars nova motets more generally. On the order of copying in the Machaut
manuscripts, see Earp, “Scribal Practice,” 178–94.
37
more space than notes, the reverse is often true in hockets and melismas, so that space must
be left between some words and syllables, but not others. A look at the beginning of the motetus in Chantilly is instructive (see Figure 1.6). The scribe has left a space for the opening
melisma on “los”—though almost too small a space, as the crowded notation shows—and
also later on “non” and “in-” at the end of the line. The inal syllable of the line is also followed by a melisma, and this too is crowded in. Clearly some calculation and experience was
required to achieve the correct text underlay in this repertory, and even this expertise would
not guarantee even note spacing.74
Figure 1.6: The opening of the motetus of Apta/Flos (Chantilly, fol. 61)
A different approach to the problem is taken by the Durham scribe, whose rendition of the same passage is reproduced in Figure 1.7. In writing the text he left no spaces
between words, with the exception of the introitus on “Flos”—and even here, not enough.
Thus “Virginum” begins six breves earlier in the Durham source, where it is underlaid to
breves separated by rests.
Figure 1.7: The opening of the motetus of Apta/Flos (Durham, fol. 339)
74
Elizabeth Randell Upton has critiqued editorial reliance on scribal text underlay as based on “the assumption that a medieval manuscript is a score in the modern sense,” arguing that the Chantilly scribe in
particular was often more interested in the symmetry of page-layout resulting from text-placement than he
was in music overlay, “Aligning Words and Music,” 115, 121–3. However this evaluation of scribal practice
does not take the motets into account, for example when Upton cites Armes, amours as exhibiting “some of
the clearest and most unambiguous word/tone alignment in the entire manuscript” (118).
38
A look back at Figures 1.4 and 1.5 shows that this example is characteristic of the
Durham scribe’s less precise approach to underlay. While Ivrea, Modena, and Chantilly
agree in essentially all details of text underlay for the syllabic parts of the motet, the notes
in Durham phase in and out of synchrony with their texts. As a result, words or parts of
words are sometimes underlaid to rests, and the alignment of many passages is unclear.
And yet the Durham scribe does not bungle things completely. Especially in the more syllabic triplum, his underlay is actually quite close to the other three sources. Furthermore,
it is clear that he copied from an exemplar that had good underlay, since the line-breaks in
Durham leave nothing to be desired and align perfectly with the text set in other sources
for those passages. Such would not have been the case if Durham were copied from a source
like Durham. In any case, we do arguably see a different set of priorities at play here, and
it would be telling if other insular sources of ars nova motets were equally cavalier (we’ll
discuss one more below).
Differences in text-setting among the other three sources are limited to melismatic
passages and hocket. In melismas, syllable placement varries slightly from source to source.
See, for example, the word “ilia,” in the passage from the motetus represented in Figure
1.8. Here Modena gives a semibreve to “i-,” two ligated semibreves to “-li-,” and the rest
(BSM) to “-a,” while Chantilly gives two semibreves in ligature to “i,” one to “li,” and, again,
three notes to “-a.” In both cases the text-setting is unambiguous. Ivrea seems to have the
same text-setting as Chantilly, also with a ligature on “i-,” though it is less clear because
the spacing is more cramped. Only Durham does not allow three notes to “-a,” and this
seems less a deliberate choice than a function of the more inexact approach already mentioned. (Strangely, PMFC follows the Durham texting.) The other two melismatic words
39
(a) Ivrea:
(b) Modena:
(c) Chantilly:
(d) Durham:
Figure 1.8: Apta/Flos, motetus mm. 74–82; text placement in four sources
(a) Ivrea:
(b) Modena:
(c) Chantilly:
(d) Durham:
Figure 1.9: Apta/Flos, motetus mm. 32–45; text placement in four sources
40
in the passage, “plue” and “pia,” are also clearly texted in Modena and Chantilly. Ivrea does
not indicate the switch from one syllable to another, but does clearly group the appropriate
notes over each word. Overall, then, the differences in underlay in the passage in question
are tiny, and this in itself is signiicant. Slightly more divergence can be found in the melismatic section between “connubio” and “indiga” in the motetus, but here too the divergences
are fairly small, since short note-values are involved (Figure 1.5, end of irst line).
The four sources of Apta/Flos also differ in their approaches to texting hockets. The
motetus passage represented by igure 1.9 is indicative. Only Durham makes no allowance
for the hocketed notes, writing them over the second half of “surgente” and “decor.” The
other three sources accommodate the hocketed notes, but demonstrate two approaches:
Ivrea and Chantilly (Figure 1.9a and c) both leave space by splitting up the word “decor,”
thus setting the hocketed notes to “de-.” Modena, on the other hand, leaves space between
“surgente” and “decor,” so that no word is split by the rests in the hocket (Figure 1.9b).
Similar discrepancies can be seen when we compare readings for a triplum passage that
mixes syllabic declamation and hocket (Figure 1.10). Here Modena makes it clear that a
four-syllable phrase (“tua[m] clio”) is surrounded by untexted hockets on either side, which
separate these words from others in the text (Figure 1.10b). Durham has a similar reading, though less precisely aligned (Fig 1.10d). The Chantilly scribe has also left space after
“tuam” and “clio,” but seems to set the former to the two hocketed minims (Figure 1.10c).
Ihe Ivrea reading is similar to Chantilly (Figure 1.10a).
41
(a) Ivrea:
(c) Chantilly:
(b) Modena:
(d) Durham:
Figure 1.10: Apta/Flos, triplum mm. 32–4; text placement in four sources
Some of these text-underlay solutions are prescriptive, and others pragmatic. The
Modena scribe has made an effort in both examples of hocket discussed so far (Figures 1.9
and 1.10) to set text unbroken to groups of notes which can accommodate it. On the other
hand, the solutions offered by the Ivrea and Modena scribes seem to be a means to an end:
words are split or spaced out as necessary when text is written to ensure that there will be
enough space for the hocket. Then, notes are added in an arrangement as close as possible
to the desired texting, but this still often means placing rests over syllables. The latter approach to texting would degrade quickly as copies became exemplars. We may perhaps agree
with Page that this kind of subtlety is less robust, and may become lost more easily when
works left the circles of performers and audiences who knew them well.
And yet, the texting of hockets was an important enough issue to form the subject of
the motet Musicalis/Sciencie. Here the motetus text is a letter from Rhetoric to Music asking
that she inluence her disciples not to split words with hockets, and the triplum is a letter
from Music to these very disciples (a long list of whom is given) asking them to comply with
42
Rhetoric’s request.75 This of course tells us that some people were splitting text and others
were not—which may seem unhelpful. But a closer look at scribal practice and compositional design shows that far fewer words are so split than the available editions would have
us believe.76
In fact, the intended texting is often clariied by the notes which follow the hocket
section. In the example of Apta/Flos discussed above, the solution offered by Modena is
most convincing not only because words stay intact, but because the melodic line seems to
be built to accommodate the text following the hocket. In Figure 1.10, “litturam” clearly
belongs with the minim-semibreve-minim phrase after the hocket, and In Figure 1.9, the
irst syllable of “Decor” also belongs after the hocket, and in that case the entire phrase
“Decor ipse quo nichil gratius” is texted syllabically, like the corresponding phrase in the
irst talea—“virginum decus et species.”77
It is important to note that in both of these cases Ivrea does not support the reading
which is indicated by compositional design. Since it is our only source for many ars nova
motets, we have trusted it perhaps too readily to provide texting solutions for these passages.
But there are a number of cases in the manuscript where a word that seems split by a hocket
is in fact perfectly accommodated by notes after the hocket which have been transcribed as
untexted. The most striking example is Vitry’s Petre/Lugentium, where all hockets seem to
split words according to Schrade’s edition (which mostly follows Ivrea). In fact it is not clear
to me that any words are split. The Ivrea readings and PMFC text underlay for the motet’s
75
Musicalis/Sciencie is discussed in more detail in Chapter Five.
76
As Bent has observed regarding a slightly later repertory, “all too often, modern editors observe the actual
physical alignment without adequate consideration of the practical constraints which produced it,” “Text
Setting,” 294.
77
Mm. 14–6.
43
irst hocket are given in Figure 1.11 and Example 1.4, and these represent the hockets as
sparsely texted. But there is space for this text in mm. 27–32. Moving it there leaves us
with an alternation of texted and untexted musical space that is much more convincing (see
Example 1.5, which also uses an improved reading of the text).78 The same kind of change
applies in six more passages in the motet: in each case the text which has been loosely underlaid to hockets by the scribe or editor can be snugly added after them, where there is
often exactly enough space for them—to the note. Making this series of changes renders
Petre/Lugentium an essay on alternating textures, since the motet in fact cycles regularly between sections of hocket with no text in either voice, sections in which the upper voices alternate in delivering passages of text two breves in length (as in mm. 31–6 in Example 1.5),
and truly polytextual sections. More broadly, it is my impression that there are few loosely
texted hockets in this repertory. Very often, and especially in the work of Vitry, hockets
either have words, or they don’t, and this has consequences for the editor and performer as
well as—in some cases—serious implications for the analyst.79
Scribal corrections and erasures serve as further evidence both of the dificulties
involved, and of the importance of text-music alignment in the copying of motets.80 These
usually involve either the erasure and re-notation of notes to bring them into better alignment with syllables, or the drawing of lines between syllables and notes that belong together
but are not aligned. Lawrence Earp has shown that in the Machaut manuscripts “a large
78
The edition in Example 1.5 uses textual readings drawn from a literary source for the motet from 1340,
which has “tenuit” instead of “temnunt” and “suscepisti” in place of “superes”—both make more sense given
the meter. See David Howlett’s edition and discussion of the source in Wathey, “The Motets of Philippe de
Vitry,” 133–6. Note however that owing to an error the motetus and triplum text switch places partway
through Howlett’s edition, without notice.
79
See the analyses of In virtute/Decens and Cum statua/Hugo in Chapters Five and Six.
80
See comments in Bent, “Text Setting,” 294.
44
Triplum:
Motetus:
Figure 1.11: Petre/Lugentium mm. 19–30 (Ivrea, fols. 37v–38)
Example 1.4: Petre/Lugentium mm. 19–30 (reproduced from PMFC1, 97)
Example 1.5: Petre/Lugentium mm. 19–38, alternate text-setting
45
portion of the erasures and corrections in the texts and music…were made speciically to
clarify the correlation between words and notes.”81 And while all genres were subject to such
emendations, motets seem to be the most frequently affected.82 Not surprisingly, corrections often clarify texting during melismas and hocket—the places where, as we have seen,
normal procedures of copying may not be precise enough. Figure 1.12 shows two examples
of guide-lines used by the scribe of Machaut Manuscript A: the irst of these connects the
last syllable of “Desir” with the longa that ends the phrase, and the second clariies the
placement of “-na” in the melisma over “superna.” Guide-lines are also used to help align
text and hockets: the lines barely visible in Figure 1.13a and simulated in Figure 1.13b
(but clearly present in the original) correct text underlay that would have split the word
“dolereus.” The reulting reading for this passage, which is not followed in any of the available editions of Motet 10, is given as Figure 1.13c.83
Figure 1.12: Clariication of text underlay during melismas in Machaut Manuscript A
(a) motetus of De bon/Puis (M4, fol. 417v)
(b) motetus of Fons/O livoris (M9, fol. 422v)
81
“Scribal Practice,” 195–6. See also Bent, “Text Setting,” 294.
82
See ibid., 266–8 for a list of corrections by genre within each manuscript.
83
Machaut, Musikalische Werke, 3:39; PMFC 2:143; Boogaart, “O series summe rata,” 607. Manuscript
C has an extra word at this point (fol. 214v), so that the line reads “et pour plus croistre mes dolereus meschies”—this can work within the meter if “croistre” functions as a monosyllable, but the music scribe assigned it two notes, and dolereus is again split. Ferrell-Vogüé follows MS C, including “plus” in its text but
giving two notes to “croistre.” Perhaps the discrepancies in later MSS arise from this initial error in MS C,
or the uncertainty that produced it. In any case, the correction in MS A is clear in its intention.
46
Figure 1.13: Hareu/Helas (M10), triplum mm. 75–82 in Manuscript A (fol. 424)
(a) Faint lines clarify text underlay before a hocket
(b) transcription in PMFC (2:143), with lines from source replicated
(c) text underlay adjusted to match corrections in source
It is not surprising that such care should be taken with Machaut’s motets in sources
that were in all likelihood copied under his watchful eye.84 But similar types of emendations
were also made in other manuscripts transmitting ars nova motets. As Kügle has noted,
Ivrea’s “numerous corrections and erasures in text and music suggest [that] most entries
were routinely proofread,” and some of these are clearly motivated by text-underlay.85 In
Chantilly, we ind a correction of a different sort near the beginning of the motetus of Rex/
Leticie. Here the music scribe noticed the words “ac salutis” missing from the text “ac salutis
humano generi,” and supplied them with a small hand, carefully placing the syllables under
the appropriate notes. He then repositioned the irst syllable of “humano” to accord with the
new text underlay (Figure 1.14).
Figure 1.14: Missing text added to the motetus of Rex/Leticie in Chantilly (fol. 66)
84
See Earp, “Machaut’s Role.”
85
For example, several minims have been erased and re-notated to clarify underlay in the triplum of A vous/
Ad te on fol. 19v.
47
Tenor Texts
So far the discussion of textual transmission and underlay has been limited to the
upper voices of motets. Tenor text underlay is not an issue in most cases, but we can look at
the transmission of tenor texts and compare the variations here with those observed in the
upper voices. Tenors are as subject to small variants as the upper voices— “ante thronum
trinitatis” of Ida/Portio is labeled “Ante thorum trinitatis” in Chantilly, with disastrous results for the translation.86 But more common are variants in how much, if any, of the tenor’s text is given. In the case of Apta/Flos, all the sources give a tenor incipit. Ivrea, Modena,
and Durham have “Alma redemptoris mater,” while Chantilly has “Alma redemptoris.” On
the other hand, the tenor of O canenda/Rex is variously labeled as “Tenor o canenda” (Ivrea
fol. 55), “Rex regum tenor” (Durham, fol. 337v and FriZ, fol. 86v), and “Tenor primus”
(Paris 2444, fol. 48v). None of these four souces transmits the full text of the chant fragment used, which is “Rex regum regi ilio.”87 Clark has listed 17 other motets whose tenors
“use more melodic material than their manuscript text indicates,” and this number is in
fact much larger when we take different sources into account—for example, “Merito hec
patimur,” the tenor of Tribum/Quoniam in Fauvel, is labeled “Merito” in Brussels.88 Clark
86
“In the presence of the throne of the trinity” becomes “in the presence of the trinity’s protuberance” (or
“the trinity’s mussel”); Chantilly, fol. 61v. The variant is transcribed without emendation in PMFC5, 24.
87
Clark, “Concordare cum materia,” 217.
88
See Ibid., pp. 46–7. The list does not include O canenda/Rex. Clark also gives a list of four “Motets that
use less melodic material than their manuscript tag indicates” (p. 48, Table II), but it is not clear that the
four should be grouped together. In once case (Apollinis/Zodiacum) only a inal melisma is omitted, so the
label is correct, as Clark notes (48n47). Firmissime/Adesto uses an Alleluia chant as tenor and the Fauvel
label, “Alleluya Benedictus et cetera,” simply indicates which Alleluia is being used (Alleluia Benedictus es
from Trinity Sunday), and as such is acting as a label rather than an incipit or a text (also noted by Clark,
p. 48). The same tenor in Brussels is labeled “[A]lleluya alleluya alleluya,” which is closer to an incipit,
depending on the number of times “Alleluia” is repeated—the tenor is repeated twice. Kügle argues that the
change was deliberate; “Two Abbots and a Rotulus,” 162n35. On the source of the chant, see Robertson,
“Which Vitry,” 57–69. The inal motet in Clark’s Table II does not in fact have a labeled tenor in either of
its surviving copies, and the tenor melody was identiied in Gunther, The Motets of the Manuscripts, xlviii.
48
has suggested that because their tenor labels diverge from the amount of chant used, these
works make up “a group of motets where the composer apparently asserts a bit more control
over the preexistent melody.” But it is not clear whether there is a stable enough pattern of
transmission to speak of authorial control, or whether in fact the decision of how much of
a tenor text to write was made by scribes. Only Machaut’s tenors are consistently labeled,
and that only within the Machaut corpus. Beyond it, they too are subject to emendation and
omission.89 The levels of divergence between tenor labels differ markedly from the kinds of
differences we have seen in the upper voices. In the upper-voice texts it is rare indeed to see
a word missing, and when missing, this text is sometimes supplied, as in the example from
Chantilly. In tenors, on the other hand, there is clearly not the same idea of a “text” that
need to be complete—tenors have labels, not texts, and these vary greatly in accuracy and
completeness from source to source.
And, of course, many tenors are not labeled at all in some or all of their sources.
With few exceptions, these missing labels seem not to have been subject to correction. In
Ivrea’s redaction of Les l’ormel/Meyn the tenor’s text—originally omitted—was indeed supplied later in a different ink color (see Figure 1.15). However, the tenor of this late thirteenth-century motet is itself a rondeau, whose text can and probably was intended to be
sung. Thus the omitted text is in this case treated as missing lyrics rather than as a missing
label.90
89
Amours/Faus semblant has the tenor “Vidi Dominum” in Trémoïlle (fol. 8)—this matches the Machaut
sources. In Ivrea (fol. 21), this tenor is written as “Vidi dmñ &c.,” which is not strictly incorrect since the
chant used includes the words “vidi dominum facie ad faciem.” Qui es promesses/Ha Fortune (M8) has the
tenor “Et non est qui adiuvet” in Trémoïlle (fol. 8), “Non est qui adiuvet” in Ivrea (fol. 24v), and no label
other than “Tenor” in CaB (fol. 16v). Martyrum/Diligenter, which has the tenor “A christo honoratus” in the
Machaut manuscripts, is labeled “Tenor xp˜ o honorate & c.” in Ivrea (fol. 11); in this case, the “& c.” is actually incorrect, since the chant used ends with “honoratus.”
90
Though in Ivrea the text is not underlaid exactly to the tenor notes (it could not it under the tenor as
49
Figure 1.15: Tenor text added to Les l’ormel/Meyn (Ivrea, fol. 22)
The text added to the rondeau tenor of Les l’ormel/Meyn and the missing syllables
supplied in Chantilly for the motetus of Rex/Leticie serve as reminders that when text is
missing it can be supplied, if someone deems it necessary. The large number of works in the
repertory whose tenors remain unlabeled in one or all of their sources strongly implies that
a motet was considered complete in its redaction whether or not its tenor had a text.
Intabulations
The last type of material to consider from the point of view of scribal reception for
motet texts is intabulations. On the face of it, the very existence of instrumental intabulations of motets would argue against the importance of words, since the fully instrumental
(probably keyboard) performance that tablatures make possible precludes the delivery of
text and seems to silence the poetic aspects of composition.91 But the transmission of several ars nova motets in the so-called Robertsbridge Codex tells a surprising story.92
written), and is allowed to low into the margin. The text given is “Je n’y saindrai plus graile saintureite, mon
ami est marie. Il a mis mon cuer en si grant distresse,” which provides enough text for all but the internal “ab”
of the rondeau. CaB does not give a tenor here. Torino 42 has only “Je ne chaindrai mais”; Udine includes
the tenor text as part of the original copying effort, though as in Ivrea it is not underlaid, but simply written.
The source is fragmentary, thus “Je ne chaindray plus haingre chainturete mes amis est” is all that survives
of the tenor text (fol. 1).
91
Though Jane Flynn has suggested that in the case of Machaut’s De toutes flous in the codex Faenza “the
intabulator emphasizes certain aspects of the poetic content and musico-poetic structure”: “The Intabulation of De toutes flours,” 178.
92
This source, BL Add. 28550, is probably from the 1350s; see Roesner’s introduction in Vitry, Complete
50
At the end of this manuscript, which contains a chronicle of the abbey of Robertsbridge between the years 1308 and 1333, are found two folios which are the earliest
surviving examples of instrumental notation. In addition to three estampies, three motets
are intabulated: Firmissime/Adesto and Tribum/Quoniam from Fauvel and an unicum with
a triplum which begins Flos vernalis stirps regalis. The reason that we can know the text of
the latter, and easily identify the two former works, is that, unlike the estampies, the motet
intabulations are in fact texted.
The irst three lines of Firmissime/Adesto, reproduced in Figure 1.16 along with a
diplomatic transcription of the text underlay, are instructive. Here the motetus text “Ades”
is underlaid to the beginning of the motet, this being as much of the word “Adesto” as
sounds before the triplum text begins, overlapping with “-to.” After this the triplum text
only is given. It may come as a surprise that in all three motets the triplum text is given in
full. Though the writer has used a large number of abbreviations, not a single word is missing from either Firmissime fidem or Tribum que non abhorruit.93
If an initial explanation for the presence of this text is that it served as an aidemémoire for the intabulator, a closer look dispels this theory: the text was entered after the
notes and letters of the intabulation, which it studiously avoids. At two points reproduced
in Figure 1.16 the scribe has run out of space and added a word above the text, and in
once case, the addition of “morti” near the end of line 2, he has drawn a faint line showing
where this interlinear word its into the text. A more detailed comparison of the motet with
its intabulation shows that the underlay of the triplum is surprisingly faithful. Despite the
Works, v–vi.
93
Flos vernalis is an unicum, and preserved incompletely, but the portion of the text that survives seems to
be metrically complete.
51
|| Fir
2. tis
patrem dili g[a]mus qui
trinita
missime idem teneamus
morti
nos tanto amore dilexit datis ad vitam e[re]
3. xit
Figure 1.16:
Intabulation of Firmissime/Adesto, mm. 1–34 (Robertsbridge, fols. 43v–
44) with text underlay transcribed
Example 1.6: Firmissime/Adesto, mm. 7–18 (reproduced from PMFC 1:60)
52
transformative arranging that makes the intabulation much more lorid than the original,
the basic points of congruence between the triplum text and its melodic contour remain.
Thus the intabulation preserves the A on “-mis[sime]” in m. 8, the F on “qui” in m. 16,
and the B-lat–F–B-lat sonority on “-xit” in m. 23 (see the congruent points marked “b,”
“d,” and “g” in Figure 1.16 and Example 1.6). Certainly not all the underlay is the same:
the parallel fourth movement between the upper voices in m. 22 is set to “ad vitam” in the
intabulation and “[e]rexit” in the motet (“f” in Figure 1.16 and Example 1.6). However, the
F-C leap in m. 21 appears in both versions with the words “[mor]ti da[tos]”—a congruence
achieved in Robertsbridge by the addition of “morti” above text already entered (see label
“e”). The other interlinear placement of text—that of “trinita-” at the end of the irst line
in Figure 1.16, is also necessitated by text underlay: as written, this text accompanies the
notes B-lat–A–G, as it does in the original (see label “c”). All around, then, it seems that
the scribe of the codex was surprisingly faithful to the original motet in his text-underlay,
and that in entering the text, after the intabulaiton had already been written, both completeness and accuracy seem to have been priorities.
What does all of this mean? For our understanding of the Robertsbridge Codex,
this messy-looking but actually quite careful texting opens up the possibility of vocal performance—perhaps by a self-accompanying musician. But even if we do not co-opt this—
the earliest source of “purely” instrumental music— for sung performance, the care taken
about text in all three motets implies that the presence of this text was an important part
of the composition on some level, whether musical or intellectual. Of course, the bitextual
framework is not preserved—the motetus is represented only by two syllables in Firmissime/
Adesto, and not at all in the other two works. And no sign of the tenor text is present. But
53
the complete presence of one voice—here the triplum—emphasizes the importance of upper-voice text to motets while also showing how these texts can sometimes take on lives of
their own.94 This independence is further conirmed by the literary transmission of motet
texts and by their citations in a wide range of poetic contexts.
MOTETS AND /AS LITERATURE
In a frequently cited passage of the Règles de la seconde rhétorique (c. 1411–32), the
anonymous author places Vitry chronologically between Jean de Meun and Machaut, commenting on his achievements and innovations:
Aprèz vint Philippe de Vitry, qui trouva la manière des motès, et des balades,
et des lais, et des simples rondeaux, et en la musique trouva les .iiij. prolacions, et les notes rouges, et la noveleté des proporcions.95
[After [Jean] came Philippe de Vitry, who discovered the manner of motets,
and of ballades, and of simple rondeaux, and in music he discovered the four
prolations, and red notes, and the novelty of proportions.]
In light of our scant knowledge of Vitry’s biography and reputation, these few lines
have been mined for anything they can tell us about the author’s lost output and legacy. The
evidence of his having found a “manner of motets” is often read as synonymous with the
ars nova.96 As for the ballades and rondeaux, commentators have lamented that no musical
settings of the formes fixes by Vitry survive.97
These readings, though by no means impossible, seem to ignore the larger structure
94
Cf. Roesner, who notes the presence of the triplum voice in the arrangements, but cites their embellishment and thinning of texture as “indicative of the complete transformation in idiom occurring when a motet
was stripped of its most distinguishing feature, its texts, and performed as an idiomatic instrumental work,”
Vitry, Complete Works, v.
95
Langlois, Recueil d’arts de seconde rhétorique, 12.
96
For example in Leech-Wilkinson, “The Emergence of Ars nova,” 285.
97
As in Brothers, Chromatic Beauty, 91.
54
of the quotation, which is clearly divided into two halves. The irst part, in keeping with the
focus of the treatise (namely, the art of versiication) lists Vitry’s poetic achievements. Then
the author shifts focus to his musical “inds.” Signaling the change of subject unambiguously with “et en la musique,” he identiies Vitry’s musical innovations as the four prolations, red notes, and the novelty of proportions. The prose format of the treatise places
few constraints upon the writer, and thus we should take him at his word when he includes
two separate lists. Thus motets would seem to be listed among other poetic forms—though
forms that are often (ballades, rondeaux) or sometimes (lais) set to music.98
That ars nova motet texts could in themselves have been considered poetry should
not be a surprise, given that the two most famous fourteenth-century motet composers
were also two of France’s most illustrious poets. Machaut’s inluence on later writers such
as Geoffrey Chaucer and Chrisine de Pisan is well known, as is Petrarch’s praise of Vitry as
“the only true poet among the French” (‘poeta nunc unicus Gallicarum . . .’).99 And yet the
idea that Vitry’s newly-discovered “manière des motès” is a poetic achievement will perhaps
sit uncomfortably with received views of the motet’s evolution. While inquiries into Machaut’s literary and musical output have recently joined forces to some extent, Vitry’s poetic
output has been traditionally down-played, or assessed separately from him musico-poetic
works.100 And as for truly anonymous ars nova motet texts (as opposed to the texts of works
98
Indeed, Vitry’s only surviving ballade, De terre en Grec Gaule appellee, survives without music and was
probably never set. It was part of an exchange to which poets Jean de le Mote and Jean Campion also contributed ballades, all of which survive without music. Their theme is the poetic craft, and it is possible that none
of them was set—we have no evidence that le Mote, the target of the exchange, was a musician. This series of
ballades is discussed in Chapter Six. For an edition and commentary, see Diekstra, “The Poetic Exchange.”
99
This praise is transmitted in the longer (a) version of Petrarch’s letter to Vitry; see Paris, Les manuscrits
françois, 3:181. On Vitry’s literary reputation, see Wathey, “The Motets of Philippe de Vitry,” 119–21.
100
Ibid. 121–2.
55
surviving anonymously but probably by Vitry), these have received no attention whatsoever
as poetic texts.
And yet motet texts clearly functioned in literary ways. Andrew Wathey has recently drawn attention to the survival of seventeen motet texts—most by Vitry—in fourteen
sources from the 14th and 15th centuries. These manuscripts, which range from a collection of sermons from 1340s Avignon to humanist miscellanies copied by German scholars
working in Italy in the mid- and even late- ifteenth century, transmit motet texts in versions that are in some cases more accurate than the versions preserved in sources such as
Ivrea.101 Thus motet texts were interesting enough to be transmitted on their own as poetry,
long after the music with which they were associated would have gone out of style. But at the
same time, this poetry seems to have gained something from being motet texts. Wathey has
stressed “the initial dependence of the tradition on copies including music, demonstrated
most clearly by the inclusion of voice-labels in the earliest of the text-only sources.”102 That
texts would be copied into manuscripts grouped by the motet to which they belong, and
with the indications of which motet voice sings which text, clearly shows that the scribes
and readers of these manuscripts took pleasure from the idea that separate texts combine
to make one work. In fact, the motet Phi millies/O creator survives only in a text manuscript,
but owing to the care of the scribe, we know not only which words belong to the motetus and
which to the triplum, but also that the tenor and contratenor sang a parodic rhyming couplet between them.103 Clearly the co-existence of texts in motets was an important aspect
101
Wathey, “The Motets of Philippe de Vitry,” 122–4.
102
Furthermore, the literary transmission of Vitry’s motet texts is an anomaly for the 14th century. As
Wathey shows, the transmission of motet texts outside of music manuscripts was not unusual in the 13th
and 15th centuries, but for the 14th century it is conined to Vitry. Idem, “Words and Music,” 1550.
103
Phi millies/O creator is discussed in detail in Chapter Six.
56
of their overall aesthetic value.
The poetic transmission of texts not by Vitry is rarer—so much so that Wathey has
suggested that “the fact of literary circulation may even emerge as a pointer towards attribution,” pushing, for example, the anonymously transmitted text Quid scire proderit closer
to the Vitry corpus.104 This may well prove to be the case, or it may be subject to revision if
more motet texts from anonymous works are discovered in literary collections. From the
Machaut corpus, the two texts of Qui/Ha Fortune (M8) survive in a collection of French
poetry from the 1480s.105
Aside from the transmission of entire texts, a number of literary allusions, citations, and elaborations attest to broader late-medieval interest in motet texts. These involve works by Vitry and Machaut as well as pieces transmitted anonymously. Sometimes
the motet text is quoted explicitly, and carries the force of a proverb. Such is the case in
Gace de la Buigne’s hunting treatise in verse, the Roman de Deduis (1359–77). Here, in the
course of discussing the behavior of falcons the speaker quotes most of the irst three lines
of the motetus in Vitry’s Douce/Garison. Vitry’s original is as follows, with the text quoted
by la Buigne italicized:106
Garison selon nature
Desiree de sa dolour
Toute humaine creature
Mais je qui ai d’un ardour
[Every human creature desires a natural cure for its sorrow.
But I, who am seized by an ardor...]
104
Wathey, “The Motets of Philippe de Vitry,” 128.
105
Earp, “Machaut’s Role,” 494–5.
106
On the place of this quotation within the larger narrative of la Buigne’s poem, see Leach, Sung Birds,
229–32.
57
In the Roman de Deduis the word order has been shifted slightly, creating a rhyming couplet
where Vitry’s rhyme-scheme was ABAB. More importantly, the word “humaine” has been
left out of Vitry’s original because la Buigne is applying the maxim to a bird rather than a
person. In a sense he has rendered Vitry’s message more universal, and also perhaps more
humorous:107
Et, se l’oysel se va baignier,
Queer il a de l’eaue mestier,
L’en ne le doit mie blasmer
De ce de quoy fait a loer
Quant garison selon nature
Desire toute creature
De sa douleur, si comme dit
Un aucteur, qui le nous escript
En un motet, qu’il ist nouveaux,
Et puis fu evesque de Meaux;
Phelippe de Vitry ot nom,
Qui mieux ist motés que nulz hom.108
[And if the bird goes to bathe itself, it seeks from the water that which is
necessary. One cannot blame it at all for this but rather must praise it, because “every creature desires a natural cure from its sorrow,” as an author
said who wrote it for us in a motet, which he newly made. Afterwards he was
Bishop of Meaux. Philippe de Vitry was his name, and he knew how to make
motets better than any other man.]109
A similar (proverbial but transformative) use of the irst several lines of a motetus
text occurs in a fatras impossible. In this form of nonsense poetry a two-line refrain AB often taken from pre-existing material is allowed to dictate the rhythmic and metrical scheme
for a poem of eleven lines with structure “AabaabbabaB.”110 These poems were not usually
107
Or perhaps not: Elizabeth Eva Leach has read in this passage an evocation of burning love, especially
Dido’s love for Aeneas, to which “the garison…is sexual consummation,” Sung Birds, 230.
108
ll. 6345–56
109
Trans. Leach, Sung Birds, 312.
110
The couplet is sometimes considered part of the poem, which is then summarized as “AB AabaabbabaB,”
but as Uhl has noted, the manuscript layout and placement of large capitals does not support this, and the
58
set to music, although there are two fatras in the interpolated Roman de Fauvel whose irst
and last lines are notated.111 And conversely a bit of the Roman de Fauvel made its way into
a fatras. Speciically, Watriquet de Couvin (l. 1319–29) used the opening two motetus
lines of Super cathedram/Presidentes to structure a fatras. The borrowed material is a complaint about corrupt rulers that sits comfortably with the broader world of Fauvel:
Presidentes in tronis seculi
Sunt hodie dolus et rapina.
presiding on the thrones of [our] age
today are treachery and plunder
In the twisted world of the fatras, the two lines get split, as we would expect, and their sense
becomes twisted. The irst line of the motetus still refers to this world, but the second is
linked hypothetically with the next: when upon the death of a sinner the “Our Father” is
said in order to absolve his wrongdoings, treachery and plunder are now in the sky with
the angels. An early transition into Latin in the middle of line 10 helps to cement this rereading:
5
“Presidentes in thronis seculi,”
Ce dist uns eus armez de cuir boilli,
“En cop de [vit] si grant medecine a
C’une charrete jusqu’a Mes en sailli,
Qui engendra le seigneur de Seulli,
La Maselaine, dont uns cos se disna;
Mais uns harens touz s’en desgratina,
Quant il fu mors, pour ce c’on li toli
La pater nostre qui li adevina
irst two lines were written only as aides-mémoire for scribes, “Fatras → fatrasie,” 218. This would have an
impact on the editions of the two fatras set to music in the interpolated Roman de Fauvel: Rosenberg and
Tischler have inserted the eleventh line after the irst to form the irst “AB,” though the manuscript presents
eleven lines without a refrain, underlaying the irst and last to music: The Monophonic Songs, 125–7.
111
Ed. Rosenberg and Tischler, The Monophonic Songs, 125–7. Two other potential musical settings of
couplets on which fatras are built survive—one is the lowest voice in the polytextual English motet Deus
creator/Rex genitor/Doucement; the other, a monotextual setting in WrocĆaw—see Brewer, “French Ars Nova,”
194–5 and “A Fourteenth-Century Polyphonic Manuscript,” 9–10, and Lefferts, The Motet in England,
84–5. However, it is not clear whether these are examples of fatras notés (as has been assumed), or whether
the poems and musical works share the same refrain. If the fatras was indeed conceived of in its eleven-line
form as Uhl suggests (see previous note), then the polyphonic works, which place lines 1 and 11 together, are
probably referring to a common source rather than to a fatras.
59
10
Qu’avec les angles, in gloria celi,
Sunt hodie dolus et rapina”112
[“Presiding on thrones of time”
Said one with arms of boiled leather,
“There is such strong medicine in a good fuck
That it blew a cart right into Metz,
Which gave birth to the lord of Seuilly,
On the Feast of Madeleine, when he dined on the hull of a wheat germ;
But a herring scratched them all,
When he was dead because one took away from him
The “our father” which came upon him
With the angels in the glory of heaven,
There are days of deceit and plunder.”]113
The exact meaning of some of the lines is elusive, but the way in which the original
couplet is transformed is evident: the ideal reader of for such poetry is one who is familiar
with these lines in their original context, and is therefore all the more able to appreciate
their transformation. Such a man was Watriquet de Couvin, and such another was his patron Guy de Châtillon, for whom this and other fatras were copied into a manuscript which
also includes a miniature of all estates grooming Fauvel, placed somewhat inexplicably
before Watriquet’s Dit de Loyauté.114
In addition to being the source of these obvious quotations (labeled as such in the
Roman de Deduis and marked as external in the fatras by their position within the form and
their use of the Latin language), it seems that motet texts also exerted a more oblique inluence on late-medieval writers. A famous example comes from Chaucer’s oeuvre. As Kittredge irst observed in 1915, the Book of the Duchess incorporates many translations and
112
Ed. Uhl, “Fatras → fatrasie,” 219–20.
113
I am grateful to Professor Michael Randall for his translation of these lines, which have not previously
been rendered in English.
114
BN fr. 14968; on connections between Watriquet and the Fauvel crowd, see Taylor, “Le Roman de
Fauvain,” 580–9.s
60
paraphrases from a number of Machaut’s works, including several motets.115 The following
lines, from a tirade against fortune, Borrow in at least four instances from Qui/Ha Fortune
(M8):116
Chaucer, Book of the Duchess
For fals Fortune hath pleyd a game
Atte ches with me, allas! the whyle!
The trayteresse fals and ful of gyle,
That al behoteth and no-thing halt,
She goth upryght and yet she halt,
That baggeth foule and loketh faire,
The dispitouse debonaire,
That scorneth many a creature!
An ydole of fals portraiture
Is she, for she wil sone wryen;
She is the monstres heed y-wryen,
As filth over y-strawed with floures;
Hir moste worship and hir lour is
To lyen, for that is hir nature;
Withoute feyth, lawe, or mesure.
She is fals; and ever laughinge
With oon eye, and that other wepinge.
That is broght up, she set al doun.117
Machaut, Qui es promesses
Fausse, traïtre, perverse (l. 17)
Une ydole est de fausse pourtraiture (l. 9)
C’est iens couvers de riche couverture (l. 7)
Sans foy, sans loy, sans droit et sans
mesure (l. 6)
Chaucer’s poem refers at several points unambiguously to Machaut’s triplum, borrowing ideas (ilth covered in lowers), copying diction (faith, law, measure), and even translating word for word when he calls Fortune “An ydole of fals portraiture.” None of this is
115
Chaucer certainly knew Qui /Ha Fortune(M8), and possibly Hé! Mors/Fine amour (M3) and Fons/O livoris
(M9). His use of Qui /Ha Fortune in the tirade against Fortune is discussed below, and this triplum is also
relevant to Duchess ll. 812–13. It has been suggested that the description of Fortune as a scorpion who
stings from behind in ll. 636–40 is borrowed from the motetus of Fons/O livoris (Wimsatt, Chaucer and the
French, 73, 159), but Fortune is not mentioned in that text, and the scorpion represents Lucifer. Perhaps
the idea of a scorpion is common enough that Chaucer need not have gotten it from Machaut. Kittredge
cites lines 1–8 of the triplum of M3 as an inspiration for the Black knight’s lay of complaint (ll. 475–486)
but Wimsatt cites Jugement dou Roy de Behaigne as a main source here, though he notes the similarity with
Motet 3; Kittredge, “Guillaume De Machaut,” 7–8; Wimsatt, Chaucer and the French Love Poets, 158.
116
This passage also has borrowings from Machaut’s Remede de Fortune and the Roman de la Rose; see Kitteredge, “Guillaume De Machaut,” 10–11, and Wimsatt, Chaucer and the French Love Poets, 158–9.
117
Ll. 618–35; Chaucer, The Complete Works, 1:298.
61
surprising within the broader scope of the Book of the Duchess, which is full of references to
the Roman de la Rose, dits by Machaut and Froissart, and a host of other classical and medieval sources.118 What may be surprising is that the triplum of Qui/Ha Fortune (M8), along
with several other motet texts, should be included in this company of inluences alongside
the Ovide moralisé, Jean de le Mote’s Regret Guillaume, Vergil’a Aeneid, and Alan of Lille’s De
Planctu Naturae, to name a few.
Obviously Chaucer knew his source well. Not only does he quote directly in one case,
he also seems to have the whole of the original triplum irmly in mind. For these references
appear in reverse order in Chaucer’s poem, relative to their original context. This could of
course be a coincidence, but it could also be deliberate. As the last line of the quoted text
reminds us, Fortune brings down what is brought up: in other words, she causes reversals.
The backwards incorporation of a series of lines from a source about Fortune would thus
be well in line with her usual iconography; we will see her doing far stranger things to music
and poetry in Chapters Four and Six. Regardless of whether the particular order in which
lines from the motet are used here is signiicant, it is interesting to see Mahchaut’s triplum
becoming part of the fabric of Chaucer’s poem. As Jacques Boogaart has shown, Machaut’s
motets are themselves suffused with quotations from sources ranging from the bible and
Boethius’s Consolatio to the poetry of the trouveres.119 Here we see them in turn become the
objects of citation and allusion.
Nor is this phenomenon limited to Machaut. Andrew Wathey has recently brought
to light a number of later engagements with motet poetry—mostly the work of Vitry—by
118
See list in Wimsatt, Chaucer and the French Love Poets, 155.
119
Boogaart, “Encompassing Past and Present.”
62
ifteenth-century humanists. Not only did they include motet text in their collections, as
noted above, but they also allowed these texts to serve as models and inspiration for new
poetry and moralistic literature. For example, a 1444 pamphlet by Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (later Pius II) engages with the themes of the triplum of Colla/Bona and echoes its
language.120 Another mid-ifteenth century source—a humanist miscellany—includes a
113-line poem that begins “Quondam colla iugo Veneris submisserat Hugo” (“Once Hugo
had lowered his neck under the yoke of Venus”). It tells the story of a cleric named Hugo
who is tried for having taken a concubine. When she denounces him because he is not rich,
Hugo is driven into a mysoginistic tirade (“Woman, dregs of satan, stinking rose, charming
poison,” etc.), and the reader is given the moral: “character, strength, spirit, possessions,
body, and honor—so many goods things does the cleric loose in [turning to] women.”121
The poem is pertinent here because its opening line references the triplum of Colla/Bona,
which begins “Colla jugo.” Furthermore, in naming the lleric Hugo the poem’s author seems
to be referencing the motet Cum statua/Hugo, which is a tirade against a friar named Hugo
for having committed some unspeciied hypocritical act against Vitry.122 In combining
these two references in the poem’s opening lines, the writer is thus implicitly noting that
they belong together because they are borrowed from the same genre.
RECEPTION OF ARS NOVA MOTETS OUTSIDE OF ARS NOVA CIRCLES
Although our primary focus has been on motets in their initial contexts, and on
their meanings for the scribes and theorists who were among their irst interpreters, we have
120
Wathey. “The Motet Texts of Vitry,” 200.
121
“Femina, fex sathane, rosa fetens, dulce venenum,” l. 93; “Ingenium, vires, animam, res, corpus, honores
/ Tot perdit bona vere clericus in muliere,” ll. 110–11: Huemer, “Lateinische Rhythmen,” 296.
122
Cum statua/Hugo is discussed in detail in Chapter Six.
63
also had occasion to see ars nova motets functioning farther out from their points of origin,
both geographically (England, Italy) and temporally (the ifteenth century). When we compare reception of motets by ars nova theorists and scribes with that of more peripheral audiences, a number of interesting differences come to light. The most consistent of these concern naming and emphasis. The fact that the Robertsbridge intabulations give the triplum
rather than the motetus text for each motet gains signiicance in light of the propensity of
English music theorists to cite ars nova and even ars antiqua motets by their triplum texts.123
And as we have seen, Chaucer’s borrowings from Machaut’s Qui/Ha Fortune (M8) also involve the triplum rather than the motetus. Poets, scribes, theorists, and intabulator: each in
his own way seems to give primacy to the triplum. This implied hierarchy in turn contrasts
with continental practice, which consistently refers to the motetus as the name-giving voice
across the irst three quarters of the century. Here again, indexers and theorists agree, as
indeed do poets: both fourteenth-century citations of motet in poetry discussed above (in
the Roman de Deduis and in Watriquet’s fatras) use the beginning of a motetus text.
To be sure, these are not earth-shattering differences. But behind names lies ontology. Noting that Italian treatises use triplum citations earlier in the 14th century than do
French treatises, Margaret Bent has suggested that such citations may disclose “a different
view of the genre.”124 And in our case the conluences in naming and placing of emphasis
among theorists, scribes, and poets in France, on the one hand, and England on the other
indeed suggest that there are differing views of the genre at play. What these views might
be is harder to say. In most motets the triplum text is probably the more easily intelligible,
123
See Appendix 1A for examples from the Regule of Robertus de Handlo and the Summa of Johannes
Hanboys; the latter even cites an ars antiqua motet (Aucun ont trouvé/Lonc tans) by its triplum.
124
Bent, “A Note on the Dating,” 223.
64
since its range is higher and its speed of delivery closer to that of speech. And yet the motetus has historical primacy and an etymological link with the motet as genre. The tendency
of French theorists to refer to motets by their inner, less audible voice may relect a heightened awareness of this history and etymology, perhaps combined with a kind of inside-out
listening. Once outside of the circles for which is was written, the motet was likely heard
differently, and the more audible triplum seems to have taken the lead.
One other difference between insular and continental reception concerns the writing of “contrafacta”—new texts to it existing melodies. This was common ars antiqua practice: Gordon Anderson has written that of the surviving corpus of thirteenth-century Latin
double motets, more than a third are contrafacta of French or bilingual motets.125 In contrast, ars nova motets were never furnished with new texts within the circles for which they
were initially written. This lack of textual re-composition is probably a result of the close
structural, rhetorical, and semantic alliances between ars nova texts and music—alliances
which have been demonstrated for a number of works in the repertory, and which will be
explored in depth in later chapters of this study. It would seem that the original intended
listeners and practitioners were aware enough of these congruences that they did not wish
to re-write texts to change their language or subject-matter. But this was not the case outside of France. As Peter Lefferts has noted, the “avoidance of the vernacular was a feature
of the motet outside a narrow but proliic Parisian orbit,” and the small number of ars nova
contrafacts that survive replace French text with Latin for English audiences.126 Thus the
125
In some cases a motet received new texts in two stages—irst for one of its upper voices, then for another: Anderson, “Notre-Dame Latin Double Motets,” 41.
126
These begin to appear in English sources in the second half of the century, created perhaps in the wake
of Jean le Bon’s captivity in the battle of Poitiers and ensuing English stay, Lefferts, The Motet in England,
190. But the English preference for Latin over French goes back to the thirteenth century: see Anderson,
“Notre-Dame Latin Double Motets,” 37.
65
notes, but not the words of the Ivrea motet Se paour/Diex tan desir/Concupisco are preserved
in the rear lyleaves of an English source from the second half of the century as Domine
quis/De veri cordis/Concupisco.127 As Lefferts has noted, these “Latin texts addressed to God
and Jesus,” are less suited to the tenor “concupisco” (“I lust”) than the courtly French texts
which came before them.128 But the use of Latin texts in this motet (and likely in several
other works from the same source) resulted in upper-voice content more suited to the overwhelmingly sacred contexts for motet performance in England.129 That the replacement
of French texts with Latin was fairly common practice is attested by the triplum of the
ive-voice motet Are post libamina/Nunc surgunt by Matheus de Sancto Johanne. This text
ends by actually identifying itself as a Latin contrafact of a French original: “the active, distinguished Frenchman composed this song on French melodies but after he had revised it
with the Latin language it more often became sweet to the English, replacing Deo gratias’.130
*
*
*
In this chapter I have used various kinds of reception as evidence about how those
interacting with ars nova motets in the fourteenth century might have conceived of them.
Speciically I have been interested in how the internal hierarchy of voices might have been
constituted. What emerges from this reception—scribal, theoretical, and poetic—is a topdown, or perhaps inside-out, rather than a bottom-up idea of the motet. Upper-voice texts
seem to be integral to motets, with the motetus voice giving its name to the genre and the
127
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Mus. e. 7, fols. 268v–9.
128
The Motet in England, 280.
129
Lefferts suggets that Parce piscatoribus/Relictis retibus and Omnis terra/Habenti dabitur are also contrafacts,
ibid. 204.
130
On Matheus de Sancto Johanne’s authorship of this work and its broader cultural context, see Wathey,
“The Peace of 1360–1369,” 149–50.
66
motetus incipit giving composition their names. This is not to downplay the fact that motets would surely have had different kinds of signiicance for different kinds of musicians
and listeners—recall Murino’s focus on tenor construction. But he also makes it clear that
these voices are a subset of the genre—tenores motettorum. More broadly, a rhetorical and
ontological emphasis on the upper voices is borne out by the layout and illumination of
manuscripts, by the focus of scribal corrections, and by the independent poetic lives motet
texts seem sometimes to have led.
This top-heavy view of motets seems to conlict with several aspects of modern
motet reception. On the one hand, we have been suspicious of motet texts because of the
polytextual texture in which we encounter them: it is often assumed that when upper-voice
texts are combined, they are rendered inaudible. On the other hand, it seems that the musical form of motets arises from the tenor’s rhythmic repetitions, and as such the upper voices
would seem to be subordinate to the tenors in theme or form. Both views can be nuanced
considerably, and this will be the goal of the following two chapters. These in turn will prepare the way for a series of analyses that read motets in ways consistent with their reception
as described above: that is, as works in which upper-voice ideas can fundamentally affect
musical texture, form, and sometimes even the tenor’s textual and melodic content.
67
APPENDIX 1A
Citations of Surviving ARS NOVA Motets in Treatises
The following list of motet citations from c. 1300–1415 is arranged in approximate
chronological order. Unless otherwise indicated, numbers in parenthesis refer to pagenumbers in the editions identiied in the notes. Information on the sources and editions
of cited motets is available in the Catalog of Ars nova Motets at the end of this study.
“COMPENDIUM TOTIUS ARTIS MOTETORUM”
(before 1340)1
Douce/Garison
“in tenore de Garyson” (35)
Tuba/In arboris
“in tenore de In arboris” (35)
Super/Presidentes
“in uno moteto Praesidentes in tronis seculi” (37)
Firmissime/Adesto
“in Adesto sancta trinitas” (37)
“in moteto Adesto sancta trinitas” (37)
Mon chant/Qui doloreus
“in uno moteto Qui doloretus” (37)
Tribum/Quoniam
“in moteto Quoniam secta latronum” (37)
JOHANNES BOEN, MUSICA
Floret/Florens
(c. 1355)2
“Sic et secunda admittitur in motheto Florens vigor super verbo
Mardocheo” (68)
O canenda/Rex
“et secunda et quarta in tenore motheti Rex quem metrorum” (68)
Se grasse/Cum venerint
“Ex quo concludo motetum Cum venerunt” (67)
“SEX SUNT SPECIES PRINCIPALES...”
Firmissime/Adesto
(mid-14th century)3
“in moteti tenore qui vocatur Adesto” (67)
1
Ed. Wolf, “Ein anonymer Musiktraktat,” 34–8. On the relationship between this treatise and the ars
nova writings broadly construed, see Fuller, “A Phantom Treatise,” 44–5, and Balensuela, “The Borrower is
Servant,” 12–14.
2
Frobenius, ed., Johannes Boens Musica.
3
“Sex sunt species principales...explicit ars quevis mensurandi motetos compilata a magistro Philippo de
68
Colla/Bona
“in Bona condit” (67)
Douce/Garison
“in Garison” (69)
“ut in tenore de Garison” (69)
Tuba/In arboris
“ut in tenore In arboris” (69)
Garrit/In nova
“ut in tenore de In nova fert animus” (69)
“DE MUSICA MENSURABILI”
(mid-14th century)4
Super/Presidentes
“ut in tenore de Presidentes” (184)
Douce/Garison
“ut in motecto de Garison” (186)
“ut in eodem de Garison exemplum de tenore dicti moteti” (186)
Garrit/In nova
“ut in tenore de In nova” (186)
Tuba/In arboris
“ut in tenore In arboris” (186)
“QUATUOR PRINCIPALIA”
Cum statua/Hugo
(1351)5
“in moteto qui vocatur Hugo quod edidit Philippus de Vitriaco”
(420)
Vos/Gratissima
“ut patet in tenore de Gratissima, quem idem Philippus edidit”
(420)
Tant a soutille/Bien
“ut patet in moteto qui vocatur Tant a sotile pointure” (459)
ARS (MUSICAE)
Impudenter/Virtutibus
(Johannes Boen, c. 1350–75)6
“quod in moteto Virtutibus” (28)
“in tenore Virtutibus” (29)
Vitry Magistro in musica.” This is the treatise also referred to as “Ars mensurandi motetos”—a title derived
from the explicit. Ed. Reany et al., Philippi de Vitriaco Ars nova, 55-69. See comments in Fuller, “A Phantom
Treatise,” 26–7.
4
Ed. Coussemaker, Scriptorum 3:177-93.
5
Ed. Aluas. See commentary on motets cited, p. 145–8. The last part of this treatise in its “A” version is
edited as “De musica antiqua et nova” in Coussemaker, Scriptorum 3:334-64.
6
Boen, Ars (musicae), 15-46.
69
“et hoc in in primis quatuor notulis illius excellenter moteti Virtutibus clare possimus contemplare” (17v)*
Apta/Flos
“sic et in tenore Flos virginum” (29)
“ut in tenore de Flos virginum” (28)
Tuba/In arboris
“ut in tenore moteti In arboris” (26)
O canenda/Rex
“ut in contratenore de Rex quem metrorum” (27)
Rex/Leticie
“ut in tenore Rex Karole moteti eodem” (78v)**
* In the redaction in London, British Library, Additional 23220, ff. 14v-21v.
**In the redaction in Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, lat. app. cl. VIII/24 (coll.
3434), ff. 73v-89v on fol. 78v.
“CUM DE SIGNIS TEMPORIS…”
Firmissime/Adesto
(later 14th-c. copy from mid-century exemplar)7
“ut in moteto Adesto sancta trinitas” (4v)
“in moteto Adesto” (4v)
Colla/Bona
“in Bona condit” (4v)
Tuba/In arboris
“in moteto In arboris epyro” (4v)
Garrit/In nova
“ut in tenore In noua fert animus” (4v)
Mon chant/Qui doloreus
“ut in moteto Qui dolereux” (4v)
Vos/Gratissima
“ut in moteto Gratissima uirginis species” (4v)
Qui/Ha Fortune
“ut in moteto Qui des promesses de fortune se fie” (5)
Douce/Garison
“ut in moteto Garison selonc nature” (5)
Zolomina/Nazarea
“ut in moteto Nazarea” (5)
7
Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, lat. 14741, ff. 2r-6v. Edited in the Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum, <
http://www.chmtl.indiana.edu/tml/14th/ANOQUAE_MPBN1474.html>. Also edited but conlated with
other treatises in Reany et al., Philippi de Vitriaco Ars nova, 25–9, 32.
70
“SEX MINIMAE POSSUNT PONI…”
(c. 1400; Italian copy of an earlier exemplar)8
Orbis orbatus/Vos pastores “ut in Orbis orbatur” (19v)9
Firmissime/Adesto
“ut in Adesto uetus” (19v)
“in Adesto” (20r)
Colla/Bona
“in Bona condit” (20r)
Douce/Garison
“in moteto Garison” (20r)
“ut in tenore de Garison” (20r)
Tuba/In arboris
“ut in motecto In arboris in tenore illius moctecti” (20r)
“ut In arboris” (20r)
Garrit/In nova
“ut in tenore In noua sit animus” (20r)
“OMNI DESIDERANTI NOTITIAM...”
Tuba/In arboris
(late 14th century)10
“in moteti tenore qui dicitur In arboris” (33)
“in tenore de In arboris” (34)
Garrit/In nova
“vel in tenore de In nova fert animus” (33)
“ARS CANTUS MENSURABILIS”
Ida/Portio
(after 1376)11
“in motecto Ida capillorum” (212)
“ut habetur in tenore Portio nature vel Ida capillorum ut hic, per
exemplum” (256)
Rex/Leticie
“sic in illo magno motecto Rex Karole” (241)
8
Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Barberini lat. 307, ff. 17r-20v. Edited in the Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum, < http://www.chmtl.indiana.edu/tml/14th/VITANV_MBAVB307.html>. Edited but
conlated with other ars nova related sources treatises in Reany et al., Philippi de Vitriaco Ars nova, 23–31.
See comments in Fuller, “A Phantom Treatise,” 25–6.
9
“Orbis orbatus” is the more verbose voice but “Vos pastores” is usually higher.
10
Two versions exist, one edited as the Ars perfecta of Vitry in Coussemaker, Scriptorum III:28–35, and
the other in Anglès, “Dos Tractats Medievals,” 6–10. The above excerpts are from the former. The latter
reads ““Et de omnibus veritas patet in tenore de In arboris. Innova fer anims,” and two examples follow; Ibid.,
10.
11
Ed. Balensuela, Ars cantus mensurabilis.
71
“TRACTATUS FIGURARUM”
(last quarter 14th century)12
Apta/Flos
“ut patet in Apta caro”
Tribum/Quoniam
“in motetis ipsorum magistrorum videlicet Tribum que non abhorruit et in aliis et cetera.”
Rex/Leticie
“et in Rex carole, ac etiam in aliis motetis” (34)
“QUONIAM CIRCA ARTEM MUSICALIS SCIENCIE...”
(after 1400)13
Mon chant/Qui doloreus
“ut monachant de morte wilhelmi” (336)
Apollinis/Zodiacum
“ut Apollinis” (336)
Degentis/Cum vix
“Degentis vita” (336)
Tuba/In arboris
“in tenore Tube sacre fidei” (336)
“NOTITIA DEL VALORE DELLE NOTE”
Sub Arturo/Fons
(early 15th century)14
“come el tinore di certi motetti, cioe Luce clarus o Sub Arturo o
Omni habenti…Sub Arturo a tre taglie di valore” (57)
“DIFFERENTIA EST INTER MOTETOS…”
Ida/Portio
“[I]da capillorum”
Impudenter/Virtutibus
“Impudenter”
(early 15th c., Italian)15
“TRACTATULUS DE CANTU MENSURALI…”
Degentis/Cum vix
(1462)16
“ut Degentis vita” (16)
“in cantione Degentis vita” (29)
Apollinis/Zodiacum
“ut…Apollinis” (16)
12
Ed. Schreur, Tractatus figurarum.
13
Ed. Wolf, “Ein Breslauer Mensuraltraktat,” 331–45.
14
Ed. Carpentyan, Notitia del valore delle note.
15
Ed. Staehelin, “Beschreibungen und Beispiele, 237–42.
16
Ed. Gallo, Tractatulus de cantu mensurali.
72
CHAPTER TWO
Hearing Voices
“One of our most important faculties is our ability to listen
to, and follow, one speaker in the presence of others. This is
such a common experience that we may take it for granted;
we may call it “the cocktail party problem.” No machine has
been constructed to do just this, to ilter out one conversation from a number jumbled together.”
—Colin Cherry, 19571
“I saw how in a large gathering of discerning people, when
motets were sung according to the new manner, it was asked
what language the singers were using, Hebrew, Greek, or Latin, for it was not understood what they were saying.”
—Jacobus de Montibus (olim Leodiensis), c. 13302
W
ITH THE GROWTH OF COMMERCIAL AVIATION
in the 1950s, air trafic controllers
encountered an unexpected problem: presented with the voices of multiple pilots
coming out of the same loudspeaker, they had trouble keeping these different streams of
information separate, and were thus at risk of misunderstanding important messages. Their
dificulties led to the irst research on what has since been termed “the cocktail party effect”
or “cocktail party problem”—the ability of people to isolate one sound-source in the presence of many. The brains of most humans are able to navigate complex social soundscapes
without much conscious effort. But how exactly we do this, and why it should have been
dificult for the air trafic controllers—and later for computers—constituted the problem.3
1
Cherry, On Human Communication, 278.
2
Bragard, ed., Jacobi Leodiensis Speculum musicae 7:95; this passage is discussed in detail below. On the
dating of the treatise and the evidence for “Jacobus de Montibus” as opposed to “Jacques de Liège” as the
treatise’s author, see Desmond, “New Light on Jacobus,” 24–36.
3
This effect has been an object of study in physiology, neurobiology, psychophysiology, cognitive psychology, biophysics, computer science, and engineering. For a review, see Haykin & Chen, “The Cocktail Party
73
For musicologists, a parallel effect—or perhaps problem—is inherent in the polytextual soundscapes of medieval motets, whose superimposition of multiple strands of text
has led us to inquire whether audiences were meant to understand any of the words during
performance. Scholars have answered this question in various ways, some insisting that the
texts of motets were not meant to be understood in performance, others suggesting that
only select words or phrases were meant to be perceived by the listener. These stances about
intelligibility have in turn led to varying views of the genre, the compositional priorities of
its composers, and the role of text in its aesthetics. In the chapters that follow, I discuss a
number of examples from the ars nova motet repertory in which compositional choices stem
from the content of the texts. These show that motet texts were meaningful to their composers. But I will also suggest that many of those compositional choices resulted in musical
events that would have been audible to listeners familiar with the generic norms of motets.
These listeners could only connect these compositional choices with the semantic stimuli
that inspired them if they were able to hear and understand some considerable amount of
the motets’ texts. For this reason it will be necessary for me to engage here with the question of intelligibility. I will irst address the small amount of medieval evidence that bears
on the topic, including the famous observation by Jacobus quoted at the head of this chapter. I will then engage with musicological literature pertaining to this problem, especially
with the arguments put forward by Christopher Page in Discarding Images. This in turn will
lead to a consideration of the performance aesthetics that underlie assumptions about the
intelligibility of motet texts. Finally, I will return to the cocktail party effect to see what
cognitive science can tell us about the listening conditions under which motet texts might
be understood.
Problem.”
74
MEDIEVAL LISTENING PRACTICES AND MODERN EARS
Before moving further with the question of intelligibility in polytextual performance, it should be noted that some motet poetry may have also been heard in monotextual
contexts. In the case of Vitry’s motets, literary circulation of the texts must have given
some the opportunity to study the poetry on the page, and perhaps to commit it to memory.
There is also the possibility that motet voices were sung separately irst and then together.4
Indeed, Jacobus refers to such a practice in the Speculum musicae.5 I have already discussed
this passage and its broader context in Chapter 1, but it will be worth repeating the relevant
part here:
The discanting voices can either be compared to the tenor…or they can be
considered by themselves, not with respect to the notes of the tenor and sung
at the same time as them, but separately and in turn, one after the other, as
when someone sings some motetus or triplum or quadruplum by himself without a
tenor.6
Clearly the practice of singing voices on their own was nothing too out of the ordinary, since Jacques is citing it here not for its own sake, but to support a broader claim
that the voices of polyphonic compositions can each be considered as independent songs
on their own terms. Further evidence of this independence comes from the interpolated
Fauvel. There, the triplum voice of the motet Floret/Florens, which survives in the Brussels
4
This approach is taken to good effect on several Gothic Voices recordings and posited by Page in a footnote: “It must be acknowledged that a ‘layered’ performance of motets (each voice being sung individually,
perhaps over the tenor) followed by a ‘complete’ performance may have taken place in the 13th c., a method
which solves the problem of comprehensibility at a stroke,” Discarding Images, 85n73. Page has also suggested that before performing a motet, the singers might have summarized the contents of their voice for
the audience, but this conjecture is supported by no evidence pertaining to the motet; “Listening to the
Trouvères,” 648; “Around the Performance,” 351.
5
Page makes reference to this passage in “Around the Performance,” 351, 356n14.
6
“Possunt autem voces discantus ad voces comparari tenoris…vel possunt per se considerari, non per respectum ad voces tenoris et ut simul dicuntur cum illis, sed divisim successive una post aliam cum aliquis per
se cantat motetum aliquem, triplum vel quadruplum, sine tenore,” Bragard, ed., Jacobi Leodiensis Speculum
musicae 7:9.
75
rotulus and Cambrai fragments, is reworked into a monophonic prose beginning Carnalitas
luxuria.7 Though some of the rhythms have been changed, the long rests that originated in
the motet remain in the prose, as do several leaps of a fourth. Alice Clark has noted that
“no concession is made in the prose melody to the fact that this voice, originally the top
part in a three-part texture, is now a monophonic piece that must stand alone.”8 Indeed, the
re-working seems to prove Jacques’ claim. In theory, and here in practice, an upper voice is
as much a song as the tenor.
And there is evidence from the literary realm that motet voices were sometimes
sung on their own: as the narrator of Froissart’s Joli Buisson de Jonece (1373) walks along in
a courtly procession on his way to see the god of Love, he gives voice to his joyful mood by
singing “a new motet” that he had been sent from Reims (“En chantant un motet nouviel/
Quon mavoit envoiiet de Rains”).9 Troubled probably by this solo performance and the late
date for a “motet nouviel” from Reims, Earp has suggested that the term in this context
may refer to “a new polyphonic ballade or rondeau, the sort of work that to a non-musician
would surely have sounded as complicated and learned as a motet.”10 But it seems likely
that Froissart, who himself composed in the formes fixes, would have been able to tell the
difference. Rather, the passage seems to attest to the spontaneous solo performance of a
single motet voice.
7
The prose is edited in Harrison, “The Monophonic Music,” 188–90. Floret/Florens in Sanders, “The Early
Motets,” 37–45, and Lerch, Fragmente aus Cambrai, 2:205–14. For a hypothesis on why the prose and not
the motet appears in Fauvel, see Bent, “Fauvel and Marigny,” 46–7.
8
She therefore posits that the original plan was to notate a two-voice composition, but the editors ran out
of space. Clark, “The Flowering of Charnalité,” 183.
9
On this source and the motets to which it may allude, see Huot, “Reading across Genres.” See also discussion in Chapter One of the present study, and below.
10
Guillaume de Machaut, 54.
76
And yet these references to voices sounding on their own do not obviate the need
for questions about intelligibility. It is unlikely that all listeners would have had access to
all motet texts ahead of hearing the works performed—indeed, motets not by Vitry seem to
have been transmitted as poetry very rarely. Nor can we assume that all performances began
with turn-by turn sing-throughs. And even if they did, it is still worth asking what audiences
heard (were expected to hear, or were able to hear, or chose to hear) in a tutti performance.
The most frequently cited medieval evidence that there might have been problems
with comprehension when motets were sung is the anecdote from the Speculum musicae
cited at the head of this chapter. Jacobus seems to refer to problems arising from polytextuality when he reveals that a listener at a “gathering of discerning people…asked what
language the singers were using: Hebrew, Greek, or Latin.” If the listener could not even
understand what language he was hearing, its seems impossible that he could have understood the words. Thus the passage has been used to support the claim that “the very nature
of double motets with their simultaneous presentation of two texts jeopardized the ‘message’
of either [text].”11
But an examination of this comment in context serves to give an entirely different
impression of its meaning. In this 46th chapter of Book Seven of the Speculum musicae,
Jacobus undertakes a comparison of two sets of things—the old art of composing and the
new, and also the “old manner of singing” and the new (“comparatio veteris artis musicae
mensurabilis ad modernam…et antiqui modi cantandi ad modernum”).12 There is no implication that it would be possible to perform the old kind of music in the new mode of
11
Pesce, “The Signiicance of Text,” 91–2.
12
Ed. Bragard, Jacobi Leodiensis Speculum musicae 7:93.
77
singing, and for the most part Jacobus keeps these two dimensions—the compositional and
the performative—coupled. But towards the end of the chapter he turns his attention to
performing speciically, and it is at that point that the discussion of text and its intelligibility takes place. The passage is worth quoting in full:
In a certain gathering in which skilled singers and discerning laypersons
were gathered together and where modern motets were sung according to the
modern manner, and some old [motets] as well, I observed that the old motets and also the old manner of singing were more adequately pleasing, even
to the laypersons, than the new. And even though the new manner [initially]
pleased in its newness, this is no longer the case, for it begins to displease
many.
Therefore let the old songs and the old manner of singing and notating be
called back to the native land of singers. Let these things come back to use,
and let the rational art lourish once more. It has been exiled, along with
its [corresponding] manner of singing, as though violently thrown down by
the fellowship of singers. But the violence need not be perpetual. To whom
does such wantonness of singing give pleasure—this curiosity in which, as
may be seen by anyone, the words are lost, the harmony of the consonances
diminished, the length of notes changed, perfection disparaged, imperfection elevated, and measure confounded?
I saw how in a great gathering of discerning people, when motets were sung
according to the new manner, it was asked what language the singers were using,
Hebrew, Greek, or Latin, for it was not understood what they were saying. Thus
the moderns, although they write many beautiful and good texts in their songs, lose
them in their manner of singing, since they are not understood.13
The inal sentence of the quoted text, which serves as a summary of what we should get
13
“Vidi ergo, in quadam societate, in qua congregati erant, valentes cantores et laici sapientes. Fuerunt ibi
cantati moteti moderni et secundum modum modernum, et veteres aliqui. Plus satis placuerunt, etiam laicis,
antiqui quam novi, et modus antiquus quam novus. Etsi enim modus novus in sua placuerit novitate, non
sic modo, sed incipit multis displicere. Ergo iam placeat cantus antiquos et cantandi notandique modum
antiquum ad patriam revocare cantorum. Revertantur haec ad usum reloreatque rationabilis ars. Exul fuit et
eius cantandi modus. Quasi violenter deiecta sunt haec a cantorum consortio. Violentum autem non debet
esse perpetuum. Ad quid tantum placet cantandi lascivia, curiositas in qua, ut aliquibus videtur, littera perditur, harmonia consonantiarum minuitur, valor notarum mutatur, perfectio deprimitur, imperfectio sublimatur mensuraque confunditur? Vidi in magna sapientium societate, cum cantarentur moteti, secundum
modernum modum, quesitum fuit, quali lingua tales uterentur cantores, Ebrea, Greca, vel Latina, vel qua
alia, quia non intelligebatur quid dicerent. Sic moderni, licet multa pulchra et bona in suis cantibus faciant
dictamina, in modo tamen suo cantandi cum non intelligantur, perdunt ea.” Bragard, ed., Jacobi Leodiensis
Speculum musicae 7:95; emphasis mine.
78
from the anecdote, is crystal clear in its meaning: it’s too bad that the well written texts of
the moderns are masked by the new manner of performance. The implication, then, is that
if the same good texts were delivered in the old manner of singing, they would not be lost. In
complaining that new texts are obscured Jacobus tacitly acknowledges that the clear projection of text is a merit of the older repertory that he champions. Far from proving that
medieval audiences could not understand the texts of motets in performance, then, this
passage in fact suggests that there was an expectation on the listener’s part that text would
be intelligible.
Nor does Jacobus necessarily men for us to take him fully at face value. As Suzannah Clark has pointed out, “Jacques’s complaint that they could be singing in Hebrew or
Greek is, of course, spurious, for the upper voices of motets were either in Latin or French
or both.”14 Hence the observer is making fun of a delivery of Latin text which was, to his
mind, muddled as a result of the new manner of singing. The listener’s mocking comment
would hardly makes any sense unless understanding text was an aspect of appreciating the
modus antiquus cantandi.
What does this passage tell us about the ars nova and new manner of singing? Not
much. Jacobus is writing to persuade, and the relation of a fellow conservative’s negative
evaluation of the performance is intended to malign the modern manner rather than to
give us insight into its aesthetics or the expectations of its adherents. It is certainly possible
that for Jacobus and similar listeners familiarity with, and a preference for older textures
and norms might have resulted in a greater facility of comprehension of texts set in the
older style. Speciically, the increased use of duple meters may have made melodies and text
14
“‘S’en dirai chançonete’,” 32n6. Frank Hentschel also points out the humor in the remark, seeing it to
relect back on the apparently discerning persons who listened. “Der Streit um die ‘ars nova,” 120.
79
delivery seem stilted enough to obscure meaning for those accustomed to perfection. But to
an unbiased listener it is hard to believe that the words of ars nova motets would be harder
to understand than those of older works, since they feature more transparent textures.
Even if Jacobus is not a trustworthy source for reporting on ars nova performances
in any but a negative way, he clearly tells us something about contemporary expectations.
Undoubtedly he and the learned person whom he paraphrases would agree that in an ideal
situation the texts of motets should be intelligible. Furthermore, he gives us the key to understanding why they are sometimes not. For towards the end of the passage he uncouples
composition and performance, focusing on the moderns’ manner of singing as the cause
of incomprehension. In doing so, he reminds us of an obvious but important fact: performances can make words audible, or they can obscure texts, causing them to become lost.
And it is here that we can turn from the new manner to a newer manner still, and consider
the effect of twentieth- and twenty-irst century performances of ars nova motets on the
intelligibility of their texts.
*
*
*
One of the most inluential and controversial arguments about the audiences for
medieval motets was put forward by Christopher Page in his 1993 Discarding Images. Offering a new reading of the often-quoted lines from Grocheio’s De Musica (c. 1300), which
seem to locate motets within elite intellectual spheres, Page argued that motet audiences
included a much broader cut of society: “Johannes de Grocheio’s ‘clergy, and those who care
for the reinements of any skill’ may have formed a very diverse group indeed.”15
15
Discarding Images, 111. The main tenets of this important study been widely discussed and critiqued in
print, and it is not the purpose of this chapter to rehearse those arguments—arguments about the writing
of history, periodization, and the role of scholars and performers in interpreting medieval music, broadly
80
But while diversifying the intended audience for ars antiqua motets, Page has narrowed the listening experiences available to this group, downplaying the intellectual aspects
of listening and shifting the focus to sensory pleasure. Objecting to the reading of mere
“contrast” as “opposition,” he argues that in fact while motets may present us with differences in diction or topic between their texted voices, these do not result in “the destabilizing
quality that much modern criticism tends to discern and explore.”16 In the process, motets
emerge as integrated structures, their separate voices merged into a uniied whole by congruences in theme, vowel-sound, and diction.
Such an aesthetic certainly has implications for the importance of individual
texts—indeed, of any text—as a salient aspect of composition or reception. Indeed, Page
suggests that part of the pleasure gained from motets by their diverse medieval audiences
may have been derived from not understanding the texts:
Some listeners in the thirteenth century may have enjoyed the sound-patterns of Latin motet poetry without deriving any signiicant understanding
of the sense, much as some modern listeners do today when hearing these
motets (or operatic arias, for that matter)…it can scarcely be doubted that
many motets were designed to induce an exhilarating impression of words
leaving sense behind and beginning to skirl.
And later:
The existence of triple motets with three simultaneous poems that sometimes deal with subjects in two languages, French and Latin, proves that the
aesthetic of the poet is one which allows verbal communication to decline
as metrical, musical, and structural ambitions mount. This was surely not
taken to involve a sacriice of meaning but rather a gain of pleasure that was
‘intellectual’ in this sense”: it produced the exhilaration of knowing that a
piece contains more than one can ever hope to hear.”17
construed. See, in order of publication, Bent, “Relections on Christopher Page’s Reflections,” Page, “A Reply
to Margaret Bent,” Strohm, “How to Make Medieval Music Our Own,” Wegman, “Reviewing Images,” and
Weller, “Frames and Images.”
16
Discarding Images, 92, 96.
17
Ibid., 85–6, 101.
81
Page’s claims and supporting arguments pertain mostly to ars antiqua motets, which
were the subject of Grocheio’s observations. And it is in this repertory that he locates a
number of traits that argue against the independence or intelligibility of texts, such as the
coordination of rhyme-sounds and vowels between voices. As additional evidence against
an intellectual reception he cites what he perceives as a lack of engagement with the time’s
intellectual trends (“the scholastic method, for example, has left virtually no impression
upon the Latin or French motets”).18
But is it is also clear that Page sees the same problems as extending beyond the ars
antiqua, to “the” motet:
Of all the musical genres known to the Middle Ages, it is the motet which
most candidly acknowledges the importance of verbal sound over verbal
sense by placing two or even three texts together, minimizing their intelligibility but maximizing their phonic contrast.19
In fact ars nova motets are much less likely to have the moments of sonic unity that Page
sees in those of the thirteenth century. And a wide cross-section of current intellectual
trends is indeed represented by their texts, which engage in contemporary theological debates, incorporate quotations from learned sources and even treat such esoteric subjects as
metaphysics and poetic theory.20 But in one aspect ars nova motets are open to the kinds of
18
Ibid., 84.
19
Discarding Images, 85–6. See also the evaluation of Machaut on p. 14: “Machaut’s music leaves no doubt
that his sensations when composing were as indifferent to moral or intellectual persuasions as those of any
composer at any period in history when genuinely engrossed.” It should be said that in general Page’s arguments are more persuasive for the ars antiqua motet, which is after all his subject. In some passages, especially
in the longer section surrounding the passage quoted above, he seems to shift from thirteenth-century listeners to “the medieval motet” almost seamlessly.
20
For an argument in favor of the Assumption as doctrine, see the triplum Almifonis melos cum vocibus, edited and summarized in PMFC 5, supplement, p. 8. On classical quotations in Vitry’s motets, see Bent, “Polyphony of Texts and Music,” and Wathey, “Myth and Mythography.” Metaphysics is criticized in ll. 19–31
of the triplum Tuba sacre fidei (PMFC vol. 1, 32–4). On In virtute/Decens and its engagement with Horace’s
Ars poetica, see Chapter Five.
82
criticisms leveled by Page—they absolutely combine diverse texts in one work.
Some arguments that motet texts may have a semantic as well as a sonic role in
performance have been put forward. Dolores Pesce has argued that in double Latin motets,
music serves texts by giving “musical prominence to…igures of repetition and rhetorical
expressions,” and that in some cases this kind of emphasis may represent “at least an attempt
to give musical expression to the words.”21 And in a recent study of the Montpellier motet
Joliement en douce/Quant voi/Je sui joliete/Aptatur, Suzannah Clark has drawn attention to a
variety of “ways in which the music clariies rather than obscures the meaning of the text
in performance.”22 Beginning from the premise that “hearing the odd word here and there
is less a matter of chance than one of effort on the part of poet-composers to convey the
text,” she has argued that some level of understanding is made possible—even assured—by
compositional choices such as the placement or refrains, the use of musical echoes, and the
careful coordination of rests between voices.23 And yet even here the matter of understanding—albeit a rather deep understanding—depends upon “grasping” on the listener’s part.24
Other scholars have agreed with Page’s claims about the impossibility of hearing individual texts while nevertheless preserving a place for an intellectual dimension. Margaret
Bent, the main advocate for the importance of text to the analysis of motets, concedes to
an “impossibility of understanding [motet texts] at a irst or unprepared hearing,” but argues
that there is space for the “prepared listener”—an “experienced listener who, like Boethius’s
musicus, ‘exhibits the faculty of forming judgments according to speculation or reason’” and
21
Pesce, “The Signiicance of Texts,” 94, 97.
22
Clark, “‘S’en dirai chançonete’,” 31.
23
Ibid., 34.
24
Ibid., 58–9.
83
is already familiar with the composition: “instant understanding is impossible, prepared
understanding possible; this applies to many kinds of music.”25
There is no doubt that a listening experience such as the one suggested by Clark—
full of intertextual and intermelodic references—would be meaningful. No doubt also that
the understanding of a piece by a listener prepared in Bent’s sense of the term—intimately
familiar with a motet’s texts, proportions, and numerical structures, as well as the liturgical context of its tenor—would be deep. But must instant understanding of the text always
be impossible for the audiences of a polytextual work? Reminded by Jacobus how much
depends on the manner of singing, I would like to evaluate one aesthetic underpinning of
Page’s incredulity about intelligibility: the question of timbre.
TIMBRE
Page’s debt to recordings—especially to his own work with Gothic Voices—is selfavowed:
The primary inspiration for [Discarding Images] has been provided by performance…recordings are sometimes superseded by advances in knowledge,
and are often vanquished by changes in taste, yet innovative or challenging
performances can none the less disturb a wide range of preconceptions that
we may unwittingly hold about the interest and scope of a repertory.26
And of course he is not alone in this. I am among those for whom Page’s beautiful recordings with Gothic Voices have felt deeply “authentic.” And there can be no doubt
that they are closer to medieval performances than many previous modern re-creations in
one sense: inspired by his research into the question of instrumental versus vocal perfor25
Bent, “Relections,” 632, and “Words and Music,” 387. Reading the latter article makes us a listener
prepared, in Bent’s sense, to hear Machaut’s Fons/O livoris (M9).
26
Discarding Images, p. xx.
84
mance of medieval song, Page’s recordings allowed us to reconceive of a wide repertory of
music as primarily vocal.27 Lawrence Earp evokes the feelings of many when he writes that
the recordings of Gothic Voices “are consistently of the highest quality, and put into practice the most advanced and solidly grounded views of performance practice at the time of
recording.”28 But if in the respect of instrumentation Page’s re-imagination of the medieval
sound was fresh and radical, another aspect of his aesthetic—that which pertains to timbre—seems to have been inherited perhaps too readily from the English choral tradition.
This is not to say that Page was not thoughtful about questions of timbre. If, as John
Potter has argued, “the position of authority [held by the British early music sound] has
been achieved with the minimum change to the techniques that the singers learned to gain
their choral scholarships,” this is perhaps less a matter of laziness (certainly in Page’s case)
than of agenda. For Page was reacting to the bright, mixed sound of instrumental performance current in the irst stage of the early music revival—a sound, in his words, of “boldly
individualized lines collaborating in a polyphony which is extrovert and almost heraldic in
colour, which is candid, even naive, in its directness of address to the listener.”29 The ascetic
English choral sound evocatively described by Daniel Leech-Wilkinson as “freshly cleaned
Anglicanism” must have seemed like the perfect antidote.30
This pure sound with its equal timbres, matched vowels, and lack of vibrato could
not but inluence Page’s conception of the motet. As his performance aesthetic blends
sounds together into a uniied whole where sonority reigns supreme, so his arguments about
27
See Page, “Machaut’s ‘Pupil’ Deschamps,” and “The Performance of Songs.”
28
Earp, Review of The Medieval Romantics, 289.
29
Page, “The Performance of Songs,” 441.
30
Leech-Wilkinson, The Modern Invention of Medieval Music, 206.
85
ars antiqua—and ars nova—aesthetics stress unity over contrast. For me, “synchronization
of vowels” and “verbal identity” that lead to sonorities “of exceptional clarity and forthrightness—characteristics which Page argues are inherent to the compositional fabric of ars
antiqua motets—bring to mind an Oxford college choir, or the Tallis Scholars.31 Theirs is
a sound in which we may “[enjoy] the sound-patterns of Latin motet poetry without deriving any signiicant understanding of the sense.”32 And in the phrase “there is variation and
contrast, but there is neither conlict nor tension,” which Page uses to describe the relationship between the motetus and triplum in a motet, I cannot help but read also a description
of the sound-world cultivated by Gothic Voices.33 Margaret Bent has pointed out the “danger
of drawing circular conclusions from particular styles of performance that emphasize some
rather than other features of the music.”34 And indeed, Page’s arguments about the priorities of the genre could double as an aesthetic manifesto: “The complexity is purely phonic
and not semantic. As I read them, the texts of this motet are designed to be so similar to
one another that there is little or no contrast between them.”35 The texts, or the voices that
execute them?
Page has himself cautioned that his reconstructions of medieval sounds are not
“wholly objective” in part because they are “based upon…experience with professional British singers, most of whom received their training in the choir of some cathedral or collegiate
31
Discarding Images, 103, 105.
32
Ibid., 86.
33
Ibid., 97.
34
Bent, “Relections on Christopher Page’s Reflections,” 630. On the question of authenticity and its role
in Page’s argument see also Wegman, “Reviewing Images,” 269–70.
35
Page, Discarding Images, 110.
86
establishment in England.”36 But we are to understand that the reconstructed sound-world
is at least mostly objective, and Page has cited various kinds of evidence to support the idea
that the late-medieval sound might be similar to the modern British one. For example, the
similar range of motet voices is cited as evidence that motets were “performed by identical
(or by nearly identical) voices”:
Many of the motets in the Bamberg manuscript (probably dating from c.
1285) exploit a range of around eleven notes from top to bottom, while
some individual voice parts also employ this compass. It would therefore
seem that 13th-century motets were conceived to exploit the resources of
two, three or four equal voices; one singer, in other words, could normally
perform any part in a motet—tenor, duplum, triplum or quadruplum—
without undue dificulty. The result would have been a well-blended sound
with each part distinguished by its text rather than by its colour.
the evidence of voice ranges suggests that blend, and not contrast, is the
guiding colour principle of the Ars Antiqua motet. This is quintessentially
music for singers, designed to exploit the sounds of Latin and Old French
as put into song by voices of very similar type singing in very much the same
kind of way.37
Such a reading of the evidence blatantly conlates range with tessitura. The compass of a
part is hardly indicative of where that part lies for most of a composition, but it is the latter
information that would indicate which singer is to be placed on which voice. Furthermore,
even if singers had similar usable ranges, it seems likely that some would be more used to
singing tenors, and some, upper parts. This distinction would be cemented in the following
century with the emergence of function designations such as “tenorista.”38
But most importantly, nothing guarantees that two medieval singers, even if they
36
“The Performance of Ars Antiqua Motets,” 149.
37
Ibid., 153–4.
38
On “tenorista” as function rather than range, see Wegman, “From Maker to Composer,” 445–8. In contrast, “contratenorista” seems to have been a range designation for bass voices. I am grateful to Alejandro
Enrique Planchart for discussing this issue with me.
87
had the same range, would necessarily have “voices of very similar type.” The unity of sound
achieved by English singers is the result of a huge system of choir schools and choral scholarships, with many professional performers emerging from either Oxford or Cambridge.39
Arguably, only such an infrastructure can produce singers so similarly trained as to perform music in this way. This is not to say that those singing motets in the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries were not experienced—the degree of specialized knowledge needed
to sing mensural notation was great, and all singers able to execute motets would probably
have begun as choirboys or, in the case of the nobility, would have been taught by clerics.40
But while the performers would all have been schooled, they would by no means have been
products of the same school. We can imagine a scenario where a Latin motet was sung by
three university men, each from a different part of Europe and with a different way of
pronouncing Latin. Would their vowels be matched, or their training be similar? We know
that even different regions within France had their own local ways of singing: the canons at
Lyons cathedral, for example, were known to shout.41 On the international level, these differences were apparently worthy of—and subject to—rivalry and ridicule. Thus an Italian
rhetorician wrote in 1226 that
the Greeks say the Latins bark like dogs and the Latins say the Greeks growl
like foxes. The French claim that the Italians groan… the Italians, on the
other hand, say that French and Germans emit tremulous sounds like someone suffering from fever, and that they sing so loudly they must think God
is deaf.42
39
Potter, Vocal Authority, 116–17.
40
Certainly there was some non-clerical performance of mensural polyphony, as indicated by the depictions of lay singers in the Machaut manuscripts (e.g. the singers gathered around a barrel, discussed below).
In the Voir dit the narrator sends notated music to the noble Toute Belle, expecting her to perform it. For
further evidence that women performed mensural polyphony, see Page, “A Treatise on Musicians.”
41
Page, “Around the Performance,” 348. See also the contemporary comments about French and Italian
singers collected in McGee, The Sound of Medieval Song, 17–8.
42
Vecchi, “Musica e scuola,” 266–73; trans. Page, “Around the Performance,” 348.
88
But motets were performed in precisely those places where singers from different corners
of Europe would have mingled—in universities, at courts, and during occasions of state.
Would not some performances have had in them, then, a trace of those exaggerated differences? If not exactly emitting howls, groans, and feverish wails, it would nevertheless be
surprising if such diverse performers could be found “singing in very much the same kind
of way.”
Other scraps of evidence support the idea that the sound-world of motets may have
been a varied one. One unlikely source of insight comes from a description of dog-song in
Gace de la Buigne’s Roman de Deduis (c. 1359–77). In arguing that hunting with dogs is
more noble than hunting with falcons, the allegory Love of Dogs alludes to the pleasure of
hearing dogs sing—in fact, he describes them singing a motet:
Les uns vont chantans le motet,
Les autres font double hoquet.
Les plus grans chantent la teneur.
Les autres la contreteneur.
Ceulx qui ont la plus clere guile
Chantent les tresble sans demeure,
Et les plus petis le quadouble
En faisant la quinte sur double.43
[Some of [the dogs] go singing the motet; the others make a double hocket:
the largest [dogs] sing the tenor and the others the contratenor. Those that
have the clearest voice sing the triplum without delay and the smallest [sing]
the quadruplum, making a ifth on the duplum.]44
To be sure, this is hardly informative from a performance practice perspective. But the variety of look and sound cultivated in this passage is still compelling. The parody evokes a disparate group producing sounds that vary both in timbre and ambitus: the dogs singing the
43
La Buigne, Le Roman de Deduis, ll. 8081-8; Page has cited this passage in support of all-vocal performance of chansons: “Machaut’s ‘Pupil’ Deschamps,” 487.
44
Trans. Leach, Sung Birds, 181–2.
89
triplum have penetrating voices, the big dogs sing tenor, and the quadruplum is left to the
puppies. This variety is the more signiicant when we remember that—as Page has noted—
many motets are relatively narrow in range, often covering no more than a twelfth—and
this in turn can be the range of a single voice in a more virtuosic work such as a chasse.45
Thus Love of Dogs presents us with a more varied picture than we might expect (if we have
any expectations of canine motet performance).
This variety is not dissimilar from that cultivated in the image of performance
which opens the motet section of Machaut’s manuscript A (see Figure 2.1). Here a mix of
clerics and laypersons is gathered around a wine cask, drinking wine and singing a motet
from a scroll.46 Their diverse ages, different backgrounds, and presumed state of inebriation (have they drained the barrel?) all but guarantee that their voices will not sound similar.
This group is a far cry from the singing angels of van Eyck’s Ghent altarpiece, whose young
identical faces seem to imply the kind of sound we associate with the English aesthetic. This
diverse group of drinkers hints instead at a smorgasbord of timbres and volumes.
45
See Kügle, The Manuscript Ivrea, 153n134.
46
That the composition being performed is a motet is clear not only from the miniature’s position at the
head of the motet section, but also from the words “tenor” and “dame” that are visible on the scroll. This
image is usually interpreted as a group of singers (and drinkers)—see descriptions in Huot, From Song to
Book, 300–1, Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 187, Wimsatt, Chaucer and His French Contemporaries, plate 13,
and Leo, “Authorial Presence,” 44. Kügle has argued that the four men on the right are singing, while those
on the left (a layman, a cleric, and a servant) are drinking and listening; “Die Musik des 14. Jahrhunderts,”
361 (note that the image descriptions and images are reversed, so that the description labeled “bild links”
pertains to the motet image, which is on the right). Kügle’s analysis is convincing as pertains to the direction
of the scroll, but the nobleman at left does seem to be keeping tactus on the arm of the cleric to his left, and
the latter’s holding the scroll seems to imply his performative participation.
90
Figure 2.1: A group of men around a wine keg singing a motet47
Granted, this too is not the kind of evidence we would like. It is certainly possible
that rather than recording anything akin to a performance, the image is serving as an allegorical depiction of motets, with their mixture of the sacred and secular.48 And Love of
Dogs is at least as biased an observer as Jacobus de Montibus. But choices were made in both
cases—the choice to use a motet as the example to be sung; the choice to depict a diverse
group as singing it. Also noteworthy is the joyful, easy mood that characterizes both depictions. Nothing could be more natural, Love of Dogs wants us to believe, than this singing,
and “there isn’t a responsory or an alleluia, even if it were sung in the Kings’ chapel…that
would cause the same tremendous pleasure that one experiences in hearing such a hunt.”49
In this context we may also return to the above-mentioned passage from Froissart’s Joli
47
Machaut MS A, fol. 414v.
48
The same iconographic motif—singers around a wine keg—is also used to illustrate the singing of a
rondeau in Machaut MS E (fol. 16). Here the singers seem all to be laypersons, but they still vary in age and
class. See Kügle’s discussion of the differences between these two images in “Die Musik des 14. Jahrhunderts,” 361. Dominic Leo also discussed this image in “Singing Around a Wine Keg.”
49
Trans. Leach, Sung Birds, 181. Though the sound is natural, it is not rational, and Leach has argued that
this passage is part of a broader discourse about vox confusa and vox discreta—the dogs are cantores but not
musici; ibid., 212–9.
91
Buisson de Jonece, in which a lover joyously sings a motet while walking to meet the god of
love. As he sings, the lover is ideally situated in mood and position:
En cheminant sus ce voyage
En pais en joie et en reveil
En chantant un motet nouviel
Quon mavoit envoiiet de rains
Premiers nestoie ne darrains
Mais en mi lieu par grant solas
Pares duns noes solers a las
Ensi quamant vont a la velle
On me boute et lors je mesvelle.
[As I traveled along on this excursion, in peace, joy, and gaiety, singing a new
motet that had been sent to me from Reims, I was neither in the front nor in
the back, but very comfortably in the middle, dressed in new lace-up shoes,
the way lovers go for a late night out.]50
We can almost hear this performance. As the lover looses his song, it is with joyful ease, allowing the sound of his voice to relect his general euphoria.51
I think it is fair to say that some of the joy and spontaneity that seems to have been
an aspect of motet performance is lost when a uniied sound is the goal. Indeed, Page has
written that singing motets should be dificult, even uncomfortable for the singer:
Something is often to be gained by pitching these motets in a way that lifts
the singers on the upper parts away from the comfortable range where they
can coast or croon. When the music is lifted above this range the relatively
higher pitch brings many things under closer control because the vocal cords
are vibrating more quickly and because the singers, recognizing that danger
is only about a tone away, begin to work hard in a fashion that is always beneicial to this music.52
Elsewhere, the same author has written that in the Middle Ages “to succeed [at composition] was to create something that singers could control and dominate,” but here the music
50
Ed. and trans. Figg and Palmer, Jean Froissart: An Anthology, 462–3.
51
The lover’s ease and happiness here are all the more important because in the next line he is woken up
from his happy dream—see the discussion in Chapter One.
52
Page, “The Performance of Ars Antiqua Motets,” 158.
92
is instead allowed to control the singers, coaxing a uniied sound from them with the threat
of nearby danger.53
The reason that all of this is pertinent to an argument about intelligibility is that
timbre is one of several variables that allows the human ear to focus on one sound-source
in the presence of others. A number of other aspects of performances—including acoustics,
an audience member’s ability to see the performer, and the role of recording technology—
also bear on this issue. In what follows I will not suggest that performance conditions which
maximize intelligibility are either authentic or desirable. I will only review the evidence
provided by psychology on the acoustic and cognitive phenomena that allow a person to
navigate a busy soundscape —whether it be a cocktail party or a “gathering of discerning
people.”
THE COCKTAIL PARTY PHENOMENON
Given the high likelihood that a motet’s intended audience would hear multiple
performances of the same work, the question of whether it is possible to hear both texts of
a polytextual motet at the same time wanes in importance next to a more basic inquiry: Is
it possible to hear any text in a polytextual setting, or does the act of combining more than
one text in one sonic space necessarily render any and all of those texts unintelligible?54
53
Cf. Jerome of Moravia’s advice that “a song never be begun very high, especially by those possessing head
voices…but they should always begin moderately, that is ‘sing’; that is so that the song may not rule the voice,
but the voice rule the song; beautiful notes cannot be produced otherwise,” trans. Rosenfeld in McGee, The
Sound of Medieval Song, 28.
54
Given the relatively small size of the repertory it seems likely that works would have been performed
multiple times. Occasional works would perhaps have been an exception to this, but they too seem to have
been reused, as in the case of Servant regem/O Philippe and Servant regem/Ludovice. Robertson has also argued
that Machaut’s Bone pastor/Bone pastor, though seemingly an occasional piece, was in fact intended to be “an
‘archbishop motet’ in the widest possible sense,” in which “Guillerme” could be replaced with another name;
Guillaume de Machaut and Reims, 60.
93
Rephrasing the question clariies the link between the psychological “cocktail party phenomenon” and the ars nova motet. Whether in a busy room where the person behind you may
be speaking louder than your collocutor, or in a motet where the triplum is singing higher
and faster than the motetus which you are perhaps desirous of hearing, the cognitive task
is the same: to isolate a sound-source of interest in the presence of other, sometimes more
prominent ones. But the assumptions have been very different in the two ields: in psychology, it is readily agreed that the cocktail party phenomenon is “one of our most important
faculties”—“such a common experience that we may take it for granted.”55 And indeed,
walking into a busy restaurant and shifting attention from one conversation to another
will quickly remind us of our considerable powers of segregating sounds.56 In musicology,
the burden of proof has been on the other side—motet texts are inaudible until proven audible, simply because they are joined by other motet texts. Given this discrepancy, it will be
worth summarizing the results of some studies that have investigated how humans are able
to solve this cocktail party “problem” that continues to bafle machines and musicologists.
A listener’s ability to understand speech in a complex environment depends on the
segregation of simultaneously occurring sounds into streams originating from different
sources—a process known as Auditory Scene Analysis.57 The ability to do this successfully rests on a number of connected factors, some of which are the result of the sound
sources while others pertain to the environment in which listening is taking place. Among
the former, differences in the fundamental frequencies and spectral proiles of sounds—or
55
Cherry, On Human Communicaton, 278.
56
Though the experiment has the side-effect of making one feel rather nosy.
57
Bregman, Auditory Scene Analysis, 3–6.
94
we might say differences in timbre—are vital to the segregation of concurrent sounds:58
“Sounds of similar timbres will group together, so that the successive sounds of the oboe
will segregate from the harp, even when they are playing in the same register.”59 And when
sounds are separated by range as well as timbre, lower and higher sounds will naturally
segregate themselves into groups, or perceptual streams. Claude Alain has shown that “an
observer’s ability to identify two different vowels presented simultaneously improved by
increasing the fundamental frequency separation between the vowels”—speciically that simultaneous sounds at least 4 semitones apart in pitch can be more easily parsed than those
closer that 4 semitones.60
These timbral and registral aspects of sound-sources are so-called monaural cues—
that is, they can be perceived and separated with one ear. But even more crucial to solving
the cocktail party problem is our faculty of localizing sound, which depends on binaural
hearing. The distance between the ears allows humans to accurately identify the location of
a sound-source along a horizontal axis, since the sound waves enter the two ears at different
times. Using a more subtle set of cues in a process known as “head-related transfer function,” we are also able to localize sounds on the other axes.61 It has long been recognized
that “spatial hearing plays a major role in the auditory system’s ability to separate sound
sources in a multiple-source acoustic environment” and thus in our ability to solve the
58
Ibid., 92–103. Though “timbre” is an inexact term (Bregman calls it “an ill-deined wastebasket category,” that “can include fundamental frequency, spectral component frequency, the balance of the spectrum,
and possibly individual peaks in the spectrum,” ibid., 92), it is also an intuitive one.
59
Ibid., 19-20, 85–6.
60
Alain et al., “Hearing Two Things at Once.”
61
See summary in Haykin & Chen, “The Cocktail Party Problem,” 1878–9.
95
cocktail party problem.62 In parallel to the observations that increased pitch differences
can aid in sound segregation, a number of studies have found that an increase in distance
between the sources of simultaneous sounds aids in their auditory differentiation.63
Some circumstantial factors also seem to play a role. Room acoustics can have an
adverse effect on the cocktail party phenomenon if excessive reverberation interferes with
auditory scene analysis, though the auditory system is powerful enough to suppress even
moderate amounts of echo and focus instead on the source sound.64 On the other hand,
visual cues such as facial expression and especially the movement of the lips in speech can
aid with comprehension. Even under ideal listening conditions, lip-reading can help us by
resolving certain ambiguities of speech—for instance by giving visual cues to aid in the
rather small phonetic difference between “b” and a “v.” In noisy situations such cues become
much more important, and an ability to see the speaker is thus a signiicant asset in understanding what s/he is saying.65
Together these monaural and binaural processes enable us to carry out auditory
scene analysis, and this subconscious process is the irst step to solving the Cocktail Party
Problem. Once sound sources are localized, attention comes into play. Attention is, in
William James’s classic deinition, “the taking possession of the mind, in clear and vivid
form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought.
Focalization, concentration of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from
62
Ibid.
63
Most recently in Drennan et al., “Perceptual segregation of competing speech sounds.”
64
Haykin & Chen, “The Cocktail Party Problem,” 1885.
65
Summerield, “Lipreading and Audio-Visual Speech Perception.” See also Wei et al., “Lip-Reading Aids
Word Recognition.”
96
some things in order to deal effectively with others.”66
In the context of the cocktail party problem, several kinds of attention have been
studied. One is selective attention, in which the listener chooses to focus on some source
and ignore others. In this case the comprehension level of the primary stream is high, but
the secondary stream is hardly attended to. In an early study in which a different text was
played into each ear (dichotic listening) and listeners were asked to speak the right-ear text
back while they listened (a process referred to as shadowing), Colin Cherry found that the
“rejected” text got very little attention—indeed, listeners did not notice when that left-ear
text switched to German.67 But more recent studies have shown that while shadowing or
listening actively to one text a listener may still hear aspects of the other, and may be able
to recall some words from the “rejected” stream.68 The listener may also be subconsciously
affected by text which they consciously choose not to listen to.69
Another paradigm is divided attention, in which the listener focuses on more than
one sound source, or switches between channels (switched attention). These different types
of focus can be produced by telling the listener what to pay attention to, though certain
sonic events in a rejected stream, such as hearing one’s own name, can produce shifts of
attention even during selective attention. Furthermore, factors that interfere with auditory
scene analysis can make some kinds of attention more dificult to sustain. For example, as
Wood and Cowan have noted, “selective attention depends heavily on physical (e.g. voice)
66
James, The Principles of Psychology (1890), 403–4.
67
Cherry, “Some Experiments on the Recognition of Speech,” 978.
68
Wood & Cowan, “The Cocktail Party Phenomenon Revisited.”
69
This is demonstrated in a number of studies using priming, for example DuPoux et al., “Lexical Access
Without Attention?”
97
differences between channels” and thus dichotic studies which use similar monotone voices
in both ears may not allow listeners to fully concentrate on one channel or to fully ignore
the other.70
If there are any similarities we can count on between ourselves and medieval listeners, they are in the makeup of our auditory systems and the cognitive mechanisms which
support the listening process.71 For the cocktail party problem precedes cocktails—it is in
fact a basic necessity for human society. But these similar biological systems and processes
receive radically different musical stimuli today than they did 600 years ago. Listening to
medieval music in the twentieth and twenty-irst centuries often means listening to a recording. The list of factors allowing the human listener to solve the cocktail problem gains
in relevance to my broader argument when we consider how much relevant information is
lost when we listen to a recording.
Most importantly, the three-dimensional localization of sound sources usually carried out by head-related transfer function is rendered ineffective by the lattening of the
auditory scene to only two channels, and even the information potentially contained in
these is often erased due to editing and mixing. Auditory scene analysis is further impeded
by often excessive reverb—either inherent in the recording space (often a large church) or
added to evoke a “medieval sound.” Such surroundings and post-production choices muddy
the waters, making it even more dificult to pick out the texts of individual voices. The recent Hilliard Emsemble recording of Machaut’s motets is a good example.72 A large amount
70
Wood & Cowan, “The Cocktail Party Phenomenon Revisited,” 255.
71
The claim of a common biological makeup is, I think, less subject to accusations of universalism than invocation of a “trans-historical humanness” or trans-historical aesthetics; see Page, Discarding Images, 190,
and Wegman’s response in “Reviewing Images,” 270.
72
Hilliard Emsemble, Motets: Guillaume de Machaut.
98
of reverb cloaks each motet with a blanket of overtones and echoes. As one reviewer wrote,
“the engineers beautifully capture the glow of the church acoustic.”73 Indeed they do, but
these are secular works—mostly love songs—which as far as we know would not have been
sung in a church, but in a chamber or small hall.74
The problem of reverb can be compounded with those of timbre discussed above to
create recordings in which is it impossible to tell voices apart by any cues other than range.
And range can be a ickle indicator. Consider the Hilliard’s recording of Machaut’s Dame/
Fins cuers doulz (M11). Listening to their rendition of mm. 11–28 (Track 9, 0:20–:54) the
impression is of a tenor and two texted voices almost identical in timbre and separated by
anywhere from a 3rd to a 6th. The upper voice seems to sing a number of neighbor-note
gestures in semibreves (A-G-A, E-D-E, G-F-G, etc). But a look at the score reveals that a
series of voice-crossings occur in this passage, so that the voices are in fact trading off this
motif (See Example 2.1). Eventually it is possible to teach oneself the difference between
these two very similar voices, and to begin to hear the crossings of their lines. But this is
a task requiring focused work and a score. How can we begin to make decisions about our
attention or to listen for a text’s meaning when the irst step—auditory scene analysis—is
made so dificult? And of course, the visual aspects of performance, which would be a great
aid in a situation where competing sound-sources are vying for attention, are taken away
in any recording. In this case trying to understand the text of a given voice is like trying to
hear your neighbor at a party held in a vaulted hall where the guests wear opaque masks over
their faces, while their voices are re-mixed and projected through two speakers at the front
73
Dan Davis, editorial review for Amazon.com, accessed 5 May 2010.
74
The recording includes eighteen motets of which four can be classiied as ceremonial, and two more as,
perhaps, paraliturgical. These latter works might have been sung in a larger space, but this is a matter of
conjecture.
99
of the room with extra reverb added by the capricious hosts.
Of course, not all recordings are the same. The 2002 album of Machaut’s motets
by the French group Ensemble Musica Nova uses two discernibly different voices to render
the same work.75 The triplum is sung by a bright tenor with forward resonance, while the
motetus is breather and has a slight buzzing quality; these distinct timbres make the voicecrossings in mm. 11–28 much more discernible (disc 2, track 2, 0:17–:39). A relatively
dry acoustic adds to the intelligibility of these voices, which are pleasantly resonant on their
own. The same can be said of several Machaut motets recorded by the American ensemble
Liber unUsualis.76 More reverberant than Ensemble Musica Nova, the performance here
is nevertheless closely miked, so that it is easier to separate the two upper voices. Quant/
Amour (M1) is sung by a triplum with a slight, fast vibrato and focused tone, and a motetus
with a slightly breathier, more luminous sound and a slower, less prominent vibrato. These
well-matched but distinct timbres allows us to keep track of each individual voice—and its
text—even through a hocket section in which the vocal ranges are suddenly equal (Track
5, :27–36).
75
Ensemble Musica Nova, Guillaume de Machaut, Intégrale des motets.
76
Liber unUsualis, Unrequited.
100
Example 2.1: Machaut’s, Dame/Fins cuers doulz (M11), mm. 7–3077
But even—or rather, especially—in these latter cases, how much more is gained by
listening to a live performance, when the ability to distinguish sound-sources from each
77
Reproduced from PMFC 2:144–5.
101
other is rendered all but automatic by their location in three-dimensional space, and when
the faculty of sight can aid our comprehension of texture and text, showing us who is singing what, when. Of course we do not always have access to a live performance (though many
scholars have the means to make a live performance happen when they need one). But it is
vital to recognize the differences between recorded and live performances, especially as they
pertain to questions of intelligibility and text-music relations more generally. Too often,
“performance” is taken as synonymous with “recordings”—indeed, Page demonstrates the
easy slippage between the two in speaking of the inluences for Discarding Images:
The primary inspiration for these chapters has been provided by performance.
The chance to hear medieval music in recorded performances is one of the
most obvious ways in which the musicological opportunities available to the
modern scholar exceed those of previous generations. Recordings are sometimes superseded by advances in knowledge...78
Similarly, when Daniel Leech-Wilkinson makes an argument for “analysis of performance”
and “studying music as sound” in his second analysis of Rose, lis, he in fact focuses on three
recordings, two of them by Gothic Voices.79 Signiicantly, the kinds of observations he makes
focus on—and, I would suggest, stem from— the dificulty of isolating voices:
When we listen to the irst phrase of Rose, lis we generally concentrate our
listening on the tune and the harmony that goes with it. In a three-part
performance that is very easy to do; with all four parts it is a little trickier,
because the tune is not always on top. The four-voice version is useful…
for this reason, that it divides our attention, taking a bit of it away from
the tune…and tempting us to hear tune and top voice, at least, as separate
but more nearly equal. The extent to which that happens depends…on our
willingness to try it rather than just to listen to the highest pitch all the
time, and on the performance. In the four-part performance issued on disc by
Gothic Voices in 1983…it is not easy to pick out the cantus...80
Indeed it is not, and it is no surprise that the ensuing analysis focuses on the interac78
Page, Discarding Images, p. xx; emphasis mine.
79
Leech-Wilkinson, “Rose, lis revisited,” 253.
80
Ibid., 254; emphasis mine.
102
tion of musical sonorities and vowels—vowels are audible in this recording. Now, LeechWilkinson is careful not to make any claims about the historicity of his approach—quite
the opposite, in fact—and the problem here is not one of authenticity. But by conlating
a recording with “performance,” with “the sound” of a piece, we risk distorting priorities,
whether they be our own or Machaut’s. For instance, it is dificult to take at face value the
assertion that “one is much more aware of the sound of the text when one sings it oneself
than when one listens to it being sung” while listening to the rendition of Dame/Fins cuers
doulz by Ensemble Musica Nova.81
None of this is to argue that “modern performance is a sensuous and provocative
inducement to study medieval music and one that must be left behind as that study becomes
progressively more engaged and serious.”82 But this music in its recorded form is perhaps
that sensuous and provocative inducement which, though there is no reason to leave it behind, must at least be viewed critically. I submit that in a live performance where each singer
is allowed to sing with his or her own voice, and where each understands the text enough to
be able to project some of that understanding in their facial expressions and declamation,
an audience member familiar with the language in question should have no problem picking one voice out and focusing on it. If that same audience member had the opportunity to
hear this piece again, then s/he would perhaps focus on a different voice. Certainly there are
times when one voice or another begs for attention by a bold gesture of some kind—here
a listener has the option of heeding the call of that gesture, or of staying their attention in
one place. In such a performance, a motet can be explored like a painting; and the listener
81
Ibid., 258. Conversely, in some recordings it is not clear that the performers themselves are any more
aware of the text than their listeners.
82
Page, “A Reply to Margaret Bent,” 132.
103
has control over their gaze. To suggest that it would be impossible to pick out various elements of that painting seems rash—especially if we perceive it most frequently through
lower-resolution, low-contrast reproductions.
How can we explore such experiences practically? A number of avenues seem open.
I have experimented with translating motets into English for English-speaking audiences,
in order to remove the linguistic barriers set up by middle French and Latin. The result
was a greater intelligibility of the text, though needless to say the translation was inelegant
compared to Machaut’s original. And the mode or performance—a recording in which
the same singer sang both voices to a MIDI tenor—is open to every objection I have outlined above.83 One can imagine multi-channel recordings that take advantage of surroundsound technology to place the listener at the center of a performance in which auditory
scene analysis is not futile, and shifts of attention can be voluntary. One can even imagine
a visual element added to this. Perhaps a trio of laptops, each with the video of one singer
(and subtitles?) could execute these complex pieces. Or we can go analog: we can perform
these works more, in small venues, with a variety of vocal types, perhaps even repeating the
same work several times in a row, so as to give the audience a chance to explore. We can reinstitute those gatherings of discerning people.
*
*
*
The goal of this chapter has not been to argue that motet texts, whether heard individually or in tandem, would have been necessarily or immediately intelligible to medieval
listeners. Nor do I hope to have convinced anyone that hearing or understanding these
texts in a live performance would be automatic, even if one knew the language. But focused,
83
I played this recording to accompany my “Lies, Damned Lies, and Hockets.”
104
mindful attention on the part of the listener will always pay off in the case of ars nova motets, and in the case of most other types of music. The limited medieval evidence seems
indeed to place a premium on clarity—that much we can glean from Jacobus’s comments.
Other contemporary echoes of performance seem to suggests that motets might well have
been performed by different-sounding voices. And whatever kind of evidence this is, there
is none to the contrary—that there was any ideal of poetic, cultural, or sonic homogeneity
associated with the ars nova motet. That is not to say that medieval performances would
have been ideal in terms of intelligibility. We cannot know that. But we can recognize that
the idea that texts in a polytextual setting are unintelligible de facto is a modern prejudice,
born in part of 1980s performance aesthetics and supported in large part by the digital
mediation to which much of our listening is subject.
105
CHAPTER THREE
What is a TALEA? Upper-voice Periodicity in ARS NOVA Motets
M
ANY ASPECTS OF THE PRACTICE KNOWN AS “ISORHYTHM”
have recently come under
review. Margaret Bent has questioned the appropriateness of the term, especially
of “iso-” (“the same”) in describing processes that are more often transformational than
simply repetitive.1 The technique’s role as generic determinant has also been subject to revision, as focus has shifted from what Ernest Sanders once characterized as “the isorhythmic
Ars nova motet,” (“a reduction of the bewildering variety of motets lourishing at the turn of
the [fourteenth] century to one deinitive type”) to, in Bent’s words, “the variety rather than
the sameness of strategies of motet composition in the 14th and 15th centuries [which
can] even less be accommodated within a single model than can sonata forms.”2 And Anna
Maria Busse Berger has questioned the purpose of isorhythmic practice, arguing that structural regularity often seen as an end in itself is in fact the result of mnemonic practices
which helped composers to write motets and performers to memorize them.3
Within this revitalized discourse, one basic aspect of the narrative remains unquestioned, even though exceptions to the apparent rule are known: the tenor continues to be
viewed as the primary shaping force in the construction of “isorhythmic” works. The idea
that the tenor’s layout dictates those of the other voices and that a motet’s primary structuring device is that of the tenor affects the ways in which 14th-century motets are edited and
1
Bent, “What is Isorhythm?” and “Isorhythm.” See also Sanders, “Isorhythm,” 351, and Kügle, “Isorhythmie,” 1219–20.
2
Sanders, “The Medieval Motet,” 556, emphasis mine; Bent, “What is Isorhythm?,” 135. See also comments in Everist, “The Horse, the Clerk,” 138–9, and Bent’s account of the emergence of “the isorhythmic
motet” as generic label in “What is Isorhythm?,” 121–8.
3
Busse Berger, Medieval Music, 212–52.
106
interpreted. In fact, a number of motets have upper-voice structures different from those
of the tenor. These upper-voice units, which have sometimes been referred to as “Großtalea” or “super-talea,” have been observed in the analyses of individual pieces, and in at least
one case—Margaret Bent’s pioneering analysis of Vitry’s Tribum/Quoniam—the presence
of such upper-voice structures has been used to question the tenor’s supremacy.4 The effects of supertaleae are also incorporated by Bent and others into a number of analyses of
individual pieces, especially, as we shall see, of Machaut’s motets Helas/Corde mesto (M12)
and Amours/Faus Semblant (M15). More general remarks about different or multiple taleae reside in Heinrich Besseler’s footnotes, Friedrich Ludwig’s editorial notes, and Ursula
Günther’s “asides,” which anticipate many of the observations below.5 And Karl Kügle has
discussed some of the formal irregularities to which I will draw attention from a complementary analytical stance.6
4
Bent argues that noticing the tenor’s structure alone in Tribum/Quoniam “will give only subsidiary attention to the amazing interlocked tripartite structure, with its own internal identities, that is counterpointed
against the two identical tenor color statements,” “Polyphony of Texts and Music,” 92. Bent’s argument has
been very inluential in the writing of this chapter. At the same time, I wish to question the notion that
the upper-voice structures in Tribum/Quoniam and other motets discussed below are “counter-isorhythmic”
(ibid.); as I will argue below, they are isorhythmic, but with units or repetition which are dictated by the upper
voices rather than the tenor. I hope that the other motets discussed here will serve to place the upper-voice
periods of Tribum/Quoniam in context.
5
In the case of In virtute/Decens, Besseler points out that the upper voices in the motet’s irst section are
organized into taleae twice as long as those of the tenor (“Studien zur Musik des Mittelalters II,” 222n9)
and other upper-voice conigurations that do not match those of the tenor are included in the footnotes
to the table on his pp. 222–4; these will be referenced individually below. Interestingly, Besseler notes the
presence of hockets in his main table as though they were a property of tenor rather than of upper-voice
construction. Günther also mentions in passing many of the motets discussed in this chapter: “As to some
extent with Vitry, in some [of Machaut’s] motets (nos. 1, 8, 10, 12 and 15) it takes two or three Tenor periods to make up one period of the upper voices. In the other 15 works the tenor divisions occur at the same
place as the upper voice ones…it is normal in [Ivrea] too for the upper voice periods to coincide with those
of the lower voices. The appearance of two short Tenor taleae against one upper voice period occurs only in
motets 9, 13, 22 and 71. The irst part of no. 15 is exceptional insofar as here the reverse process occurs,
so that two upper voice periods are the equivalent of one Tenor talea,” “The 14th-Century Motet,” 30, 37.
6
Although he does not invoke the possibility that upper-voice taleae might in fact be of different lengths,
Kügle has drawn attention to the results of supertaleic organization. For example, he notes that in the irst
107
But no discussion exists of supertaleae as a phenomenon. This is not surprising,
since it sits between general and speciic procedures. Where analysis is focused around a
single motet (usually in order to demonstrate its depth and uniqueness) the presence of
similar procedures in other works might be inconvenient or irrelevant. And in broader
surveys, these motets stand as exceptions, and are thus not worth dwelling on in great detail.
But a collection of exceptions can change the rules. I have brought together the
analyses that follow because I believe that they illustrate a single point: in a number of
14th-century motets upper-voice structure is to some extent independent of tenor talea
structure. The idea that some motets may have forms into which the tenor is made to it,
rather than forms built by that tenor, opens the space to richer and more meaningful analysis. But before turning to these “irregular” works it will be useful to consider the consequences of allowing the tenor unquestioned structural (and semantic) primacy.
THE TENOR AS A FOUNDATION?
It is by no means unreasonable to call the tenor a fundamental element in many ars
nova motets, and at irst glance the theoretical evidence seems strongly to support such a
view. Color and talea, the only terms used in the middle ages with reference to the procedure
later called isorhythm, are usually deined as the repetition, in the tenor, of melody and
rhythm respectively. Johannes de Grocheio, writing around 1300, famously compared the
tenor of a motet to a building’s foundation and to the body’s skeletal frame:
half of Colla/Bona, “phrase joints occur at the beginning…of every second talea statement”; The Manuscript
Ivrea, 98.
108
The tenor is that part upon which all the others are founded, in the same way
as the parts of a house or building are, upon its foundation. And the tenor
regulates them and gives them quantity, just as the bones do to the other
parts [of the body].7
This metaphorical description is supported by Egidius de Murino, whose De modo
componendi tenores motettorum is the only detailed account of compositional process for
ars nova motet tenors. He indicates that a composer should irst rhythmicize a tenor, then
a contratenor (if there is to be one) and inally the upper voices.8 Thus there is medieval
precedent for seeing the tenor as central to motet composition; Bent’s suggestion that most
of these works would better be called “tenor” motets than “isorhythmic” motets rings true.9
But the theoretical evidence is also contingent. For example, Murino warns that
his instructions are “written for the teaching of children” and may therefore be too simplistic for the subtilis cantor.10 And Ugolino of Orvieto provides evidence that, by the early
ifteenth century, the terms color and talea could refer to the upper voices as well—an expanded usage that Daniel Leech-Wilkinson reasonably suggests must date back to the fourteenth century.11 Most importantly, Grocheio, an oft-cited witness to the tenor’s primacy,
was writing before the developments of the Ars nova. A comparison of his statement with
Murino’s is instructive. Writing in the middle of the fourteenth century, Murino advises
his reader to “take the Tenor from some antiphon or responsory or another chant from the
7
“Tenor autem est illa pars, supra quam omnes aliae fundantur, quemadmodum partes domus vel aediicii
super suum fundamentum. Et eas regulat et eis dat quantitatem, quemadmodum ossa partibus aliis,” ed.
Rholoff, Die Quellenhandschriften, 146–7.
8
Ed. Coussemaker, Scriptores 3:124–8, partial edition and translation in Leech-Wilkinson, “Compositional Techniques,”18–23.
9
“What is Isorhythm?,” 138. Clark has also referred to the tenor as “the primary voice of the motet”—quite
naturally, given the focus of her study; “Concordare cum materia,” 2.
10
Ed. and trans. Leech-Wilkinson, Compositional Techniques, 19, 22.
11
Ibid., 15.
109
antiphonal, and the words should concord with the materia of which you wish to make the
motet.”12 Scholars sometimes read this as a statement equivalent to Grocheio’s foundational metaphor, interpreting it as evidence that “composers worked from the bottom up; that is,
they took a segment of chant and used it as a scaffold for the added upper voices.”13 But in
fact, it is clear from Murino’s description that something—materia—precedes the choice of
tenor. What is this materia? The word is unhelpfully elusive: it can mean substance, topic,
subject matter, even building material. Leech-Wilkinson reasonably interpreted it as “the
message of the upper-voice texts,” but several other commentators have linked materia with
the very tenor whose choice depends on it. Alice Clark’s discussion of Murino’s statement
exempliies the problems of interpretation presented by the text:
The tenor is thus the melodic, harmonic and rhythmic point of origin for
the motet, though it is in fact preceded by the motet’s materia, on whose basis it is chosen. In his sketchy account, it is easy to overlook this statement
“concordare cum materia,” and perhaps even Egidius is more interested in
talea and color formation than in tenor selection, but he makes it clear that
such selection is not a random act. Egidius does not, however, specify just
how the tenor is to relate to the matter of its motet. That relationship is
generally thought to center around the textual incipit given to the tenor in
the manuscript: that is, the tag is appropriate for a tenor on that subject.14
On the one hand, materia clearly precedes the tenor; on the other, materia is so vague and
unhelpful a term that it is much easier to think of the tenor, or perhaps its text in the manuscript, as the motet’s point of origin.
12
“Primo accipe tenorem alicuius antiphone vel responsorii vel alterius cantus de antiphonario et debent
verba concordare cum materia de qua vis facere motetum,” Ibid., 18, 21.
13
Robertson, “Remembering the Annunciation,” 287.
14
Clark, “Concordare cum materia,” 6. Compare also Anne Walters Robertson’s interpretations of this passage, which read it variously as indicating bottom-up composition and a more lexible approach: “Composers worked from the bottom up; that is, they took a segment of chant and used it as a scaffold for the added
upper voices. This practice was summed up by music theorist Egidius de Murino,” “Remembering the Annunciation,” 287; “for Egidius a motet grows from top down and from bottom up simultaneously,” Guillaume
de Machaut and Reims, 146.
110
If some modern accounts of isorhythmic composition unquestioningly adopt Grocheio’s foundation metaphor rather than dwelling on the nature of Murino’s “materia,” it
is also perhaps because of an implicit symmetry between the progress of music history and
a bottom-up order of composition. Plainchant is the oldest material, and thus composers
must have begun with it. The repetition of rhythm independently of melody occurred irst
in the tenors of thirteenth century motets and only later in their upper voices; thus it follows that isorhythm must have irst been applied to the tenor voice of a motet, and only
later to the upper voices. In music history and in a single composition (which here acts as
a microcosm) “isorhythm”—so the logic perhaps goes—begins in the tenor and moves upwards, “crystallizing” in the upper voices with geological propriety, “spreading” to them (like
a disease), and once there causing “acts of violence.”15 The most bruised specimens (and
therefore, the logic sometimes goes, the latest) are called “Panisorhythmic” motets—works
in which every rhythmic value in every voice is subject to periodic articulation.16
From this progression—apparently compositional as well as historical—stems the
reason most often given for the presence of upper-voice isorhythm: to make the tenor’s repetitions more audible. In the textbook explanation, “upper voices may also be organized isorhythmically, in whole or part, to emphasize the recurring rhythmic patterns in the tenor.”17
15
“It was felt necessary to introduce…strophically recurring isorhythmic passages into the upper voices.
Such isorhythmic parallelisms at irst crystallized mainly around phrase endings,” Sanders, “Isorhythm,”
352. “Isorhythms started in the tenor line but spread complexly to other parts,” Delahoyde, “Medieval Music: Ars nova” <http://www.wsu.edu/~delahoyd/medieval/ars.nova.html>. “The new principle [on the contrary] even extends the application of isorhythm to the upper voices (since the tenor is constructed in this
manner, and the complexity of its rhythm, which repeats several times, requires in compensation a rhythmically uniied layout of the upper voices as well). This necessarily leads to acts of violence”; Ludwig, “Studien
über die Geschichte,” 224, cited and trans. Bent, “What is Isorhythm?,” 122.
16
The term “pan-isorhythm” was coined by Apel; see “Remarks About the Isorhythmic Motet,” 139.
Günther used the extent of upper-voice isorhythm to date motets—a practice that has been criticized by
Bent; see Günther, “The 14th-Century Motet,” and Bent, “What is Isorhythm?,” 127–8.
17
Grout, Burkholder & Palisca, A History of Western Music, 121. The sentiment behind this textbook
111
The highlighting of structure, we are to understand, is an end in itself.18
The result is something of a contradiction. On the one hand, upper-voice rhythmic repetition has interested scholars, who have used it for dating and for articulating,
exalting, and ultimately condemning a compositional ethos “whose smallest details were
foreordained, and to which any sort of lyric sentiment was as foreign as to the numbers
that determined the form and dimension of the work.”19 On the other hand, the purpose
of all this tightly controlled compositional material is simply to highlight the repetition of
rhythmic patterns in the tenor—repetition which in and of itself was by no means new in
the fourteenth century. Despite this contradiction the unspoken assumption that ars nova
motets have no structure independent of that of their tenor persists, and it has important
implications.
For not only upper-voice rhythmic repetition, but also the structure of upper-voice
texts are said to amplify the tenor’s rhythmic cycles. In his edition of the Ivrea and Chantilly motets, Frank Harrison included a table entitled “Relation Between Sections of Poems
and Taleae” in which he assigned a letter grade, from a+ to d, to each voice of each motet
based on “the degree of coordination between poetic and musical design.”20 Although he
deinition is well represented in scholarship of the past century. To take just two examples, Ludwig wrote of
upper voices whose purpose is “die Isorhythmie der einzelnen Tenorabschnitte ebenfalls ganz scharf ausprägen,” “Geschichte der Mensuralnotation,” 622. Later Sanders claimed that “rhythmic correspondences
between successive [upper-voice] phrases or phrase groups [were put in] evidently to lend emphasis to the
work’s structure,” “Isorhythm,” 351.
18
There is however 14th-century evidence that tenor taleae are not meant to be heard, as when Johannes
Boen warns composers not take too much time in the rhythmic organization of tenors because “[talea] is
presented more to the sight than to the hearing.” Cited and trans. Busse Berger, Medieval Music, 223.
19
de Van, ed., Guglielmi Dufay opera omnia, 2:i. Sanders comments on this discrepancy: “Isorhythm is often
deined with reference only to the tenor taleae (recurring rhythmic units) of 14th-century motets [although]
it is the growth of isorhythm in the upper voices of 14th-century motets that is characteristic and signiicant,” “Isorhythm,” 352.
20
Harrison, ed., Motets of French Provenance, xii.
112
notes that these “value-symbols…admittedly cannot be completely objective,” his very belief in the exercise speaks to the analytical primacy given to tenors.
The burden of semantic congruence also lies with the upper voices. Even though
Murino indicates that the tenor’s words are chosen to concord with some pre-existing thing,
the tenor is often given interpretive priority. In Anne Robertson’s words:
What is evident [from Murino’s treatise] is that a certain amount of knowledge was embedded a priori into a composition on a cantus irmus simply
by virtue of the choice of tenor. The tenor thus assumes a crucial role in the
interpretation of a motet: it holds the key to certain aspects of meaning in
the work; it may indicate the way in which the piece was used in the liturgy;
and it may help explain the relationship of the voices to one another.21
Jacques Boogaart reads the passage similarly, conlating the choice of materia with the choice
of tenor: “According to Egidius de Murino…the composer must irst deine the materia with
which the work deals by choosing a suitable fragment from plainchant; in other words the
idea at the base of the whole construction must be ixed irst of all.”22
Tenor-centric readings of Murino tend to produce religious interpretations of ars
nova motets, since they take the tenor’s liturgical origin as a starting point. Almost inevitably, the upper-voice texts are relegated to the status of accessory and called upon only to
support interpretations which have their basis in the tenor.23 Rarely is the reverse standard
applied: just as an inverse of Harrison’s table does not exist, so it is not asked whether a par21
“Remembering the Annunciation,” 287.
22
“Love’s Unstable Balance, Part I,” 5.
23
This is the approach taken by Robertson in her study of Machaut’s motets, where “the tenors do fundamentally shape and ultimately guide the interpretation of Motets 1–17”—pieces which are only “seemingly
secular,” Guillaume de Machaut, 82. As Everist has pointed out, “while Robertson’s account of the ordering
of Machaut’s tenors, where ‘the gist of the story of Motets 1–17 is irst revealed’ (p. 84), has a strong evidential base in the mystic theological texts that she adduces, this base is much less clear and more subject to
ad hoc interpretative strategies in her accounts of the ‘story’ as told in the upper voices of the 17 motets,”
“The Horse, the Clerk,” 139.
113
ticular tenor’s text is well-suited to the message of the upper voices. This is partly because
tenor texts are only a few words long, and thus easily bent in many directions, but more
because the tenor’s perceived structural supremacy seems to preclude the question—since
the tenor is a foundation, a starting-point, and a “melodic, harmonic and rhythmic point of
origin for the motet,” its propriety to the piece is beyond reproach.24
And yet, an entire building must be planned before the foundation can be laid.
Nor is it always possible to tell from looking at a foundation how many loors the eventual
structure may have, or what materials it might be constructed from, or for what purpose.25
The elusive materia that precedes the tenor may include any number of signiicant musical and semantic decisions which may directly impact the choice of tenor and aspects of
text-music relations. Nowhere is the tenor’s foundational role more open to question than
in the works I wish to discuss here: motets in which the upper-voice taleae are of different
lengths than those of the tenor. Some of these motets exhibit structural peculiarities that
are noted in existing analyses and editions. Others will be new to the discussion. But taken
as a group they have the potential to complicate and enrich our understanding of ars nova
compositional processes by casting that basic compositional building block—the talea—in
a new light.
24
Clark, “Concordare cum materia,” 6.
25
As Abigail Klima has kindly explained to me in a private correspondence, foundations are more conditioned by the climate, soil, and earthquake potential of a region than by the materials of the structure to be
placed upon them. Understanding the soil condition, an architect would be able to make a ballpark guess
about the height of a building based on the foundation.
114
THE EVIDENCE FOR INDEPENDENT UPPER-VOICE TALEAE
The irst half of the Ivrea motet In virtute/Decens exempliies the phenomenon of
independent upper-voice structures. Its tenor and contratenor are organized in 10-breve
taleae, within which both lower voices are fully isorhythmic. But the upper voices have no
rhythmic congruence across these sections, except for a longa in the motetus in breves 5–6
of each talea (see Example 3.1, where isorhythm is shaded). Accordingly, Harrison categorized the upper voices in this part of the motet as not isorhythmic.26
In fact there is more rhythmic repetition in the upper voices than irst meets the
eye. While the odd-numbered taleae are still largely not isorhythmic, the upper voices above
tenor taleae A2, A4, and A6 have a notable amount of congruence. Or, to put it another
way, the periods being articulated in the upper voices are twice as long as the tenor taleae
(see Example 3.2). The resulting 20-breve units (marked a1–3 in Example 3.2) look
more like normal upper-voice taleae, in which isorhythm is more often found in the second
half than in the center of the talea.27 These upper-voice units of periodic repetition are not
marked in this motet’s only edition, which labels only the tenor’s repetitions. But they are
important to our understanding of the work in which we can now, at the very least, observe
a greater degree of isorhythm.
26
See the evaluations of Motet #18 in Tables II and IV in Harrison, ed. Motets of French Provenance, 202,
204.
27
This is obvious in cases where there are hockets, but it applies more broadly, as Boogaart has observed:
“Normally the degree of isorhythm increases towards the end of the tenor talea,” “Love’s Unstable Balance,
Part 1,” 13–18.
115
Example 3.1: In virtute/Decens mm. 1–60, arranged according to tenor taleae;
isorhythm shaded
116
117
Example 3.2: In Virtute/Decens mm. 1–60, arranged according to upper-voice periods; rhythmic congruence shaded
Terminology and Diagrams
In analyses of individual motets it has been unnecessary to name the phenomenon
with which we concern ourselves here—it has been suficient to comment, as Günther does
in discussing Ida/Portio, that “1 color equals 4 taleae, 2 of which correspond to one musical
section of the upper voices.”28 Similarly Bent, in describing Tribum/Quoniam, which has
twelve repetitions of the tenor talea, speciies that there are “thrice two blocks of music.”29
Discussing the phenomenon in several works, Georg Reichert used the term “Großtalea” to
describe these upper-voice constructions; Jacques Boogaart has called them “Supertaleae.”30
Although Reichert’s term is more commonly used, supertalea avoids the problems of pluralization presented by the former (Großtaleen? Großtaleae?). Unless we read “super-” as
“above,” both terms restrict themselves etymologically to upper-voice taleae that are longer
than those of the tenor. They are thus less useful in describing a work like Flos/Celsa, in
which, as I shall argue, the upper voices have shorter periods—Kleintaleen?—than those
of the tenor. In still other cases, I will suggest that even where the musical periods articulated by repeated rhythms are the same length in the tenor and the upper voices, the units
of repetition are not aligned. Perhaps there is no need for an umbrella term to describe
this variety of approaches to upper-voice form, but terminology, even if slightly imprecise,
can help us to think symbolically about related processes. I will use the terms “supertalea,”
“upper-voice talea,” and “upper-voice period” interchangeably.
Most editions of Ars nova motets label the tenor talea and color using Roman num28
The Motets of the Manuscripts, p. lx.
29
Hence, six—because every upper-voice talea includes two tenor taleae. “Polyphony of Texts and Music,”
91–2.
30
Reichert, “Das Verhaltnis,” 202; Boogaart, “O series summe rata,” 107.
118
bers for the former and letters for the latter.31 Where color breaks also fall at talea breaks,
this results in alpha-numberic labelling, so that AII would be the second talea of the irst
color, BIII the third talea of the second color, and so forth. Sometimes editors switch from
Roman to Arabic numerals to describe taleae in diminution, but this practice is not consistent. Since adding upper-voice periodic construction as a third layer has the potential
to confuse matters, it begs for some modiication of this scheme. In the diagrams below,
I through-label tenor taleae without regard of which color they belong to, though the traditional distinction between Roman and Arabic numbering is preserved, so that II is the
second talea in the motet’s irst section, and 2 is the second diminution talea. Integer valor is
indicated by straight lines (
), diminution by wavy lines(
), and breaks between taleae
by vertical strokes( | ). Greek letters refer to successive upper-voice taleae, which are labeled
according to their isorhythmic region rather than the color to which they belong (a only in
a unipartite work, a and b in a motet with two sections, etc.) Measure numbers are included
to the right of each diagram to allow comparison with available editions. In the enclosed
editions I have also used Greek letters to label the beginnings of upper-voice taleae where
these differ from the tenor’s taleae by length or position.
Supertaleae as Grouped Tenor Taleae
Reichert’s 1956 study of structural relationships between text and music in Machaut’s motets is the irst to explore supertaleic construction. There he observed that uppervoice periods in Hélas/Corde mesto (M12) and Amours/Faus Semblant (M15) encompass
31
This is the practice followed by Schrade in PMFC1, Harrison in PMFC5, and Günther in The Motets
of the Manuscripts. Ludwig’s Musikalische Werke uses Roman numerals for both color and talea, the former
larger in size.
119
several taleae.32 In discussing Motet 12 he coined a term to describe the phenomenon:
“Every such ‘Großtalea’ covers three tenor periods and coincides exactly with the course of
the tenor [color] which sounds a total of three times.”33 Thus while the tenor talea repeats
nine times, the upper voices repeat their longer period three times (see Figure 3.1). Reichert
locates the raison d’être of this super-structure in the motetus text, which is split into three
strophes, “and each of these strophes is now made the basis of a Großperiod in constant
overall disposition.”34
upper voices: |supertalea a1
tenor: |talea I
|talea II
|supertalea a2
|talea IV
|supertalea a3
|talea VII
|talea III
|talea V
|talea VI
|talea VIII
|talea IX
|
|
mm. 1–54
|
|
mm. 55–108
|
mm. 109–162
|
Figure 3.1: Upper- and Lower-voice taleae in Hélas/Corde mesto (M12)
In Amours/Faus Semblant (M15) he also saw a connection between upper-voice
text structure and isorhythmic super-structure. This time, the triplum’s text is in control.
Though it is divided into four strophes which relect the tenor’s four taleae, there is complete metrical afinity only between alternate strophes. And the musical setting exhibits
complete rhythmic replication in the upper voices only between the material corresponding
with tenor taleae I and III, and II and IV (see Figure 3.2):
32
Reichert also observed “ein ähnlicher Ansatz zur Großtalea” in the motetus of Motet 21, but I have been
unable to replicate his analysis, “Das Verhaltnis,” 203.
33
“Jede solche ‘Großtalea’ umfaßt drei Tenorperioden und deckt sich genau mit einem Ablauf der Tenormelodie, die insgesamt dreimal erklingt (= 3 ‘Colores’),” ibid., 202.
34
“Und jede dieser Strophen ist nun in gleichbleibender Gesamtdisposition zur Grundlage der Großperiode gemacht,” ibid.
120
upper voices: |supertalea a1
tenor: |talea I
|supertalea a2
|talea III
|talea II
|talea IV
|
|
mm. 1–60
| mm. 61–120
|
Figure 3.2: Upper- and Lower-Voice Taleae in Amours/Faus Semblant (M15)
Here the supertaleae are particularly stark: tenor taleae II and IV—but not I and
III—contain hockets, and since hockets are always isorhythmic, the arrangement into two
halves is inevitable (though unmarked in Ludwig’s and Schrade’s editions). Ernest Sanders, Ramon Pelinski, Agostino Ziino and Karl Kügle have all mentioned the bi-partite arrangement of the upper voices in Amours/Faus Semblant, and Margaret Bent and Jacques
Boogaart have carried out more extensive analyses linking the work’s structure with ideas
expressed in its texts.35
As Bent has noted, the upper-voice taleae of Motet 15 are also highly repetitive
within the space deined by tenor taleae. In Figure 3.3 the solid gray shading indicates
rhythms shared by all four taleae, while the patterned shading is for rhythms shared only by
alternate taleae—the rhythms which deine the supertaleae.36 Hélas/Corde mesto (M12) thus
serves as a better example of the supertaleae I would like to examine, in that the upper-voice
35
Sanders, “The Medieval Motet,” 558n257: “The analytical layout of Nos. 12 and 15 in Ludwig’s edition does not take their phrase structure into account. This was observed by G. Reichert…who recognized
the form of these motets on the basis of the poetic structure, but failed to identify the subdivisions of the
musical form, with which the poetry is congruous”; Pelinski, “Zusammenklang und Aufbau,” 69: “Auch der
Tenor-Cantus irmus der Motette Nr. 15 wird in vier Taleae gegliedert, die paarweise (Taleae 1–2 und 3–4)
den Oberstimmenperioden entsprechen”; Ziino, “Isoritmia musicale,” 450: “il Triplum ed il Motetus invece,
a mio avviso, sono costituiti da due sole talee e non da quattro, come risulta sempre dall’edizione di Ludwig
(e da quella di Leo Schrade)”; see also Kügle, “Die Musik des 14. Jahrhunderts,” 370. Besseler makes no
mention of the upper-voice structure in the footnotes to his chart, but his characterization of the triplum
and motetus as “streng isorhythmisch” implies that he must have observed the supertaleae, “Studien zur
Musik des Mittelalters II,” 222n1, 223. More extensive analyses of the motet’s form are available in Bent,
“Deception, Exegesis, and Sounding Number,” 20–22 and Boogaart, “O series summe rata,” 144–6.
36
Figure 3.3 follow’s Bent’s analysis of isorhythm in this work, as summarized by shading in her Example
1, “Deception, Exegisis,” 16–9.
121
taleae are considerably more relective of their own scheme than they are of the tenor’s.
Figure 3.3: Isorhythm in Amours/Faus semblant (M15); Correspondences on the level
of tenor Talea shaded in solid gray; those on the level of Supertalea in checks and stripes.
In both Machaut motets discussed so far, and in In vitrute/Decens, the upper-voice
taleae encompass several tenor taleae (three in Hélas/Corde mesto; two in the others). This is
the most common relationship between upper- and lower-voice taleae in cases where they
do not coincide, and it is present in several more motets. Machaut’s Qui/Ha! Fortune (M8)
consists of four supertaleae, each of which encompasses three repetitions of the tenor’s talea
(see Figure 3.4).37 In Vitry’s Tribum/Quoniam, the twelve tenor taleae are superstructured by
three supertaleae in the upper voices (see Figure 3.5).38
37
Noted in Besseler, “Studien zur Musik des Mittelalters II,” 224n19. Hoppin also observed that “By
treating three of the rhythmic patterns as one talea, [the upper voices] make the form of the tenor become 3[colores]=4[taleae],” Medieval Music, 412–13. See also Boogaart, “O series summe rata,” 1:134, and
HaĆaburda, Fortuna in weltlichen mehrstimmigen Kompositionen, 110, 218. Schrade’s edition indicates supertaleae for this motet, labeling them as though they were taleae (The Works of Guillaume de Machaut, 134–6);
in this he follows Ludwig, who however indicates in his editorial notes that although the upper voices are
made up of four periods of 9 longae each, “im Tenor T. 1–3, 4–6 und 7–9 rhythmisch gleich sind,” Guillaume de Machaut: Musikalische Werke, 3:32. Sanders reads the passage in a similar way, pointing out that
this work and also motets 1 and 10 are “based on tenor taleae with internally repetitive rhythmic patterns,”
“The Medieval Motet,” 558.
38
Figure 3.5 excludes the six-breve introitus that precedes the tenor’s entrance. Compound upper-voice
122
upper voices:
tenor:
|supertalea a1 |
|supertalea a2 |
|supertalea a3 |
|supertalea a4 |
talea I
talea II
|talea III
talea IV
talea V
|talea VI
talea VII
talea VIII
|talea IX
talea X
talea XI
|talea XII
|
|
|
|
mm. 1–27
mm. 28–54
mm. 55–81
mm. 82–108
Figure 3.4: Upper- and lower-voice taleae in Machaut’s Qui/Ha! Fortune (M8)
|
|supertalea a2 |
|supertalea a3 |
upper voices: supertalea a1
tenor: talea I
|talea II
|talea III
|talea IV
talea V
talea VI
|talea VII
|talea VIII
talea IX
talea X
|talea XI
|talea XII
| mm. 7–30
| mm. 31–54
| mm. 55–78
Figure 3.5: Upper- and lower-voice taleae in Tribum/Quoniam
|
|supertalea a2
|supertalea a3
|supertalea b1|
|supertalea b2|
|supertalea b3|
upper voices: supertalea a1
tenor: talea I
|talea II
talea III
|talea IV
talea V
|talea VI
talea 1
talea 2
talea 3
talea 4
talea 5
talea 6
|
|
|
|
|
|
mm. 1–24
mm. 25–48
mm. 49–72
mm. 73–84
mm. 85–96
mm. 97–108
Figure 3.6: Upper- and lower-voice taleae in Hareu/Helas (M10)
123
Upper-voice supertaleae composed of multiple tenor taleae are also used in several
motets with diminution sections, where two different talea lengths are already in play. In
some cases, there are supertaleae in both parts of the motet, so that the proportions between
the integer valor and diminution sections are preserved. An example is Machaut’s Hareu/
Helas (M10). Here, the tenor talea is twelve breves long (BLLLB1)becoming twelve semibreves
in diminution (SBBBS2). In the upper-voices, the talea length is doubled in both sections of
the motet, resulting in three supertaleae of 24 breves followed by three more of twelve (see
Figure 3.6).39
Ida/Portio by Edigius de Pusiex follows the same plan in a more complex fashion.
This motet, preserved in the Ivrea codex but also in later sources such as Chantilly, is
quadripartite, with successive diminution in the proportions 6:4:3:2. Each section consists of four tenor taleae, which are interpreted in the upper voices as two supertaleae (See
Figure 3.7).40 Here again, the talea length is doubled, but the proportions of diminution
are preserved. The upper-voice isorhythm (present in the triplum within each of the four
taleae noted in Besseler, “Studien zur Musik des Mittelalters II,” 223n12. Bent’s analysis does not privilege
this arrangement; her example 4.1 lines up the isorhythmic section of the motet in four rows of three taleae,
and Figure 4.1 is arranged according to color, thus 2 rows of 6 taleae each. But the structure diagramed here
plays a large role in the analysis: “thrice two block of music arranged over twice three identical places in the
tenor [create] a great hemiola of threefold form arranged over a twice-stated color,” “Polyphony of texts and
Music,” 92. The kind of supertaleic structure at work in Tribum/Quoniam is not unique to that work—If
Machaut’s Motet 8 were arranged as 3 blocks of four taleae (that is, according to its color), instead of the 4
blocks of three (the shape dictated by its upper-voice isorhythmic structure), we might there too see interesting patterns of non-coordination created by rhythmically identical blocks of music.
39
Observed by Besseler in “Studien zur Musik des Mittelalters II,” 224n18. Schrade’s edition (The Works
of Guillaume de Machaut, 108–11) ignores the tenor taleae and arranges the voices according to the uppervoice supertaleae, in which he follows Ludwig, who mentions the tenor in his notes (“im tenor T. 1–4 und
5–8 rhythmisch gleich sind”) but marks only supertaleae in his edition, Guillaume de Machaut: Musikalische
Werke, 3:37–40. Only Boogaart indicates both levels of organization in his edition, calling the tenor taleae
Ia, Ib; IIa, IIb, etc.; “O series summe rata,” 1:253–4, 2:604–8.
40
Noted by Besseler, who further points out that the motetus ceases to be isorhythmic before the triplum
does, “Studien zur Musik des Mittelalters II,” 222n8.
124
|
|supertalea a2
|supertalea b1 |
|supertalea b1 |
|supertalea g1|
|supertalea g2|
|supertalea| d1 |
|supertalea| d2 |
upper voices: supertalea a1
tenor: talea I
|talea IV
talea III
talea 1
talea 2
talea 3
talea 4
talea i
talea ii
talea iii
talea iv
talea1
talea 2
talea 3
talea 4
|
|
|talea II
|
|
|
|
mm. 1–36
mm. 37–72
mm. 73–96
mm. 97–120
mm. 121–38
mm. 139–56
mm. 157–68
mm. 169–80
Figure 3.7: Upper- and lower-voice taleae in Ida/Portio
upper voices: |supertalea a1
tenor: |talea I
|supertalea a2
|talea III
|supertalea a3
|talea V
| talea II
| talea IV
|
|
|
|supertalea b1
| talea 2
|supertalea b2
| talea 4
|talea 3
|supertalea b3
| talea 6
|talea 5
mm. 1–30
|
|
mm. 31–60
|
mm. 61–90
mm. 91–108
mm. 109–126
mm. 127–144
|
|partial supertalea b4
| talea 8
|talea 7
|
|
| talea VI
|talea 1
|
mm. 145–159
Figure 3.8: Upper- and lower-voice taleae in Vos/Gratissima
125
sections and in the motetus in sections a and b) is so prevalent that Harrison organizes
this work according to supertaleae in his edition, making no mention of the tenor taleae.41
In both parts of Vitry’s Vos/Gratissima too, tenor taleae are doubled to make uppervoice supertaleae. As Besseler has noted, while the tenor has six taleae in the irst section and
7 1/2 taleae in the second, the upper voices are grouped in three larger sections followed
by four shorter ones, the last of which is truncated (see Figure 3.8).42 At what point in
the compositional process might composers have decided to use supertaleae? For several of
Machaut’s motets, the answer is provided by the poetic structures of the upper-voice texts,
which mirror the supertaleae more closely than they do the tenor taleae. This suggests that
the tenor rhythms were here concieved as half-periods, rather than as building blocks in
themselves.43 The same is true for Vos/Gratissima, where the irst half of the triplum text
is arranged in six-line strophes with the structure a7a7b8a7a7b8. In section a, each of these
strophes is set to one upper-voice supertalea, while tenor taleae correspond with the smaller
3-line half-units (see Table 3.1). Thus the triplum’s rhyme scheme beautifully mirrors the
doubled-up taleae; certainly the three-line unit has structural validity, just as the tenor’s talea is a building block in the work’s form. But only the six-line stanza is poetically complete.
41
Motets of French Provenance, 24–9, 193.
42
“Studien zur Musik des Mittelalters II,” 223n13. Kügle has also described the results of the larger units
in the upper voices during the second half of the piece in terms of differences between adjacent taleae: “isorhythmic passages (without hocket) and isorhythmic hocket passages between triplum and motetus alternate
at the beginning of each talea in the second segment, similar to the layout of the diminution section in Flos/
Celsa,” The Manuscript Ivrea, 102. Vos/Gratissima is a slightly unusual case, in that the tenor is re-rhythmicized in the second section of the motet, rather than being diminished. This approach has sometimes been
called “pseudo-diminution,” though there is no diminution here to speak of. While other works with freely
re-rhythmicized tenors often use smaller note-values in the talea rhythm of the second section into order to
“mimic” the effect of diminution, Vos/Gratissima uses perfect and imperfect longs, breves, and breve rests in
its tenor in both sections. But the length of the taleae decreases from 15 breves in section a (L11BLLL1) to 9
in section b (1BLBL). The resulting 5:3 proportion (one that would be impossible to achieve with diminution)
is preserved in the doubled supertalea lengths of 30 and 18 breves.
43
Reichert, “Das Verhaltnis,” 202–3.
126
Table 3.1: Allocation of the Triplum text in Vos/Gratissima, section a
triplum text
rhyme
supertalea tenor talea
Vos, quid admiramini.
a1
A1
a7
virgines, si virgini
a7
pre ceteris eligende
b8
A2
c7
dignati fuerimus
c7
nubere? dum nupsimus
b8
tamquam valde diligende:
Ista pulcra spetie.
humilis manerie
ac opere virtuosa;
turpis vestrum altera.
ausu numis aspera.
necnon virtutes exosa.
d7
d7
e8
f7
f7
e8
a2
Ista lux, vos nubila
ista velox aquila.
vos, colubres gradientes!
Ista super ethera
regnat, vos in misera
valle languetis egentes.
g7
g7
h8
j7
j7
h8
a3
A3
A4
A5
A6
More Intricate Upper-Voice Arrangements
In Hareu/Helas, Ida/Portio, and Vos/Gratissima, all sections of the motet take the
same approach to building supertaleae, so that the upper-voice periods ultimately preserve
the proportions and effect of the tenor’s diminution. But at least two other works, Vitry’s
Colla/Bona and Flos/Celsa (also ascribed to Vitry), use supertaleic structure to render all of
the upper-voice periods the same length, in spite of the tenor’s diminution. The tenor of
Colla/Bona is arranged in the rather complicated scheme of seven-and-a-half twelve-breve
taleae in integer valor, followed by seven six-breve taleae in the diminution section (Figure
3.9a). But the short tenor taleae clearly form larger units, doubling up in periods which are
127
12 breves long—the same length as the integer valor taleae (see Figure 3.9b).44 Thus the inal six taleae in diminution combine to form three supertaleae. Supertalea 8 becomes a compound period, combining a fragmentary integer valor talea with irst of the short diminished
taleae. Although the text-setting is far from regular, Vitry treats the compound talea 8/9
as a unit: in the motetus, he sets one line— “nunquam saporifera”—across the diminution
break. In the triplum, two lines are set to this compound talea (“aulici sunt opere/semper
adulari”), just as two lines are set to the ive integer valor taleae before it (see Example 3.3).
The result is much simpler than it sounds: with its combination of integer valor taleae, diminution supertaleae, and the hybrid talea 8/9, the upper voices of Colla/Bona emerge
as eleven (super)taleae of twelve breves each, plus a inal longa which stands outside of the
isorhythmic scheme.
Where Colla/Bona uses double-length supertaleae in its diminution section to create periodic equality between the motet’s two sections, Flos/Celsa, another motet probably
by Vitry, takes the opposite approach to achieve the same effect: it uses half-taleae in its
integer valor section. The tenor talea is 24 breves long in the irst section—by far Vitry's
longest. This is repeated three-and-a-half times, and then sung again in diminution (12
breves long) three-and-a-half more times (see Figure 3.10a). But throughout the motet the
upper-voice rhythms recur at a rate of 12 breves.45 In other words, the tenor talea is divided
in half in the irst section of the motet (see Figure 3.10b).
The tenor’s rhythm seems to have been designed with such a division in mind. The
full pattern—X LLL11 LLLL11 11—splits easily into two rhythmically similar halves of 12
44
Noted in Besseler, “Studien zur Musik des Mittelalters II,” 222n3.
45
Again, noted by Besseler, ibid., 222n7.
128
(a) Tenor:
|talea 1
|talea 2
|talea 3
|talea 4
|talea 5
|talea 6
|talea 7
|half-talea 8 |
|talea 9 |
|talea 10 |
|talea 11 |
|talea 12 |
|talea 13 |
|talea 14 |
|talea 15 |
(b) Upper Voices:
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|talea 1
|talea 2
|talea 3
|talea 4
|talea 5
|talea 6
|talea 7
|half-talea 8 |talea 9
|talea 10 |talea 11
|talea 12 |talea 13
|talea 14 |talea 15
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| = supertalea 8
| = supertalea 9
| = supertalea 10
| = supertalea 11
Figure 3.9: Tenor (a) and Upper-voice (b) periods in Colla/Bona
Example 3.3: Colla/Bona, mm. 85–96 (reproduced from PMFC1, 86)
129
|talea I
|talea II
|talea III
|half-talea IV
|talea 1
|talea 2
|talea 3
|half-talea 4|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
mm. 1–24
mm. 25–48
mm. 49–72
mm.73-84
mm. 85–96
mm. 97–108
mm. 109–20
mm. 121-6
Figure 3.10a: Tenor taleae in Flos/Celsa
|a1
}
|}
|}
|
a2
|a3
a4
|a5
a6
|a7
|b1
|b2
|b3
|b4
|
|
|
|
|
= tenor talea I
= tenor talea II
= tenor talea III
mm. 1–12
mm. 13–24
mm. 25–36
mm. 37–48
mm. 49–60
mm. 61–72
= tenor half-talea IV
mm. 73–84
= tenor talea 1
mm. 85–96
= tenor talea 2
mm. 97–108
= tenor talea 3
mm. 109–120
= tenor half-talea 4
mm. 120–6
Figure 3.10b: Upper-voice taleae in Flos/Celsa
130
breves each. The maxima of the irst half is replaced in the second by two longae, and the
irst half’s inal longa becomes rests: X L L L 11 | L L LL11 11.46 And over these similar tenor
halves the upper voices sing similar phrases which in no way hint at the tenor’s larger structure.47
So far we have considered two ways in which multipartite motets use supertaleae. In
some, such as Ida/Portio, all sections combine upper- and lower-voice periods in the same
way, for instance by doubling the tenor with respect to upper-voice supertaleae. In others,
supertaleae appear in only one section, making the length of upper-voice periods throughout
the work equal even though the length of the tenor color changes (e.g. Colla/Bona). Machaut’s
Quant/Amour (M1) apparently combines these two approaches. Like the former group of
motets it uses supertaleae in both its integer valor and its diminution sections, with the result
that the tenor’s twelve taleae (six in each section) become six (see igure 3.11).48
46
Kügle has commented on the similarity of these “two hemistichs of twelve breves each, differentiated
from each other only by the substitution for a long of a longa rest on breves 9–10 in the second phrase
(X = L L),” The Manuscript Ivrea, 100. The sonic effect is perhaps more similar still, since in performance
a maxima does not sound any different, from a textural point of view, to two longae, though the former
guarantees more tonal stability.
47
The analytical “shape” of Flos/Celsa is not as neat as that of Colla/Bona, since it does not “square up”
completely: a inal half-talea in diminution seems external to the scheme of repetition, and its presence is
unexplained by upper-voice rhythmic concordances. I will return to this point below.
48
This was irst noted in Besseler, “Studien zur Musik des Mittelalters II,” 224n18. Gombosi also noted
that “the tenor of each talea is a double period,” seeing in this an “off-center” kind of symmetry, “Machaut’s
‘Messe Notre-Dame,’” 220.
131
upper voices:
tenor:
|a1
|talea II
talea I
|a2
|a3
|b1
|b2
|b3
talea III
|talea IV
talea V
|talea VI
talea 1
|talea 2
talea 3
|talea 4
talea 5
|talea 6
|
|
|
|
|
|
mm. 1–36
mm. 37–72
mm. 73–108
mm. 109–20
mm. 121–32
mm. 133–44
Figure 3.11: Supertaleae in Machaut’s Quant/Amour (M1)
Numerically the three inal supertaleae (b1–3) add up to one upper-voice supertalea of the
integer valor section, since the latter are 36 breves long, and the former, 12. This is not a
coincidence, but rather a result of the 3:1 ratio produced by diminution. Yet the setting of
the triplum text suggests that Machaut was thinking of the entire diminution section as
a unit equivalent to an upper-voice supertalea. The triplum is divided into four nine-line
stanzas, of which the irst three are set to sections a1, a2, and a3, and the inal one to the
diminution section:
a1
Quant en moy vint premierement
Amours, si tres doucettement
Me vost mon cuer enamourer
Que d’un regart me ist present,
Et tres amoureus sentement
Me donna aveuc dous penser,
Espoir d’avoir mercy sans refuser.
Mais onques en tout mon vivant
Hardement ne me vost donner;
132
a2
Et si me fait en desirant
Penser si amoureusement
Que, par force de desirer,
Ma joie convient en tourment
Muer, se je n’ay hardement.
Las! et je n’en puis recouvrer,
Qu’amours secours ne me veut nul prester
qui en ses las si durement
me tient que n’en puis eschaper;
a3
ne je ne weil, qu’en atendant
sa grace je weil humblement
toutes ces doleurs endurer.
Et s’Amours loyal se consent
que ma douce dame au corps gent
me weille son ami clamer.
je scay, de vray que aray, sans iner.
joie qu’Amours a in amant
doit pour ses maus guerredonner.
b1
Mais elle atent trop longuement
et j’aimme si follettement
que je n’oze merci rouver.
car j’aim mieus vivre en esperant
d’avoir merci procheinnement
que Refus me veingne tuer.
Et pour ce di en souspirant:
Grant folie est de tant amer
que de son doulz face on amer.
b2
b3
The triplum text’s arrangement invites us to view the diminution section as, in a
sense, section a4. Quant/Amour is thus poetically reminiscent of Colla/Bona, which “squares
up” its diminution section to equate it with the integer valor. Meanwhile, the motetus text
acknowledges the motet’s structure as it stands, with two lines of text assigned to each of
the supertaleae, whether in integer color or in diminution. The result is a much more densely
texted motetus in section b of the motet, since the same number of lines is squeezed into a
section a third the length.
This is as good a place as any to add that though I have opposed “upper-voice”
133
structures to tenor ones, it is by no means impossible for a motetus and a triplum to suggest
slightly different isorhythmic structures. In Colla/Bona, for instance, the actual patterns of
upper-voice rhythmic recurrence are a little more complicated than Figure 3.9b suggests,
since the motetus, but not the triplum, hints at upper-voice supertaleae during the irst four
tenor taleae. Meanwhile the text-setting for the motetus supports the scheme graphed in
Figure 3.9b, while the triplum sets approximately the same amount of text to each tenor talea, without regard for supertaleae. The kinds of structural differences I have observed above
between the tenor and the upper voices may well apply between voices, on a smaller scale.
* * *
It is one thing to argue that upper-voice supertaleae structure the relationship between text and music in a motet, and another to wonder why they should do so. What is the
point, for Machaut, of these poetic and isorhythmic congruences in Quant/Amour? And
why does Vitry use half-taleae in Flos/Celsa? Is he playing a numerical game? Maybe so.
But I think that there is a more interesting explanation for the presence of supertaleae in
the motets I have discussed so far—an explanation which has its roots in mnemonic procedures.
ISORHYTHM AND MEMORY
It is generally agreed that isorhythm was a compositional tool—a way for composers to organize their works and keep track of rhythm, which as the most recently updated
dimension of notation was probably still something of a conceptual challenge in the midfourteenth century.49 In the received view, composition took place on some kind of writ49
See, for instance, Günther’s observation that generally “complete isorhythm appears in the Machaut motets in all bars distinguished by more interesting rhythms,” “The Fourteenth-Century Motet,” 31.
134
ing surface. For example, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson suggested that a composer might have
sketched a “model talea” to help him make his way through a motet.50 More recently, Anna
Maria Busse Berger has brought the emerging ield of medieval memory studies to bear
on motet composition. As the culmination of her study of the ars memorativa in the teaching, transmission, and composition of chant, music theory, and medieval polyphony, Busse
Berger focuses on the isorhythmic motet, arguing that “isorhythmic structures assist the
memory” both for the composer and the performer.51 She argues that motets were sung by
heart and that composers used mnemonic schemes—especially of the architectural variety—to compose. Composers and singers are not separable for Busse Berger, who suggests
that isorhythmic structures were useful both in learning and composing: “The memorization of old texts and the creation of new ones are closely intertwined: they both use the same
tools. The importance of this point cannot be overstated.”52
Arguing that singers memorized text and music separately, Busse Berger goes on to
show how texts and music are separately memorable.53 Learning texts is made easy by their
regular meters and simple rhyme-schemes.54 And musical lines can be memorized due to
the presence of taleae in the tenors and of regular phrase lengths, recurring rhythmic igures,
and isomelism in the upper voices. Bringing it all together is the manuscript page, on which
50
Compositional Techniques, 60–1, 113, 140–41, 154.
51
Medieval Music, 228.
52
Ibid., 214.
53
Citing Fallows’s indings about disorderly text-underlay in ifteenth-century chansons, Busse Berger
suggests that “the evidence leaves little doubt that singers did not learn music and text at the same time,”
Medieval Music, 213. However, ifteenth-century song-texting practices differ signiicantly from those for
14th-century motets, where text-setting is often syllabic and remarkably consistent between sources (see
Chapter 1). It would seem likely that in this repertory the music is more memorable for the presence of text,
and vice-versa.
54
Ibid., 225–9.
135
both composer and performer can see the entire motet:
I suggest that composers of isorhythmic motets chose to organize their pieces in tightly organized structures because it allowed them to work out the
pieces in their mind and make them memorable to performers. Ars nova
notation allowed them to see the entire musical structure on an opening, an
important condition for mnemonic structures.55
Busse Berger’s main argument—that composers visualized compositions in their minds
during the compositional process—is compelling. But manuscript openings do not highlight musical structure. They do not, as a rule, separate tenor taleae with bars or lag uppervoice isorhythm, either by means of markings or layout. Nor is it easy when looking at an
opening of, for example, the Ivrea Codex, to see isorhythm (except perhaps in the tenor).
There can be no doubt that the ability to zoom out and view the entire memorized object at
once is a crucial aspect of mnemotechnics. But just because performer and composer see the
piece in one glance, the former on parchment and the other in his mind’s eye, can we assume
that they were seeing the same thing?
I contend that pieces with supertaleae offer some compelling hints about what the
composer might have seen when he zoomed out. In all cases described above, supertaleae
transform more complicated structures into less complicated ones. Perhaps the best example of this is Colla/Bona. Based on the tenor only, the motet’s structure is an unwieldy
seven taleae followed by a fragmentary eighth, and then seven more taleae which are half the
size of the irst seven. However, the diminution section is organized in supertaleae which are
the same length as the taleae in the integer valor section. The half-length eighth fragmentary talea “folds in” with the irst diminution talea, and the others pair off. The piece can
now be conceived as eleven phrases of equal length. It goes almost without saying that this
55
Ibid., 254.
136
arrangement of the upper voices is more memorable than that of the tenor. Where in the
tenor’s scheme there are two lengths of talea, the upper-voice units are all the same length
(12 breves), and the motet can be summarized in the simple formula 11x12—one we would
use to summarize the dimensions of a rectangle.
Flos/Celsa is also easier to picture when the long taleae of the integer valor section
are re-organized by the upper voices into half-taleae. Instead of keeping three different
lengths of talea in mind (24, then 12, then 6 breves), the motet is re-inscribed as ten 12breve taleae, with a fragmentary eleventh of 6 breves (10x12+ 1x6). And even in Machaut’s
Quant/Amour(M1), the triplum text encourages us to think of the inal three supertaleae as
combined together, making a rectangle with the three integer valor supertaleae.
To call the motet a rectangle reeks of a-historicism. It suggests that the composer
would imagine the parts as aligned, perhaps in score, and that he would further engage in
some kind of mental stacking of sections, associating like with like, perhaps even beginning
in the top and ending in the bottom of some mental space. I am not implying that composers thought in modern score layout—but I would argue that they did not think in choirbook
format either. Several factors point to the possibility that a composer might indeed visualize his work in a geometric manner.
Although the use of score notation would not be common until the sixteenth century, examples of score (or, rather, of what has been called “quasi-score”) were known in the
14th century.56 In England, it was commonly present in the ubiquitous and often virtuosic
56
Owens deines “quasi-score” as an arrangement in which “individual voices each occupy a single staff and
are superimposed one above the other, not necessarily in the order high to low, and without barlines or vertical alignment,” Composers at Work, 35. See also the discussion in Lowinsky, ‘Early Scores in Manuscript.’
137
discant repertory.57 In France, although songs and motets were notated in parts, sources
of Parisian organum continued to be available, as indicated by inventories.58 Additionally, theoretical treatises copied in the fourteenth century sometimes included examples
in pseudo-score, on grids, or on large staves.59 For instance, the anonymous De varietate et
modo discantandi (late 14th c.) contains two-part contrapuntal examples notated on staves
from six to ten lines high and separated by vertical bars (see Figure 3.12).
Figure 3.12: Example on a ten-line staff from De varietate et modo discantandi60
Even without recourse to the concept of a “score,” it does not seem drastic to posit
that composers thought of voices as progressing together through time. Regardless of how
these works were composed, the three or four voices that made up any polyphonic ars nova
composition were written to belong together. The rhythms of the upper voices especially beg
to be viewed in tandem in hocket, where they are carefully constructed to be complementary
57
Facsimiles of sources notated in score and quasi-score are collected in Summers, English FourteenthCentury Polyphony.
58
For inventory mentions of Notre-Dame organum sources, see Haggh & Huglo, “Magnus liber—Maius
minus,” Appendix I kindly made available by Professor Haggh on her website, < http://www.music.umd.edu/
Faculty/haggh-huglo/>.
59
Some of the earliest notations of polyphony use vertical alignment of simultaneous pitches in different
voices—see the famous examples cited in Apel, The Notation of Polyhonic Music, 205–13.
60
Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit, incunabulum nË 70, with facsimiles reproduced in Schreurs, Anthologie
van muziekfragmenten, 26–9.
138
(see Example 3.4). Nor need we think in score to bring these parts together; a superimposition of all three voices on one staff is easily achieved, and more readily brings to light their
closeness in range and rhythmic complementarity (see Example 3.5).
Example 3.4: Hocket in Quant/Amour (M1), mm. 94–6
Example 3.5: Hocketed notes in Quant/Amour (M1), mm. 94–6, with voices superimposed; triplum in pink, motetus in green, tenor in blue.
As for the idea that composers would mentally “stack” similar sections of compositions, this is a matter of conjecture, but perhaps an unproblematic one. Medieval diagrams
and calendars regularly stack data in columns, and illuminations often present the same
subject on several vertical levels, divided by lines.61 In the writing down of verse, lines of the
same length are placed over each other. The practice in musical manuscripts of underlaying
successive verses of a strophic piece one under the other also hints at such vertical align-
61
Other arrangements, notably circular ones, were also common. See Carruthers, The Book of Memory,
248–50. For an example of repeated depiction of the same subject see the lions in the Peterborough bestiary, reproduced in Otto Pächt, Book Illumination in the Middle Ages (New York: Harvey Miller), 26.
139
ment of like with like.
Further evidence that composers might have conceived of their works in geometric
terms comes from mnemonic treatises. As Mary Carruthers has argued, things which are to
be remembered “were thought in some way to occupy physical space” which can be surveyed
by the mind’s eye.62 The physical space so occupied was often described as square or rectangular. Thus Thomas Bradwardine writes in his “De memoria artiiciali” (c. 1333) that
the location into which texts to be memorized can be placed “should be like a four-sided
oblong” (that is, a rectangle or square) made of stacked rows.63 Similarly, Jacobus Publicius,
writing in the late 15th century, explains that the memorial matrix “will follow the pattern
of a square.”64 Even the dimensions of these squares are indicated. Bardwardine rcommends “four times ive” backgrounds, “or perhaps ten of them”; Jacobus gives an example
with ive by ive spaces.65
Busse Berger has noted that, like Bradwardine and other writers on memory, music
theorists from the fourteenth century use verbs of seeing to talk about rules of counterpoint and composition. Johannes Boen’s discussion of color serves as especially compelling
evidence that that composers might have thought this way about tenors. Busse Berger explains:
His division of the thirty tenor pitches into 6x5 or 3x20 notes is reminiscent of what we read…in memory treatises. If one were to make a diagram
of the isorhythmic structure described by Boen, it would be very similar
62
The Book of Memory, 27.
63
Trans. ibid., 281.
64
Cited and trans. in Carruthers and Ziolkowski, The Medieval Craft of Memory, 238.
65
Trans. Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 282.
140
to the structures depicted by Bradwardine…Boen’s discussion leaves little
doubt that the composer planned and visualized the composition before he
wrote it down.66
Boen discusses two motets, of which one, Impudenter/Virtutibus, is unipartite and the
other, Apta caro/Flos virginum, has a second color in diminution—“another thirty that would
make one half the length of the others.”67 Neither of motets uses supertaleae in its upper
voices, thus to describe the tenor is to describe the layout of all three voices. But is it possible that in a motet like Colla/Bona one of the mental images used by the composer to plan
his composition was the plan of the upper voices?
Certainly the emphasis on four-sided oblongs as desirable spaces for mnemonic
storage could help to explain the shape of that motet when its upper-voice isorhythm is
taken into account. Though their tenors present awkward collections of taleae and partial
taleae of various lengths, the overall schemes of both Colla/Bona and Flos/Celsa are rendered rectangular by the supertaleae. (Or nearly so: Flos/Celsa contains an extra half-talea
to which I shall return below.)
What of the simpler examples, such as Tribum/Quoniam and Qui/Ha! Fortune, where
all taleae are the same length to begin with, and supertaleae serve only to change the dimensions of the rectangle? There too the upper-voice structures may point to the presence of
a mnemonic component in composition. As noted above, Bradwardine mentions that the
memorial matrix might be some four by ive blocks, or perhaps ten by ive, “or somewhat
fewer, unless a man should want to make unheard-of marvels.”68 This accords with recent
66
Busse Berger, Medieval Music, 224.
67
Quoted and trans. ibid., 223.
68
Trans. Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 282.
141
indings that there is a capacity limit to working memory, that is, to the number of individual things we can keep in our head at the same time. George Miller famously deined this
limit in 1956 as “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two.”69
In this light it is notable that many of the motets discussed above are far “taller”
than nine taleae when we look at their tenor structure only. Qui/Ha! Fortune and Tribum/
Quoniam would each require the composer to keep twelve separate units in mind. Just try to
picture twelve distinct units without grouping them—reader, you’ll get lost. But the number
of distinct units decreases dramatically when these works are rearranged according to their
upper-voice periods. The point is not that Vitry and Machaut were reading Bradwardine,
but rather that where the memorial faculty is involved in the construction of a structure,
some limits are necessarily imposed.
Of the works catalogued by Besseler in his 1927 article (a list that includes almost
all ars nova motets) only two that have more than ten taleae do not use supertaleae.70 And
of these, one—the Fauvel motet Firmissime/Adesto—has no upper-voice isorhythm at all,
so we have no way of knowing whether its composer was indeed combining its very short
taleae in his head. The prevalence of supertaleae in motets whose structures would otherwise
exceed the limits of working memory adds weight to Busse Beger’s argument that the composition of isorhythmic works had a signiicant mnemonic component.
69
Miller, “The Magical Number Seven.” Though Carruthers and Ziolkowski caution that the limits of medieval memory are spatial rather than temporal, they observe that “the psychological phenomenon of ‘seven
plus or minus two’ can certainly be observed to apply to ancient and medieval mnemotechnic,” The Medieval
Craft of Memory, 12.
70
Besseler, “Studien zur Musik des Mittelalters II,” 222–4. Both are Fauvel motets—Firmissime/Adesto
and O canenda/Rex. The former consists of eight integer valor taleae three longae in length, and eight more
one-longa taleae in which the tenor is freely re-rhythmicized (in “pseudo-diminution”); the latter is eight
taleae in integer valor plus four more in diminution.
142
For our purposes, memory and writing are of course inseparable. While texts could
be composed entirely in the mind and then written down, they could also be memorized
from books (Hugh of St Victor recommended always using the same copy of a text); and
some treatises recommended writing on wax tablets to train the memory.71 As Busse Berger
has noted, “isorhythmic motets... could not have come about without writing.”72
But while it is misleading to rigidly oppose literacy and orality, invocation of literacy alone tends to skew our priorities. Carruthers has argued that “as a concept, literacy
privileges a physical artifact, the writing-support, over the social and rhetorical process that
a text both records and generates, namely, the composition by an author and its reception
by an audience.”73 That is where a consideration of mnemonic techniques can help identify
both the object of analysis and the most appropriate means of analytical representation.
While the manuscript opening does indeed present the motet at a glance, to privilege it is
to over-emphasize the physical artifact at the expense of the processes—literate, rhetorical, mnemonic, cultural—at work in its composition. Although the examples above, and
even more so the examples to follow, are arranged in score and stacked in accordance with
modern “paradigmatic” approaches to analysis, I suggest that they can still serve as evidence
of a kind. For it seems in keeping both with late-medieval rhetorical and compositional
practices and with the internal salient properties of these works themselves that composers might have visualized their motets as collections of similar things ordered spatially and
sequentially—as matrices, grids, or shapes.
* * *
71
Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 9, 86.
72
Medieval Music, 254.
73
The Book of Memory, 11.
143
Once we allow ourselves a sort-of birds’-eye-view of motets by assigning shapes to
them for analytical purposes at least, the question follows: were these shapes always regular?
In the examples presented above, supertaleae serve only to change the dimensions of repeating blocks, in all cases but one making larger units out of smaller ones and rendering the
object more memorable. But the next series of examples suggests that the shapes evoked by
some motets may be more complicated.
SHIFTS BETWEEN UPPER- AND LOWER-VOICE TALEAE
Doubling, tripling, quadrupling, and halving—the ways in which we have so far seen
upper-voice periods interact with the tenor’s taleae—all have in common the fact that talea
breaks in the tenor and in the upper voices regularly coincide. Here the terms supertalea (or
subtalea) are, I think, unambiguous. But there are other cases in which upper-voice periods
align less regularly with tenor taleae. One extreme example of this is a case like Machaut’s
Trop plus/Biaute (M20), in which the tenor is in the form of a rondeau, its two statements
repeated in the order ABAAABAB, while the upper voices move freely above it. The uppervoice hockets, however, are isorhythmic with each other, though they occur irregularly over
the course of the motet.74 Indeed, each of the three hockets is placed over a different tenor
rhythm, so that the only isorhythm is between upper voices (see Figure 3.13 and Example
3.6).
This approach exempliies a kind of upper-voice independence that is easy to miss.
74
The irst and third hockets sound over sections of the A and B parts of the tenor which are almost
rhythmically identical (BS BSSSSB), differing only in the inal note (a perfect breve the irst time around,
and an imperfect breve the second time). But the second hocket falls on a part of the tenor that bridges the
repetition of the A section, underlaying an entirely different tenor rhythm (S S S B1 BS BS) to the isorhythmic
hocket in the upper voices. Bent has argued that this motet “has three irregularly placed blocks of complete
isorhythm in all three parts, at mm. 8–11, 25–28, and 42–45” (“What is Isorhythm?,” 131), but the only
exact matches between all three voices are between measures 8–10 and 42–4.
144
|Hocket 1
-et 2
|
|Hocket 3
|
|Hock|
Figure 3.13: Hocket placement relative to the tenor in Machaut’s Trop plus/Biaute
(M20), Ferrell-Vogüé fol. 280.
Hocket 1:
Hocket 2:
Hocket 3:
Example 3.6: Hockets in Trop plus/Biaute (mm. 8–11, 25–8, 42–5, reproduced from
PMFC 3:11–12), isorhythm shaded.
145
As Bent has noted,
In…motets by Machaut and others, signiicant rhythmic and melodic repetitions have often been overlooked because they are not aligned with the
tenor talea. It is often the case that only regular repetition is signaled, to the
end of charting a qualitative crescendo towards tidy and mechanical rhythmic identity. The result is that subtler kinds of variation are neglected.75
But in exploring such “subtler kinds of variation,” it is worth asking whether “regular repetition” is always “aligned with the tenor talea.” A counter-example appears in Sub Arturo/
Plebs, the inal section of which features three upper-voice taleae that are out of sync with
the tenor: the upper voice periods consist of 10.5 breves of c (63 minims) but the tenor
takes up 16 breves in C (64 minims). Thus the tenor begins one minim into talea g2 and 2
minims into talea g3 (See Figure 3.14).76
|
upper voices g1
|
mm. 121–31
|upper voices g2
|
mm. 132–42
tenor talea C1
|tenor talea C2
|upper voices g3
|tenor talea C3
|
mm. 143–53
Figure 3.14: Alignment of upper-voice and tenor taleae in Sub arturo/Plebs (inal section)
Sub arturo/Plebs may seem like an extreme case, but it is also part of a later generation of motets—not transmitted in either Trémoille or Ivrea, it survives in Chantilly and
even Bologna Q15. As such I think its structure is the culmination of the independent
upper-voice schemes already implicit in much earlier works. But where in Sub Arturo/Plebs
75
Ibid., 129.
76
This is not relected in Günther’s edition (The Motets of the Manuscripts Chantilly, 52) but it is in Harrison’s (Motets of French Provenance, 176–7) and Bent’s (Two 14th-Century Motets, 1–7). See also the discussion in Bent, “What is Isorhythm?,” 129n41. Both Harrison and Bent indicate tenor talea repetitions but
not upper-voice isorhythmic regions.
146
periods of different length get progressively further misaligned, in the earlier motets the
periods of repetition in the tenor and upper voices are of the same length, but their boundaries are misaligned.
Now, this necessarily gets us into a realm of some conjecture, since if something is
looped over and over, who is to say where its cycles begin and end? In fact, motet taleae are
not identical—only rhythmically similar in parts. And these similarities may begin to appear at different points in different voices. For example, the opening and closing measures
of the work are less likely to be isorhythmic in the upper voices than corresponding measures in internal taleae. This by no means surprising: the aesthetic decisions involved in beginning and ending a piece are different from those made in structuring measures internal
to a work. But does it follow that the irst or last talea is simply less isorhythmic than others,
or is it possible that openings or closings may sometimes stand outside of the upper-voice
isorhythmic structure?77
A case in point is Flos/Celsa. As noted above, its irst three-and-a-half tenor taleae
are split in half to support seven upper-voice subtaleae equivalent in length to the periods
in diminution that follow (diagramed in Figure 3.10b, above). But this arrangement does
not adequately describe the integer valor section (see Example 3.7). To begin with (and unsurprisingly), the opening two measures are not isorhythmic. Furthermore, the upper-voice
isorhythm is clustered mostly at the beginning of each subtalea—a somewhat unusual cir77
This is more obviously the case in works that begin with an “introitus” (so called in the Machaut sources)—
a section that may include the lower voices of a motet but does not igure in the isorhythmic structure that
follows. However, Michael Allsen has convincingly shown that these sections are often related to the isorhythmic form in terms of length, and thus are affected by that form even though they do not participate in
it (or perhaps they question the notion of what it means for some section of a composition to participate in
its form). Allsen, “Style and Intertextuality,” 246–51. I am grateful to Professor Allsen for sharing unpublished work with me on this subject. I plan to address “introitus” as term and practice in a forthcoming study.
147
Example 3.7: Flos/Celsa, mm. 1–84, arranged according to upper-voice subtaleae
148
cumstance since upper-voice rhythmic congruences are more likely to occur toward the
end of periods.78 Finally, the line-ends of the upper-voice texts are consistently misaligned
with the talea breaks. Though the text-setting seems consistent (four triplum lines and two
motetus lines per upper-voice talea), the inal syllable of each group of lines falls each time
at the beginning of the next talea—a circumstance which earned Flos/Celsa’s triplum and
motetus a C+ and a C on Harrison’s report-card.79
However, if we take the non-congruence of the opening two measures as a clue that
they stand outside of the work’s isorhythmic structure, we can shift the upper-voice units of
repetition by two breves with respect to the tenor. Now the triplum and motetus line-ends in
the integer valor section correspond with upper-voice talea ends and the end of each period
is marked by several breves of upper-voice isorhythm (See Example 3.8, section a). As a
result the internal divisions and repetitions highlighted in the analysis are more closely
aligned with line-ends, and thus with the experience of both composing and performing
the work.
Since the two-breve shift does not seem to continue into the diminution section,
I have proposed in Example 3.8 that measures 85-6 function in both parts of the motet—that its two “rectangles” overlap slightly.80 This is in part borne out by the rhythmic
evidence. Although these measures correspond exactly with the rhythms which open the
78
Boogaart, “Love’s Unstable Balance, Part I,” 13–8.
79
PMFC5, Table IV, item 7, p. 204.
80
Kügle has described the same phenomenon in terms of phrase differential between the upper voices:
“This phrase differential is reversed at the beginning of the diminution section; the motetus, formerly ending after the triplum, now leads the triplum, ending its phrases one breve before it (phrase lengths: triplum
eight, twelve, twelve and ten breves; motetus seven, twelve, twelve, and eleven breves). Simultaneously with
the change in phrase alignment, isorhythmic hockets of four breves in length appear at the outset of every
tenor talea,” The Manuscript Ivrea, 100.
149
Example 3.8: Periodic Alignment in Flos/Celsa
Section a: 7 x 6L
Section b: 3 x 6L; 2-breve overlap between sections
8 breves external to periodic structure (2 at the beginning,
6 at the end)
Line-breaks in the text are marked with horizontal lines
(“|”).
150
subsequent diminution taleae (a correspondence indicated by yellow shading), the tenor’s
longa at this point (the diminished version of the maxima which begins the tenor’s integer
valor talea) corresponds with tenor longae found at the ends of alternate subtaleae in the integer valor section (e.g. mm. 13–4, 37–8, and 61–2). Thus the tenor and one measure of
the triplum in this section (shaded in green, as the intersection between blue and yellow)
correspond with both the a and the b material. Such a rhythmic link might well have been
planned in the tenor: a longa is the only rhythmic value that is shared between the original
and diminished versions of the tenor’s talea. The others (maximae and breves) are unique to
tenor parts a and b respectively.
Finally, the two measures which stand outside of the structure at the beginning of
the motet invite us to see the motet’s last six breves not as a partial talea (as igure 3.10b
would have it), but as closing material standing outside of the repetitive structure. After all,
neither an analysis nor a pre-compositional plan needs to take account of every note.
In a sense, my rearrangement of Flos/Celsa is a matter of pushing breves around
for purely analytical aims: I have not affected the edition in any way, nor have I changed
any aspect of text-music relations. But there is nothing pure about analysis. Not only do
our analytical perceptions of a piece affect judgements about its quality (as with Harrison’s
grades—the upper voices would surely deserve As now?), they also igure prominently in
the kind of hermeneutic endeavor with which the following chapters concern themselves. If
I am to argue (as I shall) that motet texts can inluence large-scale structural decisions, it is
important to be aware of the range of possible structures. The idea that upper-voice structures are both more varied and perhaps more complicated than those of the tenor opens up
new avenues of interpretation. But it may also preclude certain kinds of argument, since it
151
can alleviate what might otherwise be perceived as formal tensions between the tenor and
the upper voices. That is, if it is not unusual for the upper voices to have their own structure, then we might view their departures from the tenor’s form with less expectation of a
hermeneutic explanation. A comparison of several analyses of Machauts S’il estoit/S’amour
(M6) will illustrate this point.
UPPER-VOICE STRUCTURES AND HERMENEUTICS IN S’IL ESTOIT/S’AMOURS (M6)
S’il estoit/S’Amours is unique among Machaut’s works in being bipartite without either diminution or renotation of the tenor.81 Only its irst color is given in the manuscript
sources, with a repeat sign. But the tenor as written is one breve short of a perfection, so
that the second color begins on the third breve of a modus grouping. This results in mensural transformation upon the repetition of the notated material, since different breves are
altered the second time through:82
Notated tenor:
Altered irst time:
Altered second time:
1
1 1
1 1
1 1
BB BLBBBBB BB BLBBBBB BB BLBBBBB BB :||:
â
â
â
â
â
â
â
Figure 3.15: Altered Breves in the tenor of S’il estoit/S’amour (M6)
A further unusual aspect of the tenor is that it appears to end with a fragmentary
talea. The color is 29 notes long, but each talea only uses nine notes, hence 27 notes for
81
Günther has argued that “the work may be considered unipartite rather than bipartite” (“The 14thcentury Motet,” 30); Bent suggests the helpful term “homographic” as a descriptor of the tenor’s unity. See
also objections to Günther’s claim in Apel, “Remarks about the Isorhythmic Motet,” 143; Sanders, “The
Mediaeval Motet,” 262–3n279; and Bent, “What is Isorhythm?,” 131.
82
Cf. Bent, “What is Isorhythm?,” 129, who suggests that this example of “mensural transformation without diminution” leads to a modus change, so that “the second [tenor statement] neither renotated, nor
rewritten, nor speciied, is in imperfect modus with unaltered breves.”
152
three taleae. The two extra notes appear at the end as two breves followed by two breves of
rest, seeming to make up a partial fourth talea (and a partial eighth talea, when repeated; see
Figure 3.16).
|talea 1
|talea 2
|talea 3
|talea 4? :||:
Figure 3.16: S’il estoit/S’Amours, tenor (Ferrell-Vogüé, fol. 266)
To be sure, fragmentary taleae exist in other motets—notably Colla/Bona, Flos/Celsa
and Vos/Gratissima, all discussed above. But as we have seen, these may be reinterpreted by
upper-voice isorhythm (as in Colla/Bona) or stand outside of the isorhythmic structure (as
in Flos/Celsa). And in all three cases, the partial taleae are substantial, taking up at least half
the length of a full talea. By contrast, the extra “bits” in S’il estoit/S’amours are short in comparison with the ifteen-breve taleae, lasting only three breves in the irst section, and six in
the second. For all of these reasons the short taleae have occasioned comment. In Newman
Powell’s evaluation,
When one considers the neat, highly organized mathematical structures
found in the tenor parts of other motets by Machaut, this periodic structure—or, rather, this analysis—strikes one as being strangely lopsided, unconvincingly chopped off, irregular, and somehow inadequate.83
Nor does everything seem quite right with the upper voices. Speciically, attention
has been drawn several times to the so-called “Phasendifferenz” between the upper voices
and tenor. Speciically, the triplum’s phrases (musical as well as poetic) consistently end
83
“Fibonacci and the Gold Mean,” 242.
153
three breves later than the tenor taleae (see Example 3.9). This combination of unusual
factors—a color that changes without being renotated or diminished, a talaeic structure that
seems formally excessive, and texts that lag behind—have produced a number of fruitful
analyses.
Those analysts progressing, as it were, from the top down, have explained the tenor’s
fragmentary taleae from a text-layout point of view. Thus Reichert argued that the three
“excess measures” at the end of the irst color are there to make up for the lagging of the
triplum text, so that it is not compressed into a small space. For this reason the fourth talea
“is broken off after three measures, to wit exactly with the completion of the strophe, at
which point the irst talea of the new color begins.”84 Lawrence Earp has also noted that the
“staggered phrasing [of the triplum text] is compensated by a talea fragment of three breve
measures at the end of the integer valor section and at the end of the diminution section.”85
Such upper-voice-oriented explanations differ from the analytical indings based
on “bottom-up” approaches, which seek to explain the tenor’s fragmentary extra “bits” and
the apparent asymmetry of its two halves without recourse to non-structural elements. This
was the approach of Gombosi, who argued that despite appearances to the contrary the entire tenor is in fact symmetrical, its rhythms “strictly concentric, with the pivot of the irst
talea of the second part serving as center of the whole composition.”86 Gombosi’s analysis
is, to borrow Günther’s evaluation, “somewhat forced,” in that the symmetry he proposes
involves the interpretation of some rhythmic cells, but not of others, as retrograde, in a
84
Reichert, “Das Verhältnis,” 208.
85
Guillaume de Machaut, 371.
86
“Machaut’s Messe Notre-Dame,” 221.
154
155
Example 3.9: S’il estoit/S’Amours (M6), arranged by tenor talea (continued on following page)
The edition is based on the version of the motet preserved in Ferrell-Vogüé.
156
Example 3.9, continued.
not altogether methodical manner.87 But Gombosi’s approach prompted a more detailed
treatment of symmetry in the tenor by Powell.88 The two analyses have in common a focus
on mm. 49–51 as the central pivot within the motet’s symmetrical scheme, but differ in
their interpretations. For Gombosi, “the beginning of this talea [the irst in the diminution
section] serves as a transition,” and therefore does not participate in the form, which “is
completed by a corresponding half-talea at the end” (his diagram is reproduced as Figure
3.17).89
Figure 3.17: Gombosi’s analysis of the tenor of S’il estoit/S’Amours (M6)90
Powell places his center at the same place, but makes these measures count as part of both
halves (his analysis is reproduced as Figure 3.18):
The [11B] that is in the absolute center will be seen to complete a grouping of
ive longae in the established periodization of the irst half and at the same
time to begin the periodization of ive longae for the second half, just as this
same perfect longa both completes the irst color and begins the second.91
87
Günther, “The 14th-century Motet,” 30n16. See also Dömling’s critique of Gombosi’s approach in
“Isorhythmie und Variation,” 26n9.
88
“Fibonacci and the Gold Mean,” 242–52. Earp has summarized this approach as “Gombosi’s suggestions carried to an extreme,” Guillaume de Machaut, 371.
89
Gombosi, “Machaut’s Messe Notre-Dame,” 221.
a and b respectively represent the rhythms which read hqqqq and q ŒŒ qh in Gombosi’s 8:1 reduction; the
analysis refers to values as transcribed rather than as written, in that no distinction is made between longs
and altered breves, “Machaut’s Messe Notre-Dame,” 221 ex. 19.
90
91
Ibid., 246.
157
Figure 3.18: Powell’s analysis of the tenor of S’il estoit/S’Amours (M6)
In opposition to these demonstrations of symmetry, Jacques Boogaart argues that
asymmetry and imbalance lie at the heart of its form:
The symmetry shown by [Gombosi and Powell’s analyses] is doubtlessly
there, and yet on the surface the motet shows an intriguing pattern which is
almost, but not quite, in balance and seems to forbid any idea of symmetry.
One might even wonder whether the symmetry was meant to be there at
all, whether it was a conscious process or a natural feeling for harmonious
proportions that resulted in an unconscious symmetry in spite of apparent
disbalance.92
This disbalance begins in the tenor, which in Boogaart’s reading is made up of “two colores,
of which the second exceeds the irst by one perfect long.”93 That the tenor taleae do not line
up with the upper voices is a further relection of unbalance and inequality; together these
features have led Boogaart to propose an ingenious structure for the motet. Arguing that
the three “extra” bars at the end of the irst color really belong to the third talea, he suggests
that the irst two taleae of each half are “telescoped” (Boogaart’s diagram is reproduced as
Figure 3.19):
92
“Love’s Unstable Balance, Part I,” 4.
93
This imbalance is contingent upon counting the rests from the irst repetition as part of the second
statement—a reading “made clear by the polyphonic context” (Ibid., 10). Technically rests cannot be part of
a color, since a color is a collection of pitches that are timeless until given duration by taleae. If we compare the
length in breves of the notated tenor (including the inal rests) in its irst and second iteration, the difference
is one breve (50 breves vs. 49). If we count only the time in which the notes of each color sound, including
rests internal to the color but not the rests at the end or between colores, the difference is reversed: 48 breves
for color 1, 47 for color 2. If instead the inal breve is functionally a longa, the difference is reversed again,
etc.
158
The structure is composed of three taleae, of which only the last one reaches
its full length; the other two are foreshortened—“telescoped”, whereby the
ends of taleae I and II are simultaneously the beginnings of taleae II and III,
respectively.94
Figure 3.19: Telescopic tenor in Boogart’s anlysis of S’il estoit/S’amours95
Boogaart argues that this structure is intended to be audible, creating confusion in a listener who expects an eighteen-breve talea but is disappointed until the end of each half.96
The key to understanding this imbalance and deception is, Boogaart argues, in the
upper voices, whose texts discuss the concepts of excess and imbalance in courtly terms. The
lover complains that Love makes him suffer too much, but that if Love smiles upon his suit
he might get more joy even than he might wish (“plus qu’il ne voudroit”). This commentary
94
“Love’s Unstable Balance, Part I,” 13.
95
Example 4 from “Encompassing Past and Present,” 25.
96
“It seems that the listener is led by the isorhythmic signals to think that the talea ends after breve 18 and
then, observing gradually how the tenor proceeds, to come slowly to the conclusion that the talea ends sooner
than expected. In other words, the composer has made the talea shorter than expected and thus played a trick
on the listener,” “Love’s Unstable Balance, Part I,” 18. If we believe Johannes Boen that “color is presented
more to the sight than hearing” and therefore “not so much trouble or expense of intellect should be made
concerning it,” we might well question the listener’s ability and inclination to follow the tenor’s patterns
while counting breves—the more so given the other demands Boogaart’s analysis makes on her: noting poetic line-ends, keeping track of the meanings of both texts, and noticing where upper-voice isorhythm occurs.
159
on deiciency, excess, and equality is played out in the motet’s form and encapsulated in the
inal lines of both voices:
The closing lines of both texts refer to the procedure but in opposite terms.
Longae 6 and 7 contain the entire thirteenth line of the motetus, whose irst
twelve lines are evenly divided over the motet; the declamation is suddenly
rushed on the words ‘S’Amours le fait trop languir’ (‘if Love lets him languish
too much’). On the other hand, in the triplum the last two syllables read:
-paire, ‘equal’ (belonging to the word repaire, ‘abode’). Thus, by the excess, the
proportions of the motet are restored to an imaginary equality: plus que droit
[more than proper] turns out to be paire.97
In the inal analysis, texts and music together provoke “a permanently instable state of
balance” in which stability is only imaginary, achieved with the hypothetical “telescoped”
taleae.98
Boogaart’s reading of S’il estoit/S’Amours is careful and thought-provoking. While
it shares some aspects with earlier arguments (for instance the idea that a measure might
count twice, which also igures in Powell’s analysis), only he considers the upper voices both
on their own (formally and semantically) and in conjunction with the tenor. Furthermore,
Boogaart notes that upper-voice taleae may have different boundaries from tenor taleae:
“one can speak of the taleae in triplum or motetus, only keeping in mind that there may be
a small phase-difference between the tenor taleae and those of the upper voices, i.e. their
endings or beginnings may slightly overlap.”99 But in practice it is the very tension between
upper-voice and tenor phrase endings that drives his analysis: “the stanzas do not conform
exactly to the tenor taleae, which, ideally, they should.”100
97
Boogaart, “Encompassing Past and Present,” 26.
98
Idem, “Love’s Unstable Balance, Part I,” 23.
99
Ibid., 12.
100
Ibid.
160
It is here that considering upper-voice structures as potentially independent of tenor
organization may come to bear on the analysis. What kind of structure might we perceive in
S’il estoit/S’Amours if we attend irst to the upper-voice isorhythm, and then to the tenor?
There are several signs that the layout in Example 3.9 is not fully representative of
the motet’s form. Unusually, taleae A2 and A3 begin mid-hocket, whereas normally hockets are found towards the end of a talea and do not cross talea joins. Even more strange is
that this hocket is missing from the irst talea. Although we might expect the beginning of
a motet to be exempt from isorhythm, we expect even more strongly that hockets should
be isorhythmic, so that when a hocket occurs, it generally occurs in all taleae within a given
section.101 This circumstance suggests an analytical shape for the piece in which mm. 1–3
stand outside the isorhythmic structure, acting as an introitus before region a begins. This
shifts the resulting taleae in the upper voices with respect to the tenor’s structure (or what
is traditionally perceived to be the tenor’s structure—more about this in a bit). The uppervoice taleae retain their length of ifteen breves, but now begin and end three breves later
than the tenor (see a1–a3 in Example 3.10, below).
Three ifteen-breve taleae, and the brief introitus that precedes them, account for
the irst color, and only two breves of rest remain from the tenor as notated. In order to complete the longa they are joined by the irst note of the second color. The rhythmic transformation of the tenor’s second repetition with regard to the irst has now begun. This brings
us to the measures (mm. 49–51) that Gombosi and Powell singled out as the center of the
work. Certainly their centrality is numerical: they follow 48 breves and are followed by 48
more. And it is structural, since it is here that the tenor transitions between colores, bridging
101
Günther, “The 14th-Century Motet,” 31.
161
b
a
(3x5L)
(3x5L)
Example 3.10: S’il estoit/S’amours (M6) arranged according to upper-voice isorhythm
Tenor talea breaks as they are usually perceived (and as they are marked in Ludwig
and Schrade’s editions) are marked with elongated tenor barlines.
Line-breaks in the text are marked with horizontal lines (“|”).
162
the notated material and its repetition. I suggest that this longa stands as a bridge between
sections a and b, belonging to neither. Like the external opening measures, this reading is
supported by upper-voice rhythms. Comparing mm. 49–51 with mm. 64–6 and 79–81
(aligned on page 2 of Example 3.9) we ind a high degree of isorhythm between the latter
two that does not extend to mm. 49–51.
Allowing that mm. 49–51 are, as Gombosi irst suggested, “a transition,” the second half of the motet, like the irst, features a three-breve shift for its taleae. Region b now
begins with note 2 of the color.102 As in Sub Arturo/Plebs, the placement of the lower-voice
talea has shifted with respect to the upper voices, but the length of the upper voice taleae is
unchanged: b1, b2, and b3 are each 15 breves, with hockets toward the end of each talea,
just where we would expect them (see Example 3.10, section b). Three more breves remain
at the end of b, notated as inal longas in the upper voices and a breve followed by a longa
rest in the tenor.103 This too stands outside of the motet’s isorhythmic structure, as inal
longae sometimes do. As deined by the upper voices, then, the motet’s structure is elegantly
balanced, and may be summarized as 3+(3x15)+3+(3x15)+3.
This balanced form also conforms better to the triplum text as underlaid. As noted
above, the voice seems to “lag behind” the tenor taleae; rearranged as in Example 3.10, the
talea breaks now complement the triplum’s poetic structure. The text’s divisions according
to old and new talea breaks are as follows (old divisions in gray, new in black):
102
Gombosi, “Machaut’s Messe Notre-Dame,” 221.
103
The rests must remain unperformed and a fermata placed on the tenor’s inal note, since an unsupported
fourth in the upper voices would otherwise result. This is in contrast to He Mors/Fine amour (M3), which
ends with tenor rests that, as Thomas Brown suggested, may well be observed, lightening the motet’s texture
at its conclusion; “Flos/Celsa and Machaut’s Motets,” 44.
163
S’il estoit nuls que pleindre se deüst
Pour nul meschief que d’amour receüst,
Je me devroie bien pleindre| sans retraire,|
Car quant premiers me vint enamourer,
Onques en moy hardement demourer
Ne vost laissier de ma| dolour retraire;|
Mais ce qui plus me faisoit resjoïr
Et qui espoir me donnoit de joïr
En regardent, sans plus di|re ne faire,|
Fist departir de moy; puis en prison
Elle me mist, où j’euç ma livrison
D’ardans desirs qui si mestient con|traire|
Que, se un tout seul plus que droit en eüsse,
Je sçay de voir que vivre ne peüsse
Sans le secours ma dame debon|naire|
Qui m’a de ci, sans morir, respité.
Et c’est bien drois, car douçour en pité
Et courtoisie ont en li leur re|pai|re.
a1|
a1|
a2|
a2|
a3|a4 a3|
b1|
b1|
b2|
b2|
b3|b4 b3|
It is not surprising that upper-voice structures should conform to upper-voice texts. But
it is worth noting that they do conform to some structure, especially given the normative
discourse that has traditionally surrounded the relationship between upper-voice and tenor
form. With the redeined taleae, line- and section-ends are aligned, at least in the triplum,
so that every shifted talea coincides with a line-end, and the text-setting is regular throughout.
But are these structures limited to the upper voices? What, in fact, is the tenor’s
form? Looking again at the color as notated, it appears that where repetition occurs—and
where the “extra bits” lie—is entirely in the eye of the beholder. There are certainly three
cycles of a pattern there, and these are joined by two surplus notated breves and two breves’
rest. But whether these extra “bits” fall at the beginning, at the end, or are split (the breves
at the beginning and the rests at the end; one of the breves at the beginning with the rests,
the other at the end, etc.) is in no way indicated (See Figure 3.20).
164
|talea 1
a)
b)
c)
d)
|talea 1
|talea 1
|talea 1
|talea 2
|talea 2
|talea 2
|talea 2
|talea 3
|
|talea 3
|
|talea 3
|talea 3
|
|
:||:
:||:
:||:
:||:
Figure 3.20: Four ways of dividing the tenor of S’il estoit/S’amours (M6)
The decision to call the beginning of the tenor the beginning of talea 1 is arbitrary.
No matter how we divide the tenor, some part of it must be external to a fully repetitive
scheme. I suggest that the upper-voice rhythmic congruences and phrase-ends clarify the
tenor’s structure. A shift indeed takes place between the irst and second part of the motet.
In section a, the taleae begin on the rests following note 2 of the color, and the irst note to
sound within a talea is note 3 (Figure 3.20, option b). In section b, the taleae begin on note
2 of the color (Figure 3.20, option c). Never, it seems, do they begin on note 1.104
* * *
It should by now be evident why upper-voice structures must feature in the discourse
on text-music relations in motets. Several of the analyses discussed above, most notably
Boogaart’s, take the conlict between tenor and upper-voice periods as a starting point.
Perceiving an imbalance that stemmed from the tenor’s mensural transformation, Boogaart
104
Another work in which it might be worth asking where the tenor taleae begin and end is Machaut’s He!
Mors/Fine amour (M3), which is usually understood as having three full and a fourth partial talea in each
half. Thomas Brown’s careful analysis singles out several features which hint at shifted upper-voice periods,
including the overlapping of textual units with tenor taleae. Brown further argues that He! Mors/Fine amour
is based on Flos/Celsa; if so, then his model’s intricate upper-voice structure might well have led Machaut to
construct something similar. See “Flos/Celsa and Machaut’s Motets,” 39–52.
165
has made a compelling case for a kind of imaginary balance that represents the elusiveness
of the beloved in courtly discourse. The possibility and justiication of such a balance, created by extending the lengths of taleae to 18 breves and allowing them to overlap, is suggested to him by the ideas of deiciency and excess, thematized in the upper voices. In my
analysis nine breves stand outside of the motet’s two isorhythmic regions, and these can
certainly be read as a comment on the idea of “too much.” But perhaps we need to look to
the last two syllables of “repaire” for equality. If we begin with the upper voices, we ind not
only that the motet is balanced as it stands, but that, in retrospect, the tenor structures are
not at all in conlict with those of the triplum and motetus, for which 15-breve periods are
in fact suficient.
In a sense, S’il estoit/S’amours serves as something of a negative example within the
broader frame of this study, since a focus on upper-voice structures here has resulted in
perhaps less rather than more space for hermeneutic interpretation. By relaxing a perceived
tension between the tenor and upper voices I have made the story shorter, probably less
interesting, and certainly less inclusive of upper-voice ideas. And yet it is important to
establish the potential independence of upper-voice structures, whether they signify or not.
Any analytical stance must place some kinds of information in the foreground at the expense of others, and thus may close certain hermeneutic windows while opening new paths
for interpretation. The alternative is an analytical framework so broad that every detail is
signiicant—a dangerous foundation for interpretive endeavors, where too many open windows risk a hermeneutic draft.
In Chapter 4 and, to a greater extent, in Chapters 5 and 6 I will show that attention to upper-voice structures can in fact create larger spaces of discourse that bind music
166
and text in striking ways. This will be particularly true for Vitry’s In virtute/Decens and Cum
statua/Hugo, whose upper-voice structures bear a certain resemblance to S’il estoit/S’amours
but exhibit even more formal fragmentation without recourse to tenor diminution or renotation.
CONCLUSIONS: INDEPENDENT UPPER-VOICE STRUCTURES IN THE ARS NOVA MOTET
A list of motets whose upper voices contain periods which are different in length or
position from their tenor taleae is given as Table 3.2. Twelve of these are discussed above
in varying degrees of detail; Machaut’s Hélas/Corde mesto (M10) and Amours/Faus Samblant (M15) will feature in the next chapter. Two more—In virtute/Decens and Cum statua/
Hugo—will be the foci of detailed inquiries in Chapters 5 and 6. What can we say about
this list of pieces as a group?
The list includes fourteen works—a signiicant percentage of the ninety or so ars
nova motets.105 It thus serves to reinforce Bent’s argument that the composers of “isorhythmic” works cultivated variety.106 Chronologically these works fall within what we might
think of as a “middle” or “later” Ars nova, represented by Machaut’s motets (irst redaction
c. 1356), the Trémoille index (dated 1376) and the Ivrea codex, which Kügle has dated to
the 1380s but whose repertory he characterizes as “frozen in 1359.”107
105
For a list of the motets and notes on this qualiied use of the label “ars nova,” see the “Catalog of Ars nova
Motets, their Sources, and Editions” at the end of this study.
106
“What is Isorhythm?,” 127.
107
The Manuscript Ivrea, 76.
167
TABLE 3.2: MOTETS IN WHICH UPPER-VOICE PERIODS DIFFER FROM THE TENOR TALEAE
Motet
Tribum/Quoniam (V3)
Vos/Gratissima (V7)
Cum statua/Hugo (V8)
Colla/Bona (V9)
In virtute/Decens
Flos/Celsa
Quant/Amour (M1)
Hareu/Helas (M10)
Hélas/Corde mesto (M12)
Amours/Faus Semblant (M15)
S’il estoit/S’amour (M6)
Qui/Ha! Fortune (M8)
Ida/Portio
Sub Arturo/Plebs
Composer
Vitry
Sources
Fauvel, Str, Rob, Bru 19606, Munich 31,
RosL
Vitry
Ivrea, Durham, CaB, Br5170, (Trémoïlle)
Vitry
Ivrea, CaB
Vitry
Ivrea, Trémoïlle, CaB, Apt16bis, Arr983,
Tarr(1), Tarr(2), WrocĆaw, (Str)
?Vitry
Ivrea, Paris 2444, Trémoïlle
?Vitry
Ivrea, CaB, Paris 2444, SL2211, Trémoïlle
Machaut
Machaut MSS
Machaut
Machaut MSS, Trémoïlle
Machaut
Machaut MSS
Machaut
Machaut MSS, Ivrea, Trémoïlle
Machaut
Machaut MSS
Machaut
Machaut MSS, Ivrea, Trémoïlle, CaB
Edigius
Ivrea, Chantilly, Str, (Trémoïlle)
John Aleyn Chantilly, Q15, Yox
There are two exceptions: Tribum/Quoniam is already present in Fauvel (c. 1317)
and is likely to be the earliest in the group. Sub Arturo/Plebs is a later work, present in the
Chantilly codex but not in Ivrea. That work’s shifting approach to upper-voice/tenor coordination is arguably the most complicated of the cases examined here. But by illustrating an
extreme it helps us to deine the ield. Ida/Portio, which also survives in later sources, nevertheless its more comfortably with the rest of the listed repertory, and its use of doubled-up
supertaleae in successive diminution sections connects it with bipartite works with doubled
taleae such as Vos/Gratissima and Hareu/Hélas.108 Overall, we can say that the group of mo-
108
The work’s composer, listed in Coussemaker’s copy of F-Sm 222 as Egidius de Pusiex, was identiied by Hoppin and Clercx as the priest and composer Egidius de Puisieus, who died in 1348; “Notes
biographiques,” 86.
168
tets which use upper-voice taleae different from their tenor taleae belongs to the middle or
later ars nova, and is perhaps contemporary with some of the works Kügle has identiied as
belonging to the “ars magis subtiliter ordinata.”109
Also notable is that the list of motets in Table 3.2 is comprised overwhelmingly of
works by Machaut and Vitry.110 Only the two latest motets are by others; the rest are split
evenly between the two most famous French composers of the century. Given the number
of anonymous works in the repertory, the possibility of this being random is small indeed.
Rather, it suggests that the construction of upper-voice taleae that do not coincide with
the building blocks of the tenor represent an advanced aspect of isorhythmic technique.
I have suggested above that supertaleae can help conirm the theory put forward by Busse
Berger that isorhythmic structures have mnemonic properties—because they can yield simpler shapes and help the composer deal with large numbers of taleae. By no means is this
intended to imply, however, that these structures were simple. It was, after all, a composer’s
109
Kügle, The Manuscript Ivrea, 140–6. Of the motets on the list Kügle identiies only Ida/Portio and
Amours/Faus Semblant (M15) as potential participant in this ars, which “was well established by the end
of the 1340s” (146). The latter is included in part because of its long taleae and complicated “network of
structural ambiguities” as revealed by the analyses of Bent and Brownlee (Bent, “Deception, Exegesis, and
Sounding Number” and Brownlee, “Machaut’s Motet 15”). By these measures one might also include Flos/
Celsa and the related Colla/Bona. As for Cum statua/Hugo, that work may well date from the 1340s (see note
on dating in Chapter 6), as may the similarly constructed In virtute/Decens.
110
Problems of attribution abound with respect to Vitry, but not for the works listed here. Tribum/Quoniam
has been irmly linked with Vitry based on a marginal comment in one of his books, as discovered by Wathey,
“Myth and Mythography,” 95–7 (see Chapter One). Vos/Gratissima is attributed to Vitry in the Quatuor principalia. Cum statua/Hugo includes the composer’s name in its triplum text, and Colla/Bona, long attributed to
Vitry on stylistic grounds, inds further support from the circulation of its text in manuscript anthologies
where it is combined in several ways with references to Cum statua/Hugo (Wathey, “The Motets of Philippe
de Vitry,” 141–2). In virtute/Decens has been attributed to Vitry by Leech-Wilkinson on stylistic grounds;
Leech-Wilkinson, Compositional Techniques, 190–96, “Related Motets,” 5–8, 18–19. I believe that the
similarities with Cum statua/Hugo discussed in Chapter 6 of the present study lend further weight to the
attribution. Flos/Celsa has been assigned to Vitry by Leech-Wilkinson and Kügle based on structural and
stylistic evidence; Leech-Wilkinson, “Related Motets,” 11; Kügle, The Manuscript Ivrea, 124–5.
169
decision to use a large number of tenor taleae, incorporate partial taleae, or choose colores
with numbers of notes that do not it easily into the projected talea length. No doubt Vitry
and Machaut made things “more dificult” for themselves, and this is not in conlict with the
idea of a mnemonic component, since there is ample evidence of subtle and complicated
texts being drafted on the wax tablets of the mind.
Perhaps what we see in this more advanced set of compositional choices is a kind of
experimentation—an outlet for creativity on the parts of Vitry and Machaut. Encountering a variety of forms is perhaps less surprising in Machaut, whose motets have received
more individual attention from analysts; Bent’s and Boogaart’s work especially has underlined the extent to which each of Machaut’s motets is an individual creation. The prevailing
view of Vitry has been rather different. Reading the Règles de la Seconde Rhétorique perhaps
a bit too literally when it tells us (in a poetic context, incidentally) that Vitry discovered
“la manière des motès,” we have tended to see uniformity rather than diversity within his
works:111 Thus was Daniel Leech-Wilkinson’s impression after examining tenor color and
talea design in a number of Vitry’s works:
It seems that, at the very least, this complex of relationships [between taleae and colores] shows the composer tending to produce similar solutions to
similar compositional situations; and one would probably be justiied in suggesting a signiicant degree of plain borrowing. Indeed, it is not impossible
that Vitry set out in each new work to re-use as much as possible from his
earlier compositions. As a pioneer in a new style he may even have felt that
this was the safest way to proceed.112
This makes a rather cowardly pioneer out of Vitry. But it is also a picture developed largely
from examination of tenor structures. Attention to upper-voice units rather differentiates
these works, showing how, in at least six securely attributed motets, Vitry has created a form
111
Emphasis mine. Langlois, ed., Recueil d’arts de seconde rhétorique, 12.
112
Leech-Wilkinson, “Related Motets,” 2–3.
170
unlike any other in the repertory, though sharing some similarity of approach with his other
motets and with works by Machaut. In a further two motets, Firmissime/Adesto and Douce/
Garison, Vitry used an unusual approach to tenor construction sometimes called “pseudodiminution.” In these bipartite works a second color uses shorter taleae than the irst, hinting
at diminution. But these shorter taleae are in fact freely re-rhythmicized.113 This practice,
which we have already encountered in Vos/Gratissima, is also limited to Vitry and Machaut,
and further complicates the notion that Vitry’s motets it into some common mold.114 If,
as Gace de la Buigne wrote in his Roman des Deduis, Vitry was indeed the composer “qui
mieulx ist motets que nulz hom,” he earned this praise by the variety, rather than the monotony of his production.115
But quite apart from their contributions to our understanding of Vitry’s output, the
motets listed in Table 3.2 should cause us to question the account of motet composition
we ind in Egidius de Murino. Murino’s instructions are explicitly aimed at beginners, and
leave little space for the kind of planning that would produce the structures discussed above,
unless we relegate all of it to the realm of “materia.” If this kind of detail is less likely to be
emulated in anonymous works, it is perhaps because it required some extra skill or a different idea of how motets are composed. But to assume more generally that a motet composer
would begin composition by selecting and arranging a tenor and only then move upward,
writing his texts in a inal compositional stage after all formal decisions had been made
113
Firmissime/Adesto survives anonymously in Fauvel, but is sometimes thought to be by Vitry—it is edited
by Schrade with the Fauvel motets with a bracketed attribution to Vitry, was de-ascribed by Roesner along
with the other Fauvel motets, and re-ascribed by Leech-Wilkinson; Roesner, Avril and Regalado, Introduction to Le Roman de Fauvel, 38–42; Leech-Wilkinson, “Related Motets,” 298–9. Douce/Garison is identiied as a work of Vitry’s in la Buigne, Le Roman des Deduis, 315 (see Chapter One).
114
Machaut uses pseudo-diminution in the second part of Tous corps/De souspirant (M2).
115
la Buigne, Le Roman des Deduis, 116.
171
limits our understanding of the compositional process to only those simpler works, and
indeed means that we might miss subtleties such as those detailed here.116 The creation of
texts must often have happened at a much earlier stage in the compositional process, since
upper-voce musical structures often amplify the poetic forms of upper-voice texts.
More broadly, motets with supertaleae challenge received notions about the role of
the upper voices and the tenor in the construction of isorhythmic motets, since the forms
of these pieces are represented more meaningfully by upper-voice periods than by tenor taleae. Of course, these two are not unrelated: in cases where a very short tenor talea is doubled
to make a longer upper-voice period the result is certainly neither dramatic nor particularly
hard to explain. But even those simple examples, and certainly the more complex structures
of Colla/Bona, Flos/Celsa, and S’il estoit/S’Amours belie the cliché that isorhythmic organization in the upper voices exists “to emphasize the recurring rhythmic patterns in the
tenor.”117 In some cases, it seems, the tenor is a building block in the isorhythmic scheme
laid out by the upper voices.
116
See, for example, the compositional order proposed in Busse Berger, Medieval Music, 232.
117
Burkholder, Grout, & Palisca, A History of Western Music, 121.
172
CHAPTER FOUR
Voice-Crossings and Fortuna in Machaut’s Motets
T
HE UPPER-VOICE TALEAE
discussed in Chapter 3 represent a mode of dividing motets
into units beyond those dictated by the tenor’s rhythmic cycles that nevertheless de-
pends on the repetition of rhythm. But rhythmic repetition is by no means the only way of
segmenting motets, and it is far from the most audible. In the works analyzed in this chapter, range rather than rhythm is manipulated when the usual contrapuntal order between
triplum and motetus is reversed. Alternations between this novel texture and the more usual registral order (triplum-motetus-tenor) create audible subdivisions within compositions
which are directly linked to the presence of Fortune in the upper-voice-texts of each motet.
* * *
Fortune is a ickle goddess. To be scorned for her unfairness, to be berated for her
deceit—these are her functions within the French lyric tradition, where her name almost
always appears in the context of a lover’s complaint. How strange it seems, then, to hear the
deity praised as an ally by the motetus of Machaut’s Maugré mon cuer/De ma dolour (M14):
“[I am] a friend of Fortune to my satisfaction” the happy lover proclaims.1 And as if to
ensure that we do not miss this extraordinary admission in the motetus, the triplum voice
drops down from its customary position, allowing the normally lower motetus to sound at
the top of the texture as though carried up by its jubilation (see Example 4.1, where the
voice crossing is marked with arrows). A subversion of the poetic norm is thus accompanied
A longer version of this chapter is published as Zayaruznaya, “‘She has a wheel that turns…’: Crossed and
Contradictory Voices in Machaut’s Motets,” Early Music History 28 (2009): 185–240.”
1
l. 6, “Et de Fortune amis et à mon gré.” Full texts and translations for Motet 14 are found in Appendix
4B.
173
by a reversal in contrapuntal procedure. Signiicantly, these unusual circumstances coincide also with a moment of marked intertextual opposition: while the motetus brags on, the
normally higher triplum, here relegated to the middle of the texture, complains of the usual
courtly state of things: tears, sadness, and futile efforts. What does Machaut’s use of a voice
crossing at this contradictory moment signify?
Triplum: “[not a day which did not] pass in sadness and in
tears, illed with rejection to increase my efforts and
counter me.”
Motetus: “and a friend of Fortune to
my satisfaction”
Example 4.1: Maugré/De ma dolour (M14), mm. 49–59
To answer this question it is necessary to examine Machaut’s use of crossed voices in
his motets. Against a backdrop of “normal” usage, I have found several remarkable passages
that cue a network of ideas connected with Fortune, including circularity, reversal, contra-
174
diction, and falseness.2 In this context, Helas/Corde mesto (M12) will emerge as the work
in which Machaut’s use of voice crossings to comment upon Fortuna’s actions is at its most
systematic and accessible. I will then turn to Amours/Faus samblant (M15), which cleverly
re-uses and re-interprets some of the poetic and compositional devices developed in Helas/
Corde mesto. Finally, I will return to the above-quoted passage and to Maugré/De ma dolour,
in which Fortuna’s presence is more subtly signaled, but no less pervasive.
* * *
The question of voice crossings in Machaut’s motets has rarely been addressed by
scholars.3 The “voice-exchange” technique of earlier repertories was generally abandoned
after 1300, giving way to the gradual registral separation of the upper voices that produced
the tenor—motetus—triplum arrangement found in many 14th-century motets and discussed by the theorists of the time.4 It is often true that a motetus is, as Ernest Sanders
2
The theme of Fortune in Machaut’s motets has been most fully engaged by Jacques Boogaart in his 2001
dissertation, where he argues that a ‘Fortune’ rhythmic pattern is used in motets 8, 12, 14, and 15 to
symbolize the “instability and unreliability personiied in the igures of Fortune or Faus Semblant,” see “‘O
series summe rata’,” 130–47, 491–3. Anne Walters Robertson also discusses representations of Fortuna in
Motets 8 and 12; Guillaume De Machaut and Reims, 132–7, 156–9. Sylvia Huot touches upon Motet 12 in
“Patience in Adversity,” 233–4. For a poetic analysis of ive ballades by Machaut in which lovers complain
about Fortune, see Johnson, Poets as Players, 41–56. Elizabeth Eva Leach has analyzed two Machaut ballades dealing with Fortuna and two related anonymous ballades preserved in the Reina codex in “Fortune’s
Demesne,” 47–9. A related body of scholarship is that treating the role of Fortuna in motets from the
interpolated Roman de Fauvel. On this, see especially M. Bent, “Fauvel and Marigny,” 35–52.
3
In his discussion of the complementary relationship between Motets 12 and 15, Boogaart has compared
the registral exchange between the upper voices until the midpoint of Motet 12 with the division into halves
of Motet 15 by means of isorhythmic structure; see “‘O Series Summe Rata’,” 492. Boogaart also discusses
a highly idiosyncratic passage in Motet 17 where the Triplum is the lowest of all three voices; see “Encompassing Past and Present,” 49. Finally, Bent describes a moment in Motet 9 where low notes on signiicant
words in the triplum “sometimes allow the motetus to soar above it”; see “Words and Music,’ 376.
4
For example, Egidius de Murino identiies the order of composition for a motet as tenor, then contratenor
(if there is one), then a third voice “above [the tenor].” He also gives instructions about how to compose a
type of motet in which the tenor lies above the motetus, but where the relationship between the two newly
composed voices is unaltered: “make the triplum concord above the motetus as well as you know how and are
able to”; see Leech-Wilkinson, “Compositional Procedure,” 21, 23.
175
deines it, the “voice immediately above the tenor.”5 And yet, Machaut’s irst 20 Motets
contain some 165 instances in which the motetus sings above the triplum and tenor—a
state to which I will from now on refer as “voice crossing.”6 Together, these passages account
for approximately 17% of the combined length of the motets (Figure 4.1 represents these
voice crossings by dark shading for Motets 1-20). Indeed, such a statistic is not dificult to
believe of voices that are often close and sometimes identical in range (range for each of the
irst 20 motets is indicated in Figure 4.2).
But attributing these crossings to the similar ranges of the voices does not tell the
whole story. A comparison of Figures 4.1 and 4.2 reveals that closeness of range does not
appear to be a primary determining factor of the likelihood of voices crossing. For instance:
the upper voices of M6 and M10 have nearly identical ranges, but cross three times more
often in the former than in the latter. The same situation exists with M3 and M5. In other
words, there is no strong correlation between the closeness of the upper voices in range and
the frequency of their crossing. This would suggest that Machaut’s local control of range
is at least partially independent of a given part’s ambitus in relation to other voices in the
same work.
5
Sanders, “Motetus.”
6
Boogaart’s term “registral exchange” is useful here as well, but I want to emphasize the contrapuntal act of
crossing as opposed to the exchange that results vertically from this contrapuntal act. I exclude the last three
motets because they belong to a different stylistic period and intellectual sphere. It is also worth noting that
none of Machaut’s motets belongs to the small group of ars nova motets with a central tenor, which include
Tribum/Quoniam and Apollinis/Zodiacum.
176
Figure 4.1: Voice Crossings between Triplum and Motetus in Machaut’s Motets 1–20
177
Figure 4.2: Range of Upper Voices in Motets 1–20
Scrutiny of speciic crossings conirms the intentional nature of the device. Consider the passage from Dame/Fins (M11) reproduced as Example 4.2. The crossing in mm.
25–6 is only made possible because of the downward fall of a ifth in the triplum (indicated
in the example by diagonal lines between the notes). This sudden change in ambitus allows
a remarkable imitative passage to occur, with Motetus repeating triplum’s bars 23–5 as its
own 25–7. When this imitation has run its course, the motetus leaps down a ifth in bar 27,
allowing the triplum to continue the imitation with its a’–g’–a’.7 Another crossing follows in
measure 28. Neither of these crossings is necessitated contrapuntally, nor do they result in
smooth vocal lines; rather, they are deliberately punctuated (and caused) by unusually wide
leaps in both voices.
7
This passage attracted the attention of Gustave Reese in his search for early examples of imitation. He
calls it a “somewhat…effective” attempt on Machaut’s part, since the imitation is “obscured…by the preixing, to the melody of the second voice, of a motive that does not belong to the phrase”; Music in the Middle
Ages, 355. In fact, the voice crossing serves to conceal the “extra” motive (motetus, m. 24).
178
Example 4.2: Dame/Fins (M11), breves 23–28
There are only two other melodic leaps of a ifth in this motet, also between d’ and
a’, and they too serve to facilitate transitions between crossed and un-crossed voices. In
Motet 11, then, crossings between triplum and motetus are achieved only by means of large
intervals. If Machaut had simply re-distributed the melodic material to avoid registral exchange and allow for smoother melodic lines, the “sonic image” of the piece would not be
radically different—the same notes would sound, though they would be texted differently.
But this has not been done. The motet is written with crossings, and the conclusion must be
that in this case they are deliberate.8
Bar 28 of Example 4.2 deserves a second glance because it is typical for Machaut’s
voice crossings. Indeed, approximately 72% of the crossings in his motets begin with the
start of a poetic line, whether in triplum or motets, and last no more than a few breves. The
purpose of these crossings is probably to draw the listener’s attention to the less audible
motetus as it is about to begin a new phrase.9 which I believe to be the intelligibility of the
motetus text, are discussed in Chapter 2, above. But what is signiicant here is that, regard8
In other genres, the use of voice crossings may be less regular. In the ballades, Leach has discussed
Machaut’s use of crossings to avoid awkward contrapuntal situations; see, “Interpretation and Counterpoint,” 329–34. See also Bain, “Theorizing the Cadence.”
9
See the discussion of selective and switched attention in Chapter Two.
179
less of their purposes, Machaut’s voice crossing practices are extremely regular. Against the
background of these typical crossings, certain remarkable passages in his works come into
greater relief.
So let us return to Figure 4.1. Even a passing glance reveals that the crossing from
M14 given in Example 4.1 is noteworthy. At eight breves, it is among the longest in the motets. Furthermore, it is conspicuously placed, ending just before the midpoint of the piece
(the vertical dotted line in the igure marks the midpoints). But nothing speaks as clearly
for the purposefulness of Machaut’s use of voice crossing as Helas/Corde mesto (M12). As
Figure 4.1 shows, that work’s two halves employ two entirely different vocal hierarchies (an
edition of Helas/Corde mesto is given in Appendix 4C). In its irst half, there are only six or
seven breves in which the motetus is in its customary position below the triplum; the rest
of the time, the voices are crossed. But after the midpoint, there are no more than ive or
six breves of crossings; elsewhere, the motetus is in its usual place “immediately above the
tenor.”
What could have motivated Machaut to compose such counterpoint? The crossing
of voices in Helas/Corde mesto cannot be merely the by-product of voices that are too close
in range, since this would result in crossings throughout the piece, and not just in the irst
half. Moreover, the crossings that dominate the Motet’s irst 80 breves are entirely inconsistent with Machaut’s usual practice, being much longer than usual and coinciding only
rarely with the beginnings of poetic lines. These circumstances, combined with the careful
placement of the point of un-crossing at the midpoint of the piece, speak of a deliberately
conceived and executed authorial plan—as central to the form of the piece as the tenor’s
color and talea.
180
That midpoints are important in Machaut’s musical and poetic works is often
stressed,10 but a midpoint as starkly articulated as that in Helas/Corde mesto is hard to ind.
Is there anything in the text to warrant such an unusual manipulation of the musical texture?
THE MOTETUS CORDE MESTO CANTANDO CONQUEROR
Helas/Corde mesto is unusual in Machaut’s oeuvre for mixing upper-voice texts in
two languages: its triplum is French; its motetus, Latin (see Appendix 4A for full texts
and translations).11 This disparity in language is matched by another in poetic voice. The
triplum keeps to a stylized courtly register, presenting us with the familiar igure of a lover
whose lady ignores his affection and suffering. The Latin motetus, however, does not it
comfortably into the conventions of any one poetic register. In the irst stanza the speaker
seems to be a usual courtly lover complaining of his lady’s indifference to his suit, the second stanza represents a generic complaint against Fortune’s unfairness, and by the third
stanza the lover has waxed religious, turning to prayer and penitence “that to me, cleansed
of the ilth of guilt by forgiveness, at my death may glory be given.” As a whole, then, the
10
The importance of the midpoint to Machaut’s music has been investigated on several levels of magnitude.
In the ordering of the motets, Thomas Brown has noticed parallels between the midpoint speech of Amours
in the Rose, and the middle lines (12–13) of the motetus of M10. Placing the midpoint of the sequence at
the “silence between M10 and M11,” Brown shows a mirrored structure in the ordering of Motets 1–20; see
“Another Mirror for Lovers,” 128–32. Focusing instead on the irst seventeen motets as an ordered unit,
Robertson has argued for M9 as an important midpoint, with its fera pessima (most evil beast) analogous
to the minotaur at the center of a maze; Guillaume De Machaut and Reims, 168–74. In individual pieces
of music, the midpoint is sometimes marked by textual or isorhythmic means. For the former, see Brown,
“Another Mirror for Lovers,” 126; For the latter, Boogaart, “O series summe rata,” 492. In the Mass, Owen
Rees points to “an aurally striking emphasis upon the midpoint” of the Kyrie I, Christe, Agnus I and Agnus
II; see “Machaut’s Mass and Sounding Number,” 103. Some important caveats are offered by David Maw in
“Machaut and the ‘Critical’ Phase,” 285–6.
11
Machaut’s other bilingual motet is Quant vraie/O series (M17).
181
motetus text represents a sublimation of love into purely religious fervor.12 Now, we should
not be surprised to ind amorous desire transformed into something more noble and lasting
in Machaut’s poetry. Sylvia Huot sees the “elaboration of a love independent of desire” as “a
hallmark of Machaut’s poetry.”13 However, the third stanza of the motetus goes rather too
far. Instead of the usual re-painting of the lady as eternally available to the lover’s imagination, though unyielding to his desire, the text rejects her outright. This kind of sublimation
is much rarer in Machaut’s work, and indeed Douglas Kelly wrote that it was represented
only by a solitary ballade.14
If stanzas 1 and 2 are part of the usual courtly register, then Stanza 3’s sudden shift
seems inexplicable. But does the shift occur there? Or is there something in the middle
stanza to help explain the ultimate rejection of fin’ amors? The topic of the second stanza
has been identiied by Huot as “the implicit allegorization of the courtly lady as Fortune.”15
That is, where in the irst stanza the focus is on the protagonist’s futile servitude, the second
stanza addresses—not the lady, but the goddess:
In derisum
Das arrisum
Et obrisum
Tollis risum
Fortuna te ponis.
Expers rationis,
Malis; sed a bonis
Et abis cum donis.
[You put yourself to scorn, o Fortune:
You give favor, without sense,
And gold, to evil men; but from the good
You take laughter away, and depart with your gifts.]16
12
For another detailed analysis of this motetus, see Boogaart, “O series summe rata,” 102–9, 37–40.
13
“Reading the Lies of Poets,” 36. On mixing the erotic and sacred realms, see also ead., “Guillaume de
Machaut,” 47-69.
14
Kelly was perhaps not including the motet texts when he wrote that “in only one poem, an isolated ballade,
does Machaut [move] from courtly love to a speciically religious sentiment,” Medieval Imagination104n40.
15
“Reading Across Genres,” 5.
16
I am grateful to Rob Getz for his translation of this motetus.
182
Is Fortune identical to the lady implied in stanza one? It is possible to read the text
that way. However, the middle stanza can also be read as separate both from what came before it and what comes after, if we consider its context not courtly, but Boethian.
The inluence of Boethius and his Consolation of Philosophy on Machaut’s work generally, and his motet texts speciically, is well known and extensive, and particularly remarked upon in this motetus.17 And indeed, the Consolation, with its insistence that those
suffering injustices should turn to God, who “orders all things and directs them towards
goodness” despite sometime appearances to the contrary is a comfortable it with the change
of focus that takes place in the text’s second stanza.18
The three stanzas of motetus live in three different realms: courtly—philosophical—religious. And it is philosophy’s Consolation that creates the shift from the irst to the
third. We leave the dame behind in the irst stanza, only to encounter her much-less-nice
allegorical twin in the second. And if there were to be a lady in the inal stanza, perhaps it
would be Our Lady. Fortune, a goddess but a disreputable one, thus mediates between the
earthly and the divine.19
17
Indeed, Machaut’s reliance on Boethius is self-declared—a passage in the Remede de Fortune reminds
the reader that “Boeces si nous raconte/Q’on ne doit mie fair conte/De ses anuis,” l. 982–4, Machaut, Jugement and Remede, 222. Huot treats the courtly transformation of Boethius in Machaut’s dits in “Guillaume
de Machaut.” Boogaart points to Boethius’s panegyric of Love in book II, m. 8 as a rhetorical model for
the triplum of Motet 17; “Encompassing Past and Present,” 42–4. Robertson also links Motet 17 with
Boethius: Guillaume de Machaut and Reims, 174–5. On boethian inluence in this motetus in particular, see
Huot, “Patience in Adversity,” 233–34, and Robertson, Guillaume de Machaut and Reims, 156–57.
18
Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, 109. For ease of reference I use a widely available edition of
the Latin Consolation. However, it is likely that Machaut would have encountered it in the French: there are
no fewer than 13 medieval French translations of the Consolatio surviving, of which 11 are from the 13th
and 14th centuries. Of these, the most famous is by Jean de Meun; see Kaylor, The Medieval Consolation of
Philosophy, Chapter 4.
19
This mediation often leads to her degradation, but in at least two isolated cases it causes her exaltation
and identiication with divine Providence; see Hunt, “The Christinization of Fortune,” 99–100, 105–13.
183
SINGING FROM FORTUNE’S WHEEL
Behind every medieval description of Fortune lies the image of the tool through
which she interferes in human affairs: her ever-spinning wheel. Its four inhabitants articulate the cardinal axes of the wheel: at the top is placed a king, labelled “regno” (“I reign”); at
the bottom, a powerless fool or drunkard “sine regno”— powerless. On the left and rising to
the top is the aspirant who will reign, “regnabo,” and on the right, falling towards the bottom
is the has-been, “regnavi.” That the wheel is symbolic is clear; its inevitable turning means
that the felicity of those on it is forever in a state of lux. And while Boethius and those
following in his tradition often draw upon the metaphor’s explanatory power, there is also a
physical aspect to the turning of the wheel: the vertical motion, in real space, of those on it.
It is this motion that is on the mind of the narrator of the Roman de la Rose after Jealousy
has imprisoned his beloved Fair Welcome: “She has a wheel that turns, and when she wishes
she raises the lowest up to the summit, and with a turn plunges him who was on top of the wheel
into the mud.”20
In fact, these words are an apt description of a voice crossing, where a normally low
voice is raised to the highest place, while the highest voice is plunged downwards. The image of Fortune’s wheel aligns happiness and sadness with the vertical extremes of the circle
itself, and the words of the motetus in the central stanza echo this alignment: The strongly
articulated musical mid-point (marked “|” below and in breves 80–81 of the edition in Appendix 4C) is centered between “malis” (the evil men) and “bonis” (the good). And because
of the voice crossing, “evil” is indeed raised up, while “good” is sung at the motetus’s normal
range, below the newly restored triplum (compare bars 80 and 82-3).
20
Lorris and Meun, The Romance of the Rose, 87; emphasis mine.
184
Meanwhile, Fortune herself is close at hand. She appears twice in the text, once before and once after the midpoint, irst helping the mali, then hindering the boni:
In derisum
Das arrisum
Et obrisum
Tollis risum
Spernens cece
Fortuna te ponis.
Expers rationis,
Malis; sed | a bonis
Et abis cum donis.
Fortune tedia
I suggest that the extended crossing and uncrossing of voices in Hélas/Corde mesto
actually depicts the effect of Fortuna upon her victims and thus achieves a musical representation of the goddess’s spinning wheel. The moment of un-crossing is perfectly centered
between the “evil” men whom she has placed at the top, and the “good,” who are relegated
to the bottom. In the irst stanza, while she has inluence over the speaker, his world is, as it
were, inverted, and it is only with his refutation of Fortune’s claim on him that the speaker
can see things as they are. The motet stages the change from a world controlled by Fortune
to one that is free of her wickedness by returning to its own natural state (triplum above
motetus) in the center of the pivotal Boethian stanza.
Can we not see in all this the lover, sitting on Fortuna’s wheel and singing of his
woes, as he and his song are raised up to the highest level, only to be plunged downwards
into the mud? The singer is doubly unlucky: unlucky in having the woes of which he sings,
and unlucky in that the very notes of his song seems to be controlled by Fortune: while
speaking about her unfairness, he inds himself subject to it; while singing that the good are
thrown down, he and his voice are cast into the abyss.
Just such a scene—that of the lover sitting on Fortune’s wheel—is depicted in the
famous illuminated miniature that accompanies Machaut’s Remede de Fortune in Machaut
Manuscript C. While “the lover composes a complainte about Fortune and her wheel” in the
185
top frame of the image, the contents of his complainte play out in the bottom frame (see
Figure 4.3).21
Figure 4.3: The lover composes a complainte about Fortune and her wheel
(Machaut MS C, fol. 30v)
21
“Comment l’Amant fait une complainte de Fortune et de sa roe.”
186
Here, Fortune cranks a wooden gear which causes her own wheel to turn. The machine is at once fantastical and practical, perhaps reminiscent of a real Fortune’s wheel built
for clerical or courtly entertainment and apparently giving the goddess a 4:3 mechanical
advantage.22 In addition to the rare iconography of the gears, another departure from the
usual awaits the viewer in the person representing “regno” on top of the wheel. Though usually depicted as a crowned king, the igure here wears a small pink cap. As Dominic Leo has
shown, this garment is rare in 14th-century iconography and seems in the Machaut manuscripts to be reserved for the author and his lady.23
The complainte being illustrated, Tels rit au main qui au soir pleure, is a discursive tourde-force whose 576 lines in 36 strophes focus obsessively on Fortune.24 Though eventually the tone settles down into a courtly lover’s complaint, the irst strophe is clerical in tone,
focusing on the character and habits of Fortune. Here, the action of turning dominates the
text. The use of “—ourne” as one of the strophe’s two rhymes echoes that choice, causing
the sound as well as the sense of the phrase to turn constantly:
Car Fortune tout ce deveure
Quant elle tourne
Qui n’atent mie qu’il ajourne
Pour tourner; qu’elle ne sejourne,
Ains tourne retourne et bestourne
[Fortune does all this harm as she turns her wheel,
and she doesn’t wait for daybreak to turn it; she doesn’t stop,
but turns it, turns it some more, and turns it upside down]25
22
See Nelson, “Mechanical Wheels of Fortune,” 227.
23
Leo, “Looking at Illuminated Machaut Manuscripts.”
24
The complainte’s structure and contents are treated in more detail in Chapter 6.
25
ll. 911–915, Machaut, Jugement and Remede, 218–9.
187
The musical setting highlights the “-ourne” rhyme-sounds and adds its own circularity: the irst appearance of “tourne,” (in “et mal l’atourne”) coincides with a repeat, and
thus leads immediately to a return to the beginning (Example 4.3, longae 15–17). Such
emphasis is no accident in the important irst stanza of the complainte, and speaks to Machaut’s tendency to foreground this aspect of the goddess’s character.26
Example 4.3: The Lover’s complainte about Fortune—irst stanza
On the other side of the parchment page (in MS C) the image echoes this arrangement.27 Representing the contents of the complainte, it shows us the lover, and therefore the
singer, momentarily perched on top of the wheel. I picture the singer situated exactly thus
within the imaginary world of Hélas/Corde mesto: as Fortuna’s wheel goes round, his notes
follow suit, their pitch at the mercy of a sort of allegorical Doppler effect.
26
The choice may seem like an obvious one, but there are other possible loci of attention, such as Fortune’s
embodiment of opposite states, or her falseness—qualities discussed in later stanzas of the complainte.
27
In fact, the dark image bleeds through considerably, which adds to an effect of unity between the depiction of the creation of the complainte, and that piece itself. The irst appearance of “tourne” is in fact overlapped with the top of the wheel, and with the lover—a fortuitous coincidence.
188
But if in one sense the structure of Hélas/Corde mesto depicts the effect of a spin of
Fortuna’s wheel, in another it depicts that wheel itself by invoking circular imagery. There are
several contemporary precedents for connecting music and the visual. Guillaume tells us in
his Prologue that “Musique est une science.”28 Not only can it morally inluence the hearer
in an Aristotelian manner, it can also have visible manifestations: “ce sont miracles apertes/
Que Musique fait.”29 The circle is inherent in the name of the rondeau, a relationship which
Machaut underlines in his famous Ma fin est mon commencement et mon commencement est
ma fin. Though the words describe the retrograde canon that forms the piece, they are also
a riddle that has a circle as its answer—any point on a circle is its end and its beginning.
The analogy of 14th-century musical forms to geometric patterns is evocatively
summarized by Daniel Poirion:
the formal structure [of the formes fixes] provides the language with a parallel
to the system of the universe. The ballad looks like a trefoil… the rondeau
has a small circle inscribed around a larger one; the virelai has three circles
bound together… the motet, which distributes text among different levels, or we
could say different spheres… [has] the story of the lover circling about a religious
prayer... The polyphony relects the cosmos’ hierarchy, with its homocentric
spheres. Man himself is subject to similar movements.30
In other words, the circular movement of the heavens is mirrored in man’s trajectory through
a motet. As he circles around its sacred tenor, his motion might well trace out the outlines
of a ruthlessly turning wheel.
Is a listener meant to see a circle in his mind’s eye while listening to such a piece?
It could certainly be part of the experience. Right around this time—in the irst half of
the 14th century—visualization seems to have emerged as a new and persistent mode of
28
Line 199; Machaut, The Fountain of Love, 12–3.
29
Ibid., lines 259–260 (pp. 16–17), emphasis mine.
30
Poirion, “The Imaginary Universe,” 199, emphasis mine.
189
cognition. Johan Huizinga already saw the importance of this change, noting that “the basic characteristic of the late medieval mind is its predominantly visual nature,” though he
characteristically linked this tendency “to explain images through images, and to hold up
mirrors to mirrors” with “the atrophy of the mind.”31 More recent studies have celebrated
the change, connecting it instead with broader developments in quantitative reasoning,
painting, and composition.32 And as I have argued in Chapter Three, some motets seem to
have had shapes for their creators. Others, like In virtute/Decens (which will be the focus of
Chapter Five), were clearly intended to evoke colorful imagery of a different nature.
As visualize-able ideas go, Fortuna is perhaps one of the more attractive. The link
between the goddess and the notion of circular movement through different spheres is explicated by Boethius in the Consolatio. When the narrator asks Philosophy about the relationship between Fate (Fortune) and divine Providence, her answer is geometric in its
precision:
Imagine a set of revolving concentric circles. The inmost one comes closest
to the simplicity of the center, while forming itself a kind of center for those
set outside to revolve round… anything that joins itself to the middle circle
is brought close to simplicity, and no longer spreads out widely. In the same
way whatever moves any distance from the primary intelligence becomes
enmeshed in even stronger chains of Fate, and everything is the freer from
Fate the closer it seeks the center of things. The relationship between the
ever-changing course of Fate and the stable simplicity of providence is like
that between reasoning and understanding, between that which is coming
into being and that which is, between time and eternity, or between the moving circle and the still point in the middle.33
Here, circular imagery is used as an exemplum to explain a universe in which bad
31
Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, 248, 341.
32
On the relationship between visualization and the emergence of Quantiication, see Chapter 7, “Visualization: An Introduction” Crosby, The Measure of Reality. For Visualization as it applies to music, and
especially to 14th-century motets, see Berger, Medieval Music, 210–51.
33
Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, 105.
190
things often seem to happen to good people. The smaller circle represents divine providence, while the larger is the means by which Fortune inlicts pain on those who stray too
far from the divine “simplicity of the center.”
In light of all this, I suggest the motetus of Hélas/Corde mesto may be seen as moving
between Boethian spheres. Before the midpoint, Fortuna is being endured and implored by
the unfortunate narrator. While he is in her power, he necessarily inhabits Boethius’s outer
circle, where he is subject to the goddess’s ickle whims. But over the course of the work
Fortuna is spurned and nulliied by the speaker’s religiosity. Refuting the goddess’s claim
on him, the Lover is able to move inwards to the circle of Providence, where he is musically
and semantically closer to the motet’s sacred tenor.
Figure 4.4 diagrams the proposed reading which equates the voice crossings in Hélas/Corde mesto with shifts between Boethius’s concentric circles. Here, pitch and virtue ind
themselves on the same axis: the outermost circle, a space for the topmost voice, is Fortune’s
realm. The inner circle, providence’s domain, contains the middle voice. And the tenor, the
only voice in this motet which is unmoving in terms of its relative register, is in the center
of the circle, sharing space (appropriately, given its origin in chant) with divine simplicity.
Triplum does not participate as obviously in the shifts of meaning—its text remains courtly
throughout and therefore (presumably) in the realm of Fortune. However, Boogaart has
argued that the Triplum can in fact be split into two semantic halves:
In the triplum text of M12 a process can also be seen but here the argument
is divided in two contrasting halves. The text begins as a wrathful complaint
about the lady; in its second half, from l. 18, the lover accepts her harshness
and wishes nothing else.34
34
Boogaart, “O series summe rata,” 139.
191
Figure 4.4: The Voices of Motet 12 mapped on to Boethius’s Concentric Circles
Thus the triplum may be shifting spheres as well. Nearer to the center, he perceives
his lady’s unjust ways and complains bitterly. But after the shift, back in the realm of cruel
Fortune, he is forced to put up with ill treatment in silence. Both voices, then, undergo a
transition that is at once registral and philosophical.
If the analogy between circular spheres and pitch seems far-fetched, we need only
recall Baude Cordier’s Tout par compas. This famous rondeau is notated on two concentric
circular staves: the outer transmits a canon for the upper voices; the inner contains the
tenor. The arrangement of a smaller circle within a larger one is reminiscent of Boethius’s
description and also powerfully evokes (or provoked?) Poirion’s idea of the song as inhabiting several different spheres.
192
We see a similar arrangement in an earlier and less often-cited example of circular
notation, the canonic ballade En la maison Dedalus preserved in Berkeley’s Music MS 744
(See Figure 4.5).35 Whereas Tout par compas refers simply to a circle, “as beits a rondeau,”
this earlier ballade evokes Daedalus’s labyrinth, in which the singer’s lade is imprisoned:36
My lady is enclosed in
the house of Daedalus where
I cannot go, for I see no exit
or entry by means of which I
may commune with her comely form.
And thus I am compelled to stile
many a sigh, and languish in torment;
If I do not see her soon I must die. 37
The arrangement of the piece in the manuscript cleverly takes up the idea of the
labyrinth, so that the return to the beginning that a singer normally makes in a ballade is reconstrued as part of the labyrinth’s winding path.38 And given the dificulties in this outer
staff, it is easy to imagine that that singer’s striving is inwards, towards the bright red center,
where his love is presumably imprisoned. In fact, he almost gets there: since the canonic
upper voices do not it completely onto the outer circle only, they must move inwards for
their last line. In the inner circle they encounter the tenor, and share a staff with it for long
enough to say that the lover will die if he does not ind his lady soon. The spinning of the
irst part of the song seems resolved, and the move inwards is the only one that would allow
stillness, while bringing the singer—literally—close to the simplicity of the center; in this
35
The music theory treatise to which the ballade is appended is dated 1375, making this the earliest example of circular notation, and one contemporaneous (though just barely) with Machaut. Richard Crocker
points out that there may be some connection between Machaut’s oeuvre and En la maison: “In melodic
inlection it bears a striking similarity to Guillaume de Machaut’s ballade, ]e puis trop bien.” “A New Source,”
166.
36
“En ceste ronde proprement,” Tout par compas, l. 2.
37
Trans., Wright, The Maze and the Warrior, 242.
38
Wright, The Maze and the Warrior, 240–2.
193
case, perhaps, the stillness of death. But then a new strophe begins, and the lover must again
move outwards, cast back to the entrance of the labyrinth by a pitiless and unrelenting form.
Figure 4.5: En la maison Dedalus39
What both circular chansons have in common is the association of the center of a
circle with the tenor of a work—an arrangement I am suggesting also for Machaut’s Motet
39
Berkeley, University of California, Berkeley, Music Library MS 0744, p. 62. http://scriptorium.columbia.edu.
194
12. En la maison Dedalus goes a step further than Tout par compas, in that its outer/upper
voices profess a desire to leave the outer circle and move inwards—to be, in other words,
closer to the tenor. Even more so than the later rondeau, the ballade illustrates the tension
between a poetic yearning for stillness and the same musically induced perpetual motion
that is dramatized by different compositional means in Hélas/Corde mesto.
And entirely apart from symbolic considerations, layout also helps explain the
choices made by scribes and composers for the circular pieces: upper/outer voices have more
notes than lower/inner ones. The same holds true for Machaut’s motets: the tenor, motetus,
and triplum operate on respectively increasingly complex levels of rhythmical activity, with
the result that the triplum has the most notes, the motetus fewer, and the tenor fewest. So
that by the same reasoning the three voices of a motet could it on three concentric circles,
with the tenor at the center (as in Tout par compass) and the triplum on the outermost orbit. It is not hard to imagine these motets curling up around their own tenors, even as they
evoke the “order perfectly proportioned” that their texts describe.40
CECE FORTUNA AND BLIND ISAAC
Though the Motetus is able to escape “cum penitencia,” a closer look the other two
voices of Hélas/Corde mesto reveals that they do not get off so easy. The triplum text is a
seemingly standard courtly text, in which the lover bemoans his lady’s harsh treatment. It
is built around the oft-repeated paradoxical problems of courtly love: the lover desires the
lady, but in doing so he desires that which may hurt him. Though the theme is a fundamental one, it receives almost too much emphasis in this text:41
40
“series summe rata,” M17, motetus l. 1.
41
Three of these four paradoxical statements are found after the midpoint of the motet—a circumstance
195
nor can I even now hope for anything/that would not be wholly to my despair. (l. 7-8)
we often pursue/that which we have no wish to possess (l. 21)
I most want that by which I am most grieved (l. 32)42
I love above all else that which does not care about me (l. 34)
By stressing unfair duality, the lover is strengthening the afinity between his lady and Fortune, who is indeed cruel to the good.
Equally telling is the fact that the triplum text twice mentions the eyes: “Why did my
eyes ever see my dear… lady?” (l. 1) and “if I had been/without eyes” (l. 11). Though Machaut’s motet texts often mention seeing, nowhere else does he name the organs of sight.43
Meanwhile, the motetus complains of cece Fortuna—blind Fortune. The depiction of Fortune as blind is common in medieval art and literature. In fact, we have already seen her
in this guise in Figure 4.3, where she is blindfolded. The Roman de la Rose proclaims that
Fortune is not only blind herself, but also blinds her victims44—a theme taken up by Machaut in his Voir Dit:
The goddess did not see all,
Although Cato did not doubt…
That Fortune had poor vision;
which support’s Boogaart’s reading of the triplum’s two halves as different.
42
Boogaart has identiied this and other lines in the motetus as textual quotations from Gace Brulé’s Ire
d’amour qui en mon cuer repaire; see “Encompassing Past and Present,” 31.
43
The link between Fortune and the lover’s eyes is present also in Machaut’s ballade Amours, ma dame, et
Fortune et mi oueil (Love, my lady, and Fortune, and my eyes). In the second stanza, the lover complains that,
though his eyes have formerly been the venue for attaining earthly joy, Fortune has extinguished his sense
and now he does not often see his lady. The third stanza clariies that the narrator’s not seeing his lady, encapsulated in the refrain “Quant seur tout l’aim et souvent ne la voy,” is a result of distance rather than of his
blindness—and indeed, the Ballade is interpolated into the Voir dit before Guillaume has seen Toute Belle.
But Leonard Johnson points out that the pervasive presence of eyes also draws our attention to the physical
act of seeing—or not seeing (Poets as Players, 49). The uniqueness of eyes is signiicant precisely in light of
the frequency with which sight is mentioned; in fact, Robertson sees sight as “central to Motets 1–17 [and]
especially important to [Motets 11–14], as they foreshadow the leeting vision that is inally granted in the
tenor of Motet 15, ‘I have seen the Lord’ (Vidi dominum)” (Guillaume de Machaut and Reims, 154).
44
She blinds them with riches (“Les uns de richeces avugle,” Rose, l. 5904), though in her typical paradoxical fashion, she can also makes people see clearly (Rose, l. 4952).
196
That she was blind and could hardly see.
But in any case she deceives and blinds
Her own… 45
By focusing on eyes and on paradox, the triplum glosses two important aspects of
Fortune’s nature, but does so from within its own courtly world. And yet, if we remember
the ambiguity as to the lady’s identity in the irst stanza of the motetus, where the offending
goddess has not yet been named, the similarities between the two voices are brought once
more into focus. Triplum’s lady might well be Fortune; motetus’s Fortuna might well be a
lady.46
Not surprisingly, the tenor of Hélas/Corde mesto, “Libera me,” also its into this web
of associations. Its text is Jacob’s plea from Genesis 32:11: “Libera me, domine, de manibus
Esau, quia valde contremit cor meum, illum timens” (Free me, Lord, from the hands of
Esau, for my heart quakes greatly, fearing him).
Esau indeed had cause to be angry with Jacob, who had tricked their father Isaac
into blessing him, even though the honor properly belonged to Esau as irstborn. Jacob
accomplished his trick because his father was not only old, but also blind. Thus Isaac, like
Fortune, blesses the “wrong” person. Giving riches to the false Jacob, he leaves Esau to fend
for himself.
Thus Fortune invades the contents of all three voices of Hélas/Corde mesto. Obviously present in the motetus and dividing that voice in two, she affects a similar division in
the triplum, lending that voice her paradoxical nature and suggesting that there is a likeness
Ll. 8713–8719, Machaut, Le Livre dou voir dit, 599. Dominic Leo discusses this passage of the Voir Dit
in reference to the cross-eyed depiction of Machaut in the images accompanying the Prologue in Manuscript
A, “Authorial Presence,” 245–9.
45
46
On the relationship between Fortune and the courtly Lady in Machaut’s work, see Attwood, “The Image
in the Fountain.”
197
between herself and the desired lady. And as for the tenor, a new dimension is now added
to its telling of the biblical story. We are very used to reading the upper voices of medieval
motets as derivative of the sacred tenor: in Anne Robertson’s estimation, Machaut’s motets
are “secular-looking” but are at heart the description of a spiritual journey.47 But if the upper voices of Hélas/Corde mesto are a gloss on the tenor, they are not a particularly orthodox
one. Recasting the biblical story in a new light, the triplum and motetus offer a reading
that stresses Isaac’s blindness and his unfairness and casts Jacob and Esau as Regno and
Regnavi. The result is as much a reading of the biblical source in a secular vein as it is the
opposite. Nor is the comparison between Fortune’s actions and the story of Jacob and Esau
limited to Hélas/Corde mesto, as I will argue in the following discussion.
Amours/Faus Samblant (M15)
A inal glance at Figure 4.1 and its shaded beams reveals that there is another motet
in which voice crossings seem to be more prevalent in one half than in the other. This is
Amours/Faus Samblant (M15). Here the pattern is reversed: it is in the second half that the
motetus tends to sing above the triplum. Granted, there is no strongly articulated midpoint
here, and the frequency of crossing is not as great. If it were not for the case of Hélas/Corde
mesto, there would perhaps be no reason to paying any special attention the voice crossings
in the second half of Amours/Faus Samblant. But given the program of Hélas/Corde mesto,
we can ask: is there any kind of reversal at the heart of Amours/Faus Samblant?
In fact, there is. We have a good deal of analytical perspective into Amours/Faus
47
In Roberston’s reading, Libera me in this tenor has resonances with Libera mede morte aeterna, from the
ofice of the dead, and Machaut “clearly relished the double associations,” see Guillaume de Machaut and
Reims, 90.
198
samblant thanks to a pair of articles by Margaret Bent and Kevin Brownlee.48 Their full
reading of the motet need not be rehearsed here, but two important points of similarity
between Hélas/Corde mesto and Amours/Faus Samblant concern us here: one in the motetus,
and one in the tenor.
What is perhaps most striking about Amours/Faus samblant are the two semantically
opposite halves of its motetus. In the irst half (lines 1–6), False Seeming has deceived the
lover, causing him to hope. In the second half (lines 7–12) he undeceives, showing the lover
his true unhappy fate. Thus, the motetus text of Amours/Faus samblant, like that of Motet
12, cuts nicely in half to reveal two contrasting states of courtly being: irst elated, then
dejected: 49
Faus Samblant m’a deceü
Et tenu en esperance
De joie merci avoir;
Et je l’ay com fols creü
Et mis toute ma iance
En li d’amoureus vouloir.
Las! or m’a descongneü,
Quant de moy faire aligence
Ha heu temps et pooir;
N’en riens n’a recongneü
Ma dolour ne ma grevance,
Eins m’a mis en nonchaloir.
False Seeming has deceived me and has held
out the joyful hope of my obtaining favour. And
I like a fool believed him, and put all the trust
of my loving desire in him.
Alas! now he has undeceived me, after having had the time and the power to win my allegiance; In no way has he rewarded my pain
and my suffering, rather he has treated me
badly.1
And if our experience with Hélas/Corde mesto leads us to posit that the point of
voice crossing would fall at the division between the two texts, we are not far off. In fact,
the uncrossing occurs not at the exact midpoint, but on the words “m’a descongneu”—“Has
48
Brownlee in “Machaut’s Motet 15,” and Bent, “Deception, Exegesis, and Sounding Number,” 15–27.
49
As Bent has pointed out, the triplum is also divisible into “two parallel textual halves,” not in terms of
textual content but as regards “line count, metrical and rhyme scheme,” Ibid., 21–2.
199
undeceived me.” This seems to me to be an appropriate place for a crossing, in that it represents reversal. Another kind of articulation falls at the exact midpoint of the work: as we
saw in Chapter Three, Amours/Faus samblant is split in half by two supertaleae in the upper
voices, which combine two tenor taleae each (see Figures 3.2 and 3.3). A structural point
of articulation thus coincides with the poetic undeception.50
The biggest obstacle to reading Amours/Faus samblant as a parallel to Hélas/Corde
mesto is, of course, the absence of Fortune. However, it seems that she is there in spirit.
Indeed, the Tenor voice here, as in Hélas/Corde mesto, is in the words of Jacob—that same
deceitful son whose blind father aught not to have blessed him. And his words, “Vidi Dominum facie ad faciem” (I have seen the Lord face to face) recall his duplicity and deceit.
In Bent’s reading:
Jacob is yoked to its false seeming by his own earlier ‘two-faced’ deception of
his father Isaac (by cheating his older twin brother Esau both of his birthright and of his father’s blessing), as he was in turn deceived by Laban when
he served seven years for Rachel and was then given her sister Leah… Jacob’s twinned relationship to deceit, as both a perpetrator and a victim, is
implicit in the choice of his words; his two-faced history is now resolved in
his face-to-face encounter with his God.”51
Though Bent does not link Jacob to Fortune, but only to Faus Semblant, the connection is implicit. Jacob has faced the ups-and-downs of Fortune, irst reaping her beneits
with his undeserved blessing, then being cast down and himself victimized. Furthermore,
the tenor words “facie ad faciem” may in themselves be enough to recall the goddess, since
she is often depicted with two faces (see Figure 4.6). Finally, the theme of deception is
strongly linked with Fortune—a point to which I shall return below.
50
See Bent, ibid.
51
“Deception, Exegesis,” 25.
200
Figure 4.6: A Two-Faced Fortuna from the Livre dou Voir Dit
Thus much unites Hélas/Corde mesto and Amour/Faus samblant, and the use
of crossed voices for half of each becomes more than coincidental: it becomes, in fact,
thematic. Is there anything to the fact that the state of undeception is represented in
one as uncrossed voices, and in the other as crossed? Is Amours/Faus samblant an answer to Hélas/Corde mesto, rejecting its vision of a rational world, and reminding us that
even the undeceived lover is still subject to Fortune’s vicissitudes? In this view Amours/
Faus samblant might be a rejection of the Boethian claim. Or is Hélas/Corde mesto the
answer to the question posed by Amours/Faus samblant, arguing that the realization
of a lady’s inconstancy is not enough to set the lover free: he must cease to be a lover.
I do not want to push one answer above the other, especially as they take us into the tricky
realm of compositional order. But clearly there is a kind of conversation going on here, and
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we can listen in, and perhaps weigh in, if we listen carefully enough.
The voice crossings in Amour/Faus samblant have never been commented upon.
Those in Hélas/Corde mesto have been discussed rarely and only tentatively linked to Fortune. And though the extant analyses of the former have placed much emphasis on the
upper-voice texts, most commentators on these motets—indeed, on Machaut’s motets in
general, follow a bottom-up approach, where the tenor text dictates the terms and extent of
the analysis. But though they certainly conirm the ideas expressed in the upper voices, the
tenors of both motets do not have the kind of explanatory power that the motetus wields in
each case. And thus the usual “bottom-up” approach to these motets naturally leads to much
more general readings, since the words “Free me” and “I have seen the Lord,” even with their
exegetical context, are much less detailed and therefore easily adaptable to any reading.
However, if we view these works irst through the lens of their motetus voices, the interesting connection between Isaac’s blindness and that of Fortuna is highlighted in Hélas/Corde
mesto, and the dramatic structural schemes of both motets can be reconciled with the texts
of their other voices.
Am I suggesting that it is the motetus we should look to irst? Indeed not—it seems
that each motet will suggest its own point of entry, perhaps with a textual detail, or perhaps
with a formal device such as voice crossing. Signiicantly, in Hélas/Corde mesto and Amours/
Faus samblant it is not a subtle, but a rather large and obvious formal gesture that takes
center stage in each case.
At the end of such an inside-out analysis, the texts of Amours/Faus samblant, which
already seemed uniied, are enriched by a possible intertextual link with Hélas/Corde mesto.
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And the three texts of Hélas/Corde mesto, whose content seemed at irst to be unconnected
but not mutually exclusive, are brought into semantic unity. But where the voices in Hélas/
Corde mesto seemed benignly disjointed, the texts of Maugré/De ma dolour, with which I
began, apparently stand in direct conlict. Can an attention to crossings help in a situation
that seems wholly contradictory?
LYING VOICES
Of all of Machaut’s motets, Maugré/De ma dolour (M14) contains the most strikingly contrasting upper-voice texts. Here, the triplum says that those who force him to sing
happy songs cause him to lie, because he is in fact unhappy in love, and endures all manner
of ill-treatment at the hands of his lady: “Never did my noble and gentle-mannered lady
give any joy to my constant and suffering heart” (ll. 15-18; see full texts and translations in Appendix 4B). Meanwhile, the motetus declares his good fortune where matters
of love are concerned: he is “like a pauper richly given aid, like a famished man generously fed with all the favors that lady and good Love can honorably bestow upon a lover”
(ll. 8-11). Then, in the inal line of each text, both speakers seem to negate everything
that they have said: “everyone can well understand that I have lied,” admits the triplum in
an echo of the motetus’s confession of the previous breve: “by my soul, I’m lying through
my teeth.” A large amount of shared vocabulary at this and other points conirms that
the two voices were clearly conceived together. And indeed, unlike the voices of Hélas/
Corde mesto, which occupy different linguistic and semantic spheres, the triplum and motetus of Maugré/De ma dolour are similar in tone. Yet their contradiction is perhaps more
striking than their similarities. Although some have read the voices as being in agreement,
203
others see oppositional, or even paradoxical relationships between them.
If the voices are in disagreement, then their inal lines must be read as mutually
contradicting. Thus, for the triplum, the reality would be the state of affairs described by
the motetus, while for the motetus the triplum’s complaints are the truth. This arrangement
has been described by Marie-Bernadette Dufourcet as “opposition symétrique,” and would
strongly suggest two speakers, or one speaker in two distinct situations. This dual opposition is represented in Figure 4.7.
Figure 4.7: Motetus and Triplum of Motet 14 in Opposition
However, another interpretation of the relationship between the voices is possible—
one which neither pits them against each other, nor equates them. The triplum complains
of having to sing that he is comforted by good love. Could the motetus be an example of the
kind of song the triplum is forced to sing? Indeed, an indication that the motetus text may
well be the triplum’s falsely written song is found in the fact that the motetus text contains
the two speciic admissions that the triplum bemoans being forced to make. “They make me
204
say,” says the triplum, “that I have consolation from good love,” (l. 2–3) and the motetus
indeed claims that “Love is helping me in everything” (l. 10). The triplum is also forced to
sing that “from the favors of love (biens amoreus) I often reap great sweetness” (l. 6–7). The
motetus incorporates this sentiment too, saying that he is well provided “with all the favours
that lady and good Love (biens que Dame et bonne Amours) can honorably bestow upon a
lover” (l. 8–9). Thus the triplum’s description of one of his obligatorily happy chans aptly
describes the motetus text (see Figure 4.8).
Figure 4.8: Motetus and Triplum In Agreement; Motetus as a Song
The idea of the motetus as the triplum’s song is strengthened by its stylized and
rhetorical structure, with repeated initial line sounds and internal rhymes: “De ma dolour…,” “De mon labour…,” “De grant tristour…,” “De grief langour…,” etc. The parallel
grammatical construction of the irst four lines of the motetus and the intricacy of the
single sentence that takes up lines 7–11 also serve to heighten our sense of the artfulness of the text. Within this careful structure, the content and diction are well in line
205
with the amorous register of the lyric je of Grand chant courtois, whose own poetic persona is, in Kevin Brownlee’s formulation, “identical with his song and with his love.”
The triplum, in contrast, adapts the identity of “Poet-Narrator as Lover-Protagonist”.
Not only does he tell us in lines 4–5 that he has written songs (“j’ay fait… mes chans”),
but his text opens and closes with allusions to his audience: In the beginning, it is they who
make the poet say that he is happy, and in the last line, each of them (chascuns) can well
know that the poet has lied.
A very physical example of the relationship I am proposing between triplum and
motetus can again be seen in the Remede de Fortune image in Figure 4.3 above. There, one
frame shows the lover composing a complainte, while the other shows the scholar/narrator
participating in his own creation. The lower image of the illumination is a product of, and
provides more information about, the upper. Machaut’s Motet 14 works in exactly this way:
the amatory motetus is generated by the authorial triplum and acts as a thematic expansion
of it.
A inal corroboration of this proposed relationship between motetus and triplum is
found in the tenses of the statements of lying that conclude each text. The motetus lies in
the present—”je mens”—while the triplum notes a past lie one breve later, using a perfect
tense—”j’ay menti.” Thus both confessions can easily refer to the same lie, and the concluding remarks of the upper voices are not opposite, but equivalent. In both cases, the lover is
unhappy in his love.
206
The Dishonesty of Poets
It is precisely the question of truthfulness that aligns Triplum 14 so strongly with
the poetic voice, since the veracity of poetry, and therefore of poets, was traditionally in
doubt. We ind perhaps the pithiest presentation of this attitude in Conrad of Hirsau’s
12th-century Dialogue on the authors. Here, the grammarian deines a “poet” as a “maker (fictor), or one who gives shape to things (formator), because he says what is false instead of the
truth, or else sometimes intermingles truth with falsehood.”52 For 14th-century French literary circles, Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet has demonstrated the centrality of the concern
that a “professional” poet’s honesty is compromised by his audience’s demands—a tendency
to question the veracity of the poet-dependant that arose from a conlict between aesthetic
and social conditions for poets who “found themselves faced with the contradiction of having to sing when they felt like weeping.”53
Machaut’s own work shows a continuous awareness of the tension between poetic
authenticity and an entertainer’s lexibility. In a famous passage from the Remede de Fortune, the narrator endorses the authenticity of the lover: “Car qui de sentement ne fait/Son
oeuvre at son chant contrefait” (for he who does not write his sentement counterfeits his poems and his songs).54 Later in the Remede, the poet-lover conirms that the truth of a work
52
Minnis et al., Medieval Literary Theory, 43. For a broader discussion of poetry and veracity, see ibid.,
112–26.
53
One solution to the emotional inauthenticity of commissioned poetry was the notion of the real or
metaphorical “coffer”—a place where heartfelt works could be kept until such a time as they were needed;
see Cerquiglini-Toulet, The Color of Melancholy, 37. On the topic of poets as liars, see Huot, “Reading the
Lies of Poets.”
54
Ll. 407–409, Machaut, Jugement and Remede, 188–189. To say, as we often do, that this is Machaut’s
own opinion is perhaps over-simplifying, since it is not the aging poet, but his young protagonist who makes
the assertion. The lover, as yet untortured by Fortune, could even be saying the opposite of what Machaut
himself thinks. I thank an anonymous reader for offering this important caveat.
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is guaranteed by its authentic authorship:
And if you will kindly, my dear lady,
Look at the last little
song that I sang,
whose words and music are my own,
you will easily be able to know
whether I am lying or telling the truth.55
The implication here is that when the words and music are a poet’s own, truth is
guaranteed. And yet, the need is there for the assertion. Perhaps default incredulity is expected of the lady. Machaut explores this issue of authorial authenticity in several of his
musical works, most notably Pour ce que tous (Ballade 12) and Aucune/Qui plus (M5). In the
former, Elizabeth Eva Leach has discussed the tension set up when the poet apologizes for
singing less than he used to because his honest but sad songs are not in line with the idealized use of music to celebrate the joy of love.56 The triplum of Aucune/Qui plus also “refuses”
to sing but, like the singer of Ballade 12, does so in song:
Some people have asked me what is wrong,
why I do not sing and my heart is not merry…
and I say to them that truly, I do not know
But I have lied, for in my heart I have
a great sorrow which is never erased.57
Ballade 12, the triplum of Aucune/Qui plus, and the triplum of Maugré/De ma dolour
all complain of their inability to sing happy songs, but the motetus of Motet 14 actually
attempts to do just this. Yet he admits that he is lying, putting, in essence, a giant set of
55
“Et s’il vous plaist, ma dame chiere,/A resgarder la darreniere/Chansonnette que je chantay,/Que fait en
dit et en chant ay,/Vous porrez de liegier savoir/Se je mens ou se je di voir” (lines 3705–10); trans. Brownlee,
Poetic Identity, 56–7.
56
“Singing More About Singing Less,” 111–24; the relationship between love and falsehood is further
explored in Brownlee, “Machaut’s Motet 15,” 1-14.
57
“Aucune gent m’ont demandé que j’ay/Que je ne chant et que je n’ay cuer gay,/Si com je sueil chanter de
lié corage;/Et je leur di, certes, que je ne sçay./Mais j’ay menti, car dedens le cuer ay/Je trop grief dueil qui
onques n’assouage” (lines 1–2, 4–6), trans. Robertson, Gullaume de Machaut, 301.
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quotation marks around all but the last two lines of his text. Since we know that the words
of the motetus are not, in spirit, authentic, we do not take them at face value. It is a testament to Machaut’s self-awareness that the motet’s ambiguity is both a result of the dificult
situation into which its faiseur has been placed, and a solution to the problem caused by that
situation. By remaining ambiguous with regard to his own truthfulness, the narrator actually avoids lying.
FAUSSE FORTUNE AND AMOUR LANGUOUR
Thus we arrive (full circle) back at the passage with which we began—the crossing
on the words “et de Fortune amis et a mon gré” on breves 49–60. That Fortuna should be
present in the seemingly contradictory Maugré/De ma dolour is not surprising. After all,
she is the epitome of duality, an embodiment of opposites. She is often described as having two faces—one happy, one sad—or two eyes of which one laughs and the other weeps.
Fortuna’s right hand does good; her left, evil. This contradictory status is not conined to
her person—it invades everything with which she associates, and is most manifest in the
description of her dwelling. In her forest, even the trees contradict each other:
One is sterile and bears nothing; another delights in bearing fruit. One never
stops producing leaves; another is bare of foliage… every tree is deformed in
some way; one takes the shape of another. The laurel, which should be green,
has tarnished leaves; the olive in its turn dries up when it should be fecund
and living; the willows, which should be sterile, lower and bear fruit.58
In the midst of these false woods stands Fortune’s house—a structure built half out
of gold and precious stones, half out of mud. Duality leads to duplicity, and the Roman de
la Rose warns that Fortune is not to be believed: “Pleasant, agreeable Fortune lies to men,
58
Lorris and Meun, The Romance of the Rose, 119.
209
tricks them, and makes fools of them [as] she confuses their understanding.”59 Machaut’s
detailed description in the Remede’s complainte (Figure 4.3 and Example 4.3, above) retains the arborial metaphor of the Rose and makes an even more explicit liar of the goddess
in stanza 16: “she is split between gold and excrement… She is the tree of inhumanity,
rooted in falsity,/The trunk signiies that in her truth, she lies.”60
It should by now be clear that the duality that infects everything Fortune touches is
relected by the upper voices of Machaut’s Motet 14. On one level, this results in the seemingly contradictory emotional states of the triplum and motetus, who simultaneously evoke
a frustrated and a satisied lover. As I have argued above, this contrasting state is dramatized
by the presence of Fortuna, enacted by the voice crossing in Example 4.1.
But long before the crossing, which comes near the mid-point, the motet’s opening
explores the contrast between opposing emotions. Given that the motetus and triplum voices are in seeming opposition, the appearance of these two together in a bitextual framework
is surprising. Where we would expect actual, mutual disagreement such as that in Example
4.1, we ind instead that words of happiness and sadness coincide. Some striking examples
include the sad sentiments in both voices in measures 1–4, the happy text in both for measures 7–10 and the co-utterance of “dolour” and “tristour” in measure 22, and “dolens”
and “languor” in 33. Thus a signiicant amount of semantic correspondence links the two
seemingly opposite voices (these instances of vertical semantic correspondence are circled
in Example 4.4).
59
Ibid, 103.
60
“Et mi partie est par deduist/D’or et de iens… C’est l’arbre de inhumanité,/Entraciné seur fausseté;/
L’estoc est qu’en sa verité/Est mensonguese” (ll. 1127–8, 153–6), Guillaume de Machaut, Jugement and
Remede, 230–2.
210
211
Example 4.4: Maugré/De ma dolour, breves 1–36
Such a unity between two seemingly opposite voices is made possible by the structures of both texts: the motetus is a list of the grievances that love has righted, while the
triplum, though dejected, nevertheless gives voice to joyful utterances as examples of the
words he is forced to sing. This carefully crafted structural plan must have come early in the
plans for the motet. In fact, the irst four lines of the motetus text can actually be divided
vertically into regions employing sad and happy vocabulary:
âč
De ma dolour
De mon labour
De grant tristour
De grief languor
âș
confortés doucement,
meris tres hautement
en toute joie mis,
eschapés et garis
The poetic skill required to write a poem that can be split down the middle to result
in differing semantic zones is great, and it is this aspect of Machaut’s artistry that would
later appeal to the grands rhétoriqueurs. But within the context of a motet about Fortuna, the
endeavour is more than a formal game. The texts are set in a way that allows the motetus’s
righted wrongs to coincide with the triplum’s wretchedness, while the triplum’s examples of
the joyful lies he is forced to tell match up with the motetus’s “real” happiness. Rather than
projecting the seeming contradiction that a simple reading of the texts might give, their
combination in the motet’s opening measures gives the effect of a constant teeter-totter
between two opposite states.
The Lover’s changes of mood are especially signiicant in light of the motet’s tenor,
“quia amore langueo” (for I languish with love). This emotionally charged phrase appears
twice in the Song of Songs. First, it is accompanied by sweetness. The bridegroom has taken
his amica to his wine-cellar, and there, having overwhelmed her with love, he elicits from her
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a request for sustenance: “fulcite me loribus, stipate me malis, quia amore langueo” (“support me with lowers, ill me with apples, for I languish with love” v. 2.5). The second time
the words appear, the mood has darkened—the Lovers are separated. Amica calls for her
bridegroom, but cannot ind him anywhere (v. 5.7). Running out into the street, she inds
only the guards, who strike and wound her, and take away her veil. Again using the imperative, the sponsa makes a desperate plea: “Adjuro vos, iliæ Jerusalem, si inveneritis dilectum
meum, ut nuntietis ei quia amore langueo” (“I implore you, daughters of Jerusalem, if you
ind my beloved, to tell him that I languish with love”) (v. 5.8). The striking contrast between the two passages is put into sharp relief by their use of the same phrase. Though the
sponsa languishes in both, we must assume that these are two very different kinds of languor.
The chant used for the tenor of Motet 14 is taken from the Marian antiphon Anima
mea liquefacta est, which incorporates the second of these two passages.61 But the earlier,
sweeter context for the languor was surely known to Machaut, and he may well have enjoyed
the resulting juxtaposition—manifest in his motet in the seeming opposition between the
upper-voice texts. But as important as the scriptural context of the tenor text is that text
itself. “Quia amore langueo,” often translated also as “for I am sick with love,” often refers
speciically to the state of lovesickness. In fact, this passage in particular from the Song of
Songs served as a key biblical source for medieval discussions of lovesickness.62 Certainly
the association was already a valid one for Baldwin of Ford, the 12th-century archbishop
of Canterbury who based his sermon on lovesickness (amor languor) on the irst of the Song
61
The antiphon is used for various Marian feasts, but especially the Assumption. For a comparison of
sources and discussion of variants, see Clark, “Concordare cum materia,” 196, 246–7.
62
Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages, 21–24, 110–11.
213
of Songs appearances of “quia amore longueo.”63 Machaut makes this connection explicit in
the motetus when the lover echoes the tenor’s choice of words while complaining that his
lady’s heart delights in the things from which he suffers: “se delite es maus dont je langui”
(l. 26).
And indeed, the ups-and-downs of the combined texts of Maugré/De ma dolour show
all of the symptoms of that most courtly of maladies. In this unenviable state, which had
a rich pathology in antiquity and the Middle Ages, a lover suffering from his beloved’s absence or neglect suffers bodily and psychological harm. Some of the symptoms associated
with the disease still contain a modern ring: the patient loses weight, his or her breathing
becomes erratic, and the face blushes and goes pale in turn.64 In line with the physiognomic
oscillation there is an instability of mood. Richard de Fournival (d. 1260) writes that the
true lover “looks at you as though he will cry while laughing,” while Avicenna, the 11thcentury Persian physician cited in Gerard of Berry’s inluential commentary on the Viaticum, prefers alternation to simultaneity, noting that lovers “easily swing between crying and
laughing.”65 Other commentators singled out the story of Amnon and Thamar (2 Kings),
in which a sudden shift from love to hate accompanies the satisfaction of a lovesick man.66
Nor can the sanity of the lovesick be trusted: “Amour rend fou” (Love makes us foolish) is
a common proverb of the time, and one quoted by Machaut, but “Amour rend sage” (Love
63
Bell, ed. Balduini De Forda Opera, 331–9; See the discussion of this sermon in Robertson, Guillaume de
Machaut and Reims, 92, where the tenors of the irst seventeen of Machaut’s motets are mapped onto the
sermon’s text.
64
Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages, 18.
65
Ibid, 63.
66
Ibid., 20.
214
makes us wise) is another.67
This emphasis on coinciding and alternating extremes goes a long way towards explaining the relationship between the disparate voices of Motet 14. In accordance with the
subject-matter of the tenor, the Lover suffers from a restless delirium in which he cannot
tell wish from fear, luck from misfortune, or lies from the truth. The duality of love and the
ardour of his feelings have turned the speaker’s rhetoric into a confused babble of alternating emotional states. It is curiously apt that this condition of the amans—a constant alternation between elation and anguish, between smiles and tears—makes him well resemble
that tormentor of lovers, fausse Fortune herself. In the words of the Remede:
The heart of a lover who loves deeply
Is now joyful, now mournful
Now laughing, now crying, now singing, now lamenting,
now happy in its plaint,
now trembling, now sweating, now hot,
now cold, and no longer cares
what assault love may make upon it;
now it is pleased, now it cannot be pleased,
for the lover’s heart is happy or sad
Depending on whether Love wishes to console it
And depending also on the mood of Fortune.68
Here we have, in Machaut’s own words, the link between Fortune and lovesickness:
the opposites embodied in the goddess are the very symptoms of the malady, and a man under the control of Fortune is particularly susceptible to amor languor. This connection is underlined further by the composer’s use of the voice crossing in Example 4.1. While in itself
explicable as simply a way of making Motetus’s comment about Fortune more audible, what
67
Hassell, Middle French Proverbs, A119–A120.
68
“Que cuer d’ammant qui aimme fort/Or a joie, or a desconfort,/Or a rit, or pleure, or chante, or plaint,/
Or se delite en son complainte,/Or tremble, or tresu, or a chaut,/Or a froit, et puis ne li chaut/D’assaut
qu’Amours li puisse faire;/Or li plaist; or ne li puet plaire;/Car selonc ce qu’Amours le veult/Deduire, il
s’esïoist ou duet,/et selonc l’estat de Fortune,” (lines 875–87) (Machaut, Jugement, 216–17).
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we know about the symbolism of voice crossings in Hélas/Corde mesto and Amours/Faus
samblant suggests that the gesture is here also evocative of the set of ideas that surrounds
Fortune, who raises the low and casts down the high. So involved is she in the piece when
her connection with lovesickness is explored that we might even see her as a character in its
action.69 It is in Machaut’s own Voir Dit that we ind, in Fortune’s own voice, an admission
that could easily pass from the lips of either of the upper voices in Maugré/De ma dolour:
Fortune:
I sing and disport myself falsely
My song deceives, falsiies, and lies.70
OTHER “FORTUNA CROSSINGS”
Dramatic as the crossings in the irst half of Hélas/Corde mesto, the second half of
Amours/Faus samblant, and the “Fortune” passage of Maugré/De ma dolour are, they are in
fact participating in a wider trend. One of the few voice crossings that happens after the
midpoint of Hélas/Corde mesto, for example, is exactly long enough to allow the motetus to
sing “Fortune” during the goddess’s second and inal appearance in the motet (see Example
4.5). We ind a similar moment in Motet 8, where the words “Fausse Fortune” are pro69
The opposition of the texts, the self-proclaimed lies, and the invocation of Fortune herself are all enough
to signal the important presence of the goddess in the piece, and yet Robertson has excluded it from her list
of motets in which the image of lady fortune is employed, focusing instead on the link between the Song
of Songs and the Assumtion liturgy: “The time of no more lying for the Lover in Motet 14 is… analogous
to the moment when Mary tells the truth in the story of the Assumption” (Guillaume de Machaut and Reims,
84, 162). The link implied here seems slightly forced; indeed, there is no real reason why Mary would not
tell the truth in the assumption. We assume that she is truthful in anything she says because she is Mary.
Precisely for this reason we are not justiied in comparing her with the motetus here: she had never lied to
begin with. A different Mary, Mary Magdalene is identiied as truthful in the sequence Victimi paschali
laudes, but even here there is no implication that she has lied recently; she is truthful only by comparison:
“Credendum est magis soli Mariae veraci quam iudaeorum turbae fallacy.” David Rothenberg suggests that
the identity of Mary was left purposely ambiguous in the sequence and could refer to the virgin, but the occasion for its singing was still Easter and the feast of Mary Magdalene (22 July), not the assumption. See
“The Marian Symbolism of Spring,” 368–9. I am grateful to David Rothenberg for his help in navigating
the Assumption.
70
Ll. 8300–1, Machaut, Le Livre dou voir dit, 567.
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nounced by a motetus singing above the triplum (Example 4.6):
Adding to this the crossed “Fortuna” during the irst half of Helas/Corde mesto (Appendix 4C, breves 60–64) and the “Fortune” who is the friend of the motetus in Maugré/
De ma dolour (Example 4.1, breves 52–3), we arrive at a short but signiicant list of “Fortuna crossings” (see Table 4.1). In fact, there are only two instances in Machaut’s motets in
which the name “Fortune” is present without a voice crossing, and in one of these a different
kind of emphasis is placed on her because both voices sing “Fortune” together (Example
4.7).71 In the other four instances in which her name is sung, the motetus rises above the
triplum to declaim the name of the ickle, inverting goddess.
Example 4.5: Helas/Corde mesto, breves 115–118
Example 4.6: Qui/Ha! Fortune, breves 100–6
71
A comparable passage with identical words simultaneously declaimed occurs at the beginning of Bone
Pastor Guillerme/Bone Pastor qui pastores (M18). Here, the triplum and the motetus begin to sing the words
“Bone pastor” together, but immediately diverge due to the former’s slower verbal rhythm. This passage is
punctuated by a voice crossing, which draws additional attention to the common subject-matter of the upper
voices—and in fact of all three voices.
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Table 4.1: Occurrences of “Fortune”/“Fortuna” in Machaut’s Motets
Motet
M3
M8
M8
M8
M12
M12
M14
Voice
motetus
triplum
motetus
motetus
motetus
motetus
motetus
Breve(s)
74–5
4
4-9
102
60–4
116–7
52–3
Crossed Upper Voices?
no
}no; simultaneously declaimed
yes
yes
yes
yes
Example 4.7: Qui/Ha! Fortune, breves 4–9
In the case of Hé! Mors/Fine amour (M3), it may well be argued that Fortune, though
present, is not a key element in that motet’s text. But in the other examples, Machaut’s
treatment of the theme is compelling. Furthermore, the use of crossings to enact Fortuna’s
actions in motets may not be unique to Machaut: the anonymous Fortune/Ma dolour which
survives in the Ivrea Codex has a deliberate voice crossing between the triplum and motetus
during the last two of its ive taleae.72 And Vitry’s Tribum/Quoniam mentions Fortuna and
72
Breves 76–110. There is also a six-breve crossing near the beginning of the motet (breves 4–10). Otherwise, the voices hardly cross: again proof of careful and deliberate control of range. In light of its Fortunarich content, it is also interesting that the motet is notated upside-down in the Ivrea codex. This may be, as
Kügle cautiously suggests, a result of the refolding of a folio across its central crease—see The Manuscript
Ivrea, 6. However, as Kügle cautions, there is no real evidence that this was done. It is just possible that ideas
of Fortune as a goddess who causes reversal and inversion led to the strange notation. There is no direct
evidence for this either, though I have argued that another Fortuna-infused piece, Josquin’s Missa Fortuna
desperata, contains a bassus part notated upside-down; “What Fortuna Can Do to a Minim.”
218
her agency in causing sudden falls and reversals while placing the tenor unusually and consistently above the motetus.73 Another candidate for participation in a network of motets
using signiicant voice crossings is Amer/Durement, which has sometimes been attributed
to Vitry on stylistic grounds.74 This piece has the tenor color “dolor meus” in common with
Fortune/Ma dolour, while sharing with Tribum/Quoniam the technique of crossing tenor and
motetus. But here the tenor’s place is not permanent. Rather, the motet’s color is transposed
up a ifth for its irst iteration, which results in a voice crossing lasting for the irst half of
the motet and uncrossing at the midpoint, just like the motetus and triplum in Machaut’s
Hélas/Corde mesto. This circumstance is all the more remarkable given that, due to the presence of an introitus, the end of the irst color is not the center of the piece. The composer
actually manipulates the motetus voice so that the irst moment of uncrossing occurs not
when the tenor is transposed back downwards, but earlier. Furthermore, this moment of
uncrossing occurs on the word “contraire,” located on breves 58–60 of the motet: these
three breves are preceded and followed by 57 breves, with the result of perfect symmetry.
While it is too early to decide whether some of these motets might be modeled on
other ones, I am convinced that they all participate in the general phenomenon of illustrating Fortuna’s actions with reversals of standard contrapuntal procedures. Can we begin to
speak of a musical iconography?
Probably not. In most cases it is the motetus voice that pronounces the goddess’s
name, and the crossings could be interpreted simply as devices that bring an important
73
A rich and thorough analysis of this piece is available in Bent, “Polyphony of Texts and Music,” 137,
164.
74
For the attribution to Vitry, see Leech-Wilkinson, “Related Motets,”13–4 and Kügle, “The Manuscript
Ivrea,” 130–8.
219
word to the forefront of the texture. Furthermore, most of Machaut’s voice crossings have
nothing to do with Fortune. Meanwhile, there are many other ways of treating the theme of
Fortune in music. For example, Machaut’s ballades on this theme gave him a mono-textual,
strophic medium in which to explore the subject at length, and Jacques Boogaart has argued
that particular rhythmic igures in the tenor taleas of the motets signal her presence.75 In
the Lai de la confort, Virginia Newes has shown that the form of the piece itself—a 3-voice
canon or rota—symbolizes Fortune’s ever-turning wheel, and in that same Complainte from
the Remede, the important “–ourne” words of the irst stanza signal both the actions of the
goddess and those of the singer, who returns to the beginning after singing his irst “–ourne”
word (“attourne,” breves 15–17 in Example 4 above).76 Text, rhythm, form, and range—as
the elements of a purported iconography these are impractical, because Machaut uses these
tools to indicate the presence not only of Fortune, but also of everything else: musical parameters can’t be consistently relexive.
And in the group of motets I have discussed, voice-crossings are not the only way
in which Fortune is evoked. The isorhythmic division of Amour/Faus samblant into two
supertaleae also evokes the goddess’s two halves and two faces, as do the poetic divisions
within several of the texts discussed. And in Maugré/De ma dolour, the semantic teetertotter with which the motet begins serves as a powerful image of Fortune’s own instability.
What unites all of these parameters it is their careful staging of contrast, with the result that
compositions which we would expect to be uniied (by texture, poetic voice, or scenario) are
fragmented. The divisions in half are especially compelling in this regard, because in their
75
See note 3, above.
76
“atourne,” breves 15–17; Newes, “Turning Fortune’s Wheel,” 95–121.
220
simplicity they most enact Fortune’s split body. It is not so much that particular words are
painted, but that the broader idea of Fortune is imprinted on entire composition when her
inconsistency and monstrosity are mirrored in disjunct and contradictory musical forms
and procedures. And it is in this thematization of disjunction that the motets about Fortune join a broader discourse. For there are other, more complicated monsters lurking in
the texts of ars nova motets, and their effects on the musical forms that engage with them
are even mere extreme. Their stories are told in the chapters that follow.
221
APPENDIX 4A:
HELAS/CORDE MESTO, TEXTS AND TRANSLATIONS77
TRIPLUM
5
10
15
20
25
30
Helas! pour quoy virent onques mi oueil
Ma chiere dame au tres plaisant accueil,
Pour qui je vif en tel martire
Que je ne congnois joie de ire?
N’onques Amour ne me vost enrichir
Tant que j’eüsse un espoir de joïr,
Ne je ne puis encor rien esperer
Que tout ne soit pour moy desesperer.
Dont vraiement plus chier eüsse,
Quant ma dame vi, que je fusse
Sans yex ou que mes corps tel cuer eüst
Que ja mais jour dame amer ne peüst
Qu’en li veoir je conquis mort crueuse
Et mon vivant vie avoir dolereuse,
Puis qu’einsi est que pité ne merci
Ses crueus cuers ne vuet avoir de mi.
Las! elle het mon preu et ma santé,
Pour ce que j’ain s’onneur et sa biauté,
Et si la serf de cuer en tel cremour
Que nulle riens ne li pri, eins l’aour.
Et c’est raisons c’on quiert souvent
Ce qu’on n’a de l’avoir talent.
S’aim miex einsi ma dolour endurer
Qu’elle me fust plus dure par rouver;
Car s’el savoit que s’amour souhaidier
Eüsse osé, ja mais ne m’aroit chier.
Et se l’aim tant que s’en ce monde avoie
Un seul souhait, einsi souhaideroie
Que s’amour fust envers trestous d’un fuer,
Fors vers celui qui l’aimme de mon cuer.
Par tel raison suis povres assizes:
Quant je plus vueil ce dont plus sui grevés;
Dont ne doit nuls pleindre ce que j’endure,
Quant j’aim seur tout ce qui n’a de moy cure.
77
French and Latin texts are taken from Vladimir Chichmaref’s edition of Guillaume de Machaut, Poesies
lyriques, vol. II, 509–510. The triplum translation is my own. For the translation of the Latin motetus Corde
mesto cantando conqueror I am indebted to Rob Getz.
222
1–4
Alas, why did my eyes ever see my dear lady with her most pleasant welcome,
for whom I live in such torment that I cannot tell joy from sorrow?
5–8
Never did Love want to enrich me enough that I should have any hope for joy,
nor can I even now hope for anything that would not be wholly to my despair.
9–16
So truly I wished, when I saw my lady, that I had been eyeless, or that my body
had possessed such a heart as could never love a lady, since in seeing her, I
earned a cruel death and a mournful life while yet I live, since it so happens
that her cruel heart does not wish to grant me either pity or mercy.
17–20
Alas, she hates what’s to my proit and my health because I love her honour
and her beauty, and thus I serve her with a heart so much afraid that I ask
nothing of her, and simply adore her.
21–2
And it is true that we often pursue that which we have no wish to possess.
23–6
And so I would rather endure my suffering than cause her to be harsher by
imploring; for if she knew that I had the audacity to desire her love, she would
never hold me dear.
27–30
And so much do I love her that if in this world I had a single wish, thus would
I wish: that her love were of equal measure toward all but him who loves her
with my heart.
31–4
For that reason I am poorly situated: because I most want that by which I am
most grieved; thus no one should deplore what I endure, since I love above all
else that which does not care about me.
223
MOTETUS78
Corde mesto Cantando conqueror,
Semper presto Serviens maceror,
Sub honesto Gestu totus terror
Et infesto
Causu remuneror.
5
10
In derisum
Das arrisum
Et obrisum
Tollis risum
Fortuna te ponis.
Expers rationis,
Malis; sed a bonis
Et abis cum donis.
Spernens cece
Utor prece
Culpe fece
Michi nece
Fortune tedia,
Cum penitentia
Ut lauto venia
Promatur gloria.
Sad-hearted, I make lament in song:
An ever ready servant, I am distressed:
Beneath a fair exterior, I am outworn,
And am rewarded with unfriendly chance.
5
10
You put yourself to scorn, o Fortune:
You give favour, without sense,
And gold, to evil men; but from the good
You take laughter away, and depart with your gifts.
Spurning blind Fortune’s hateful ways,
I turn to prayer and penitence,
That, washed through pardon from the ilth of sin,
I may, in death, win glory.
Tenor: Libera me [Free me]
78
Reading 3. terror, 4. casu, 7. obryzum
224
APPENDIX 4B:
MAUGRE MON CUER/DE MA DOLOUR, TEXTS AND TRANSLATIONS79
TRIPLUM
5
10
15
20
25
1–7
79
Maugré mon cuer, contre mon sentement
Dire me font que j’ay aligement
De bonne Amour
Ceaus qui dient que j’ay fait faintement
Mes chans qui sont fait dolereusement
Et que des biens amoureus ay souvent
La grant douçour.
Helas! dolens, et je n’os onques jour,
Puis que premiers vi ma dame d’onnour
Que j’aim en foy,
Qui ne fu nez et fenis en dolour,
Continuez en tristesse et en plour,
Pleins de refus pour croistre mon labour.
Et contre moy.
N’onques ma dame au riche meintieng coy
Mon dolent cuer, qui ne se part de soy,
Ne resjoy,
Ne n’ot pitié dou mal que je reçoy.
Et si scet bien qu’en li mon temps employ
Et que je l’aim, criem, serf, desir et croy
De cuer d’ami;
Et quant il n’est garison ne merci
Qui me vausist, se ne venoit de li
A qui m’ottry,
Et son franc cuer truis si dur anemi
Qu’il se delite es mauls dont je langui,
Chascuns puet bien savoir que j’ay menti.
In spite of my heart, contrary to my feelings they make me say that I have
support from good Love, they who say that I have deceitfully composed [those
of] my songs which are sadly written and that I often reap great sweetness
from the favors of love.
French texts taken from Chichmaref, Poesies lyriques, vol. II, 511–512. Translations are my own.
225
8–14 Alas, woe is me! and since I irst saw my honored lady, whom I love in faith,
I have not had a single day which was not born and did not end in sorrow,
and did not pass in sadness and in tears, illed with rejection to increase my
efforts and counter me.
15–8 Never did my noble and gentle-mannered lady give any joy to my constant
and suffering heart, nor did she take pity on the hardship I endure.
19–21 And yet she well knows that I devote my time to her, and that I love, reverence, serve, desire and believe her with a lover’s heart;
22–7 And since there is neither aid nor mercy which would comfort me if it did
not come from her to whom I devote myself, and I ind her worthy heart so
hard a foe that he delights in the pains from which I suffer, everyone can well
understand that I have lied.
226
MOTETUS80
De ma dolour confortés doucement,
De mon labour meris tres hautement,
De grant tristour en toute joie mis,
De grief languor eschapés et garis,
5
De bon eur, de grace, de pitié,281
Et de Fortune amis et à mon gré,
Com diseteus richement secourus
Com familleus largement repeüs
De tous les biens que dame et bonne Amours
10 Pueent donner à amant par honnour
Suis, et Amours m’est en tous cas aidans;
Mais, par m’ame, je mens parmi mes dens.
5
10
For my pain tenderly consoled
for my toil very highly compensated
from great sadness led into greatest bliss
from heavy sickness released and recovered,
of success, of grace, of mercy
and a friend of Fortune to my satisfaction,
like a pauper richly given aid,
like a famished man generously fed
with all the favours that lady and good Love
can honorably bestow upon a lover
am I, and Love is helping me in everything;
but, by my soul, I’m lying through my teeth.
Tenor
Quia amore langueo [For I languish from love]
80
Trans. Brownlee, “Machaut’s Motet 15,” 2.
81
Most editions place a period after line 5, but this has no basis in the manuscript tradition and I have
chosen to omit it, since it spoils the clever structure of this text: in fact, the entire motetus is one sentence,
and the main verb for its irst 10 lines is “suis” in line 11.
227
APPENDIX 4C
HÉLAS/CORDE MESTO/LIBERA ME82
Philippe de Vitry
82
The edition follows Ferrell-Vogüé, except for the motetus at breve 147, which is missing there and
supplied from Manuscript C. Vertical bars mark the midpoint of the motet at breve 81.
228
229
230
231
232
233
CHAPTER FIVE
THE MONSTER IN THE MOTET
B
EGINNINGS ARE IMPORTANT.
No one knew this better than Horace. At the start of the
Ars poetica, his inluential treatise on the writerly craft, we ind, instead of the ex-
pected introduction or deinition of poetics, these famous lines:
Humano capiti ceruicem pictor equinam
iungere si uelit et uarias inducere plumas
undique collatis membris, ut turpiter atrum
desinat in piscem mulier formosa superne,
spectatum admissi, risum teneatis, amici?
[If a painter were willing to join a horse’s neck to a human head and spread
on multicolored feathers, with different parts of the body brought in from
anywhere and everywhere, so that what starts out above as a beautiful woman
ends up horribly as a black ish, could you my friends, if you had been admitted to the spectacle, hold back your laughter?]1
Horace begins in medias res (to use his own expression), but the reader doesn’t have to wait
long to get her bearing. In the ensuing lines the speaker explains that this picture is a
metaphor for “a literary work in which meaningless images are fashioned, like the dreams
of a sick man, so that neither the foot nor the head can be attributed to a single form.”2
Although he grants some space to poetic licence, the author goes on to make a case for simplicity and propriety in style, evenness in voice, and continuity in subject—the opposite, in
short, of the confusing monster with which he began.
This chapter concerns itself with an intersection between the Ars poetica and music
history embodied in the motet In virtute nominum/Decens carmen edere/Clamor meus—a four1
Trans. Golden and Hardison, Horace for Students of Literature, 7 (modiied). All further Ars poetica quotations are from Golden. On the novelty of Horace’s beginning, see Greenberg, “The Use of Poiema and
Poiesis,” 266–7.
2
Verses 6–9, translation modiied.
234
voice work tentatively attributed to Philippe de Vitry and preserved in the Ivrea Codex and
in a fragmentary source now in Paris.3 While there is nothing so extraordinary in the fact
that a motet—a genre known for its elite audience—should quote Horace, a staple of the
university education from the 11th century on, I will suggest that this motet’s use of the Ars
poetica goes well beyond literary reference.4 The author of In virtute/Decens does not merely
mention Horace’s monster, he actually manages to depict it, using the basic building blocks
of talea length and hocket. Such depiction, in turn, raises questions about other motets in
the repertory, the function of isorhythm, the relationship between content and form, and
the aesthetics which underlie late-medieval composition.
THE TEXTS OF IN VIRTUTE/DECENS
Both upper voices of Vitry’s motet are derived from Horace (their texts are given in
full in Appendix 5A). The motetus, as the more concise of the two, limits its observations
to two points. First, that those wishing to write a song should be it to put forth an appropriate topic. This brings to mind several passages in Horace’s text, especially the observation
that “wisdom is the source and fount of writing well,” and the discussion in lines 416–18
of bad and mediocre poetry.5 The motetus’s second point expands upon the triplum’s ob3
Ivrea fol. 55v and BN 2444, fol. 48; the latter may offer a better reading. In virtute/Decens is also listed
in the index of Trémoïlle, but the folios on which it was located have not survived. Daniel Leech-Wilkinson
has argued that the motet can be “conidently be attributed to Vitry,” on technical, textual and stylistic
grounds, see “Related Motets,” 5–8, 18. Karl Kügle is more cautious, categorizing In virtute/Decens as “possibly” by Vitry; The Manuscript Ivrea, 36, 52n12. Further support for the attribution to Vitry will come
to the fore when the analysis below is compared with that of the securely attributed Cum statua/Hugo in
Chapter 6.
4
On the motet’s audiences cf. Page, Discarding Images, 65–84 and see Chapter 2, above. On the place of
Horace and especially the Ars poetica in the medieval education, see Friis-Jensen, “The Reception of Horace,” 300–2.
5
“Scribendi recte sapere est et principium et fons,” l. 309.
235
jections as to the mixing of incompatible registers: “If the tragic style of writing is at the
outset,” it warns, “let the comic not be in the middle or at the end; For one is humble, the
other; elevated” (ll. 9–14). This too is emphasized by Horace:6
If I fail to keep and do not understand these well-marked shifts and shades
of poetic forms, why am I hailed as a poet? Why through false shame do I
prefer to be ignorant rather than to learn? A theme for comedy refuses to
be set forth in verses of tragedy; likewise the feast of Thyestes scorns to be
told in strains of daily life that well nigh beit the comic stock. Let each style
keep the becoming place (locum…decentem) allotted to it.
The theme of decency and itness also permeates the triplum text, which in fact begins with “decens.” It accuses certain ignoramuses of trusting too implicitly in the inherent
virtues of words while writing inappropriately (ll. 1–6). Their sin is to combine incompatible stylistic categories (e.g., the obscure with the clear) and subjects (sadness with joy; ll.
7–14). These inexperienced people also misjudge the extent of elaboration required, giving
too much space to things that should be concise (ll. 14–16). The text ends, like many motet texts, with a borrowing from the auctoritates (ll. 17–26). In this case, the inal ten lines
of the triplum—over a third of the entire poem—are devoted to paraphrasing the famous
opening of the Ars poetica:7
Heccine congeries
verborum enormis
est picture species
picta multiformis,
ut si pictor faciat
caput femininum,
cui plumas adiciat
et collum equinum,
6
“descriptas servare vices operumque colores / cur ego si nequeo ignoroque, poeta salutor? / cur nescire,
pudens prave quam discere malo? / versibus exponi tragicis res comica non volt; / indignatur item priuatis ac
prope socco / dignis carminibus narrari cena Thyestae. / Singula quaeque locum teneant sortita decentem,”
ll. 86–92.
7
Beginnings and endings of motet texts are the places in which quotations are most often located. For a
discussion of a particularly quotation-rich motet, see Bent, “The Vitry motet Tribum que,” and “Polyphony
of Texts and Music.” On quotations in Machaut’s motets, see Boogaart, “Encompassing Past and Present.”
236
residuum iniat
in piscem marinum?
[Is not their pile of shapeless words a kind of picture painted with many
shapes, as though the artist were to draw a female head, to which he might
add feathers and the neck of a horse, and then to inish the rest out as a seaish?]
The poet of the motet ends where Horace began. The description of the monster, rather
than acting as an intriguing ice-breaker, is here fully integrated into the text, which irst
describes the villainy of the inept poets and then likens their creations to the picture of a
multipartite beast.
The texts of In virtute/Decens would seem to mark it as belonging to a group of invective motets that blame corrupt oficials or personal enemies.8 But these works take on
the deeds and morals of princes, popes, and courtiers. In virtute/Decens instead directs its
well-organized rant toward a group of bad poets. Furthermore, it gives them advice drawn
from one of their most important didactic texts. While this subject-matter is consistent
with the clerical and university milieux to which a motet like In virtute/Decens inevitably
belongs, the decision to set it to music is still surprising. Musical texts sometimes give advice to composers—several songs and motets from the later middle ages comment on issues
related to performance and composition.9 But In virtute/Decens seems to stand alone in setting rhetorical and stylistic injunctions to music.
The opposite scenario—music theory in a poetic guise—is more common.In addition to the Regulae rhythmicae that head Guido’s antiphoner, there are two short and little-
8
See especially Cum statua/Hugo and Colla/Bona, both found in gathering II of Ivrea, and Garrit Gallus/In
nova fert, Floret/Florens, and Aman novi/Heu, Fortuna in Fauvel.
9
See, for example, the pieces discussed in Günther, “Fourteenth-Century Music with Texts.” See also the
comments on Musicalis/Sciencie, below.
237
known music-theoretical works in Leonine hexameter from the fourteenth century.10 Two
further treatises mix prose and poetry: the 1279 “Anonymous of St. Emmeram” presents
itself as a prose commentary on verse, while Johannes de Muris’s Summa is a prosimetrum
in emulation of Boethius’s Consolatio, ending each of its prose chapters with a lengthy poem.
Otherwise, the role of verse in music-theoretical texts was limited to the occasional couplet
or short poem (usually an excerpt of the Regulae) intended to help the learner memorize a
musical or moral rule.
To this body of late-medieval music theory in verse In virtute/Decens stands as a
mirror example: poetic doctrine in song. This is surprising. If music sometimes sets poetry
about music, it is because music so often sets poetry, and some poetry is about the musical
craft. But poetry about poetry doesn’t need song—a musical setting would only slow down
the text and perhaps make its delivery less effective by drawing attention to the music and
away from the prosody. In setting poetic doctrine to music, In virtute/Decens would seem to
be unique among songs.11 But I suggest that the composer has musical motives for treating the topic of poetry—that the motet texts are relevant not only to the art of writing in
general, but to the composition of motet texts in particular. Such a reading is suggested by
speciic elements of the texts’ diction, and further supported by the uses to which poetry is
habitually put in motets.
In the motetus of In virtute/Decens we ind several words that refer to the musical
10
Ed. Pesce, Guido D’Arezzo’s Regule rithmice. The two short treatises are Erfurt, Wissenschaftliche Bibliothek der Stadt, Ca 8° 94, ff. 70V-71 (Ars discandi datur hic et dulcisonandi) and Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica
Vaticana, Regin. lat. 1146, ff. 47-48 (Discantare volens normas istas bene seques). See Yudkin, “The Anonymous Music Treatise,” 177–8.
11
David’s aria “Mein Herr! Der Singer Meisterschlag” in Act I, Scene II of Die Meistersinger von Nüremberg
lists the kinds of things there are to know about poetry, but gives no actual points of doctrine.
238
realm. First, there is the use of carmen, which often means song, to identify the object being composed; Horace’s example is a liber.12 Next, there is “ymis” in the motetus for the
progression “in primis”—“in medio”—“in ymis” which refers most obviously to the beginning, middle, and end of the carmen. While rhyme does place some constraint on the poet,
it is also true that “imus” really means “lowest,” “deepest” and “bottommost,” and Horace
and Quintilian, along with a number of music theorists, use “vox ima” or “vox inima” to
designate the lowest voice.13 The poet could thus be talking about simultaneous voices as
well as the traditional beginning—middle—end divide. The “primus” could be the triplum,
and the “vox media” would be the motetus, which is located between the tenor and triplum.
More significantly, the idea that different voices might be in different poetic registers
is very relevant to the motet. While a few sacred motets may be considered “pure,” any
motet mixing a plainchant tenor with a newly written or secular text is technically mixing
high and low. A motet with French upper voices is also mixing languages, since the label
of its plainchant tenor, though unheard, is in Latin. Furthermore, some motets contained
simultaneously declaimed texts in two different languages—a combination that could be
found objectionable under Horatian guidelines of stylistic purity and appropriateness.
Placed in the voices of a motet, these poetic guidelines take on added signiicance, and In
virtute/Decens seems to be participating in a broader conversation not only about rhetoric,
but about rhetoric as it applies to motet poetry. A comparison with the texts of the so-called
12
“Credite, Pisones, isti tabulae fore librum persimilem” (6–7).
13
Examples of this usage in music theory abound. From Marchetto, “nam sicut diversa protractio vocis
vel soni alta vel ima facit consonantiam in cantu...” to Johannes de Muris, who actually rhymes “ima” with
“prima” in analogy to the motet’s “primis” and “ymis”: “Sic est in reliquis, it clavis littera prima / De notulis
quaedam scandit, quaedam petit ima”; Vecchi, ed. Marcheti de Padua Pomerium, 55; Muris, Summa, 3:208,
237. The word does mean “last” as well, but in that case it is often used in opposition to summus, “to express
a whole from end to end,” Lewis & Short, A Latin Dictionary, 910–11.
239
“musicians’ motet” Musicalis/Sciencie strengthens the case for such a discourse.
Hockets and Rhetoric
Musicalis/Sciencie is the ars nova motet whose texts most obviously engage with compositional questions. It seems that some composers were allowing hockets to split words,
and others considered this a crime against music and rhetoric.14 The two voices of the motet thus purport to carry out an epistolary intervention. The triplum, famous for its long list
of singers’ and composers’ names, is in the form of a letter from Music to her favorites. The
text adheres to the classical form: the writer identiies herself, gives a long list of the letter’s
recipients in the dative, and sends greetings to them (“salutem [dicit]”) in line 26. Finally,
Music gets to the point of her letter, which is to ask a favor of her disciples:
26
28
30
32
34
salutem et observare
sua precepta mandare
vestrum cuilibet cupio,
ne sit erroris motio
in dominam rethoricam,
neque contra grammaticam
lingua secans incomplexa
sit in silentio nexa;
cuncta vicia cavete;
in melodia valete.
[[I send] greetings, and desire each of you to heed your lessons, so that there
might not be a false step against Lady Rhetoric, nor against Grammar, in
severing simple speech that it might be bound in silence. Entirely avoid this
vice; in melody, farewell!]
If we are not sure what exactly the vice of “severing simple speech” might be, we
need only look at the motetus for clariication. This voice is also an epistle, this time from
Rhetoric to Music:
14
On the text underlay of hocketed passages and what it can tell us about the splitting of words, see Chapter
1.
240
2
4
6
8
10
12
14
Sciencie laudabili
musice venerabili
rethorica sciencia
cum omni reverencia
salutem, O dulcissima
subiectisque gratissima,
tali conquerens nuncio
quod maxima corruptio
it a multis canentibus
in nostris dictaminibus.
nam dividunt simplicia,
faciendo suspiria.
Quare pietate rogito
remedium his audito.
[To the praiseworthy, venerable science of Music, the science of Rhetoric
with all respect [sends] greetings. Oh sweetest and most pleasing of subjects,
lamenting I relate such a message: that the greatest corruption is committed by many singers under your command. For they divide single [words] by
making sighs. Whereby I politely request that you attend to a remedy for
these things.]
“Dividing single words by making sighs” refers to hocket, using a terminology that, as Harrison points out, “is still preserved in the Italian sospiro, a short rest in music, and in the
French soupir, a crotchet rest.”15 Hockets do not occur in poetry, and are almost never
texted in songs.16 Thus this motet is self-relexive: in motet form it addresses what it sees as
a problem with motet composition. This of course raises the question of whether Musicalis/
Scientie follows its own injunctions. Indeed it does. The six-breve hockets at the end of each
of the motet’s taleae are never texted in either voice (see Example 5.1).
15
Harrison, ed., Musicorum collegio, 40.
16
As Leach has noted, when hockets are texted in song, it is usually with nonsense syllables intended to illustrate “vox confusa”—the inarticulate sounds of men and animals. As such, these hockets are in no danger
of splitting words to create nonsense—their texts are already nonsensical. To this group belongs the chasse
“Se je chant mains que ne seul…”; Sung Birds, 180–197.
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Example 5.1: Musicalis/Scientie, talea 1 (breves 1–24)17
Looking back at In virtute/Decens, it seems likely—even probable—that here too
the “conditores criminum” are not just poets, but the poet-composers of motets. But where
the message of Muscalis/Sciencie is clear, the grievances voiced in In virtute/Decens are much
more general. Could it be that In virtute/Decens is also campaigning against splitting up
words with hockets, in addition to its more explicit messages about appropriateness of subject and unity of style? As it happens, In virtute/Decens also has hockets which, like those
of Musicalis/Scientie, remain untexted and therefore do not split words.18 But that does not
mean that the Horatian motet is lobbying for the same rules. In fact, a look at the motets
safely attributed to Vitry, the probable author of In virtute/Decens, shows that he rarely
17
Reproduced from PMFC 5:181; layout and annotations modiied.
18
Though this is not apparent from the PMFC edition, which gives incorrect text underlay for the triplum
in measures 76–7. Neither source supports this underlay and I have remedied it in my edition.
242
texted his hockets and almost never split words.19 As we shall see, the hockets of In virtute/
Decens are unusual not for their lack of text, but for their position within the motet.
THE ISORHYTHMIC SCHEME OF IN VIRTUTE/DECENS
At irst glance, the construction of In virtute/Decens seems completely straightforward. The tenor color is made up of 21 notes from the tract for Wednesday of Holy Week,
Domine exaudi orationem meam.20 Each tenor talea comprises 3 notes, for a total of seven
taleae per color. The color is repeated once without diminution, yielding 14 taleae in total:
talea:
A1
A2
A3
A4
A5
A6
A7
B1
B2
B3
B4
B5
B6
B7
color A:
talea:
color B:
Example 5.2: Color disposition of In virtute/Decens
The tenor talea rhythm is similarly straightforward, composed of three longs (two imperfect and one perfect) followed by three breves of rest (L L L . 1 1 1 ).21 An isorhythmic contratenor executes the same rhythmic pattern at a ive-breve delay, so that one of the lower
19
An important exception is Cum statua/Hugo, discussed in Chapter 6. See also the comments on Petre/
Lugentium in Chapter 1. This observation deserves further contextualization, since the different texting
practices of ars nova motet composers have not yet, to my knowledge, been a focus of inquiry. It may well be
possible to read in the texts of Musicalis/Scientie a feud about the proper way to text hockets, and Vitry’s practices may proitably be contrasted with those of Machaut and some others whose names appear in the motet.
20
Clark argues that the composer probably changed the original chant source by omitting two notes near
the beginning of the excerpt and adding one near the end, “Concordare cum materia,” 68, 107, 218, 262.
21
This is the notation in Ivrea. BN 2444 uses coloration on the irst two notes instead of a dot on the thirs.
Leech-Wilkinson has argued the latter to be original; Compositional Techniques, 193. I have used the former
notation here and in my edition of the work to avoid ambiguity in the case of monochrome reproduction.
243
voices is always singing. The resulting taleae are 5 imperfect longae (10 breves) each. There
is no diminution.
But while the tenor and contratenor rhythms are unchanging over the course of the
motet’s 14 taleae, the upper voices are subject to an important modiication. Where taleae
A1–7 contain smooth, melodic parts for both voices, the second half of the motet includes
two breves of hocket which bridge the third and fourth longs of each talea (Example 5.3).
Example 5.3: In virtute/Decens, talea B1
This circumstance in itself may not seem particularly remarkable. After all, many
motets have hockets only in their second color. In fact, a irst color without hockets followed by a second with them is perhaps the most common Ars nova motet form. The hockets signal that a structural landmark has been reached in the motet, and help to add to the
feeling of acceleration caused by diminution.
There are at least seventeen other roughly contemporaneous motets in which hockets are introduced only partway through. But all of these differ from In virtute nominum in
an important way: these motets have a diminution section, in which the tenor’s notes are
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sped up. And the hockets appear only in that diminution section, where their aesthetic
function is to heighten the effect of acceleration produced by the tenor’s smaller note values. In virtute/Decens is the only motet in the repertory whose second-color hockets do not
correspond with a diminution section (see Figure 5.1). In virtute/Decens thus emerges as
something of taxonomic anomaly: its two different structural feaures—two colores without
diminution and hockets in the second color only—belong to two lists of motets which otherwise have no overlap (see Figure 5.1). The two halves of In virtute/Decens might as well
come from two different motets.
Figure 5.1: Overlap of diminution and second-color hockets in ars nova motets22
22
Full incipits and edition information for the motets in this igure is available in the Catalog of Ars nova
Motets at the end of this study.
245
This fact has not gone unnoticed or uninterrogated. We can tell from Heinrich
Besseler’s summary of this work’s form that he considered its hockets an anomaly.23 Ursula Günther has called this a “bipartite hybrid” where “hockets in the [second color] give
the impression that this is a bipartite work.”24 And Daniel Leech-Wilkinson has described
the result as an “illusion of a typical two-section motet whose second color proceeds in
diminution.”25
And indeed the impression, pretense, or illusion of diminution is upheld by the upper voices, which seem to be structured in supertaleae during the irst color.26 The scheme
suggested by Besseler, Günther, and Leech-Wilkinson is one of three-and-a-half supertaleae
followed by seven shorter taleae.27 Example 5.4 shows the upper voices of In virtute/Decens
arranged according to this plan, with resulting isorhythm shaded. The result is indeed the
shape and semblance of a motet with diminution. Taleae A1–6 fall neatly into three groups
of two, where the isorhythmic correspondence between supertaleae is more pronounced in
23
“Studien II,: 222. Besseler’s standard way of notating a motet whose second color is in diminution is
to use the “greater than” sign; hockets are indicated with a superscript zero. Thus, the following represents
Altissonis/In principes, the second motet in the Ivrea codex, as depicted in Besseler’s formidable table: 4 > 04.
This means that the motet has two colores, each with four tenor taleae, and with the second in diminution;
the diminution section has hockets, while the irst color does not. Where there is no diminution but adjacent sections of a motet are nevertheless not isorhythmic (in Margaret Bent’s more speciic use of the term),
Besseler sometimes used “+” between colores, so that we might expect In virtute/Decens to be summarized as
“7+07.” The problem is that such a motet should not exist—that without diminution there is no way to explain the hockets of the second color. Instead, Besseler notates it thus: 3 ½ (>) 07. “(>)” is Besseler’s symbol
for “pseudo-diminution,” in which the tenor is freely re-rhythmicized to create the illusion of diminution,
instead of being mensurally or proportionally transformed. For a useful summary of Besseler’s system, see
Turner, “Proportion and Form,” 93–4.
24
“The 14th-century Motet,” 37. In virtute/Decens is “No. 71.”
25
Compositional Techniques, 194.
26
Supertaleae are discussed in Chapter 3.
27
Günther notes that “the upper voices have 3 1/2 periods to the irst half of the tenor and 7 short taleae
to the second,” “The 14th-century Motet,” 37. Leech-Wilkinson has also described the disposition of the
irst color in the upper voices as “three and a half double-length taleae,” Compositional Techniques, 194. These
evaluations match Besseler’s formula of 3 ½ (>) 07.
246
Example 5.4:
The triplum and motetus of In virtute/Decens arranged in supertaleae for
the irst color, and simple taleae during the second. Taleae marked as in
Example 5.2 above.
247
the second half—that is, in taleae A2, A4, and A6. And there can be no doubt that the
hockets of color B easily align vertically when the taleae are stacked individually—it would
seemingly make no sense to rearrange these.
The only glitch is in talea A7. According to the pseudo-diminution scheme, this
should be a inal half-talea in the integer valor section. But if talea A7 is the irst half of
a supertalea, then it should correspond to talea A5. Instead, the upper voices of this color
have more in common with the one that follows it—B1. These correspondences are shaded
in blue in Example 5.5. Naturally, the correspondence between the two taleae stops at the
hocket (gray in Example 5.5), since talea A7 has no hocket section. But the second half of
A7 does have a correspondence with the end of talea A6 (shaded yellow in Example 5.5).
Rather than being the irst half of a fourth supertalea, then, A7 acts as a join between the
isorhythmic scheme of the irst and second sections of the motet.
The surprising correspondences do not stop there. Example 5.6, below, highlights
two more points of rhythmic congruence between taleae that should be unrelated according
to Besseler’s scheme. Taleae B2 and B3, whose non-hocket correspondences are shaded in
green, turn out to be almost rhythmically identical. A further noteworthy correspondence
is between taleae B4 and B6, especially in the triplum voice.
There is a way to line up the upper voices in this motet so as to allow these correspondences to be aligned, and I will suggest an alternate analytical shape for this motet
below. But irst, let us take a closer look at the culprits of all this formal ambiguity—the
hockets of color B. If they make little sense in terms of isorhythmic form, I will suggest that
they make perfect sense when the triplum text of the motet is considered.
248
Example 5.5:
In virtute/Decens, tenor taleae A6, A7 and B1; upper voices only. Isorhythmic correspondences between taleae shaded in blue and yellow. Isorhythmic hocket section shaded in gray.
Hockets and Wordlessness
As hockets go, the ones in In virtute/Decens are not very impressive. When compared with the pyrotechnics of a motet like Vos/Gratissima (Example 5.7 below), whose
hockets take up fully four breves of each ifteen-breve talea, those found in the second half
of our Horatian motet are rather modest. Only two breves per talea are really involved in
hocketing, though the panisorhythmic section around these stretches to 5 breves—half of
each talea (gray in Example 5.8). But the hockets and their surrounding isorhythmic sections—made up mostly of tame breves and breve rests—do have something in common:
they are distinctly under-texted when compared to the rest of the motet. The irst or last
note within the isorhythmic region may be used by either voice to complete or begin a word,
249
Example 5.6:
In virtute/Decens, upper voices. Isorhythmic correspondences not accounted for by Besseler’s form (“3 ½ (>)07”) are shaded in colors; those
accounted for are shaded in gray.
250
but the central section, which includes the hockets, is consistently untexted.
Example 5.7:Vos/Gratissima, breves 115–123, hockets boxed28
Example 5.8: In virtute/Decens, talea B3, upper voices; isorhythm shaded, hockets boxed.
As noted in Chapter 3, it is not unusual for hockets to be untexted, and the injunction against splitting words articulated in Musicalis/Sciencie goes a long way to explain this.
However, it is possible to plan texts in such a way that they it hockets without splitting
words (as in the excerpt from Vos/Gratissima in Example 5.7, above). And indeed the short
hockets of In virtute/Decens could carry more text than they do, and still not split words. For
instance, the upper voices in Example 5.8 could have accommodated the next two words
of each text —“cui plumas” in the triplum and “et collum” in the motetus. A hypothetical
re-texting for this talea is shown in Example 5.9.
28
Edition reproduced from PMFC 1:80.
251
Example 5.9: In virtute/Decens talea B3, upper voices; alternate text-setting
But even though the hockets of In virtute/Decens might have been texted without doing offense to Rhetorica sciencia, none of them carries text. Indeed, this textlessness spreads
beyond the hockets, so that four or even sometimes ive breves of each ten-breve talea in the
second half of the piece are without text. And even given the dificulties of text underlay
presented by hockets (discussed in Chapter One), the distinctions between texted and textless regions of music are clearly maintained in both sources for this motet. In BN 2444
the scribe has even gone so far as to ill in the spaces below hockets with decorative red and
blue doodles (see Figure 5.2).29 Clearly the absence of text in and around the hockets is
intentional—in fact, I will suggest that the hockets are there for the purpose of textlessness,
and not the other way around.
Figure 5.2: Hockets and inal motetus melisma in In virtute/Decens (Paris 2444, fol. 48)
29
In this source, but not in Ivrea, the motet also ends with untexted notes after the last hocket. This is
relected in my edition in Appendix 5B, but not in other existing editions or performances.
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The avoidance of text during hockets and the music around them leads to a motetwide crunch. Comparing the midpoint of the piece with those of the texts, we ind that
about 2/3 of the poetry has been squeezed into the irst talea: lines 1-18 of 26 in the
Triplum, and lines 1-15 of 22 in the motetus. The reason for this crunch cannot be to accommodate the hockets since, as we have seen, they could in fact carry more text than they
do. Rather, the textual silence in and around the hockets is so engineered that the only lines
of the triplum text remaining for the second color are those paraphrasing Horace.
The subdivision of these lines in the motet is telling. There are eight triplum lines
but seven taleae in the second half of the motet, which seems inconvenient. But this too is a
compositional choice; the motetus is quite regular, having only 7 lines of text in this section
of seven taleae. The composer is therefore interested in varying the rates of declamation of
text. He squeezes the irst two lines, which set up the “pictura species picta multiformis” into
the phrase before the irst hocket (measures 71–6 of the edition in Appendix 4B). Thereafter, he sets the remaining six lines separately, dividing each from the next by a hocketed
section. The division of text renders each line separate and distinct. The result is that in
each section of music set off by hockets we learn something more about the hybrid creature.
Since the hockets are untexted and texturally distinct, the effect is quite audible, and much
attention is given to each new part of the text, and thus of the monster. The hockets, then,
act as oversized ellipsis, controlling the singer’s pronuntiatio and the mental image of the
text as it emerges for the listener. In effect, the hybrid is built in real time, from head to
tail:30
30
For a similar case of hockets setting of poetic lines from each other, and thus acting as punctuation, see
the motetus voice of Tuba/In arboris during the diminution section.
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... as though the artist were to draw ...
a female head ...
feathers ...
a horse’s neck...
a sea-fish
(and to finish the rest out ...)
Written thus, the motet’s hocket sections can be apprehended in a glance. But in performance hockets take up time rather than space. The declamation is relatively clear in both
voices, and especially in the triplum. And for a listener who knows some Latin, and knows
his Horace (and most in the clerical-intellectual audience for which this motet was written
certainly knew both), the words would evoke pictures. The listener would imagine—perhaps
even without meaning to—a jumble of human and animal parts that is disorienting as well
as humorous. Like the proverbial pink elephant, a woman-bird-horse-ish would force itself
on the listener’s mind.
I have not been able to ind a drawing of Horace’s chimera,31 but without a visual
aid, it may even be hard to call to mind a hybrid as complex as the one Vitry builds. The
following is therefore offered as a poor but faithful rendition:
Figure 5.3: “picture species picta multiformis”
31
This may in part be a function of the text’s ambiguity about the creature’s nature—a point I discuss below.
254
It’s easy to forget how strange hybrids are to contemplate—at once implausible and
compelling, they live somewhere between the amusing and the disgusting, challenging our
taxonomic and imaginative faculties. Fourteenth-century thinkers delighted in such unnatural beasts, depicting them frequently in the margins of illuminated manuscripts and
dwelling on their natures in bestiaries and books of marvels, which placed fantastical creatures such as mermaids and basilisks alongside elephants, beavers, and hedgehogs. The lines
between fantasy and reality were not so irmly set, nor would they yield to ossiication easily:
the 19th century saw a boom in the exhibition of dead, dried-out “mermaids.” The most
famous of these—the so-called Feejee mermaid—was accepted as real by doctors and zoologists alike as she took London and the US by storm.32
In the third millennium, when the “natural” of “natural wonders” has become more
strictly deined, we nevertheless continue to ponder hybrids in books and ilms, where depictions of the creatures have become ever more realistic. Though few have had the occasion to contemplate a hybrid as complicated as Horace’s chimera, Thomas Grünfeld and
Iris Shieferstein are among a number of hybrid taxidermists who combine pieces of different animals to make fantastical beasts that look challengingly, disturbingly real.33 Their
work serves as a reminder that hybridity is almost inherently disturbing. No matter how
cute or harmless the animals in question, their combinations disturb species boundaries
32
The mermaid was of Japanese origin and was acquired from Dutch sailors by an American captain in
1822. She had the dried-out head and torso of an orangutan skeleton with a jaw and teeth from a baboon
attached to the body of a large salmon. Her face was distorted, as though with pain, and she was 2 feet 10
inches in length. The curious history of her very successful career is chronicled in Bondeson, The Feejee
Mermaid, 36–63.
33
Grünfeld’s “Misits” is a series of two-animal hybrids including lamingo-cow and parakeet-piglet. Shieferstein mixes even more animals in her work, and her creations come closer to approximating chimeras by
mixing the parts of three, four, and sometimes more characters. Representative of this approach is her series
“Life Can Be So Nice,” which uses chimeras to spell out the refrain from Prince’s song. Images of the work
of both are readily available online.
255
while blurring the difference between reality and imagination.
The idea that the motet is designed to emphasize the hybrid creature in its text leads
us to the crux of a contradiction: though the creature is abhorrent, the entire second half of
the piece is engineered so as to give it prominence. And if we remember that the two halves
of the motet are different enough to belong to two different pieces, then the entire motet
can be viewed as a pictura—on several simultaneous levels—of a hybrid being. Vitry (if it
is indeed he) may be nominally denouncing hybridity, but he is indulging musically and
formally in the image his texts denigrate.34
A MONSTER-SHAPED MOTET
There is yet another level of the piece at which the hybrid is depicted: the level of
isorhythm. Looking back at Example 5.6, we ind that it does not bring into direct alignment many of the isorhythmic correspondences between the motet’s upper voices. My proposed solution to this riddle is given as Example 5.10.
The arrangement I propose may seem chaotic at irst, but I believe that it is implicitly suggested by the correspondences highlighted in Example 5.6. As Besseler suggested, the
irst six taleae need to be arranged into supertaleae, which highlight the congruence of taleae
A2, A4, and A6 (these upper-voice rhythmic correspondences are highlighted in purple
in Example 5.10). This is equally clear of the last four taleae, where the correspondences
between B4 and B6 (highlighted in pink) are most clearly brought out by this arrangement.
The middle of the motet is slightly more complicated, but also dictated by the rhythmic rep34
Cf. Leech-Wilkinson, who argues that “this is a remarkably straightforward and clearly-organized piece.
It is, perhaps, just this simplicity and regularity which represents the composer’s main achievement, given
the apparently irreconcilable quantities of the initial material,” Compositional Techniques, 195.
256
257
etition between upper voices. Here, correspondences between voices cross talea boundaries
(as between taleae B1 and B2, or B2 and B3), which are accordingly adjusted on the graph.
Finally, Section b now makes sense: the two sets of correspondences represented as Yellow
and Blue in Examples 5.5–6 are in fact one (colored blue).
What is the ontological status of Example 5.10? Is it a creation of the analyst’s
brain, “conceived fantastically like a sick man’s dreams”? I rather hope not, and I think the
clarity of elements in the motet structure revealed by this alignment speaks against its being
only my conceit. First, only this alignment can make some sense of the otherwise confusing isorhythmic correspondence in the upper voices around the joints of taleae A6–A7 and
A7–B1 while also showing the correspondence between taleae A6 and A4. The periodicity in these returns of this rhythmic material is regular enough that it seems unlikely to be
coincidental and more likely to be an element of compositional design.
Furthermore, the re-arrangement of taleae into these four sections keeps poetic
lines together, unlike the sections in Examples 5.4 and 5.6 above. This is because the lines
of poetry in In virtute/Decens are out of alignment with the tenor taleae beginning with A7.
And yet, when we listen, it is the declamation of lines that forms natural units, while the
hockets, with their abrupt rhythms, form natural boundaries between phrases. Thus the
structure suggested in Example 5.10 more closely approximates the experience of the motet as heard.35
I don’t mean to imply that anyone would be expected to “hear” the quadripartite
35
Such a structure would also give the motet a better grade in Harrison’s Table IV (PMFC5, p. 204), which
assigns a grade of A+ to D to each motet text based on how well it corresponds with the isorhythmic structure of the motet. In virtute nominum has earned a “C-” and Decens carmen edere a “C.” See further discussion
of Harrison’s grading scheme, and other motets whose grades would have been affected by rearrangement of
taleae, in Chapter 3.
258
structure of the motet. But a listener could easily be aware that there was hybridity afoot.
Apart from hearing the words, possibly even of both voices—an activity which I believe is
not beyond the careful listener in live performance—one would certainly hear the shift into
hockets, and the careful isolation of each of the chimera’s body parts. As they listened to
the irst half of the motet they might think abstractly about poetic vice. And as the second
color came about, Horace’s bizarre creation would slowly insinuate itself on the listener’s
imagination.
But if for the listener the important divisions occur in the hockets and in the semantically disjointed creature, the composer’s challenge is elsewhere, and I believe that it
is to his domain that the arrangement in Example 5.10 belongs. This shape, which consists of four differentiated rhythmic regions—could easily have served as a mnemonic aid
for composition. Anna Maria Busse Berger has argued that isorhythmic repetition was in
part a mnemonic device used to organize motets.36 As I argued in Chapter Three, motets
with supertaleae support this idea, since their “shapes” are often made more memorable
by the units of repetition in the upper voices.37 The four regions a b g d of Example 5.8
may look foreboding, but are in fact perfectly suited to memorization due to the simplicity of their dimensions. a is 20 breves wide, and so is d. b and g are 10 breves wide. This
scheme—20-10-10-20—is simple. a has three iterations; the others only two. Hence,
20x3, 10x2, 10x2, 20x2. There is only one small glitch: the 20 breves of a overlap by 4
breves with the 10 of b (measures 57–60). These four breves are “made up” by a four-breve
“tail” external to d at the end of the motet. The resulting shape is one that can be easily seen
36
Medieval Music, 210–51.
37
See especially the discussions of Vos/Gratissima and Flos/Celsa in Chapter 3.
259
in one glance, whether with the mind’s eye or the head’s. The existence of such a structure
for reference would greatly simplify the composition of the motet, helping the author to reuse metric schemes in a regular manner. If he were instead working with the shape depicted
in Example 5.4 above, his work would be much more dificult. Or rather, the upper-voice
rhythmic correspondences that are observable in the piece would certainly not be present
if the composer’s conception of his work was as a bipartite motet with three-and-a-half
double taleae followed by seven in diminution.
Thus the composer of In virtute/Decens has used a mnemonic aid for his motet whose
structure closely approximates that of the most colorful element of the motet’s text: Horace’s four-part monster. This clever choice reminds us at once of the importance of text in
this motet and the lexibility of form supported by “isorhythmic” procedures. Motets come
in many shapes, and In virtute/Decens, I believe, was chimera-shaped in the mind’s eye of its
creator.
Intensified Monstrosity
Returning to the Ars poetica, we can make one inal observation about Vitry’s texts.
A comparison of the triplum’s paraphrase with Horace’s original (quoted at the start of this
chapter) reveals a subtle but important transformation: the motet’s texts actually intensify
the hybridity of the metaphorical igure. Although there is some ambiguity in the text due
to Horace’s complex grammatical structure, commentators agree that the lines opening the
Ars poetica bring to mind not one creature, but several, each of them resulting from the
mixture of two separate animals or categories:38
38
Oliensis, Horace and the Rhetoric of Authority, 199–200.
260
The painting contains the proiles, blurred but unmistakable, of thoroughly
familiar monsters, in particular the horse-man Centaur and ish-woman
Scylla. Although Horace’s ut-clause superimposes one proile upon the other, retroactively specifying the “human head” of line 1 as the head of a beautiful woman… this syntactical logic is countered by the powerful descriptive coherence of the inal igure—a igure reminiscent, as commentators
note, of Virgil’s biform Scylla, fair maiden above and sea–monster below…
Rhetorically, if not syntactically, Horace’s pictured mermaid displaced the
centaur-like igure of the opening lines.
Hardison, in his helpful commentary, also sees “a human head on the neck of a
horse and a lovely woman with the lower parts of a ish,” while Dorsch reads three hybrids,
imagining a painter who would depict “a human head on a horse’s neck, or to spread feathers
of various colours over the limbs of several different creatures, or to make what in the upper
part is a beautiful woman tail off into a hideous ish.” 39
The motet, in contrast, explicitly creates a being with a woman’s head, feathers, a
horse’s neck, and a ish tail. Having analyzed the motet, we may see why Vitry would chose
to disambiguate and intensify the creature’s hybrid structure: his motet is made up of four
connected parts that echo the chimera’s quadruple nature.40 Naturally, a poet’s adaptation
of a text is the result of a personal reading of the original, and this case serves as a good
reminder of the creative and at times transformative potential of citation. At the same time,
the rest of the triplum text, and the entire motetus text, intensify a different message.
The Ars poetica is notoriously cryptic and several commentators have noted the dificulty scholars encounter when they attempt to draw maxims out of Horace’s text. Bernard
Frischer even went so far as to say that the poem is “illed with advice and rules as useless
39
Emphasis mine; Hardison and Golden, Horace for Students of Literature, 42. Aristotle et al., Classical
Literary Criticism, 79.
40
Then again, the bipartite division is present as well, in the more audible division of the piece into two
halves, one without hockets and one with. In this sense the motet’s form, if not its texts, preserve the ambiguity in Horace.
261
as they are dull and jejune.”41 Whether we will agree so far, it is undeniable that Horace’s
most central points are often contradicted within the poem itself. Even the clear distinction between tragic and poetic style referenced in the motetus and quoted above is immediately undermined: “nevertheless sometimes even Comedy raises her voice.”42 Not so with
the motet texts. Clinging to a message of propriety and evenness in tone and style, they
out-Horace Horace to present a completely cohesive set of instructions.
Hybridity’s Ambivalence
We come to a seeming conundrum. Formally, In virtute/Decens seems almost obsessed with the hybrid it depicts, and it shows that obsession simultaneously on several
levels: the two halves of the motet are mismatched in their use of hockets, and the more detailed isorhythmic scheme presents four separate areas of rhythmic correspondence. Meanwhile, the motet’s texts seem fully committed to their Horatian injunctions against hybridity. Mixes in style and content can only be the work of unskilled poets and are in no way to
be tolerated according to the stern voices of the triplum and motetus. The tenor agrees: its
text, “clamor meus” should probably be read as “my noise” or, literally, “my clamor,” rather
than the biblical “my cry” of “Lord, hear my cry.” The use of the phrase is in fact a pun, and
“clamor” is the result of sins against rhetoric that resemble the monstrous creature. The
chimera, we are to remember, is a negative exemplum. So why did Vitry (or whoever) dwell
on it in so much detail?
The question is an important one, but there is no easy answer. Beyond identifying
special occasions, we rarely ask why a composer has chosen to write a motet on a particular
41
Frischer, Shifting Paradigms, 68.
42
“interdum tamen et vocem Comoedia tollit,” l. 93.
262
topic. And in this case, the answer offered by the texts alone (to encourage poets to write
more responsible motet texts) is undermined when words and music are considered in tandem.
It is even possible that the rest of the work’s textual content—poetic advice—is
present only because it accompanies the creature in its original context. The fact of the
matter is that it is unclear from Horace’s text what exactly it is that the chimera is supposed to represent, and commentators both ancient and modern have disagreed in their
interpretations.43 For some, the monster represents disunity in style; for others, incongruence in form; for 2nd-century grammarian Pomponius Porphorio the monster is a warning against writing that is contrary to nature and lacks verisimilitude. For Pseudo-Acro,
another 2nd-century commentator, the creature lacks unity of subject. For Quintilian, the
hybrid represents the sin of mixing incompatible types of vocabulary. Modern commentators have tended towards broader interpretations. For Brink, the image “lacks verisimilitude” and Horace is campaigning for unity in general—“the unity of a work of poetry seen
by a poet.”44 For Hardison and Golden, the warning is against “unnatural combinations”
which threaten unity and homogeneity.45 These divergent readings rightly led Frischer to
complain that “even after two millennia of trying, we still cannot be certain we understand
what the speaker is trying to say in the opening lines of the poem.”46
Thus, if the poet–composer had instead decided to write a motet about the best way
to write a (motet) text, it is not at all clear that he would have ended by referencing Horace’s
43
For what follows, see Frischer, Shifting paradigms, 70–2.
44
Brink, ed., Horace on Poetry, 85, 81.
45
Hardison and Golden, Horace for Students of Literature, 42.
46
Frischer, Shifting Paradigms, 72.
263
monster. He might well have based his texts on the clearer and less enigmatic Poetria nova by
Geoffery of Vinsauf.47 In view of the disposition of triplum text in the second half of the
motet, there can be no doubt that the decision to write a formally hybrid motet that used
hockets between pieces of the monster was a very early pre-compositional choice—perhaps
the “materia” with which the motet’s subsequent form, texts, and tenor had to concord.48 It
seems that the monster, and not poetic theory, that was foremost in the composer’s mind.
Vitry and the Zytiron
Why choose a monster as the starting point for a musical work? It is just possible
that Vitry wrote a hybrid motet because he liked hybrids and motets—or to put it more
palatably, because he was participating in what Madeline Caviness has termed a medieval
“intellectual preoccupation with the problem of the unnatural.”49 Such a reading of the
situation would suggest that, although we have no reason to doubt the poet’s sincerity where
his injunctions against uneven motet poetry are concerned, he chose this subject for the
chance that it gave him to illustrate the hybrid, and not the other way around.
Indeed, an enigmatic biographical reference improbably creates a link between Vitry and a marine monster. Pierre Bersuire (c. 1290–1362), the author of the inluential
Ovide moralisé, who elsewhere described Vitry as “an exceptional ardent lover of moral philosophy, history, and also antiquity, and learned in all the mathematical sciences,” also cited
47
Visnauf starts with a dedication to Pope Innocent III made humorous by his calling the pope ‘Nocent
“because if I attach the beginning it will be unfriendly to my meter.” After this, the introduction begins, as
does Horace’s with a metaphor, but a less confusing one: just as a builder must plan out a whole house before
he begins to build, so must “not the hand be in a rush toward the pen.” See Murphy, Three Medieval Rhetorical
Arts, 32–4.
48
Bent makes a similar argument about the formal signiicance of a quotation in “Polyphony of Texts and
Music,” 89.
49
“No laughing matter,” 93.
264
the composer as an eyewitness to a human-ish hybrid. The comment comes in the course of
his discussion of the zytiron—a creature with the tail of a ish and the body of an armored
knight. This monster is not included in most medieval bestiairies, but it is described with
other marine monsters in book six of Thomas de Cantimpré’s encyclopedic Opus de natura
rerum (c. 1230–45). There, we learn that the beast is “cunning, and very strong...”:
Its front part in form makes it look very like an armed man, and on its head
is a helmet made of skin which is rough and hard and very strong From its
neck hangs a shield that is long and broad and thick and hollow within, so
that the monster can use it to defend itself against blows from attackers. The
veins and nerves of its neck are particularly strong, and a hard spur of bone
protrudes from its shoulders; the shield I mentioned earlier hangs from its
collar-bone. The shield is triangular, particularly hard and strong, so that it
is almost impossible for a weapon thrown at it to penetrate it. Its arms are
remarkably strong, and its hands like cloven hooves, so that it can land very
effective blows, and no man can wound it unless the blow is especially carefully aimed. As a result, it can only with the greatest dificulty be captured,
and, if it is captured, it can be killed only with blows from a mace or a hammer.50
Bersuire begins by speaking of the zytiron and citing De natura rerum, but then
moves on to describe a smaller marine monster:51
From another man I heard once in the same sea near the isle of Cioca a tiny
ish [was] taken, shaped to the form of an armed knight, armed with a helmet
and shield and breastplate. The like of which I have heard from the venerable man master Philippe de Vitry, asserting that he had seen in Normandy
a similar knight.
It is curious indeed to read such details about a igure like Vitry, whom we imagine
contemplating the stars as an astronomer and tending his lock as a bishop. Here we have
50
The description continues: “These beasts seem to imitate the conlicts of the human race, so they wage
war among themselves, and their battles under the sea cause such a commotion and such turbulence, that it
is sometimes supposed that there is a violent storm. And these monsters are to be found in the British Sea”;
trans. from Taylor, “Pursuing the Parrot,” 184n10.
51
“Zytiron, id est miles marinus: monstrum est marinum sicut dicit liber de natura rerum . . . Ab altero
viro audivi semel in eodem mari [Britannico] prope insulam ciocam parvulum piscem captum, ad formam
armati militis iguratum, casside et scuto et lorica armatum. Cuius simile audivi a venerabili viro magistro
Philippo de Vitriaco, asserente in Normandia similem militem vidisse” Pictaviensis, Reductorii moralis, 310.
Cited and trans. Wathey, “The Motets of Philippe de Vitry,” 145.
265
a glimpse of him marvelling at… an armored merman? Although the illustrators of bestiaries followed Cantimpré’s description to produce improbable creatures like the one in
Figure 5.4, in all likelihood Vitry was not experiencing a vision. Leo Daniël Brongersma
has convincingly argued that the Zytiron was probably a sea turtle, speciically the leatherback (Dermochelys coriacea), whose head “is indeed like that of the conical helmets used in
the middle ages” and whose shell resembles a shield when the creature is examined from the
top as though standing up (Figure 5.5).52 When viewed thus it is by no means beyond the
imagination that a scholar steeped in naturalistic texts such as De natura rerum would see a
knight in armor.53
Figure 5.4: A zytiron pictured in MS Prague Metropolitan
Library L. 11 (dated 1404)
52
European Atlantic Turtles, 221–3.
53
Though it is easy to see texts like De natura rerum as whimsical, especially in light of the quotations I
have given, they were in fact encyclopedic texts aimed at, and used by, scholars. A copy of excerpts from De
natura rerum housed at Harvard (Houghton library MS Lat 125) brings this point home: the book is very
small—its untrimmed folios only 10cm by 13.5 cm, with a text block of 7 cm by 10 cm. It contains no pictures, and only red rubrication in addition to small, clear black text. Annotations in the margins, an index
with corrections and erasures, and well-worn pages all point to heavy use. The section on marine monsters
does not include the zytiron, but it does list the dolphin, siren, crocodile, and hippopotamus, among other
creatures.
266
Figure 5.5: Dermochelys coriacea, dorsal view54
The leatherback is the largest living sea turtle, with one recorded specimen measuring over 9 feet in length and weighing more than a ton: a creature of such dimensions would
truly seem monstrous. The “tiny ish” Vitry saw might have been a baby leatherback, or a sea
turtle of another species. Clearly the sight was a memorable one, and writing a motet about
a chimera may have been a commemoration of the fact, or a chance to explore in music an
encounter with nature so unusual that Vitry thought it worth mentioning to Bersuire.
And even if the evidence provided by Bersuire’s citation does not take us straight
to the genesis of the piece, it is still possible that it speaks to Vitry’s interest in such matters and suggests even more strongly that the composer is using Horace not for the sake of
54
Reproduced from Brongersma, European Atlantic Turtles, Plate 1.
267
poetics but for his own purposes, even if he does pay lip service to the Ars poetica’s broader
contents.
Am I accusing Vitry of sarcasm or insincerity? Of saying one thing and (as it were)
painting another? Nothing so serious, but I think it is possible that there is an element of
fun built into the motet. Indeed, as Bernard Frischer’s provocative 1991 study suggests,
Horace himself may not have been wholly serious. Frischer’s parodic reading of the Ars
poetica is prompted by an earlier dating of the work and careful scrutiny of the critical
voices mentioned in Horace’s text. Reacting in part to the treatise’s strange beginning with
its “multiply mixed metaphor,” he argues that Horace “portrays the speaker of the poem
as a pedant and an ignoramus.”55 New art-historical indings that Horace’s villa was itself
decorated with hybrid creatures support such a reading: “right from the start of the poem
Horace gives us and his contemporary reader ample reason to suspect that the Ars poetica is
to be the inept ramble of an unreliable narrator.”56
I am by no means suggesting that Vitry would have read the Ars poetica as a satire.
Like any school-trained medieval youth, he would have come across this text before his
own critical faculties were fully formed, and might well have learned to revere it before he
learned to question it—such is the fate of school texts.57 But it is possible that the ambiguity of the text was not lost on Vitry. Like Horace’s narrator, Vitry revels perhaps a bit too
much in the negative exemplum.
55
Frischer, Shifting Paradigms, 52, 72–3.
56
Ibid., 85.
57
Horace was an author that a medieval student could take with him through his whole life, since his four
works were considered to be appropriate to the four ages of man: boys could read the Odes, young men could
learn from the Ars poetica, the Satires were for the mature, and the Epistles for the old. See Friis-Jensen,
“The Reception of Horace,” 291–3.
268
*
*
*
But it is unlikely that the composition of this complex piece was entirely a matter
of fun for Vitry.58 If for Horace the image is merely laughable, the later middle ages saw
chimeras as morally and conceptually challenging. On the moral front, Madeline Caviness has argued that chimeras, in referring to the serpent who spoke to Eve (often depicted
with a human head), could represent sin personiied, and thus the devil.59 But chimeras
also represented a logical puzzle, summarized in the sophism “a chimera is chimera.” This
problem—that the term “chimera” signiies nothing that actually exists but can still be used
to create seemingly logical sentences—received a detailed analysis involving the nature of
signs and signiiers in the Sophismata of John Buridan, one of the fourteenth century’s most
famous philosophers and a professor at the University of Paris.60
To Burdian, a “chimera” (insofar as it was anything) was a mixture of a goat, a lion,
and a snake. But any creature made of various animal and human parts could be so termed,
and among these Horace’s monster stands out as one of the more complicated. No other
monster mixes human, bird, ish, and horse. But this very collection of parts might have
recommended itself to Vitry not only as a general reference to marine hybrids or to the
intellectual problem of the chimera, but as containing a potentially musical dimension.
Horace’s collection of parts may have been reminiscent of an important musical creature—
the siren.
58
Nor was the contemplation of hybrids entirely a safe enterprise. Albertus Magnus’s De secretis mulierum
(13th-c.) reports that if a human-animal hybrid is on a woman’s mind during intercourse, the fetus may be
formed in accordance with the monster; cited in Caviness, “No Laughing Matter,” 87.
59
Caviness, “No Laughing Matter,” 89–90.
60
See Roberts, “A Chimera is a Chimera,” 273–8.
269
Though classical and early medieval artists depicted sirens as human-headed and
human-torsoed birds with wings and talons, their connection with the sea, from the rocky
cliffs of which they sang their dangerous songs, led to a transformation.61 Already in the
early eighth century, the Liber monstrorum gives these musicians “the body of a maiden...
from the head to the navel... but scaly ishes’ tails, with which they always lurk in the sea.”62
The result was sometimes a group of three sirens, some of which were part bird, and some
part ish. Other medieval sources split the difference, describing a creature with a woman’s
head and torso, falcon’s feet, and a ishtail.63 Medieval bestiaries tend to draw freely upon
these various aspects of sirens, betraying what Debra Hassig characterizes as a “relative uncertainty concerning the siren’s physical characteristics”: although most texts describe the
creature as part-woman/part-bird, “the majority of images represent a creature that is either
half ish, or at best, a woman-ish-bird.”64 These latter types of illustration show sirens with
human torsos, bird elements (webbed feet and/or feathered wings), and ishtails. All but the
horse neck of Horace’s chimera is accounted for (see Figure 5.6).
“Is the siren a beast, bird, ish, or monster?” Hassig poses the question rhetorically,
arguing that the siren is all of the above, while Elizabeth Eva Leach focuses on the avian
nature of sirens in her recent exploration of bird song, sometimes even calling the creatures
birds. Yet their ishiness is equally important to her argument, since she posits that fe-
61
Holford-Strevens, “Sirens in Antiquity,” 16–29.
62
Trans. ibid., 29.
63
For example, Philippe de Thaon wrote in the early 12th century that “Serena en mer hante/Cuntre tempeste chante/ E plurë en bel tens,/ Itels est sis talenz;/E de feme at faiture/Entresqu’a la ceinture,/E les piez
de falcun/E cue de peissun,” Walberg, ed., Le bestiaire de Philippe de Thaün, 51.
64
Hassig, Medieval Bestiairies, 105, 108. See also McCulloch, Medieval Latin and French Bestiairies, 167–9.
270
males—naturally moist and cool as a function of their
Figure 5.6: Woman-Fish-Bird sirens in Cambridge, Corpus Christi MS 53, f. 201v
(left) and Cambridge University Library, MS li. 4. 26, fol. 39r (right)65
males—naturally moist and cool as a function of their sex—are implicated in any discussion of music as wet or sirenic.66 In virtute/Decens allows us to have our cake and eat it too,
since it has the makings in it for any kind of siren—the woman, feathers, and ishtail are
all there, and they can be recombined as necessary in the reader’s/listener’s/singer’s imagination to construct the sirens in all their complexity and instability.
Sirens are, of course, musical creatures—singers and often instrumentalists. While
their song is deadly, it is also beautiful.67 Indeed, a rare bit of praise for female singers from
Arnulf of St. Ghislain’s Tractatulus de differentiis et gradibus cantorum (c. 1400) calls these
skilled performers “goddesses, or indeed rather earthly Sirens.”68
65
Reproduced from Hassig, Medieval Bestiairies, 110 and Holford-Strevens, “Sirens in Antiquity,” 33.
66
Leach, Sung Birds, 264.
67
There are positive characterizations of sirens in Guillaume de Lorris, Gottfried von Straßburg, Dante,
Petrarch, and Tinctoris—see Holford-Strevens, “Sirens in Antiquity,” 28–9.
68
“Dee ymo verius syrene terrestres”; for an edition and translation of the treatise and an analysis of Arnulf’s attitude towards female singers, see Page, “A Treatise on Musicians,” 13–14, 16, 20. See Also Leach,
271
Arnulf’s use of sirens within a music treatise is not entirely unprecedented. Leach
has discussed the “sparse” presence of sirens in medieval music theory, where they are sometimes present out of etymological need: when musica is derived from moys (water), sirens are
mentioned as being both musical and aquatic.69 In addition, there is a parallel between the
iconography of the three sirens—often depicted singing, playing a wind instrument, and
plucking a harp—and the species of musica instrumentalis outlined by Isidore: musica harmonica (singing), musica organica (wind instruments) and musica ritmica (plucked and percussive instruments).70 Leach’s goal is to situate sirens within the broader medieval discourse
about birdsong, which has a more robust presence not only in music theory, but also in
late-medieval compositions. But sirens are not treated by composers: “unlike most other
birds to which singers are compared, the siren is not directly represented in contemporary
musical pieces.”71
This is true if by directly we mean mimetically: while cuckoos, larks, and nightingales are evoked with stylized versions of their cries in late-medieval songs, we have no
sirenic equivalent to the lark’s “que te dit que te dit” or the nightingale’s “oci oci.”72 But such
stylized mimesis is only one mode of representation available to the medieval composer.
“Representation” is a broader category and can include the manipulation of formal ele-
Sung Birds, 265–6.
69
Ibid., 264 and ead., “‘The Little Pipe Sings Sweetly,” 197.
70
Sung Birds, 264–5 and “The Little Pipe Sings Sweetly,” 198.
71
She goes on to suggest that this lack of musical representation of sirens is only seeming, if we read a resonance between trahat, Johannes Boen’s word for the way in which pitches outside of the guidonian hand that
are necessary for directed progressions attract the ear, and Aribo’s use of “contrahere” as the Latin equivalent
of “Siren”: “this interpretation would make the whole notated repertory of fourteenth-century song—sacred
and secular—sirenic,” Sung Birds, 270.
72
For these cries set to music, see, for example, Vaillant’s Par maintes foys and the anonymous Or sus vous
dormes trop and Sung Birds, 141–65.
272
ments such as isorhythm and hocket. As such the form of In virtute/Decens is representative,
though certainly in a broader way, of a creature not very different from a siren.
UT PICTURA MOTETUS?
The siren’s presence in music theory, on the one hand, and this particular chimera’s
origin in a treatise, on the other, become signiicant when we consider that the citation of
text from a treatise strengthens the authority of the motet as itself a treatise.73 Quoting
from the auctoritates was a time-honored way to gain authority for oneself, and music’s
kinship with poetry—still undisputed at mid-century—would make the treatise on poetic
composition an obvious candidate for inclusion in a motet trying to fashion itself as a didactic object.74
If In virtute/Decens is a treatise, what are its precepts? It is conceivable that Vitry,
like Porphyrio, saw in the mishmash of animal and human parts the analogue to a poem that
lacks verisimilitude because its “formal qualities [are] inappropriate to its subject matter.”75
Under a doctrine of verisimilitude, a motet about a chimera would actually need to embody
73
I am grateful to Professor Lewis Lockwood for pointing this out to me.
74
The fact that In virtute/Decens quotes from the a poetic treatise underscores the extent to which motets
were poetic as well as musical creations. For more on the literary presence of motets, see Chapter One.
The other obvious direction would have been to quote from a music treatise. The earliest motet that does
this seems to be the fragmentary Musicus est ille from London PRO E24 (ifteenth century). This work
paraphrases lines from the inal chapter of the irst book of Boethius’s De musica and references its source
explicitly. This motet forms part of an unpublished study on the musician motets by Margaret Bent and
David Howlett, and I thank Dr. Bent for bringing it to my attention. There are not many later examples:
John Adams’s Harmonielehre (1984–85) takes its title from Schoenberg’s famous textbook, but is an orchestral work that sets no text. Therefore the next work to set a treatise to music is Tom Johnson’s 1988
Riemannoper—“eine Oper in zwei Akte für Bariton, Tenor, Primadonna, Primadonna assoluta, und Klavier,
mit Text direkt aus dem Riemann Musik Lexikon.” The opera uses exact quotations, and even sets bibliographic information to music, such as when the tenor sings “Hugo Riemann Musiklexikon Sachteil Seite
neunhundert sieben-und-vierzig” in the Vorspiel.
75
Frischer, Shifting paradigms, 70.
273
a chimera in some ways, just as a poem needs to formally agree with its topic.
And that, after all, is the point: I have argued in this and previous chapters that
14th-century motet composers were interested not in text painting but in a broader congruence of textual content and poetic form, and further that this form often has a visual component: motets have shapes. Often these shapes are rather simple, such as the rectangles and
sets of parallel lines described in Chapter 3. Sometimes, as in the Fortuna motets analyzed
in Chapter 4, the shape evoked is circular. In the case of In virtute/Decens, the shape is a
more complicated one—a set of four rectangles of two different sizes that are adjacent and
in one case overlapping. But it seems fully itting that a more complicated visual image
would represent a more intricate subject.
Horace’s work leads us easily to such pictorial metaphors. He himself was interested
in linking the visual and the poetic—a union summarized in his famous dictum “ut pictura
poesis.”76 Nor are the Ars poetica’s pictures limited to the chimera at its head; the lines immediately following the description of the monster unite poem and image by grouping their
creators when they argue that painters and poets (pictoribus atque poetis) are entitled to artistic license. Only a few lines later, Horace makes another set of analogies which combines
references to embroidery, drawing and pottery in a passage teeming with images:77
Often, one or two purple patches are stitched onto works that have begun in
high seriousness…but this was not the place for such embellishments. And
perhaps you know how to draw a cypress tree. What does it matter if you have
been paid to depict a desperate sailor swimming away from a shipwreck? You
76
Horace’s saying is a distillation of the theories of the greek poet Simonides (c. 556 BC-468 BC) who
(according to Plutarch), “calls painting silent poetry, and poetry speaking painting.” See Cook, The Art of
Poetry, 249. On the link between Simonides, visualization, and medieval memory, see the introductory
comments in Carruthers and Ziolkowski, The Medieval Craft of Memory, 29.
77
Ll. 9, 14–23.
274
started out to make a wine-jar. Why, as the wheel turns, does it end up as a
pitcher? In short, let the work be anything you want, but let it at least be one,
single thing.
Woman, horse, bird, purple patch, cypress, shipwreck, drowning man, wine-jar and
pitcher: all these images are to be found in the irst 25 lines of Horace’s text, and they remind us that Horace is a painter’s poet, and a poet for anyone who calls up an imago in the
act of imagining and remembering. Thus he is the perfect poet on which Vitry might pin
his own theoretical discussion, the one embedded into the structure of In virtute/Decens, a
sort-of Ars motetrum in form of an exemplum—ut pictura motetus.
* * *
If, with its congruence of form and topic, In virtute/Decens is Horatian in spirit, it
yet deies the only clearly stated rule in Horace’s introduction, since it is blatantly not “one,
single thing.” The placement of hockets in the second color and the resulting change in texture, coinciding with the triplum’s abrupt switch of subjects from poetry to painting, result
in a work that is as close to being two different things as one ars nova motet can get. Unless
that single thing is itself a disjunct creature. We land in the usual logical troubles into which
hybrids lead us: “a chimera is a chimera,” and what is that?
Anthropologically speaking, the solution to this riddle may be the statement of it.
Drawing on evidence from Ethiopian, biblical, and Western folk taxonomies, Dan Sperber has argued that hybrids and monsters exist precisely because they encourage symbolic
thought. Nor do they ever actually succeed in confusing us: rather, their anthropological
function may be to reinforce taxonomic boundaries by standing outside of them.78
Disagreeing with Mary Douglas, who posited that “[a]ny given system of classiica78
Sperber, “Why are Perfect Animals,” and “Pourquoi les animaux parfaits.”
275
tion must give rise to anomalies,” Sperber argues that anomalies are not inevitable, but are
built into folk taxonomies to stengthen the boundaries of those systems of classiication.79
When we judge an animal to be less representative of a genus than another animal (the crow
is more of a bird than the ostrich; the sea horse is less of a ish than a trout), “a normative
judgment is considered as modifying the taxonomic identiication which it logically presupposes.”
For our purposes, this means that we have to know what a motet is to say that In
virtute/Decens is a strange one, so that our idea of the motet will not be signiicantly modiied by the strangeness of a hybrid case: the identiication of the genre’s normal state must
come irst.80 All this is reasonably obvious without turning to anthropology, but what is
important here is the symbolic thought that necessarily results: a formally hybrid motet is
guaranteed to make us think about motets in the abstract, and would probably do so even
if the texts were not there to guide us—with their reference to theoretical treatises—into
deeper consideration.
In mixing two different aspects of motets, In virtute/Decens actually allows us to
understand the workings of “standard” motets more clearly. We can only recognize it as the
exception if we pay attention to the rules. By its very disjunction, it helps us to see “normal”
boundaries.
79
Douglas, Purity and Danger, 39.
80
We sometimes talk about pieces of music as individual members of a species. When Michael Scott Cuthbert read a paper which employed statistical methods normally used to count animal populations in order
to estimate the number of lost Trecento sources, I could not help but imagine wild ballate, madrigals, and
motets hopping about in the forest and occasionally being tagged by researchers, only to be released again.
Cuthbert, “Counting Our Losses” and “Trecento Fragments,” 53–86. Julie Cumming has also taken a
taxonomic approach to motets from the ifteenth century, even referring to some as hybrid: see The Motet
in the Age of Du Fay.
276
In virtute/Decens is a motet about motets, seemingly about texts but also—it turns
out—about structure, and ultimately about the connection between text and structure. It is
unusual—and even extraordinary—and has deserved its own chapter. But In virtute/Decens
is not alone, which is perhaps the most extraordinary thing.
Not only is it not the only motet to deal with a hybrid creature, it is also not unique
within Vitry’s oeuvre in referencing Horace’s chimera. Nor is it even alone in deploying
hockets unusually to create a strange shape which accommodates hybrid-themed uppervoice lyrics. In the inal chapter I will discuss several more motets that contain—and in
some way embody—hybrid content, and do so in formally hybrid ways. If In virtute/Decens
is a distillation, the raw materials from which it is distilled are in relative abundance within
the Ars Nova motet repertory.
277
APPENDIX 5A
IN VIRTUTE/DECENS CARMEN/CLAMOR MEUS, TEXTS AND TRANSLATIONS
TRIPLUM
5
10
15
20
25
In virtute nominum
quamplures ignari
conditores criminum
falso predicari
gaudent dictis hominum
putantes equari.
Many ignorant authors of crimes rejoice
in the virtue of words to preach falsely,
thinking that the writings of [all] men
are equal.
Miscet impericia
talium delusa,
non evitans vicia
scribendi preclusa,
placidis immicia
sinceris obtusa,
alba nigris, tristia
letis, et profusa
nimis arat brevia
sub inepta forma.
The foolish inexperience of these people,
not avoiding forbidden vices of composition, mixes the rough with the gentle,
the obscure with the plain, white things
with black, the sorrowful with the joyous,
and the excessive with the very brief and
they grow concise things into overly excessive ones within an ill-itting form.
Heccine congeries
verborum enormis
est picture species
picta multiformis,
ut si pictor faciat
caput femininum,
cui plumas adiciat
et collum equinum,
residuum iniat
in piscem marinum?
Is not their formless heap of words a kind
of picture painted with many shapes, as
though the artist were to draw a female
head, to which he might add feathers and
the neck of a horse, and then to inish the
rest out as a sea-ish?
278
MOTETUS
5
10
15
20
Decens carmen edere
quicumque volentes,
thema decens capere
debent et decentes
esse thema promere.
Posse mencientes,
honeri subcumbere
non liquunt prudentes.
Anyone wishing to write an appropriate
song should take a itting subject and
themselves be it to put forth a topic.
Si scribendi tragicus
stilus est in primis,
in medio comicus
non sit, nec in ymis:
unus enim modicus,
alter est sublimis.
If the tragic style of writing is at the outset, let the comic not be in the middle or
at the end: for one is humble, the other;
elevated.
Verborum coniugium
rite celebretur
adeo quod vicium
minime causetur,
et nichil inproprium
eminus aptetur,
secus enim precium
carmen non meretur.
Let the marriage of words be duly celebrated, so that error may hardly be
blamed, and nothing improper should be
accommodated from afar, otherwise the
song will not merit reward.
Those counterfeiting the ability are
clearly not wise to take on the burden.
TENOR:
Clamor meus
Domine, exaudi orationem meam, et
clamor meus ad te veniat.
-Psalm 101, i.
279
Lord, hear my prayer, and let
my cry come to you.
APPENDIX 5B
In virtute/Decens carmen/Clamor Meus1
?Philippe de Vitry
1
Edition based on Ivrea fol. 55v. Text underlay adjusted based in part on BN 2444, fol. 48. For a listing
of variants see PMFC 5:197.
280
281
282
283
284
CHAPTER SIX
VITRY’S CUM STATUA/HUGO AND LATE-MEDIEVAL INTERPRETATIONS
OF NEBUCHADNEZZAR’S DREAM
“N
E FAIS DE MOY HUGO S’EN ALBION SUIS”— “do not make a Hugo of me because I am
in England.”1 In these words Jean de le Mote pleaded his defense against an attack
on his abilities, his politics, and his understanding of classical references by fellow poet and
composer Philippe de Vitry. The seemingly enigmatic idea of “making a Hugo of someone” is
a reference to one of Vitry’s most irmly attributed works—the motet Cum statua Nabugodonasor/Hugo, Hugo, princeps invidie/Magister invidie.
It is no wonder that the motet in question would have made an impression on Jean. It
is an angry diatribe on the faults of a man named Hugo whom it paints as an envious hypocrite. Though he may seem like a holy man, “a man of peace, a son of virtues,” the motet warns
that he is a false prophet and “prince of envy” whose impious tongue has wounded Philippe
with slander (full texts and translations are included in Appendix 6A).
The motet seems to have been well known, as evidenced by its survival in two extant
sources, a listing in the index of a third source now lost, and a mention in a theoretical treatise.2 Jean de le Mote’s passing reference to the motet also attests to its fame: as Schrade has
written, the motet “must have had a powerful echo since it impressed Jean de le Mote almost
1
Trans. Diekstra, “The Poetic Exchange,” 509–10.
2
Cum statua/Hugo has survived in the Ivrea codex (fols. 14v–15) and in the Cambrai Fragments (CaB,
fol. 11v). It is also mentioned in Trémoïlle, where it occupied fols. 2v-3 (now lost). The motet is cited and
attributed to Vitry by John of Tewkesbury in Quatuor Principalia, where it serves as an example of imperfection in part of a longa by a preceding note: “Posset tamen prima longa imperici a parte ante, nisi punctus
immediate eam sequatur, ut patet in moteto qui vocatur Hugo quem edidit Philippus de Vitriaco,” Coussemaker, ed., Scriptorum 4: 268.
285
with the force of a proverb.”3 Indeed, recent work by Andrew Wathey shows that this echo resounded even into the ifteenth century.4
The motet’s fame and secure attribution have led to stylistic commentary and much
discussion of its date, but no detailed analysis of the work exists.5 As regards the texts, they
are often summarized as examples of vitriolic poetry set to music: the work has been called
“ein literarisch-musikalischer Angriff auf einen bis jetzt noch unbekannten Gegner”; “Oeuvre
polemique contre un calomniateur nommé Hugo”; “a direct and violent attack on a personal
3
Schrade, “Philippe de Vitry,” 341.
4
Evidence of the continued resonance of Cum statua/Hugo is presented by a Bohemian humanist miscellany from the mid-ifteenth century, which elaborates the text of this motet and of Vitry’s Colla/Bona in the
119-line poem Quondam colla iugo veneris submisserat Hugo. See Wathey, “The Motets of Philippe de Vitry,”
142n51.
5
The dating of the motet has rested on that of the the ballade quoted above, in which le Mote refers to
“Hugo,” thus prividing a terminus ante quem. Pognon, who irst edited the poems, placed the exchange between 1328 and 1339 because of a line in which he read to mean that le Mote had never found in France
such approbation as he receives in England (l. 8, “Onques n’oy; ailleurs bont ne volee”). This resulted in a
terminus ante quem of 1340, since in 1340 le Mote wrote two poems popular in France. Musicologists have
followed this dating, placing the motet in “the Early 1430s, if not earlier” (Schrade), 1337 (Reany et al.),
and 1325 (Blachly); see the summary in Kügle, The Manuscript Ivrea, 86n22. Kügle also argues for “an early
date” for the motet, in the range of “1315 and 1320, possibly extending to c. 1325,” ibid 118. In 1986
F. N. M. Diekstra published a careful re-edition of the poems, which argues that Pognon’s original dating
was based on a misreading. In fact, Diekstra convincingly argues, “the line [in question] means that he has
never heard anywhere else accusations such as Philippe is now directing at him” (“The poetic exchange,”
516). Schrade also cites evidence that le Mote returned to France after 1339 (“Philippe de Vitry,” 342).
Although he was probably in Paris in 1340, le Mote was back in England on 21 July 1343, when he was
paid for entertaining King Edward (Wilkins, “Music and Poetry at Court,” 192). All evidence points to this
as the beginning of an extended English stay and a close connection with Edward’s court. Wimsatt places the
poetic exchange between le Mote, Campion, and Vitry in the years following 1343, based on the evidence
of the ballade texts, as well as external characteristics of the poetry such as Le Mote’s long ballade strophes
and extensive use of literary exempla—features of the ballade in the 1350s (Chaucer and his French Contemporaries, 50, 63, 69). Diekstra’s re-reading combined with Wimsatt’s evidence and the work of Wilkins
has resulted in a re-dating of the poems for literary scholars; MacDonald tentatively dates the debate to the
1350s (“Doubts about Medea,” 262). This would give a much later terminus ante quem for Cum statua/Hugo,
though of course it does not necessarily argue that the motet itself is later. It does, however, mean that the
“evidence” by which the motet’s dating has been calculated is entirely inconclusive and that biographical and
stylistic arguments resting on it are open to revision.
286
enemy.”6 Surely it is all those things. But these summaries fail to mention an important presence in the motet—the elephant in the room that is cued by the triplum’s irst line, “Cum
statua Nabugodonasor.” This is a reference to a dream-statue from the book of Daniel which
Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babyon saw in a dream. Its head was gold, and the rest of its body in
turn made of silver, bronze, iron, and clay. The listing and description of these materials takes
up the irst half of the triplum text:7
Like the metal statue of Nebuchadnezzar, the Lord allowed Zion to be successively and by stages reduced to pieces, which when it was gold (Zion was)
virtuous, then silver (and Zion was) clean in body, following this copper…
earthen iron, and mud.
Only after this extended biblical paraphrase does the triplum text settle into its blame of
Hugo. What is Nebuchadnezzar’s dream statue doing in Vitry’s motet? No obvious answer
comes to the fore, and thus the statue has been relegated to the status of an allegorical
“aside.”8 But I hope my study of In virtute/Decens in the previous chapter showed that such
“asides” can actually be central to the meaning of a motet.
Indeed Cum statua/Hugo has much in common with the Horatian motet. In the
course of a rant (whether against Hugo or against inept poets more generally), each motet
makes use of an extended literary allusion notable for its physical incongruence. In the
case of In virtute/Decens, we have seen that the last ten lines of the triplum are dedicated
to describing the chimera from Horace’s Ars poetica, and that they carefully name its body
6
Besseler, “Studien zur Musik des Mittelalters II,” 204; Zwick, “Deux motets inedits,” 32; Gallo, Music
of the Middle Ages II, 36.
7
The statue is discussed in lines 1–9, of 20. Since the second half of the motet includes some shorter lines
(discussed below), its presence accounts for very nearly half of the text: the irst 34 words, of 69 total.
8
See, for example, Besseler, “Studien zur Musik des Mittelalters I,” 192. But Besseler is unusual in even
mentioning the statue while discussing the motet.
287
parts piece by piece, from human head to ishtail. The opening nine lines of the triplum
Cum statua Nabugodonasor are similarly engaged in listing and characterizing the parts of a
hybrid creature—this time hybrid in materials—and naming them in order, from golden
head to muddy toes.9 It will therefore be important to explore this motet’s musical engagement with its hybrid statue, paying careful attention to text-setting and isorhythmic regions—compositional aspects which proved to be expressive in the case of In virtute/Decens.
Two other musical works from the fourteenth century—another motet by Vitry
and a complainte by Machaut—concern themselves in part with Nebuchadnezzar’s dream,
and analysis of these will reveal interesting links among the statue’s musical incarnations.
But while the interpretation of Horace’s monster was relatively straightforward since its
source—a treatise on poetics—matched the theme of the motet, the biblical icon at the
center of Cum statua/Hugo is more resistant to interpretation. As a result, it forces us to ask
a broader set of questions. What might Nebuchadnezzar’s statue have meant to Vitry and
to his listeners? Was it commonly invoked in the course of blaming an adversary? To what
extent is Vitry’s reading of this passage consistent with those of his contemporaries?
Answering these necessarily leads to an exploration of the uses of this particular
allegory in the work of fourteenth-century intellectuals, among them Guillaume de Deguilleville, Philippe de Mézieres, Dante, Boccaccio, and John Gower. A look at the statue’s
depictions in music, poetry, and art can serve as a useful case study of how one idea found
cross-medial resonances in late-medival culture, while also allowing us to ask in what ways,
if any, musical treatments of this theme differ from poetic and artistic ones.
9
The motets also share a source—the Ivrea Codex—where they are part of a small group of similarly angry
motets including Colla/Bona, Rachel/Ha fratres, and O canenda/Rex.
288
THE STATUE’S LAYERS: A METALLURGICAL SUMMARY
It will be useful to begin with the biblical dream and it explication, since the irst
line of the motet’s triplum, “Like the statue of Nebuchadnezzar,” tacitly assumes that its
listener knows the story. Vitry’s source is Daniel 2, which begins in the second year of
Nebuchadnezzar’s reign as king of Babylon. One night he dreams a dream whose meaning
is unclear and whose contents he imperfectly remembers. Terriied, he orders his magicians to tell him tell him what, and why, he dreamt. But his team is unable to comply and is
sentenced to death barring the appearance of a more powerful prophet. Enter Daniel, who
tells the king that his dream was of an enormous statue made of various materials that is
shattered by a stone:
Thou, O king, sawest, and behold a great image. This great image, whose
brightness was excellent, stood before thee; and the form thereof was terrible. This image’s head was of ine gold, his breast and his arms of silver, his
belly and his thighs of brass, his legs of iron, his feet part of iron and part
of clay. Thou sawest that a stone was cut out without hands, which smote
the image upon his feet that were of iron and clay, and brake them to pieces.
Then was the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold broken to pieces together, and became like the chaff of the summer threshingloors; and
the wind carried them away, that no place was found for them: and the stone
that smote the image became a great mountain, and illed the whole earth.10
This vision, sometimes referred to as the “Dream of Precious Metals,” easily captures the imagination: the irst half of the description is still, giving a vertical and focused
account of the statue from its head to its hybrid feet. Then suddenly a lurry of motion
erupts when the stone is carved inexplicably from the mountain and hits the iconic “feet of
clay,” scattering the statue and itself illing the whole world.
The apocalyptic imagery of this symbol is all but inescapable. Daniel’s interpretation of the dream, which follows, explicates this image of decay through time and sudden
10
Daniel 2:31–5.
289
upheaval. He equates Nebuchadnezzar’s reign with the statue’s golden head and a series of
three successively worse kingdoms with its less precious lower divisions:
Thou, O king, art a king of kings…Thou art this head of gold. And after thee
shall arise another kingdom inferior to thee, and another third kingdom of
brass, which shall bear rule over all the earth. And the fourth kingdom shall
be strong as iron…and as iron that breaketh all these, shall it break in pieces
and bruise. And whereas thou sawest the feet and toes, part of potters’ clay,
and part of iron, the kingdom shall be divided; but there shall be in it of the
strength of the iron, forasmuch as thou sawest the iron mixed with miry clay.
And as the toes of the feet were part of iron, and part of clay, so the kingdom
shall be partly strong, and partly broken…and in the days of these kings
shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed:
and the kingdom shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces
and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand for ever. Forasmuch as
thou sawest that the stone was cut out of the mountain without hands, and
that it brake in pieces the iron, the brass, the clay, the silver, and the gold; the
great God hath made known to the king what shall come to pass hereafter:
and the dream is certain, and the interpretation thereof sure.11
That the dream is political is hardly in doubt, and although only the gold part of
the statue is explicitly linked with a real kingdom, the book’s writers intended to convey
other kingdoms (Media, Persia, and Greece) through the rest of the metals, so that the
stone striking the statue could signify an end to the reign of Antiochus in the Maccabbean
revolt.12 Christian writers from Jerome’s inluential commentary onward have extended the
story, reinterpreting the Kingdoms as the Medo-Persian, Greek, and Roman empires and
understanding the stone as Christ’s irst coming.13
In these commentaries the dream’s interpretation received more attention than the
dream itself, but we can get some hint of the statue as it must have been present to the
late-medieval cultural imagination from illustrated bibles, which almost always depict it as
11
Daniel 2:37–45.
12
Kratz, “The Visions of Daniel,” 92–3.
13
Trans. Archer, Jerome’s Commentary on Daniel, 633-4.
290
whole, with the stone resting ominously at its feet. Illuminators usually include Nebuchadnezzar, either dreaming or awake, and often Daniel as the intermediary between dreamer
and dream (see Figure 6.1).
Figure 6.1: Daniel narrates the king’s dream, Bible moralisée (1234)14
In many depictions the artists have gone to great pains to reproduce the bible’s
description exactly, switching ink colors at each new level of the statue’s composition. This
often means using gold paint for the head, and sometimes silver for the chest (which has
tarnished to black). Beyond that, some illuminators forego verisimilitude: rather than approximating the colors of bronze, iron, and clay, they use contrasting pigments to ensure
that the difference between materials is conveyed (See Figure 6.2).15
14
The illustration reproduced here, which also shows the counselors who were not able to tell the king what
he dreamt, is from Toledo, Cathedral Treasury, Mss. 1–3, fol. 204. In this famous Bible moralisée which
belonged to Saint Louis we have the unusual opportunity to see the statue depicted twice: once whole (reproduced here), and then in pieces. This is due to the heavily illustrated format of the Bibles moralisées, which
contain eight round images per page, accompanied by biblical summaries. The statue’s layers are depicted
carefully here, and preserved when we see it shattered into pieces. A lavish facsimile of the manuscript is
published as Biblia de San Luis (Barcelona: M. Moleiro, [2000-2004]). But note that the facsimile applies
gold and silver paint indiscriminately to the image of the statue on fol. 204, so that the individual striations
are not visible. Fortunately, volume 1 of the commentary reproduces an unadulterated photograph of this
folio on page 396, a detail from which is shown above as Figure 6.1.
15
When a lack of pigment, time, or interest leads to a less precise delineation of the statue’s levels than the
291
Figure 6.2: Daniel narrates the king’s dream, Bible historiale (1372)16
This arbitrary use of color (as in the orange-ish thighs which are meant to depict
iron in Figure 6.2) suggests that it was more important to depict the difference in the
statue’s makeup than its actual materials. Its many internal boundaries deined it and differentiated it from other biblical visions and dreams (including a story later in the book
of Daniel in which Nebuchadnezzar raises a golden idol). This emphasis on the statue as
a markedly fragmented object, even prior to its destruction, will also be pervasive in the
motet, on various levels .
bible prescribes, the boundaries most consistently depicted are those at the head and feet of the image. See,
for example, the emphasis on the statue’s head placed by the Maitre de Fauvel and his collaborators in Paris,
Fr. 8, a Bible Historiale illustrated c.1320-30, fol. 189.
16
Den Haag MMW 10 B 23, fol. 254v.
292
THE MOTET’S LAYERS: A FORMAL SUMMARY
Let us look briely at the organization of Cum statua/Hugo so as to get oriented for
more detailed analysis (see Appendix 6B for a complete edition). The motet is for three
voices, the upper two texted throughout and the bottom an untexted isorhythmic tenor. The
tenor color is 24 notes long, and each statement is divided into three taleae ifteen breves in
length. The color is repeated three times, for a total of 9 taleae and 135 breves (see Example
6.1).
Example 6.1: Cum statua/Hugo Tenor color and talea pattern
While the tenor’s ninefold repetition of the same rhythm without change or diminution suggests a simple structure, upper-voice rhythmic congruences complicate the picture. Cum statua/Hugo divides into four isorhythmic regions made up of two nearly panisorhythmic pairs of taleae at the beginning and end of the piece, with less structured material
in the middle (see Example 6.2). The material in region a (taleae A1 and A2) is marked by
nearly identical triplum rhythms which are proiled enough to be memorable. This material
is also partially isomelic (see the boxes labeled x and x’ in Example 6.2). The experience of
listening to these is thus almost strophic. The following four taleae (A3, B1, B2, and B3)
form two supertaleae of 30 breves each (labeled b1 and b2 in Example 6.2). These again
share several areas of rhythmic congruence and some marked isomelism in the triplum
(boxed and labeled y and y’). Next comes a single talea—C1 (g under the new scheme). The
motet concludes with another pair of taleae (labeled d1 and d2) distinguished by the use
293
of hockets and by a high rate of rhythmic congruence (highlighted yellow in Example 6.2).
Thus the motet, like the statue, has its internal divisions—it has, arguably, four of
them.17 While there is nothing like a simple equation between the bodies of the dream image and the piece of music, these regions will have analytical signiicance and we shall see
different compositional priorities in each. Moreover these divisions, when seen in light of
the structure of In virtute/Decens, suggest that the allegorical statue described in the triplum
may play an important role in the motet’s meaning, as constituted by text-music interactions. Indeed the fragmentation which characterizes the motet’s rhythmic structure also
plays a pervasive role in other aspects of its composition, from local text-setting decisions
to the very choice of the tenor color.
17
Section g (talea C1) is the odd one out. While it shares some rhythmic characteristics with the second
half of d2, especially the longa in triplum in mm. 97–9, it lacks the memorable and proiled triplum
rhythms that are present in mm. 46–50 and 76–80. Besseler’s reading of the upper-voice isorhythm in this
case was “2 (5 c)t+ 2 ½ (5 c) + 2 (5 c),” which implies that C1 is aligned with B2. There is certainly some
correspondence in triplum rhythms between the two taleae, but the isomelism which links A3 and B2 is not
present in C1. As such I have labeled it as a separate section.
294
295
The Composite Tenor of Cum statua/Hugo
The tenor of Cum statua/Hugo is something of a mystery. In the Ivrea codex, it is
labeled simply “Tenor Cum statua”—an indication that the scribe either did not know the
tenor’s source or that the tenor is newly composed for the motet.18 In the other source for
this motet, a set of fragments now in Cambrai, the tenor is labeled “Magister invidiae”
(master of envy), but no chant with this text has yet been identiied. Alice Clark has shown
that there is a partial match between the color and the antiphon Salve crux pretiosa for Saint
Andrew. Here, the last nine notes, which are sung to the words “te magister meus Christus,”
correspond to the beginning of the color (see Example 6.3).19 After this the antiphon ends,
but the motet tenor continues. Clark reasonably proposes that the rest of the color is freely
composed.
Example 6.3: Chant concordance for notes 1–9 of the color of Cum statua/Hugo
It is very rare for a motet tenor to begin with chant and continue with newlycomposed material, and rare also for the text of the tenor to be changed from that of the
18
Schrade hesitantly put forward the hypothesis that “since the motet is composed against a certain Hugo,
a personality not yet identiied, the [tenor] might be a melody of Philippe himself rather than borrowed
material,” Commentary to Volume 1, 106.
19
“Concordare cum materia,” 181, 207. Clark does not include the motet tenor’s irst note in her discussion,
and it is omitted in the table which lines up chant sources against the motet tenor. Thus she has argued that
the motet’s irst eight notes align with the words “magister meus Christus.” In fact, the irst nine notes are
concordant with “te magister meus Christus.”
296
plainchant (as must happen if “Et magister meus Christus” becomes “magister invidiae”).20
Thus Clark has called Cum statua/Hugo “an extreme case of alteration of chant-based materials, where the text is modiied and the melody takes its chant source only as a point of
departure.”21 She suggests further that that the change of “meus Christus” to “invidiae” (a
word found in the irst line of the motetus text) “would be in keeping with what is known of
[the] erudite and witty” Vitry.22
However, keeping in mind the statue that stands at the center of this work—a
strongly piecemeal creation—it is worth asking whether the tenor notes that follow this
fragment are necessarily newly composed, or whether they may be pieced together from
various chants. Even without consulting chant sources it is clear that the 24-note tenor is
divisible into three sections 9, 8, and 7 notes long, respectively, which are differentiated
by range and modal orientation (see Example 6.4). Region 1, which corresponds with the
excerpt from Salve crux, is set apart from the following notes by the cadential igure D-C-C.
It is also the highest part of the tenor, possibly a mode 7 or mode 8 melody transposed up a
fourth (if the C is indeed inal). Notes 10–17, which form a unit that begins and ends with
D, inhabit a signiicantly lower range. The use of B-lat hints at a transposed D-mode piece,
though the scalar descent followed by a gapped ascent in this fragment does not resemble
a typical Gregorian melody. Finally, notes 18–24 seem to be a group on their own, with a
20
As a precedent for the latter, Clark points to Detractor/Qui from the Roman de Fauvel, whose tenor, “Verbum iniquum et dolosum abhominibitur dominus” is based on the chant “Verbum iniquum et dolosum longe
fac a me, Domine”; “Concordare cum materia,”162, 181–2. It may be worth asking whether the change of text
is in this case a result of normal compositional practice, or of the Fauveline context, in which contrafacta
abound and the perversion of texts is common. For a motet whose tenor begins with several notes of chant
and then continues as freely-composed material, see the discussion of Petre/Lugentium in ibid., 174–81.
21
Ibid., 162.
22
Ibid., 182.
297
range still lower than the previous two, and a melodic shape that suggests mode 6.
Example 6.4: Range and modal regions in the tenor “Magister invidiae”
If these regions do come from different chants, what kind of chant might they be?
In fact the text of the color incipit is from a late-medieval rhyming ofice for Saint Benedict.
There the words “magister invidie”occur in the fourth antiphon for the irst nocturn—Sanctum Romanus habitum.23 It is clear that this chant alone cannot be the source for the tenor
color, whose irst part concords with Salve crux. But the notes sung to the irst two syllables
of “magister” do ind a match in notes 11–16 of the tenor (See Example 6.5). That is, they
account for fragment 2 of the chant, excluding the Ds on either end (indeed the fragment
makes more sense as a gregorian melody without the Ds). It seems, then, that a chant with
the words “magister invidiae” is indeed represented in the tenor of Cum statua/Hugo, if only
by its own incipit—”Magi[ster].” After this the color jumps again.
It turns out that the tenor for Cum statua/Hugo is a collection of three chant fragments, all taken from internal sections of their respective chants, which in turn come from
disparate parts of the liturgical year. They are linked only by their local textual content:
23
This ofice appears in numerous manuscripts from the 12th to 14th centuries. The current edition is
from a 15th c. sanctorale from the Benedictine monastery of SS. Ulrich and Afra in Augsburg (Mbs 4305).
For an edition of the ofice text and a listing of sources see Analecta hymnica 25:145-9. An edition of the
music and brief commentary is available in Heckenbach, “Das mittelalterlichen Reimofizium Praeclarum
late,” 189-210. The ofice is not included in the Corpus Antiphonalium Officii.
298
Vitry seems to have gone on a scavenger hunt for “magister” chants.24 The only two notes
not accounted for are the Ds that frame the second fragment. These perhaps function as
boundaries between the three chants while also extending the range of the middle section
(see Example 6.7).
Example 6.5: Sanctum romanus habitum (Mbs 4305, fol. 47); notes concordant with the
tenor of Cum statua/Hugo are boxed and numbered
Given that the irst two sections of the tenor combine two consecutive chant fragments that involve the word “magister,” it seems likely that its inal section is also from a
chant. Indeed, the inal seven notes of the color seem to be drawn from the Maundy Thursday antiphon Vos vocatis me magister. The word “magister” appears twice in this chant, and
the notes set to it and to the words around it are in both cases concordant with notes 18–
24 of the chant tenor, barring repeated notes. In the irst case, the match encompasses the
text “[vo]catis me magister et”; in the second, “et magister, et” (See Example 6.6).25
24
It was Professor Thomas Kelly who suggested that I look for more “magister” chants when “invidie” was
not turning up, and I am grateful to him for his insight. “Magister” is not a particularly common word in the
liturgy—I have located it in ifteen chants. Of these, three are from Holy Week, three more are for Saint
Andrew, two are for Saint Benedict, and one each is for saints Agatha and Udalric. The other ive chants
come from the 12th, 17th, 19th, and 22nd Sundays after Pentecost, and from a Tuesday in the second
week of Lent. Vitry has thus chosen his three chant fragments from the three most common contexts in
which “magister” appears—Saint Andrew, Holy Week, and Saint Benedict.
25
The chant’s F would transpose as a B-lat. In the motet this is unsigned, but in color 3 the tenor must sing
B-lat as ficta in mm. 131, corresponding in that case with the chant’s intervallic structure. I am grateful to
Dr. Jeffrey Dean for bringing the second match to my attention.
299
Example 6.6: Chant concordance for notes 18–24 of the tenor of Cum statua/Hugo26
Example 6.7: The tenor of Cum statua/Hugo with sectional concordances
The emphasis on “magister” is puzzling, especially as the word does not appear in
the upper voices. However, perhaps the color hints that Hugo is a university man—a possibility strengthened by the motetus’s comment that it is better that Hugo should teach the
ignorant (“ignarum doce te pocius,” l. 6) than go on spreading slander. In light of this we
might propose as a possible candidate the Dominican friar Hugo di Castello who lectured
26
Edited from BN 1112, fol. 82v; the source is a Parisian missal from c. 1225.
300
at Paris in 1337 on astronomy—a topic dear to Vitry.27 The mocking air with which the
triplum text uses the term “mendicant” would be consistent with a Dominican target. It is
possible that in a lecture Hugo disagreed with Vitry (who would likely have been in Paris at
the time) on some point of astronomical or religious doctrine and thus provoked Vitry’s angry musical response. But this must remain a point of conjecture, awaiting further evidence.
Quite apart from the biographical implications of its focus on “magister,” the fact
that the color is sectional must have consequences for our understanding of the motet. I
believe that this unusual construction, like the sectional arrangement of the upper voices,
calls to mind the statue of Nebuchadnezzar. Just as the statue is made up of different materials, so the tenor is put together from different chants—a Frankenstein among colores. Nor
does the composer try to hide his seams: the tenor’s discontinuity is marked by its various
ranges and modal orientations.
The direct textual context of the chants may also be pertinent here. In Sanctum
Romanus habitum, there is mention of a stone (“sed magister invidiae/saevit in illum lapide)
which may bring to mind the stone which struck the statue’s feet. Even more suggestive is
the text of Vos vocatis me magister, in which Christ bids his disciples wash each other’s feet, as
he has just washed theirs.28 But these references to a stone and to feet may well be felicitous
accidents.29
27
While in Paris, Hugo began a commentary on Sacrobosco’s De Sphaera at the insistence of his students.
See Thorndike, A History of Magic, 3:217. I am grateful to Gabriela Ilnitchi Currie for suggesting that I
consider Hugo di Castello.
28
“Vos vocatis me Magister et Domine, et bene dicitis: sum etenim. Si ergo ego lavi pedes vestros, Dominus
et Magister, et vos debetis alter alterius lavare pedes,” [Ye call me Master and Lord: and ye say well; for so I
am. If I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet; ye also ought to wash one another’s feet,” John
13:13–4.
29
Responding to the liturgical context of Salve crux pretiosa, Clark has suggested that the motet’s dedicatee,
called Hugo in the text, may in fact be an Andrew—either Andrew of Hungary (assassinated in 1345), or
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The tenor’s unusual construction has several compositional consequences worth
noting. First, there is the issue of range. The chant fragments are lined up so as to be consistently lower, which involves the upward transposition of “Salve crux” and the downward
transposition of the last fragment. The gradual descent is thus intentional, and the resulting color covers the wide range of an octave. As the upper voices adjust to tenor, they are
forced to stretch upwards and downward with the result of an even wider range—an eleventh in both triplum and motetus.30 But even given this wide range the tenor sometimes
sings above the motetus.
The composite tenor also has modal ramiications. Kügle has argued that “ambiguity is…the hallmark of the modal orientation of the tenor” in which “the finalis f appears
only at the very end of each color statement, resulting in an uncertain modal character
throughout the irst two talea statements.” For him, this ambiguity is a metaphor for “the
hypocrisy and deceit of an unidentiied adversary named Hugues.”31 But that ambiguity
itself—though not in conlict with the motet’s message—is again a function of the color’s
unusual piecemeal construction. And this construction is evocative of the statue’s divisions,
rather than the more vague negative attributes we can associate with Hugo.
“perhaps a friend named Andrew,” “Concordare cum materia,” 182). But the second fragment of chant would
make him a Benedict, and the third a Peter or a Jesus. It seems likely that Vitry has brought together these
fragments of chant not for the holy men whom they laud, but because they have the word he wants. This
magpie sensibility coming from the pen of the man who “mieux ist motés que nulz hom” challenges some of
our most cherished notions about the role of tenor sources in motets (the epithet is from Buigne, Le Roman
de Deduis, l. 6356). A few other examples readily come to mind (Vitry’s “clamor meus,” Machaut’s “amara
valde”) where the use of chant text seems to be more of a pun than a liturgical reference. Clearly the liturgical context of some chants would have been present to the minds of listeners—but it seems equally clear
that sometimes chants are used simply because they have the right words. In these cases exegesis based on
the liturgical occasion may well lead us beyond the interest of the piece.
30
See comments in Kügle, The Manuscript Ivrea, 153.
31
Ibid., 115.
302
Thus the statue emerges as a prevalent metaphor and shaping idea for the motet on
two broad, precompositional levels: the isorhythmic form and the color construction. And
yet Hugo stands at the forefront of every discussion of the piece. How does Hugo relate to
the statue? This question is answered at the head of the composition.
The Beginning of the Motet: “Cum statua... Hugo [est]”
The opening measures of Cum statua/Hugo are intentionally confusing with respect
to texture. Since the tenor talea starts with a rest, the motetus and triplum begin alone.
When the tenor enters in m. 2, it sings above the motetus (see Example 6.8). This sequence
of entries is repeated in mm. 4–6. After this the tenor returns to the bottom of the texture
for three breves, hovers around the motetus in mm. 10–13, and then settles down into its
normal contrapuntal place at the bottom of the texture, where it remains for the rest of the
piece with few exceptions. It is not surprising that the tenor should cross with the motetus
at the beginning of the color given the nature of the piecemeal color melody, which starts
high and then descends gradually with each segment. But, as I argued in Chapter 3, voicecrossings can be highly controlled in the motet repertory. Although the tenor’s place in the
middle of the texture is a result of the unusual color design, it is not an unavoidable one: at
the start of color 2, the tenor is in the middle of the texture for only one breve (m. 46).32 So
we must view this voice-crossing as a deliberate musical gesture. What does it accomplish?
32
The crossing accompanying the beginning of color 3 is slightly longer (mm. 92–6). Kügle argues that
“the color melody, which shifts between the middle and the bottom of the texture throughout most of the
setting... [creates] deliberate subversion of the listener’s expectations,” and that the design of this piece is
related to Tribum/Quoniam, which places its tenor consistently above the motetus (ibid., 116–8). However,
the actual amount of time that the tenor spends in the middle of the texture in Cum statua/Hugo is small, and
the voice crossings between tenor and the upper voices are probably a function of the tenor’s unusual shape,
rather than a precompositional decision as in Tribum/Quoniam.
303
Example 6.8: Cum statua/Hugo breves 1–27
Kügle has identiied the placement of the tenor in the middle at this and other
points in the motet as “an allusion to [the] subject matter [of falsehood and deceit] (the
motetus temporarily “posing” as the tenor, and vice versa)”.33 And indeed, the opening measures of Cum statua/Hugo feature a voice-crossing that is very different and potentially even
more “false” than those I have explored in Machaut. In motets 12 and 14, voice-crossings
between the triplum and motetus created inverted-sounding music because, although they
switched ranges, the upper voices held on to their normal rhythmic proiles and modes of
text-declamation. But in the opening measures of Cum statua/Hugo, there is indeed pretense
and “posing,” because the motetus hardly sings a word. Or rather, it sings one word: Hugo.
We can instantly see what is unusual about the opening measures when we look at
how the motetus text is distributed over the motet’s nine taleae. Starting with B1, the dis33
Ibid., 115–6.
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tribution of text to music is regular, with one-and-a-half full-length lines per talea.34 But
for the irst seventeen measures (all of talea A1 and part of A2), the motetus sings “Hugo.”
The same word is then immediately repeated, and again stretched out (mm 19–23). For
the irst 23 breves of the motet, then, the motetus sings the name of the offending person.35
The result is a very un-motet-like texture. If we would usually expect the motetus
to carry text at a rate a little slower than the triplum’s, here we instead ind it singing melismatically, and at the bottom of the texture to boot. Nor is there much of “Hu-” to “Hugo”—
the irst syllable lasts only two breves and is split off from the rest of the name by a rest.
Thus for measures 4–17, the motetus sings only “-go”—truly a tenor-like rate of declamation which also brings to mind the large number of clausulae with the tenor [-GO].36
The moment of highest confusion comes in measures 10–15, where the tenor starts
out in unison with the motetus but then moves faster than that voice, singing two breves
while motetus sings a long (mm, 10–11) and continuing above the motetus in parallel
thirds until the cadence back to the unison in m. 15. This is a clear instance of the kind of
“posing” described by Kügle.
But whether such posing is meant to represent hypocrisy, the opening texture resulting from the loosely texted motetus imparts a clarity to the triplum above “Hugo,” so that
34
This means two lines per talea once the hockets begin, since they alternate half-lines with full-length
lines. Thus, C2: “Stupeo et eo/cum invidus sic sis palam pius;” C3: “perpere dicere/ ipocritam te possum
verius.”
35
Talea A2 goes on to set the rest of the irst motetus line, “princeps invidie.” Then talea A3 rushes through
two full lines of poetry, seemingly in order to catch up.
36
I am positing no connection whatsoever between [Hu]go [princeps invidiae] and the [Vir]go [salutiferis]—
I only suggest that a long melisma on –GO would probably be marked easily enough as a tenor for a latemedieval musician. On the availability of the Nôtre Dame repertoire during the later middle ages and the
possibility that the source F was in the French royal library during the fourteenth century, see Haggh &
Huglo, “Magnus liber—Maius minus,” 224–9 and Appendix I.
305
“Cum statua Nabugodonasor metallina” is delivered in an effectively monotextual space.37
“Statua” especially emerges as clearly declaimed, its B supported by one an octave below it
in the motetus (m. 4).
While such a texture is in some ways reminiscent of a chanson, the motet is not trying to be a song—rather, these measures are accomplishing a very motet-like juxtaposition
of two simultaneous texts. The co-existence of “Hugo” and the cum clause allows for an
equation or a sentence: “Hugo is like the statue of Nebuchadnezzar.” We know that motets
can do this, and indeed we revel in their ability to connect like with like.38 Nor is it a big
surprise that Hugo, the focus of the motetus, is like the statue of Nebuchadnezzar, which
the triplum is busy describing. This superimposition during the motet’s opening creates an
elegant summary, and the parallel octave motion between the upper voices in measures 1–6
strengthens the connection: “Cum” and “statua” are aligned with “Hu”-“Go” in terms of
both time and pitch-class, effectively equating the courtier and the biblical statue.
Talea A3 even equates the face of the former with the head of the latter. Here,
triplum sings (of the statue) that it was irst of virtuous gold (“quecum primo fuerit aurea
virtuosus”) and motetus (of Hugo) that he initially appeared to be “a man of peace, a son
of virtues” (“tu cum prima pateas facie homo pacis virtutum ilius”). The musical setting
of these lines highlights their similar sounds—cum primo/cum prima and virtuosus/virtutum
(boxed in Example 6.9). But it also superimposes facie—“face” on aurea—gold, the material
of which the statue’s head was made (circled in Example 6.9). These measures conirm even
more explicitly the identity between Hugo and the statue suggested by the motet’s opening.
37
This is especially the case in the motet’s opening, where “Hu-” and “Cu-” amplify the same vowel.
38
As in the opening of Machaut’s Motet 18, where “Bone pastor” sounds in both voices.
306
Example 6.9: Cum statua/Hugo, breves 31–42
This construction of Hugo-as-statue in the motet’s opening taleae is far from subtle, but it
is only the beginning of the story.
“Gradatim deduci ac minus”: The Statue’s Layers in the Motet, mm. 31–63
If vertically within the polytextual world of the motet “cum statua” refers to Hugo,
within the triplum text the simile drawn is between Zion and the statue. Zion, like the image
in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, was “successively and by stages reduced and made less” (“successive... ac gradatim deduci ac minus,” triplum lines 2–3). With reference to the biblical
story, this summary of things does not quite seem to it. True, the statue decreased in value
as it went down, but it was not “made less by stages”: it shattered instantly into a thousand
pieces. Reading the triplum, we would think it had shrunk several times.39 And Zion, if we
take it to stand for the world, was debased gradually according to Daniel’s interpretation
but also did not shrink. On the contrary: the brass kingdom expanded to “rule over all the
earth.”40
The phrase “successive... ac gradatim deduci ac minus,” then, does not clearly de39
For instance, Clark has written about “the slow deterioration of the statue of Nebuchadnezzar, described
in the triplum,” “Concordare cum materia,” 183.
40
Daniel 2:39.
307
scribe the biblical statue. And yet it consists of two sets of synonyms that hint precisely at
gradual diminution. The temptation is strong to look for a musical interpretation of these
words expressed perhaps as diminution in the motet. But the tenor of Cum statua/Hugo does
not undergo any diminution, even though the inal two taleae involve hocket.
There is, however, a sort of poetic diminution that occurs in lines 5–8 of the triplum
text. Here, the metals that make up the statue are listed at the end of each line: aurea (gold,
line 5), argentea (silver, line 6), herea (bronze, line 7), ferea (iron, line 8).41 Line 9 adds a
rhyme mid-line (lutea—mud) to complete the series. Each metal seems to have its own line
of the triplum text, but the rhyme scheme is misleading. The semantic zones allotted to
each material are not congruent with the line-breaks; rather, they are enjambed, leading to
a less even division of text.
5
7
9
que cum primo fuerit aurea
virtuosus, inde argentea
carne mundus, deinceps herea
sancti loquis,
ictilis ferea
ac lutea pater novissime
← which (statue) was gold (and Zion) virtuous
← then silver (and Zion was) clean in its Flesh
← next bronze (and Zion was) holy in speech
← then (the statue was) earthen iron
← and mud
With fourteen syllables, gold has the most poetic air time. Silver and bronze each
have ten syllables. The internal rhymes “virtuosus” (l. 6) and “mundus” (l. 7) placed at the
ends of these two successive sense units helps to articulate the poetic change of gears. After
this, the degree of description allotted to each metal drops: iron (ferea) is modiied only by
“ictilis,” and mud (lutea) recieves no gloss at all.42
41
The resulting monotonous rhyme creates a moment or relative poetic stillness against the background
of couplets which makes up the rest of the text (except in lines 1–2 where “Nabugodonasor” and “Syon” do
not rhyme): ab|cc|dddd|eeffgg|hhjkkj. The stasis labeled dddd marks those four lines in which the metals of
the statue are listed.
42
While the biblical text names ive materials—gold, silver, bronze, iron, and clay—it is worth pointing
308
This gradual decrease in the amount of poetic space allotted to each metal is heightened when the text is set to music. Here, the sections describing gold and copper, though
equal in syllabic length, become differentiated, while the other phrases are set in accordance
to their length. The result is that the amount of musical time lent to each material’s description is indeed successively reduced (see Table 6.1).
Table 6.1: Poetic and Musical Space allotted to each material of the statue
Phrase:
que cum primo fuerit aurea virtuosus
inde argentea carne mundus
deinceps herea sancti loquis
ictilis ferea
ac lutea
Syllables:
14
10
10
6
4
Measures of music:
11
9
6
4
3
What we see here is a kind of diminution, but one carried out on a smaller, arguably
more audible scale. Rather than shortening the amount of time allotted to each fragment of
the color, the unit that is reduced here is the triplum text itself. This device seems unusual
enough to warrant suspicion, and two questions need to be asked. First: how might Vitry
have gone about composing such a text? Second: to what extent is the text setting in this
section manipulated to make this work?
To answer the second question irst, it is worth noting that no special text-setting
tools seem to have been used, nor have the boundaries between the enjambed segments been
out that there was in fact no pure clay element of the statue, which is correctly identiied as metal (“metallina”) in line 2 of the triplum. But there seems to have been some confusion about the statue’s feet. In the
vulgate they are clearly a mix: “pedum quaedam pars erat ferrea quaedam ictilis” (Daniel 2.33), and Petrus
Comestor follows suit in his Historia scholastica: “pedum quaedam pars ferrea, quaedam ictilis” (“Historia
scholastica,” Patrologia Latina 198:1448). But the Bible historiale, the most popular French translation of
the bible, though based on the Historia scholastica, splits up the mix, assigning one material to each of the
feet: “une jambe de fer et lautre de terre.” We see this interpretation of the statue depicted in Houghton Library’s Bible historiale (MS Typ 555), fols. 109v–110.
309
stressed by the musical setting. The text has simply been written with this built-in device of
successively diminished poetic space, and then it has been set to music in the normal way,
obeying syllable count and poetic syntax. And yet the idea of writing such a text is musical
at heart: only a poet thinking musically would arrive at this peculiar type of diminution,
which aligns the statue’s materials’ decreasing values with increasingly smaller intervals
of time. And only when set to music, which controls declamation, can this metaphorical
diminution of the statue’s parts be ensured without peril from alteration based on a reader’s
whims, as would be more the case in a verbal performance of poetry.43
One other factor makes it seem likely that Vitry wrote this section of the text—and
of the motet—with such a scheme in mind. The text of the triplum here is unusually dificult. We know from other works that Vitry was more than capable of writing clear poetry
and making unambiguous references. But here, everything but the list of metals seems to
be open to interpretation and the phrases “carne mundus” and “sancti loquis,” especially do
not yield easily to translation. A comparison of three available translations of these lines
illustrates the point:
Howlett: “which (statue) though was gold (and Zion was) virtuous, then silver (and Zion was) clean in its Flesh, next bronze (and Zion was
holy in speech, then (the statue was) earthen, iron, and muddy.”44
Ilnitchi: “a statue which at irst was made of gold (by analogy, of the virtuous), then of silver-like lesh (like the world) afterwards of bronze
(like the vessel of the Holy Word), iron, and mud”45
43
This section bears comparison to the inal section of In virtute/Decens, which also controls declamation,
though with a more obvious goal.
44
Trans. Howlett in Orlando Consort, Philippe de Vitry and the Ars Nova, liner notes p. 21.
45
trans. Gabriela Iinitchi in program notes for Sequentia, “Philippe de Vitry: Motets and Chansons”
(Deutsche Harmonia Mundi, 1991), 19.
310
Blachly: “the statue was gold irst, then silver. The virtuous elements constituting its lesh up to this point. Then bronze, and inally, to repeat
what is known, clay and mud and iron”46
If something like a successive diminution of space allotted to each material was
indeed on the poet’s mind, this would perhaps help to explain the enigmatic nature of these
lines. In that case, the dificult expressions and strange adjectives in the triplum might be
there more for the sake of taking up space and making rhymes than for their clarity. And
the goal might not have been an entirely coherent narrative, but rather the creation of a text
that, when put to music, will last a certain amount of time and thereby help to build up the
statue that it describes, in successively diminished pieces.47
THE MOTET’S LAYERS: QUESTIONS OF ISORHYTHMIC FORM
With the “lutea” (mud) in m. 63, the discussion of the statue is over and the triplum
shifts focus, joining the motetus in its blame of Hugo. But the statue is still present as an
agent of disjunction in the tenor with its multiple sources, and perhaps in the motet’s isorhythmic divisions. It is to these that I would like briely to turn. Although it is possible to
construct an argument in which the four regions of the motet represent the four kingdoms
in Daniel’s interpretation, I think it will be useful to think of the musical and textual reasons the composer might have had to divide the motet as he did.
Looking back at the two sections of the motet I have so far analyzed (a and b),
we can see that they align with different compositional goals and textures: the equivalence of Hugo with the statue takes place in section a, during which the motetus sings
46
rev. and trans. Alexander Blachly, Medieval Music Database, <http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/MMDB/composer/H0028008.HTM>. Blachly reads “scitum loqui” in line 8 and changes “Zion” in line 2 to “minor”
for the sake of rhyme.
47
I am grateful to Leofranc Holford-Strevens for discussing this issue with me.
311
its long “Hugo,” eventually followed by the rest of line 1—“princeps invidiae.” Meanwhile
the triplum sets out the statue’s presence and the idea that it was successively reduced and
made less. The opening isorhythmic section of each of these taleae, with its slightly stilted
declamation, is very memorable, and lends emphasis to the words “statua” and “gradatim”
(mm. 3–4, 18–9). But if this scheme were to continue—that is, if talea A3 were to act as
a3—the next emphasis would be placed on “cum primo”; hardly an important sentiment.
And the motetus carries far too little text in section a—presumably a deliberate decision
on the composer’s part but one that can only work in these opening taleae.
Thus section b begins. Here the upper-voice taleae are twice as long, and much less
upper-voice rhythmic congruence is present. This is the section that presents the statue’s
materials in the triplum voice in ever smaller numbers of measures, and the choice to switch
to longer taleae may have been motivated by the constraints of text-setting necessary to
make the trick work. Alternately, the composer might have been driven by a desire to avoid
sonic monotony, since the rhyme scheme of the motet lags during this section, stuck on
“-ea.” Such a rhyme scheme combined with short, congruent taleae like those in section a
would surely have been tedious.
Section g has nothing to be congruent with—it is a single talea of 15 breves (see example 6.10). Textually it contains personal material in each voice. In the motetus, it begins
with “mihi”—a pronoun relating to Vitry, who defends himself of these crimes imputed to
him while he remains “unconsulted and ignorant of the cause” (line 9). And in the triplum
we ind here the authorial signature “haec concino Philippus publice”—“I, Philip, sing these
things publicly.”
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Example 6.10: Cum statua/Hugo breves 91–105 (Talea C1/section g)
To highlight this important line Vitry changes texting strategies partway through the
talea. In breves 91–4 triplum and motetus are roughly equal in terms of the rates at which
they declaim text. Then they take turns. In mm. 97–99, the motetus is given the spotlight
while the triplum holds a longa. Then the triplum takes over to deliver its important authorial message beginning in measure 100.48 During these pockets of text-declamatory primacy, motetus and triplum deliver what together amounts to a rhyming couplet overlapping
by a breve: “inconsultus causamque... hec concino Philippus publice.” The strongly proiled,
catchy melodies that accompany these texts hint at an antecedent-consequent kind of relationship, further strengthening their intertextual link. If the composer chose to write
this talea afresh, rather than itting it into an available mold, it is because it has different
aesthetic aims than other sections of the motet.
Thus we come to section d of the motet, which is in some ways the most unusual.
That the two inal taleae of the motet constitute a separate region is clear: they are nearly
identical rhythmically, and are the only two taleae to contain hockets, which here ill a majority of each. Furthermore these two taleae take an approach to texting that is not found
elsewhere in the motet.
48
Although the motetus has some text here, it declaims only on the level of breve or long, resulting in a
texture similar to that of the opening.
313
Feet of Clay: Hockets and Fragmentation
As we saw in Chapter 4, hockets that begin partway through an ars nova motet normally coincide with a diminution section. In virtute/Decens, which contains hockets without
diminution in its second color, emerged as a taxonomic anomaly among motets. But Cum
statua/Hugo is an even stranger animal than In virtute/Decens. Where in the latter work
hockets were introduced at a color break, the change in texture in Cum statua/Hugo takes
place one-third of the way through color C. No other ars nova motet uses hockets in this way,
and this uniqueness invites a closer look at the inal two taleae of the work.
Not only do the hockets in Cum statua/Hugo carry text, they split words. Elsewhere
in his oeuvre, Vitry is very careful to construct both music and poetry in such a way as
to keep words together, thus avoiding what a contemporary calls a “vice” and sin against
Rhetoric—the division of indivisible words.49 It cannot be said that the texts of Cum statua/
Hugo make no provision for the hockets—the line lengths and rhyme schemes change for
the inal two taleae (at line 15 of the triplum and line 10 of the motetus), switching from
decasyllabic couplets to uneven tercets in the scheme a3a3b10c3c3b10, where the shorter lines
are set to hockets. But though the text takes account of the hockets, its musical setting
does not accommodate them. Rather than making opportunities for two- and three-syllable
words to remain whole, like they do in Vos/Gratissima (Example 5.7), Vitry has written the
hockets of Cum statua/Hugo as isolated notes in both voices, viciously forcing the threesyllable lines to be divided.
The result is nonsense. While any texted hocket has the potential for a certain level
of confusion, the two voices here are deliberately conlated to produce one by successive
49
See the discussion of Musicalis/Sciencie in Chapter Five.
314
unisons (circled in Example 6.11). A further mingling is effected by frequent assonance
and alliteration between syllables from alternate voices (boxed in Example 6.11). This
treatment results in the improbable, even comedic intertexts “Stupeo et-et-e-qui-o-a-cum
in-im-vi-pi-dus” (mm. 108–14) and “perpere-pro-di-ce-ve-re-ro” (mm. 121–6). The
composer who is careful elsewhere in his oeuvre not to split words is here launting his division of indivisibles with purposefulness that begs for explanation.
Example 6.11: Assonance, alliteration, and pitch repetition in Cum statua/Hugo mm. 106–35
It is possible that the nonsensical syllables are meant to evoke a state of surprise or
indignation, illustrating “stupeo” (“I am astounded”), the last coherent word before the irst
hocket (mm 106–7). The inal two taleae could then be seen as a a text-driven, madrigalistic device where the composer, having named himself and charged his accuser, becomes
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stupeied and ceases to make sense.
But the hockets may have more profound implications relating to the motet’s broader
structure and meaning. If the motet’s form as a whole is in some inexact way representative
of the statue, then this symbolic correspondence must proceed from the head down. This we
know from the internal listing of elements in b1, which progresses from gold to mud, thus
aligning musical time with the vertical axis. Without worrying about the statue’s middle
divisions (and indeed Daniel does not worry too much about them), this would result in
some afinity between the end of the motet and the bottom of the statue. Can we read these
hockets as evocative of the statue’s hybrid feet?
Perhaps, if we remember that the inal kingdom is a divided one despite its best effort to unite two races into one. In Daniel’s explanation, “whereas thou sawest iron mixed
with miry clay, they shall mingle themselves with the seed of men: but they shall not cleave
one to another, even as iron is not mixed with clay.”50 This unsuccessful attempt at intermingling seems to be illustrated by the hockets. Two separate texts suddenly ill the same
range, often alternating on the same notes, and switching syllables which resemble each
other. But the result is not some new alloy which is stronger and more resilient. As iron and
clay do not mix, so these two texts combine not to create some clever intertext, but rather a
muddle of notes and syllables that fail to signify.
And there is a third viable reading of these unusual hockets. Rather than illustrating the attempted and futile intermingling of two incompatible materials, they may instead
evoke the fragmentation of the statue when the apocalyptic stone has struck its feet. The
poetic diminution of materials in b1 aligns the axis of time with the statue’s body, from the
50
Daniel 2:43.
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top down, but in doing so it also aligns performance time with the passing of human history,
since the statue’s parts signify cultural decline through the ages. As such the hockets may in
fact be a comment on the statue’s inal state—fragmented into pieces and scattered all over
the earth.51 I do not think that we need to choose between these interpretations. All three
readings are viable, and it is left to us to wonder whether the hockets are meant to evoke the
futile mingling of incompatibles, the breakdown of sense, or the end of everything.
* * *
However we interpret the inal hockets, a reading of Cum statua/Hugo as a whole
must allow a large role to Nebuchadnezar’s dream in shaping the motet, from its unprecedented hybrid tenor, to the sectional correspondences in the upper voices, to the unusual
conception of musical time hinted at by the section following “gradatim successive minor.”
But the motet does not make clear why the statue is like Hugo. Is it because Hugo, like the
statue, started out good but got worse? Does he, like the statue, stand on feet of clay and
face an imminent downfall? Or does the reference to the statue represent Vitry’s general
pessimism about human history, of which Hugo acts as a reminder? As it turns out, we can
learn more about the statue’s meaning for Vitry through a wider consideration of his oeuvre.
For Cum statua/Hugo is not alone in including Nebuchadnezzar’s dream. The texts of another motet, Phi millies/O creator, also refer to the this biblical story. And while the statue’s
presence in this work might look at irst sight like a passing reference, closer analysis reveals
that it is central to the work’s upper and lower-voice texts.
51
In light of this it is worth noting that the name Hugo is split in two during its irst appearance. Again, Vitry does not split words often, and this fragmentation of Hugo further aligns him with the fragmented statue.
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PHI MILLIES/O CREATOR/IACET GRANUM/QUAM SUFFLABIT
Although its music has not survived, the motet Phi millies/O creator/Iacet granum/
Quam sufflabit has come down to us as four texts labeled “Triplum,” “Motetus,” “Tenor,” and
“Contra” in a ifteenth-century Latin miscellany (for full texts and translations see Appendix 6c).52 The texts are attributed to attributed to “Meldensis episcopus Philippus de Vittriaco,” but even without the attribution it would be easy to see that this is a motet by Vitry;
the content of Phi millies/O creator is reminiscent of both In virtute/Decens and Cum statua/
Hugo (and to a lesser extent of Musicalis/Sciencie).53 The triplum text is an unrestrained
tirade criticizing its target with rhetorical force and emotional venom. The offending person is unnamed, but is clearly a poet or composer, since he dares to “write in the tongue
of the Franks, their glory, things that [he doesn’t] know how to express” and manages “to
vomit bellowing instead of song.”54 Like In virtute/Decens, Phi millies/O Creator references
the opening of Horace’s Ars poetica, claiming that the “monsters’ member” of a poet “has
not blushed to publicly present the chimerical song (“carmen chimericum”) which Horace
damns in his irst verses.”55 As a “promulgator of public lies,” the “sad brute” is also compared to Tantalus, who here plays the role of a fellow “chatterer.”56
But by far the most developed allusion in the motet is to the dream from Daniel 2.
52
For information on the source (F-Pn lat. 3343, fols. 71v–72), see Wathey, “The Motets of Philippe
de Vitry,” 148. The texts were irst discussed and edited in Pognon, “Du nouveau sur Philippe de Vitri,”
48–52. Pognon’s edition is reprinted in Vitry, Complete Works, 54.
53
These connections have yet to be explored, though Schrade invites us to compare the triplum of Phi
millies/O creator with the motetus and triplum of Cum statua/Hugo, ibid.
54
Triplum ll. 2–4.
55
Triplum ll. 1, 6–8. The reference, by author and line, to the opening of the Ars poetica, followed four
lines later by one to the statue of Nebuchadnezzar strengthens the attribution of In virtute/Decens to Vitry.
56
Triplum ll. 1, 11.
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The explicit reference is in lines 12–14:
et garriens velut Tantalides
tuos Nabugodonozorides
egre credis non posse cadere
et oppressum numquam resurgere.”
[and chattering like a Tantalus you hardly believe that it is possible for your
Nebuchadnezzar’s [statue] to fall and, crushed, never to rise up again.]
“Tuos Nabugodonozorides” is ambiguous in that it links the statue both with the
poet, and with England, which Vitry accuses him of championing. The former connection
is made through Tantalus, who, as part of his punishment, had a stone suspended above his
head and ever threatening to fall on him. If the poet chatters like Tantalus, then he is the
statue whom the rock will strike. But there are also political implications to “Tuos Nabugodonozorides” which is brought out by the rest of the triplum text.
While the explicit reference to the statue seems to end in line 13, the image in fact
controls the following eight lines of the triplum. We have seen that the reference to Nebuchadnezzar in Cum statua/Hugo is followed by a listing of the statue’s metals. In Phi millies/O
creator we see instead the succession of empires which those metals were thought to represent. These are listed as a series of conquests, emphasizing the transience of all empires.
The conceited Belshazzar (a king of Babylon, represented by gold) is conquered by Cyrus
(the founder of the Persian monarchy, represented by silver).57 The fall of Greece, identiied
with bronze, is represented by the poetic evocation of its crumbling walls: “those things fell
which Amphion built.”58 Finally, the most famous fallen empire and the one classed with
57
Triplum l. 16.
58
Triplum l. 17. The following three lines seem to depart from the scheme since they talk of England’s own
series of conquests (“ad Troiquos transiit Albion/post oppressa diris Saxonibus/post a Danis obtenta trucibus”). Legend had it that the survivors of Troy founded England, hence the mention of the fall of Greece
leads to this “aside” from the historical scheme (though of course it is very pertinent to the motet’s larger,
English-bashing point). After naming England’s successive conquerors (the Trojans, the Saxons, and then
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iron is alluded to: “Think yourself of the city, that conquered the world, which fell to the
conquering Germans!”59 This mention of the Germans introduces another empire to the
list, probably the Holy Roman Empire under Otto I. Even Rome fell, and so will England,
whose very name Vitry attempts to silence at the end of his text.
The triplum texts “Cum statua Nabugodonasor” and “Phi millies” thus emerge as
similarly constructed, in that both mention Nebuchadnezzar’s statue and go on to discuss
its layers: the former in materials; the latter in empires. The motetus texts are more different in that Hugo forms the focus of one, while the other is a prayer. But it is a prayer with
teeth, and one which allows Philippe to identify himself as he did in Cum statua/Hugo:
O creator Deus pulcherrimi...
ora claudas isti fantastico
adversus quem Philipus dimico,
ne polluto ledatur labio
regnum partum Francorum gladio,
O God maker most noble... close up the mouth of that false visionary against
whom I, Philippe, ight, lest the kingdom of the French fathers be injured by
the infected sword [of his] lips.
Vitry’s rhetoric in signaling his authorship is reminiscent of Cum statua/Hugo, and even
the placement is similar: “hec concino Philipus publice” comes in line 14 of a twenty-line
triplum; “adversus quem Philipus dimico” in line 16 of a twenty-line motetus.
A further link between the two motets comes from their use of tenor material. As
we saw, the tenor of Cum statua/Hugo, takes its incipit, “magister invidiae,” from a rhymed
ofice for St. Benedict. For Phi millies, only the tenor text survives, but it suggests that Phi
millies too might have taken some or all of its tenor from a late-medieval rhyming ofice.
the Danes) the triplum returns to Rome, next on the list of empires thought to be symbolized by the statue.
On the legend of England as Trojan, see Ingledew, “The Book of Troy and the Genealogical Construction
of History.” I am grateful to Steven Rozenski for discussing this question with me.
59
Triplum ll. 21–3.
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The manuscript which transmits the texts for Phi millies assigns one decasyllabic line to the
tenor and another to the contratenor. Pognon, who irst edited the text, observed that the
texts of tenor and contra form a rhyming couplet, matched in meter and making grammatical sense:60
T: Jacet granum oppressum palea
C: Quam suflabit Francus ab area.
[T: The grain lies smothered by chaff
C: Which the Frenchman will blow from the threshing-loor.]61
Pognon was surprised by the texted contratenor and unable to ind a liturgical source for the
tenor, and Schrade followed him in his commentary to PMFC, commenting that “the verse
of the Tenor seems to indicate that Philippe de Vitry composed the melody of the Tenor;
i.e. he did not draw upon borrowed material.”62
The assumption that metered verse precludes a chant identiication must be revised
in light of increased recent attention to late medieval rhymed ofices. Indeed, Denis Stevens
has identiied Phi millies as one of two medieval motets to use material from Jacet granum,
the ifth matins responsory for St. Thomas of Canterbury.63 The tenor text, “Jacet granum
60
Pognon, “Du nouveau sur Philippe de Vitri,” 49.
61
Trans. Stevens, Music in Honor of St. Thomas, 332.
62
“Les musicologues trouveront certainement surprenant que le contratenor comporte un texte, et
s’etonneront de ne pouvoir reconnaitre dans le tenor les paroles d’aucun chant preexistant, mais cette question dépasserait le cadre de cette Revue et les bornes de ma competence, et je me contente de donner le texte
du motet tel qu’il est,” Pognon, “Du nouveau sur Philippe de Vitry,” 49n1. Schrade, Commentary to Volume
1, 119–21. The use of a texted contratenor may not be unique to this motet: a (now lost) four-part version
of Colla/Bona seems also to have had a texted contratenor—Wathey, “The Motets of Philippe de Vitry,” 143.
63
St. Thomas of Canterbury was canonized in 1173 and this ofice probably dates from the later 12th
century. The text of the responsory in question is edited in Dreves and Blume, Analecta hymnica medii aevi
13:239. Hughes comments on the musical style of the chants and on their wide dispersion on the continent
and in England in “Chants in the Rhymed Ofice,” 185, 192–6. Of the two other polyphonic works built
on Jacet granum one is a four-part motet surviving in an English source from c. 1320, Oxford, New College
MS 362. Januam quam clauserat/Jacinctus in saltibus/’Quartus cantus’/Jacet granum uses the entire respond (111
notes), sung once, as a tenor. See Harrison, “Ars nova in England,” 70–1 and Stevens, “Music in Honor of
St. Thomas,” 328–31. There is also a polyphonic responsory from the Notre Dame school which sets only
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oppressum palea” quotes the irst line of the responsory verbatim, strongly suggesting that
the color of the motet was taken at least in part from this chant:64
R: Jacet granum oppressum palea,
Justus caesus pravorum framea:
Caelum domo commutans lutea.
V: Cadit custos vitis in vinea,
Dux in castris, cultor in area:
R: Caelum domo commutans lutea.
[The grain lies smothered by chaff,
A good man lies slain by the lance of wicked men:
Exchanging heaven for a lowly dwelling-place.
The keeper of the vine falls in the vineyard,
The leader falls in camp, the laborer on the ield:
Exchanging heaven for a lowly dwelling-place.]65
The contratenor text, on the other hand, is newly composed in purposeful opposition to the source. The original message of the responsory (and much of the rest of the St.
Thomas liturgy) is that of the shepherd giving his life for the sheep. The responsory is a list
of good things sacriiced to worse: the grain to the chaff, or the vintner to a hostile vineyard,
or the laborer to his ield. But the contratenor’s completion of the couplet changes the message to a “food chain” scenario: The grain is smothered by the chaff, and the chaff will fall
to the French. Such a continuation of the rhyme makes the tenor text a kind of pun, while
remaining rooted in the pro-French sentiments of the motet and echoing the triplum text’s
repeated assertions that all great empires will fall.66 The contratenor’s half of the couplet
“Jacet” surviving in Manuscript F; see Haggh and Huglo, “Magnus Liber—Maius minus,” 208–9.
64
Clark cites two “tenors with liturgical texts that do not use the corresponding melody,” both in Chantilly;
“Concordare cum materia,” 161.
65
Trans. Stevens, “Music in Honor of St. Thomas,” 324.
66
I think that we should not read too much into Vitry’s use of a chant from the ofice of St. Thomas of
Canterbury in this motet. The saint’s ofice was celebrated all over Europe, and while his Englishness can
align with the England that is the target of the motet, it would perhaps be going too far to suggest that the
upper voices direct their tirade at him, or that the fall of a popular English saint should stand for England’s
ultimate fall as predicted in the triplum. Much more likely, the tenor here has been chosen for its text,
and probably some musical characteristics. The re-reading of the tenor prompted by the contratenor’s text
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also links the lower voices with the idea of Nebuchanezzar’s statue, since its threat that “the
Frenchman will blow [the chaff] from the threshing-loor” echoes Daniel’s description of
the statue’s broken pieces which “became like the chaff of the summer threshing-loors; and
the wind carried them away.”67 In an elegant move, the composer has cast the Frenchman
in the lattering role of the wind, and this intertextual reference underscores the extent to
which here, as in Cum statua/Hugo, Nebuchadnezzar’s statue is central to understanding the
motet.
It is frustrating that we cannot know whether Phi millies/O creator and Cum statua/
Hugo contained musical parallels along with these textual ones. Very likely one motet borrowed structural devices or textures from the other. Given its extended scope, the incorporation of a countertenor, and the political climate it evokes, Phi millies/O creator seems to
be the later of the two. The likeliness of this chronology is strengthened when we consider
its manuscript context. The ifteenth-century miscellany in which the motet’s texts survive
also contains a series of six French Ballades recording an argumentative exchange between
Philippe de Vitry, fellow French poet Jean Campion, and Jean de le Mote, employed at the
time of the exchange at Edward III’s court.68 Campion and Vitry accuse le Mote of crimes
both political and poetic: at a time of peak hostility between England and France they call
him a traitor for serving the English court and a fool for his excessive and irregular use
of classical exempla. In his defense, le Mote pleads that he should not be criticized for his
further discourages me from looking for a connection between St. Thomas of Canterbury and the motet’s
message.
67
Daniel 2:35.
68
Campion was a chaplain at Notre-Dame in Tournai whose interest in music is attested by his receipt in
1357 of rolls of motets and songs. See Wilkins, “Music and Poetry at Court,” 191–2.
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defection from France to England since he is not a native Frenchman.69 He thus does not
deserve such censure, and it is here that the plea with which I began the chapter comes in:
“Ne fais de moy Hugo s’en Albion suis.” Le Mote feels it unfair that Vitry should treat him
like a personal enemy just because he, Jean, is in England. Phi millies/O creator follows some
folios later in the manuscript, and its clear relation to this debate makes it all but inevitable
that that Vitry’s target in the motet is le Mote. The poet at fault may not be French, the
triplum tacitly concedes, but he still writes in that language which is France’s glory, using
it to express things he does not understand. The other charge against le Mote—that he is
sloppy and excessive with his allusions—helps to explain the motet’s unusually long roster:
teasingly, Vitry brings in Horace, Tantalus, Nebuchadnezzar, Cyrus, Belshazzar, and Amphion. The thematic and structural similarities I have outlined between Cum statua/Hugo
and the texts of Phi millies/O creator add an interesting twist to this exchange. In many ways
the later motet seems to be a variation on the former one, from which it borrows the image
of the statue, the authorial signature in the motetus, and perhaps an unusual approach to
lower-voice construction. If the target of Phi millies/O creator is indeed Jean de le Mote, then
it seems that his plea fell on deaf ears: Philippe has indeed made another Hugo of him.
NEBUCHADNEZZAR’S STATUE IN MACHAUT’S COMPLAINTE
One other appearance of Nebuchadnezzar’s statue in fourteenth-century music remains to be accounted for, and this in a song rather than a motet. The context is Machaut’s
Remède de Fortune, a narrative dit with lyric insertions that is already present in the earliest
69
Le Mote was from Hainault or Ghent hence the reply “Ne je ne sui point de la nacion/De terre en Grec
Gaulle de Dieu amee” (Nor do I belong at all to the nation of the land in Greek called Gaul, loved by God),
“La reponse,” ll. 9–10, ed. and trans. Dikestra, “The Poetic Exchange,” 509–10.
324
redaction of his complete works.70 About a quarter of the way through the poem, the poetnarrator inds himself in a secluded garden, contrasting his previously happy state with his
current despondence. While in this mood, he decides “to compose about Fortune and my
sorrows, my thoughts and my griefs, a piece called a complainte, in which there would be
many rhymes and a sad subject.”71 The result is a 36-strophe, 576-line poem which begins
Tels rit au main qui au soir pleure (He laughs in the morning who weeps in the evening). Celebrated within Machaut’s oeuvre for its poetic virtuosity and treatment of Fortune in terms
dependent on Boethian tradition as well as courtly traditions, the complainte is also famous
for the image with which it opens in its earliest source—a double panel illustration in which
the lover sits on top in a walled garden writing, while in the bottom frame Fortune turns her
wheel using a series of gears (see Figure 4.3, above).72
But this striking image of Fortune is unique to Manuscript C. In the three other illustrated sources of the Remède the only image which accompanies Tels rit au main is one of
Nebuchadnezzar’s dream statue (see Figure 6.3). And in Manuscript C as well, a depiction
of the statue supplements the more famous one of Fortune.73 This may be a surprise given
the complainte’s subject, but as we shall see the statue plays an important structuring role in
70
The Remède is present in MS C, and is cited in the Conford d’ami which can be dated to 1357. This occurrence of Nebuchadnezzar’s statue may thus be earlier than, later than, or contemporaneous with Vitry’s use
of the symbol. On the dating of Cum statua/Hugo, see note 5 in this chapter. On the dating of the Remède
and Confort, see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 189–91, 213, 218–9
71
“Et en ce penser ou j’estoie/Je m’avisai que je feroie/De Fortune et de mes doulours,/De mes pensers et
de mes plours,/.I. dit qu’on appelle complainte,/Ou il averoit rime mainte,/Qui seroit de tristre matiere” (ll.
897–904). This and all future citations from Remède refer to Machaut, Le jugement du roy de Behaigne and
Remède de Fortune, trans. Wimsatt and Kibler, and will be cited by line in the text.
72
For bibliography on Tels rit au main, see Earp, Guillame de Machaut, pp. 380–1. On the double-panel
illumination see especially Huot, From Song to Book, 252, Nelson, “Mechanical Wheels of Fortune,” 227,
and Chapter 3, above.
73
Manuscript C is the only source to illustrate the complainte with a program of ive miniatures; see Earp,
Guillaume de Machaut, 139–40, 153.
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the poem and provides a novel framework for poetic treatment of the goddess.
Figure 6.3: Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream in Machaut MS J (fol. 53)
Recent scholarship on the complainte as genre has stressed its lexibility, manifest
in stanzas that are thematically linked but formally separate.74 The dificult symmetrical
rhyme scheme a8a8a8b4a8a8a8b4|b8b8b8a4b8b8b8a4 gives each sixteen-line stanza a closed internal structure that is further reinforced by the non-repetition of rhymes across strophes.
Hence Machaut’s promise of “many rhymes”: the 36 stanzas of Tels rit au main contain 72
unique rhymes. However, these formally distinct units are connected by a mournful theme
74
Margolis, “Clerkliness and Courtliness,” 137–8, Ferrand, “Aux frontières de l’écriture,” 105–8, Deschaux, “Le lai et la complainte,” 77–83.
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that is developed over the course of the poem. Complaintes are sometimes mini dits, and
Machaut and Rotebeuf before him equated the terms, as in the example cited above, where
Machaut promises us “un dit qu’on appelle complainte.”75 As micro-dits, complaintes can exhibit their own internal structures and narrative shifts, and can even, as I shall argue, hint
at lyric interpolation.
Tels rit au main is divided neatly into two halves by a shift in poetic voice: in strophes
1–18, the narrator speaks in what Brownlee has called a “clerkly didactic tone,” marked
by a proverbial opening, biblical paraphrase, citation of Boethius by name, and generally
moralizing tone (“I don’t consider someone very clever who...”).76 At the start of stanza 19,
however, “je” suddenly morphs into the irst person lover-protagonist: “Fortune has treated
me, I believe, just as I’ve told you here; for once I abounded in every sort of joy, but now…
all the good I had is left behind.”77
This split is the starkest structural break in the complainte, but the work’s irst half
is further subdivided by shifts in voice and subject. The opening strophes are the most frequently discussed, since they are the ones underlaid to the notation in all editions of the
piece.78 Here, the poet describes Fortune’s actions—the turning of her wheel—and warns
that she can never be trusted because she is fundamentally false. After a long tirade the
poem seems to wind down in Stanza 6, summarizing (or repeating—it’s hard to make the
75
Ferrand, “Aux frontières de l’écriture,” 102–6.
76
L. 1097. See Brownlee, “Guillaume de Machaut’s Remède de Fortune,” 5–6.
77
“Einsi m’a fait, ce m’est avis,/Fortune que ei vous devis;/Car je souloie estre assevis/De toute joye,/Or m’a
d’un seul tour si bas mis/Qu’en grief plour est mué mon ris,/Et que tous li biens est remis/ Qu’avoir souloie,”
ll. 1193–1200. This phrase also has the function of equating the two contrasting voices, since “m’a fait”
refers to the lover, while “vous devis” implies the clerkly poet who has been speaking up to this point.
78
For editions, see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 380 and Example 4.3 above, which sets the irst verse.
327
distinction here) Fortune’s contrary actions and seemingly ending: “She never keeps her
promises and, to conclude (pour conclure), she’s always trying to knock you down” (998–
1000).
It is at this point that Nebuchadnezzar’s story enters Machaut’s complainte, and it
seems to do so almost as an interpolated lyric, set off from what came before by “pour conclure” and introduced by its own illustration. There is also an apparent topical rift: Stanza
7 is the irst in the poem that does not mention Fortune by name or pronoun. Instead, we
ind the story of Daniel 2 molded here into the poetic form of the complainte:
1005
1010
1015
Nabugodonosor igure
Qu’il vit en songe une estature
Grande et haute, qui la igure
Horrible avoit,
Et la teste d’or riche et pure,
Les bras, le pis d’argenteiire,
Ventre, cuisses de sa faiture
D’arain portoit,
Jambes de fer sus qu’elle estoit,
Des piez l’une part fer estoit,
L’autre terre. Et encor veoit
Que d’aventure
D’une pierre sans main venoit
Qui parmi les piez la feroit,
Si qu’en pourre l’acraventoit
Et en ordure.
Nebuchadnezzar relates
that in a dream he saw a statue,
large and tall, with a
hideous face,
its head of rich, ine gold,
its arms and chest of silverwork,
its belly and thighs were made
of bronze;
it was standing on legs of iron,
its feet were part iron and
part earthenware. And then he saw
that by chance
a stone, untouched by any hand,
came down and struck its feet,
and shattered it to dust
and refuse.
Radically different in theme from the complainte’s irst six stanzas, these lines also
seem to break the rules by repeating a rhyme. The a rhyme “-ure,” which permeates the irst
half of Stanza 7, recalls “–eure” in the complante’s irst (and therefore most memorable)
strophe.79 In performance, the melodic setting would add to this similarity (stanza seven
79
The intervening a rhymes are -able, -oing, -une, -uis, and -ique. The closest A-rhyme to -eure/-ure from
later in the work is -euse in stanzas 15 and 16, which share a rhyme scheme and the pervasive use of “C’est”
at the beginning of lines, clearly acting as a single poetic unit and the work’s climax. For a full list of rhymes
328
is shown in Example 6.12).80 Given this afinity between the irst and seventh stanzas (an
afinity that is not in keeping with the poetic rules of the complainte) and the radical change
in theme, the complainte may seem momentarily to have ended and given way to an interpolation (an interpolation within an interpolation—the mind boggles).
Example 6.12: Tels rit au main qui au soir pleure, Verse 781
in the complainte, see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 380.
80
Though the repetition of melody in strophic song in some sense acts to equate all stanzas, the added
similarity caused by a prominent rhyme might well recall the irst stanza during the seventh.
81
As transmitted in Manuscript C, fol. 30.
329
But the rift is temporary. The connection between the statue and what came before is explicitly laid out in Stanza 8, where the narrator equates Nebuchadnezzar’s dream
with Fortune herself: “L’estature que ci pourpose / Estre ne me semble autre chose / Que
Fortune.”82 During this and the following four stanzas, the comparison is laid out in detail,
assigning the statue’s metals in turn to Fortune’s body. “Her head, in which all wealth is enclosed, is gold, if I dare say so, or so it seems to the fools she latters,” “her arms and chest
are silver, but it’s only an illusion,” “her belly and thighs are bronze,” and although “she’s set
on legs of iron... it’s a covering or deception, for her feet are of mud, slippery and soft.”83
This anatomy of Fortune as statue takes up the central six stanzas of the complainte’s irst
half.
The inal six stanzas serve to reconcile the interpolation of Fortune-as-statue with
more traditional discourse surrounding the goddess. Stanza 13 neatly ties in the statue and
the Fortune on a symbolic level with a discussion of weak foundations: “I don’t consider
someone very clever,” the clerkly narrator preaches, “who expects to build a tall structure
on a worthless foundation, for when he is in the midst of construction the foundation fails,
which causes the whole ediice to tumble and fall” (1099–1104). A well-known parallel is
implicit, since according to the Roman de la Rose Fortune herself has built a house on such
a foundation: “On high, at the top of [a] mountain, on the slope, not on the plateau, always
threatening ruin and ready to accept a fall, the house of Fortune stands aslant.”84
This house is split in every way—part of it mounts upward, the rest slopes down; half
is decorated with brilliant stones, the rest has walls made of mud. As we saw in Chapter 3,
82
“The statue he presents here seems to me to be none other than Fortune,” ll. 1017–9.
83
Ll. 1021–3, 1049–50, 1065, 1081, 1086–8.
84
Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, 121.
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the split nature of her surroundings infests Fortune’s own body. Stanza 14 of the complainte
details this rift between Fortune’s right side and her left, which is the traditional alternative
to Machaut’s new scheme of splitting her horizontally into layers::
her right side is soft, the other sharp;
her right holds lowers, leaves, and fruit,
the other is empty, sterile, and void
of earthly goods.
The right shines brightly,
the other resembles darkest night,
and she’s split between
gold and excrement (121–8).
This more familiar treatment of Fortune’s body takes on new meaning now, following the
comparison with the statue. Machaut seems to be tacitly arguing here that his new idea—
that the statue is Fortune—inds support in old conventions. The mention of gold—here
used simply as a superlative substance to be contrasted with feces—is now reminiscent of
the statue’s head. The two following stanzas, notable for their use of anaphora, oxymoron,
antithesis, and paradox, serve as a rhetorical climax to the complainte’s irst half while placing Fortune’s opposite qualities in dramatic relief (1129–60).
These different ways of splitting Fortune are reconciled in the penultimate stanza
of the complainte’s clerkly half. Here, a description which calls the statue to mind because of
its direction (head-to foot) also incorporates elements of a right-left divide. The discussion
of Fortune’s feet especially resonates with the idea of weak foundations evoked by Nebuchadnezzar’s dream:
Her head is half bald;
with one eye she laughs, and with the other weeps;
one cheek has the color of life,
the other is like death;
if one of her hands is your friend,
the other will be your mortal enemy;
331
one foot is straight, the other lame;
she twists the straight (1161–7).
After one further stanza in which the narrator reminds us that Fortune is above the courts
and above those popes and kings whom she elevates, the clerkly half of the poem concludes.
The image of Nebuchadnezzar’s statue is centrally and carefully placed in the complainte. The irst six stanzas present a traditional view of Fortune, describe her turning
wheel, and provide the expected warnings, especially that of Boethius (982–4). Then the
statue makes its appearance in Stanza 7, and its parts are analogized to Fortune’s body in
stanzas 8–12. In the inal third of the clerkly the weak foundations of Fortune’s house are
compared to the statue’s unstable feet, and her body is characterized by a mix of the traditional vertical split and Machaut’s new horizontal scheme.85
An appreciation of the statue’s centrality—both narrative and structural—in the
complainte’s irst half helps to explain the emphasis, at irst puzzling, placed on it by the ileluminators under Machaut’s direction. The statue is able to represent the complainte alone
in Manuscripts A, J, and Pm because the integration of the biblical account of the King’s
dream with classical and medieval descriptions of Fortune constitutes the main event of the
85
Machaut comments wryly on the length of his treatment of the statue in the Remede when he returns
to the theme of Daniel in the Confort d’ami. Though he introduces the subject of the dream which Daniel
interpreted after all others in the kingdom had failed to do so, the Confort narrator neatly sidesteps that
dream’s content, explaining that he does not “intend to treat the dream which was faithfully interpreted,
since it would be too long a subject, whoever would rhyme it” (“Mais ne vueil pas dire le songe/Qui fu exposez sans mansonge/Car trop longue chose seroit/Qui en rime le metteroit”), ll. 446–50. But the Confort
cites the Remede by name in l. 2248 and must therefore be the later poem; see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut,
191, 218–9. The reference to the lengthy task that awaits “whoever would rhyme it” is therefore tongue-incheek. The mention of rhyme in particular may evoke the dificulties of the complainte as a form in which no
rhyme is used in more than one stanza. This statement also attests to Machaut’s desire to avoid redundancy
across dits.
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poem’s clerkly section.86
In terms of the broader line of inquiry I am conducting here, it is interesting to
see Machaut explicitly linking Fortune and the statue. The complainte hints at the root of
his interest in both subjects: they are allegories of opposition and disjunction. This link
strongly suggests that a consideration of this goddess as a hybrid, piecemeal creature may
have useful analytical implications. And indeed, as we saw in Chapter 3, musical treatments
of Fortune in motets emphasize her disjunct and contradictory nature using isorhythmic
and textural tools.
The statue’s importance in the complainte also raises broader questions when viewed
in tandem with our analysis of Cum statua/Hugo. On the one hand, two works in two different genres by two well-known composers both treating the same subject hardly constitute a
trend—or rather, it would be dificult to evaluate chronology or inluence in a case where
the two works in question are so different from each other. On the other hand, the topic of
the statue is an unusual one, and both Vitry and Machaut use it in unexpected places and
ways—a point that becomes apparent only when we consider the cultural function of the
86
Perhaps as a response to the puzzling emphasis given to Nebuchadnezzar’s dream by illuminators, Sylvia
Huot has suggested that although the iconography of the depictions in Manuscripts C and J is based on the
bible narrative, “in its present context of courtly lyricism, it additionally recalls the miniature at the head of
so many manuscripts of the Rose: the dreamer asleep in bed, with the menacing igure of Dangier standing
beside him,” From Song to Book, 258. This visual parallel equates the dreaming Nebuchadnezzar with the
lover-dreamer of the Rose, and thus the irst-person narrator of the complainte (l’amant) with Jean de Meun.
Such an interpretation of the image is of course possible, but it precludes the possibility of an extant pictorial tradition for Nebuchadnezzar’s statue that might have been stable enough to refer to itself, as opposed to
outward. In fact, as Michael Camille notes, the image was “a favorite subject in medieval bible iconography”
(The Gothic Idol, 281), and Joel Freddell suggests that “this iconographic form may have been drawn from
the same stock of conventions used for images of Nebuchadnezzar in illustrated Bibles; one such Bible was
produced for Jean le Bon by the illuminator who did the miniatures for the Remède in [Manuscript C]”;
“Reading the Dream Miniature,” 71. Attesting to the relative antiquity of the iconography in question we
can cite the twelfth-century Lambeth Bible (reproduced in Camille, The Gothic Idol, 282), the 1220 facade
of the cathedral in Laon, and the story’s depiction in the 1234 Toledo Bible Moralizé reproduced in Figure
6.1 above.
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statue more broadly. While the genres are different, the extent to which the statue comes to
permeate the poetry of both the motet and complainte is remarkable.
The link provided between the statue and Fortune also allows us to compare Vitry’s
treatments of Nebuchadnezzar and Machaut’s treatments of Fortune in motets (See Chapter 3). In this sense the complainte its into an emerging cloud of ideas with which Vitry
and Machaut seem to have engaged in distinct but related ways (see Figure 6.4). Fortune
and Nebuchadnezzar’s dream mean something similar to Machaut, just as the link between
the chimera and the statue made explicit in Phi millies/O creator conirms that Vitry saw a
connection between those two—a connection borne out in similarities of musical structure
and theme between In virtute/Decens and Cum statua/Hugo. And segmentation—whether
isorhythmic or textural—characterizes many of the works involved.
Figure 6.4: Ideas and Devices connecting several works discussed in this study
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It is certainly possible that these connections between works of different genres by
two different composers are a function of shared intellectual climate. After all, the statue
is a biblical story and therefore available to any thinker at any time. On the other hand,
the similarities with which Nebuchadnezzar’s dream functions poetically in Machaut’s complainte and musically in Vitry’s motet(s) might be a result of possibilities inherent in musical
depiction, and thus more connected to a music-making mind-set. In order to understand
to what extent this is a musical phenomenon, it will be necessary to compare Vitry’s and
Machaut’s uses of the image with those of their contemporaries.
NEBUCHADNEZZAR’S STATUES
A cultural history of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of precious metals has yet to be written. Most studies of the icon have come from the direction of either Dante or Gower studies, since the former poet uses a modiied version of it in Canto 14 of the Inferno, and
the latter structures the prologue of his Confessio amantis around the dream’s symbolism.
But these two discussions have taken place in isolation, using classical texts, the bible, and
early medieval commentary to explore the statue’s meaning within each work.87 The idea
that there is anything like a cultural “presence” for this colorful but elusive symbol beyond
its place in the bible has not been put forward. But although the statue is infrequently
referenced in secular literature when compared to other parts of the book of Daniel and
more famous bible stories, Nebuchadnezzar’s irst dream was certainly never entirely absent
from medieval intellectual life.88 In the fourteenth century, we ind the statue in contexts
87
Dante’s interpretation of the symbol diverges markedly from Gower’s and is unlikely to be an inluence.
James M. Dean’s The World Grown Old comes closest to putting the statue in broader context, but his concern
is still primarily with Dante and Gower, who occupy separate chapters.
88
More popular are the feast at which Belshazzar sees the writing on the wall (Daniel 5) or the story of
Daniel in the lions’ den (Daniel 6).
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as diverse as hagiography, amorous dits, pilgrimage of life poems, and dream allegories,
not to mention the motet texts discussed above. And these poetic treatments diverge from
earlier biblical commentary in important and often surprising ways. Sketching—however
briely—the statue’s medieval life will thus help us to situate Machaut’s and Vitry’s readings of the story, showing to what extent their treatments of the theme are consistent with,
derivative from, or perhaps even formative of contemporary intellectual trends and modes
of depiction.
* * *
The biblical story of Nebuchadnezzar’s irst dream is rich, and various elements of it
have been drawn on at different times, depending on the needs and aims of its readers. The
commentary tradition, beginning with Jerome’s fourth-century Commentario in Danielem,
focused on a Christian interpretation of the dream.89 Jerome is not interested in the statue
as such—his commentary skips the dream’s initial telling and moves directly from verse 32
to verse 38, “thou art the head of gold.”90 As noted above in the discussion of Phi millies/O
creator, he interprets the gold, silver, bronze, and iron parts of the statue as the Babylonian,
Medo-Persian, Alexandrian, and Roman empires. As a result the statue’s downfall becomes
Christ’s irst coming:
However, at the inal period of all these empires of gold and silver and bronze
and iron, a rock (namely, the Lord and Savior) was cut off without hands,
that is, without copulation or human seed and by birth from a virgin’s womb;
and after all the empires had been crushed, He became a great mountain and
illed the whole earth.
Thus began a long medieval tradition of putting emphasis on the conclusion of the
89
Jerome, “Commentariorum in Danielem prophetam,” Patrologia Latina 25:491–584. The following citations are to the English translation in Archer, Jerome’s commentary on Daniel.
90
Ibid., 32.
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dream: the apocalyptic idea of the stone which struck the feet of the statue illing the world
as a mountain. We can see this idea explicitly illustrated in copies of the Beatus of Liébana’s
8th-century commentary on the Apocalypse, which was often transmitted together with
Jerome’s commentary.91 Here the statue receives two strikingly similar illustrations (Figure 6.5). First it stands with the stone at its feet. To the right, the mountain from which
the stone was carved is depicted, its space clearly labeled. Below, that same mountain (still
missing its original stone) has grown to ill in what is clearly a representation of the world
in the so-called T-O style.92 In the second depiction of the story, the statue has been cut
away, but it seems to be in pieces; the “before” and “after” mountains still dominate the page.
Figure 6.5: Saint-Sever Beatus (12th c.)93
91
The work was composed in Spain in 784, and revised in 784 and 786. It takes part of its pictorial program, including the depictions of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, from illustrated copies of Jerome’s commentary
on the book of Daniel; see Steinhauser, “Narrative and Illumination in the Beatus Apocalypse,” 185–90.
92
See Edson and Savage-Smith, Medieval Views of the Cosmos, 50–1.
93
BN ms lat. 8878, fols. 51v (left) and 220(right).
337
The emphasis placed on the stone and the mountain hint at a careful illuminator
whose literal approach seems at odds with his depiction of the statue as entirely golden. But
the emphasis is theological: the apocalypse, not the succession of kingdoms leading up to it,
was Beatus’s focus, and the image of a mountain coming to ill the whole world is terrifying
and evocative enough to be worth depicting in detail.
The lasting impact of Jerome’s identiication of Christ with the “Lapis abscisus de
monte sine manibus” is illustrated in Honorius of Autun’s popular Speculum Ecclesiae, a collection of twelfth-century sermons.94 This reading appears in the Aquitanian versus Resonemus hoc natali and De monte lapis scinditur (from c. 1100 and 1200, respectively).”95 In
the irst of these the stone carved from the mountain is supplemented with the sympathetic idea of the “lapis angularis”—a cornerstone safe to build on—from Isaiah 28:16.96
Sometimes the two stones are conlated, as in some copies of the so-called Biblia pauperum, where the nativity is glossed with the words “lapis angularis sine manibus abscisus de
monte.”97 This complex of ideas, which puts more emphasis on the end of the dream and
94
“Lapis autem abscisus de monte sine manibus praecidentium est Christus, natus de Virgine sine manibus
amplectentium,” Honorius, “Speculum Ecclesiae,” 905. Trans. in Raby, The History of Christian-Latin Poetry,
374. For an abridged English summary of this sermon, see Male, The Gothic Image, 148–9.
95
Rachel Golden Carlson has argued that the earlier setting focuses on Christ as the stone, while the later,
in accordance with a growing Marian cult, pictures Mary as the mountain; “Two Paths to Daniel’s Mountain,” 620–46.
96
The new testament identiies Christ as the cornerstone in Acts 4:11 and 1 Peter 2:6–8. This connection
is made explicit in the St. Martial versus Resonemus hoc natali: “the stone not cut by hand, which Daniel sees,
which Gabriel predicted would come. He is our cornestone” (lapis manu non precisus/quem videt Daniel/
quem venturum predixit Gabriel/Hic est noster angularis), ed. and trans. Carlson, “Two Paths to Daniel’s
Mountain,” 629. This cornerstone is in turn linked with the stone rejected by the builders, the “caput anguli”
of Ps. 118:22. Jesus quotes the latter in Mark 12:10.
97
See, for example, the irst plate reproduced in the late ifteenth-century Biblia pauperum; Faksimileausgabe
des vierzigblättrigen Armenbibel-Blockbuches in der Bibliothek der Erzdiözese Esztergom (Hanau/Main, W. Dausien: [1967]). See also BAV Codex palatinus latinus 871, reproduced in Christoph Wetzel, ed., Armenbibel:
die Bilderhandschrift des Codex Palatinus latinus 871 im Besitz der Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (Stuttgart:
Belser, c1996), fol. 4.
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reads it in a Christological and Marian way, constitutes one important way of interpreting
the dream which would have been familiar to authors both clerical and lay.
Another reading of the biblical story emphasized its description of dream interpretation. As Antonina Harbus has written, “Nebuchadnezzar’s dreams and Daniel’s prophetic
abilities held a fascination for medieval people,” and Somniale Danielis was the name given
to popular alphabetic dream-interpretation handbooks.98 But sometimes the dreams were
less important than their interpretation: the author of the Old English Daniel, for example,
entirely omits mention of the statue, “summarizing the general import of the dream rather
than reporting its images.”99 To the Daniel-poet, the dream signiies “how the world would
be made wondrously to a new creation unlike in previous ages.”100 The statue, in a sense, is
a moot point.
These Christological, Marian, and dream-centered interpretations continued to be
inluential over the course of the middle ages. But two scholastic treatises on Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of precious metals hint at a new direction, and one which will have more bearing
on fourteenth-century literary occurrences of the statue.
The most original treatment of the topic is De somnio regis Nabuchodonosor by the
Premonstratensian theologian Philip of Harveng (d. c. 1182).101 Though he begins with
the unquestioned assertion that the stone is Christ, he goes on to consider the igure that
the stone hit. This is an unusual enough move that Philip seems to feel the need to defend
98
“Nebuchadnezzar’s Dreams,” 489.
99
Ibid., 493. The date of the poem is uncertain, but often given as c. 700 or earlier. It survives in a single
source from c. 1000: Oxford, Bodleian Library Junius 11. See Remley, Old English Biblical Verse, 1–2.
100
Harbus, “Nebuchadnezzar’s Dreams,” 493.
101
All further citations are to the edition in Patrologia Latina 203:585–92.
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it, explaining its importance both in reference to the stone and to the sanctity suggested by
the vision’s strangeness: “But now let us see what this statue means, which the stone hit and
shattered, for so remarkable a dream, and so unusual a vision, would not have been revealed
to the king of Babylon except under the weight of a great blessing.”102
Philip inds that the statue consists of ive materials and can be divided into seven
parts. He correlates these numbers with stages in the history of mankind: the ive with oldtestament time, and the seven with Judaeo-Christian time. In the irst scheme, Adam lived
in the age of gold, the silver age begin in the time of Noah, the third age lasted from Abraham to Moses, the fourth from Moses to David, and the ifth from David to the coming of
Christ.103
Then Philip starts over. He divides the statue’s body into seven parts, representing
seven spiritual ages of this world—the head and the chest remain unchanged from the
irst scheme, the arms represent the third age (from Abraham to Moses), the brass belly is
the time from Moses to the Apostles, and the legs are the apostles and early church fathers
(iron is resonant, as were their teachings).104 For toes of the statue, “we can understand that
age in which we are”—a time that is the last age, as the toes are an extremity to the body;
the Antichrist is close at hand.105 The stone which comes to knock down the statue in this
102
“Sed jam nunc videamus quid signiicet illa statua quam lapis iste percussit et comminuit, quia tam admirabile somnium, et tam insolita visio, sine pondere magni sacramenti regi Babylonis nullatenus ostensa
fuit,” ibid., 585.
103
He then returns to the traditional gloss: “in sexta igitur aetate abscisus est lapis sine manibus de monte,
id est Christus natus est absque tactu hominis de Maria Virgine...Christus, qui est angularis lapis,” ibid.,
586.
104
Ibid., 587–8.
105
“Ista aetas intelligitur in qua nos sumus. Per pedes autem ferreos et ictiles qui solent esse extrema pars
corporis nostri, recte intelligenda est ultima aetas, quae futura est sub tempore Antichristi,” ibid., 588.
340
interpretation is still Christ, but this time in his second coming.106
Following these two historical interpretations of the statue, Philip provides three
further allegories. First the statue’s body represents the Church, with Christ as its head, the
apostles as its the silver chest, martyrs as arms, confessors and doctors of the contemporary
church for a belly, etc.107 In the second allegory “the igure of this statue [is] the entire divine scripture,” where genesis and the gospel together make up the golden head, the books
of the prophets make up the chest, and so forth down to the mixed feet of iron and clay,
which are the modern doctrines of the Catholics and the heretics.108 The inal allegory is a
moral one, where wisdom is the head; sincere thinking and holy works, the chest and arms;
the stomach, holy thought; the thighs, chastity; and so on. It is interesting that the bible’s
diachronic interpretation of the symbol doesn’t stop Philip from treating it as synchronic:
holy thought does not end before chastity begins—they are interdependent. In Philip’s
hands the statue is separated from the historical scheme imposed upon it by the apocalyptic
rock and transformed into a lexible mnemonic device which can accommodate various
kinds of content organized vertically and hierarchically. Nor was Philip alone in taking
this approach: the inluential biblical exegete Richard of St. Victor composed a long commentary on the dream in which the statue is used to organize a wide range of content both
good and bad.109
106
Ibid., 588–9.
107
Ibid., 590–91.
108
“iguram hujus statuae allegorico sensu referremus ad textum totius divinae scripturae,” ibid.
109
Richard of St. Victor, “De eruditione hominis interioris libri tres.” It is impossible to characterize this
long text simply. The exegesis is detailed and deliberate, covering the same territory many times and, like
Harveng’s allegorizations, re-drawing its meanings. At one point, Richard glosses the parts of the body and
the metals separately, assigning activities to the body parts and virtues to the metals (“In auro intelligitur
charitas, in argento veritas, in aere simultas, in ferro crudelitas, in testa ictili fragilitas,” p. 1269) before
combining his glosses (“Si ergo caput intentio, et aurum devotio, quid aliud est aureum caput, nisi devota in-
341
Outside of the bible itself, the commentaries discussed so far (by Jerome, Beatus
of Liébana, Philip of Harveng, and Richard of St. Victor) are the primary mode in which
discussion of our statue occurs during the early and high Middle Ages. But with the advent
of the fourteenth century the Dream of Precious Metals enters the secular sphere, where it
makes infrequent but signiicant appearances irst in Italian, then in French, and inally in
English works (see Table 6.2).
Table 6.2: The Statue Outside of Biblical Commentaries (to 1400)
c. 1308
Dante, Inferno (Canto 14)
1328–37
Ugolino Boniscambi of Montegiorgio, Actus Beati
Francisci et sociorum eius
?1340s
Vitry, Cum statua/Hugo
?1350s
Vitry, Phi millies/O creator
Before 1357
Machaut, Remède de Fortune
1357
Machaut, Confort d’ami
1355–8
Guillaume de Deguileville, Pélerinage de l’âme
c. 1375
Boccaccio, commentary on Dante’s Inferno
1385
John Gower, Vox clamantis
1386–90
John Gower, Confessio amantis
1388–9
Philippe de Mézières, Songe du vieil pelerin
To my knowledge, Dante is the irst to treat the dream of precious metals in a secular context, and his reading remains among the most idiosyncratic. We meet the statue in
Canto 14 of the Inferno in the guise of an old man who stands weeping on a desolate mountain on the ruined island of Crete:
Within the mountain stands erect a great old man, with his back toward
Damietta, looking toward Rome as to his mirror. His head is formed of ine
gold and pure silver are his arms and breast; then he is of brass as far as the
fork; from there downward he is all reined iron, except that his right foot is
baked clay; and on that one, more than on the other, he stands erect.
tentio?,” p. 1273). After this he re-glosses the metals to carry vices rather than virtues: (“per aurum potest
intelligi arrogantia. per argentum jactantia, per aes pertinacia, per ferrum saevitia, per testam impatientia,”
p. 1274), and so forth.
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Each part of him, except his golden head, is broken by a crack that drips
tears, which, gathering, bore through that cave. Their course plunges into
this valley; they become Acheron, Styx, and Phlegethon.110
Here is the statue as we have never seen it before. Looking longingly to Rome as a seat of
historical and spiritual authority, it stands on a desolate and fallen Crete “under whose King
the world was once chaste,” and the deterioration of the world is signaled in the statue’s own
body.111
This veglio di Creto has been called “one of the most elaborate and interpreted symbols in the Inferno,” and analyses of his signiicance in the broader narrative of the poem are
numerous.112 For our purposes I think it is important to note that Dante takes the statue out
of the dream context, removing both Daniel as interpreter and Nebuchadnezzar as dreamer
(two aspects of the story which played an important role in earlier commentaries).113 And
of course the rock which is to strike the statue is nowhere to be found—it stands on its clay
foot, unsteadily to be sure, and certainly unhappily, but presumably will stand for all human
time, since its tears low down to make the rivers of hell.
Dante’s statue is more symbol than allegory: its four metals remain unglossed and
stand together to show a general degradation through time rather than signifying any particular ages. Boccacio interpreted the metals more speciically in his commentary on the
110
Ll. 94–6; Dante, Inferno, ed. Durling, 223–5.
111
Ibid., 223. See Dean, The World Grown Old, 175–95.
112
Dante, Inferno, ed. Mark Musa, 203. See also notes in Dante, Inferno, ed. Durling, 555–7. For a summary of the accepted symbolism of the statue with bibliography, see Di Scipio, “Old Man of Crete,” 658–9.
113
Dante returns to the issue of Nebuchadnezzar as dreamer in Paradiso 4:14, where Beatrice compares
herself to Daniel and him to the sleeping King. The statue is not mentioned, but it is depicted in the deluxe
copy of the work illuminated by Giovanni di Paolo (British Library Yates-Thompson MS 36, c. 1445); see
reproductions in John Pope-Hennessy, ed., Paradiso: The Illuminations to Dante’s Divine Comedy by Giovanni
di Paolo (New York: Random House, 1993), 78–81.
343
Inferno, part of the Esposizioni sopra la commedia left uninished at his death in 1375. His
gloss, which Tobias Foster Gittes has called a “subtle” and “dramatic revision of the conventional model,” seems to imply progress as well as decline between the stages.114 Thus although the second generation will not retain the purity of Eden (because gold is more valuable than silver), Boccaccio indicates that the silver generation was more beautiful than the
previous, as silver is more lustrous than gold. Similarly, the citizens of the bronze age shall
be distinguished by its learning which will resonate, just as bronze is a resonant metal. But
bronze is still worse than both silver and gold, and this learning shall be put to vile ends.115
While Boccacio’s reading is certainly a revision of Dante, it is not, in fact, original: there is a similar account of the metals in the popular Actus Beati Francisci et sociorum
eius (Deeds of Blessed Francis and His Companions), written between 1328 and 1337
by Ugolino Boniscambi of Montegiorgio.116 Chapter 25, one of those focused on the origins of Francis’s fraternity, relates how “A Statue Like the Statue of Nebuchadnezzar, but
Dressed in a Sackcloth, Speaks to Blessed Francis and Tells Him About the Four Stages
of His Order.” Ugolino’s reading, which precedes the Espositioni by many decades, shows an
almost identical treatment of the successive generations (here the stages of the Franciscan
order) as both degenerating and improving:
“The chest and arms of silver will be the second stage of the Order…And
just as silver has great value, brightness and melodious sound, so in that
second stage there will be those of value in the divine Scriptures, brilliant in
114
Gittes, Boccaccio’s Naked Muse, 69.
115
Papio, ed. and trans., Boccaccio’s Expositions, 550–1.
116
The collection of stories was translated into Italian after 1337 (and possibly much later in the century)
as Fioretti di San Francesco (The Little Flowers of Saint Francis). I quote from the English translation of
Ugolino’s text in Armstrong and Short, eds., Francis of Assisi: Early Documents 3:435–65.
344
the light of sanctity and melodious in sounding the word of God…But even
though that will be a remarkable generation, it will not reach that most perfect stage of those who came irst, but will be to it what silver is to gold.”117
The passage on bronze is also reminiscent of Boccaccio’s treatment, touching both on
the resonance of the metal and the learning associated with the third generation: “Just as
bronze is considered less valuable than silver, so those of the third stage will be less than
those of the irst and second stages… Because of their learning, they will have tongues with
a wonderful sound, like brass.”118 It seems that Boccaccio’s interpretation of Dante is not
of his invention and indeed that it follows established modes of thought which are perhaps
Italian in their origins.
Dante’s statue cries while looking longingly towards Rome, and Ugolino’s also commands an emotional response due to its beauty and poor mode of dress: “Blessed Francis,
gazing at the statue, was thoroughly amazed by its almost indescribable beauty, its extraordinary size, and the embarrassment it seemed to have about the cheap sackcloth which it
was wearing.”119 No rock strikes the statue; it simply disappears, having delivered its holy
message about how the Franciscan order will decline.
Ugolino’s reading certainly departs from the biblical statue, which stands only to
be demolished, and whose face, which could as little talk as cry, it terrible to behold. The
sad, humanized statue seems to be an Italian phenomenon, and it differs markedly from
what we have observed in the commentary tradition and in Machaut and Vitry. It serves as a
reminder of the variety of ways in which this exemplum can be read, underlining the extent
to which any reading is an authorial decision rather than biblical paraphrase.
117
Ibid., 3: 487.
118
Ibid.
119
Ibid., 3:486.
345
We next encounter the statue back in France, in Guillaume de Deguileville’s popular
Pélerinage de l’âme. Here, in a plot typical of the allegorical dream vision, the soul, naked and
bearing the burden of sin, is shown a series of sights by an angel who leads it through heaven
and purgatory before seeing it safely to heaven. Near the end of the soul’s long journey, it
sees a statue that “in all things resembled the one Nebuchadnezzar dreamed.”120 The angel’s
description of the statue is entirely biblical as pertains to its appearance, but the framing
is Deguileville’s own. It seems that as Nebuchadnezzar lay in bed he was thinking about his
state, musing over the best way to govern his people and wondering who might rule after
him.121 The dream that follows is cast as an answer to these political questions. Deguileville
devotes over a thousand lines to a detailed allegory of the statue as the body politic, with
the king at its golden head, the arms and breast representing barons and counsellors, and so
forth down to the feet, which stand allegorically for the laborers and craftsmen.122
Deguileville’s scheme is similar to some of the allegories proposed by Philip of
Harveng, but it goes even further away from the notion of degeneration. Most of Philip’s
schemes, whether diachronic (such as the succession of ages) or synchronic (the statue as
the holy scriptures, the statue as the body of the church), imply some kind of decay. But
Deguileville’s allegory is organic, and he explains why each part of the body and each material is suited to represent its part in the social order. For example, the head represents the
King because the head rules the body. And gold represents the king as a metal both pre120
“Qu’a l’estatue que jadis Nabugodonasor songoit/En toutes choses ressembloit,” Deguileville, Pélerinage
de l’âme, ll. 7218–20. All following citations refer to this edition.
121
“Comment dedens son lit jadis/Nabugodonasor pensis/Estoit de son gouvernement/Comment son royaume et sa gent/Estoient traities et menes/Et par quelles loys gouvernes,/Et comment seroit apres li/I.e regne
garde et de qui,/Et quel en la in it seroit/Et en quel main il escheroit,” ll. 7235–44.
122
The discussion of the statue takes up ll. 7205–8344. On the head, see l. 7385ff.; the neck, 7661ff.;
the arms, 7709ff.; the breast, 7795ff.; the stomach, 7939ff.; the thighs, 8013ff.; the calves, 8121ff.; the
feet, 8213ff.
346
cious and ductile, appropriate to the good ruler’s lexibility with regard to his councilors’
advice. Though its parts are made of different materials, Deguileville’s statue is as uniied
as the ideal state it represents. The idea of biological unity is emphasized by mention of the
joints—the knees are used as a point of reference, and a description of the neck is provided.123
The discussion of the feet of iron and clay is a particularly good example of Deguileville’s novel interpretation. For him, the feet of the statue represent the “tresnecessaires” craftsmen (iron) and laborers (clay), who “bear the limbs above and support the
kingdom.”124 The bible is explicit that iron does not mix with clay, but Deguileville revises
this interpretation:
Or voit on que mipartis sont
Les pies et entremelles sont
De deux matieres qui entr’eux
Semblent estre moult despareux,
Mes tant n’est pas, com il semble,
Car nees furent ensemble.
Le fer de la terre est issu
Et de terre est et terre fu
[Now we can see that the feet are divided in two and mixed of two materials which seem to be very different from each other, but it’s not as it seems,
because they were born together. Iron is extracted from the earth, and clay is
made from earth.]125
Having a common source, iron and clay do belong together, and on these mixed but natural
feet, the government is stable—all of its parts support each other, and the statua upholds its
123
Deguileville admits that the book of Daniel does not specify the material of the neck, but reasons that it
should be gold like the head. The neck represents the royal family, which serves as the link between the king
and the rest of the body politic (ll. 7661–7708).
124
“Les membres d’amont soustiennent/Et le royaume maintiennent,” ll. 8219–20.
125
Ll. 8239–46.
347
etymological link with the latin status (stand).126 Nebuchadnezzar’s statue as it stands in the
Pélerinage de l’âme is not in danger of being hit by the stone, which is nowhere mentioned in
the poem. The very sign and symbol of a well-governed state, it represents not the deterioration of society but its stability.
Such an interpretation of Deguileville is conirmed by another allegorical dream
vision, the epic Songe du vieil pèlerin of Philippe de Mézières (1327-1405).127 Here Nebuchadnezzar’s dream makes its appearance when Lady Justice is talking about the danger of
rising too fast through the ranks, as when the son of a poor man becomes very rich. First
she cites Aristotole as an advocate for a government in which a prince maintains the difference between ranks and ofices so that “one cannot usurp the authority or the ofice of
another.”128 And then as further proof for her claim, Lady Justice turns to “une belle igure”
whose interpretation she attributes to Deguileville, “en son Pélerinage de l’åme”: “la statue du
roy Nabugodonosor.”129
In summarizing Deguileville’s plan for the statue (which he calls “assez prolixe”),
Mézières entirely leaves out the metals of the statue, both because he assumed that his
readers would know them, and, more importantly, because the metals do not matter to his
reading of Deguileville. What is important is the metaphor of the stable body politic, with
126
“Et estatus sont estables/En monstrant que de sto sont nes,” ll. 7316–7.
127
Written some 30 years after the Péleriange de l’âme, Mézières’s work describes a sea journey through
Christendom undertaken by the narrator with Queens Truth, Justice, Peace, and Mercy. On the way they
describe conditions and recommend political and religious reforms in the countries they visit, eventually
focusing on France. An edition of the French text with detailed English summary is available: Mézières, Le
songe du vieil pèlerin, ed. G. W. Coopland. See, however, the review by Janet M. Ferrier in The Modern Language Review 65 (1970), 620–2.
128
“En son livre de Politique clarement le devise, et dit ainsi en substance: que qouvernement et police d’un
royaume est tres bon quant le prince maintient les habitans du royaume chacun en son ofice: c’est assavoir
que l’un ne doit pas usurper la dignite ou ofice de l’autre,” Mézières, Le songe du vieil pelerin, 1: 572.
129
Ibid.
348
each member assigned to its own part: “le corps d’un royaume est bien dispose quant chacun
membre fait bien son ofice, et l’un ne s’empesche de l’ofice de l’autre.”130
Deguileville’s Pélerinage de l’âme is roughly contemporary with Machaut’s Remède,
and also probably with both Vitry motets. But these three French poets use the statue very
differently from each other, as well as from the slightly earlier Italian examples discussed
above. Gittes, in commenting on Boccacio’s use of the symbol, has commented on its lexibly in signifying decline: “Like so many abstract, artiicial schemes, the classical pattern
of epochal degeneration proves an ideological scaffolding amenable to a wide variety of
agendas.” But what is interesting is that Deguileville and Mezieres following him decades
later use the exemplum entirely separately from any degeneration. In their hands the king’s
troubling apocalyptic vision is re-interpreted to signify stability and natural balance.
These contemporary uses of the statue in France and Italy do little to contextualize Vitry’s calling it up in invective, or Machaut’s related comparison of the statue to the
despised and unreliable Fortune. In fact the closest analogue to both Machaut’s and Vitry’s
uses of the statue is found in the symbol’s most famous fourteenth-century appearance—
the prologue to John Gower’s Confessio amantis.
130
Ibid. To make his point, Mézières includes a detailed allegory of the arms of the statue that is not found
in Deguileville: the upper arms are the great oficers and chieftains of the Kingdom, the forearms are the
nobility and squires, and the ingers are the valets and servants who attend to the king’s person. If a servant
exceeds his rank, Mézières suggests, it is like a inger that grows to the girth of an arm, and the deformed
hand that results can in no way be useful to the King (ibid., 1:537). The one other appearance of the statue
in the Songe is on the same theme. In Book 3, “la igure du roy Nabugodonasor” is summoned to support a
description of “bons conseilliers, serviteurs et oficiers, et chacun en son degre ne passera pas les termes de
son ofice, ne ce qui lui sera ordonne,” 2: 330.
349
GOWER’S “DIVISIOUN” AND THE MUSICAL STATUE
Begun in 1386 and inished four years later, Gower’s long middle-English poem
collects stories, moral instruction, and social commentary within the framing narrative of
a middle-aged lover confessing to Genius. The prologue of this amorous and clerkly work
(“somwhat of lust, somwhat of lore,” as the author characterizes it) is devoted to equalopportunity inger pointing, as Gower criticizes each of the three estates in turn.131 For
government, clergy, and commons he irst evokes a golden age (in which rulers were welladvised, lawyers were fair, friars were meek and honest, etc.) and then presents the pitiable
conditions of the current day, in which “it wel nyh stant al reversed” (30).
Much is wrong with the world, but the diagnosis is simple. Corruption, tyranny,
hypocrisy, war, and schism—all are caused by division, which is, in Russell Peck’s analysis, Gower’s “cause of all forms of psychological, social, ethical, linguistic, and political
disjunction.”132 “Divisioun” is the “moder of confusioun” and ultimate cause of anarchy and
apocalypse (852):
Division, the Gospell seith,
On hous upon another leith,
Til that the regne al overthrowe.
And thus may every man wel knowe,
Division aboven alle
Is thing which makth the world to falle (974–9).
Gower’s symbol of all this worldly division is none other than the statue from Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, which tells “hou that this world schal torne (change) and wende (decay)/ Til
it befalle to his ende” (591–2).
131
This and all following quotations are from Gower, Confessio amantis, ed. Russell A. Peck. Subsequent
references will be cited in the text by line number.
132
Peck, “The Politics and Psychology of Governance,” 218.
350
The prologue’s treatment of the allegory is trifold. First described in biblical paraphrase, then as a series of progressively worse ages, the statue is inally interpreted as a succession of empires reaching into the present day, in which Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece,
Rome, and the Holy Roman Empire all succeed each other. Overall some 500 lines of
Gower’s prologue are devoted to the statue and its embodied property of division, and these
provide a frame for viewing the Confessio as a whole as a story de senectute mundi in which
the aging lover represents the aging world.133 The allegory’s centrality to the work is further
underscored by an image of the statue, which often heads copies of the Confessio amantis
(see Figure 6.6).134
Figure 6.6: Statue Miniature in Confessio amantis (irst quarter 15th c.)135
133
On senectus mundi, see Dean, The World Grown Old, 233–70. For commentary prior to 1989 on Gower’s use of the statue, see Nicholson, An Annotated Index, 65–7, and especially Peck, “John Gower and the
Book of Daniel.” Se also Freddell, “Reading the Dream Miniature,” and Williams, “Gower’s Monster.”
134
The image appears either at the beginning of the poem or at line 585, where the dream is mentioned.
See discussion in Grifiths, “Confessio amantis: The Poem and its Pictures,” and Freddell, “Reading the
Dream Miniature in the Confessio amantis.” Camille wonders that the image is “chosen for depiction even
though it is a very small part of the work,” but this view does not acknowledge the importance of the prologue
in framing the narrative that follows; The Gothic Idol, 285.
135
Columbia University, Rare Book and Manuscript Library MS Plimpton 265, fol. 1v.
351
Although Deguileville is sometimes cited as a precedent to Gower’s use of the statue,
it should now be clear that their treatments have little in common, and that Gower’s reading
is more reminiscent of Vitry’s and Machaut’s interpretations.136 Michael Camille has noted
this latter afinity: “For Gower and Machaut, the statue signiies physical impermanence,
while for Deguileville is it a public image of enduring stability.”137 In addition to this general similarity of connotation, several speciic parallels may be drawn between the statue as
it is used and interpreted in Gower and its earlier musical incarnations. The irst of these
has to do with Fortune.
The idea of a world that is not as it has been, but reversed, naturally brings Fortune
to mind. And indeed she is a pervasive presence in Gower’s text.138 Nor does it escape him
that the topos of Fortune causing a change for the worse is compatible with the statue’s
meaning. In fact, it is Fortune who prepares the way for the irst mention of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, and the link between her and the biblical story is seamless:
For every worldes thing is vein,
And evere goth the [wheel] aboute,
And evere stant a man in doute:
Fortune stant no while stille,
So hath ther no man al his wille.
Als fer as evere a man may knowe,
Ther lasteth nothing bot a throwe.
The world stant evere upon debat,
So may be seker non astat:
Now hier now ther, now to now fro,
136
It seems likely that Gower read Deguileville. He indicates that the neck of the statue was gold (605–
7)—a detail found (to my knowledge) only in the Pélerinage de l’âme, although Deguileville cites some other
unnamed authority.
137
Given this difference it is interesting that Camille characterizes Gower’s engagement as a “re-use” of
Deguileville’s image: The Gothic Idol, 285, 287.
138
Though he is loathe to put all the blame on her and criticizes those who blame Fortune or the stars for
things that are really their own fault: “For man is cause of that schal falle/And natheles yet som men wryte/
And sein that fortune is to wyte, /And som men holde oppinion/That it is constellacion,/Which causeth al
that a man doth./God wot of bothe which is soth” (ll. 528–34).
352
Now up now doun, this world goth so,
And evere hath don and evere schal,
Wherof I inde in special
A tale writen in the Bible,
Which moste nedes be credible (560–78).
This tale, of course, is from Daniel 2. In light of our analysis of Machaut’s complainte, the
only other work to connect Fortune and Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, this transition is particularly interesting. Gower does not compare Fortune’s body to the statue’s, as Machaut
does. Instead he uses her as a way to move from people’s unhappiness to the cause of that
unhappiness—division. And he continues to use the wheel as metaphor throughout the
prologue, especially in navigating between sections of the statue, where turns of the wheel
cause the successive empires to fall.139
Reacting to similar iconography in certain manuscripts of the Confessio amantis and
some versions of the Remède, Joel Freddell has pointed to a congruity of approach between
Machaut and Gower.140 The Remède, he argues, presents “a clear precedent, and one well
known in Gower’s literary world, for using Nebuchadnezzar’s dream statue as a literary icon
for Fortune.”141 The relationship between these texts is perhaps a bit more complicated: in
Machaut the statue is undoubtedly an icon for Fortune, but in Gower, where the statue is the
main character, Fortune becomes an agent by which we might navigate and assimilate that
more unusual symbol. But regardless of these differences, Grifith’s point that the Remède
139
For example in navigating between brass and steel (“Tho goth the regne of bras aweie,/And comen is the
world of stiel,/And stod above upon the whiel,” l. 730–3) or steel and steel-clay (“Bot a long time it stod
so stille/Under the Frensche kynges wille,/Til that Fortune hir whiel so ladde,/That afterward Lombardy it
hadde,” ll. 769–72).
140
“Reading the Dream Miniature,” 70–7. Freddell is concerned with those miniatures which depict the
statue without Nebuchadnezzar or Daniel: Manuscript A fol. 56v and Manuscript Pm fol. 53 v. On the
interpretive differences between these depictions and the earlier, more traditional scheme represented in
Manuscripts C and J, see Huot, From Song to Book, 252–4, 275–80.
141
Freddell, “Reading the Dream Miniature,” 65.
353
serves as an antecedent to certain ideas in Gower is well taken and may be supported by
several more observations.
In addition to the borrowed theme of Fortune, the Confessio amantis may be linked
to the Remède by a rhetorical device. Towards the end of his discussion of the statue Gower
complains that even the weather is affected by division: the sunshine and clean air of ages
past have been replaced by a ickle climate where everything is in lux. His discussion takes
anaphoric form:
Now be the trees with leves grene,
Now thei be bare and nothing sene,
Now be the lusti somer loures
Now be the stormy wynter shoures,
Now be the daies, now the nyhtes (935–9).
This contradictory and changing world, which mirrors “man and his condicioun,”
(944) has a rhetorical analogue in a passage from the Remède leading up to the complainte.
Enumerating the usual symptoms of amour langour, Machaut writes that the heart of a lover:
Or ajoie, or a desconfort,
Or rit, or pleure, or chante, or plaint,
Or se delite en son complaint,
Or tremble, or tresue, or a chaut,
Or a froit, et puis ne li chaut
[is now joyful, now mournful, now laughing, now crying, now singing, now
lamenting, now happy in its plaint, now trembling, now sweating, now hot,
now cold (875–81)]
Gower’s frame is geological and Machaut’s is biological, but the root of both is Fortune and
even the thermal effects are similar.
Gower may have acknowledged the inluence of Machaut’s work: while describing
the noisy disapproval of the common people shortly before his irst mention of Fortune, the
354
poet remarks that “eche in his compleignte telleth/How that the world is al miswent.”142 It is
just possible that these lines refer not only to the act of complaining but also to the genre
of complainte.
In other ways, Gower’s prologue brings to mind Vitry’s reading of the statue as manifest in Cum statua/Hugo and, to an even greater extent, Phi millies/O creator. The most
obvious link with the latter motet is the list of empires as it appears in Gower. Now, the
association of the statue’s empires with a Christian time-line that matches gold with the
Babylonian, silver with the Medo-Persian, Bronze with the Greek, and Iron with the Roman empires goes back at least to Jerome’s commentary and was prevalent enough that its
use by Gower and Vitry need not be related. However, the prologue to the Confessio amantis
shares its approach to naming these empires with the triplum “Phi millies,” indicating each
age by the conqueror who began it, so that Cyrus, Belshazzar, and Alexander are mentioned
in both texts. More signiicantly, Gower has brought the King’s dream “up to date,” in that
the Lombard and ultimately German takeovers of Rome constitute a ifth age which continues to this day.143 From the time of Otto, he explains,
Th’empire of Rome hath ben and is
To th’Alemans. And in this wise,
As ye tofore have herd divise
How Daniel the swevene expondeth
Of that ymage, on whom he foundeth
The world which after scholde falle,
Come is the laste tokne of alle.
Upon the feet of erthe and stiel
So stant this world now everydiel
Departed, which began riht tho,
Whan Rome was divided so (820–30).
142
Ll. 516–17, emphasis mine.
143
Peck, “John Gower and the Book of Daniel,” 174.
355
This extension of the statue’s scheme into the present day has been lauded as an
unusual step: Dean inds it noteworthy that “Gower does not dwell on the early Roman
Empire but moves on to the Christian Roman Empire, especially of Charlemagne and the
French.”144 But in fact we see his same extension of kingdoms reaching into the present
time in Vitry’s triplum: “Think yourself of the city, that conquered the world, which fell
to the conquering Germans!”145 To be sure the triplum acts on a much smaller scale than
Gower’s prologue, so that its engagement with any idea must be brief. But it still seems that
the updating for which Gower is praised is adumbrated in Vitry’s motet. We might even hear
the hint of an echo: wondering that Rome should fall, Gower complains that “the chaff is
taken for the corn”—a sentiment reminiscent of “The grain lies smothered by chaff” from
the tenor of Vitry’s motet.
Finally, Gower shares with Vitry the idea that the statue can represent an individual. In the Confessio amantis the reading of the dream is diachronic and synchronic: in
the most obvious interpretation, the world has undergone the transformations which the
statue embodies and, having already passed through the gold, silver, and copper periods,
has now reached its inal stage “and stant divided ek also/Lich to the feet that were so,/As I
tolde of the statue above” (889–91). But in another sense the world is the statue, and, like
the statue, it stands (and has always stood) on feet of iron and clay: “And now upon his olde
[toes]/It stant of brutel erthe end stiel” (876–7).
Man too represents both the feet and the statue as a whole. The dream image is
shaped like a human (and not some other beast) because it is man who is at fault in all the
144
Dean, The World Grown Old, 258.
145
Ll. 21–3; See Appendix 6A.
356
division.146 And man himself represents the world in a microcosmic scheme which Gower
carefully describes, citing Gregory’s Moralia:147
Forthi Gregoire in his Moral
Seith that a man in special
The [smaller] world is properly,
And that he proveth redely.
For man of soule resonable
Is to an angel resemblable,
And lich to beste he hath ielinge,
And lich to trees he hath growinge;
The stones ben and so is he.
Thus of his propre qualité
The man, as telleth the clergie,
Is as a world in his partie (945–56).
The world stands on feet of clay, ready to be knocked down by the apocalyptic stone, and
so does each man, a world in himself. This division is built into the human body, which is
composed of opposite substances: hot and cold, moist and dry. If, Gower theorizes, man
were made throughout of one material, “ther scholde no corrupcioun/Engendre upon that
unité,” and we would be immortal (986–7). But we are not, for man has been divided ever
since the fall. That this condition is not limited to the denizens of the mixed age of the feet
further underscores the extent to which Gower is willing to align the statue with the contrary individual, even while he is connecting it with a succession of empires.
Nicolette Zeeman comments on Gower’s “apparently original move, [in which he]
extends his earlier connection between the world and human beings by comparing people to
146
“Bot al this wo is cause of man,/The which that wit and reson can,/And that in tokne and in witnesse/
That ilke ymage bar liknesse/Of man and of non other beste,” ll. 905–9.
147
The passage is a paraphrase of Gregory’s discussion: “Homo itaque, quia habet commune esse cum
lapidibus, vivere cum arboribus, sentire cum animalibus, discernere cum angelis, recte nomine universitatis
exprimitur, in quo juxta aliquid ipsa universitas tenetur. Unde et discipulis Veritas dicit: Euntes in mundum
universum, praedicate Evangelium omni creaturae (Marc. XVI, 15),” “Moralium Libri, sive Expositio in Librum
Beati Job,” Patrologia latina 75:740.
357
the statue.”148 The move is certainly an unusual one, but we have seen that it is not original:
exactly this combination of interpretations characterizes Vitry’s treatment of the theme in
both motets. Hugo is at fault not simply for being bad, but for seeming good, so that Vitry’s
triplum accuses him above all of inconsistency: “since you seem on irst appearance a man
of peace, a son of virtues, it beits you to wound no man among the people with the javelin
of your tongue.” And the motetus is also concerned with the coexistence of opposites, this
time linguistic: “Most recently hypocrisy gives [the name] “father” to certain young men
...together with the hypocritical fathers to whom antiphrasis sophistically gives the name
“mendicant.”149 Hugo is split—like Fortune, like the statue, like mortal Man in Gower’s
scheme—between opposites. Like the world, he began good and got worse; like the statue,
he is disjunct. And a similar reading underlies Phi millies/O creator. There Jean de le Mote
with his divided loyalties represents the statue which the stone threatens to strike (and the
comparison with Tantalus furnishes a stone, though from a different quarry). At the same
time, Jean acts in the role of the dreamer/spectator who will watch as his beloved England
is wiped out.
* * *
It not the aim of this study to establish any deinite links between Gower and the
musical works of Machaut and Vitry. Certainly such links are possible: English poets would
have had access to Machaut’s Remède, especially after what Wimsatt has described as a
“French cultural ‘invasion’ of London” following the Battle of Poitiers in 1356.150 It is also
148
Zeeman, “The Verse of Courtly Love in the Framing Narrative,” 234. See also Porter, “Gower’s Ethical
Microcosm and Political Macrocosm,” 142-3.
149
Triplum ll. 9–13; see Apendix 5A.
150
Wimsat, Chaucer and His French Contemporaries, 43. See also Wilkins, “Music and Poetry at Court,”
194–7.
358
conceivable that Gower’s close friend Geoffrey Chaucer, upon whom Machaut’s inluence
is well-known, might have been a means of introducing the younger poet to the Remède.151
More broadly, the traditional view that Gower “shows little, if any knowledge” of the French
court poets152 has been subject to revision, and the parallels I have drawn here between his
work and Machaut’s are consistent with an emergent Gower whose “debts to the fourteenthcentury French verse of courtly love are great.”153 As for Vitry’s motets, which sit outside of
that tradition, it seems likely that an English poet with international leanings would have
been aware of Phi millies/O creator. The work’s target, le Mote, was prominent at the English
court, and such disagreements as those commemorated by the series of ballades and the
motet, in which famous, accomplished poets strike out at their colleagues with all of their
sharpest arrows, would surely have been the stuff of juicy gossip, if not of legend.154
But for present purposes I am equally happy with Gower as a reader of Vitry and
as a fellow thinker contemplating the same symbol at a remove of several decades. The
similarities between their approaches—whether the result of actual interaction (as seems
probable) or simply Zeitgeist—are useful in helping us to think about the symbolism operating in Vitry’s motets. We have seen that even within the sparse history of the statue’s
use in secular and poetic contexts, Machaut’s and Vitry’s interpretations stand aside from
Italian and French poets who use the statue as a more positive and sometimes even stable
symbol. The decision to use it in a negative light thus becomes exactly that: a decision,
rather than a mechanical reproduction of the bible. And Gower makes the same choice,
151
Chaucer dedicated Trolius in part to Gower, giving him the much-quoted epithet “moral Gower.”
152
Fisher, John Gower, 74.
153
Zeeman, “The Framing Narrative,” 223. See also Burrow, “The portrayal of Amans,” 6, 10–11, 19–21,
who argues that the use of an elderly lover as a narrator links the Confessio with Machat’s Voir dit.
154
The presence of the exchange in a ifteenth-century manuscript attests to its longevity.
359
dwelling upon the same symbolism on the more expansive scale allowed by his medium. His
idea of “division” emerges as especially useful because it allows us to navigate semantically
between things which seem to have musical connections: Horace’s chimera, Nebuchadnezzar’s statue, and Fortune. Not all three are false (though falseness has been cited as a reason
for much of what is unusual about Cum statua/Hugo), but all three are divided.155 I believe
that this idea of “division,” which (to put it most contentiously) Gower may have distilled
from the musical incarnations of a biblical icon, stands at the heart of an aesthetic that we
can see in many of the most famous motets in the repertory.
155
See Kügle, The Manuscript Ivrea, 115–8, and the discussion above.
360
Epilogue: ARS NOVA and Disjunction
This study set out to explore text-music relations in ars nova motets, but it has ended
as an exploration of musical monstrosity. Admittedly this is partly because I have found
monsters irresistible. But I have also found them useful, and in this I am not alone. In
the later middle ages “monster” was frequently etymologized as deriving from “monstrare”
because these creatures are able to show how things are by showing how they are not.156 Indeed, in the process of exploring these unusual works we have perhaps become more attuned
to the “normal” state of affairs in motets. In inverting the contrapuntal order of voices, for
example, Machaut’s Helas/Horde mesto (M12) has reminded us of the extent to which differences in range and declamation between the voices in motets are involved in establishing
a “default” sound-world. And yet this sound-world also emerged as mutable. Observing the
distortion of this “normal” order in Helas/Horde mesto, we can ind similar rifts in a number of other works. Similarly, In virtute/Decens and Cum statua/Hugo, with their unusual
introduction of hockets partway through a motet without accompanying diminution, have
clariied the relationship between hockets and diminution. But even more importantly, in
dividing a work into multiple isorhythmic regions without the participation of the tenor,
In virtute/Decens and Cum statua/Hugo can lead us to a larger group of works whose internal divisions are dictated by upper-voice isorhythmic congruences rather than tenor taleae.
Even though monstrous works may hint at a “normal” state of the genre, they do not simply
reinforce the boundaries—they expand them. For once we are on the lookout for generic
subversion we ind that they are not limited to these monstrous works. (And indeed I must
156
Williams, Deformed Discourse, 4.
361
admit that it was the strange forms of the motets analyzed in Chapters 4–6 which led me to
wonder about the supertaleae discussed in Chapter 3, and not the other way around.)
And conversely, once we have been alerted to the possible importance of stratiied subjects and texts, we ind them in unexpected places. To take just one example, let us
consider Vitry’s famous Tuba/In arboris, whose motetus begins with the couplet “In arboris
empiro prospere/virginitas sedet puerpere”—“At the top of the tree virginity sits pleasantly,
bearing a child.” To ind the Virgin in a tree is not surprising—this iconography is related
to the association of the Tree of Jesse—used to depict Christ’s genealogy—with the nativity
scene (virga yields easily to virgo).157 Often the tree in question is an apple tree, casting Mary
as the second Eve. We can see this set of associations played out in Deguileville’s Pelerinage
de l’ame, with which we are already familiar. Near the end of its journey, the soul is shown two
trees, of which one is verdant and the other barren. In the verdant tree—an apple tree—sits
Virginity (see Figure 6.7).
Figure 6.7: Virginity sits in a tree while Justice petitions that she give up the apple in her
lap (detail right), Deguileville’s Pelerinage de l’ame158
157
Levi D’Ancona, The Iconography of the Immaculate Conception, 48–50.
158
Paris, Bibl. Sainte-Geneviève, ms. 1130, fol. 127v.
362
But when we compare Deguileville’s tree with Vitry’s, we ind the latter to be a more
complicated object. For where Deguileville gives us two symbols—one verdant and the
other barren—Vitry puts everything in the same tree. Virginity sits on top, Faith in the
middle, and Reason (here blind and unsuccessful) at the bottom:
In arboris empiro prospere
virginitas sedet puerpere
mediatrix ides in medio
cum stipite cecata ratio
insecuta septem sororibus
sophismata sua foventibus
hec ut scandat dum magis nititur
debilitas ramorum frangitur
petat ergo idei dexteram
vel eternam nitetur perperam.
[In the top of the tree virginity sits auspiciously. Faith, the mediatrix of the
one who has borne the child (sits) in the middle. With the stump (is) blinded
reason followed by seven sisters promoting their sophisms; while she strives
more that she should ascend, the weakness of the branches is broken. Therefore let her seek the right hand of faith or strive wrong-headed forever.159]
Thus Vitry’s is at once the dry tree, the verdant tree, and something in between. Meanwhile,
the progression “at the top”—“at the middle”—“at the foot” is reminiscent of “in primis”—
”in medio”—”in ymis” from In virtute/Decens. Indeed, the tree breaks the rules as much as
Horace’s chimera, and it impossible not to read this motet as engaging with similar ideas,
though in different ways. The weak branches at the bottom of the tree even call to mind the
unstable foundations on which Nebuchadnezzar’ statue—and, for that matter, Fortune—
rest. The triplum continues the vertical and incremental dialogue, calling reason “the root
of sin” (“basis peccatorum,” l. 6) because it, unlike faith, is acquired by degrees (“gressi159
Trans. Howlett in Orlando Consort, Philippe de Vitry, 16.
363
bus,” l. 23). Only faith can give us an understanding of mysteries (“archana”), and there
are mysteries present. For while Virginity sits at the top of the tree, it is the motet’s lowest
voice—the tenor—that sings “Virgo sum” (“I am the Virgin”). If this seems irrational, that
may well be the point: reason is blind. David Williams has argued that Christian Neoplatonic thought “valorized the grotesque and the monstrous,” using “concepts such as paradox,
negation, contrariety, nonlimitation, and related ideas” to “propose a fundamental critique
of rational discourse.”160 A critique of reason is the explicit goal of the triplum text,161 and
the strange tree in the motetus acts here as a kind of hybrid whose contrariety can help us
see past reason.
This uselessness of reason may also account for a notational peculiarity of the motet. It is indicated by rubric that in the tenor, “nigre notule sunt imperfecte et rube sunt
perfecte”—“the little black notes are imperfect, and red ones are perfect” (see Figure 6.8).
This is unusual: during the fourteenth century, red notes were normally used in the opposite
way—to transform perfect mensuration to imperfect.162 Granted, Tuba/In arboris comes at
a point in the tradition when coloration was still new and its functions may not have been
fully set. On the other hand, its very use of a rubric indicates that something unusual may
be going on. In the other two early motets that use red notation, perfect is turned to im-
160
Williams, Deformed Discourse, 4.
161
It warns that “because reason is acquired in nature by degrees, it begets uncertainty at the beginning
and will therefore lean upon guesswork,” (“nature quod gressibus/ratio potita/in premissis dubium/gignat et
augurium/igitur nitetur),” ll. 23–7.
162
Compare Machaut’s rubric for Felix/Inviolata (M23): “Nigre sunt perfecte et rubee imperfecte.” Apel
writes that “in early fourteenth-century music the use of red notes occurs chiely, if not exclusively, in perfect mensuration, which is thus temporarily changed into imperfect mensuration,” The Notation, 348. Parrish notes that “red notes were almost never used in imperfect mensurations in French Ars Nova sources,”
The Notation, 147.
364
perfect with no verbal commentary required.163 The use of red notation to shift notes from
perfect to imperfect continued to be the standard for most of the fourteenth century, and
Tuba/In arboris remained a sort of counter-example, mentioned in treatises but not emulated.164 In retrospect it is tempting to see it as a reasonable extension of the system. But I
suggest that at the time of writing it was meant to be an unreasonable extension.
Figure 6.8: Tuba/In arboris, tenor (Ivrea, fol. 15v)
Leech-Wilkinson has argued that “that particularly ine motet Tuba/In arboris,
which is cited so often by medieval theorists as typifying the innovations of Ars nova” occupies a “crucial position” within the ars nova repertory, where it functions as a nexus point
for emulation.165 It is interesting to see this same motet here re-aligned to relate to works
such as Cum statua/Hugo and In virtute/Decens—works that are peripheral to the scheme
proposed by Leech-Wilkinson.166 And yet, attention to the common ideas that the three
163
Neither Garrit/In nova nor Douce/Garison uses a rubric, but the notation of longa rests makes the difference clear (Apel, The Notation, 328–30). By analogy, the imperfect longa rests in Tuba/In arboris should
also be suficient to indicate that the black notes are imperfect. The rubric draws extra attention to the
notation here, marking it as a reversal.
164
Consider, for example, the author of the anonymous De musica mensurabili who writes that “rubrae vel
vacuae sunt imperfectae, ut in tenore de In nova, et pluribus aliis cantibus mensuratis; et si mensura sit
<im>perfecta, dictae rubrae vel vacuae sunt perfectae, ut in tenore de In arboris, et pluribus aliis cantibus
mensuratis,” Sweeny, ed. Anonymous: De musica mensurabili, 44. Here the second use of “et pluribus aliis
cantibus mensuratis” has a formulaeic ring—there are in fact not very many examples.
165
It is “V10” in Leech-Wilkinson’s beautiful Example 9, where it is located at the center of the crossshaped igure, “Related Motets,” 16.
166
In virtute/Decens is IV71, which stands in a box of its own to the left of the cross. Cum statua/Hugo is V8,
which appears in the left arm of the cross. Ibid.
365
works share stands to give us insight into formal and notational features of each that have
heretofore remained unexplored.
And Tuba/In arboris is only one example. In fact a number of important ars nova
works are in some sense monstrous, hybrid, or disjunct in content or in form. Homing in
on them as manifestations of musical division may well cast the entire ars nova in a rather
different light. Not least it would reconcile the later repertory with the movement’s irst
incarnations, which come down to us accompanied by the colorful Fauvel. And, as I have
suggested above, works with monstrous content can give us fresh insight on the question
of text-music relations, encouraging us to recast them more broadly as the interaction of
forms and ideas. But beyond this, focusing on moments of fragmentation, reversal, and
paradox—of division in its broadest sense—will ultimately force us to question the nature of repertorial center and periphery, the role of musical unity, and the function and
deinition of form as we explore the implications of an ars nova built upon an aesthetics of
disjunction.
366
APPENDIX 6A
CUM STATUA/HUGO/MAGISTER INVIDIE, Texts and Translations
TRIPLUM
5
10
15
20
Cum statua Nabucodonasor
metallina successive Syon
ac gradatim deduci ac minus
ieri colis passus est dominus,
que cum primo fuerit aurea
virtuosus inde argentea
carne mundus, deinceps herea
sancti loquis ictilis ferea
ac lutea pater novissime
novissimis quibusdam maxime
corde dantis una cum patribus
ipocrisis antifrasis quibus
dat mendici nomen sophistice
hec concino Philippus publice
et quia
impia
lingua ledor unius territe
pro vero
refero:
“A prophetis falsis attendite.”
ll. 1–4 Like the metal statue of Nebuchadnezzar, the Lord allowed Zion to be successively
and by stages reduced to pieces,
5–9 which when it was gold (Zion was) virtuous, then silver (and Zion was) clean in
body, following this copper of holy speech, earthen iron, and mud.
9–13 Most recently hypocrisy gives [the name] “father” to certain young men by the great
spirit of giving together with the hypocritical fathers to whom antiphrasis sophistically gives the name “mendicant.”
14
I, Philippe, sing these things publicly.
15–20 And because I am terribly wounded by an impious tongue, I say the truth: beware
of false prophets!1
1
English translation modiied from Howlett’s in Orlando Consort, “Philippe de Vitry and the Ars Nova,”
21. Any errors resulting from the modiications are my own.
367
MOTETUS
5
10
15
Hugo, Hugo princeps invidie
tu cum prima pateas facie
homo pacis virtutum ilius
te neminem decet in populo
lingue tue ledere iaculo
set ignarum doce te pocius.
qua me culpas igitur rabie
assignata mihi nulla die
inconsultus causamque nescius?
Stupeo
et eo
cum invidus sic sis palam pius
perpere
dicere
ipocritam te possum verius.
ll. 1–3 Hugh, Hugh, prince of envy, since you seem on irst appearance a man of peace, a
son of virtues,
4–6 it beits you to wound no man among the people with the javelin of your tongue,
but rather to teach the ignorant.
7–8 With what madness do you therefore charge me, imputed to me on no day?
9–15 Unconsulted and ignorant of the cause, I am astounded, and therefore, since
though so envious you seem outwardly to be holy, I can quite truly say, perverse
man, that you are a hypocrite.2
TENOR:
Magister invidiae
2
Master of envy
Trans. ibid.
368
APPENDIX 6B
Cum statua Nabugodonasor/Hugo, Hugo3
Philippe de Vitry
3
Particulars of edition, including sources used, variants, any signiicant differences from PMFC.
369
370
371
APPENDIX 6C
PHI MILLIES/O CREATOR/IACET GRANUM/QUAM SUFFLABIT,
Texts and Translations
TRIPLUM4
5
10
15
20
25
30
Phi millies ad te, triste pecus,
Cauda monstri, quod in Francum decus
Linguam scribis quam nescis promere!
Quid? Mugitum pro melo vomere
quod musicus horret ebmelicum!
Non puduit Carmen chimericum
palam dare quod Flaccus versibus
primis dampnat. Ve! Qui tot fecibus
Danos pascis, olei venditor
Mendacii publici conditor,
et garriens velut Tantalides
tuos Nabugodonozorides
egre credis non posse cadere
et oppressum nunquam resurgere.
At Bathazar doxosus cecidit
Carthaginem Cyrus et condidit,
cecidere quas struxit Amphion,
ad Troiquos transiit Albion
Post oppressa diris Saxonibus,
post a Danis obtenta trucibus;
Urbem cernas, que mundum domuit,
que Germanis victis succubuit!
Hinc desine superbire, quia
Dana manus non fecit omnia,
sed spiritus ipse vertiginis
quem miscuit ilius Virginis
in nos lapsos peccati scoria;
quibus pulsis resurget Francia,
et gregabit virilem synodum,
et diriget Denis periodum
Quem decrevit lex Albumazaris,
Et cessabunt canere citharis,
et cessabit horum peridia,
nec plus erit hoc nomen: Anglia.
4
The edition of the Latin text follows Pognon (“Du nouveau sur Philippe de Vitri,” 52) with the following
changes: “monstri” for “monstrorum” (l. 2), “nunquam” for “mumquam” (l. 14) and “cecidit” for “cecedit” (l.
15). I am indebted to Leofranc Holford-Strevens for generous assistance with the translations below.
372
ll. 1–3
Fie! a thousand times on you, sad brute, monster’s member, who write to honor
the French language things that you don’t know how to pronounce!
4–7
What! Instead of song to vomit unmusical bellowing which makes Music shudder!
He has not blushed to present in public the chimerical song which Horace damns
in his irst verses.5
7–10
Woe! you who feed the Danes (English?) with so many dregs, vendor of oil, promulgator of public lies!6
11–4
And chattering like a Tantalus7 you believe in your sickness that it is hardly possible for your Nebuchadnezzarids to fall and, crushed, never to rise up again.
15–7 And conceited Belshazzar fell, and Cyrus restored Carthage,8 [then] those things
fell which Amphion built,9
18–20 England went over to the Trojans,10 then was oppressed by the cruel Saxons, and
then occupied by the savage Danes;11
21–3
Look at the city that conquered the world, which fell to the Germans they had
conquered!
24–7 So stop being prideful, for it was not the Danish war that did all [these things],
but the spirit of giddiness12 itself, which the son of the Virgin stirred up against
us fallen in the dung of sin;
28–31 When they have been driven out France will rise again, and will gather a mighty
council and (St.) Denis will direct the age which the law of Abu Ma’shar13 decreed,
32–4 and they will cease to play lyres, and the treachery of these men shall stop, and
there will no longer be such a word as “England.”
5
i.e., the Ars poetica, ll. 1–4.
6
The translation of ll. 4–7 is modiied from Wimsatt, Chaucer and his French Contemporaries, 74.
7
Among the crimes of Tantalus was revealing secrets of the gods, hence chattering. As part of his punishment a stone hung above his head, which might explain the link here between him and Nebuchadnezzar’s
statue.
8
Nebuchadnezzar’s grandson and the last king of Babylon.
9
i.e. the walls of Thebes, which Amphion caused to come together by his singing.
10
Reading Troiquos as Troicos.
11
i. e. before the Norman conquest.
12
Cf. Isaiah 19:14, “Dominus miscuit in medio ejus spiritum vertiginis; et errare fecerunt Aegyptum in
omni opere suo, sicut errat ebrius et vomens.”
13
Abu Ma’shar al-Balkhi, 8th century astronomer. Vitry’s interest in his work is revealed by annotations in
his copy of Guillaume de Nangis’s Chronicon. See Wathey, “Philippe de Vitry’s Books,” 148.
373
MOTETUS
5
10
15
20
O creator Deus pulcherrimi
universique perfectissimi,
rex cum matre super empireo
angelorum stipatus cuneo,
nove spere sculptor, ymaginum
mobilium mater et luminum,
organo quo te dicunt vertere
clementia vatis tribuere,
tractum vite, mores, et cetera,
sectis vices regnisque propera,
indulgeas humano sanguini,
pacem donans et lumen lumini,
id est regno quod tulit humeris
Arrianum multis cum ceteris;
ora claudas isti fantastico
adversus quem Philipus dimico,
ne polluto ledatur labio
regnum partum Francorum gladio,
quod preferri ceteris meruit
dono tuo quo felix claruit.
1–4
O God maker of the most noble and most perfect universe, king together
with thy mother above the empyrean heaven surrounded by a battalion
irey batallion of angels,
5–9
sculptor of the new universe, mother of mobile images and of lights, with
the instrument (with) which they say that that you cause upheavals and by
the clemency of the prophet, grant length of life, habits, and the rest,
10–14 be quick with changes to sects and kingdoms, be kind to human blood,
granting peace and light to light, that is to the kingdom that bore the Arian14 on its shoulders along with many others;
15–8 close up the mouth of that false visionary against whom I, Philippe, ight,
lest by his infected lip[s] the kingdom won by the sword of the French be
injured,
19–20 which [kingdom] has deserved to be preferred to the rest with your gift, by
which it has become renowned in happiness.
TENOR:
Jacet granum oppressum palea
CONTRATENOR: Quam suflabit Francus ab area.
14
This is probably a reference to an illustrious Frenchman.
374
The grain lies smothered by chaff,
which the Frenchman will blow
from the threshing-loor.
Catalog of ARS NOVA Motets, their Sources, and Editions
T
HE FOLLOWING IS A LIST OF MOTETS
which may be called ars nova in the most conser-
vative sense of that term—each is, or shares a share a source with, a work cited in
the network of treatises from the irst half of the century that discusses a “new” manner of
composition practiced by Vitry and others. In practice, this means the Fauvel manuscript
(excluding ars antiqua works), the Machaut corpus, the Ivrea codex, and works listed in the
index to the lost Trémoïlle manuscript. Unica surviving in fragmentary sources are included if that source has a concordance with one of the above-listed manuscripts, and if those
unica seem stylistically related to the ars nova corpus (i.e., French language and/or style if in
an insular source). By making such a list I do not mean to imply that works that have been
excluded from it are necessarily part of a different tradition, or that all of the works on the
list are equally representative of some ideal ars nova “type.” But the extremely high level of
concordance between Ivrea and Trémoille—both retrospective collections—strongly suggests that there existed in the minds of some scribes, editors, singers, indexers, or patrons,
a category into which these works would it reasonably well.1 To avoid thorny issues of the
identiication and indexing of fragmentary works, only works surviving complete in one or
more of their sources are included.2
Motets are listed irst by a short title (Triplum/Motetus) and then by a more detailed
1
Excluded from this list are works from the end of the century which, because of the inadequacy of the
term “ars subtilior,” are sometimes referred to as a “late ars nova.” The obvious contradiction inherent in the
term is not much of a problem, and it has the advantages of emphasizing the very real poetic and formal
continuities that characterize the century. However, the notational advances which were synonymous with
the new art were old news by the 1380s, and subject to further innovation.
2
With the exception of Cede locum/Nam, which survives uniquely in CaB. Its tenor is missing for measures 32–9, but can be reconstructed becsuse it is isorhythmic. See Lerch, Fragmente aus Cambrai, 85.
375
list of voices. Incipits are italicized, while unsung text (such as tenor labels) are in quotation marks. Ellipses within labels indicate that the label continues but is too long to be
included here in full. Sources are identiied by sigla listed at the beginning of this dissertation. Trémoïlle is placed in parenthesis if the work survives only in the index and not on the
surviving folios. Strasbourgasbourg is placed in parenthesis unless the work in question was
copied out by Coussemaker. Text-only sources and contrafacta are not included. Editions
listed are from easily accessible collections organized by manuscript or genre. Editions
in teaching anthologies, articles, and dissertations are not listed, unless they are the only
available ones. A much more comprehensive catalog of this repertory, including fragmentary works and more detail about the content of fragmentary sources is badly needed, and I
hope that the following can at least provide a starting point.
A vous/Ad te
A vous vierge/Ad te virgo clamitans/T: “Regnum mundi”
Source: Ivrea 19v–20. Edition: PMFC 5:74–7.
Almifonis/Rosa
Almifonis melos/Rosa sine culpe spina/T
Sources: Ivrea 11v–12; Cort [fragment 1], verso (frag); (Trémoïlle).
Edition: PMFC 5:46–9.
Altissionis/Hin
Altissonis aptatis viribus/Hin principes qui presunt/T: “Tonans”/CT
Source: Ivrea 2v–3. Editions: PMFC 5:7–12; Lefferts, Three
14th-Century Motets, 1–6.
Aman/Heu
Aman novi/Heu, Fortuna/T: “Heu me, tristis est anima mea”
Source: Fauvel, 30. Edition: PMFC 1:48–50.
Amer/Durement
Amer amours est la choison/Durement au cuer/T: “Dolour meus”
Sources: Ivrea 56v–57; Durham 336 (frag.); PPic 67 (frag.),
recto; (Trémoille). Edition: PMFC 5:100–3.
376
Amours/Faus Samblant Amours qui a/Faus Samblant m’a deceu/T: “Vidi dominum”
(Machaut, M15)
Sources: Machaut MSS, Ivrea 20v–1, Trémoïlle 8.
Editions: see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 292.
Apollinis/Zodiacum
(Bernard de Cluny)
Apollinis eclipsatur/ T: “In omnem terram”/Zodiacum signis
Sources: Ivrea, 12v–13; Strasbourgasbourg, 64v–65 (with
added voices); Leiden 2512, 1 (frag.); PadC, 2v (frag.);
Barc853, 1; Barc971, 11v–12; Tarr(2), verso (frag.); SL2211
69v/79; Lpr 163, 2 (frag., with added voices and motetus
contrafact); Oas 56, Ar (frag.); (Trémoïlle). Editions: PMFC
5:50–3; Bent, Two 14th-Century Motets, 8–13; Harrison, Musicorum Collegio, 7–10.
Apta/Flos
(?Vitry)
Apta caro plumis ingenii/Flos virginum/T: “Alma redemptoris”/CT
Sources: Ivrea, 5v–6; Chantilly, 60v–61; Durham, 338v–
339; ModA 18v–19; CaB 10v–11 (frag.); SL2211 61v/70r
(frag.); (Trémoïlle). Editions: PMFC 5:17–23; Günther, The
Motets of the Manuscripts Chantilly, 8–13; Lerch, Fragmente aus
Cambrai, 2:109–18.
Aucune/Qui plus
(Machaut, M5)
Aucune gent/Qui plus aimme/T: “Fiat voluntas tua”/CT
Sources: Machaut MSS.
Editions: see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 293.
Bone pastor/Bone pastor
(Machaut, M18)
Bone pastor Guillerme/Bone pastor qui pastores/T: “Bone pastor”
Sources: Machaut MSS.
Editions: see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 296.
Bonne/Se me desirs
Bonne est amours/Se me desirs/T: “A”
Source: Fauvel, 29v. Edition: PMFC 1:45–7.
Cede locum/Nam
Cede locum cede/Nam sum qui/T: “Beati qui persecutionem”
Source: CaB, 9.
Edition: Lerch, Fragmente aus Cambrai, 2:79–84.
Celi domina/Maria
Celi domina/Maria, virgo virginum/T: Porchier mieuz estre
Source: Fauvel, 42v. Edition: PMFC 1:57–8.
377
Christe/Veni
(Machaut, M21)
Christe qui lux/Veni creator spiritus/T: “Tribulatio proxima est…”/CT
Sources: Machaut MSS.
Editions: see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 298.
Clap/Sus Robin
Clap, clap par un matin/Sus Robin, alons/T
Source: Ivrea, 60v. Edition: PMFC 5:113–15.
Colla jugo/Bona
(Vitry)
Colla jugo subdere/Bona condit cetera/T: “Libera me [de sanguinibus]”
Sources: Ivrea, 17v–18; Trémoïlle, 1v; CaB, 13r; Apt16bis,
20v–21; Arr983, 62 (frag.); Tarr(1), recto (frag.); Tarr(2), recto
(frag.); WrocĆaw, 1v, 2v (frag.); (Strasbourgasbourg). Editions:
PMFC 1:85–7; Lerch, Fragmente aus Cambrai, 2:155–60.
Cum statua/Hugo
(Vitry)
Cum statua Nabugodonasor/Hugo, Hugo/T: “Magister invidie”
Sources: Ivrea, 14v–15; CaB, 11v; (Trémoïlle).
Editions: PMFC 1:82–4; Lerch, Fragmente aus Cambrai 2:129–
33; Appendix 6B, above.
Dame/Fins
(Machaut, M11)
Dame, je sui cils/Fins cuers dous/T: “Fins cuers doulz”
Sources: Machaut MSS.
Editions: see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 305.
Dantur/Quid
Dantur officia/Quid scire poderit/T
Sources: Ivrea, 5v–6; Apt16bis, 21r; (Strasbourg).
Edition: PMFC 1:104–5.
De bon espoir/Puis que De Bon Espoir/Puis que la douce/T: “Speravi”
(Machaut, M4)
Sources: Machaut MSS.
Editions: see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 298.
Degentis/Cum vix
Degentis vita/Cum vix artidici/CT/T: “Vera pudicitia”
Sources: Chantilly, 62v–63; Barc971, 8v–9; Br5170, 53v
(frag.); Nür9, 1 (frag.); Yox, iiv (frag.); (Strasbourg); (Trémoïlle).
Editions: PMFC 5, nos. 23&23a, 116–127; CMM 39:4–7.
Desolata/Que nutritos
Desolata mater ecclesia/Que nutritos filios/T: “Filios enutrivi...”
Source: Fauvel, 8v. Edition: PMFC 1:24.
378
Detractor/Qui
Detractor est nequissima/Qui secuntur castra/T: “Verbum iniquum...”
Sources: Fauvel, 4; Paris 571, 144v–45.
Edition: PMFC 1:16–7.
Douce/Garison
(Vitry)
Douce playsence/Garison selon nature/T: “Neuma quinti toni”
Sources: Ivrea, 23v–24; (Trémoïlle).
Edition: PMFC 1:72–5.
Facilius/Alieni
Facilius a nobis vitatur/Alieni boni invidia/T: “Imperfecte canite”
Source: Fauvel, 13. Edition: PMFC 1:35–7.
Febus/Lanista
Febus mundo oriens/Lanista vipereus/T: Cornibus equivocis
Source: Ivrea, 3v–4. Editions: PMFC 5:13–16; Lefferts, Three
14th-Century Motets, 7–12.
Felix/Inviolata
(Machaut, M23)
Felix virgo/Inviolata genitrix/T: “Ad te suspiramus gementes…”/CT
Sources: Machaut MSS; (Trémoïlle).
Editions: see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, p. 321.
Firmissime/Adesto
(Vitry)
Firmissime fidem/Adesto, sancta trinitas/T: “Alleluya, Benedictus”
Sources: Fauvel, 43; Br19606, recto; Rob, 43v–44 (intabulation). Edition: PMFC 1:60–3.
Floret/Florens
Floret cum vana gloria/Florens vigor ulciscendo/T “Neuma quinti toni”
Sources: CaB, 16r; Br19606, verso.
Editions: Sanders, “The Early Motets,” 37–42. Lerch, Fragmente
aus Cambrai, 2:205–12.
Flos/Celsa
(?Vitry)
Flos ortus inter lilia/Celsa cedrus/T: “Quam magnus pontifex”
Sources: Ivrea, 9v–10; CaB, 20v; Paris 2444, 49; SL2211, 62v;
(Trémoïlle). Editions: PMFC 5:42–5; Lerch, Fragmente aus Cambrai, 2:175–80.
Fons/O livoris
(Machaut, M9)
Fons tocius superbie/O livoris feritas/T:“Fera pessima”
Sources: Machaut MSS; (Trémoïlle).
Editions: see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 322.
379
Fortune/Ma dolour
Fortune, mere a dolour/Ma doulour ne cesse pas/T: “Dolour meus”
Sources: Ivrea, 53v; CaB, 11v; PPic 67, recto (frag.); (Trémoïlle).
Editions: PMFC 5:92–4; Lerch, Fragmente aus Cambrai, 2:
184–8.
Garrit/In nova
(Vitry)
Garrit Gallus flendo/In nova fert animum/T: “N[euma quinti toni]”
Sources: Fauvel, 44v; PPic67, recto.
Editions: PMFC 1:68–70.
Hareu/Helas
(Machaut, M10)
Hareu! hareu!/Helas! ou sera/T: “Obediens usque ad mortem”
Sources: Machaut MSS; (Trémoïlle).
Editions: see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 323.
Hé! Mors/Fine amour
(Machaut, M3)
Hé! Mors com tu/Fine Amour/T: “Quare non sum mortuus”
Sources: Machaut MSS.
Editions: see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 325.
Helas/Corde mesto
(Machaut, M12)
Helas! pour quoy virent/Corde mesto cantando/T: “Libera me”
Sources: Machaut MSS.
Editions: see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 328.
Ida/Portio
(Egidius de Pusiex)
Ida capillorum/Portio nature/CT/T: “Ante tronum trinitatis”
Sources: Iv, 6v–7; Chantilly, 61v–62; Strasbourg, 74v-75;
Leiden 342A, 2v; (Trémoïlle). Edition: PMFC5 nos. 5&5a,
24–35.
Impudenter/Virtutibus
(Vitry)
Impudenter/Virtutibus/T: [Alma redemptoris mater]/CT/ST
Sources: Ivrea, 4v–5; Strasbourg, 20v; Leiden 342A, 1v
(frag.); Apt16bis, 13v–14; SL2211, 79v; Be421, 18 (frag.);
Br5170, 53 (frag.); Br19606, 53 (frag.); Tro1397, 230
(frag.). Edition: PMFC 1:91–6.
In virtute/Decens
(?Vitry)
In virtute nominum/Decens carmen edere/T: “Clamour meus”/CT
Sources: Ivrea, 55; Paris 2444, 48; (Trémoïlle).
Editions: PMFC 5:95–9; Appendix 5B, above.
Inflammatus/Sicut
Inflammatus invidia/Sicut de ligno/T [“Victime paschali laudes”]
Source: Fauvel, 22. Edition: PMFC 1:43–4.
380
Inter/O livor
Inter amenitatis tripudia/O livor anxie/T: “Revertenti”
Sources: Fauvel, 21v–22; YM3, 10v (frag.); (Trémoïllé).
Edition: PMFC 1:42.
J’ai tant/Lasse
(Machaut, M7)
J’ai tant mon/Lasse! je sui/ T: “Ego moritar pro te”
Sources: Machaut MSS
Editions: see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, p. 329.
Je comence/Et je
Je comence ma chancon/Et je feray li segons/T: “Soules viex”
Sources: Ivrea, 61v–62; McVeigh, 27 (frag.); (Trémoïllé),
Edition: PMFC 21:73–80.
Je Voi/Fauvel
Je voi douleur/Fauvel nous a fait/T: “Fauvel:” Autant m'est si
Sources: Fauvel, 9v. Edition: PMFC 1:p. 25.
L'ardure/Tres dous
L’ardure qu’endure/Tres dous espoir/CT/T: “Ego rogavi deum…”
Soures: Chantilly, 66v–67; (Trémoïlle).
Editions: PMFC 5:149–54; CMM39, 29–33.
L’amoureuse/En l’estat
L’amoureuse flour d’esté/En l’estat/T [Sicut fenum arui]
Sources: Ivrea, 59v–60; Durham, 338 (frag.); (Trémoïlle).
Edition: PMFC 5:108–12.
La mesnie/J’ai fait
La mesnie fauveline/J'ai fait nouveletement/T: Grant despit ai ie
Source: Fauvel, 15v–16. Edition: PMFC 1:40–1.
Lasse/Se j’aim
(Machaut, M16)
Lasse! comment oublieray/Se j’aim/T: Pour quoy me bat
Sources: Machaut MSS; (Trémoïlle).
Editions: see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 336.
Les l’ormel/Mayn
Les l’ormel a la turelle/Mayn se leva sire/T: Je n'y saindrai plus
Sources: Ivrea, 22; CaB, 17; Torino 42, 34–5; Udine, recto
(frag.). Editions: PMFC 5:78–9; Lerch, Fragmente aus Cambrai,
2:122–4.
Li enseignament/De tous
Li enseignament de Chaton/De tous les biens/T
Sources: Ivrea, 26v–27; FriZ, 86; (Trémoïlle).
Edition: PMFC3, 34–6.
381
Martyrum/Diligenter
(Machaut, M19)
Martyrum gemma/Diligenter inquiramus/T: “A Christo honoratus”
Sources: Machaut MSS; Ivrea, 10v–11; (Trémoïlle).
Editions: see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 342.
Mater/Gaude
Mater formosa/Gaude virgo/T
Source: Br19606, recto. Edition: none.
Maugré/De ma dolour
(Machaut, M14)
Maugré mon cuer/De ma dolour/ T: “Quia amore langueo”
Sources: Machaut MSS; (Trémoïlle).
Editions: see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 343.
Mon chant/Qui doloreus Mon chant en plaint/Qui doloreus/T: “Tristis est anima mea”
Sources: Ivrea, 22v–3; Durham, 339v (frag.); (Trémoïlle).
Edition: PMFC 5:80–3.
Musicalis/Sciencie
Musicalis sciencia/Sciencie laudabili/T
Source: PPic 67, verso. Editions: PMFC 5:p. 181–4; Harrison,
Musicorum Collegio, 32–5.
Nulla/Plange
Nulla pestis est gravior/Plange nostra regio/T: “Vergente”
Source: Fauvel, 3.
Edition: PMFC 1:12–5.
O canenda/Rex
(Vitry)
O canenda vulgo/Rex quem metrorum/CT/T: “Rex regum [regi ilio]”
Sources: Ivrea, 55; Paris 2444, 48v; Durham, 337v (frag.); FriZ,
86v; (Trémoïlle). Edition: PMFC 1:106–9.
O Philippe/O bone
O Philippe franci/O bone dux indolis/ST
Sources: Ivrea, 1v–2; (Trémoïlle).
Edition: PMFC 5:1–6.
Orbis/Vos pastores
Orbis orbatus/Vos pastores adulteri/T: “Fur non venit...”
Source: Fauvel, 7.
Edition: PMFC 1:22–3.
Petre/Lugentium
(Vitry)
Petre clemens/Lugentium siccentur/T [Non est inventus similis illi]
Sources: Ivrea, 37v–38; (Trémoïlle).
Edition: PMFC 1:97–105.
382
Portio/Ida
see Ida/Portio
Post missarum/Post misse
Quant en moy/Amour
(Machaut, M1)
Post missarum/Post misse modulamina/CT/T cum C/solus T
Sources: Ivrea, 7v–8; (Trémoïlle).
Edition: PMFC 5:36–41.
Quant en moy/Amour et biauté/T: “Amara valde”
Sources: Machaut MSS
Editions: see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 361.
Quant je le voi/Bon vin Quant je le voi/Bon vin doit/T: Cis chans veult boire
Sources: Fauvel, 45. Edition: PMFC 1:p. 71.
Quant vraie/O series
(Machaut, M17)
Quant vraie amour/O series summe/T: “Super omnes speciosa”
Sources: Machaut MSS.
Editions: see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 364.
Quasi/Trahunt/Ve
Quasi non/Trahunt in precipia/Ve qui gregi/ T: “Displicebat ei, etc.”
Source: Fauvel, 6v. See also Trahunt/An dies.
Edition: PMFC 1:18–21.
Qui/Ha! Fortune
(Machaut, M8)
Qui es promesses/Ha! Fortune/T: “Et non est qui adjuvet”
Sources: Machaut MSS; Ivrea, 24v–25; CaB, 16v; Trémoïlle, 8.
Editions: see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 367.
Rachel/Ha fratres
Rachel plorat filios/Ha fratres, ha vos domini/T
Source: Ivrea, 16v–17. Edition: PMFC 5:66–9.
S’il estoit/S’Amours S’il estoit nulz/S’Amours tous/T: “Et gaudebit cor vestrum”
(Machaut, M6)
Sources: Machaut MSS.
Editions: see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 371.
Scariotis/Jure
Scariotis geniture/Jure quod in opere/T: “Superne matris gaudia etc.”
Sources: Fauvel, 2; (Trémoïlle).
Edition: PMFC 1:8–9.
Se cuers/Rex beatus Se cuers ioiaus/Rex beatus confessor Domini/T: “Ave”
Sources: Fauvel, 10v; Br19606, verso; McVeigh, 26v (frag.);
(Trémoïlle). Edition: PMFC 1:26–8.
383
Se grace/Cum venerint
Se grace n’est a mon/Cum venerint miseri/T: “Ite missa est”
Sources: Ivrea, 21v–22; WrocĆaw, 2v (frag.); Tou 476,
33v; (Trémoïlle). Editions: PMFC 1:129–31; CMM
13:32–3; Doumoulin et al., La Messe de Tournai, 104–7.
Se paour/Diex
Se paour d’umble astinance/Diex tan desir estre amés/T: “Concupisco”
Sources: Ivrea, 25v–6; CaB, 17v–8; (Trémoïlle).
Edition: PMFC 5:84–7; Lerch, Fragmente aus Cambrai, 2:137–
42.
Servant/Ludowice
see Servant/O Philippe
Servant/O Philippe Servant regem misericordia/O Philippe, prelustris/T: “Rex regum...”
Sources: Fauvel, 10v–11; Paris 571, 144 (Motetus “[L]udowice”
for “O Philippe”); (Trémoïlle). Edition: PMFC 1:29–31.
Super/Presidentes
Super cathedram Moysi/Presidentes in thronis seculi/T: “Ruina”
Sources: Fauvel, 1v; CaB, 8v; Br19606, recto; Ox271, Ar (frag.).
Editions: PMFC 1:5–8; Lerch, Fragmente aus Cambrai, 2:71–5.
Tant a soutille/Bien Tant a souttille/Bien pert qu’en moy/T: “Cuius puichritudinem sol…”
Sources: Ivrea, 18v–19; Chantilly, 71v–2; Arr983, 62v (frag.).
Editions: PMFC 5, 70–3; CMM39, 1–3.
Tant doucement/Eins
(Machaut, M13)
Tant doucement m’ont/Eins que ma dame/T: “Ruina”
Sources: Machaut MSS.
Editions: see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 379.
Tous corps/De souspirant
(Machaut, M2)
Tous corps/De souspirant cuer/T: “Suspiro”
Sources: Machaut MSS.
Editions: see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 381.
Trahunt/An diex
Trahunt in precipicia/An Diex/T
Sources: Br19606, verso; Fauvel, 26v (motetus only). See also
Quasi/Trahunt/Ve.
384
Tribum/Quoniam
(Vitry)
Tribum que/Quoniam secta latronum/T: “Merito hec patimur”
Source: Fauvel, 41v–42; StrasbourgStrasbourgourg, 71v; Rob,
44–44v (intabulation); Br19606, recto; Munich 31 (frag.), RosL,
43 (frag.).
Edition: PMFC 1:54–6.
Trop/Par sauvage
Trop ay dure destinée/Par sauvage retenue/CT/T
Source: Ivrea, 57v–8.
Edition: PMFC 5:105–7.
Trop plus/Biauté
(Machaut, M20)
Trop plus/Biauté parée de valour/Je ne sui mie certeins
Sources: Machaut MSS; (Trémoïlle).
Editions: see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 383.
Tu qui/Plange
(Machaut, M22)
Tu qui gregem/Plange, regni respublica!/T: “Apprehende arma...”/CT
Sources: Machaut MSS.
Editions: see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 383.
Tuba/In arboris
(?Vitry)
Tuba sacre fidei proprie/In arboris empiro prospere/T: “Virgo sum”
Sources: Ivrea, 15v–16; (Trémoïlle).
Edition: PMFC 1:32–4.
Vos/Gratissima
(Vitry)
Vos quid admiramini/Gratissima virginis/T: “Gaude gloriosa”/CT
Sources: Ivrea, 8v–9; Durham, 336v–337; CaB, 15v; Br5170,
67bisv (frag.); (Trémoïlle).
Edition: PMFC 1:76–81; Lerch, Fragmente aus Cambrai, 2:192–
201.
Zelus/Jhesu
Zelus familie/Jhesu, tu dator venie/T
Source: Fauvel, 44. Edition: PMFC 1:65–7.
Zolomina/Nazerea
Zolominia zelus/Nazarea que decora/T: “Ave Maria”
Sources: Ivrea, 13v–14; Barc853, 4 (frag.); (Trémoïlle).
Editions: PMFC 5:62–5.
385
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